Author: Abdusalam F Ahmed Nwesri
Title: Answering English Queries in Automatically Transcribed Arabic Speech
Abstract: There are several well-known approaches to parsing Arabic text in preparation for indexing and retrieval.
Techniques such as stemming and stopping have been shown to improve search results on written newswire dispatches, but few comparisons are available on other data sources.
In this paper, we apply several alternative stemming and stopping approaches to Arabic text automatically extracted from the audio soundtrack of news video footage, and compare these with approaches that rely on machine translation of the underlying text.
Using the TRECVID video collection and queries, we show that
normalisation, stopword-removal, and light stemming increase retrieval precision, but that heavy stemming and trigrams have a negative effect. We also show that the choice of machine translation engine plays a major role in retrieval effectiveness.


Author: Alex Holkner
Title: Inline dispatch caching for dynamic languages
Abstract: Dynamic object-oriented languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl and ECMAScript (a.k.a. JavaScript) allow relatively unconstrained modification to types and objects at runtime. This flexibility permits rapid application development at the expense of runtime efficiency. The most advanced optimisation techniques such as method inlining and specialisation cannot immediately be applied in these languages due to the mutable nature of the object types.
Inline dispatch caching, introduced with the Self compiler and used in virtually every Java virtual machine today, can enable these optimisations; but only if suitably extended to deal with mutable types. We introduce such an extension and discuss our research proposal, including the relation of our work to Microsoft's recent foray into the dynamic language area.


Author: Amirreza Aryani Kashani
Title: Entity-based change propagation analysis
Abstract: An important part of software evolution is change impact analysis: determining what are the consequences of a given change. An initial change in a system can propagate to other parts of the system, and require further development and software testing. Change propagation analysis is important in order to evaluate the cost of maintenance and software evolution plans. There are a number of change impact analysis approaches in the literature, but complexity and specific technical requirements stop enterprise companies from adopting them as a generic methodology in the software life cycle. We propose a novel approach for estimating the scope of change propagation based on logical relationships between system components. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that a dependency map for software components can be derived from domain-level (abstract) analysis. This approach is understandable and usable by domain experts who have no expertise in software architecture. Also it is applicable to environments where design artifacts or maintenance history are not accessible. In this paper we focus on details of the first key step including defining dependency map, underlying concepts and a method for developing them.


Author: Antony Iorio
Title: Improving the performance of rotationally invariant differential evolution
Abstract: In many optimization problems it is desirable to have an optimization algorithm which exhibits behaviour which is independent of the orientation of the search space. Differential Evolution is a very popular optimization algorithm which has this characteristic and can self adapt to the search space. It has been applied successfully to many real world optimization problems. Unfortunately, it has some short comings if rotational invariance is required, because often insufficient diversity can be maintained in the population in order for the search to make progress. Here we will present a novel Differential Evolution algorithm which samples vectors around better individuals in the population. This approach has demonstrated improved performance over a canonical Differential Evolution scheme, as well as competitive behaviour compared with Simulated Binary Crossover on the truss topology design problem.


Author: Bin Rong
Title: Making Application Layer Multicast Reliable is Feasible
Abstract: Application layer multicast (ALM henceforth) was proposed as a substitute for network layer multicast~(IP multicast). However, the end users, who take the responsibility to replicate and forward data in ALM, are not as stable as routers in IP multicast. Therefore, reliability has become the major concern in ALM. This paper presents
a new tree construction algorithm and demonstrates that making ALM reliable is achievable, even when a single-tree based multicast structure is used. It exploits the property that participating users' lifetime follow a Pareto distribution which has the used better than new~(UBTN) feature, and dynamically adjusts the multicast tree. Participating nodes are organized into a hierarchy and the hierarchy is organized in such a way that it reflects the relative stability among participating nodes. The proposed approach
achieves reliability enhancement for ALM by using a very low overhead and no a~priori knowledge about usersÇ«÷ lifetime is required. A minimum reduction of $50\%$ can be achieved in terms of service disruption frequency. Detailed mathematical analysis and simulation results reveal that making ALM reliable is feasible.


