This paper presents how state-of-the-art parallel algorithms designed to solve the Satisfiability (SAT) problem can be applied in the domain of product configuration. During an interactive configuration process, a user selects features step-by-step to find a suitable configuration that fulfills his desires and the set of product constraints. A configuration system can be used to guide the user through the process by validating the selections and providing feedback. Each validation of a user selection is formulated as a SAT problem. Furthermore, an optimization problem is identified to find solutions with the minimum amount of changes compared to the previous configuration. Another additional constraint is deterministic computation, which is not trivial to achieve in well performing parallel SAT solvers. In the paper we propose five new deterministic parallel algorithms and experimentally compare them. Experiments show that reasonable speedups are achieved by using multiple threads over the sequential counterpart.

The IBM z Systems(TM) is the backbone of the insurance, banking, and retail industry. Innovation in these markets is driving the demand for new and additional applications to better serve the customers. These workloads like machine learning, data analytics, AI, etc. require a rapidly increasing number of computations in smaller precision formats. With IBM z15(TM) we completely redesigned the binary and hexadecimal floating-point unit to efficiently implement SIMD operations at 5.2GHz while maintaining the industry leading reliability, availability and serviceability standard. This paper describes the new design and special techniques used to achieve these goals like reusing the existing double precision unit pipeline for lower precision parallel SIMD, new approaches to formally verify the design, and improving error detection for the 14nm technology node.

In complex and collaborative ecosystems like business networks, different partners need to share their respective expert knowledge in order to be successful. Due to the diversity of business applications and highly customized application suites used by business partners, knowledge exchange and the establishment of interoperability between enterprise applications is extremely difficult. Different representations and meanings of enterprise data lead to incomprehensibility between partners inside collaborative environments. This paper presents an model-driven approach to support sustainable interoperability for enterprise applications in collaborative environments. Based on an event-driven architecture, Knowledge Links enable dynamic modelling of knowledge transformations between knowledge domains. They keep background consistency between the connected domains, thus making enterprise applications interoperable. Knowledge Links can be created and modified at any time, which enables sustainable interoperability. Business partners are able to rely on their enterprise applications and don't need to switch to another system. Sensitive data stays covert due to the nature of modular ontologies. The presented approach is exemplified in the context of the OSMOSE Project and will be evaluated by the proof-of-concept scenarios in this Project.

This paper describes an attention-gating recurrent self-organising map approach for emergent speech representation. Inspired by evidence from human cognitive processing, the architecture combines two main neural components. The first component, the attention-gating mechanism, uses actor–critic learning to perform selective attention towards speech. Through this selective attention approach, the attention-gating mechanism controls access to working memory processing. The second component, the recurrent self-organising map memory, develops a temporal-distributed representation of speech using phone-like structures. Representing speech in terms of phonetic features in an emergent self-organised fashion, according to research on child cognitive development, recreates the approach found in infants. Using this representational approach, in a fashion similar to infants, should improve the performance of automatic recognition systems through aiding speech segmentation and fast word learning.

Automated matching of semantic service descriptions is the key to automatic service discovery and binding. But when trying to find a match for a certain request it may often happen, that the request cannot be serviced by a single offer but could be handled by combining existing offers. In this case automatic service composition is needed. Although automatic composition is an active field of research it is mainly viewed as a planning problem and treated separatedly from service discovery. In this paper we argue that an integrated approach to the problem is better than seperating these issues as is usually done. We propose an approach that integrates service composition into service discovery and matchmaking to match service requests that ask for multiple connected effects, discuss general issues involved in describing and matching such services and present an efficient algorithm implementing our ideas.

Service management in mobile ad-hoc networks has been a hot research topic in the past few years. With this demonstrator, we present the first service-oriented middleware that unifies semantic service description, service query management and Peer-to-Peer-based query dissemination. By adding a comfortable graphical interface on top of our middleware, we provide and demonstrate a fully functional software package that lets end-users elegantly manage and share application-level services on their wireless devices.

Web services will only have advantages over existing technologies if the service binding can be performed dynamically. However, existing service description languages do not contain enough information for a computer agent to do the selection automatically during runtime on behalf of the user. This results from the fact that in most approaches the offer description language doubles as a re-guest language, which prevents the requestor from a precise formulation of requests and preferences. Therefore, in this paper, we emphasize the need for a distinguished service request language that allows to capture all of the requestor's preferences. We present a concrete technique to represent such preference-containing requests, which is based on fuzzy object sets.