ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Development of a biomimetic miniature robotic crawler
Authors: Arianna Menciassi, Dino Accoto, Samuele Gorini, Paolo Dario
Venue: Autonomous Robots (2006)

The paper presents the development of segmented artificial crawlers endowed with passive hook-shaped frictional microstructures. The goal is to find design rules for fabricating biomimetic, adaptable and mobile machines mimicking segmented animals with hydrostatic skeleton, and intended to move effectively along unstructured substrates.The paper describes the mechanical model, the design and the fabrication of a SMA-actuated segmented microrobot, whose locomotion is inspired by the peristaltic motion of Annelids, and in particular of earthworms (Lumbricus Terrestris). Experimental locomotion performance are compared with theoretical performance predicted by a purposely developed friction model -taking into account design parameters such as number of segments, body mass, special friction enhancement appendixes--and with locomotion performance of real earthworms as presented in literature.Experiments indicate that the maximum speed of the crawler prototype is 2.5 mm/s, and that 3-segment crawlers have almost the same velocity as earthworms having the same weight (and about 330% their length), whereas 4-segment crawlers have the same velocity, expressed as body lengths/s, as earthworms with the same mass (and about 270% their length).
Rapid Identification of Column Heterogeneity
Authors: Bing Tian Dai, Nick Koudas, Beng Chin Ooi, Divesh Srivastava, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Data quality is a serious concern in every data management application, and a variety of quality measures have been proposed, e.g., accuracy, freshness and completeness, to capture common sources of data quality degradation. We identify and focus attention on a novel measure, column heterogeneity, that seeks to quantify the data quality problems that can arise when merging data from different sources. We identify desiderata that a column heterogeneity measure should intuitively satisfy, and describe our technique to quantify database column heterogeneity based on using a novel combination of cluster entropy and soft clustering. Finally, we present detailed experimental results, using diverse data sets of different types, to demonstrate that our approach provides a robust mechanism for identifying and quantifying database column heterogeneity.
Distributed channel management in uncoordinated wireless environments
Authors: Arunesh Mishra, Vivek Shrivastava, Dheeraj Agrawal, Suman Banerjee, Samrat Ganguly
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking (2006)

Wireless 802.11 hotspots have grown in an uncoordinated fashion with highly variable deployment densities. Such uncoordinated deployments, coupled with the difficulty of implementing coordination protocols, has often led to conflicting configurations (e.g., in choice of transmission power and channel of operation) among the corresponding Access Points (APs). Overall, such conflicts cause both unpredictable network performance and unfairness among clients of neighboring hotspots. In this paper, we focus on the fairness problem for uncoordinated deployments. We study this problem from the channel assignment perspective. Our solution is based on the notion of channel-hopping, and meets all the important design considerations for control methods in uncoordinated deployments - distributed in nature, minimal to zero coordination among APs belonging to different hotspots, simple to implement, and interoperable with existing standards. In particular, we propose a specific algorithm called MAXchop, which works efficiently when using only non-overlapping wireless channels, but is particularly effective in exploiting partially-overlapped channels that have been proposed in recent literature. We also evaluate how our channel assignment approach complements previously proposed carrier sensing techniques in providing further performance improvements. Through extensive simulations on real hotspot topologies and evaluation of a full implementation of this technique, we demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques for not only fairness, but also the aggregate throughput, metrics.We believe that this is the first work that brings into focus the fairness properties of channel hopping techniques and we hope that the insights from this research will be applied to other domains where a fair division of a system's resources is an important consideration.
Software Confederations - An Architecture for Agile Development in the Large
Authors: Jaroslav Kral, Michal Zemlicka, Michal Kopecky
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (2006)

There are two important shifts in software development: from object-oriented monoliths to service orientation and from the rigid specification-development-delivery to agile development when the needs of users are better taken into account as it can be reacted on the changes of the needs even during the development. In the point of intersection of these movements is the use of software confederations. The concept of software confederation uses decomposition of problem and application into smaller parts (services) and at the same time it is expected very tight cooperation with users as it is usual in agile development. Software confederations can be developed incrementally, quite easily modified during the development and even after the delivery. During the development of software confederations legacy systems and third party products may be used what reduces development and learning effort and opens opportunity for development subcontraction.
Entity Resolution with Markov Logic
Authors: Parag Singla, Pedro Domingos
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Entity resolution is the problem of determining which records in a database refer to the same entities, and is a crucial and expensive step in the data mining process. Interest in it has grown rapidly in recent years, and many approaches have been proposed. However, they tend to address only isolated aspects of the problem, and are often ad hoc. This paper proposes a well-founded, integrated solution to the entity resolution problem based on Markov logic. Markov logic combines first-order logic and probabilistic graphical models by attaching weights to first-order formulas, and viewing them as templates for features of Markov networks. We show how a number of previous approaches can be formulated and seamlessly combined in Markov logic, and how the resulting learning and inference problems can be solved efficiently. Experiments on two citation databases show the utility of this approach, and evaluate the contribution of the different components.
Identifying Follow-Correlation Itemset-Pairs
Authors: Shichao Zhang, Jilian Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhu, Zifang Huang
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

An association rule A\to B is useful to predict that B will likely occur when A occurs. This is a classical association rule. In real world applications, such as bioinformatics and medical research, there are many follow correlations between itemsets A and B: B likely occurs n times after A occurred m times, wrote to \le A^m , B^n \ge. We refer to this follow-correlation as P3.1 itemset-pairs because \le A^3 , B^1\ge like that in Example 2 should be uninterested in association analysis. This paper designs an efficient algorithm for identifying P3.1 itemset-pairs in sequential data. We experimentally evaluate our approach, and demonstrate that the proposed approach is efficient and promising.
Dynamic Web Services Personalization
Authors: Yacine Sam, Omar Boucelma, Mohand-Said Hacid
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and E-Services (2006)

In order to fulfill current customers requirements, companies and services providers need to supply a large panel of their products and services. This situation has led recently to the Mass Customizing Paradigm, meaning that products and services should be designed in such a way that makes it possible to deliver and adapt different configurations. The increasing number of services available on the Web, together with the heterogeneity of Web audiences, are among the main reasons that motivate the adoption of this paradigm to Web services technology. In this paper we describe a solution that allows automatic customization of Web services: a supplier configuration, published in a services repository, is automatically translated into another configuration better suited for fulfilling customers' needs.
Efficient secure query evaluation over encrypted XML databases
Authors: Hui Wang, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Venue: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Very large data bases (2006)

Motivated by the "database-as-service" paradigm wherein data owned by a client is hosted on a third-party server, there is significant interest in secure query evaluation over encrypted databases. We consider this problem for XML databases. We consider an attack model where the attacker may possess exact knowledge about the domain values and their occurrence frequencies, and we wish to protect sensitive structural information as well as value associations. We capture such security requirements using a novel notion of security constraints. For security reasons, sensitive parts of the hosted database are encrypted. There is a tension between data security and efficiency of query evaluation for different granularities of encryption. We show that finding an optimal, secure encryption scheme is NP-hard. For speeding up query processing, we propose to keep metadata, consisting of structure and value indices, on the server. We want to prevent the server, or an attacker who gains access to the server, from learning sensitive information in the database. We propose security properties for such a hosted XML database system to satisfy and prove that our proposal satisfies these properties. Intuitively, this means the attacker cannot improve his prior belief probability distribution about which candidate database led to the given encrypted database, by looking at the encrypted database as well as the metadata. We also prove that by observing a series of queries and their answers, the attacker cannot improve his prior belief probability distribution over which sensitive queries (structural or value associations) hold in the hosted database. Finally, we demonstrate with a detailed set of experiments that our techniques enable efficient query processing while satisfying the security properties defined in the paper.
Development of a large word-width high-speed asynchronous multiply and accumulate unit
Authors: S. C. Smith
Venue: Integration, the VLSI Journal (2005)

