• The work required to design an adequate platform to support maintenance and operation activities related to safety instrumented systems is frequently underestimated. • Clear objectives and, in consequence, a well-designed strategy supported by a software platform facilitates achieving the required levels of safety and the optimization of resources. • Engineering the maintenance of safety inst...

Electronic mail has become an integral part of our daily lives With this trend mail servers have to provide a fast highly available reliable and secure service Hence workload characterization and performance evaluation of mail servers are to be addressed as primary issues This paper deals with a detailed characterization of mail server workloads Our study is based on the analysis of a large set...

The musical quality of computer-generated performances of piano scores might be improved by incorporating a physical model of the pianist’s body as it interacts with the instrument. Issues considered include the various aspects of musical structure (as conceived by a virtual pianist) that interact with expression, and the expressive function and algorithmic determination of fingering (as used b...

We formulate and evaluate a Bayesian approach to probabilistic input modeling. Taking into account the parameter and stochastic uncertainties inherent in most simulations, this approach yields valid predictive inferences about the output quantities of interest. We use prior information to construct prior distributions on the input-model parameters. Combining this prior information with the like...

Research has suggested that adding contextual information such as reference markers to data sonification can improve interaction with auditory graphs. This paper presents results of an experiment that contributes to quantifying and analysing the extent of such benefits for an integral part of interacting with graphed data: point estimation tasks. We examine three pitch-based sonification mappin...

Project Solutions. Increasing responsiveness is often dealt against decreasing another valuable resource. As responsiveness is a quality, the most significant resources in a software project to trade off are scope, cost, time, and other quality aspects. In a lot of systems, namely “embedded systems”, software is an integral part, but only one part of the system. Here trade-offs against hardware...

Current mirrors are core structures for almost all analog mode circuits and are integral part of a signal processing elements like op amps. The performance of analog structures largely depends on their characteristics. In this paper we present some of the current mirror circuits and analyze their performances, so that one can choose a suitable current mirror for a particular application.

Most studies of the effects of manufacturing defects such as voids have focused on composite strength properties, e.g. the interlaminar strength [1]. The current study investigates how irregularities in the manufacturing process affect progressive damage in the subcritical regime. This effort is along the lines of a broader strategy for performance evaluation of composites coined as defect dama...

Different music performances of the same score may significantly differ from each other. It is obvious that not only the composer’s work, the score, defines the listener’s music experience, but that the music performance itself is an integral part of this experience. Music performers use the information contained in the score, but interpret, transform or add to this information. Four parameter ...

We describe an automatic approach for evaluating interpretability of fuzzy rule-based classifiers. The approach is based on the logical view of fuzzy rules, which are interpreted as rows in truth tables. These truth tables are subject of a minimization procedure based on a variant of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm. The minimized truth tables are used to build new fuzzy rules, which are compared ...