OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modern consumerism and the waste problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2012
Year: 2012

With the advance of industrial mass production, modern micro-electronics and computers, the intervals between the release of new generations of consumer products have been dramatically reduced and so have their lifetime cycles. While it was very natural in the post-war era, that sophisticated consumer products like television sets and stereo equipment would not be replaced with a new product until they break, and usually beyond that point since it was very common to have a broken television set serviced, the habits of consumers have changed during the last quarter of the 20th century. A modern consumer product, like Apple's famous iPhone has a market life of approximately one year until a successor is announced and subsequently pushed into the market. Usually these new generations bring a bunch of new features, have a higher performance while maintaining the price or becoming even cheaper, thus the consumer greatly benefits from the reduced lifetime cycle of these products. However, electronic devices not only require a lot of of Earth's limited resources for their production, but their production processes are a major source for harmful climate gases like carbon dioxide and toxic waste like heavy metal alloys, acids and alkalis. And last but not least is every obsoleted iPhone a candidate for waste facilities unless consumers are going to sell them on the second hand market. While we can not expect consumers and manufacturers to go back to the early days of consumer products where lifetime cycles reached up to 20 years, the world record being the famous "Centennial Lightbulb" in Livermore, CA in the US, which has been lit for over 100 years, it is certainly about time to rethink modern consumerism with regard to responsibility to future generations.
Performance analysis of an opportunistic relay selection protocol for multi-hop networks (Technical report)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2012
Year: 2012

In this technical report, we analyze the performance of an interference-aware opportunistic relay selection protocol for multi-hop line networks which is based on the following simple rule: a node always transmits if it has a packet, except when its successive node on the line is transmitting. We derive analytically the saturation throughput and the end-to-end delay for two and three hop networks, and present simulation results for higher numbers of hops. In the case of three hops, we determine the throughput-optimal relay positions.
ICT's role in e-Governance in India and Malaysia: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2012
Year: 2012

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a key role in Development & Economic growth of the Developing countries of the World. Political, Cultural, Socio-economic Developmental & Behavioral decisions today rests on the ability to access, gather, analyze and utilize Information and Knowledge. Government of India is having an ambitious objective of transforming the citizen-government interaction at all levels to by the electronic mode by 2020.Similarly according to the Vision 2020-The Way Forward presented by His Excellency YAB Dato' Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the Malaysian Business Council "By the year 2020, Malaysia can be a united nation, with a confident Malaysian society, infused by strong moral and ethical values, living in a society that is democratic, liberal and tolerant, caring, economically just and equitable, progressive and prosperous, and in full possession of an economy that is competitive, dynamic, robust and resilient". This paper presents a comparative study and review relating to e-Governance and application of ICT development between India & Malaysia.
Large convex holes in random point sets
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2012
Year: 2012

A {\em convex hole} (or {\em empty convex polygon)} of a point set $P$ in the plane is a convex polygon with vertices in $P$, containing no points of $P$ in its interior. Let $R$ be a bounded convex region in the plane. We show that the expected number of vertices of the largest convex hole of a set of $n$ random points chosen independently and uniformly over $R$ is $Θ(\log{n}/(\log{\log{n}}))$, regardless of the shape of $R$.
A Mixed Observability Markov Decision Process Model for Musical Pitch
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

Partially observable Markov decision processes have been widely used to provide models for real-world decision making problems. In this paper, we will provide a method in which a slightly different version of them called Mixed observability Markov decision process, MOMDP, is going to join with our problem. Basically, we aim at offering a behavioural model for interaction of intelligent agents with musical pitch environment and we will show that how MOMDP can shed some light on building up a decision making model for musical pitch conveniently.
Loopy Belief Propagation in Bayesian Networks : origin and possibilistic perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

