Machine vision for plant phenotyping is an emerging research area for producing high throughput in agriculture and crop science applications. Since 2D based approaches have their inherent limitations, 3D plant analysis is becoming state of the art for current phenotyping technologies. We present an automated system for analyzing plant growth in indoor conditions. A gantry robot system is used to perform scanning tasks in an automated manner throughout the lifetime of the plant. A 3D laser scanner mounted as the robot's payload captures the surface point cloud data of the plant from multiple views. The plant is monitored from the vegetative to reproductive stages in light/dark cycles inside a controllable growth chamber. An efficient 3D reconstruction algorithm is used, by which multiple scans are aligned together to obtain a 3D mesh of the plant, followed by surface area and volume computations. The whole system, including the programmable growth chamber, robot, scanner, data transfer, and analysis is fully automated in such a way that a naive user can, in theory, start the system with a mouse click and get back the growth analysis results at the end of the lifetime of the plant with no intermediate intervention. As evidence of its functionality, we show and analyze quantitative results of the rhythmic growth patterns of the dicot Arabidopsis thaliana (L.), and the monocot barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) plants under their diurnal light/dark cycles.

This paper presents a novel multimodal training platform integrated with hand-over-hand (HOH) haptic guidance for dual-console surgical robotic systems such as the da Vinci Si system. The expert-in-the-loop (EIL) framework incorporates a fuzzy interface system in order to provide a trainee with adaptive authority over the procedure as well as hand-over-hand haptic guidance adjusted in real time based on the proficiency level of the trainee. The EIL expertise-oriented framework enables performance of a surgical procedure by an expert surgeon on a patient, while simultaneously providing a trainee at any stage of the motor-skills development with multimodal training without jeopardizing patient safety. Closed-loop stability of the system is investigated using the circle criterion and it is shown that the proposed architecture is unconditionally stable. Experimental evaluations are presented in support of the proposed platform through the implementation of a dual-console surgical setup consisting of the classic da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA) and the dV-Trainer master console (Mimic Technology, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA). To the best of our knowledge, the implemented setup is the first research platform for dual-console studies involving the classic da Vinci surgical system.

The steady drumbeat of Cloud as a disruptive influence for Infrastructure Service Providers (ISP's) and the enablement vehicle for Software As A Service (SAAS)providers can be heard loud and clear in the industry today. In fact, Cloud is probably at the peak of the hype curve, and already there are identified challenges associated with effective deployment for business critical applications (so called Production Applications) in mature enterprises. One of these challenges is the smooth migration of workload from the previous environment to the new cloud enabled environment in a cost effective way, with minimal disruption and risk. In this paper we introduce extensions to an integrated automation capability called the Darwin framework that enables workload migration for this scenario and discuss the impact that automated migration has on the cost and risks normally associated with migration to clouds.

Tool development to support service management is a problem in optimizing service quality and reducing redundant work subject to competing constraints, both technical requirements and political realities. However, many of the constraints only become clear over time, and often only after a series of iterations as tooling exposes new or previously discounted constraints. We present a case study: the evolution of tooling for global dispatch of work orders supporting incident tickets. We discuss different approaches, how they highlighted different constraints, and even how they competed with each other, and conclude with a discussion of approaches to balancing constraints, many of which are not initially apparent and some of which shift over time.

In recent years, IT service management (ITSM) has become one of the most researched areas of IT. Incident and problem management are two of the service operation processes in the IT infrastructure library (ITIL). These two processes aim to recognize, log, isolate and correct errors which occur in the environment and disrupt the delivery of services. Incident management and problem management form the basis of the tooling provided by an incident ticket systems (ITS). In an ITS system, seemingly unrelated tickets created by end users and monitoring systems can coexist and have the same root cause. The connection between failed resource and malfunctioning services is not realized automatically, but often established manually by means of human intervention. This need for human involvement reduces productivity. The introduction of automation would increase productivity and therefore reduce the cost of incident resolution. In this paper, we propose a model to correlate incident tickets based on three criteria. First, we employ a category-based correlation that relies on matching service identifiers with associated resource identifiers, using similarity rules. Secondly, we correlate the configuration items which are critical to the failed service with the earlier identified resource tickets in order to optimize the topological comparison. Finally, we augment scheduled resource data collection with constraint adaptive probing to minimize the correlation interval for temporally correlated tickets. We present experimental data in support of our proposed correlation model.