Author: Carlos Alexandre Queiroz Batista da Silva
Title: Distributed Situations Awareness for Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: Many frameworks and architecture models used to develop agent-based applications are based on the ECA (Event-Condition-Action) paradigm. When an event is perceived by the ECA engine it verifies if the event satisfies one of the conditions registered for it, if it does, an action is triggered. Some frameworks have extended the ECA model to support situations which are scenarios demanding reasoning upon a set of events and in some cases limited by a temporal space. However these frameworks are not necessarily adequate for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Multi-Agent Systems are loosely coupled entities (agents) connected by a network. Agents collaborate with each other to solve problems or deliver application functionality. Our research intends to explore a Distributed Situations model, which is generic enough to be used by any Multi-Agent systems.


Author: Charles Thevathayan
Title: Composition of security Protocols
Abstract: We present a method for composing security protocols where multiple message elements using different levels of security properties can be combined in a provably secure manner. This is done by using compoable security patterns and constraints that limit possible actions of valid protocol participants. The security properties include authentication, data integrity, secrecy and non-repudiation allowing eCommerce protocols to be created from specification.


Author: D. N. F. Awang Iskandar, James A. Thom and S. M. M. Tahaghoghi
Title: Content-based Image Retrieval Using Image Regions as Query Examples
Abstract: A common approach to content-based image retrieval is to use example images as queries; images in the collection that have low-level features similar to the query examples are returned in response to the query. In this paper, we explore the use of image regions as query examples. We compare the retrieval effectiveness of using whole images, single regions, and multiple regions as examples. We also compare two approaches for combining shape features: an equal-weight linear combination, and classification using machine learning algorithms. We show that using image regions as query examples leads to higher effectiveness than using whole images, and that an equal-weight linear combination of shape
features is simpler and at least as effective as using a machine learning algorithm.


Author: Dariush Riazati
Title: Drill Across & Visualization of Cubes with Non-Conformed Dimensions
Abstract: Data analysts would benefit greatly from the ability to navigate and view combined multidimensional data from multiple sources, a key requirement of which is the conformity between their dimensions. The strict requirements of conformity restrict navigating to related multidimensional data from unseen or unfamiliar sources.
In this paper we make a distinction between conformed dimension tables and conformed dimension attributes and discuss the merits of relaxing the conformity requirement. We propose extending the navigation operation drill across to include the non-conformed dimensions and introduce Nested Pivot Tables as an extension to Pivot Tables to show how sources that have conformed as well as non-conformed dimensions can be viewed and analyzed together.


Author: Dhirendra Singh
Title: Collaborative Learning in Multi-agent Systems
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong potential in their applicability to dynamic environments. Learning in the context of MAS is a valuable tool for creating more adaptive and robust systems. Furthermore, and intuitively, a group of learning agents that collaborate have the potential to achieve better system performance than when learning individually. In this research we explore the use of collaborative multi-agent learning (CMAL) in a dynamic system of multiple agents. The MAL problem is addressed from an agent paradigm perspective rather than a Machine Learning one. We consider a practical application for this work within the Distributed Energy domain. The scenario is based in a domestic household equipped with a network of agents that control various electrical appliances, and where energy consumption is efficiently managed and controlled through the use of collaborative learning between the agents.


Author: Gayan Wijesinghe
Title: Using Indexed Nested Loops in Genetic Programming
Abstract: Genetic programming is used to automatically evolve programs to solve problems specified by a human user. Loops, in general, are rarely used in genetic programming due to the problems of representing them in the tree structures of the programs, detecting and avoiding infinite loops, ensuring that they are logically and structurally valid through their operation and fitness measurement. In some of our previous work, we have shown how to successfully use a restricted form of loops, with no nesting and indexing, for object classification. In this work, we present a way to implement indexed nested loops in genetic programming and discuss the how to avoid the previously mentioned issues when doing so.


