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The New American Series is designed for high school and general readers who want to know more about immigrant groups. This volume explores the history of Vietnamese immigration and analyzes the struggles of Vietnamese Americans to make a better future. Both minor economic success and serious problems are detailed. The chapters are: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "Vietnamese Immigration History"; (3) "Issues in the Vietnamese American Community"; (4) "Employment and Education Trends"; (5) "The Impact of Vietnamese Americans"; and (6) "Conclusion and Future Prospects." (Contains 155 references.) (SLD)

The formulation of the spatial and material motion problem in nonlinear electro-elastostatics is revisited in this work. A finite element discretization is realized and a numerical example is presented to demonstrate possible application of the formulation in studying the closing process of cracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this whitepaper, we present a synchronization-based communication protocol for EPCglobal Class-1 Gen-2 RFID devices. The Class-1 Gen-2 RFID tag supports only simple cryptographic primitives like Pseudo-random Number Generator (PRNG) and Cyclic Redundancy Code (CRC). Our protocol is secure in a sense that it prevents the cloned tags and malicious readers from impersonating and abusing legitimate tags, respectively. In addition, our protocol provides that each RFID tag emits a different bit string (pseudonym) or meta-ID when receiving each and every reader's query. Therefore, it makes tracking activities and personal preferences of tag's owner impractical to provide the user's privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the thermodynamic equilibrium predictions for steam reforming of vegetable oil in a thermal plasma reformer. An optimal operating condition has been chosen at temperature of 800°C and mole flow ratio of vegetable oil to water of 1:18 using software simulation. The predicted results show that mole fraction of hydrogen reaches, respectively, 61% and 63% on wet and dry bases for proton exchange membrane fuel cell applications. In addition, the total mole fractions of fuels for solid oxide fuel cell applications approaches 95% and even over 98% on wet and dry bases, respectively. These predicted data will be compared with experimental data conducted with a 1kWe thermal plasma reformer at Clean Energy R&D Center, Da-Yeh University in Taiwan, R.O.C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our purpose aims to illustrate the Uniform Methodology by choosing a system made of objects taken from various disciplines.Asimple inclined elevator going between two levels has all ingredients of such a system as it contains mechanical components (cabin, door, mechanical brakes), electromechanical components (buttons, microswitches, contact sensors, motors), intelligent components (microcontroller, electronic command for variable speed motors), biological (humans making use of the system), and computer software (program that give intelligence to the controller). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex systems consist of a large number of objects/agents/components that interact in an intricate fashion. The dynamical behavior of such systems can be understood only with a correct model thoroughly decomposed into manageable chunks. Nowadays, with the power of computer simulation and software, more and more complex systems are attempted in many fields, stretching across natural, economic, social sciences, etc. Furthermore, complexity reduction techniques needed for analyzing complex systems are fundamentally the same across disciplines. There is currently great interest in bringing together researchers with different backgrounds for a truly multidisciplinary collaboration. The question is "could we really conceive a unifying modeling formalism that can be used across multiple disciplines?"Our research attempt targets to make use of the object paradigm as the starting point. As the UML implements a graphical notation to be used with the object paradigm, it is natural to include the UML inside the original package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dream of a software maker is how to get running software directly from a CASE tool, to make a jump from abstraction to functionality. The passage is targeted either from the PSM to code or from the PIM to code. The later joins the former with a preliminary transformation from PIM to PSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a general graphical language, the UML is not just targeted for modeling object-oriented software. Being very flexible and customizable, it enables us to create our own in-house methodology that can describe real-time workflow, system activities, state evolution, object, relational databases, etc. The "U" in the UML means "Unified"since the first version of the UML came from the effort of three persons, Rumbaugh who developed the OMT methodology (Rumbaugh et al., 1995), Booch (1993), who developed the Booch methodology, and Jacobson who developed the Objectory methodology (Jacobson et al., 1992). In 1997, they submitted the version 1.0 of the UML to the OMG, an independent standards organization which took over the UML development and released subsequent UML versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling is a complex task, an attempt to capture the intricacies of real-world situations, to describe the characteristics of real-world objects, their relationships, and the way objects communicate together to evolve. The modeling process is based on abstractions and concepts. An abstraction is a mental process of taking a thing, material (mobile phone) or immaterial (electromagnetic wave), real (person) or abstract (his emotional state), pruning all details that are not relevant for a particular purpose, naming it, giving it a short description to be able to manipulate and work with the abstraction (as a result) issued from this complexity reduction process. An abstraction is therefore both a process and a result of this process. The object or the idea that results from an abstraction cannot be a specific detailed thing ("Ferrari Car"cannot be an abstraction but "Car"can be an abstraction). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Seeing is believing"or "A picture is worth a thousand words"stress the importance of visual formalisms in learning and communication. Every time, we want to draw a system, unconsciously, we draw a circle or a rectangle. A closed contour delimits a small surface that materializes an abstraction, in our case, a system, an object or a component. Children draw forms before language. Primates such as chimpanzees produce paintings with a striking similarity to drawings made by children at the early stages. The world seems to have an iconic representation before we can abstract it with language. Six recurring "diagrams" were identified by psychologists with children: circles/ovals, squares, rectangles, triangles, crosses, and irregular odd shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of the second major release of UML 2 has been a long-awaited process. In 2000, the OMG issued four Requests for Proposals (RFP) for UML 2.0, Infrastructure, XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), and Superstructure. Most users are concerned only with the last Superstructure that contains modeling concepts having a direct relationship with their application blueprints. As this textbook is partly addressed to researchers, when necessary, we must expose the Infrastructure that contains basic constructs merged by the Superstructure. Some figures are reproduced as is from the standard. Others are synthesized, to explain this complex standard in an understandableway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex systems are the central theme that emerges from many disciplines and domains. Addressing the newchallenge of complex system solving requires new research and educational initiatives based on the synergy of many disciplines as complex systems are often multidisciplinary and require a total integration of concepts, methodologies, and tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preprocessing is the process of adapting the input of our Computational Intelligence (CI) problem to the CI technique applied. Images are inputs of many problems, and Fractal processing of the images to extract relevant geometry characteristics is a very important tool. This chapter is dedicated to Fractal Preprocessing. In Pedology, fractal models were fitted to match the structure of soils and techniques of multifractal analysis of soil images were developed as is described in a state-of-the-art panorama. A box-counting method and a gliding box method are presented, both obtaining from images sets of dimension parameters, and are evaluated in a discussed case study from images of samples, and the second seems preferable. Finally, a comprehensive list of references is given [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support Vector Machines is the most recent algorithm in the Machine Learning community. After a bit less than a decade of live, it has displayed many advantages with respect to the best old methods: generalization capacity, ease of use, solution uniqueness. It has also shown some disadvantages: maximum data handling and speed in the training phase. However, these disadvantages will be overcome in the near future, as computer power increases, leaving an all-purpose learning method both cheap to use and giving the best performance. This chapter provides an overview about the main SVM configuration, its mathematical applications and the easiest implementation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the different types of Neural Networks (NN), the most popular and frequently used architectures are the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Functions (RBF) due to their approximation capabilities. In this chapter we discuss the use of RBF networks to solve problems in different areas related to communications systems. In the first part of the chapter, we revise the structure of the RBF networks and the main procedures to train them. In the second part, the main applications of RBF networks in communication systems are presented and described. In particular, we will focus our attention in antenna array signal processing (direction-of-arrival estimation and beamforming) and channel equalization (intersymbol interferences and co-channel interferences). Other applications such as coding/decoding, system identification, fault detection in access networks and automatic recognition of wireless standards are also mentioned [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is dedicated to the scope of which facts should be considered when deciding whether a Neural Network (NN) solution is suitable to solve a given problem. This is followed by a detailed example of a successful and useful application: a Neural Binary Detector [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter starts with a historical summary of the evolution of Neural Networks from the first models which are very limited in application capabilities to the present ones that make possible to think in applying automatic process to tasks that formerly had been reserved to the human intelligence. After the historical review, Neural Networks are dealt from a computational point of view. This perspective helps to compare Neural Systems with classical Computing Systems and leads to a formal and common presentation that will be used throughout the book [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The galaxy pair AM 1353-272 nicknamed "The Dentist's Chair" shows two ∼30 kpc long tidal tails. Previous observations using multi-slit masks showed that they host up to seven tidal dwarf galaxies. The kinematics of these tidal dwarfs appeared to be decoupled from the surrounding tidal material. New observations of the tip of the southern tidal tail with the VIMOS integral field unit confirm the results for two of these genuine tidal dwarfs but raise doubts whether the velocity gradient attributed to the outermost tidal dwarf candidate is real. We also discuss possible effects to explain the observational difference concerning the strongest velocity gradient seen in the slit data, which is undetected in the new integral field data, but arrive at no firm conclusion. Additionally, low-resolution data covering most of the two interacting partners show that the strongest line emitting regions of this system are the central parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tied Mixture Hidden Markov Model (TMHMM) is an important approach to reduce the number of free parameters in speech recognition. However, this model suffers from degradation in recognition