Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2011 Issue 1

Abstract While weighted features are known in information retrieval (IR) systems to be used for increasing recall during the document selection step, conceptual methods helped for finding good features. Starting from the features of a sample of Arabic news belonging to k different financial categories, and using the support vector model (SVM), k(k-1) classifiers are generated using one-against-one classification. A new docu Read More

Abstract The scarcity of the radio resources and variable channel quality cause many challenges to the resource management for future all-IP wireless communications. One technique to guarantee a certain level of quality of service (QoS) is call admission control (CAC). Briefly, CAC is a mechanism which decides whether a new call could be admitted or rejected depending on its impacts on the current calls’ QoS. Convent Read More

Abstract Assuming that the IEEE802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are based on a radio/infrared link, they are more sensitive to the channel variations and connection ruptures. Therefore the support for multimedia applications over WLANs becomes non-convenient due to the compliance failure in term of link rate and transmission delay performance. We studied link adaptation facets and the Quality of Service Read More

Abstract Modern communication systems apply channel-aware adaptive transmission techniques and dynamic resource allocation in order to exploit the peak conditions of the fading wireless links and to enable significant performance gains. However, conveying the channel state information among the users’ mobile terminals into the access points of the network consumes a significant portion of the scarce air-lin Read More

Abstract Rapid advances in robotic surgical devices have put significant pressure on physicians to learn new procedures using newer and sophisticated instruments. This in turn has increased the demand for effective and practical training methods using these technologies, and has motivated the development of surgical simulators that promise to provide practical, safe, and cost-effective environments for practicing Read More

Abstract Background: Force plates have been used in sports biomechanics since the 1960's. However, extracting useful information related to performance from curve analysis is a complicated process. It requires a combined knowledge in signal processing (filtering), mechanical equations, testing protocols, biomechanics, and discrete mathematical analysis to properly process the data. Objectives: The aim is to provide a pr Read More

Abstract Data outsourcing is a growing business. Cloud computing developments such as Amazon Relational Database Service promise further reduced cost. However, use of such a service can be constrained by privacy laws, requiring specialized service agreements and data protection that could reduce economies of scale and dramatically increase costs. We propose a private data outsourcing approach where the link b Read More

Abstract Inspired by the success and the increasing prevalence of MapReduce, this work proposes a novel MapReduce task scheduler. MapReduce is by far one of the most successful realizations of large-scale, data-intensive, cloud computing platforms. As compared to traditional programming models, MapReduce automatically and efficiently parallelizes computation by running multiple Map and/or Reduce tasks over distributed Read More

Abstract Modern societies rely on software applications for performing many critical tasks. As this trend is increasing, so it is the necessity to develop cost-effective methods of writing software that ensure that essential safety and security requirements are met. In this context, dependent type theories are recently gaining adoption as a valid tool for performing formal verification of software. The focus of this work is Coq, a Read More

Abstract Usability and usefulness have made the spreadsheet one of the most successful computing applications of all times: millions rely on it every day for anything from typing grocery lists to developing multimillion dollar budgets. One thing spreadsheets are not very good at is manipulating symbolic data and helping users make decisions based on them. By tapping into recent research in logic programming, dat Read More