pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
The effects of mobile service quality and technology compatibility on users' perceived playfulness

There is a growing body of research into Mobile Information and Entertainment Services in recent years. This study explored the effect of mobile service quality and its compatibility to mobile technology on users' perceived playfulness toward these services. Perceived Service Quality and Perceived Technology Compatibility were found to influence users' Perceived Playfulness. Furthermore, Perceived Technology Compatibility significantly mediated the relationship between Perceived Service Quality and Perceived Playfulness. This suggests that service attributes need to be aligned with mobile phone functionalities to enhance user's Perceived Playfulness. In addition, Perceived Usefulness, Ease of Use and Personalization were the three most important service quality aspects that influenced Perceived Playfulness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
Structural Inference of Hierarchies in Networks

One property of networks that has received comparatively little attention is
hierarchy, i.e., the property of having vertices that cluster together in
groups, which then join to form groups of groups, and so forth, up through all
levels of organization in the network. Here, we give a precise definition of
hierarchical structure, give a generic model for generating arbitrary
hierarchical structure in a random graph, and describe a statistically
principled way to learn the set of hierarchical features that most plausibly
explain a particular real-world network. By applying this approach to two
example networks, we demonstrate its advantages for the interpretation of
network data, the annotation of graphs with edge, vertex and community
properties, and the generation of generic null models for further hypothesis
testing.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure
Beyond the static money multiplier: in search of a dynamic theory of money

In this paper, we analyze the process of money creation in a credit economy. We start from the consideration that the traditional money multiplier is a poor description of this process and present an alternative and dynamic approach that takes into account the heterogeneity of agents in the economy and their interactions. We show that this heterogeneity can account for the instability of the multiplier and that it can make the system path-dependent. By using concepts and techniques borrowed from network theory and statistical mechanics, we then try to shed some
light on the actual process by which money is endogenously created in an economy.
Testing double auction as a component within a generic market model architecture

Since the first multi-agents based market simulations in the nineties, many different
artificial stock market models have been developped. There are mainly used to reproduce
and understand real markets statistical properties such as fat tails, volatility clustering and positive auto-correlation of absolute returns. Though they share common goals, these market models are most of the time different one from another: some are based on equations, others on complex microstructures, some are synchronous, others are asynchronous. It is hence hard to understand which characteristic of the market model used is at the origin of observed statistical properties. To investigate this question, we propose a generic model of artificial markets architecture which allows to freely compose modules coming from existing market models. To illustrate this formalism, we implement these components to propose a model of an asynchronous double auction based on an order-book and show that many stylized facts of real stock markets are reproduced with our model.
New Bisimulation Semantics for Distributed Systems

Bisimulation semantics are a very pleasant way to define the semantics of systems, mainly because the simplicity of their definitions and their nice coalgebraic properties. However, they also have some disadvantages: they are based on a sequential operational semantics defined by means of an ordinary transition system, and in order to be bisimilar two systems have to be “too similar”. In this work we will present several natural proposals to define weaker bisimulation semantics that we think properly capture the desired behaviour of distributed systems. The main virtue of all these semantics is that they are real bisimulation semantics, thus inheriting most of the good properties of bisimulation semantics. This is so because they can be defined as particular instances of Jacobs and Hughes’ categorical definition of simulation, which they have already proved to satisfy all those properties
Correlating text and images: concept and evaluation

This paper presents the concept and an evaluation of a novel approach to support students to understand complex spatial relations and to learn unknown terms of a domain-specific terminology with coordinated textual descriptions and illustrations. Our approach transforms user interactions into queries to an information retrieval system. By selecting text segments or by adjusting the view to interesting domain objects, learners can request additional contextual information. Therefore, the system uses pre-computed multi-level representations of the\ud
content of explanatory text and of views on 3D models to suggest textual descriptions\ud
or views on 3D objects that might support the current learning task.\ud
Our experimental application is evaluated by a user study that analyzes (i) similarity measures that are used by the information retrieval system to coordinate the content of descriptive texts and computer-generated illustrations and (ii) the impact of the individual components of these measures. Our study revealed that the retrieved results match the preferences of the users. Furthermore, the statistical analysis suggests a rough value to cut-off retrieval results according to their relevancy.Postprint (published version
Towards the testing of power-aware software applications for wireless sensor networks

12th Ada-Europe International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Geneva, Switzerland, 25-29 June 2007.HKU CS Tech Report TR-2007-05The testing of programs in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an important means to assure quality but is a challenging process. As pervasive computing has been identified as a notable trend in computing, investigations on effective software testing techniques for WSN are essential. In particular, energy is a crucial and scarce resource in WSN nodes. Programs running correctly but failing to meet the energy constraints may still be problematic. As such, testing techniques for power-aware applications are useful; otherwise, the quickly depleted device batteries will need frequent replacements, hence challenging the effectiveness of automation. Since current testing techniques do not consider the issue of energy constraints, their automation in the WSN domain warrants further investigation. This paper proposes a novel power-aware technique built on top of the notion of metamorphic testing to alleviate both the test oracle issue and the powerawareness issue. It tests the functions of programs in WSN nodes that are in close proximity, and uses the data consolidation criteria of data aggregation in programs as the basis for verifying test results. The power-aware transmissions of intermediate and final test data as well as the computation required for verification of test results are directly supported by the WSN programs. Our proposed technique has been strategically designed to blend in with the special features of the WSN environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.preprintThis work is supported in part by a grant of the Innovation and Technology Commission in
Hong Kong (Project No. ITS/076/06), a grant of City University of Hong Kong (Project No.
7200079), a discovery grant of the Australian Research Council (Project No. DP 0771733), and CERG grants of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project Nos. 612306 and
717506)
Bioinformatics service reconciliation by heterogeneous schema transformation

This paper focuses on the problem of bioinformatics service reconciliation in a generic and scalable manner so as to enhance interoperability in a highly evolving field. Using XML as a common representation format, but also supporting existing flat-file representation formats, we propose an approach for the scalable semi-automatic reconciliation of services, possibly invoked from within a scientific workflows tool. Service reconciliation may use the AutoMed heterogeneous data integration system as an intermediary service, or may use AutoMed to produce services that mediate between services. We discuss the application of our approach for the reconciliation of services in an example bioinformatics workflow. The main contribution of this research is an architecture for the scalable reconciliation of bioinformatics services
Survey design for visually impaired and blind people

"This paper presents guidelines for the design of self-administered surveys for visually impaired and blind people within a mixed mode approach. The different needs of the target group are fulfilled by offering different modes of participation (paper-based, braille-based, Web-based). Reading aids have in common that they enhance the focus of a specific piece of text or single word. This advantage turns into a disadvantage in terms of a clear overview and arrangement of the text elements on a page. Therefore text needs to be designed with cognitive processes and accessibility standards in mind. This is especially true for a survey questionnaire where each question and answer item has to convey its own special meaning independent from context. Design problems and their solutions are described and illustrated with experiences from pretesting and a case study." (author's abstract
Does My Stigma Look Big in This? Considering the acceptability and desirability in the inclusive design of technology products

This chapter examines the relationship between stigmatic effects of design of technology products for older and disabled populations and contextualizes this within wider social themes such as the social and medical models of disability. Inclusive design approaches are identified as unbiased methods for designing for the wider population that may accommodate the needs and desires of people with impairments, therefore reducing ’aesthetic stigma’. Two case studies illustrate stigmatic and nonstigmatic designs
Low-cost portable text recognition and speech synthesis with generic software, l

The final publication is available at link.springer.comBlind persons or people with reduced eyesight could benefit from a portablesystem that can interpret textual information in the surrounding environment and speakdirectly to the user. The need for such a system was surveyed with a questionnaire, and aprototype system was built using generic, inexpensive components readily available. Thesystem architecture is component-based so that every module can be replaced with anothergeneric module. Even though the system makes partly incorrect recognition of text in aversatile environment, the evaluation of the system with five actual users suggested that thesystem can provide genuine additional value in coping with everyday issues outdoors.Peer reviewe
Engineering social awareness in work environments

A growing interest is seen for designing intelligent environments that support personally meaningful, sociable and rich everyday experiences. In this paper we describe an intelligent, large screen display called Panorama that is aimed at supporting and enhancing social awareness within an academic work environment. Panorama is not intended to provide instrumental or other productivity related information. Rather, the goal of Panorama is to enhance social awareness by providing interpersonal and rich information related to co-workers and their everyday interactions in the department. A two-phase assessment of Panorama showed to promote curiosity and interest in exploring different activities in the environment
Systems development methods and usability in Norway: An industrial perspective

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 Springer Berlin HeidelbergThis paper investigates the relationship between traditional systems development methodologies and usability, through a survey of 78 Norwegian IT companies. Building on previous research we proposed two hypotheses; (1) that software companies will generally pay lip service to usability, but do not prioritize it in industrial projects, and (2) that systems development methods and usability are perceived as not being integrated. We find support for both hypotheses. Thus, the use of systems development methods is fairly stable, confirming earlier research. Most companies do not use a formal method, and of those who do, the majority use their own method. Generally, the use of methods is rather pragmatic: Companies that do not use formal methods report that they use elements from such methods. Further, companies that use their own method import elements from standardised methods into their own
Mobile personalization at large sports events : user experience and mobile device personalization

This is a refereed conference paper. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comMobile personalization is frequently discussed, and has been\ud
shown in relation to a number of usage scenarios. However, this\ud
research has focused mainly on technology development. There have\ud
been few studies of mobile user experience, and personalization in\ud
sports. This paper is devoted to the new field of studying the user\ud
experience related to mobile personalization at large sports events\ud
(LSE). In order to support and enrich the user experience at LSE with\ud
mobile personalization, this study investigates the current audience\ud
experience at stadiums and derives the usage patterns that device\ud
personalization could usefully support in this context
Vehicle and crew scheduling: Solving large real-world instances with an integrated approach

In this paper we discuss several methods to solve large real-world instances of the vehicle and crew scheduling problem. Although there has been an increased attention to integrated approaches for solving such problems in the literature, currently only small or medium-sized instances can be solved by such approaches. Therefore, large instances should be split into several smaller ones, which can be solved by an integrated approach, or the sequential approach, i.e., first vehicle scheduling and afterwards crew scheduling, is applied. In this paper we compare both approaches, where we consider different ways of splitting an instance varying from very simple rules to more sophisticated ones. Those ways are extensively tested by computational experiments on real-world data provided by the largest Dutch bus company
Finite Element Modeling to Aid in Refining the Rehabilitation of Amputees Using Osseointegrated Prostheses

The direct anchorage of a lower-limb prosthesis to the bone has been shown to be an excellent alternative for amputees experiencing complications in using a conventional prosthetic socket. After surgical implantation, amputees have to go through a weight bearing exercise program to prepare the bone to tolerate forces and promote bone-remodeling. Currently, the load magnitude prescribed by the clinician is measured by a weight scale which reports only the axial force in the limb. Previous study using a load transducer revealed that in addition to the axial force there were other forces and moments. This study develops a FE model and utilizes our load data to investigate the stress distribution at the bone-implant interface. The model shows that the stress distribution could be highly non-uniform during the exercise. Bone-implant interface stress has certain implications in pain adaptation and bone-remodeling, and a good understanding of it can assist in future attempts to refine and shorten the period of rehabilitation exercise
Non-commercial object-base scene description

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 SpringerThis paper investigates methods of describing two-dimensional and three-dimensional scenes using eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). It also investigates the initial development of a non-commercial object-based scene description language, for the effective capture of two- and three-dimensional scenes. Design science research techniques were applied to determine the ideal factors involved in effective scene capture. The solution facilitates the description of 2D and 3D environments via interpretation of object relationships; the implementation of the inheritance, functionality, interactions and behaviour
Conceptual Ontology Enrichment for Web Information Retrieval

