flooding is not possible. The application of routing indexes is a commonly used technique to avoid this. Promising techniques to further reduce execution costs and interesting aspects are query operators like top-N and skyline, constraints, and the relaxation of exactness and/or completeness requirements

from an extensive literature essential principles that ensure stability and use these to present a concise characterization of most of the model predictive controllers that have been proposed in the literature. In some cases the finite horizon optimal control problem solved on-line is exactly

to make use of this information. In experiments with arti cial constraints on six data sets, we observe improvements in clustering accuracy. We also apply this method to the real-world problem of automatically detecting road lanes from GPS data and observe dramatic increases in performance. 1.

The traditional SPM approach based on bag-of-features (BoF) requires nonlinear classifiers to achieve good image classification performance. This paper presents a simple but effective coding scheme called Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC) in place of the VQ coding in traditional SPM. LLC

The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic

. Second, there must be some way of choosing internal representations which allow the preexisting hardware connections to be used efficiently for encoding the con-straints in the domain being searched. We describe a generol parallel search method, based on statistical mechanics, and we show how it leads

We survey 392 CFOs about the cost of capital, capital budgeting, and capital structure. Large firms rely heavily on present value techniques and the capital asset pricing model, while small firms are relatively likely to use the payback criterion. We find that a surprising number of firms use

is easy for programmers to use. The subtype relation is based on the specifications of the sub- and supertypes; the paper presents a way of specifying types that makes it convenient to define the subtype relation. The paper also discusses the ramifications of this notion of subtyping on the design of type

likelihoods, marginal probabilities and most probable configurations. We describe how a wide varietyof algorithms — among them sum-product, cluster variational methods, expectation-propagation, mean field methods, max-product and linear programming relaxation, as well as conic programming relaxations — can

Requirements analysis includes a preliminary acquisition step where a global model for the specification of the system and its environment is elaborated. This model, called requirements model, involves concepts that are currently not supported by existing formal specification languages