Second six-monthly periodic report

Work Report

Ulrich Meyer

Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science,

Saarbruecken, Germany
Guest at MTA SZTAKI during Jan/Feb 2002
Following the accepted work plan, I conducted research and gave lectures on graph-traversal problems for large data sets In an introduction lecture for the research group of Prof. Dr. Lajos Ronyai on January, 14^th, I provided an overview of graph-traversal algorithms. The talk also covered new compression data-structures that might prove useful for the data-mining project carried out by Dr. Andras Benczur. In subsequent discussions we identified common research interests, which we will pursue in the future. Making each other aware of recent results obtained by third parties was also very helpful.
On February, 11^th and 18^th, I gave lectures at the TU Budapest on external-memory algorithms; more details can be found under http://www.math.bme.hu/~ig/valfej/
(Válogatott fejezetek az algoritmusok körébõl) I was told that the students enjoyed the talks; an external visitor from Ericsson Hungary attended the lectures as well. Giving these presentations in front of an interested audience was a very good experience of my stay.
Parts of the research results obtained during my stay at SZTAKI will appear as a refereed full paper at the 16^th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium to be held this year in Fort Lauderdale, USA.
A preprint of this paper "Buckets strike back: Improved Parallel Shortest-Paths" is attached. Valuable comments from SZTAKI members helped to improve both the presentation and the analysis. This is also true for a revised journal version of my paper on sequential shortest-paths from SODA 2001. My forthcoming invited talk at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Data Structures ( http://www.dagstuhl.de/DATA/Seminars/02/#02091 ) covering the papers above will directly benefit from the visit at SZTAKI.

Altogether, I truly enjoyed my stay in Budapest; the warm spirit of the working group of Prof. Ronyai allowed a fast integration. The general research conditions are fine; however, it would be nice to have at least online access to some important publications series like "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" (Springer) that are not regularly ordered by the library in printed form..

MTA-SZTAKI

FINAL REPORT
VISIT OF ALEXANDRU POPA

AT THE CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE MTA-SZTAKI

DURING 15.01.2002 – 15.03.2002

INTRODUCTION

Alexandru Popa had the honour to being selected to receive a visiting scholarship at the Centre of Excellence MTA SZTAKI, Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, informatics Department and CIM Research Laboratory, headed by Acad. Janos Demetrovics and Prof. George L. Kovacs.

During the last few years, SZTAKI and HRTC (Human Resources Training Center of University “Politehnica” of Bucharest) have established a co-operation and knowledge exchange. Currently, they joint consist into submission together with other partners, of a 5th Framework Proposal Project, STAR, on stimulating the access to the Cultural Heritages.

Mr. Popa spent 2 months at MTA SZTAKI, from 15.01.2002 up to 15.03.2002.

GOAL OF THE REPORT

The goals of this report consist in:

 Presenting the work done during the visit of Mr. Popa at MTA SZTAKI

 Indicating the main results of the visit

 Presenting the plans for future collaborations

 Evaluating the visits achievements and summarising the main results.

OBJECTIVES OF THE VISIT

During his visit, Mr. Popa proposed himself to:

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   Learn and understand the local solutions and to benefit the scientific progress of MTA SZTAKI;
  
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   Prepare new research proposals for submission to the EU into the 5th and the following Framework Programmes;
  
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   Work for the preparation of joint conference papers;
  
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   Deliver scientific seminar series, technical presentations
  
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   Work on his PhD thesis;
  
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   Develop a suitable work environment for operating a virtual multimedia laboratory connected with University “Politehnica” of Bucharest.
  

INTERACTION AT THE INSTITUTE

After the first contact with the realities and getting acquainted with the technical environment at SZTAKI, Mr. Popa started to learn about the current research themes and topics in development of the colleagues at SZTAKI, and with their precious help could understand the specific needs, requirements and local solutions implemented.
In the first week, Mr. Popa sustained an Initial presentation of his expertise and research themes. Principally, was described his interests areas and work results, the PhD Thesis focus, and the common proposal project –STAR- for the EU 5th Framework Programme. This was the basis for the future discussions on common research themes with experts of SZTAKI. At the proposal of Dr. Otto Hutter, the Educational Service Manager at SZTAKI, Mr. Popa has delivered a series of five Multimedia topics technical seminars, focused on Digital Media. This has constituted another basis for co-operation on the running and future projects.