In this paper we present a synthesis of the work performed on two inference algorithms: the Pearl's belief propagation (BP) algorithm applied to Bayesian networks without loops (i.e. polytree) and the Loopy belief propagation (LBP) algorithm (inspired from the BP) which is applied to networks containing undirected cycles. It is known that the BP algorithm, applied to Bayesian networks with loops, gives incorrect numerical results i.e. incorrect posterior probabilities. Murphy and al. [7] find that the LBP algorithm converges on several networks and when this occurs, LBP gives a good approximation of the exact posterior probabilities. However this algorithm presents an oscillatory behaviour when it is applied to QMR (Quick Medical Reference) network [15]. This phenomenon prevents the LBP algorithm from converging towards a good approximation of posterior probabilities. We believe that the translation of the inference computation problem from the probabilistic framework to the possibilistic framework will allow performance improvement of LBP algorithm. We hope that an adaptation of this algorithm to a possibilistic causal network will show an improvement of the convergence of LBP.
Privacy Preserving and Ownership Authentication in Ubiquitous Computing Devices using Secure Three Way Authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2012
Year: 2012

In todays world of technology and gadgets almost every person is having a portable device, be it a laptop or the smart phones. The user would like to have all the services at his fingertips and access them through the portable device he owns. Maybe he wants some data from the fellow user or from the service provider or maybe he wants to control his smart devices at home from wherever he is. In the present era of mobile environments, interactions between the user device and the service provider must be secure enough regardless of the type of device used to access or utilize the services. In this paper we propose a "Secure Three Way Authentication (STWA)" technique intended to preserve the user privacy and to accomplish ownership authentication in order to securely deliver the services to the user devices. This technique will also help the users or the service providers to check if the device is compromised or not with the help of the encrypted pass-phrases that are being exchanged.
Infinite Synchronizing Words for Probabilistic Automata (Erratum)
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2012
Year: 2012

In [1], we introduced the weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata. In this report, we show that the emptiness problem of weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata is undecidable. This implies that the decidability result of [1-3] for the emptiness problem of weakly synchronizing language is incorrect.
Use of Fuzzy Sets in Semantic Nets for Providing On-Line Assistance to User of Technological Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

The main objective of this paper is to develop a new semantic Network structure, based on the fuzzy sets theory, used in Artificial Intelligent system in order to provide effective on-line assistance to users of new technological systems. This Semantic Networks is used to describe the knowledge of an "ideal" expert while fuzzy sets are used both to describe the approximate and uncertain knowledge of novice users who intervene to match fuzzy labels of a query with categories from an "ideal" expert. The technical system we consider is a word processor software, with Objects such as "Word" and Goals such as "Cut" or "Copy". We suggest to consider the set of the system's Goals as a set of linguistic variables to which corresponds a set of possible linguistic values based on the fuzzy set. We consider, therefore, a set of interpretation's levels for these possible values to which corresponds a set of membership functions. We also propose a method to measure the similarity degree between different fuzzy linguistic variables for the partition of the semantic network in class of similar objects to make easy the diagnosis of the user's fuzzy queries.
Research On Mobile Cloud Computing: Review, Trend, And Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2012
Year: 2012

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) which combines mobile computing and cloud computing, has become one of the industry buzz words and a major discussion thread in the IT world since 2009. As MCC is still at the early stage of development, it is necessary to grasp a thorough understanding of the technology in order to point out the direction of future research. With the latter aim, this paper presents a review on the background and principle of MCC, characteristics, recent research work, and future research trends. A brief account on the background of MCC: from mobile computing to cloud computing is presented and then followed with a discussion on characteristics and recent research work. It then analyses the features and infrastructure of mobile cloud computing. The rest of the paper analyses the challenges of mobile cloud computing, summary of some research projects related to this area, and points out promising future research directions.
Evaluation and Improvement of Laruelle-Widgrén Inverse Banzhaf Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2012
Year: 2012

The goal of this paper is to critically evaluate a heuristic algorithm for the Inverse Banzhaf Index problem by Laruelle and Widgrén. Few qualitative results are known about the approximation quality of the heuristics for this problem. The intuition behind the operation of this approximation algorithm is analysed and evaluated. We found that the algorithm can not handle general inputs well, and often fails to improve inputs. It is also shown to diverge after only tens of iterations. We present three alternative extensions of the algorithm that do not alter the complexity but can result in up to a factor 6.5 improvement in solution quality.
From individual to population: Challenges in Medical Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2012
Year: 2012

In this paper, we first give a high-level overview of medical visualization development over the past 30 years, focusing on key developments and the trends that they represent. During this discussion, we will refer to a number of key papers that we have also arranged on the medical visualization research timeline. Based on the overview and our observations of the field, we then identify and discuss the medical visualization research challenges that we foresee for the coming decade.
Parallel random variates generator for GPUs based on normal numbers
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2012
Year: 2012

