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Cataloged from PDF version of article. The object-based analysis of remotely sensed imagery provides valuable spatial and structural information that is complementary to pixel-based spectral information in classi- fication. In this paper, we present novel methods for automatic object detection in high-resolution images by combining spectral information with structural information exploited by using image segmentation. The proposed segmentation algorithm uses morphological operations applied to individual spectral bands using structuring elements in increasing sizes. These operations produce a set of connected components forming a hierarchy of segments for each band. A generic algorithm is designed to select meaningful segments that maximize a measure consisting of spectral homogeneity and neighborhood connectivity. Given the observation that different structures appear more clearly at different scales in different spectral bands, we describe a new algorithm for unsupervised grouping of candidate segments belonging to multiple hierarchical segmentations to find coherent sets of segments that correspond to actual objects. The segments are modeled by using their spectral and textural content, and the grouping problem is solved by using the probabilistic latent semantic analysis algorithm that builds object models by learning the object-conditional probability distributions. The automatic labeling of a segment is done by computing the similarity of its feature distribution to the distribution of the learned object models using the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The performances of the unsupervised segmentation and object detection algorithms are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using three different data sets with comparative experiments, and the results show that the proposed methods are able to automatically detect, group, and label segments belonging to the same object classes.

During the first days in space, i.e., after a transition from 1G to 0G, more than 50% of the astro- (and cosmonauts) suffer from the Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS).The symptoms of SAS, like nausea and dizziness, are especially provoked by head movements. Astronauts have mentioned close similarities between the symptoms of SAS and the symptoms they experienced after a 1 hour centrifuge run on Earth, i.e., after a transition from 3G to 1G (denoted by Sickness Induced by Centrifugation, SIC). During several space missions, we related susceptibility to SAS and to SIC in 11 astronauts and found 4 of them being susceptible to both SIC and SAS, and 7 being not susceptible to SIC nor to SAS. This correspondence in susceptibility suggests that SIC and SAS share the same underlying mechanism. To further study this mechanism, several vestibular parameters have been investigated (e.g. postural stability, vestibularly driven eye movements, subjective vertical). We found some striking changes in individual cases that are possibly due to the centrifuge run. However, the variability between subjects generally is very large, making physiological links to SIC and SAS still hard to find.

Objectives: Workers in many industries are exposed to endotoxins, which may cause adverse health effects. In exposure assessment, information about exposure variability is essential. However, variability in exposure has rarely been investigated for biological agents and more specifically for endotoxin. Therefore, variance components and determinants of exposure were studied in a large database with >2000 endotoxin measurements. Methods: Data from 10 individual studies were combined to create a database with 2010 personal inhalable dust and endotoxin measurements, of which 1650 were repeated measurements. Exposure groups were defined based on job codes. Between- and within-worker variance components were estimated for different grouping strategies, and determinants of exposure were studied using mixed effects models. Results: Inhalable dust and endotoxin exposure levels are summarized for 46 industries and 4 broadly defined sectors. The between-worker variability exceeded the within-worker variability overall and within sectors and subsectors, and variance components were larger for endotoxin than for dust. Between-worker variability also exceeded within-worker variability in nearly half of the exposure groups based upon industries or job code within industries for endotoxin exposure and in 10% of the groups for dust exposure. Among other things, dustiness of the process, contact with animals, bulk production, presence of plant material or a cyclic process appeared as determinants of exposure, which largely explained the between-worker variability. Conclusions: Exposure groups were much less homogeneous for endotoxin exposure than for dust exposure. This is distinctly different than for chemical exposure. Large variability in measured exposure levels is inherent to endotoxin exposure, which is caused in part by determinants that influence growth of microorganisms. These findings have major consequences for the design of future occupational intervention and epidemiological studies. The measurement effort needs to be greater than exposure assessment for chemical agents which demonstrate lower exposure variability, especially when evaluating endotoxin exposure for compliance testing. The established determinants of exposure give direction for potential exposure control, although more information about determinants of day-to-day variability in exposure is still needed to be able to effectively control endotoxin exposure. © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Occupational Hygiene Society.

