ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Multiscaled Texture Synthesis Using Multisized Pixel Neighborhoods
Authors: Feng Dong, Xujiong Ye
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2007)

A novel texture synthesis method produces high-quality results by introducing a multiscaled texture similarity measurement. Compared with other multiscaled methods, this approach focuses on measuring texture properties at different scales ranging from local to global using an adaptive similarity metric that accounts for texture variations across different image regions.
Aligning IT Strategy with Business Strategy through the Balanced Scorecard in a Multinational Pharmaceutical Company
Authors: Richard Bricknall, Gunilla Darrell, Hans Nilsson, Kalevi Pessi
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

In this article, we look at the use of the Balanced Scorecard and how it can be used to align business and IT strategies. In particular, we have made a study of how the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (AZ) uses their method called the Business Performance Management (BPeM). We have related this to the Balanced Scorecard and compared how they have broken down strategies, objectives, targets and measurements on both the business and IT sides of the company to see if they have alignment between business and IT. We have analysed the results of the case study in two parts firstly, a review against Henderson's and Venkatraman's Strategic Alignment Mode [16l and secondly, against a Balanced Scorecard as defined by Kaplan and Norton [1]. From these results, we appraise the level of alignment between business and IT by implementing a simple comparison process.
Rapid CORBA server development in Tcl: a case study
Authors: Jason Brazile, Andrej Vckovski
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Tcl/Tk - Volume 7 (2000)

A large Swiss bank needed to collect, combine, process, and distribute financial market data from various 3rd party data sources to a large number of internal and external clients - the typical integration task at which scripting languages excel. The bank uses an implementation of CORBA as their standard enterprise-wide middleware for distributed applications. We describe how we designed and built a Tcl/C++ transport framework which allowed us to develop the "kernel" of this server application entirely in Tcl, yet support CORBA as the primary interface to the server. We further describe how this framework allows a small development team to rapidly implement changes and enhancements to the server and its external interface, while automatically generating the corresponding changes that are needed for the CORBA interface. Additionally, we show how we were able to automatically generate code to create new tcl commands that make use of the same, generated, Tcl/C++ marshalling routines in order to develop a CORBA client in Tcl, which is used to regression test the server, when full end-to-end testing is needed.
Modeling of Target Shadows for SAR Image Classification
Authors: Scott Papson, Ram Narayanan
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th Applied Imagery and Pattern Recognition Workshop (2006)

A recent thrust of non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been to complement the extraction of scattering centers by incorporating information contained in the target shadow. When classifying targets based on the shadow region alone, it is essential that an image be well clustered into its respective shadow, highlight, and background regions. To obtain the segmentation, the intensity and spatial location of a pixel are modeled as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Expectation-maximization (EM) is used to obtain the corresponding distributions for the three regions within a given image. Anisotropic smoothing is applied to smooth the input image as well as the posterior probabilities. A representation of the shadow boundary is developed in conjunction with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) ensemble to obtain target classification. A variety of targets from the MSTAR database are used to test the performance of both the segmentation algorithm and classification structure.
An integrated environment for modeling, simulation, digital signal processing, and control
Authors: C. C. Crane
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

An integrated laboratory for system modeling, simulation, real-time digital signal processing, and control is being developed at Bucknell University for undergraduate electrical engineering education. The laboratory bridges the gap between software simulation and testing of actual systems through a common visual programming interface. Students can explore the iterative process of developing a model and then refining the model until computer simulation results agree with experimental measurements. A liquid level control system is presented to illustrate the features of the laboratory environment. The key components of the laboratory are networked digital signal processing (DSP) hardware units and a simulation software package. The simulation software runs on workstations, and all of the laboratory equipment (including the DSP hardware) is connected to the Internet.
Building Information System with Wireless Connected Mobile Device - testing phase of PDPT Framework
Authors: Ondrej Krejcar
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Systems (2007)