Providers of IT services are under constant pressure to reduce cost and improve the quality of the services they provide. The ability to decompose such IT services (defined by themselves or third party suppliers) into elemental service processes characterized by core function can benefit the providers by allowing them to identify alternative service processes of potentially lower cost and/or improved quality. This paper proposes an ontology-based hierarchical service decomposition and identification approach to support service providers in managing their operational service processes by the characterization and exploitation of such elemental service processes. We further demonstrate the feasibility and sample outcomes of the proposed approach an example.

Change management is viewed as one of the most important processes in IT management with the main challenge of scheduling the change requests. That is, given a set of change requests for different parts of an IT system, how one should schedule changes to minimize the costs and risks of service delivery. In this paper, we approach the change request scheduling problem using a simple optimization model and consider both deterministic and stochastic cases. We show that these models can be converted to the Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework for which promising solution techniques exist. We conclude the work with an illustrative example as an instance of our model.

This paper investigates the use of Random Dynamic Neighborhoods in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the purpose of training fixed-architecture neural networks to classify a real-world data set of seismological data. Instead of the ring or fully-connected neighborhoods that are typically used with PSOs, or even more complex graph structures, this work uses directed graphs that are randomly generated using size and uniform out-degree as parameters. Furthermore, the graphs are subjected to dynamism during the course of a run, thereby allowing for varying information exchange patterns. Neighborhood re-structuring is applied with a linearly decreasing probability at each iteration. Several experimental configurations are tested on a training portion of the data set, and are ranked according to their abilities to generalize over the entire set. Comparisons are performed with standard PSOs as well as several static non-random neighborhoods.

The IT infrastructure library (ITIL) provides clarity to IT service management and its processes. ICO 20000 further describes the responsibilities of service providers operating in ITIL conformant environment. However, neither one specifically addresses external service providers' challenges that arise in a cost conserving operational model when service provider is supporting multiple customers using shared resources. This paper provides a summary of a required extension to the service provider domain for an IT service management (ITSM) solution with ITIL conformant core.

We study dependable group communication for large-scale and delay-sensitive mission critical applications. The goal is to design a protocol that imposes low loads on bottleneck network links and provides both stable throughput and fast delivery of multicast messages even in the presence of frequent node and link failures. To this end, we propose our GoCast protocol. GoCast builds a resilient overlay network that is proximity aware and has balanced node degrees. Multicast messages propagate rapidly through an efficient tree embedded in the overlay. In the background, nodes exchange message summaries (gossips) with their overlay neighbors and pick up missing messages due to disruptions in the tree-based multicast. Our simulation based on real Internet data shows that, compared with a traditional gossip-based multicast protocol, GoCast can reduce the delivery delay of multicast messages by a factor of 8.9 when no node fails or a factor of 2.3 when 20% nodes fail.

A service level agreement (SLA) is a service contract that includes the evaluation criteria for agreed service quality standards. Since agreeable specifications on the evaluation criteria cannot be limited in practice, competitive SLA management products must be extensible in terms of their support for contract-specific SLA compliance evaluations. While the need of running and managing those software products as services increases, we have found that developing a good solution for configuring them as per contractual terms is a challenging task. This paper presents the Fresco framework, which facilitates configuring extensible SLA management systems using Web services. An XML-based specification of SLA management related data called SCOL will also be presented to show how the framework supports contract-specific SLA terms and contract-specific extensions of the deployed SLA management software. The paper furthermore shows how the Fresco system uses a template-based approach to communicate with other Web services applications with support for various input and output formats. Our experience with implementing the Fresco framework for a leading commercial SLA management software product demonstrates that the framework facilitates the creation of effective and efficient solutions for configuring extensible SLA management systems.

The routing tables of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) can vary from size O(1) to O(n). Currently, what is lacking is an analytic framework to suggest the optimal routing table size for a given workload. This paper (1) compares DHTs with O(1) to O(n) routing tables and identifies some good design points; and (2) proposes protocols to realize the potential of those good design points.We use total traffic as the uniform metric to compare heterogeneous DHTs and emphasize the balance between maintenance cost and lookup cost. Assuming a node on average processes 1,000 or more lookups during its entire lifetime, our analysis shows that large routing tables actually lead to both low traffic and low lookup hops. These good design points translate into one-hop routing for systems of medium size and two-hop routing for large systems.Existing one-hop or two-hop protocols are based on a hierarchy. We instead demonstrate that it is possible to achieve completely decentralized one-hop or two-hop routing, i.e., without giving up being peer-to-peer. We propose 1h-Calot for one-hop routing and 2h-Calot for two-hop routing. Assuming a moderate lookup rate, compared with DHTs that use O(log n) routing tables, 1h-Calot and 2h-Calot save traffic by up to 70% while resolving lookups in one or two hops as opposed to O(log n) hops.

