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In this study, international research papers by Turkish scholars on social studies education were investigated. The sample was selected among published journals of education indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database, such as Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded). The obtained data were analyzed via the bibliometric analysis method using version 1.6.17 of VOSviewer software. The results revealed that the first publication in the relevant indexes was released in 2005, and after 2007 the number of publications showed an increasing trend. In addition, it was found that "Educational Sciences-Theory & Practice" and "Education and Science" were among the international journals that most frequently published papers on social studies education, while Kaya Yilmaz, Arife Figen Ersoy, and Handan Deveci were the most cited authors. Results also revealed that Anadolu University, Marmara University, and Gazi University were identified as the institutions that published most papers while they were also cited most. Finally, the most frequently used common keywords were determined as "social studies", "social studies education", "pre-service social studies teachers"; "academic achievement", "citizenship education" and "values education".

We consider the problem of communicating over a channel that randomly “tears” the message block into small pieces of different sizes and shuffles them. For the binary torn-paper channel with block length $n$ and pieces of length ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ , we characterize the capacity as $C = e^{-\alpha }$ , where $\alpha = \lim _{n\to \infty } p_{n} \log n$. Our results show that the case of ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ -length fragments and the case of deterministic length- $(1/p_{n})$ fragments are qualitatively different and, surprisingly, the capacity of the former is larger. Intuitively, this is due to the fact that, in the random fragments case, large fragments are sometimes observed, which boosts the capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-English languages are widely used, but their roles in scholarly communication are relatively under-explored. By using Web of Science's Science Citation Index Expanded ( SCIE, 1900-2015), Social Sciences Citation Index ( SSCI, 1900-2015), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index ( A&HCI, 1975-2015), this study probes the patterns and dynamics of non-English papers by year, citation index, and discipline using bibliometric analysis. The analyses show that English is increasingly being used as the dominating language from natural sciences and social sciences to arts and humanities. Around 97% of the papers in SCIE, 95% of the papers in SSCI, and 73% of the papers in A&HCI during the past decade were in English. However, other languages such as German and French were also used as important academic languages in sciences and social sciences during the first half of the 20th century, 1970s, and 1980s. Unlike natural science and social science disciplines, non-English papers have consistently played important role in arts and humanities disciplines from the beginning of 1975. Although the shares of non-English papers in SCIE and SSCI databases have been limited during the past decade, a large number of non-English papers can be found in some applied disciplines of sciences and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unification of South Korea and North Korea is a plausible idea yet it requires a comprehensive preparation in advance. As a method to achieve fiscal efficiency in public services, decentralization theory is consistently applied. However, the current literature and political reality argue that decentralization does not always hold its efficiency. Therefore, this paper focuses on finding an ideal education finance model for post-unification Korea by studying how one country's academic/economic status is related to their education finance model. This paper conducts the OLS linear regression analysis with 40 OECD and its partner countries' information on GDP per capita, Gini Index, PISA mathematics score, and the form of education finance system. The main findings of this research are that the political and fiscal decentralization are different ideas, and fiscal decentralization does not always hold its efficiency as the decentralization theory states. Among the types of decentralization, the optimal education finance model for academic and economic improvement is deconcentration--which is a combination of fiscal centralization and political, or administrative, decentralization to empower regional autonomy.

Today, digital technologies are used extensively in all areas of life, so education has important role to raise individuals who are researching, questioning, and constructing the knowledge. Digital storytelling; Written, visual, audio tools that work together, providing information in a digital environment is a method that allows students to learn with fun. The aim of the study is to compile the studies related with digital story (2005-2019) in Turkey. Descriptive scanning model was used in the study which is one of the qualitative research methods. The studies were examined in terms of their population, sample, years of publication, their universities, the indexes of the journals, their findings and the courses and disciplines that they are preferred most. Also, by including recommendation of the studies, the researchers aims to help teachers to shape their teaching process, experts to to improve program features, Ministery of National Education to develop projects on digital storytelling. As a result of the study, it was found that 2017 is the year that the most thesis were published whereas this situation is valid for 2018 in articles. Qualiative methods were preferred in articles generally, and in theses, researchers used quantitative methods. In sample choice, students were the most included group in the studies. When we look at the findings, the most encountered ones were "digital storytelling increases students' motivation, creative and critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills ". The recommendations of the studies were generally was "digital storytelling can be used in different areas and disciplines", "digital stories can be applied to students in different level and examine different variables". As a result, the study revealed the increasing importance of digital storytelling with the digital age. Also, it display that digital storytelling enables students learn actively by exploring, help to develop creative and critical skills, and give opportunity to learn by doing. [This study was presented as an oral presentation in 17th Primary Teacher Education Symposium.]