The proliferation of mobile computing devices and local-area wireless networks has fostered a growing interest in location-aware systems and services. Additionally, the ability to let a mobile device determine its location in an indoor environment at a fine-grained level supports the creation of a new range of mobile control system applications. Main area of interest is in model of radio-frequency (RF) based system enhancement for locating and tracking users of our control system inside buildings. The framework described here joins the concepts of location and user tracking in an extended existing control system. The experimental framework prototype uses a WiFi network infrastructure to let a mobile device determine its indoor position as well as to deliver IP connectivity. User location is used to data pre-buffering and pushing information from server to user's PDA. Experiments show that location determination can be realized with a room level granularity.
'But i don't read text printed in braille font'...: parables from a business and information technology student
Authors: Anne Dickinson
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2007)

The author works in Coventry University and has been engaged in tutoring a student with disabilities who had enrolled for a degree in Business and IT at Coventry University. To do this, the author drew upon previous experiences in the Further Education (FE) sector at a College in the Midlands, where she taught Information Technology (IT) to diverse groups of students who had varied abilities. The ages of the FE students ranged from pre-16, visiting the College from a local special school to attend "taster" sessions, to adults, some of whom were seniors, attending a day centre for disabled adults that had a special arrangement for College tutors to give classes. The degree student was a white cane user, read Braille and navigated the computer with screen reader software. During her time at University, she took on an ambassadorial role: she gave guided tours to prospective students around the University campus during open days! From time to time she would recount stories that she described as amusing but which clearly showed ignorance on the part of her tutors. The title of this presentation is taken from one of her anecdotes. The Degree course in Business and IT had several workshops in Computing including statistics where spreadsheets and specialist software were used. The author was asked to tutor the student for the IT workshops of a year-long module. This included translating the instructional handouts from mouse-based to keyboard-based, being aware of potential problems with specialist software and the quirks of the online learning system (WebCT) [1] and finding ways of working around them all. This poster shows some of the issues related to the student's stories, the creating and translating of instructions for keyboard use and navigating the keyboard using JAWS.
Secure file system versioning at the block level
Authors: Jake Wires, Michael J. Feeley
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2007 (2007)

In typical file systems, valuable data is vulnerable to being accidentally or maliciously deleted or overwritten. Versioning file systems protect data from accidents by transparently retaining old versions, but do less well in protecting data from malicious attack. These systems remain vulnerable to attackers who gain unauthorized access to prune old file versions, who bypass the file system to directly manipulate storage, or who exploit bugs in any part of the operating system. This paper presents VDisk, a secure, block-level versioning system that adds file-grain versioning to a standard, unmodified file system. VDisk consists of a set of untrusted user-mode tools and a trusted, secure kernel that is implemented within an isolated Xen virtual machine domain. The secure kernel is designed to be simple and thus trustworthy. This kernel logs file-system updates to a secure log, exports a read-only view of the log to the rest of the system and securely removes unwanted versions from the log. Secure cleaning is implemented in a two-level manner. An untrusted, user-mode cleaner selects log entries for reclamation and submits cleaning requests to the trusted VDisk kernel along with a proof that the request satisifies the device's version-retention policy. The secure kernel verifies the proof and updates the log.
"Star Wars" revisited-a continuing case study in ethics and safety-critical software
Authors: K. W. Bowyer
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

Safety-critical software is a core topic in courses on "ethics and computing" or "computers and society," as well as in software engineering courses. The Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was the focus of a great deal of technical argument relating to design and testing of safety-critical software. Most of today's students have no familiarity with the substance of the SDI arguments. However, with presidents Clinton and Bush considering various versions of a national missile defense system, the topic has again become quite current. This paper describes a curriculum module developed around a Reagan-era SDI debate sponsored by the Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility.
A subspace method for separating cochannel TDMA signals
Authors: R. Chandrasekaran
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (1999)

We describe an adaptive algorithm that uses a subspace method for separating cochannel time-division multiple-access (TDMA) signals impinging on an antenna array. A frame synchronization algorithm is initially employed to identify the cochannel scenario. The adaptive algorithm uses a subspace decomposition of the array signals to constrain the beamformer weights for the signal of interest to be in a specific subspace. This subspace corresponds to the orthogonal complement of the subspace spanned by the direction vectors of the interferers. A follow-on linear equalizer removes the intersymbol interference (ISI) introduced by the transmit filter.
Automated design of application specific superscalar processors: an analytical approach
Authors: Tejas S. Karkhanis, James E. Smith
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (2007)