accuracy due to its Gaussian Probability Density Function (GPDF) clustering error. This paper proposes a clustering algorithm called a Heterogeneous Centroid Neural Network (HCNN) for use in TMHMMs. The algorithm utilizes a Centroid Neural Network (CNN) to cluster acoustic feature vectors in the TMHMM. The HCNN uses a heterogeneous distance measure to allocate more code vectors in the heterogeneous areas where probability densities of different states overlap each other. When applied to an isolated Korean digit word recognition problem, the HCNN reduces the error rate by 9.39% over CNN clustering, and 14.63% over the traditional K-means clustering. Keywords: speech recognition, tied mixture, unsupervised clustering, Hidden Markov Model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of human behaviours used in multi-agent simulations are limited by the ability of introspection of the social actors: some of their knowledge (reflexes, habits, non-formalized expertise) cannot be extracted through interviews. The use of computer-mediated role playing games put these actors into a situated stance where the recording of their "live" behaviours is possible. But cognitive processes and motivations still have to be interpreted. In this paper, we propose an artificial maieutic approach to extract such pieces of knowledge, by helping the actors to better understand, and sometimes formulate, their own behaviours. The actors are playing their own roles in an agent-mediated simulation and interact with agents that question their behaviours. The actor's reactions and understanding are stimulated by these interactions, and this situation allows in many cases to reveal hidden knowledge. We present here the first results using two complementary works in social simulations, one in the domain of air traffic control and one in the domain of common-pool resources sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we have proposed yet another forward secure signature based on bilinear pairings. Our forward secure signature requires the general security parameters only independent to the total number of time periods. The scheme can perform key evolving for unlimited time periods while maintaining sizes of keys and signature fixed. In addition, the signing algorithm is very efficient with the simple verification algorithm. We also provide a formal definition along with a detailed security proof of our signature scheme under the assumption of Computational Diffie-Hellman problem. Keywords: Forward security, pairings, key exposure, key evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new chip design paradigm, so called Network on Chip, has been introduced based on the demand of integration of many heterogeneous semiconductor intellectual property (IP) blocks. The Network on Chip design not only requires the good performance but also the minimization of several physical constraints such as the network latency, the used area as well as the power consumption of design. This paper analyzes the average latency of heterogeneous Network on Chip architectures in which the shortest path routing algorithm is applied. This average latency includes the queuing latency and the wire latency, and is calculated for general cases of allocating IPs onto the fixed generic switching architectures such as 2-D Mesh and Fat-Tree. With different allocation schemes of IPs, the network has different average latencies. Hence, this article presents an optimal search that adopts the Branch and Bound algorithm to find out the optimal mapping scheme to achieve the minimal network latency. This algorithm automatically map the desired IPs onto the target Network on Chip architecture with the criteria of lowest network latency. Some experiments of On Chip Multiprocessor Network application are simulated. The results show that the network latency is significantly saved with the optimized allocation scheme for the several cases of generic architectures of On Chip Multiprocessor Network application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System-on-chip (SoC) designs provide integrated solutions to challenging design problems in the telecommunications, multimedia, and so on. Present and future SoC are designed using pre-existing components which we call cores. Communication between the cores will become a major bottleneck for system performance as standard hardwired bus-based communication architectures will be inefficient in terms of throughput, latency and power consumption. To solve this problem, a packet switched platform that considers the delay and reliability issues of wires so called Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed. In this paper, we present interconnected network topologies and analyze their performances with a particular application under bandwidth constrains. Then we compare the performances among different ways of mapping the cores onto a Mesh NoC architecture. The comparison between Mesh and Fat-Tree topology is also presented. These evaluations are done by utilizing NS-2, a tool that has been widely used in the computer network design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand of integration of many heterogeneous semiconductor intellectual property (IP) blocks has been introducing a new chip design paradigm so called on chip network. This paradigm promisingly offers a packet switched network among IPs to reduce the main problems in the very deep sub micron technologies that arise from non-scalable global wire delay, failure to achieve global synchronization, errors due to the signal integrity, non-scalable bus based functional interconnection, etc. This paper introduces interconnected or switched network topologies and also analyze their performances in terms of communication protocol related to the issues such as routing strategy, buffer size, routing algorithm , etc. The above mentioned evaluations are done by utilizing the tool that has been widely used in the research domain of computer network design, so called NS-2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watermarking techniques can be applied in many applications, such as copyright protection, authentication, fingerprinting, and data hiding. Each different purpose of usability requires different approaches and schemes. In this paper, we present the framework of combining the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with watermarking techniques for hiding secret information