This paper details the design of the fastest known asynchronous Multiply and Accumulate unit (MAC) architecture published to date. The MAC architecture herein is based on the MAC developed in Smith et al. (J. Syst. Archit. 47/12 (2002) 977-998). However, the MAC developed in Smith et al. (2002) contains conditional rounding, scaling, and saturation (CRSS) logic, not present in other comparable MACs (Twenty-Sixth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 379-388; Asian South-Pacific Design Automation Conference, 2000, pp. 15-16; Sixth IEEE International Conference on Proceedings of ICECS, vol. 2, 1999, pp. 629-633); thus making the comparison between the MAC developed in Smith et al. (2002) and other delay-insensitive/self-timed MACs in the literature not completely fair, in favor of the other MACs. This paper first details the removal of the CRSS logic from the MAC developed in Smith et al. (2002), and describes its subsequent optimal re-pipelining, in order to provide a more fair comparison. This yields a speedup of 1.12. Secondly, this paper details the application of the NULL Cycle Reduction technique (The 10th International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis, 2001, pp. 185-189; Gate and throughput optimizations for NULL convention self-timed digital circuits, Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 2001) to the MAC's feedback loop, and subsequent re-pipelining of the feed-forward partial product generation and summation circuitry to further increase throughput, resulting in an additional speedup of 1.31 (a speedup of 1.46 over the MAC from Smith et al. (2002). Lastly, the bit-wise completion strategy is utilized in lieu of full-word completion to decrease the area required by 6% and also increase the MAC's throughput an additional 1%.
Semantic Processing in the Left Inferior Prefrontal Cortex: A Combined Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study
Authors: Joseph T. Devlin, Paul M. Matthews, Matthew F. S. Rushworth
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2003)

The involvement of the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) in phonological processing is well established from both lesion-deficit studies with neurological patients and functional neuroimaging studies of normals. Its involvement in semantic processing, on the other hand, is less clear. Although many imaging studies have demonstrated LIPC activation during semantic tasks, this may be due to implicit phonological processing. This article presents two experiments investigating semantic functions in the LIPC. Results from a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment demonstrated that both semantic and phonological processing activated a common set of areas within this region. In addition, there was a reliable increase in activation for semantic relative to phonological decisions in the anterior LIPC while the opposite comparison (phonological vs. semantic decisions) revealed an area of enhanced activation within the posterior LIPC. A second experiment used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily interfere with neural information processing in the anterior portion of the LIPC to determine whether this region was essential for normal semantic performance. Both repetitive and single pulse TMS significantly slowed subjects' reactions for the semantic but not for the perceptual control task. Our results clarify the functional anatomy of the LIPC by demonstrating that anterior and posterior regions contribute to both semantic and phonological processing, albeit to different extents. In addition, the findings go beyond simply establishing a correlation between semantic processing and activation in the LIPC and demonstrate that a transient disruption of processing selectively interfered with semantic processing.
Approximate Bayesian Multibody Tracking
Authors: Oswald Lanz
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2006)

Visual tracking of multiple targets is a challenging problem, especially when efficiency is an issue. Occlusions, if not properly handled, are a major source of failure. Solutions supporting principled occlusion reasoning have been proposed but are yet unpractical for online applications. This paper presents a new solution which effectively manages the trade-off between reliable modeling and computational efficiency. The Hybrid Joint-Separable (HJS) filter is derived from a joint Bayesian formulation of the problem, and shown to be efficient while optimal in terms of compact belief representation. Computational efficiency is achieved by employing a Markov random field approximation to joint dynamics and an incremental algorithm for posterior update with an appearance likelihood that implements a physically-based model of the occlusion process. A particle filter implementation is proposed which achieves accurate tracking during partial occlusions, while in cases of complete occlusion, tracking hypotheses are bound to estimated occlusion volumes. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is efficient, robust, and able to resolve long-term occlusions between targets with identical appearance.
General gyrotropic finite element formulation with loss: Research Articles
Authors: L. Y. Tio, A. A. P. Gibson, B. M. Dillon, L. E. Davis, A. M. T. Abuelma'atti
Venue: International Journal of Numerical Modelling: Electronic Networks, Devices and Fields (2006)