Analytical modeling is applied to the automated design of application-specific superscalar processors. Using an analytical method bridges the gap between the size of the design space and the time required for detailed cycle-accurate simulations. The proposed design framework takes as inputs the design targets (upper bounds on execution time, area, and energy), design alternatives, and one or more application programs. The output is the set of out-of-order superscalar processors that are Pareto-optimal with respect to performance-energy-area. The core of the new design framework is made up of analytical performance and energy activity models, and an analytical model-based design optimization process. For a set of benchmark programs and a design space of 2000 designs, the design framework arrives at all performance-energy-area Pareto-optimal design points within 16 minutes on a 2 GHz Pentium-4. In contrast, it is estimated that a naíve cycle-accurate simulation-based exhaustive search would require at least two months to arrive at the Pareto-optimal design points for the same design space.
A new rendering model for X
Authors: Keith Packard
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2000)

X version 11 [SG92] was originally designed and implemented in 1987. In the intervening 13 years, there have been advancements in both applications and hardware, but the core of the X Window System has remained largely unchanged. The last major X server architecture changes were included in X11R4. The last wide-spread functional enhancement exported by the X server might well be the Shape extension [Pac89], designed (in the hot tub) at the 1989 Winter Usenix in San Diego. The rise of inexpensive Unix desktop systems in the last couple of years has led to the development of new user-interface libraries, which are not well served by the existing X rendering model. A new 2D rendering model is being developed to serve this new community of applications. The problem space and proposed solutions are discussed.
Speech enhancement using nonlinear microphone array with complementary beamforming
Authors: H. Saruwatari
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1999)

This paper describes an improved spectral subtraction method by using the complementary beamforming microphone array to enhance noisy speech signals for speech recognition. The complementary beamforming is based on two types of beamformers designed to obtain complementary directivity patterns with respect to each other. It is shown that the nonlinear subtraction processing with complementary beamforming can result in a kind of the spectral subtraction without the need for speech pause detection. In addition, the design of the optimization algorithm for the directivity pattern is also described. To evaluate the effectiveness, speech enhancement experiments and speech recognition experiments are performed based on computer simulations. In comparison with the optimized conventional delay-and-sum array, it is shown that the proposed array improves the signal-to-noise ratio of degraded speech by about 2 dB and performs about 10% better in word recognition rates under heavy noisy conditions.
Comparative Study of Reactive and Proactive Routing Protocols Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: C. Mbarushimana, A. Shahrabi
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops - Volume 02 (2007)

The mobility of nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) results in frequent changes of network topology making routing in MANETs a challenging task. Some studies have been reported in the literature to evaluate the performance of the proposed routing algorithms. However, since the publication of experimental standards for some routing protocols by IETF, little activity has been done to contrast the performance of reactive against proactive protocols. This paper evaluates the performance of reactive (AODV, DSR) and proactive (OLSR) routing protocols in MANETs under CBR traffic with different network conditions. Our results, contrarily to previously reported studies conducted on the same routing protocols, show the superiority of proactive over reactive protocols in routing such traffic at the cost of a higher routing load.
Towards higher disk head utilization: extracting free bandwidth from busy disk drives
Authors: Christopher R. Lumb, Jiri Schindler, Gregory R. Ganger, David F. Nagle, Erik Riedel
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Symposium on Operating System Design & Implementation - Volume 4 (2000)

Freeblock scheduling is a new approach to utilizing more of a disk's potential media bandwidth. By filling rotational latency periods with useful media transfers, 20-50% of a never-idle disk's bandwidth can often be provided to background applications with no effect on foreground response times. This paper describes freeblock scheduling and demonstrates its value with simulation studies of two concrete applications: segment cleaning and data mining. Free segment cleaning often allows an LFS file system to maintain its ideal write performance when cleaning overheads would otherwise reduce performance by up to a factor of three. Free data mining can achieve over 47 full disk scans per day on an active transaction processing system, with no effect on its disk performance.
Fast statistical circuit analysis with finite-point based transistor model
Authors: Min Chen, Wei Zhao, Frank Liu, Yu Cao
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe (2007)

