ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
E-Commerce for the 21st Century
Authors: Scott Hamilton
Venue: Computer (1997)

Picture a massive economy of online services linked together so that businesses routinely outsource functions such as fulfillment and shipping. Distributors themselves will go virtual, outsourcing the physical warehousing and movement of goods to logistics specialists such as Federal Express. But why stop there? How about a virtual FedEx that outsources the heavy lifting to independent warehouse operators and truckers to reduce costs and improve flexibility? How will it all come together? Though people in the industry tend to talk about Internet commerce in more arcane terms like public-key infrastructures, digital signatures, and payment protocols, Marty Tenenbaum, chair and founder of the CommerceNet consortium, summarizes the barriers in three words: content, convenience, and confidence. There must be incentives to purchase goods over the Internet, be they a better selection, service, or price. It must be convenient, as simple to use as ATMs and as ubiquitous. Finally, users must have confidence that their transactions are secure, their privacy is inviolate, and they will not be subject to liability. All three of these areas call for collaboration to build a marketplace, an infrastructure, and a legal and regulatory framework. Launched in 1994 as a not-for-profit organization, CommerceNet is dedicated to advancing electronic commerce. The group's nearly 250 member companies seek solutions to technology issues, sponsor numerous industry pilots, and foster market and business development. If the projects, some of which are profiled in this issue, succeed, we might well experience the new "ecology" of global Internet commerce Tenenbaum envisions-with buyers, sellers, and intermediaries forming numerous industry-specific Internet markets that in turn form extended trading communities. It's a vision suited to the speed of the Information Age, promising rapid transformation-and threatening radical dislocation-of business and even society as we approach the next century.
Virtual Reality and Parallel Systems Performance Analysis
Authors: Daniel A. Reed, Keith A. Shields, Will H. Scullin, Luis F. Tavera, Christopher L. Elford
Venue: Computer (1995)

Recording and analyzing the dynamics of application-program, system-software, and hardware interactions are the keys to understanding and tuning the performance of massively parallel systems. Because such systems contain hundreds or thousands of processors, each potentially with many dynamic performance metrics, the performance data occupies a sparsely populated, high-dimensional space. These dynamic performance metrics define a group of evolving, n-dimensional points. Understanding the dynamic "shape" of the metric movement is possible only if multiple, lower dimensional projections can be examined. The authors have implemented an immersive virtual world, called Avatar, that shows all possible three-dimensional projections of a sparsely populated, n-dimensional metric space. The presentation metaphor is a three-dimensional generalization of a two-dimensional scatterplot matrix. Users can move about scatterplot cubes, control selected characteristics of the scatterplot display, listen to the sounds of statistical data attributes, and interactively modify application behavior and performance in real time.
APIs for Real-Time Distributed Object Programming
Authors: K. H. (Kane) Kim
Venue: Computer (2000)

Ideally, according to the author, a real-time distributed programming method should be based on a general high-level style that could be easily accommodated by application programmers using C++ and Java. If such a method were to exist, these programmers could specify the interactions among distributed components and the timing requirements of various actions without expending much effort.Facilitating high-level, high-precision, real-time object programming by establishing some form of language tools has consequently become a subject of great interest to the embedded systems community.This article focuses on application programming interfaces (APIs) that take the form of C++ and Java class libraries and support high-level, high-precision, real-time object programming without requiring new language translators. These APIs wrap the services of the real-time object execution engines, which consist of hardware, node OSs, and middleware; they enable convenient high-level programming almost to the extent that a new real-time object language can. The author explains the API's fundamental features, how they interact among real-time objects, and how multicast channels and real-time multi-cast APIs contribute.
Portfolio Selection and Transactions Costs
Authors: Michael J. Best, Jaroslava Hlouskova
Venue: Computational Optimization and Applications (2003)

This paper deals with the portfolio selection problem of risky assets with a diagonal covariance matrix, upper bounds on all assets and transactions costs. An algorithm for its solution is formulated which terminates in a number of iterations that is at most three times the number of assets. The efficient portfolios, under appropriate assumptions, are shown to have the following structure. As the risk tolerance parameter increases, an asset's holdings increases to its target, then stays there for a while, then increases to its upper bound, reaches it and stays there. Then the holdings of the asset with the next highest expected return proceeds in a similar way and so on.
Spanning the Product Life Cycle: RASSP DFT
Authors: Richard M. Sedmak, John S. Evans
Venue: IEEE Design Test (1996)

This article describes a design for testability process, which is highly automated, hierarchical, and spans the entire life cycle. The process was developed for the DoD's RASSP Program and contributes significantly to the RASSP goals of 4x improvement in cycle time, design quality, and life cycle costs.
Customizing Information. 2. How successful are we so far?
Venue: Computer (1994)

For pt.1 see ibid., p.96-8, September 1994. Although advanced information customization-transforming information so that it is appropriate to a particular consumer at a particular time-shares some characteristics of other information science disciplines, it is set apart by a need for such capabilities as transformation of individual documents, interactivity, and nonprescriptive structuring. Information retrieval and filtering, hypertext and hypermedia, information extraction and knowledge discovery in databases, information analysis, and data interchange all embody some of the characteristics that will be needed to make the totality of human knowledge more accessible and useful. Additional tools and methods are being developed to help implement advanced information customization. Interactive, nonlinear, nonprescriptive document customization for browsing is but one component among many approaches that will be needed to effectively use information in tomorrow's world. Information is becoming increasingly available online, and digital libraries will eventually become so thoroughly interconnected as to make all such libraries elements in a single, distributed, worldwide digital library. Together with information-customizing interfaces, this will fulfil H.G. Wells' promise of making the whole human memory accessible to everyone.
The Role of Polymorphism in Schema Evolution in an Object-Oriented Database
Authors: S. L. Osborn
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (1989)

A polymorphic object algebra for an object-oriented database model is introduced. Types of schema modification that follow naturally from this model are described. It is shown to what extent queries return identical or equivalent results when the objects in the database are modified to conform to a modified schema.
Parallel Signature Analyzers Using Hybrid Design of Their Linear Feedbacks
Authors: A. Hlawiczka
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (1992)

A bottom-top exclusive OR (BTE) type multiple input linear feedback shift register (MISR) and a top-bottom exclusive OR (TBE) type MISR which use only (t+1)/2 XOR gates in their linear feedback are presented. An algebraic analysis of the operation and certain analytical results regarding the detection capability of a BTE MISR are included. Infirmities of certain BTE type MISRs and TBE type MISRs with a reducible characteristic polynomial have been made. The proof that the probability of error sequence aliasing on a single input of BTE or TBE type MISR, where a characteristic polynomial of degree n is reducible, asymptotically approaches a value greater or equal to 2/sup -n/ is also given.
Spreadsheets in Science and Engineering
Authors: Gordon Filby
Venue:  (1997)

:"Spreadsheets in Science and Engineering" shows scientists and engineers at all levels how to analyze, validate and calculate data and how the analytical and graphic capabilities of spreadsheet programs (Excel) can solve these tasks in their daily work. The examples on the CD-ROM accompanying the book include material of undergraduate to current research level in disciplines ranging from chemistry and chemical engineering to molecular biology and geology.
A Probabilistic Limit on the Virtual Size of Replicated Disk Systems
Authors: R. W. -M. Lo, N. S. Matloff
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (1992)

Recently, there has been considerable interest in parallel disk drive systems, in which full or partial replication of the stored data is used for both fault tolerance and enhanced performance. The performance-enhancement derives both from the ability to do parallel reads, and from the reduction of seek time which results from being able to assign a read to whichever drive will produce the shortest seek. Although earlier work implied that for a k-drive system, mean seek distance for read converges to 0 as k to alpha , a refined analysis is presented which shows that this limit is actually nonzero. It is further shown that the system behaves probabilistically as if k were small, no matter how large the physical value of k is.
Real-Time Index Concurrency Control
Authors: Jayant R. Haritsa, S. Seshadri
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2000)

Real-time database systems are expected to rely heavily on indexes to speed up data access and, thereby, help more transactions meet their deadlines. Accordingly, high-performance index concurrency control (ICC) protocols are required to prevent contention for the index from becoming a bottleneck. In this paper, we develop real-time variants of a representative set of classical B-tree ICC protocols and, using a detailed simulation model, compare their performance for real-time transactions with firm deadlines. We also present and evaluate a new real-time ICC protocol called GUARD-link that augments the classical B-link protocol with a feedback-based admission control mechanism. Both point and range queries, as well as the undos of the index actions of aborted transactions are included in the scope of our study. The performance metrics used in evaluating the ICC protocols are the percentage of transactions that miss their deadlines and the fairness with respect to transaction type and size. Our experimental results show that the performance characteristics of the real-time version of an ICC protocol could be significantly different from the performance of the same protocol in a conventional (nonreal-time) database system. In particular, B-link protocols, which are reputed to provide the best overall performance in conventional database systems, perform poorly under heavy real-time loads. The new GUARD-link protocol, however, although based on the B-link approach, delivers the best performance (with respect to all performance metrics) for a variety of real-time transaction workloads, by virtue of its admission control mechanism. In fact, GUARD-link provides close to ideal fairness in most environments. These and other results presented here represent the first work in the area of real-time index concurrency control.
Towards a software evolution benchmark
Authors: Serge Demeyer, Tom Mens, Michel Wermelinger
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (2001)

Case-studies are extremely popular in rapidly evolving research disciplines such as software engineering because they allow for a quick but fair assessment of new techniques. Unfortunately, a proper experimental set-up is rarely the case: all too often case-studies are based on a single small toy-example chosen to favour the technique under study. Such lack of scientific rigor prevents fair evaluation and has serious consequences for the credibility of our field. In this paper, we propose to use a representative set of cases as benchmarks for comparing various techniques dealing with software evolution. We hope that this proposal will launch a consensus building process that eventually must lead to a scientifically sound validation method for researchers investigating reverse- and re-engineering techniques.
Success Factors of Systematic Reuse
Authors: William B. Frakes, Sadahiro Isoda
Venue: IEEE Software (1994)

Systematic software reuse is a paradigm shift in software engineering from building single systems to building families of related systems. The goal of software reuse research is to discover systematic procedures for engineering new systems from existing assets. Implementing systematic reuse is risky. Not doing it is also risky. Trying systematic reuse unsuccessfully can cost precious time and resources and may make management sceptical of trying it again. But if your competitors do it successfully and you do not, you may lose market share and possibly an entire market. There is no cookbook solution-each organization must analyze its own needs, implement reuse measurements, define the key benefits it expects, identify and remove impediments, and manage risk. Reliable data on how much this costs and the benefits an organization will derive are insufficient. The article addresses issues from management, measurement, law, economics, libraries, and the design of reusable software.
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Computer graphics, virtual Reality, visualisation and interaction in Africa
Venue: Computer graphics, virtual reality, visualisation and interaction in Africa (2003)

Welcome to AFRIGRAPH 2003, the second International Conference on Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Visualisation and interaction in Africa. This conference follows on from the highly successful conference in 2001 and is the the main event of the African Graphics Association, AFRIGRAPH <http://www.afrigraph.org/>. It is co-sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH and in co-operation with Eurographics.AFRIGRAPH was established in March 2001 following the visit by a high level ACM SIGGRAPH-Eurographics delegation to Southern Africa. Full details of that visit may be seen at: <http://www.siggraph.org/project-grants/SA/sigsarport.html>. The goal of AFRIGRAPH is to promote computer graphics and interactive techniques throughout Africa and to help establish Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Visualisation and Interaction as a leading African research and application activity. Everyone's participation at this conference helps to achieve these goals.More than forty papers were received this year from twelve different countries. Unfortunately, due to the limited time of the conference, we were only able to accept slightly over half of the submissions. These papers form the high scientific content of this confence and these proceedings.
Adaptive Binary Sorting Schemes and Associated Interconnection Networks
Authors: M. V. Chien, A. Yavuz Oruc
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (1994)

Many routing problems in parallel processing, such as concentration and permutationproblems, can be cast as sorting problems. In this paper, we consider the problem ofsorting on a new model, called an adaptive sorting network. We show that any sequenceof n bits can be sorted on this model in O(lg/sup 2/ n) bit-level delay using O(n) constantfanin gates. This improves the cost complexity of K.E. Batcher's binary sorters (1968) bya factor of O(lg/sup 2/ n) while matching their sorting time. The only other network thatcan sort binary sequences in O(n) cost is the network version of columnsort algorithm,but this requires excessive pipelining. In addition, using binary sorters, we constructpermutation networks with O(n lg n) bit-level cost and O(lg/sup 3/ n) bit-level delay.These results provide the asymptotically least-cost practical concentrators andpermutation networks to date. We note, of course, that the well-known AKS sortingnetwork has O(lg n) sorting time and O(n lg n) cost, but the constants hidden in thesecomplexities are so large that our complexities outperform those of the AKS sortingnetwork until n becomes extremely large.
RAID5 Performance with Distributed Sparing
Authors: Alexander Thomasian, Jai Menon
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (1997)

Distributed sparing is a method to improve the performance of RAID5 disk arrays with respect to a dedicated sparing system with N + 2 disks (including the spare disk), since it utilizes the bandwidth of all N + 2 disks. We analyze the performance of RAID5 with distributed sparing in normal mode, degraded mode, and rebuild mode in an OLTP environment, which implies small reads and writes. The analysis in normal mode uses an M/G/1 queuing model, which takes into account the components of disk service time. In degraded mode, a low-cost approximate method is developed to estimate the mean response time of fork-join requests resulting from accesses to recreate lost data on the failed disk. Rebuild mode performance is analyzed by considering an M/G/1 vacationing server model with multiple vacations of different types to take into account differences in processing requirements for reading the first and subsequent tracks. An iterative solution method is used to estimate the mean response time of disk requests, as well as the time to read each disk, which is shown to be quite accurate through validation against simulation results. We next compare RAID5 performance in a system 1) without a cache; 2) with a cache; and 3) with a nonvolatile storage (NVS) cache. The last configuration, in addition to improved read response time due to cache hits, provides a fast-write capability, such that dirty blocks can be destaged asynchronously and at a lower priority than read requests, resulting in an improvement in read response time. The small write penalty is also reduced due to the possibility of repeated writes to dirty blocks in the cache and by taking advantage of disk geometry to efficiently destage multiple blocks at a time.
Frame-Sliced Signature Files
Authors: Z. Lin, C. Faloutsos
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (1992)

A superimposed coding method, frame-sliced signature file, is proposed, and the performance of this method is studied and compared with that of other signature file methods. The response time of the method is improved due to its ability to effectively partition the signature file so that fewer random disk accesses are required on both retrieval and insertion, while the good characteristics of conventional square file, i.e., low space overhead, low maintenance cost, and the write-once property, are retained. The generalized version of the method is shown to be a unified framework for several popular signature file methods including the sequential signature file (SSF) method, bit-sliced signature file (BSSF) method, and its enhanced version of B'SSF. A prototype system was implemented on UNIX workstations with the C language. Experimental results on a 2.8-Mb database consisting of 2800 technical reports and a 28-Mb database with 28000 technical reports are presented.
On the Integration of Design and Test for Chips Embedding MEMS
Authors: Salvador Mir, Benoit Charlot
Venue: IEEE Design Test (1999)

Many difficulties that can prevent the introduction of the next generation of large-volume chips embedding MEMS are strongly related to testing. The intimate linkage of form and function in MEMS parts makes unavoidable the integration of design and test from the very beginning, building models that can take fault injection into account, and using them during fault simulation and test generation. This article illustrates this problem for chips that use bulk and surface silicon micromachining for the fabrication of MEMS parts. Micromachining defects are targeted because they are unique to the MEMS components and need to be incorporated in a test strategy for the overall chip. We use suspended thermal MEMS and electrostatic micromechanical resonators as representative test vehicles. As for purely microelectronic chips, the adoption of fault-based or defect-oriented approaches can help the validation of complex systems and the generation of structured tests, in part alleviating high testing costs in this next generation of chips.
Optimizing VHDL Compilation for Parallel Simulation
Authors: John C. Willis, Daniel P. Siewiorek
Venue: IEEE Design Test (1992)

Auriga, an experimental simulator that utilizes five compilation techniques to reduce runtime complexity and promote concurrency in the simulation of VHDL models is described. Auriga is designed to translate a model using any VHDL construct into an optimized, parallel simulation. Auriga's distributed simulation uses a message-passing network to simulate a single VHDL model. The authors present results obtained with seven benchmark models to illustrate the compiler's aggressive optimization techniques: temporal analysis, waveform propagation, input desensitization, concurrent evaluation, and statement compaction.
Application of fuzzy control to industrial bioprocesses in Japan
Authors: Jun-Ichi Horiuchi, Michimasa Kishimoto
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2002)

Applications of fuzzy control to industrial biological processes in Japan were summarized, compared and discussed in terms of the system features, control purpose, input and output variables, development of fuzzy rules and its effectiveness. Fuzzy control was mainly applied to the fed-batch cultures of microorganisms and used for the on-line control of feeding rate of substrate. Most of the control systems were developed based on the knowledge of experienced. Fuzzy control is regarded as a promising method for automating the bioprocesses where the experienced operators play significant roles for their successful operation.
Avalanche Characteristics of Substitution-Permutation Encryption Networks
Authors: Stafford E. Tavares, Howard M. Heys
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (1995)

This paper develops analytical models for the avalanche characteristics of a class of block ciphers usually referred to as substitution-permutation encryption networks or SPNs. An SPN is considered to display good avalanche characteristics if a one bit change in the plaintext input is expected to result in close to half the ciphertext output bits changing. Good avalanche characteristics are important to ensure that a cipher is not susceptible to statistical attacks and the strength of an SPN¿s avalanche characteristics may be considered as a measure of the randomness of the ciphertext. The results presented in this paper demonstrate that the avalanche behavior of encryption networks can be improved by using larger S-boxes. As well, it is shown that increasing the diffusion properties of the S-boxes or replacing the permutations by diffusive linear transformations is effective in improving the network avalanche characteristics.