Attending to the numerous seminars and conferences, local or international –and here had to be mentioned that these events are really useful by their high technical contents and valuable information contained related to new fields of research and interdisciplinary co-operation- Mr. Popa got an broad view of the subjects and the important results of the very best experts who are working in the research environment at SZTAKI.

SCIENTIFIC WORK

Using written materials (reports, publication, etc.), Mr. Popa got acquainted with the technical environment at SZTAKI and with the help of CIM Research Laboratory colleagues has used it for his work. He learnt about the current research topics and the projects running at SZTAKI, specifically on themes and projects addressed by the CIM research Laboratory, Educational Service Center, Research Group on Intelligent Manufacturing and Business Processes,

A main task was to get involved with the formulation of the multimedia research environment, developing a suitable work environment for operating a virtual multimedia-oriented research laboratory connected with the University “Politehnica” of Bucharest. A real-life connection was realised by working on the joint EU research proposal for EU 5th Framework: STAR project proposal.

A great progress has been achieved in simulation and 3D modelling, virtual world environment building in CIM systems. The results had been tested at the Technical University of Budapest, Department of Manufacturing Engineering, experimental robotic and machining CIM cells. He had been working with the new technology of 3D scanning of real-life objects for building digital models in extended databases.

Another concrete result of collaboration was the delivering of two joint publication with participation at two major International Conferences: “VIPRomCom-2002” -The International Symposium on Video/Image Processing and Multimedia Communications, and “Gepeszet 2002”.

Beside scientific work, Mr. Popa was getting acquainted with the industrial solutions by attending to discussions with experts from several Hungarian companies. By participating to an important exhibition of the automation and control industry, has the opportunity to being familiarised with the solutions and the strategies of big companies (PYRAMID, EYEVIS, General Electric, etc.).
A special benefit was achieved by getting acquainted with the SZTAKI’s current research project DIMORF on digitisation of old movies, a special task of our joint project proposal, VIMIMS – an ongoing ODL research project carried out by SZTAKI with other five European research and educational institutes, and another EU project XPERTS- a project management topic based on Rational Unified Process methodologies.

Sharing experiences with former and present Centre of Excellence visiting scientists –at Goethe University Frankfurt where observed the on-site implementations of CNN chip and artificial algorithms for study of Brain Activity for the realisation of an epilepsy warning and preventing system, scientists from Artificial Intelligence Department of Academy of Sciences Sofia, ERCIM guests from Holland and Austria, and others, helped in establishment of true international collaboration in this scientific field.

FUTURE COLLABORATION

Continuous exchange on the research results will be established by regular exchange of publications, and in the same time by preparation of joint publications. The competencies at the CIM Laboratory at SZTAKI and MWPG at HRTC are to a large extent harmonious. This lead to a natural joint contribution and collaboration on common subjects and other topics, involving control, digital media, ODL, Virtual Reality. A virtual laboratory being established between SZTAKI and HRTC provides complementarities in expertise of both sides. A very special aspect of future collaboration consist in preparations for the common proposal in the 6th and following EU Framework Programme.

Based on co-operation realised and results achieved, a joint supervision of PhD thesis became a very interesting near future plan. In the perfect working conditions and with the precious help of this excellently organized institute, a real “Centre of Excellence” any kind of occupation is easy to get done with 101% success.

On the working table are also the development and improvement of the running projects, and a tight co-operation in extending the knowledge network. These kinds of initiatives are very useful for establishing tight collaborations among RTD organisations in Europe.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The value achieved during this visit cannot be expressed in a short report. All the things are valuable for future, and definitely ensure a tight collaboration among European scientists.

The visit was more then useful for Alexandru Popa, from all the points of view. Scientifical, Technical, Social, Cultural. The experts friends from SZTAKI have openly presented their results and enabled the visitor to fully get acquainted and to learn about the main results of the Institute. The conditions provided by SZTAKI (working environment, organization, accommodation, access to knowledge, technical infrastructure) were excellent.

This very fruitful and most enjoyable visit at SZTAKI was the result of contribution of the kind people who make me even in this moment to feel and see on my working way, soul and mind the sign of lessons learnt at Budapest. The support I received during my visit were exemplary, and I am very grateful to Dr Geza Haidegger, Prof Dr. George Kovacs, Mrs. Elisabet Zudor Angyalka, Prof.Dr. Lazlo Monostori, Dr. Otto Hutter, Dr. Sandor Kopacsi, Dr. Janos Nacsa, Dr. Istavan Mezgar, Mr. Ferencz Sarkozy, Mr. Szilvester Drozdic, Dr. Kiraly Lazlo, Dr. Renner Gabor and many others.