The thermally activated characteristics (TAC) of the linearly modulated optically stimulated luminescence (LM-OSL) signals of seven quartz samples from different origin were studied relative to the TAC of their respective thermoluminescence (TL) glow-peaks at 110 degrees C. Within the framework of the study the TAC behavior of the LM-OSL was investigated by measuring the OSL signal at room temperature (RT) with the 110 degrees C glow-peak present during OSL measurements, as well as, at 125 degrees C without the glow-peak at 110 degrees C removed by a cut-heat at 180 degrees C prior to OSL measurement. The LM-OSL curves were analyzed into individual components using a computerized deconvolution procedure. It was found that all individual LM-OSL components of each kind of quartz follow the TAC behavior of the respective TL glow-peak at 110 degrees C. The fourth component of the LM-OSL curve, centered at about t(m) = 400 s, appeared when the OSL measurements were performed at RT, whereas it was absent when the OSL measurement were performed at 180 degrees C. It is suggested that this component is closely related with the TL glow-peak at 110 degrees C. Publisher's Version Q2 WOS:000257808000028

Introduction: "Ergonomic" questionnaires are widely used in epidemiological field studies to study the association between workstation characteristics, work posture and musculoskeletal disorders among office workers. Findings have been inconsistent regarding the putative adverse effect of work postures. Underestimation of the true association might be present in studies due to misclassification of subjects to risk (i.e. exposed to non-neutral working postures) and no-risk categories (i.e. not exposed to non-neutral working postures) based on questionnaire responses. The objective of this study was to estimate the amount of misclassification resulting from the use of questionnaires. Methods: Test-retest reliability and concurrent validity of a newly developed questionnaire was assessed. This questionnaire collects data on workstation characteristics and on individual characteristics during computer work (i.e. work postures, movements and habits). Pictures were added where possible to provide visual guidance. The study population consisted of 84 office workers of a research department. They filled out the questionnaire on the Internet twice, with an in-between period of 2 weeks. For a subgroup of workers (n=38), additional on-site observations and multiple manual goniometer measurements were performed. Results: Percentage agreement ranged between 71% and 100% for the test-retest analysis, between 31% and 100% for the comparison between questionnaire and on-site observation, and between 26% and 71% for the comparison between questionnaire and manual goniometer measurements. For 9 out of 12 tested items, the percentage agreement between questionnaire and manual goniometer measurements was below 50%. Conclusions: The questionnaire collects reliable data on workstation characteristics and some individual characteristics during computer work (i.e. work movements and habits), but does not seem to be useful to collect data on work postures during computer work in epidemiological field studies among office workers. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction: "Ergonomic" questionnaires are widely used in epidemiological field studies to study the association between workstation characteristics, work posture and musculoskeletal disorders among office workers. Findings have been inconsistent regarding the putative adverse effect of work postures. Underestimation of the true association might be present in studies due to misclassification of subjects to risk (i.e. exposed to non-neutral working postures) and no-risk categories (i.e. not exposed to non-neutral working postures) based on questionnaire responses. The objective of this study was to estimate the amount of misclassification resulting from the use of questionnaires. Methods: Test-retest reliability and concurrent validity of a newly developed questionnaire was assessed. This questionnaire collects data on workstation characteristics and on individual characteristics during computer work (i.e. work postures, movements and habits). Pictures were added where possible to provide visual guidance. The study population consisted of 84 office workers of a research department. They filled out the questionnaire on the Internet twice, with an in-between period of 2 weeks. For a subgroup of workers (n=38), additional on-site observations and multiple manual goniometer measurements were performed. Results: Percentage agreement ranged between 71% and 100% for the test-retest analysis, between 31% and 100% for the comparison between questionnaire and on-site observation, and between 26% and 71% for the comparison between questionnaire and manual goniometer measurements. For 9 out of 12 tested items, the percentage agreement between questionnaire and manual goniometer measurements was below 50%. Conclusions: The questionnaire collects reliable data on workstation characteristics and some individual characteristics during computer work (i.e. work movements and habits), but does not seem to be useful to collect data on work postures during computer work in epidemiological field studies among office workers. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Date of Conference: 7-9 Nov. 2007 Conference name: 22nd international symposium on computer and information sciences, 2007 Threshold Broadcast Encryption (TBE) is a promising extension of threshold cryptography with its advantages over traditional threshold cryptosystems, such as eliminating the need of a trusted party, the ability of setting up the system by individual users independently and the ability of choosing the threshold parameter and the group of privileged receivers at the time of encryption. An ElGamal-based solution for TBE was proposed by Ghodosi et al. In this paper, we propose an improved ElGamal-based TBE scheme with reduced transmission cost. ©2007 IEEE.