Pseudorandom number generators are required for many computational tasks, such as stochastic modelling and simulation. This paper investigates the serial CPU and parallel GPU implementation of a Linear Congruential Generator based on the binary representation of the normal number $α_{2,3}$. We adapted two methods of modular reduction which allowed us to perform most operations in 64-bit integer arithmetic, improving on the original implementation based on 106-bit double-double operations. We found that our implementation is faster than existing methods in literature, and our generation rate is close to the limiting rate imposed by the efficiency of writing to a GPU's global memory.
Traditional sufficient conditions for Nash implementation may fail on Internet
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2012
Year: 2012

The Maskin's theorem is a fundamental work in the theory of mechanism design. In this paper, we propose that if agents report messages to the designer through channels (e.g., Internet), agents can construct a self-enforcing agreement such that any Pareto-inefficient social choice rule satisfying monotonicity and no-veto will not be Nash implementable when an additional condition is satisfied. The key points are: 1) The agreement is unobservable to the designer, and the designer cannot prevent the agents from constructing such agreement; 2) The agents act non-cooperatively, and the Maskin mechanism remain unchanged from the designer's perspective.
Causality, Influence, and Computation in Possibly Disconnected Dynamic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2012
Year: 2012

In this work, we study the propagation of influence and computation in dynamic distributed systems. We focus on broadcasting models under a worst-case dynamicity assumption which have received much attention recently. We drop for the first time in worst-case dynamic networks the common instantaneous connectivity assumption and require a minimal temporal connectivity. Our temporal connectivity constraint only requires that another causal influence occurs within every time-window of some given length. We establish that there are dynamic graphs with always disconnected instances with equivalent temporal connectivity to those with always connected instances. We present a termination criterion and also establish the computational equivalence with instantaneous connectivity networks. We then consider another model of dynamic networks in which each node has an underlying communication neighborhood and the requirement is that each node covers its local neighborhood within any time-window of some given length. We discuss several properties and provide a protocol for counting, that is for determining the number of nodes in the network.
Model Checking Stochastic Branching Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

Stochastic branching processes are a classical model for describing random trees, which have applications in numerous fields including biology, physics, and natural language processing. In particular, they have recently been proposed to describe parallel programs with stochastic process creation. In this paper, we consider the problem of model checking stochastic branching process. Given a branching process and a deterministic parity tree automaton, we are interested in computing the probability that the generated random tree is accepted by the automaton. We show that this probability can be compared with any rational number in PSPACE, and with 0 and 1 in polynomial time. In a second part, we suggest a tree extension of the logic PCTL, and develop a PSPACE algorithm for model checking a branching process against a formula of this logic. We also show that the qualitative fragment of this logic can be model checked in polynomial time.
Finding Quality Issues in SKOS Vocabularies
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2012
Year: 2012

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard model for controlled vocabularies on the Web. However, SKOS vocabularies often differ in terms of quality, which reduces their applicability across system boundaries. Here we investigate how we can support taxonomists in improving SKOS vocabularies by pointing out quality issues that go beyond the integrity constraints defined in the SKOS specification. We identified potential quantifiable quality issues and formalized them into computable quality checking functions that can find affected resources in a given SKOS vocabulary. We implemented these functions in the qSKOS quality assessment tool, analyzed 15 existing vocabularies, and found possible quality issues in all of them.
Broadcast-based Directional Routing in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2012
Year: 2012

An optimized broadcast protocol is proposed for VANETs. It is based on two key information: the direction to the destination and the beamforming angle θ. The efficiency of this technique is demonstrated in terms of packet delivery, bandwidth gain and probability of transmission success. An analytical model is developed to calculate the transmission area. This model allows capturing the propagation shape of the forwarding area. Comparisons with simulations show that the analytical model is precise.
An Intelligent Approach for Negotiating between chains in Supply Chain Management Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