Author: Hendrik Gani
Title: Transparently Adding Adaptation Capabilities to Existing Java Applications
Abstract: Significant development effort is required to implement adaptive applications that include capabilities such as collecting contextual information, making adaptation decisions, and performing the actual adaptation. Existing work attempts to add transparency by either partially or completely shifting adaptation responsibility to a supporting system (e.g. library or middleware). However in general there is a trade-off between transparency and adaptation capability since the more complex or sophisticated the capability, the more communication required between the application and supporting system. As such, an extensible and configurable source based pre-compiler (mobjexc) was developed in conjunction with a middleware platform for adaptation (MobJeX), which provides transparent insertion of middleware-supported adaptation code into existing Java applications. Furthermore, transparency issues in the produced code were addressed in order to accommodate transparent insertion of the current as well as future capabilities. This paper provides example scenarios where non-trivial capabilities such as object mobility and metrics collection are seamlessly inserted into an ordinary Java application. In addition, an evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed solutions in terms of reducing development effort is provided.


Author: Iftah Gideoni, Lin Padgham, Sebastian Sardina
Title: Merit Based Choice and Commitment in BDI Agents
Abstract: We intend to amend a typical Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) style agent-oriented programming language so as to enable agents to natively select and use the best plan from a set of available plans for serving a goal. In order to tell which course of action would eventually lead to a preferred state, an agent should forecast the outcome of each applicable plan. To that end, we appeal to Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, which is already embedded within the BDI language to be used. Because the work is aimed to be applicable to resource-bounded systems, we shall explore mitigation techniques to cope with the potentially intractable planning computation. In particular, we explore ways in which plans may be abstracted to the so-called ``macro-actions'' and ways in which the embedded planner may leverage its BDI context to prioritize computation.
We will define the language semantics, show its native properties with respect to (preferred) plan selection, and demonstrate its usage in a multi unmanned-aircraft (simulated) application.
Though the techniques developed are not expected to lead to optimal solutions, they are expected to cope with time-constrained domains. Thus, we expect this work to contribute to the ability to base real-life applications on formal BDI languages.


Author: Iman Ibrahim Yusuf
Title: Recovery-Oriented Software Architecture for High Performance Grids(ROSA-Grids)
Abstract: Solving large and time intensive applications within much shorter period of time is now possible by running applications on grid environment. In grids, a huge number of heterogeneous resources that are possibly in geographically separated areas coordinate to solve problems. Hence, applications are expected to run reliably on such environment. However due to the nature, number and location of resources involved, and the complexity of the mechanisms needed to integrate these resources into a seamless utility; the possibility of failure is not only higher but also inevitable in the environment.
There are exiting fault tolerance approaches for grids. The approaches are either application specific, restricted to single domain as opposed to grid definition or limited to only detect failure. We propose a recovery-oriented computing (ROC) to grid systems as a fault tolerance mechanism. Since failure is not a problem rather unavoidable matter in computing environment, we concentrate on decreasing the time to recover from possible failure.
In this paper, we survey the combination of ROC with grid applications. We also analyse how having information about the architecture of the application benefits us in developing a better recovery-oriented fault tolerance mechanism. At the end, we highlight the problems of existing fault tolerance approaches.


Author: Iman S. H. Suyoto, Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd, and Falk Scholer
Title: Effective retrieval of polyphonic audio with polyphonic symbolic queries
Abstract: Accurately finding audio recordings in response to symbolic queries is one of the key challenges in the field of music information retrieval. Pitch is one of the main features of music; in this paper we propose and evaluate approaches for using pitch information in polyphonic symbolic queries to retrieve full tracks of audio recordings. The audio data is first converted into symbolic data, using an automated transcription process. This is a noisy process, adding up to three times as many notes to the transcription than are actually present. Nevertheless, recordings can be accurately retrieved by manually-constructed queries (either in full or truncated) using the longest common subsequence algorithm (and a sliding window if the queries are truncated). Precision at 1 of about 80% was achieved, and around 85% of queries return correct answers in the top 10 from a collection of 1808 recordings. Truncated queries are as effective as untruncated queries for retrieving correct answers in the first rank position. Thus, the burden on users is reduced as they only need to produce a small fraction of a song as a query.