A key feature of particle swarm optimization algorithms is that fitness information shared with individuals in a particle's neighborhood. The kind of neighborhood structure that is used affects the rate at which information is disseminated throughout the population. Existing work has studied global and simple local topologies, as well as more complex, but fixed neighborhood structures. This paper looks at randomly generated, directed graph structures in which information flows in one direction only, and also outgoing edges randomly migrate from one source node to another. Experimental evidence indicates that this random dynamic topology, when used with an inertia weight PSO, performs competitively with some existing methods and outperforms others.

Many value-added and content delivery services are being offered via service level agreements (SLAs). These services can be interconnected to form a service overlay network (SON) over the Internet. Service composition in SON has emerged as a cost-effective approach to quickly creating new services. Previous research has addressed the reliability, adaptability, and compatibility issues for composed services. However little has been done to manage generic quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for composed services, based on the SLA contracts of individual services. In this paper we present QUEST a QoS assUred composEable Service infrasTructure, to address the problem. QUEST framework provides: (1) initial service composition, which can compose a qualified service path under multiple QoS constraints (e.g., response time, availability). If multiple qualified service paths exist, QUEST chooses the best one according to the load balancing metric; and (2) dynamic service composition, which can dynamically recompose the service path to quickly recover from service outages and QoS violations. Different from the previous work, QUEST can simultaneously achieve QoS assurances and good load balancing in SON.

It is imperative for a competitive e-business service provider to be positioned to manage the execution of its service level agreement (SLA) contracts in business terms (e.g., minimizing financial penalties for service-level violations, maximizing service-level measurement based customer satisfaction metrics). This paper briefly describes the design rationale of an integrated set of business-oriented service level management (SLM) technologies under development in the SAM project at IBM TJ Watson Research Center. The e-business SLA execution manager SAM, (1) enables the provider to deploy an effective means of capturing and managing contractual SLA data as well as provider-facing non-contractual SLM data; (2) assists service personnel to prioritize the processing of action-demanding quality management alerts as per the provider's SLM objectives; and (3) automates the prioritization and execution management Of approved SLM processes on behalf of the provider, including assigning SLM tasks to service personnel.

This paper discusses design considerations for a giga-speed data link control (DLC) protocol designed for low altitude multiple satellite (LAMS) networks. Two important and intimately interrelated design issues are reliability and performance. Both of these are influenced by the inconsistency gap (I/sub g/) associated with the protocol. Closely associated measures are the bounded maximum sender queueing time (MSQT) and maximum receiver holding time (MRHT). This paper discusses these time measures. In LAMS-DLC both MSQT and MRHT are bounded, thus I/sub g/ is also bounded. With I/sub g/ bounded LAMS-DLC permits continuous operation (i.e. if the DLCP has data available for transmission it will be sent without protocol delays) provided the link is active. These benefits are obtained by relaxing the FIFO reliability constraint found in conventional DLC protocols without permitting packet loss or duplication.

A data link control protocol for low earth orbit satellite networks has been developed to overcome throughput limitations inherent in event-based positive acknowledgment automatic-repeat-request class protocols. This was accomplished by relaxing a reliability constraint, specifically, the in-sequence delivery constraint. This relaxation results in a new class of link layer service, that of reliable datagram, and permits a fresh approach to link layer protocol design. The authors present one such protocol, the low altitude multiple satellite data link control (LAMS-DLC) protocol. They derive the throughput efficiency of LAMS-DLC and compare the results with HDLC (selective reject). The analysis is verified using an event-based simulation. Measurements suggest that LAMS-DLC provides near optimal throughput efficiencies in the target environment, while using significantly less buffer space than that required for HDLC-SREJ.>

This paper introduces a new link management protocol, LAMSLM, appropriate for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. The procedure is based on the reliable link initialization procedure (RLIP) proposed by Baratz and Segal (1988) for use between terrestrial nodes connected by point-to-point links. The principal criterion for the design of LAMSLM is to minimize the time spent in link initialization during the period a link is active so that data transmission time can be extended. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, LEO satellite systems are periodic. This implies that satellite links are repeatedly broken and reestablished. The proposed procedure uses a unique link closure mechanism at the conclusion of each active period that permits link reinstallation at a later point. The paper includes the algorithm design and a first order analysis of throughput efficiency.>

article Free Access Share on The LAMS-DLC ARQ protocol Authors: Christopher Ward Computer Science and Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL Computer Science and Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, ALView Profile , Cheong H. Choi Computer Science and Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL Computer Science and Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, ALView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication ReviewVolume 21Issue 4Sept. 1991 pp 249–257https://doi.org/10.1145/115994.116015Online:01 August 1991Publication History 3citation173DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads173Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF