ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A Fair Utility Function for Incentive Mechanism against Free-Riding in Peer-to-Peer Networks
Authors: Yuhua Liu, Chun Yang, Kaihua Xu, Hongcai Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference, NEW2AN and 1st Russian Conference on Smart Spaces, ruSMART on Next Generation Teletraffic and Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking (2008)

There are two problems, unfair and too strict, with the utility function of the proposed incentive mechanisms for restraining the free-riding in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. This paper is devoted to establish a new fair utility function to solve those problems. We absorb both the absolute contribution value and the physical performance of peers in our utility function and the absolute contribution value is divided into supply value and profit value. Besides, we take the time the user is in the system as a factor of a peer's utility. The mathematical modeling, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), is used in this paper to construct the function. The simulations compare the fair utility function with the proposed three functions and the results verify that this function is effective to solve those two problems.
Incentive and contracting problems in enterprise software
Authors: David Mowery
Venue:  (2007)

This dissertation examines the strategies by which enterprises and enterprise information technology (IT) vendors, particularly vendors of enterprise software, handle complex incentive and contracting problems arising from the unusual industry economics, product characteristics and human capital concerns associated with this product. It uses the lens of microeconomics, particularly industrial organization, personnel economics and transaction cost economics, to shed light on how contracting patterns between IT vendors and their customers vary as key vendor and customer characteristics change. The dissertation uses proprietary data from transactions between IT vendors and their customers. The first chapter of the dissertation examines the impact of a highly convex salesperson commission scheme in enterprise software on sales timing and pricing. Salespeople receive a higher commission on the same potential deal if they close it in a quarter in which they have generated substantial other sales, leading salespeople to attempt to concentrate sales in a single quarter. I demonstrate empirically that salespeople give excess discounts to customers in order to accomplish this bunching of sales, and that these excess discounts represent 6-8% of the vendor's total revenue. In the second chapter, I examine how software vendors and their customers react to the significant switching costs involved with buying and implementing an enterprise software package. I show empirically that vendors charge an average price premium of nearly 50% to customers that are "locked in," but also that many customers avoid paying these "locked in" rates by switching vendors rather than purchasing upgrades. Switching behavior is positively correlated with a customer's financial strength and IT capabilities. The final chapter examines the phenomenon of total IT outsourcing by global banks and demonstrates that these relationships are an example of hybrid governance, predicted in transaction cost economics when the market and hierarchy governance modes are both problematic. I show that the uncertainty generated by quick innovation in banking IT, incentive and agency problems banks face in managing human capital, and idiosyncratic financial concerns were important drivers of the choice by some banks to completely outsource their IT function.
Evaluating Trustworthiness from Past Performances: Interval-Based Approaches
Authors: Jonathan Ben-Naim, Henri Prade
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (2008)

In many multi-agent systems, the user has to decide whether he (or she) sufficiently trusts a certain agent to achieve a certain goal. To help users to make such decisions, an increasing number of trust systems have been developed. By trust system, we mean a system that gathers information about an agent and evaluates its trustworthiness from this information. The aim of the present paper is to develop new trust systems that overcome limitations of existing ones. This is a challenging problem that raises questions such as: how trustworthiness may be represented, and from which information it may be estimated? We assume that a set of grades describing the past performances of the agent is given. With this common basis, two approaches are proposed. In the first one, the aim is to construct an interval that summarizes the grades. Such an interval gives a good account of the trustworthiness of the agent. We establish axioms that should be satisfied by summarizing methods, devise a particular method based on pulling, and check that it satisfies the axioms, which provides theoretical justifications for it. In the second approach, which is more briefly presented, a level of trust as the certainty that a future grade will be good, and a level of distrust as the fear that a future grade may be bad, are computed on the basis of the past grades. This approach is based on possibility theory and provides, thanks to the two levels, another view of trustworthiness, as well as summarizing intervals.
Design Considerations for Lateral Skin Stretch and Perpendicular Indentation Displays to Be Used in Minimally Invasive Surgery
Authors: Koen Peeters, Mauro Sette, Pauwel Goethals, Jos Vander Sloten, Hendrik Brussel
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Haptics: Perception, Devices and Scenarios (2008)

Despite the advantages of minimally invasive surgery the applicability of (robot assisted) minimally invasive techniques is limited to simple operations due to the lack of tactile feedback. Tactile feedback is essential in many operations such as border detection during tumor resections and localization of nerves and veins embedded in soft tissue. This work compares the performance of existing tactile stimulation methods using psychophysical techniques in an edge detection test. Several mechanical and psychophysical design considerations for lateral skin stretch and perpendicular indentation displays are given. Considering the list of disadvantages, related to lateral skin stretch, we conclude that perpendicular indentation is the preferred stimulation method for tactile feedback systems to be used in minimally invasive surgery.
How additive are the Fourier series in the sense of high Dimensional model representation?
Authors: Caner Gülpinar, N. A. Baykara, Metin Demiralp
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st WSEAS International Conference on Multivariate Analysis and its Application in Science and Engineering (2008)

The focus of this work is to investigate the quality of High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR) to Fourier series. Towards this end, we experimantate with various Fourier series which are constructed for known univariate functions. Although the investigations are kept univariate, the extension that we obtain here to multivariate cases seems to be straightforward. This is because we use the additivity measurers whose conceptual structures do not change from one multivariance to another. The additiviy measurers are certain well-ordered functionals mapping from a Hilbert space of multi or univariate functions to the interval [0,1] and their close-to-one values mean certain level of additivity and therefore higher qualities of truncated HDMR approximants. Hence, those entities are evaluated for certain known cases.
A Speech Enhancement Method in Subband
Authors: Xiaohong Ma, Xiaohua Liu, Jin Liu, Fuliang Yin
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks, Part III (2007)

The speech enhancement method based on blind source separation and post-processing in subband [1] is an effective method in noise and reverberation environments. Performance analysis and computer simulations indicate that its performance is degraded under uncorrelated or mild correlated noise cases, and sometimes it might cause distortion of the enhanced signals. To apply the method in real environment, some improvements have been made on it. These are that adaptive noise cancellers are only used in the subbands with poor separation results and the independent component analysis (ICA) operations in low frequency bands are replaced by the efficient time-frequency masking method. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Mathematical model for quality cost optimization
Authors: N. V. R. Naidu
Venue: Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (2008)

Quality engineering uses robust design in order to improve quality by reducing the effects of variability. Variability of the product can be reduced by two stages. One is parameter design which is adjustable to the nominal value so that output is less sensitive to the cause of variability. Other one is tolerance design which is to reduce the tolerance in order to control variability. All costs incurred in a product life cycle can be divided into two categories-manufacturing cost before the sale to the customer and quality loss after the shipment of the product to the customer. It is very important to find the optimum tolerances for each of the characteristics. A balance between manufacturing cost and quality loss should be arrived at in the tolerance design for quality improvement and cost reduction. For the case of Nominal-The-Best, a mathematical model is developed in order to determine the optimum product tolerance and minimize the total cost which includes the manufacturing cost and the quality loss. Since the process capability index (C"p"m) shows the balance of quality responsibility between the design and the manufacturing engineers, this is taken as the basis in developing the functional relationship between the variability of the product and the tolerance. Based on these relationships, the total cost of model can be expressed as a function of product tolerance from which the optimal tolerance limits can be found out. Finally, using this model a tolerance design approach that increases the quality and reduces the cost can be achieved in the early stages of the product process design stage itself.
Topic 3: Scheduling and Load Balancing
Authors: Dieter Kranzlmueller, Uwe Schwiegelshohn, Yves Robert, Francisco F. Rivera
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th international Euro-Par conference on Parallel Processing (2008)

The key objective in scheduling and load balancing is to reduce the computing power that remains unusable by planning and distributing tasks among processing elements to achieve the expected performance goals, such as minimizing execution time, minimizing communication delays, or maximizing resource utilization.
"End-by-Hop" Data Integrity
Authors: Stephen Farrell, Christian D. Jensen
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th European workshop on Security and Privacy in Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (2007)

Wireless sensor networks have been proposed for various applications, such as environmental monitoring and tactical military applications. For most of these applications sensors, scattered across a large physical area, organize themselves into a network that forwards data back to a central sink. Sensors are typically assumed to be severely constrained with respect to energy consumption, computational power and communication capabilities (especially the data rate and range of the transmitter). Data-centric networking, where forwarding nodes aggregate or filter data en-route to the central sink, have been proposed to reduce the amount of data transported in the network and conserve energy. This means that data-centric networks are significantly different from traditional end-to-end networks, because data are altered on every hop from the source to the sink.Traditional end-to-end integrity mechanisms ensure that data cannot be modified on the way from the source to the destination. In data-centric networking, however, data is supposed to be altered on every hop from the source to the sink, so new integrity mechanisms must be investigated. In this paper we propose a new "end-by-hop" data integrity service that supports aggregation or filtering in data-centric networks. We also describe a mechanism that could be used to provide this service and provide an initial analysis of the efficiency and security of the mechanism proposed. One of the desirable properties of the proposed mechanism is that it allows the system architect to trade-off the computational load on the sensor nodes against a higher computational load at the sink, which we assume does not have the same severe resource limitations as the sensor nodes.
Modeling Human Performance in Two Player Zero Sum Games Using Kelly Criterion
Authors: Rafal Lopatka, Andrzej Dzielinski
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, Part I (2007)

The paper presents a new way of modeling the human performance in two player games using a rating system based on Kelly Criterion which is often utilized for gambling and financial engineering. The advantage of the proposed system is the ability to assess playing strength based on both the final outcome of the game and the style of play. The last aspect of the rating assessment system is novel compared to the rating systems developed so far (like ELO, Bradley-Terry, etc.). Another advantage of the proposed method is the tackling of the problem of drawn games. To the very best authors knowledge the approach presented below is a relatively new look at the problem of playing strength assessment based on probability theory. The paper presents and discusses few illustrative examples.
Open Service Process Platform 2.0
Authors: Dirk Habich, Sebastian Richly, Andreas Ruempel, Wolfgang Buecke, Steffen Preissler
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Congress on Services - Part I (2008)

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have revolutionized software-engineering over the last years. As a result, many domains have begun to switch to this architecture style. However, to efficiently support different domains from an SOA perspective, several extensions have to be included, e.g., concepts for efficient data transfer or runtime adaptation of processes. On the one hand, our Open Service Process Platform 2.0 is a central SOA infrastructure including several extensions. On the other hand, this platform can be used as the basis for the development of further extensions. The unique features of our platform are: (i) orchestration and execution of processes in an easy way (ii) arbitrary extensibility with regard to simple specialization for various domains, (iii) central infrastructure within an organization, and (iv) full accessibility through Web 2.0 technologies.
Provably Secure Identity-Based Undeniable Signatures with Selective and Universal Convertibility
Authors: Wei Wu, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo, Xinyi Huang
Venue: Information Security and Cryptology: Third SKLOIS Conference, Inscrypt 2007, Xining, China, August 31 - September 5, 2007, Revised Selected Papers (2007)

In this paper, we present the first concrete example of identity-based undeniable signature with selective and universal convertibility, where the signer can release a selective proof to make a single undeniable signature publicly verifiable, or publish a universal proof to convert all his undeniable signatures into ordinary digital signatures. Furthermore, we also formalized the security models of identity-based convertible undeniable signatures. The new models capture more essence of the property "convertibility" of identity-based undeniable signatures, compared with other known security models. Our scheme can be regarded as an improvement of Libert and Quisquater's identity-based undeniable signature scheme published in CT-RSA 2004. The security of our scheme is formally proven in the random oracle model under some well-known complexity assumptions. Its unforgeability relies on the hardness of the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem, while the invisibility (and anonymity) is based on the hardness of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem.
A Nonblocking Approach for Reaching an Agreement on Request Total Orders
Authors: Yun Wang, Jie Wu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The 28th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2008)

In distributed systems that use active replication to achieve robustness, it is important to efficiently enforce consistency among replicas. The nonblocking mode helps to speed up system execution. Unfortunately, this benefit comes at the expense of introducing decision conflicts when the replicas form a single logical token ring and client requests are processed in sequence following the ring. In order to reach an agreement regarding request total orders, this paper proposes a forward-confirmation (FC) approach to identify and solve decision conflicts when up to k successive replicas fail simultaneously. The FC approach can obtain consistent decisions among replicas. An implementation of the FC approach, namely, the queueing method, is proposed. Test results show that our protocol in the nonblocking mode outperforms the Totem protocol regarding delays and failure recovery.
Free-Riding Prevention in Super-Peer Desktop Grids
Authors: Peter Merz, Florian Kolter, Matthias Priebe
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The Third International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (iccgi 2008) (2008)

Resource sharing in Peer-to-Peer environments with selfish participants suffers from the free-riding phenomenon unless the environment provides appropriate countermeasures. We present a concept for a distributed Desktop Grid which promotes fairness and inhibits free-riding. It contains a shared-history reputation mechanism designed for use in dynamic Peer-to-Peer systems. In simulations based on real-world network delay and workload information, we show that our concept offers a considerable speedup over non-distributed computation while effectively thwarting free-riding. Moreover, we assess the benefits of self-organizing super-peer overlays for Desktop Grids.
A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Test Statistical Hypothesis on Means
Authors: Juan Carlos Figueroa García, Jose Jairo Soriano Mendez
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intelligent Computing: Advanced Intelligent Computing Theories and Applications - with Aspects of Artificial Intelligence (2008)