in digital images. This framework can also be customized for other type of multimedia objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a classification system that exploits the content information as well as citation structure for scientific paper classification. The system first applies a content-based statistical classification method which is similar to general text classification. We investigate several classification methods including K-nearest neighbours, nearest centroid, naive Bayes and decision trees. Among those methods, the K-nearest neighbours is found to outperform others while the rest perform comparably. Using phrases in addition to words and a good feature selection strategy such as information gain can improve system accuracy and reduce training time in comparison with using words only. To combine citation links for classification, the system proposes an iterative method to update the labellings of classified instances using citation links. Our results show that, combining contents and citations significantly improves the system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new equalization method for a wireless ATM communication channel using a simplified version of the complex bilinear recurrent neural network (S-CBLRNN) is proposed in this paper. The S-BLRNN is then applied to the equalization of a wireless ATM channel for 8PSK and 16QAM. The results show that the proposed S-CBLRNN converges about 40 % faster than the CBLRNN and gives very favorable results in both of the MSE and SER criteria over the other equalizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia databases usually store thousands of audio files such as music, speech and other sounds. One of the challenges in modern multimedia system is to classify and retrieve certain kinds of audio from the database. This paper proposes a novel classification algorithm for a content-based audio retrieval. The algorithm, called Gradient-Based Fuzzy c-Means Algorithm with Divergence Measure (GBFCM(DM)), is a neural network-based algorithm which utilizes the Divergence Measure to exploit the statistical nature of the audio data to improve the classification accuracy. Experiment results confirm that the proposed algorithm outperforms 3.025%-5.05% in accuracy in comparison with conventional algorithms such as the k-Means or the Self-Organizing Map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, dynamic local search (DLS) clause weighting algorithms have emerged as the local search state-of-the-art for solving propositional satisfiability problems. This paper introduces a new approach to clause weighting, known as Divide and Distribute Fixed Weights (DDFW), that transfers weights from neighbouring satisfied clauses to unsatisfied clauses in order to break out from local minima. Unlike earlier approaches, DDFW continuously redistributes a fixed quantity of weight between clauses, and so does not require a weight smoothing heuristic to control weight growth. It also exploits inherent problem structure by redistributing weights between neighbouring clauses. To evaluate our ideas, we compared DDFW with two of the best reactive local search algorithms, AdaptNovelty+ and RSAPS. In both these algorithms, a problem sensitive parameter is automatically adjusted during the search, whereas DDFW uses a fixed default parameter. Our empirical results show that DDFW has consistently better performance over a range of SAT benchmark problems. This gives a strong indication that neighbourhood weight redistribution strategies could be the key to a next generation of structure exploiting, parameter-free local search SAT solvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on extending the Jade agent toolkit with a new mobility service. Jade implements a straightforward mobility model that is based on a pull migration strategy. This strategy is a good choice in specific environments, because only necessary classes are loaded. However, loading classes might cause a network overhead in other scenarios, in particular wide-area networks. In addition, Jade's code cache cannot distinguish between different versions of the same class, which is a drawback in long-running agent systems. We have implemented a new mobility model, named Kalong, and integrated it as a new mobility service in Jade. The paper also reports on first experiments comparing the migration performance of Jade's and Kalong's mobility service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how to efficiently combine satisfiability procedures built by using a superposition calculus with satisfiability procedures for theories, for which the superposition calculus may not apply (e.g., for various decidable fragments of Arithmetic). Our starting point is the Nelson-Oppen combination method, where satisfiability procedures cooperate by exchanging entailed (disjunction of) equalities between variables. We show that the superposition calculus deduces sufficiently many such equalities for convex theories (e.g., the theory of equality and the theory of lists) and disjunction of equalities for non-convex theories (e.g., the theory of arrays) to guarantee the completeness of the combination method. Experimental results on proof obligations extracted from the certification of auto-generated aerospace software confirm the efficiency of the approach. Finally, we show how to make satisfiability procedures built by superposition both incremental and resettable by using a hierarchic variant of the Nelson-Oppen method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of building satisfiability procedures for unions of disjoint theories. We briefly review the combination schemas proposed by Nelson-Oppen, Shostak, and others. Three inference systems are directly derived from the properties satisfied by the theories being combined and known results from the literature are obtained in a uniform and abstract way. This rational reconstruction is the starting point for further investigations. We introduce the concept of extended canonizer and derive a modularity result for a new class of theories (larger than Shostak and smaller than Nelson-Oppen theories) which is closed under disjoint union. This is in contrast with the lack of modularity of Shostak theories. We also explain how to implement extended canonizers by using the basic building blocks used in Shostak schema or by means of rewriting techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]