Holding commercial negotiations and selecting the best supplier in supply chain management systems are among weaknesses of producers in production process. Therefore, applying intelligent systems may have an effective role in increased speed and improved quality in the selections .This paper introduces a system which tries to trade using multi-agents systems and holding negotiations between any agents. In this system, an intelligent agent is considered for each segment of chains which it tries to send order and receive the response with attendance in negotiation medium and communication with other agents .This paper introduces how to communicate between agents, characteristics of multi-agent and standard registration medium of each agent in the environment. JADE (Java Application Development Environment) was used for implementation and simulation of agents cooperation.
Analytical Study for Seeking Relation Between Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2012
Year: 2012

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a integration of various resources of any organization. It is computer software. All kinds of organization data that is relating to each and every function of the organization are available in ERP. So most of the big business organizations are implementing ERP and some of the medium, small scale companies are also using ERP system. CRM in an organization helps to retain their existing customers as well as capturing new customers for their products. So it makes the organization to produce those goods required by their consumers. This paper focuses mainly on the merging of CRM and ERP through Neural Networks.
Human Arm simulation for interactive constrained environment design
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2012
Year: 2012

During the conceptual and prototype design stage of an industrial product, it is crucial to take assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations in advance. A well-designed system should enable relatively easy access of operating manipulators in the constrained environment and reduce musculoskeletal disorder risks for those manual handling operations. Trajectory planning comes up as an important issue for those assembly and maintenance operations under a constrained environment, since it determines the accessibility and the other ergonomics issues, such as muscle effort and its related fatigue. In this paper, a customer-oriented interactive approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic related issues encountered during the design stage under a constrained system for the operator's convenience. Based on a single objective optimization method, trajectory planning for different operators could be generated automatically. Meanwhile, a motion capture based method assists the operator to guide the trajectory planning interactively when either a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization or the operator prefers guiding the virtual human manually. Besides that, a physical engine is integrated into this approach to provide physically realistic simulation in real time manner, so that collision free path and related dynamic information could be computed to determine further muscle fatigue and accessibility of a product design
Impact of Gender and Age on performing Search Tasks Online
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2012
Year: 2012

More and more people use the Internet to work on duties of their daily work routine. To find the right information online, Web search engines are the tools of their choice. Apart from finding facts, people use Web search engines to also execute rather complex and time consuming search tasks. So far search engines follow the one-for-all approach to serve its users and little is known about the impact of gender and age on people's Web search behavior. In this article we present a study that examines (1) how female and male web users carry out simple and complex search tasks and what are the differences between the two user groups, and (2) how the age of the users impacts their search performance. The laboratory study was done with 56 ordinary people each carrying out 12 search tasks. Our findings confirm that age impacts behavior and search performance significantly, while gender influences were smaller than expected.
Optimizing Face Recognition Using PCA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2012
Year: 2012

Principle Component Analysis PCA is a classical feature extraction and data representation technique widely used in pattern recognition. It is one of the most successful techniques in face recognition. But it has drawback of high computational especially for big size database. This paper conducts a study to optimize the time complexity of PCA (eigenfaces) that does not affects the recognition performance. The authors minimize the participated eigenvectors which consequently decreases the computational time. A comparison is done to compare the differences between the recognition time in the original algorithm and in the enhanced algorithm. The performance of the original and the enhanced proposed algorithm is tested on face94 face database. Experimental results show that the recognition time is reduced by 35% by applying our proposed enhanced algorithm. DET Curves are used to illustrate the experimental results.
Software Aging Analysis of Web Server Using Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

Software aging is a phenomenon that refers to progressive performance degradation or transient failures or even crashes in long running software systems such as web servers. It mainly occurs due to the deterioration of operating system resource, fragmentation and numerical error accumulation. A primitive method to fight against software aging is software rejuvenation. Software rejuvenation is a proactive fault management technique aimed at cleaning up the system internal state to prevent the occurrence of more severe crash failures in the future. It involves occasionally stopping the running software, cleaning its internal state and restarting it. An optimized schedule for performing the software rejuvenation has to be derived in advance because a long running application could not be put down now and then as it may lead to waste of cost. This paper proposes a method to derive an accurate and optimized schedule for rejuvenation of a web server (Apache) by using Radial Basis Function (RBF) based Feed Forward Neural Network, a variant of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Aging indicators are obtained through experimental setup involving Apache web server and clients, which acts as input to the neural network model. This method is better than existing ones because usage of RBF leads to better accuracy and speed in convergence.