This paper describes work performed in the development of a set of specification for the construction of an integrated electronic system for piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS). The paper starts with a comprehensive review of the PWAS material properties, dimensions, and electrical characteristics. PWAS of various shapes and sizes are considered. Two boundary conditions were examined: free...

In recent years, a huge amount of effort has been invested in the area of service discovery and composition. However, surprisingly little effort is being put into the evaluation of these approaches. The SWS Challenge is an ongoing and continuous experiment in developing a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, composition, and discovery ...

Traceability is an important quality aspect in modern software development. It facilitates the documentation of decisions and helps identifying conflicts regarding the conformity of one artifact to another. We propose a new approach to requirements engineering that utilizes qualitative research methods which have been well established in the domain of social science. Our approach integrates tra...

Nominal color coding is the aesthetic and functional use of color to convey qualitative information in graphical environments. The specification of high contrast color sets is a fundamental step in this process. We formulate the color coding problem here as a combinatorial optimization problem on graphs and present an algorithm which performs well and does not require that the function used to ...

Several works IMcKeowu 86, Suthers 88] have emphasized the common aspects of Explanation Production in expert systems and Text Generation. The work described in this paper deals with text generation applied to a particular type of explanations: causal explanations of physical systems. They have akeady motivated influential developments in the field of qualitative reasoning about physical system...

This paper presents a study on personalized add-on filters applied to web search results in order to make those results more intuitive to users. Fuzzy Sets and Logic are used in order to construct such filters. Linguistic features are extracted as their universe of discourse. Three experimental filters are presented in the following specific contexts: (1) narrowing down results, (2) product spe...

We propose a generic approach to evolutionary optimization that is suitable for problems in which candidate solutions are difficult to assess: Instead of a deterministic, numerical evaluation of the fitness of individual candidates, we proceed from stochastic, qualitative evaluations in the form of pairwise comparisons between competing candidates. Our extension is based on a proper specificati...

This paper addresses the identification and representation of the variations induced by style for the synthesis of realistic and convincing expressive gesture sequences. A qualitative and quantitative comparison between styled gesture sequences is performed. This comparison leads to the identification of temporal, spatial, and stuctural processes that are described in a theoritical model of sig...

We introduce an empirical Bayesian procedure for the simultaneous segmentation of an observed motion field and estimation of the hyper-parameters of a Markov random field prior. The new approach approach exhibits the Bayesian appeal of incorporating prior beliefs, but requires only a qualitative description of the prior, avoiding the requirement for a quantitative specification of its parameter...