The launching of the JOT provides a welcome opportunity to resume the Eiffel column that ran for many years in JOOP from 1998 (edited first by Rock Howard from whom I took over in 1998). It will run pretty much like its predecessor, with a mix of contributions by guest columnists and by me, and a mix of topics — from language matters to methodological issues of object-oriented software construc...

Effective multicast routing schemes alleviate potential congestion on nodes and channels, thereby improving network throughput. This paper studies the problem of finding the shortest load-balanced multicast tree with minimum channel utilization in response to a multicast communication request in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways. We propose an optimization ...

Sign languages (SL) require a fundamental rethinking of many basic assumptions about human language processing because instead of using linear speech, sign languages coarticulate facial expressions, shoulder and hand movements, eye gaze and usage of a three-dimensional space. SL researchers have therefore advocated SL-specific approaches that do not start from the biases of models that were ori...

Construction Grammar has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Recently, there have been exciting developments to cater for this demand, most notably in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). Unfortunately, like playing a music instrument, the formalisms used by SBCG and FCG take time ...

The IEEE 802.16 technology (WiMAX) is a promising technology for providing last-mile connectivity by radio link due to its high speed data rates, low cost of deployment, and large coverage area. However, the maximum number of channels defined in the current system may cause a potential bottleneck and limit the overall system capacity. The aim of this paper is to compare the impact on system per...

It is well known that the envelope of the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) consists of smaller-scale convective systems, including mesoscale convective systems (MCS), tropical cyclones, and synoptic-scale waves called ‘‘convectively coupled equatorial waves’’ (CCW). In fact, recent results suggest that the fundamental mechanisms of the MJO involve interactions between the synoptic-scale CCW and ...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the throughput performance of IEEE802.11n WLANs using a well-known commercial simulator called OPNET Modeler. We study the effects of IP packet size, Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), Channel Bonding, number of MIMO spatial streams, Block Acknowledgement (BA) and Type of Service (ToS)/Access Category (AC) on maximum throughput and Throughput Efficiency (TE...

This paper proposes an efficient multiuser adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme that considers inevitable feedback delay by employing short-term and long-term channel state information (CSI) in time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. By taking the statistic of the true signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a given predicted SNR value into account, the required transmit power to meet t...

Previous approaches to compute-and-forward (C&F) are mostly based on quantizing channel coefficients to integers. In this work, we investigate the C&F strategy over block fading channels using Construction A over rings, so as to allow better quantization for the channels. Advantages in decoding error probabilities and computation rates are demonstrated, and the construction is shown to outperfo...