Interactive genetic algorithms (iGAs) depend on the evaluations or decisions provided by a user. The reliability of those evaluations is key for the successful application of iGAs. However, even moderately-sized problems my require thousands of evaluations that are sometimes between rather similar solutions which can lead to frustration and inconsistent evaluations.

This invention provides a scheme for actively combating user fatigue and inconsistency in iGAs. The efficiency gained from using an interactive procedure by requiring fewer evaluations is lost if the user is unable to provide consistent evaluations. This invention leads to the creation of active iGAs (aiGAs) which include steps of learning from human-computer interaction that actively guide the search-based interaction process.

The innovation includes an evaluation-relaxation scheme that actively combats user fatigue and inconsistency by addressing two important issues:

• Lack of computable fitness
• Lack of a systematic method for modeling user-decision process

Active iGAs optimize a synthetic fitness to obtain educated guesses of the user preferences and thereby reduce the number of user evaluations required. Three important components enable this invention to combat user fatigue and inconsistency.

• Partial Ordering: Qualitative decisions made by the user about relative solution quality are used to generate partial ordering of solutions Induced
• Complete Order: Concepts of non-domination and domination count from multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to induce a complete order of the solutions in the population based on their partial ordering
• Surrogate Function: Induced order is used to assign ranks to the solutions and use them

Applications

This technology provides the ability to solve difficult problems such as data management, engineering design and optimization, and time and resource allocation in large-scale businesses and organizations, more quickly, reliably, and accurately.

Polymer materials are ubiquitous in everyday life and are used in various applications (medical, automobile, electronics, structural, etc.). These materials experience stress through normal use, which can lead to damage and failure of the product. Having the ability to detect damage and locate areas under high stress in situ is essential to eliminating failure of the material. Our invention incorporates a chemical into the polymer backbone that signals an area under stress by causing a visible color change in the material.

This invention will allow for damage detection via a color change of the material and thus early repair before failure, ultimately extending the lifetime of the product.

For this invention, the chemical incorporated into the polymer backbone is a stress-responsive spiropyran mechanophore. One spiropyran molecule is placed in the center of the polymer backbone and undergoes a structural change in response to stress. This change causes a visible color change of the polymer material.

There are several advantages to this method of stress/damage detection. The damage sensing mechanophore is chemically incorporated into the polymer backbone and hence is distributed evenly throughout the material. Since the spiropyran is chemically incorporated, no extra processing steps are required post-polymerization and the mechanophore cannot be eliminated by everyday wear.

Finally, damage can be detected visually without removing parts or using expensive detection equipment such as UV of x-ray monitors.

In one embodiment of the present invention an oxygen iodine laser includes a gas mixing section. Ground state oxygen and a carrier gas are introduced into the first gas mixing section, sometimes separately. The laser includes a discharge region to generate at least said excited oxygen from the flow of the first gas mixing section. A sensitizer gas having a lower ionization threshold than ground state oxygen is also introduced into the first gas mixing section, such that electrons are more easily produced in the electrical generator. The laser system includes introducing a source of iodine into the excited singlet delta oxygen flow to generate a laser-active gas. In another embodiment a conditioner is placed into the gas mixing section to help mix the flow and/or introduce one or more of the aforementioned gases.

This technology details five different methods of manipulating speech sounds to identify how they are processed, and measures the listener response to altered speech sound, truncated speech sound, added noise, altered intelligibility, and morphed sounds. These methods allow for identification of the unique feature of each speech sound (e.g. time of onset and frequency).

The invention provides in one of the embodiments for either a continuous wave (cw) or pulsed alkali laser having an optical cavity resonant at a wavelength defined by an atomic transition, a van der Waals complex within the optical cavity, the van der Waals complex is formed from an alkali vapor joined with a polarizable gas, and a pump laser for optically pumping the van der Waals complex outside of the Lorentzian spectral wings wherein the van der Waals complex is excited to form an exciplex that dissociates forming an excited alkali vapor, generating laser emission output at the wavelength of the lasing transition.

A method and system for presenting a visual representation of search results relating to information on a computer network. A complex relevance rating scheme for generating a relevance rating for each match of the search results. The display space is defined with a display space relevance profile. A visual representation of the matches is determined and positioned within the display space according to the match relevance rating and the display space relevance profile.

A computer-implemented method of predicting tie strength between persons within a social media network includes: modeling tie strengths between a user of the social media network and connected persons in the network as a combination of: a plurality of predictive variables, interactions between dimensions of the predictive variables, and network structure of the social media network; altering or filtering a stream of social media content from the connected persons using the tie strength as associated with the respective connected persons according to the modeling; and delivering the altered or filtered stream of social media content to a communications device of the user.

A method for controlling Internet access of a mobile device by using a communication system having a number of access points includes the steps of performing a certificate-based authentication between an authentication access point and a mobile device seeking access to the Internet; transmitting a certificate from the mobile device to the authentication access point; verifying the certificate by the authentication access point; determining whether the authenticating mobile device's certificate has been revoked prior to the expiration of its lifetime; and granting the authenticating mobile device access to the Internet, if the certificate has been verified successfully and not revoked prior to the expiration of its lifetime.

A method for measuring system response sensitivity, using live traffic and an analysis that converts randomly arriving stimuli and reactions to the stimuli to mean measures over chosen intervals, thereby creating periodically occurring samples that are processed. The system is perturbed in a chosen location of the system in a manner that is periodic with frequency p, and the system's response to arriving stimuli is measured at frequency p. The perturbation, illustratively, is with a square wave pattern.

A processor triggers a first advanced execution processing pass to an instruction sequence in response to a first stalled instruction and initiates execution of a further instruction in the instruction sequence that stalls during the performance of the first advanced execution processing pass. A second advanced execution pass is performed through the instruction sequence in which the further instruction is processed again to provide a valid result after stalling. In one form, the first instruction is performed while the processor operates in a normal execution mode and the first and second advanced execution processing passes are performed while the processor operates in an advance execution mode.

A symmetric cryptosystem uses cascaded chaotic maps to encrypt plaintext and decrypt ciphertext. Received plaintext is encrypted using the cascaded chaotic maps to generate a ciphertext. The ciphertext can then be decrypted using the same cascaded chaotic maps in order to retrieve the plaintext.

In the present scalable system routing method, received packets are associating with threads for processing the received packets. While a previously received packet is being processed, arrival of an interrupt is checked. If there is an interrupt, a thread is created associating the interrupt is created. Then, a determination of whether the thread associated with the interrupt has a priority that is higher than the priority of a thread associated with the previously received packet is made. If the thread associated with the interrupt has a higher priority than the previously received packet, the thread associated with the previously received packet is saved in a Shared Arena storage area. However, if the thread associated with the interrupt does not have a higher priority than the previously received packet, the thread associated with the interrupt is queued. Because threads are attached to the packets, the threads can now be suspended and resumed without having to disable interrupts, which includes periods during a context switch. As a result, a more flexible and efficient scheduling routing method can be implemented.