<p>Searching for information on the Web can be frustrating. One of the reasons is the ambiguity of words. The work presented in this thesis concentrates on how the effectiveness of standard information retrieval systems can be enhanced with semantic technologies like ontologies. Ontologies are knowledge models that can represent knowledge of any universe of discourse by describing how concepts of a domain are related. Creating and maintaining ontologies can be tedious and costly. However, we focus on reusing ontologies, rather than engineering, and on their applicability to improve the retrieval effectiveness of existing search systems.</p><p>The aim of this work is to find an effective approach for applying ontologies to existing search systems. The basic idea is that these ontologies can be used to tackle the problem of ambiguous words and hence improve the retrieval effectiveness. Our approach to semantic search builds on feature vectors (FV). The basic idea is to connect the (standardised) domain terminology encoded in an ontology to the actual terminology used in a text corpus. Therefore, we propose to associate every ontology entity (classes and individuals are called entities in this work) with a FV that is tailored to the actual terminology used in a text corpus like the Web. These FVs are created off-line and later used on-line to filter (i.e. to disambiguate search) and re-rank the search results from an underlying search system. This pragmatic approach is applicable to existing search systems since it only depends on extending the query and presentation components, in other words there is no need to alter either the indexing or the ranking components of the existing systems.</p><p>A set of experiments have been carried out and the results report on improvement by more than 10%. Furthermore, we have shown that the approach is neither dependent on highly specific queries nor on a collection comprised only of relevant documents. In addition, we have shown that the FVs are relatively persistent, i.e. little maintenance of the FVs is required.</p><p>In this work, we focus on the creation and evaluation of these feature vectors. As a result, a part of the contribution of this work is a framework for the construction of FVs. Furthermore, we have proposed a set of metrics to measure the quality of the created FVs. We have also provided a set of guidelines for optimal construction of feature vectors for different categories of ontologies.</p>PhD i InformasjonsteknologiPhD in Information Technolog
DLSITE-1: lexical analysis for solving textual entailment recognition

This paper discusses the recognition of textual entailment in a text-hypothesis pair by applying a wide variety of lexical measures. We consider that the entailment phenomenon can be tackled from three general levels: lexical, syntactic and semantic. The main goals of this research are to deal with this phenomenon from a lexical point of view, and achieve high results considering only such kind of knowledge. To accomplish this, the information provided by the lexical measures is used as a set of features for a Support Vector Machine which will decide if the entailment relation is produced. A study of the most relevant features and a comparison with the best state-of-the-art textual entailment systems is exposed throughout the paper. Finally, the system has been evaluated using the Second PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge data and evaluation methodology, obtaining an accuracy rate of 61.88%.QALL-ME consortium, 6º Programa Marco, Unión Europea, referencia del proyecto FP6-IST-033860. Gobierno de España, proyecto CICyT número TIN2006-1526-C06-01
Applying Wikipedia’s multilingual knowledge to cross–lingual question answering

The application of the multilingual knowledge encoded in Wikipedia to an open–domain  Cross–Lingual Question Answering system
based on the Inter Lingual Index (ILI) module of EuroWordNet is proposed and evaluated. This strategy overcomes the problems due to
ILI’s low coverage on proper nouns (Named Entities). Moreover, as these are open class words (highly changing), using a community–based up–to–date resource avoids the tedious maintenance of hand–coded bilingual dictionaries. A study reveals the importance to translate Named Entities
in CL–QA and the advantages of relying on Wikipedia over ILI for doing this. Tests on questions from the Cross–Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) justify our approach (20% of these are correctly answered thanks to Wikipedia’s Multilingual Knowledge).This work has been developed in the framework of the project QALL-ME, which is a 6th Framework Research Programme of the European Union (EU), contract number: FP6-IST-033860
Involving users in OPAC interface design: Perspective from a UK study

This is the post-print versoin of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 SpringerThe purpose of this study was to determine user suggestions for a typical OPAC (Online Public Library Catalogue) application’s functionality and features. An experiment was undertaken to find out the type of interactions features that users prefer to have in an OPAC. The study revealed that regardless of users’ Information Technology (IT) backgrounds, their functionality expectations of OPACs are the same. However, based on users’ previous experiences with OPACs, their requirements with respect to specific features may change. Users should be involved early in the OPAC development cycle process in order to ensure usable and functional interface
UPPAAL-Tiga: Time for Playing Games!

International audienceIn 2005 we proposed the first efficient on-the-fly algorithm for solving games based on timed game automata with respect to reachability and safety properties. The first prototype presented at that time has now matured to a fully integrated tool with dramatic improvements both in terms of performance and the availability of the extended input language of Uppaal-4.0. The new tool can output strategies or let the user play against them both from the command line and from the graphical simulator that was completely re-designed