A new approach of transistor modeling is developed for fast statistical circuit simulation in the presence of variations. For both I-V and C-V characteristics of a transistor, finite data points are identified by their physical meaning; the impact of process and design variations is embedded into these points as closed-form expressions. Then, the entire I-V and C-V are extrapolated using polynomial formulas. This novel approach significantly enhances the simulation speed with sufficient accuracy. The model is implemented in Verilog-A at 65nm node. Compared to simulations with the BSIM model, the computation time can be reduced by 7x in transient analysis and 9x in Monte-Carlo simulations.
Efficient Collision Detection within Deforming Spherical Sliding Contact
Authors: Anderson Maciel Ronan Boulic
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2007)

Handling the evolving permanent contact of deformable objects leads to a collision detection problem of high computing cost. Situations in which this type of contact happens are becoming more and more present with the increasing complexity of virtual human models, especially for the emerging medical applications. In this context, we propose a novel collision detection approach to deal with situations in which soft structures are in constant but dynamic contact, which is typical of 3D biological elements. Our method proceeds in two stages: First, in a preprocessing stage, a mesh is chosen under certain conditions as a reference mesh and is spherically sampled. In the collision detection stage, the resulting table is exploited for each vertex of the other mesh to obtain, in constant time, its signed distance to the fixed mesh. The two working hypotheses for this approach to succeed are typical of the deforming anatomical systems we target: First, the two meshes retain a layered configuration with respect to a central point and, second, the fixed mesh tangential deformation is bounded by the spherical sampling resolution. Within this context, the proposed approach can handle large relative displacements, reorientations, and deformations of the mobile mesh. We illustrate our method in comparison with other techniques on a biomechanical model of the human hip joint.
Beyond cryptographic conditional access
Authors: David M. Goldschlag, David W. Kravitz
Venue: Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Smartcard Technology on USENIX Workshop on Smartcard Technology (1999)

Conditional access (CA) systems manage chargeable content (e.g., movies). Traditional CA systems use a smartcard as a cryptographic component that decrypts broadcast content for authorized recipients. Since that approach protects content by protecting cryptographic keys, it has two inherent weaknesses: It relies on the smartcard to protect universal secrets (i.e., the broadcast keys); and it cannot protect content from redistribution. This paper describes a noncryptographic conditional access system, where instead of protecting content directly, the content's identity is inserted as a watermark in the content and the CA smartcard is used as a licensing authority to authorize the display device to display watermarked content. This approach places a lower security burden on individual smartcards, and protects against the use of redistributed content.
A content-collaborative recommender that exploits WordNet-based user profiles for neighborhood formation
Authors: Marco Degemmis, Pasquale Lops, Giovanni Semeraro
Venue: User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (2007)

Collaborative and content-based filtering are the recommendation techniques most widely adopted to date. Traditional collaborative approaches compute a similarity value between the current user and each other user by taking into account their rating style, that is the set of ratings given on the same items. Based on the ratings of the most similar users, commonly referred to as neighbors, collaborative algorithms compute recommendations for the current user. The problem with this approach is that the similarity value is only computable if users have common rated items. The main contribution of this work is a possible solution to overcome this limitation. We propose a new content-collaborative hybrid recommender which computes similarities between users relying on their content-based profiles, in which user preferences are stored, instead of comparing their rating styles. In more detail, user profiles are clustered to discover current user neighbors. Content-based user profiles play a key role in the proposed hybrid recommender. Traditional keyword-based approaches to user profiling are unable to capture the semantics of user interests. A distinctive feature of our work is the integration of linguistic knowledge in the process of learning semantic user profiles representing user interests in a more effective way, compared to classical keyword-based profiles, due to a sense-based indexing. Semantic profiles are obtained by integrating machine learning algorithms for text categorization, namely a naïve Bayes approach and a relevance feedback method, with a word sense disambiguation strategy based exclusively on the lexical knowledge stored in the WordNet lexical database. Experiments carried out on a content-based extension of the EachMovie dataset show an improvement of the accuracy of sense-based profiles with respect to keyword-based ones, when coping with the task of classifying movies as interesting (or not) for the current user. An experimental session has been also performed in order to evaluate the proposed hybrid recommender system. The results highlight the improvement in the predictive accuracy of collaborative recommendations obtained by selecting like-minded users according to user profiles.