A four-transverse-field formulation for a lossless Hermitian tensor material was introduced previously for an arbitrary direction of applied bias field. This method is extended here to include loss, which is critical in modelling experimental devices and which causes variational functionals for gyrotropic waveguides to become non-Hermitian. The functional is developed from Maxwell's equations before demonstrating its stationary properties at the boundary value problem solution. Using the finite element method, the functional is implemented and then validated against various waveguide structures. For the first time, the Et &ndash; Ht formulation has been explicitly applied to lossy gyroelectric waveguide cross-sections. This method has important implications for the study and design of future phase shift and control components used in sub-millimeter wave and terahertz systems. Copyright &copy; 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Using computer simulations in disaster preparedness exercises: a study of factors that influence learning and performance in a first responder agency
Authors: Daniel Joseph O'Reilly
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

This a dissertation study investigating the effectiveness of computer simulation as an instructional tool in disaster and mass emergency (including homeland security) preparedness with regard to learning and field response performance. The effectiveness will be determined through a summative performance evaluation of a local public health agency to a full-scale mock drill after receiving preparedness training through computer simulated instructional program(s). Simulation variables of fidelity, richness, prior experience of participants with emergencies, and prior experience with computersimulation training will be included in the assessment. Currently, this study has evaluated applicable learning theories and the degree to which computer simulation meets the instructional criteria requirements proposed by these theories. A literature review of computer simulations in this instructional context has been found to be subjectively supportive but empirically weak. The objective of this study is to generate empirical evidence related to computer simulation in this current and particularly crucial arena of mass emergency preparedness and to contribute to the body of data on research in computer simulation instruction overall. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Supporting problem-based learning in groups in a net environment
Authors: Robin Cheesman, Simon B. Heilesen
Venue: Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning (1999)

Since 1996 the Communication Studies programme at Roskilde University (Denmark) has been offered as distance education. During the four years, we have improved our means to achieve a functioning CSCL pedagogy, developing from initially a somewhat na&iuml;ve translation of face-to-face and group organized PBL to an online context, into a now rather reflected CSCL learning concept, with intensive facilitator/supervisor involvement.In this paper we seek to identify ways of supporting PBL in groups in a net environment. This exercise is based upon four years of continually refining the conversion of pedagogical principles from face-to-face teaching at Roskilde University to Open University activities using WWW technology. In this process we have been looking for a software concept that could help implement our ideas by supporting students and teachers in their efforts.While smart technologies may make it easier to transfer messages of all kinds (including multimedia components) and to co-operate on distance, pedagogical insights and competencies cannot easily be replaced.
AmbientTalk: Language Support for Mobile Computing
Authors: Jessie Dedecker, Tom Van Cutsem, Stijn Mostinckx, Wolfgang De Meuter, Theo D'Hondt
Venue: Proceedings of the International Workshop on System Support for Future Mobile Computing Applications (2006)

An important aspect of system support for mobile computing involves alleviating the issues related to programming the underlying distributed system. Our approach to dealing with these issues is by means of programming language support. To this end, we have designed a high-level, distributed object-oriented programming language -- called AmbientTalk -- which has been designed specifically for mobile networks. We motivate the need for such dedicated language support based on the fundamental characteristics of mobile distributed systems. Subsequently, we describe the salient features of AmbientTalk with respect to distributed programming by means of an exemplar mobile computing application.
A Stable On-Demand Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Weight-Based Strategy
Authors: Nen-Chung Wang, Jhu-Chan Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (2006)

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of mobile hosts that can communicate with each other without the assistance of base stations. In MANETs, the high mobility of mobile nodes is a major reason for link failures. In this paper, we propose a stable weight-based on-demand routing protocol (SWORP) for MANETs. The proposed scheme uses the weight-based route strategy to select a stable route in order to enhance system performance. The weight of a route is decided by three factors: the route expiration time, the error count, and the hop count. Route discovery usually find multiple routes from the source node to the destination node. Then we select the path with the largest weight value for routing. Experimental results show that the proposed SWORP outperforms DSR and AODV especially in the high mobility environment.