Strong claims are made regarding the significant role that multiword sequences play in the comprehension and production of speech and writing. Although the literature is replete with research-informed, evidence-based guidelines on how to maximize the learning of such sequences, such guidelines need to be synthesized, analyzed and evaluated for learning purposes. This paper attempts to fill this gap, addressing the numerous instructional options that ESL/EFL practitioners, curriculum designers and materials authors have at their disposal while dealing with lexically bundled sequences in several learning contexts. Another purpose of this paper, is to explain the problems that may arise as a result of teaching these sequences and the ways to solve them. The bulk of discussion will be centered on the tasks, activities and techniques suggested by researchers for deepening learners' understanding of these patterns across a wide range of contexts.

This paper sets out to tackle the issue of the criteria which should be met prior to submission of papers to indexed scientific journals. Firstly, the author addresses the field of qualitative research and tries to define the general characteristics of such works, and secondly, some clarification is brought with respect to the imbalance between the number of published articles in favor of quantitative research. Many authors from our region restate observations and cite other authors, and use the term "qualitative study" for such articles. This paper is also concerned with an overwhelming number of misconceptions which can be found in the articles made by the authors from the Balkans. These misconceptions include: (1) confirmation or rejection of hypotheses by correlations, (2) perform an analysis on "item-by-item" basis, (3) application of parametric statistics on non-parametric set of data; and so forth. Each of the mentioned misconceptions is explained in this paper, but it has not been attempted to prove them as this had been done before in numerous up-to-date textbooks. This paper also deals with action research,with respect to their relatively insignificant presence in highly ranked scientific journals, since they combine characteristics of qualitative and quantitative works. Some authors often fall into the trap of putting every action change in the focus of action research. Reproducibility of study is one of the most fundamental scientific prerequisites, and it has to be met by any study--qualitative, quantitative and action research alike.

The Randić index (R) and the geometric-arithmetic index (GA) are found to be useful tools in QSPR and QSAR studies. In the Journal of Inequalities and Applications 180, 1-7, Lokesha, Shwetha Shetty, Ranjini, Cangul, and Cevik gave "New bounds for Randić and GA indices." In the paper, we first point out that Theorems 1, 2, and 4 are incorrect and in this short note we present the correct inequalities for Randić and GA indices. In the same paper, we provide the equality cases for Theorems 3, 5, and 6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current scientometric indexes do not encourage the linguistic diversity of sources cited in academic texts and researchers are not motivated to cite texts written in smaller languages. This diminishes the cultural diversity of the sources cited and limits the representation of small and indigenous cultures. This text proposes a scientometric measure designed to encourage the linguistic diversity of sources cited in articles, books, and papers. The Linguistic Diversity Index is based on two stipulations: (a) the more linguistically diverse the sources, the higher the score, and (b) the rarer the languages cited, the higher the score. If such a metric were used for the evaluation of social science and humanities journals, it would encourage the publication of papers that cite ideas from rarely represented cultural groups such as indigenous nations, ethnic groups from small countries, and other linguistic groups that have been omitted from mainstream scientific discourse. This might help to produce new research, which would help to improve the situation for these groups and create an epistemology that is more just to small cultural groups.

Student academic burden exists to varying degrees throughout the world. To reach a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the roles of academic burden, this paper explores academic burden from different viewpoints and summarizes existing assessment indexes for it. Factors correlated with student academic burden are examined and detailed evaluations on both its advantages and disadvantages are conducted. Some suggestions are proposed to better address this issue for the benefit of student healthy growth and development.

