We describe the Nimrod/O distributed optimization tool and its application to a problem in mechanical design. The problem is to determine the shape for a hole in a thin plate under load that gives optimal life in the presence of flaws. The experiment reveals two distinct design strategies for optimizing this life. Nimrod/O is able to find both of these rapidly due to its inherent parallelism.

Given three regular space curves r1(t), r2(t) r3(t), t ∈ [ 0, 1 ] that define a curvilinear triangle, we consider the problem of constructing a C triangular surface patch R(u1, u2, u3) bounded by these three curves, such that they are geodesics of the constructed surface. Results from a prior study [6] concerned with tensor–product patches are adapted to identify constraints on the given curves...

Matching 2-D gel electrophoresis images is the first and a major step in bioinformatics study of protein. This paper presents an improved implementation of a thin-plate spline image registration. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on matching 2-D gel protein separation profiles.

We give some empirical comparisons between two nonparametric regression methods based on regularization: the elastic or thin-plate splines, and plastic splines based on total variation penalties. 1. Nonparametric regression with elastic and plastic splines We seek f to fit the dependence of response points zi ∈ R on two-dimensional covariates (xi, yi) living in the domain Ω. To this end, we emp...

In this study we consider the performance of different feature detectors used as the basis for the registration of images from two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. These are three spot detectors also used to identify proteins, and two domain independent keypoint detectors. We conduct a case study with images from a publically available data set which are synthetically distorted using thin plate...

A new multivariate approximation scheme to scattered data on arbitrary bounded domains in Rd is developed. The approximant is selected from a space spanned (essentially) by corresponding translates of the ‘shifted’ thin-plate spline (‘essentially,’ since the space is augmented by certain functions in order to eliminate boundary effects). This scheme applies to noisy data as well as to noiseless...

We consider the problem of data interpolation or smoothing using a thin-plate spline approach. The thin-plate spline formulation involves the linear combination of logarithmic kernels. For problems with large data sets, current methods for evaluating the splines are too slow. Recently, Beatson and Newsam 1] have suggested using a form of multi-pole type technique for the rapid evaluation of thi...

We describe a new approach to modelling pearlescent paints based on decomposing paint layers into stacks of imaginary thin sublayers. The sublayers are chosen so thin that multiple scattering can be considered across different sublayers, while it can be neglected within each of the sublayers. Based on this assumption, an efficient recursive procedure of assembling the layers is developed, which...

In surgery one of the major problems is a safe approach of the operation site. For surgeons it is paramount to know the location of surgically relevant nerves and vessels. Especially in surgery of the lateral (outside) foot, the anatomy is not always completely clear since the location of nerves and vessels is highly variable. Therefore CASAM is developed by students in Delft and Rotterdam (Net...