The large number of components, nonlinear interactions, time delays and feedbacks, and spatial heterogeneity together often make ecological systems overwhelmingly complex. This complexity must be effectively dealt with for understanding and scaling. Hierarchy theory suggests that ecological systems are nearly completely decomposable (or nearly decomposable) systems because of their loose vertic...

The early visual system is composed of a set of anatomically distinct areas that are linked together in a hierarchy. This structure uses simple rules at each stage but supports an impressive array of processing capabilities. In order to capture the full range of these computations, neuronal models in these areas should include this hierarchical architecture. Neurons in the earliest stages recei...

It is important to develop general prediction models in current software reliability research. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical mixture of software reliability models (HMSRM) for software reliability prediction. This is an application of the hierarchical mixtures of experts (HME) architecture. In HMSRM, individual software reliability models are used as experts. During the training of H...

This paper proposes a new algorithm called soft partitioning particle swarm optimization (SPPSO), which performs video-based markerless human pose tracking by optimizing a fitness function in a 31-dimensional search space. The fitness function is based on foreground segmentation and edges. SPPSO divides the optimization into two stages that exploit the hierarchical structure of the model. The f...

Neutron stars are perhaps the most promising class of gravitational wave (GW) sources, and searches for such GW signals is particularly suited to the characteristics of the GEO600 detector (see Schutz “Getting Ready for GEO600 Data” gr–qc9910033). However, the instantaneous GW frequency of such a source will evolve due to both intrinsic spindown effects and Doppler modulations induced by the mo...

In this paper we propose a new hierarchical parallel processing model based on high-speed realtime sensory feedback to realize manipulation in a dynamically changing environment. In this model high-speed sensory feedback is used at hierarchical three stages: (1) servo control, (2) motion planning, and (3) adaptation of the motion planner and the motion controller. Because the structure of the m...

Enamel is a hard nanocomposite bioceramic with significant resilience that protects the mammalian tooth from external physical and chemical damages. The remarkable mechanical properties of enamel are associated with its hierarchical structural organization and its thorough connection with underlying dentin. This dynamic mineralizing system offers scientists a wealth of information that allows t...

Molecular modeling and simulation has been recognized as an effective tool for gaining a comprehensive and insightful understanding of nanomaterial structure-property relationships, which are critical for nanomaterial development. Note that nanomaterial development is a very complicated task involving the design and management of massive runs of simulations and numerous types of subtasks in mul...

Fast visual recognition in the mammalian cortex seems to be a hierarchical process by which the representation of the visual world is transformed in multiple stages from low-level retinotopic features to high-level, global and invariant features, and to object categories. Every single step in this hierarchy seems to be subject to learning. How does the visual cortex learn such hierarchical repr...

We present an efficient framework to estimate the rule probabilities for a hierarchical phrasebased statistical machine translation system from parallel data. In previous work, this was done with bilingual parsing. We use a more efficient approach splitting the bilingual parsing into two stages, which allows us to train a hierarchical translation model on larger tasks. Furthermore, we apply lea...