Author: Jennifer Sandercock
Title: Somatic Marker Agent Development: A Methodology for Creating Many Characters that Use Emotions and Personality to Make Decisions
Abstract: Creating virtual characters who use their emotions and personality to make decisions can be a time-consuming and difficult task. Little work has been done previously to address how to easily build unique personalities based on behavioural choices for a large number of characters. The methodology presented here shows a simple method to automatically generate personalities using Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis. Characters build up a personality in the form of which choices are better or worse based on their soft goals and emotional past experience of what they felt was ``good'' or ``bad''. The methodology has been implemented generically and allows a user to easily use the techniques to include emotions and personality in their own domain dependent environment. The process is described in detail so the reader can use these techniques themselves; either from scratch, or using the software developed by the authors.


Author: Jonathan Yu
Title: Ontology Evaluation using Wikipedia categories for browsing.
Abstract: Ontology evaluation is a maturing discipline with methodologies and measures being developed and proposed.
However, evaluation methods that have been proposed have not been applied to specific examples. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art in ontology evaluation - current methodologies, criteria and measures, analyse appropriate valuations that are important to our application - browsing in Wikipedia, and apply these evaluations in the context of ontologies with varied properties. Specifically, we seek to evaluate ontologies based on categories found in Wikipedia.


Author: Jun Jie Foo
Title: Clustering Near-duplicate Images in Large Collections
Abstract: Near-duplicate images introduce problems of redundancy and copyright infringement in large image collections.
The problem is acute on the web, where appropriation of images without acknowledgment of source is prevalent.
In this paper, we present an effective clustering approach for near-duplicate images, using a combination of techniques
from invariant image local descriptors and an adaptation of near-duplicate text-document clustering techniques; we extend our earlier approach of near-duplicate image pairwise identification for this clustering approach.
We demonstrate that our clustering approach is highly effective for collections of up to a few hundred thousand images. We also show --- via experimentation with real examples --- that our approach presents a viable solution for clustering near-duplicate images on the Web.


Author: Ken Gardiner
Title: A Framework for the Co-Evolution of Genes, Proteins and a Genetic Code wi
Abstract: This paper presents an artificial chemistry model where genotypic and phenotypic strings
react with each other. The model prevents the genome from directly coding for genotype-phenotype mappings or for gene-replication enzymes. Experiments demonstrate the genome can evolve to manipulate reactions of phenotypic strings in such a
way as to alter the genotype-phenotype mapping, and produce gene-replication enzymes.


Author: Khanh Hoa Dam and Michael Winikoff
Title: Generation of Repair Plans for Change Propagation
Abstract: One of the most critical problems in software maintenance and evolution is propagating changes. Although many approaches have been proposed, automated change propagation is still a significant technical challenge in software
engineering. In this paper we present an agent-oriented change propagation framework based on fixing inconsistencies when primary changes are made to
design models. A core piece of the framework is a new method for generating repair plans from OCL constraints that restrict these models.


Author: Malith Jayasinghe
Title: A Quality of Service Aware Load Distribution Policy for Web Server Farms
Abstract: Developing efficient load distribution policies for web server farms has been challenging due to the complex workload characteristics of the Internet traffic.
Such policies should take into account the high variance in service time distribution and high variability in arrival rates. Although there have been several attempts in the past to develop efficient load distribution polices, these have several limitations. In this paper, we propose a Ç«ˇquality of service aware load distribution policyÇ«÷ for a distributed server farm called QOS-SITA-E. Our QoS aware task assignment policy is based on the well known SITA-E. Our model provides Ç«ˇquality of service differentiationÇ«÷ for different classes of clients. We analysis our load distribution policy analytically and prove that it can outperform several existing policies under certain constraints.


