The rapid expansion of Web services and broadband network has enabled more and more useful services for the users with different systems at distributed locations to share applications over the network. However, the operation of such services has become more and more difficult in proportion to the complexity of the total system with applications and networks that need to be managed. Therefore, it requires a lot of effort for the operators to manage the total system if some trouble occurred with an application or a network. This paper presents an autonomic Web service platform with the dynamic multi-layer control that can manage both the network layer and the application layer simultaneously to offer the most preferred service for the users under any circumstances. It consists of three major components: 1) environment information database, which stores the status of networks and applications, 2) dynamic control manager, which maintains service policies on both networks and applications, and controls the service delivery based on the service policy that conforms to the current situation, 3) dynamic control agent, which works as a Web service proxy and controls SOAP messages of the applications based on the service policy. The communications and controls of this platform are all Web services based, and therefore, are quite open and applicable to any field of services. The result of an experiment on the disaster information sharing service proved the effectiveness of this Web service platform.

This paper shows how to create interpretations for overlapped figures including T-junctions, in which figural completion may be needed. In order to achieve this, some restrictions on figural completion, possible completion line paths, and control factors of figural completion are investigated. Rules on when and how to complete figures are introduced. Finally, a restriction is added to create natural interpretations of overlapped figures including T-junctions.>

Conventional drawing recognition systems can process only objects that are segregated from each other and distinctly regularized in terms of geometric properties such as location, size, and orientation. On the other hand, humans can recognize objects easily even in a complex configuration. This paper proposes a human-like drawing perception model which is composed of eye fixation, figure segregation, complex logarithm coordinate transform, transform to frequency domain, pattern matching, and knowledge pattern activation mechanisms. Results of the computer simulation of the model showed that it can move the direction of gaze to objects to be observed, it can segregate overlapped objects, it can recognize objects invariantly against location, size, and orientation, and it can correctly understand the meaning of scenes composed of several objects.>

The automatic creation of a small number of reasonable interpretations for complex and ambiguous line figures is proposed. In order to achieve this, four types of restrictions are introduced: (1) restrictions making the number of interpretations finite; (2) restrictions obtained from common sense; (3) restrictions that are natural for humans and that can decrease the number of interpretations; and (4) restrictions obtained from the results of psychological experiments. In order to check the effectiveness of this method, a psychological experiment was conducted, and the result showed that the proposed method can create a small number of reasonable interpretations.>