Very special thanks to Geza and Klara for your hospitality and the enormous time you spent on me and all the pleasant activities that you arranged (I missing the great Budapest Opera performances), Gyuri for the great trips outside Budapest, many thanks.

“Making virtual bridges of real friendships” is an appropriate name for this Centre of Excellence.

Thanks !
Alexandru-Nicolae POPA, MSc

Multimedia and Web Technologies Group, Human Resources Training Center at

University “Politehnica” of Bucharest

[e-mail]

PROLAMAT Conference Report –2001November, Budapest
The triennial PROLAMAT conferences focus on computer applications in manufacturing, and have already a respectable history. The first conference in Rome, Italy in 1969 and the next in Budapest, Hungary, addressed the issue of Programming Languages for Machine Tools, and created the acronym PROLAMAT. While the acronym has not changed, the topic has shifted considerably. The conferences have addressed Advances in CAM, Software for Discrete Manufacturing, Human Aspects of CIM and Globalization and Virtual Enterprises; the aim of PROLAMAT 2001 is to demonstrate activities and results that will characterize manufacturing in the 21^st century. The conferences have covered a wide geographical area, and have travelled around the globe. They left the European continent for Glasgow, Scotland U.K. in 1976, then went on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. in 1979, followed by Leningrad, U.S.S.R. in 1982, and after visiting some European cities it arrived at Tokyo, Japan in 1992. The last few conferences came back to Europe.

The information technology revolution of the 1980s and 1990s made a strong impact on production technology as well as on its management, and many of today’s enterprises can rightly be called digital enterprises. The pervasiveness of computers and networks has enabled the full computerization of production, and further on the whole supply chain. Decision support systems and other management support tools have also become more and more widespread.

As the web of computer networks gradually expanded, it opened up the possibility of global, computer assisted production, management, etc. Different stages of the design and production process can now be conducted at different parts of the globe, and still be overseen by real-time control and management. Networked activities are not restricted to one enterprise: virtual enterprises allying different companies for the lifetime of a project are heavily relying on computer-enabled communication, cooperation and coordination, and business-to-business (B2B) commercial activities via electronic communication are becoming everyday practice.

The computing power of today’s equipment has reduced the calculation time of modeling and simulation to such an extent that new approaches using computation intensive methods, techniques and algorithms have become feasible to employ. Using modeling and simulation tools a wide range of alternatives can be examined quickly to provide support for decisions. Design and manufacturing time has also been reduced, which allows faster response to market needs.

The 2001 PROLAMAT focused on one of the greatest new challenges facing these digital enterprises: Life Cycle Approach in Management and Production. In an increasingly environment conscious world manufacturing and production is regarded as part of a larger picture: the product life cycle (production – use – disposal). This approach is characterized by three aspects: technology, economy and ecology (environmental impact). The PROLAMAT conference focused on technology but also included papers on the other two aspects; various solutions for the different activities are described in the papers. While elements of integrating several phases of the product life cycle have been apparent in earlier approaches, such as Design for Manufacturing, Design for Maintenance etc., the life cycle approach looks at the different phases from a holistic aspect.

Modeling can help in calculating the cost of a product, both in the manufacturing stage and in later stages of the product’s life. As cost can be a decisive factor in a product’s success, support tools can be used to facilitate the examination of economy aspects. Other uses of modeling include analysis and simplification of complexities in the supply chain that includes life cycle dependencies. Using the life-cycle approach a product model can be reverse engineered from the intended use and the given set of constraints, and the optimum design is derived from the desired outcome.

The principal message of the conference was that engineering has to embrace the whole life-cycle of the product, which includes environmental, social and economic sustainability of the production – supply chain, customer use and disposition phases. Life cycle thinking integrates many different processes to give a complete view; from product design to decommissioning and disposal.

Because of several reasons, including the terror attacks against the USA in September the conference had only about 50 registered participants from 23 countries, including Brasil, Japan and the USA – instead of the expected 100-150. This made the conference more friendly, a little workshop-like, which was a positive thing allowing several professional discussions on joint projects, joint R&D activities, etc.