Author: Michael C. Harris
Title: What size should a reusable learning object be?
Abstract: Digital resources for teaching and learning, or learning objects, have been made available in specialised repositories as well as on the World Wide Web. Learning objects may be single files or complex aggregations of many media assets. When searching learning objects, system implementors must decide whether it is appropriate to return an entire learning object or some part thereof. In this paper we explore the issue of what is an appropriate resource to return to the user in the context of an actual query against a repository of learning objects.


Author: Mikhail Perepletchikov
Title: Cohesion Metrics for Predicting Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software
Abstract: Although Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a promising paradigm for developing enterprise software systems, existing research mostly assumes the existence of black box services with little attention given to the structural characteristics of the implementing software, potentially resulting in poor system maintainability. Whilst there has been some
preliminary work examining coupling in a service-oriented context, there has to date been no such work on the structural property of cohesion. Consequently, this paper extends existing notions of cohesion in OO and procedural design in order to account for the unique characteristics of SOC, allowing the derivation of assumptions linking cohesion to the maintainability
of service-oriented software. From these assumptions, a set of metrics are derived to quantify the degree of cohesion of service-oriented design constructs. Such design level metrics are valuable because they allow the prediction of maintainability early in the SDLC.


Author: Nalaka Dilshan Gooneratne
Title: Matching Strictly Dependent Global Constraints for Composite Web Services
Abstract: Web service discovery requires matching techniques for comparing and selecting web service descriptions based on user constraints. Semantic-based approaches achieve higher recall than other approaches (such as syntax-based approaches), because they employ ontological reasoning mechanisms to match syntactically heterogeneous descriptions. However, existing semantic-based approaches are not scalable as they perform an exhaustive search to locate composite services that conform to global constraints. This paper proposes a semantic-based matching technique that locates composite services. It relates attributes of services to a common attribute to ensure that they have the same scope. This enables the assigned values to be compared and evaluated against a given global constraint. Conforming composite services are located in polynomial time with a three-dimensional data structure that indexes services based on their types, attributes and the assigned values. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach achieves higher recall than syntax-based approaches and is more scalable than existing semantic-based approaches.


Author: Nicholas Richard May
Title: Improving the availability of composite services in service-oriented systems
Abstract: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a style of software organization that models components as services and promotes the reuse and sharing of services between enterprizes. However, SOA does not provide guarantees on the quality of the services provided, which hinders the adoption of SOA in business critical systems.
Our project aims to address one of these quality issues by improving the availability of services through the run-time optimization of service composition.
In this paper we discuss the goals of the project and the rationale for the approach selected.


Author: P C Thevathayan
Title: ECommerce Protocols through Pattern Composition
Abstract: Creating and verifying security protocols remains a slow process limiting the number of eCommerce applications. In this paper we propose an approach where protocols are composed from existing patterns for eCommerce properties such as authentication, non-repudiation, recency and data integrity. This approach allows protocols that are provably secure against known attacks to be created, avoiding the need for verification.


Author: Paul McIntosh
Title: X3D-UML: Towards Validation of 3D State Diagrams
Abstract: 3D abstraction techniques for modelling software systems are not common in the area of software development. The reasons for the lack of 3D abstraction are unclear and strong evidence to support or refute the use of 3D, as applied to software engineering, does not exist. Part of the reason for the lack of evidence is the difficulty in producing 3D visualisations and then measuring the benefits in a way that is not clouded by how the 3D abstraction has been implemented. This paper builds on previous research, where a 3D abstraction technique (coined X3D-UML) that is based on the Unified Modelling Language has shown that UML classes, already familiar to many software engineers, can be rendered easily in a 3D space. The initial research went so far as to mitigate the risk that the X3D, the Web3D technology used, was not capable of large scale 3D UML abstraction. This paper presents how this technology is to be applied to gain strong evidence as to the benefit in use of 3D for state diagrams.