In this paper, I propose that the indexical sign can be used to derive a model for active (touching-and-feeling) learning. The implicit processes involved in the subtle reading of indices contain explanatory possibilities for understanding how students adapt to novelty in the learning process. Besides looking at how indexicality functions in human ontogeny and cognition, I will also examine the human capacity for modeling our world through aggregations of systems of representations (Sebeok, 1994). Modeling systems (with their implicit recognition that the human is a semiotic animal) help us to conceptualize how novelty is assimilated in the learning process. I posit that how we come to terms with new experiences (and new stimuli generally) is of an indexical nature. I am specifically referring to the site where "the new" comes from the outside (like a rain cloud signaling the coming storm) and acts upon us. We can recognize the rain cloud as an experiential pattern (as a semiotic entity) or not; the rain is still going to bear down on us regardless of the success of our interpretations. This existential realness of indexical signs is precisely their power to function as a pedagogical tool, to help us assimilate and accommodate to novel stimulus. The concept of modeling helps us conceptualize the process in which the new stimulus is absorbed and integrated into our cultural/semiotic systems. In short, this paper aims to explore what I call the indexical rub of learning; that initial friction or resistance felt when meeting a new experience. My hope is that this exploration can aid in the cultivation of a mindset in teachers, students and researchers that does not fear this resistance, but can use it to propel positive absorption (in the Deweyian sense) and engaged learning.

This paper reports on a distinctive one-year online open crowdsourcing initiative which originated in the Republic of Ireland with a view to compiling an A-Z directory of educational technology tools for teaching and learning. Through analysis of multiple sources of data, the paper presents an intrinsic case study which outlines the design and implementation of the initiative and offers critical insights into engagement and participation in the project. The study found that participants from across the spectrum of educational sectors contributed to this project from a range of geographical locations, with significantly greater numbers engaging with the directory of educational technology tools that resulted from the crowdsourcing activity. It concludes that the creative project design, combined with a novel crowdsourcing methodology encompassing elements of collaboration, competition, and gamification, were strong motivational factors for participation. The case study provides a valuable context for considering the wider potential of this particular crowdsourcing format (and crowdsourcing applications in general) for teaching and learning purposes.

An $(r, \delta)$ -locally repairable code ($(r, \delta)$ -LRC for short) was introduced by Prakash et al. for tolerating multiple failed nodes in distributed storage systems, which was a generalization of the concept of $r$ -LRCs produced by Gopalan et al.. An $(r, \delta)$ -LRC is said to be optimal if it achieves the Singleton-like bound. Recently, Chen et al. generalized the construction of cyclic $r$ -LRCs proposed by Tamo et al. , and constructed several classes of optimal $(r, \delta)$ -LRCs of length $n$ for $n\, |\, (q-1)$ or $n\,|\, (q+1)$ , respectively in terms of a union of the set of zeros controlling the minimum distance and the set of zeros ensuring the locality. Following the work of , , this paper first characterizes $(r, \delta)$ -locality of a cyclic code via its zeros. Then we construct several classes of optimal cyclic $(r, \delta)$ -LRCs of length $n$ for $n\, |\, (q-1)$ or $n\,|\, (q+1)$ , respectively from the product of two sets of zeros. Our constructions include all optimal cyclic $(r,\delta)$ -LRCs proposed in , , and our method seems more convenient to obtain optimal cyclic $(r, \delta)$ -LRCs with flexible parameters. Moreover, many optimal cyclic $(r,\delta)$ -LRCs of length $n$ for $n\, |\, (q-1)$ or $n\,|\, (q+1)$ , respectively with $(r+\delta -1)\nmid n$ can be obtained from our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work reported in this paper aims at developing an algorithm for system operators to solve a robust security-constrained AC optimal power flow (R-SC-ACOPF) problem, which also optimizes the settings of discrete controllers including load tap changers (LTCs) and shunt capacitor banks (SCBs). An iterative algorithm involving a master problem and a number of sub-problems is proposed. The master problem selects the optimal discrete controllers’ settings by taking into account primal SC-ACOPF constraints based on the single-component worst contingencies identified by the sub-problems. Each sub-problem is a bi-level max-min problem used to find the current worst contingency. The overall objective is to minimize the total cost, including generation and load shedding cost, while satisfying all relevant constraints. The master problem and sub-problems allow representing LTC tap positions, SCB status, and contingencies using binary variables. Two case studies are presented as applications of this novel technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the effects of the alignment entailed in the continuation task on syntactic complexity in L2 written production. A total number of 48 sophomores majoring in English at a university in China were randomly assigned to two groups, one is the continuation group and the other is the topic writing group. The current study employs an advanced computational tool "the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyser" to assess syntactic complexity in writing samples and focused on 7 indexes including three measures of length of production, two coordinate phrase measures, and two complex nominal measures. The result shows that significant differences exist in six of the syntactic complexity measures with the continuation group outperforming the topic writing group. It is demonstrated that the continuation task, which couples production with comprehension and entails the alignment effect, has a facilitating impact on improving the writing syntactic complexity for L2 learners. The implications of these findings for second language acquisition and L2 writing pedagogy are considered.

