Disruptions to an ecological system can have profound effects on the use of that system by various species. Such effects are often studied in terrestrial or aquatic species, but subterranean species are equally affected. To investigate how environmental perturbation affects the territory size of subterranean termites, a lattice model was designed based using seasonal and behavioral data to simulate the foraging behavior of the Formosan subterranean termite Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki. This computer model was then used to subject a given number of founding pairs (N = 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 at t = 0) to several levels of environmental perturbations (H = 0.0–1.0) once initial territory growth had reached saturation for a fixed area (t = 5). At lower values of H, territories were reduced to localized holdings randomly distributed over the entire model area. As H increased, the size of surviving territories increased while the total number of territories decreased. Analysis of territory size post-disruption (t = 10) indicated a trend towards larger overall territorial size when both N and H were high, whereas no such increase was seen when N was low. These results can be used to improve modeling systems to determine survival of subterranean populations in environmental disasters.

We previously developed a shape recognition methodology that uses “branch length similarity” (BLS) entropy, which is defined as a simple branching network consisting of a single node and branches. The simple network is referred to as a “unit branching network” (UBN). Our approach involves obtaining BLS entropy profiles from UBNs created by joining each pixel in the outline of a shape with every other pixel in the shape's border. The profiles successfully characterize the shapes by comparing their BLS entropy profiles. Presently, we modified this approach to facilitate its application to butterfly species identification by partitioning and weighting the entropy profile. As a test, we identified the butterfly species Colias erate, Parnassius bremeri, Eurema hecabe, Gonepteryx rhamni, and Papilio maackii. Each species group consisted of 10 specimens. We used wing shape to identify a species. We extracted evenly spaced x–y coordinates of boundary pixels for the wing shapes in a counter counterclockwise direction. The number of the pixels was 749. We then sequentially partitioned 749 x–y pairs into 15 groups, calculated entropy profiles for the groups, and weighted the profiles. The profiles were combined in order, resulting in a single weighted BLS entropy profile for a wing's shape. Subsequently, we statistically compared the correlation coefficient among the weighted BLS profiles. Our experimental results showed that this method was statistically successful for butterfly species identification. The advantage of the partitioning and weighting process in shape recognition is also discussed.

Image matting may be defined as the extraction and composition of foreground pixels from a given image using colour or opacity estimation. A novel alpha matting methodology is proposed using compressive sensing. The experimental results show that the proposed matting method can provide good mattes from either scribbles or large parts of unknown regions in a trimap.

3D object retrieval is an important research issue in the area of computer graphics for applications such as computer-aided design, simulation, and visualisation. The performance of 3D object retrieval systems is dependent on the development of efficient and effective deors and similarity measures. Presented is an effective approach for supporting 3D object retrieval based on optimising the gradient deor which has recently been shown to perform among the state of the art. The approach relies on sparse coding and the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by experimental evaluation.

In this paper, we propose a round-optimal identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol for a three-party setting in which three parties can actually transmit messages simultaneously. We then give its security proof in the random oracle model under the Bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption.

In this paper, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme, called CPAS , using pseudo-identity-based signatures for secure vehicle-to-infrastructure communications in vehicular ad hoc networks. The scheme achieves conditional privacy preservation, in which each message launched by a vehicle is mapped to a distinct pseudo-identity, and a trust authority can always retrieve the real identity of a vehicle from any pseudo-identity. In the scheme, a roadside unit (RSU) can simultaneously verify multiple received signatures, thus considerably reducing the total verification time; an RSU can simultaneously verify 2540 signed-messages/s. The time for simultaneously verifying 800 signatures in our scheme can be reduced by 18%, compared with the previous scheme.

The identity-based infrastructure introduced by Shamir allows a user's public key to be easily derivable from her known identity information such as an email address or a cellular phone number. Such cryptosystems alleviate the certificate overhead and solve the problems of PKI technology. In this letter, we show that two identity-based authenticated key agreement protocols proposed by Holbl and Welzer are completely broken.

Many motile bacteria display wiggling trajectories, which correspond to helical swimming paths. Wiggling trajectories result from flagella pushing off-axis relative to the cell body and making the cell wobble. The spatial extent of wiggling trajectories is controlled by the swimming velocity and flagellar torque, which leads to rotation of the cell body. We employ the method of regularized stokeslets to investigate the wiggling trajectories produced by flagellar bundles, which can form at many locations and orientations relative to the cell body for peritrichously flagellated bacteria. Modelling the bundle as a rigid helix with fixed position and orientation relative to the cell body, we show that the wiggling trajectory depends on the position and orientation of the flagellar bundle relative to the cell body. We observe and quantify the helical wiggling trajectories of Bacillus subtilis, which show a wide range of trajectory pitches and radii, many with pitch larger than 4 . For this bacterium, we show that flagellar bundles with fixed orientation relative to the cell body are unlikely to produce wiggling trajectories with pitch larger than 4 . An estimate based on torque balance shows that this constraint on pitch is a result of the large torque exerted by the flagellar bundle. On the other hand, multiple rigid bundles with fixed orientation, similar to those recently observed experimentally, are able to produce wiggling trajectories with large pitches.