Author: Pengfei Han
Title: Reducing Overfitting in Predicting Intrinsically Unstructured Proteins
Abstract: Intrinsically unstructured or disordered proteins are proteins that lack fixed 3-D structure globally or contain long disordered regions. Predicting disordered regions has attracted significant research recently. In developing a decision tree-based disordered region predictor, we note that many previous predictors applying 20 amino acid compositions as training parameter tend to overfit the data. In this paper we propose to alleviate overfitting in
prediction of intrinsically unstructured proteins by reducing input parameters. We also compare this approach with the random forest model, which is inherently tolerant to overfitting. Our experiments suggest that by reducing 20 amino acid compositions into 4 groups according to amino acid property can reduce the overfitting in decision tree
model. Alternative approach, ensemble-learning technique like random forest is naively more tolerant to this kind of overfitting and can be a promising candidate in disordered region prediction.


Author: Peter Somerville, Sandra Uitdenbogerd
Title: Note-Based Segmentation and Hierarchy in the Classification of Digital Musical Instruments
Abstract: The ability to automatically identify the musical instruments occurring in a recorded piece of music has important uses for various music-related applications. This paper examines the case of instrument classification where the raw data consists of musical phrases performed on digital instruments from eight instrument families. We compare the use of extracted features from a continuous sample of approximately one second, to the use of a systematic segmentation of the audio on note boundaries and using multiple, aligned note samples as input to classifiers. The accuracy of the segmented approach was greater than the one of the unsegmented approach. The best method was using a two-tiered hierarchical method which performed slightly better than the single-tiered flat approach. The best performing instrument category was woodwind, with an accuracy of 94% for the segmented approach, using the Bayesian network classifier. Distinguishing different types of pianos was difficult for all classifiers, with the segmented approach yielding an accuracy of 56%. For humans, broadly similar results were found, in that pianos were difficult to distinguish, along with woodwind and solo string instruments. However there was no symmetry between human comparisons of identical instruments and different instruments, with half of the broad instrument categories having widely different accuracies for the two cases.


Author: Sarvnaz Karimi
Title: Improving Transliteration Effectiveness by Systems Integration
Abstract: Machine transliteration, the process of rendering a word from a source language to a target language with preserved pronunciation, has been studied for a variety of language pairs. Typically, each of these studies suggest specific source-target character alignment and word segmentation methods to form their translation rules. However, the specific segmentation approach of a transliteration model can cause errors for some inputs, leading to incorrect transliteration. In this paper, we investigate combining the outputs of multiple transliteration methods. Evaluating the proposed scheme for Persian-English and English-Persian transliteration, we observe either improvement in performance in comparison to using the output of individual systems.


Author: Shahrul Badariah Mat Sah
Title: Animation of photomosaic composition
Abstract: Photomosaic is a new form of mosaic using pictures as tiles
to produce the bigger image. Previous researches had focused
more on producing the final picture in a form of static
display. Although the final composition is an artistic piece, animating the process of composing it will create interesting effect on viewers. This paper enhanced the work of Ciesielski et al.'s idea of animating the process of generating colour photomosaic through the use of Evolutionary Computing methods.


