Recent Patents on Computer Science - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2010

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) form a sub-field of Decision Support Systems (DSS) where information technology and decision models are combined to facilitate the effective and efficient working of groups. Using online patent databases, this study identified that researchers and professionals produced few GDSS patents between 2005 and 2009. Selected GDSS patents are sorted and presented according to five categories that are used to identify the main objective of a GDSS: collaborative decision, negotiation, GDSS for social networks, group consensus and design of group preferences. For each of these categories, a sample of patents is presented in order to illustrate what has been tackled with regard to this subject.

The Web service composition has received much attention recently to support business-to-business enterprise applications integration. Many composition approaches, languages, platforms, and patents have been proposed to overcome this issue. In this paper we present some of Web service composition languages, platforms, patents, and composition strategies, we compared them to some of the features that must be held by composition process, features such as the dynamic adaptation, execution monitoring, and quality of service (QoS) constraints to satisfy client's requirements to execute Web process. And we give an outlook to essential future research work. Recent patent and research advances aim to find methods for dynamic learning and redesigning along with monitoring and optimization of Web service composition process to satisfy user constraints.

Digital Image Restoration is a technique used to recover original image information from degraded images. Digital images lose information because of factors like noise, blurring and camera misfocus. Image restoration plays a significant role in improving the quality of pictures obtained from unmanned aircrafts, poor quality video tape of a crime scene and blurred satellite images. In this paper we review how the field of image restoration has evolved over the years, and how the techniques of image restoration are making inroads into various applications, thus improving user's perception. The article also portrays recent advances and patents in the field of image restoration.

Distributed systems have become increasingly common because they offer significant computational power and are cost-effective and scalable. Moreover, collaboration between users that are part of these distributed systems improves efficiency and effectiveness for a better utilization of this computational power. Due to this, new specific collaboration models for distributive systems are needed for enabling effective collaboration between users of these dynamic environments. This paper presents AMBAR, an awareness-based learning model for distributed environment with some patent literature related with learning and collaboration systems. AMBAR allows nodes to accomplish an effective collaboration by means of a multi-agent architecture in which agents are aware of its surroundings by means of a parametrical and flexible use of this information. This approach makes use of heuristic strategies to improve effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration in these environments. Results presented in this paper prove this assertion.

Software product line engineering (SPLE) is an emerging paradigm for the development of a family of products based on customization and reuse of artifacts. Several advantages such as reduction of time-to-market, improved product quality and reuse could be achieved by employing software product line engineering. Therefore, this is useful for the industrial sector developing product lines and is a fertile area for patents. Variability management, which enables customization and reuse, is the central part of software product line engineering. This paper provides a review of existing patents in the field of variability management. Particular patents include, feature-oriented approaches for variability management, variability at the level of components and source code, approaches for the identification and analysis of variability and rationale-based variability. The review is based on criteria qualifying the identification, instantiation and evolution of variability. Based on this review, a vision is provided on future patents/approaches in the area of software product line engineering.

The patents annotated in this section have been selected from various patent databases. These recent patents are relevant to the articles published in this journal issue, categorized by different computation methods, bioinformatics, medical informatics, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, hardware architectures, software, theory and methods involved and related to computer science.