As a meta-heuristic algorithm, the Golden Jackal Optimization (GJO) algorithm has been widely used in traditional network intrusion detection due to its ease of use and high efficiency. This paper aims to extend its application to the emerging field of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which is a new network architecture. To adapt the GJO for SDN intrusion detection, a modified Golden Jackal Optimization (mGJO) is proposed to enhance its performance with the use of two strategies. First, an Elite Dynamic Opposite Learning strategy operates during each iteration to find solutions opposite to the current global optimal solutions, which increases population diversity. Second, an updating strategy based on the Golden Sine II Algorithm is utilized in the exploitation phase to update the position information of the golden jackal pairs, which accelerates the search for the best feature subset indexes. To validate the feasibility of the mGJO algorithm, this paper first assesses its optimization capability using benchmark test functions. Then, four UCI datasets and the NSL-KDD dataset are used to test the classification capability of the mGJO algorithm and its application in traditional network intrusion detection. Furthermore, the InSDN dataset is used to validate the feasibility of the mGJO algorithm for SDN intrusion detection. The experimental results show that, when the mGJO algorithm is applied to SDN for intrusion detection, the various indexes of classification and the selection of feature subsets achieve better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents F2C, a cooperative resource management system for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Inspired by group-buying mechanisms in real product and service markets, F2C advocates a group of cloud tenants (called tenant coalition) to buy resource capacity in bulk and share the resource pool in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Tenant coalitions leads to vast opportunities for fine-grained resource sharing among multiple tenants. However, resource sharing, especially for multiple resource types, poses several challenging problems in pay-as-you-use cloud environments, such as sharing incentive, free-riding, lying and economic fairness. To address those problems, we propose Reciprocal Resource Fairness (RRF) , a novel resource allocation mechanism to enable fair sharing on multiple resource types within a tenant coalition. RRF is implemented in two complementary and hierarchical mechanisms: inter-tenant resource trading and intra-tenant weight adjustment. RRF satisfies several highly desirable properties to ensure fairness. We implement F2C in Xen platform. The experimental results show F2C is promising for both cloud providers and tenants. For cloud providers, F2C improves VM density and cloud providers’ revenue by 2.2X compared to the current IaaS cloud models. For tenants, F2C improves application performance by 45 percent and guarantees 95 percent economic fairness among multiple tenants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sought to discuss entrepreneurial learning competencies by determining the outcome of entrepreneurial learning on the views of built environment students in the university setting. In this study, three relevant competencies were identified for entrepreneurial learning through literature, namely: entrepreneurial attitude, entrepreneurial skills and knowledge of entrepreneurship. On this basis, questionnaire was designed and administered to graduate students in built environment. In all, a total of 124 questionnaires were administered to respondents. Out this, 84 were retrieved representing a response rate of 68% and were further subjected to analysis using Relative Importance Index (RII). The findings from the study highlighted on competencies factors that have great impact on entrepreneurs in dealing with tasks and problems related to entrepreneurial learning processes. These key entrepreneurial competencies as perceived by the built environment students were ranked as: "entrepreneurial attitude," "knowledge of entrepreneurship" and "entrepreneurial skill." The findings may help stakeholders in the building industry including up-coming graduate students. Thus, it could help in their journey into entrepreneurial terrain affiliated to advancement of their career, as a way to increase private wealth and the pursuit of a more balanced life.