Author: Shuhaida Mohamed Shuhidan
Title: Debugging: A constructivist approach to learning programming
Abstract: The search for effective methods of learning programming is far from over. This study proposes a methodology for a novice programmer to learn programming through debugging. Our study aims to explore debugging to learning programming, as it has the ability to promote code reading and tracing, and to generate excitement
during the problem solving process. The constructivist approaches encourage the learner to construct or build their own mental model of the knowledge and processes involved, rather than forcing information to be learnt by rote, or managed in a top-down manner by the instructor. The study will look into studentsÇ«÷ learning approaches and how such learning fits in with constructivism. We believe that the proposed method will contribute towards a viable mental model of learning programming and also enhance the learnersÇ«÷ abilities to construct knowledge by themselves. The expected learning outcomes are not only limited to identifying bugs, novice programmers may also extract design knowledge from the given code, modify code in order to solve slightly different problems, and develop mental models of program organization and flow. This improves critical thinking and problem solving skills, and also instills in novices the ability to distinguish between good and bad programs. The study will also investigate the errors made by novices by identifying and categorizing their flaws during programming. The approaches to this study are experimentation via an action research methodology which incorporates questionnaires and voluntary focus group participation from first-time programmers.


Author: Simon Alan Duff
Title: Formal Proactive Maintenance Goals
Abstract: In intelligent agent systems, goals are an important concept, and take a variety of forms. One such case is are maintenance goals, that in contrast to achievement goals, define a state that an agent should continue to keep true, rather than a final state to bring about. However, agent systems have used maintenance goals as triggers to goals or plans, rather than being used in any form of goal deliberation. Our earlier work addressed this and introduced a notion of proactive maintenance goal, which enabled an agent to deliberate on all of its goals, thus producing more rational and intelligent behaviour. The agent, thru anticipating the effects of its actions, can avoid violating its maintenance conditions.
This work extends our work in proactive maintenance goals with the development of formal semantics of maintenance goals. In contrast to other efforts, our work ensures that there is a defined declarative link between maintenance goal and preventative and recovery action.


Author: Stefan Bird, Xiaodong Li
Title: Using Regression to Improve Local Convergence
Abstract: Traditionally Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) choose candidate solutions based on their individual fitnesses, usually without directly looking for patterns in the fitness landscape discovered. These patterns often contain useful information that could be used to guide the EA to the optimum. While an EA is able to quickly locate the general area of a peak, it can take a considerable amount of time to refine the solution to accurately reflect its true location.
We present a new technique that can be used with most EAs. A surface is fitted to the previously-found points using a least squares regression. By calculating the highest point of this surface we can guide the EA to the likely location of the optimum, vastly improving the convergence speed. This technique is tested on Moving Peaks, a commonly used dynamic test function generator. It was able to significantly outperform the current state of the art algorithm.


Author: Steven Burrows
Title: Source Code Authorship Attribution
Abstract: Plagiarism and copyright infringement are major problems in academic and corporate environments. Existing solutions for detecting infringements in structured text such as source code are restricted to textual similarity comparisons of two pieces of work. In this paper, we examine authorship attribution as a means for tackling plagiarism detection.
Given several samples of work from several authors, we attempt to correctly identify the author of work presented as a query. On a collection of 1,640 documents written by 100 authors, we show that we can attribute authorship in up to 67% of cases. This work can be a valuable additional indicator for the more difficult plagiarism investigations.


Author: Sunidhi Bhalla
Title: Efficient information flow control approach for web services
Abstract: Web service is a new service-oriented computing paradigm which poses the unique security challenges due to its inherent heterogeneity, multi-domain characteristic and highly dynamic nature. The key challenges in web service security are access control and information flow control. Information Flow Control is a generalization of access control because it controls information after its release, when access control no longer
applies. Most of the previous work done on access control and information flow control makes no distinction between global access control (controlling access of composite web services) and local access control (controlling access within a single web service). In this paper we propose the possible solutions to develop a new integrated security approach that will deal with large scale distributed applications of web services by considering global access control and information flow control


Author: W R M U K Wickramasinghe
Title: User-preference multi-objective optimization using particle swarms
Abstract: The increase of the number of dimensions or objectives in a multi-objective optimization problem makes the search space large that traditional methods of finding solutions become unfruitful. This is especially the case when the number of objectives is greater than three. The introduction of user preferences to the problem is an efficient search strategy for large search-spaces. When a user can define the regions in the search-space where solutions are interesting, the algorithm can concentrate only in those areas. Here we introduce a user-preference based particle swarm optimization approach, which is used to find solutions in multi-objective optimization problems. This is a novel and efficient approach to find solutions in multi-objective problem instances which have very large search spaces.