The importance of the topic was evidenced by the large number of papers submitted to the conference. Due to space limitations only some of them were selected for publication. The papers included in the volume were considered by the program committee to provide the best insight into these issues, and describe solutions for the problems. The selected papers of the conference were published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in a very attractive hardbound book of 556 pages.There were a number of people assisting in the editing process and organising the conference, and we wish to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this conference for their efforts. We hope that this conference will lead to further IFIP TC5 activities in the area, and which will also bring people from industry, research and education closely together.

The editors: George L. Kovács, Péter Bertók and Géza Haidegger

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: 2

WP2 Educational and training courseware, videoconferencing….

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  Objectives and planned actions:
  

To give the chances for a wide audience, to improve their knowledge about multimedia technologies. To establish a multimedia service centre and start to create a database of ready materials.

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  Problems encountered:
  

We had some problems with the interfacing of available HW and SW tools.

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  Results:
  

Alexandru Popa from Romania, an expert in MM was helping SZTAKI and we organised a series of multimedia seminars: his presentations are as follows:
1. Multimedia technologies – digitalization process. Workflow guideline

2. Digital audio guidelines

3. The digital image.

4. The digital video. Digitalization, compression, processing

5. Authoring tools. Applications

About 12 young researchers took part on the presentations and can use the gained knowledge in their work.

In our laboratory we established a Multimedia Service Centre. We purchased a multimedia computer station equipped with professional video digitising and editing tools.

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  Publications and papers, other deliverables:
  

The content of presentations both in text and ppt. format are available on demand through the web: http://www.sztaki.hu/~reitli/multimedia.html.
2. WP-C Foreign visitors at SZTAKI, operating virtual laboratories

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  Objectives and planned actions:
  

Foreign experts visiting at SZTAKI will transfer the knowledge of best practice, we can share our experiences and create new common projects.

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  Problems encountered:
  

Sometimes the presentation time was short , but the started common work can be followed on Internet base.

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  Results:
  

Alexandru Popa from Romania spent at SZTAKI 2 months.

Radoslav Pavlov Institute of Mathematics and Informatics – BAS [e-mail] Danail Dochev Institute of Information Technologies – BAS [e-mail] from Bulgaria has just started spending 2 months at SZTAKI – March and April 2002. We planned a series of seminars about E-learning where they are to give their presentations. We elaborated a mutual new Leonardo project PRP-LEARN.

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  Publications and papers, other deliverables:
  

The contents of presentations both in text and ppt. format will be on the web: http://www.sztaki.hu/~rszabo/index.html.
3. Organizing Workshops, Conferences and Scientific meetings

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  Objectives and planned actions:
  

Organising a series of scientific meetings, the participants can get knowledge about cryptography and they can joint and implement future projects.

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  Problems encountered:
  

Lack of finding such a seminar schedule, that suits every interested person, who plans to attend.

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  Results:
  

We are in process of 11 events, every week from February to May 20-25 young fellows from SZTAKI and other institutes are discussing about cryptography.

Name	Title-topic	Time
Pásztor Miklós	Nyilvános kulcsú titkosítás - elv, fogalmak, példák	2002.febr.26. de.10.00
Orvos Péter	Biometrikus felhasználó-azonosítás	2002. máj. 28. de.10.15.

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  Publications and papers, other deliverables:
  

The agenda, contents of presentations both in text and ppt. format are available on the web: http://pele.ilab.sztaki.hu/~sztibor/kriptografia.html

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: 3

ANALOGIC CNN

Results:

In this year will be the CNNA2002 (Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications) conference in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). We have submitted 7 contributions. The World Scientific will publish the proceedings of the conference.

From 1^st of January 2002 Prof. Tamas Roska have been serving as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems I.
Alessandro Vaccarese MSc. Student of Prof. Marco Balsi form University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy has been prepering his master thesis in our laboratory on the field of analogic CNN algorithms running on CNN-UM chips by using the ALADDIN system.

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: 4

Supercomputing Centre

"Sun Grid Engine" – Technical Day

The Supercomputing Centre organised a workshop day on 10^th of December, 2001. The subject was the summary of the first year experiences of the supercomputer usage in Hungary, plans for the future, and the Hungarian planned actions in connection with grid. Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, the developing director of the Sun Microsystems Grid Computing, and the spiritual master of Sun Grid Engine (SG Grid Engine Distributed Resource Manager

There were 52 Hungarian participants, and one German, Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch,