Effective and efficient Quality of Service (QoS) management is critical for a service grid to meet the requirements of both grid users and service providers. We introduce Q-GSM, a scalable framework for service management in grid environments, to address this problem. Main characteristics of our framework are 1) grid level resource reservation mechanism; 2) mapping application level service qua...

While middleware platforms have been established in besteffort environments nowadays, support for QoS-sensitive services is still found lacking. More specifically, due to the high diversity of QoS requirements, the abstractions provided for QoS-unaware services cannot be maintained and the developer has to face the difficulties of low-level networking in heterogeneous environments again. In thi...

In this paper, the similarity of moment vectors between the test and the reference image blocks together with the result from the block classification are used in the formulation of an image quality metric (IQM). First, the reference and the test images are divided into non-overlapping 8 8 blocks and transformed into moment domain using Discrete Tchebichef Transform. The moment features are the...

This paper presents a market-enabling framework where users, content providers and network operators can interact in the seamless, transparent sale and delivery of a wide range of services. The framework allows for dynamic creation, configuration and delivery of services with quality assurance, via automated management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose an approach relying on a syst...

We extend the service abstraction in the Open Grid Services Architecture[12] for Quality of Service (QoS) properties. The realization of QoS often requires mechanisms such as advance or on-demand reservation of resources, varying in type and implementation, and independently controlled and monitored. Foster et al. propose the GARA [10] architecture. The GARA library provides a restricted repres...

An automated system that provides feedback about aesthetic quality of facial pictures could be of great interest for editing or selecting photos. Although image aesthetic quality assessment is a challenging task that requires understanding of subjective notions, the proposed work shows that facial image quality can be estimated by using low-level features only. This paper provides a method that...

Nowadays, the human-computer interaction is being a hot topic. In such a way, several methods have been proposed to deal with multi-granularity when people with different knowledge level express their preferences on the same concept using linguistic notation, that is, words instead of numbers. This is a critical problem in group decision making scenarios, but all the existing approaches have th...

INTRODUCTION The new, five-level version of the EQ-5D (EQ-5D-5L) questionnaire has better psychometric properties than the standard three-level version (EQ-5D-3L), including a reduced ceiling effect. Currently, there are few existing population norms for the EQ-5D-5L. The aims of this study were to provide population norms for the EQ-5D-5L in Poland, based on a representative sample of adults, ...

BACKGROUND A five-level version of the EuroQol five-dimensional (EQ-5D) descriptive system (EQ-5D-5L) has been developed, but value sets based on preferences directly elicited from representative general population samples are not yet available. The objective of this study was to develop values sets for the EQ-5D-5L by means of a mapping ("crosswalk") approach to the currently available three-l...

SERVQUAL (Service Quality) model is being used to measure the service quality in almost every service sector globally. However, little research exists on its usage in evaluating the performance of the training sector despite its significant role in many developing economies. This article examines the performance of a very reputed training institute in India using SERVQUAL instrument. The first ...