Author: W. A. Vidura Gamini Abhaya
Title: DNS based Efficient and Scalable load balancing for Internet Traffic
Abstract: Clustering of servers either locally or geographically distributed has become a common solution for popular web sites and content delivery companies. Most load balancing
solutions at the geographically distributed level are based on the Domain Name System (DNS). Although DNS provides great support in its functionality for such situations, its inherent architecture creates limitations in these solutions. Many of the current request dispatching policies are based on primitive measures of parameters such as server load and domain popularity. Furthermore, the architecture of the Internet adds to the complexity of these problems. This research aims to address these limitations and come up with a more efficient and scalable solution for DNS based load balancing in geographically distributed web servers.


Author: Yi Wang
Title: Estimate Singular Point Rotation using Analytical Models
Abstract: Singular points are important features of ïngerprints. They play a critical role in ïngerprint registration and hence many ïngerprint applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach to estimate the singular point rotation based on ridge orientation modeling. The estimation exploits the analytical features enabled by the orientation model of our previous work. The accuracy of the proposed estimation approach is assessed with a ïngerprint rotation database. The performance is reported with mean squared errors (MSE) and ROC curves.


Author: Yohannes Tsegay, Andrew Turpin, Justin Zobel
Title: Dynamic Index Pruning for Effective Caching
Abstract: To provide fast query evaluation, search engines make use of an inverted list stored on disk, caching lists in RAM wherever possible to reduce query evaluation times. Dynamic pruning schemes, such as pruning impact-ordered inverted lists, reduce the amount of each inverted list processed during query evaluation. Despite only a small
portion of lists being processed when dynamic pruning is used, current systems still store the entire inverted list in the cache. In this paper we study the effects of caching only the pieces of the inverted lists that are actually used to answer a query when dynamic pruning is used, leaving the other part of the list on disk. We examine an LRU cache model, and two other recently proposed models that have richer eviction policies. We introduce a new dynamic pruning scheme for impact-ordered inverted lists that further reduces the volume of lists processed without degrading answer list quality.
Using two large Web collections and their corresponding query logs we show that, using an LRU cache, our new pruning scheme reduces the number of disk accesses during query processing time by 7-15% over the state-of-the-art impact-ordered baseline, without reducing answer quality. Surprisingly, however, we discover that using our new pruning
scheme makes little difference to disk traffic when the more sophisticated caching schemes are employed.


Author: Zhiyong Zhang
Title: Automated Unit Testing for Agent Systems
Abstract: Although agent technology is gaining world wide popularity, a hindrance to its uptake is the lack of proper testing mechanisms for agent based systems. While many traditional software testing methods can be generalized to agent systems, there are many aspects that are different and which require an understanding of the underlying agent paradigm. In this paper we present certain aspects of a testing framework that we have developed for agent based systems. The testing framework is a model based approach using the design models
of the Prometheus agent development methodology. In this paper we focus on unit testing and identify the appropriate units, present mechanisms for generating suitable test cases and for determining the order in which the units are to be tested, present a brief overview of the unit testing process and an example. Although we use the design artifacts from Prometheus the approach is suitable for any plan and event based agent system.


Author: Qinying Xu
Title: Evaluation of a system for evolving families of images
Abstract: This research continues the previous work which described an image generation system called IMAGENE. In this paper a new texture function called RMod is proposed, which results in new styles of repeating patterns. We also build a new system based on IMAGENE called parent system, which is good at creating families of images. Each family contains images with similar features, such as shapes or colours. These images are attractive to artists who work in ïelds like web design, games and video animation. The focus of this paper is
on the evaluation of these two new methods. An experiment of comparing these methods is designed and the analysis of the results is presented.