Functional test sequences can detect defects that are not detected by scan-based tests, but overall, achieve a lower gate-level fault coverage than scan-based tests. Design-for-testability (DFT) approaches for functional test sequences cause the sequences to deviate from functional operation conditions in arbitrary ways over the entire design. This paper introduces the concept of invisible-DFT as a DFT approach for functional test sequences, where the effects of activating the DFT logic are confined to selected logic blocks. This paper develops an invisible-scan approach. Considering a single logic block, the procedure described in this paper inserts scan shift cycles into a functional test sequence while maintaining the same primary input and output sequences for the logic block. This makes the activation of the DFT logic invisible to other logic blocks. The procedure allows a limited number of primary output vectors to be corrected for this purpose. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the increase in fault coverage that can be achieved by invisible-scan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the downlink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) in which a centralized processor (CP) communicates with mobile users through base stations (BSs) that are connected to the CP via finite-capacity fronthaul links. Information theoretically, the downlink of a C-RAN is modeled as a two-hop broadcast-relay network. Among the various transmission and relaying strategies for such model, this paper focuses on the compression strategy, in which the CP centrally encodes the signals to be broadcast jointly by the BSs, then compresses and sends these signals to the BSs through the fronthaul links. We characterize an achievable rate region for a generalized compression strategy with Marton’s multicoding for broadcasting and multivariate compression for fronthaul transmission. We then compare this rate region with the distributed decode-forward (DDF) scheme, which achieves the capacity of the general relay networks to within a constant gap, and show that the difference lies in that DDF performs Marton’s multicoding and multivariate compression jointly as opposed to successively as in the compression strategy. A main result of this paper is that under the assumption that the fronthaul links are subject to a sum capacity constraint, this difference is immaterial; so, for the Gaussian network, the compression strategy based on successive encoding can already achieve the capacity region of the C-RAN to within a constant gap, where the gap is independent of the channel parameters and the power constraints at the BSs. As a further result, for C-RAN under individual fronthaul constraints, this paper also establishes that the compression strategy can achieve to within a constant gap to the sum capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number-theoretic code is a class of codes defined by single or multiple congruences. These codes are mainly used for correcting insertion and deletion errors, and for correcting asymmetric errors. This paper presents a formula for a generalization of the complete weight enumerator for the number-theoretic codes. This formula allows us to derive the weight enumerators and cardinalities for the number-theoretic codes. As a special case, this paper provides the Hamming weight enumerators and cardinalities of the non-binary Tenengolts’ codes, correcting single insertion or deletion. Moreover, we show that the formula deduces the MacWilliams identity for the linear codes over the ring of integers modulo $r$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many applications, top-k query is an important operation to return a set of interesting points in a potentially huge data space. It is analyzed in this paper that the existing algorithms cannot process top- k query on massive data efficiently. This paper proposes a novel table-scan-based T2S algorithm to efficiently compute top-k results on massive data. T2S first constructs the presorted table, whose tuples are arranged in the order of the round-robin retrieval on the sorted lists. T2S maintains only fixed number of tuples to compute results. The early termination checking for T2S is presented in this paper, along with the analysis of scan depth. The selective retrieval is devised to skip the tuples in the presorted table which are not top-k results. The theoretical analysis proves that selective retrieval can reduce the number of the retrieved tuples significantly. The construction and incremental-update/batch-processing methods for the used structures are proposed in this paper. The extensive experimental results, conducted on synthetic and real-life data sets, show that T2S has a significant advantage over the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Load profile classification is very important in load forecast, planning and management. Although customers are generally grouped by utilities into residential, commercial classes and respective subclasses, there is a lack of systematic framework that can be used to characterize different classes with signatures that are both human-readable and machine-readable. The work presented in this paper attempts to formulate the theoretical framework for customer classification using the annual load profiles. This paper demonstrates how to extract characteristic attributes in frequency domain (CAFD) and use these CAFDs to formulate a hierarchy of load profiles that can be used as the systematic framework for customer load classification. As signatures for customer classes and subclasses, the CAFDs are obtained by using a data mining method called CART (classification and regression tree). The paper presents a load profile classification test to establish the efficacy of the proposed approach which is significant improvement over current practices that provide mostly qualitative labeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a test compaction procedure that combines the advantages of using multicycle tests for test compaction with the advantages of using both broadside and skewed-load tests for increasing the fault coverage and achieving test compaction. The procedure is the first to combine these two concepts in a single procedure. The combination is made possible by a definition of a multicycle skewed-load test that is suggested in this paper, and complements the definition of a multicycle broadside test. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of multicycle broadside and skewed-load tests in achieving test compaction for benchmark circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholar name disambiguation remains a hard and unsolved problem, which brings various troubles for bibliography data analytics. Most existing methods handle name disambiguation separately that tackles one name at a time, and neglect the fact that disambiguation of one name affects the others. Further, it is typically common that only limited information is available for bibliography data, e.g., only basic paper and citation information is available in DBLP. In this study, we propose a collective approach to name disambiguation, which takes the connection of different ambiguous names into consideration. We reformulate bibliography data as a heterogeneous multipartite network, which initially treats each author reference as a unique author entity, and disambiguation results of one name propagate to the others of the network. To further deal with the sparsity problem caused by limited available information, we also introduce word-word and venue-venue similarities, and we finally measure author similarities by assembling similarities from four perspectives. Using real-life data, we experimentally demonstrate that our approach is both effective and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes achieving or nearly achieving the Singleton bound are interesting in both theory and practice. The objective of this paper is to construct several infinite families of MDS, near MDS and almost MDS codes from some special cyclic subgroups of ${\mathbb {F}}_{q^{2}}^{*}$. To this end, the augmentation and extension techniques are used. The codes in this paper have flexible parameters and their lengths could be large. The minimum linear locality of the codes constructed in this paper is also studied. Some infinite families of optimal linearly locally recoverable codes are obtained. Besides, some codes in this paper are proved to be proper for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an interesting paper, Prof. C. Ding provided three constructions of cyclic codes of length being a product of two primes. Numerical data shows that many codes from these constructions are best cyclic codes of the same length and dimension over the same finite field. However, not much is known about these codes. In this paper, we explain some of the numerical data by developing a general method on cyclic codes of composite length and on estimating the minimum distance. We also provide a general construction of cyclic codes of composite length which are related to Ding’s constructions. Numerical data shows that it produces many best cyclic codes as well. Finally, we point out how these cyclic codes can be used to construct convolutional codes with large free distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

List decoding of insertions and deletions in the Levenshtein metric is considered. The Levenshtein distance between two sequences is the minimum number of insertions and deletions needed to turn one of the sequences into the other. In this paper, a Johnson-like upper bound on the maximum list size when list decoding in the Levenshtein metric is derived. This bound depends only on the length and minimum Levenshtein distance of the code, the length of the received word, and the alphabet size. It shows that polynomial-time list decoding beyond half the Levenshtein distance is possible for many parameters. Further, we also prove a lower bound on list decoding of deletions with the well-known binary Varshamov–Tenengolts codes, which shows that the maximum list size grows exponentially with the number of deletions. Finally, an efficient list decoding algorithm for two insertions/deletions with VT codes is given. This decoder can be modified to a polynomial-time list decoder of any constant number of insertions/deletions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cycle time, which is of order of ten weeks for most products in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (wafer fabs), must be explicitly considered in production planning models. Cycle times depend nonlinearly on the resource workload in a wafer fab. Different data-driven (DD) production planning formulations are studied in this paper. Such formulations are based on a set of system states representing the congestion behavior of a wafer fab with work in process (WIP) and resulting output levels. Different WIP-output relations in the DD formulations are investigated. In addition, different methods are proposed to gather representative sets of system states. The DD formulations are compared with the Allocated Clearing Function (ACF) formulation with respect to profit and cost values using simulation models of a scaled-down and a large-sized multi-product wafer fab, respectively. The simulation results show that some DD variants are able to outperform the ACF formulation under several experimental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Availability of a common, shared benchmark to provide repeatable, quantifiable, and comparable results is an added value for any scientific community. International consortia provide benchmarks in a wide range of domains, being normally used by industry, vendors, and researchers for evaluating their software products. In this regard, a benchmark of untimed Petri net models was developed to be used in a yearly software competition driven by the Petri net community. However, to the best of our knowledge there is not a similar benchmark to evaluate solution techniques for Petri nets with timing extensions. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for the comparative analysis of generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPNs) simulation techniques. Although we focus on simulation techniques, our framework provides a baseline for a comparative analysis of different GSPN solvers (e.g., simulators, numerical solvers, or other techniques). The evaluation framework encompasses a set of 50 GSPN models including test cases and case studies from the literature, and a set of evaluation guidelines for the comparative analysis. In order to show the applicability of the proposed framework, we carry out a comparative analysis of steady-state simulators implemented in three academic software tools, namely, GreatSPN, PeabraiN, and TimeNET. The results allow us to validate the trustfulness of these academic software tools, as well as to point out potential problems and algorithmic optimization opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role assignment is an important and complex task in collaboration and management. Group role assignment (GRA) pursues the optimal team performance by assigning pertinent roles to agents in a team from the team’s viewpoint. There are many factors that should be considered when conducting role assignment. Budgets are such a factor. This paper presents a challenging role assignment problem in collaboration, called GRA with budget constraints (GRABC). This paper contributes a thorough investigation of the GRABC problem including: 1) the first formalization of the proposed problem; 2) a set of practical solutions to different forms of this problem by using the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package (CPLEX); 3) a set of necessary conditions for these problems to possess feasible solutions to improve the CPLEX solutions; and 4) a synthesized process to deal with GRABC problems. Contribution 2) actually clarifies a list of requirements in solving the GRABC problem. Simulations, experiments and a case study are used to verify the practicability and efficiency of the proposed solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a planning procedure that allows an anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic system to perform a manipulation task in a natural human-like way by using demonstrated human movements. The key idea of the proposal is to convert the demonstrated trajectories into attractive potential fields defined over the configuration space and then use an RRT*-based planning algorithm that minimizes a path-cost function designed to bias the tree growth toward the human-demonstrated configurations. This paper presents a description of the proposed approach as well as results from a conceptual and a real application example, the latter using a real anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic system. A path-quality measure, based on first-order synergies (correlations between joint velocities) obtained from real human movements, is also proposed and used for evaluation and comparison purposes. The obtained results show that the paths obtained with the proposed procedure are more human-like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mean hitting time for random walks on a network, defined as the average of hitting times over all possible pairs of nodes, has found a large variety of applications in many areas. In this paper, we first prove that among all $N$ -node networks, the complete graph has the minimum mean hitting time $N-1$ , which scales linearly with network size. We then study a random walk mobility model with location heterogeneity, modeled by scale-free networks, which are ubiquitous in realistic systems such as P2P networks. For this purpose, we consider random walks on two sparse scale-free small-world networks. By using the connection between random walks and electrical networks, we derive explicit formulas about mean hitting time for both networks, the dominant scaling of which exhibits the same behavior as that of complete graphs. This paper demonstrates that heterogeneous sparse networks can have low-mean hitting time with a behavior similar to that of dense complete graphs, which is instrumental in designing networks, where search is fast between any pair of nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a method of finding a constrained optimum excitation of a generic transmitting antenna subarray. Constraint of a maximum power coupled from the transmitting to the receiving subarray is discussed. Optimum realized gain, optimum gain, and optimum directivity goals are covered. The proposed method can operate on any generic multi-port antenna, with no assumptions taken on the geometry, the constituent elements construction, or the interelement coupling. This paper in particular investigates dense linear arrays and analyses the applicability of several typical transmitter/receiver partitionings to the proposed method. Achieving a below −30 dB TX-to-RX total coupling with less than 1 dB realized gain penalty over a 135° scanning angle is demonstrated for below-half-wavelength spaced 73 GHz $E$ -band PCB-based linear arrays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a general framework of constructing the optimal frequency-hopping sequence (FHS) sets is presented based on the designated direct product. Under this framework, we obtain infinitely many new optimal FHS sets by combining some one-coincide (OC) sequence sets that are newly constructed in this paper with some known optimal FHS sets. Our constructions are also based on extension method. However, our constructions give new and flexible parameters due to the free choice of OC sequence set. As a result, our constructions allow a great flexibility of choosing parameters of FHS sets for a given frequency-hopping spread spectrum system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the problem for which lengths a maximum distance separable (MDS) Euclidean self-dual code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ exists. This problem is completely solved for the case where $q$ is even. For $q$ is odd, some $q$ -ary MDS Euclidean self-dual codes were obtained in the literature. In this paper, we construct six new classes of $q$ -ary MDS Euclidean self-dual codes by using generalized Reed–Solomon (GRS for short) codes and extended GRS codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let m be an even positive integer. A Boolean bent function ƒ on F2m-1 × F2 is called a cyclic bent function if for any a ≠ b ∈ F2m-1 and ε ∈ F2, ƒ(ax1, x2)+ ƒ(bx1, x2 + ε) is always bent, where x1 ∈ F2m-1, x2 ∈ F2. Cyclic bent functions look extremely rare. This paper focuses on cyclic bent functions on F2m-1 × F2 and their applications. The first objective of this paper is to establish a link between quadratic cyclic bent functions and a special type of prequasifields, and construct a class of quadratic cyclic bent functions from the Kantor-Williams prequasifields. The second objective is to use cyclic bent functions to construct families of optimal sequences. The results of this paper show that cyclic bent functions have nice applications in several fields such as coding theory, symmetric cryptography, and CDMA communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based method to construct composite indices to rapidly assess power system transient stability. By assigning appropriate weights to a few selected sub-indicators, a composite index can be constructed to guarantee a better coverage of worst-case stability scenarios of the power system. This paper provides an automatic method to construct a composite index with four sub-indicators calculated by the integral of acceleration, speed deviation and rotor angle of generators over a certain integration period using PCA. The effectiveness of the sub-indicators is validated first, followed by a comprehensive example of process of composite index construction, and the assessment of the influence of the effect of integration period on the performance of the composite index. High accuracy of classification has been demonstrated using composite index with appropriate settings of the integration periods of the sub-indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volt-VAR optimization (VVO) has been investigated extensively in power systems. However, under the era of integrated energy systems (IES), the growing interdependencies between different energy systems complicate traditional VVO. This is further hardened by incurred gas quality problems due to the hydrogen injection in IES, produced by widely applied power-to-gas (P2G) facilitates that couple between power and gas systems. This paper develops a two-stage volt-VAR-pressure optimization (VVPO) model for PV-penetrated IES to manage the variation of system voltages while managing gas quality indices. In addition to the traditional voltage regulating devices, P2G facilities, which can mitigate fluctuating PV output via converting the surplus generation into hydrogen, are also used for voltage management. A two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) based on moment information is utilized to model PV uncertainty. A semidefinite programming model is formulated and finally solved by the constraint generation algorithm. A 33-bus-20-node IES is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed VVPO on voltage management, ensured gas quality with high economic efficiency. The proposed VVPO is applicable to injecting other green gases into gas systems while ensuring power quality and enable system operators to provide low-cost but high-quality multi-energy to customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the rate at which scientific work is published continues to increase, so does the need to discern high-impact publications. In recent years, there have been several approaches that seek to rank publications based on their expected citation-based impact. Despite this level of attention, this research area has not been systematically studied. Past literature often fails to distinguish between short-term impact, the current popularity of an article, and long-term impact, the overall influence of an article. Moreover, the evaluation methodologies applied vary widely and are inconsistent. In this work, we aim to fill these gaps, studying impact-based ranking theoretically and experimentally. First, we provide explicit definitions for short-term and long-term impact, and introduce the associated ranking problems. Then, we identify and classify the most important ideas employed by state-of-the-art methods. After studying various evaluation methodologies of the literature, we propose a specific benchmark framework that can help us better differentiate effectiveness across impact aspects. Using this framework we investigate: (1) the practical difference between ranking by short- and long-term impact, and (2) the effectiveness and efficiency of ranking methods in different settings. To avoid reporting results that are discipline-dependent, we perform our experiments using four datasets from different scientific disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with randomized polling of a social network. In the case of forecasting the outcome of an election between two candidates A and B, classical intent polling asks randomly sampled individuals: who will you vote for? Expectation polling asks: who do you think will win? In this paper, we propose a novel neighborhood expectation polling (NEP) strategy that asks randomly sampled individuals: what is your estimate of the fraction of votes for A? Therefore, in NEP, sampled individuals will naturally look at their neighbors (defined by the underlying social network graph) when answering this question. Hence, the mean squared error (MSE) of NEP methods rely on selecting the optimal set of samples from the network. To this end, we propose two NEP algorithms for the following cases: (i) the social network graph is not known but, random walks (sequential exploration) can be performed on the graph, and (ii) the social network graph is unknown but, uniformly sampled nodes from the network are available. For both cases, algorithms based on a graph theoretic consequence called friendship paradox are proposed. Theoretical results on the dependence of the MSE of the algorithms on the properties of the network are established. Numerical results on real and synthetic data sets are provided to illustrate the performance of the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]