This paper presents a generalized Type-1 Fuzzy Logic engine to test statistical hypothesis on means by using standardized data samples to simplify the rule base. This inference engine attempts to test hypothesis on imprecise means, being an alternative to reject or accept the hypothesis via a fulfillment degree. To do so, an application example is provided and compared against classical tests to verify their results.
Optimized Conformal Parameterization of Cortical Surfaces Using Shape Based Matching of Landmark Curves
Authors: Lok Ming Lui, Sheshadri Thiruvenkadam, Yalin Wang, Tony Chan, Paul Thompson
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - Part I (2008)

In this work, we find meaningful parameterizations of cortical surfaces utilizing prior anatomical information in the form of anatomical landmarks (sulci curves) on the surfaces. Specifically we generate close to conformal parametrizations that also give a shape-based correspondence between the landmark curves. We propose a variational energy that measures the harmonic energy of the parameterization maps, and the shape dissimilarity between mapped points on the landmark curves. The novelty is that the computed maps are guaranteed to give a shape-based diffeomorphism between the landmark curves. We achieve this by intrinsically modelling our search space of maps as flows of smooth vector fields that do not flow across the landmark curves, and by using the local surface geometry on the curves to define a shape measure. Such parameterizations ensure consistent correspondence between anatomical features, ensuring correct averaging and comparison of data across subjects. The utility of our model is demonstrated in experiments on cortical surfaces with landmarks delineated, which show that our computed maps give a shape-based alignment of the sulcal curves without significantly impairing conformality.
A User Field Study: Communication in Academic Communities and Government Agencies
Authors: Filip Kruse, Annette Balle Sørensen, Bart Ballaux, Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Hans Hofman, Michael Poltorak Nielsen, John W. Pattenden-Fail, Seamus Ross, Kellie Snow, Jørn Thøgersen
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (2008)

The preliminary findings of a study focusing on communication in academic communities and government agencies are outlined. The study was conducted within the academic community at British and Danish universities and government agencies in The Netherlands, using the `Contextual Design' approach and `Cultural Probes'. Qualitative data on researchers' and government agents' communicative and interactive behaviour were collected and an affinity analysis carried out. The analysis produced two types of results; 1) a conceptual model of flow from idea to dissemination, and 2) a catalogue of central elements of the communicative and collaborative behaviour of researchers and government agents. These results will be further explored and validated by means of a questionnaire based survey of academic communities and government agencies.
Improving Features Subset Selection Using Genetic Algorithms for Iris Recognition
Authors: Kaushik Roy, Prabir Bhattacharya
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd IAPR workshop on Artificial Neural Networks in Pattern Recognition (2008)

In this paper, we propose an iris recognition method based on genetic algorithms (GA) to select the optimal features subset. The iris data usually contains huge number of textural features and a comparatively small number of samples per subject, which make the accurate iris patterns classification challenging. Feature selection scheme is used to identify the most important and irrelevant features from extracted features set of relatively high dimension based on some selection criterions. The traditional feature selection schemes require sufficient number of samples per subject to select the most representa-tive features sequence; however, it is not always practical to accumulate a large number of samples due to some security issues. In this paper, we propose GA to improve the feature subset selection by combining valuable outcomes from multiple feature selection methods. The main objective of GA is to achieve a balance among the recognition rate, the false accept rate, the false reject rate and the selected features subset size. This paper also motivates and introduces the use of Gaussian Mixture Model for iris pattern classification. The proposed technique is computationally effective with the recognition rates of 97.81 % and 96.23% on the ICE (Iris Challenge Evaluation) and the WVU (West Virginia University) iris datasets respectively.
Kriging for Localized Spatial Interpolation in Sensor Networks
Authors: Muhammad Umer, Lars Kulik, Egemen Tanin
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2008)

The presence of coverage holes can adversely affect the accurate representation of natural phenomena being monitored by a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Current WSN research aims at solving the coverage holes problem by deploying new nodes to maximize the coverage. In this work, we take a fundamentally different approach and argue that it is not always possible to maintain exhaustive coverage in large scale WSNs and hence coverage strategies based solely on the deployment of new nodes may fail. We suggest spatial interpolation as an alternative to node deployment and present Distributed Kriging (DISK), a localized method to interpolate a spatial phenomenon inside a coverage hole using available nodal data. We test the accuracy and cost of our scheme with extensive simulations and show that it is significantly more efficient than global interpolations.