Date of Conference: 22-24 Aug. 2007 Conference name: 2007 IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing In this paper we consider the problem of finding the optimum beamforming vectors for the downlink of a multiuser system, where there are individual signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) targets for each user. Majority of the previous work on this problem assumed a total power constraint on the base stations. However, since each transmit antenna is limited by the amount of power it can transmit due to the limited linear region of the power amplifliers, a more realistic constraint is to place a limit on the per antenna power. In a recent work, Yu and Lan proposed an iterative algorithm for computing the optimum beamforming vectors minimizing the power margin over all antennas under individual SINR and per antenna power constraints. However, from a system designer point of view, it may be more desirable to minimize the total transmit power rather than minimizing the power margin, especially when the system is not symmetric. Reformulating the transmitter optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power subject to individual SINR constraints on the users and per antenna power constraints on the base stations, the algorithm proposed by Yu and Lan is modified. Performance of the modified algorithm is compared with existing methods for various cellular array scenarios. ©2007 IEEE.

Date of Conference: 25-27 June 2007 Conference name: International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, 2007 The management and exchange of multimedia data is challenging due to the variety of formats, standards and intended applications. In addition, production of multimedia data is rapidly increasing due to the availability of off-the-shelf, modern digital devices that can be used by even inexperienced users. It is likely that this volume of information will only increase in the future. A key goal of the MUSCLE (Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning) network is to develop tools, technologies and standards to facilitate the interoperability of multimedia content and support the exchange of such data. One approach for achieving this was the creation of a specific "E-Team", composed of the authors, to discuss core questions and practical issues based on the participant's individual work. In this paper, we present the relevant points of view with regards to sharing experiences and to extracting and integrating multimedia data and metadata from different modes (text, images, video). © 2007 IEEE.

Adapting to user context, individual features and behaviour patterns is a topic of great attention nowadays in the field of Web-based and mobile learning. A challenge is to design personalized interfaces and software enabling easy access to the learning content while being sufficiently flexible to handle changes in a user's context, perception and available resources. This paper presents a Web-based adaptation and personalization system, AdaptiveWeb, that uses cognitive aspects as its core filtering element. The proposed system focuses upon the creation of a comprehensive user profiling that combines parameters that analyze the most intrinsic users' characteristics like visual, cognitive, and emotional processing parameters as well as the "traditional" user profiling characteristics and together tend to give an optimized adapted and personalized result to the user. The use of semantics enables the openness of the system as adequately described in the paper. © 2007 IEEE. 68 73 Conference code: 72636 Cited By :7

We consider the problem of survivable network design in traffic-groomed optical WDM mesh networks that support subwavelength capacity connections. In typical survivable network designs, individual sessions are provided either full protection or no protection. We consider a quality of protection (QoP) framework where a connection is provided partial protection, i.e., when a link failure occurs on the primary path, the protection bandwidth provided on the backup path is less than or equal to the primary bandwidth. Each connection request specifies the primary bandwidth and a minimum backup bandwidth required. The network will guarantee at least the minimum backup bandwidth and, if capacity is available, higher backup bandwidth up to the primary path's bandwidth. The advantage of such a model is that it can reduce backup capacity requirements based on connection needs leading to lower blocking probability and lower network costs. We consider two scenarios: (i) a network with static traffic that is designed using an integer linear program (ILP) formulation and (ii) a network with dynamic traffic for which we present a heuristic connection admission control algorithm that prevents backup resource contention during recovery from a link failure. The results quantify the gain in blocking probability for different partial protection scenarios. The mechanism proposed to counter backup contention is seen to provide an average of 120% reduction in the contention among backup paths of connections traversing a link, especially when the number of wavelengths in each link is small. �2008 Optical Society of America.