ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A qualitative study to the usability of three XML query languages
Authors: Joris Graaumans
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Dutch directions in HCI (2004)

In this paper we describe a think aloud experiment to the usability of three XML query languages: SQL/XML, XQuery and XSLT. We demonstrate the difference in user performance between these languages and we show that differences in effectiveness are related to the efficiency of the query solving process.
Simplified Grid Computing through Spreadsheets and NetSolve
Authors: David Abramson, Jack Dongarra, Eric Meek, Paul Roe, Zhiao Shi
Venue: Proceedings of the High Performance Computing and Grid in Asia Pacific Region, Seventh International Conference (2004)

Grid computing has great potential but to enter the mainstream it must be simplified. Tools and libraries must make it easier to solve problems by being simpler and at the same time more sophisticated. In this paper we describe how Grid computing can be achieved through spreadsheets. No parallel programming or complex tools need to be used. So long as dependencies allow it, formulae in a spreadsheet can be evaluated concurrently on the Grid. Thus Grid computing becomes accessible to all those who can use a spreadsheet. The story is completed with a sophisticated backend system, NetSolve, which can solve complex linear algebra systems with minimal intervention from the user. In this paper we present the architecture of the system for performing such simple yet sophisticated grid computing and a case study which performs a large singular value decomposition.
Surface preparation and post thermal treatment effects on interface properties of thin Al2O3 films deposited by ALD
Authors: Y. Chang, F. Ducroquet, E. Gautier, O. Renault, J. Legrand, J. F. Damlencourt, F. Martin
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2004)

The effects of different surface preparation (HF solution cleaned substrate, thermally and chemically oxidized substrates) and post thermal treatment on Al2O3 dielectric properties were investigated. High resolution transmission electron microscopy showed different characteristics of interfacial growth between each surface preparation. Al2O3 films remained amorphous after annealing at 800 °C whatever the surface preparation. Angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed that interfacial layer is composed of SiO3 and Al-silicate layer. As-deposited Al2O3 film on HF solution cleaned substrate showed higher and more unstable leakage current than those grown on SiO2 layer. However low and stable currents (10-8-10-9 A/cm2 at-1 V) were obtained for all samples after annealing at 1000 °C. The I-V characteristics measured in various temperatures fitted well with Fowler-Nordheim conduction in high electric field. The interface state density (Dit) was reduced after annealing at 800 °C.
New covert channels in HTTP: adding unwitting Web browsers to anonymity sets
Authors: Matthias Bauer
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society (2003)

This paper presents new methods enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. We describe a new protocol that allows us to create an anonymous overlay network by exploiting the web browsing activities of regular users. We show that the overlay net work provides an anonymity set greater than the set of senders and receivers in a realistic threat model. In particular, the protocol provides unobservability in our threat model.
Real-Time Dynamic Wrinkles
Authors: Caroline Larboulette, Marie-Paule Cani
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

This paper proposes a new method for designing dynamicwrinkles that appear and disappear according to theunderlying deformation of tissues. The user positions andorients wrinkling tools on a mesh. During animation, geometricwrinkles are generated in real-time in the regionscovered by the tools, mimicking resistance to compressionof tissues. The wrinkling feature can be added to any existinganimation. When the local resolution of the mesh is notsufficient, our tool refines it according to the wrinkleýs finestfeature. As our results show, the technique can be appliedto a variety of situations such as facial expression wrinkles,joint wrinkles or garment wrinkles.
On a problem concerning the Smarandache left-rigth sequences
Authors: Felice Russo
Venue: Smarandache Notions Journal (2004)

In this paper a problem posed in [1] and concerning the number of primes in the Smarandache Left-Right Natural number sequence (SLRNN) and in the Smarandache Left-Right prime (SLRP) sequence is analysed.
Animated Sweepers: Keyframed Swept Deformations
Authors: Alexis Angelidis, Geoff Wyvill
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

This paper presents animated sweepers, a method for animatingthe space deformations called sweepers. This techniqueallows a user to animate the modeling of a shape,and to edit the animation until it satisfies the userýs requirements.To place this method in the more general frameworkof animation with space deformation, we propose anoverview of the possible relations between time and the deformationparameter. We formulate sweepers to take intoaccount a varying time parameter, and present the datastructure that allows the user to efficiently edit the modelingof a shape. This data structure has been implementedas a Maya plugin. Its implementation in the Maya API isdescribed.
HIBOL: a language for fast prototyping in data processing environments
Authors: Roland T. Mittermeir
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1982)

The aim of this paper is to describe HIBOL from the point of view of its suitability for fast prototyping of business data processing applications. This suitability stems basically from the fact that HIBOL (or its special editor) allows for a very convenient definition of the user interface as form templets which can be either bound to a crt-terminal, to formatted print output or structured input/output from other edp media. Using HIBOL, the prototyping activity consists of 5 phases: activity definition, definition of form templets, definition of elementary data types, definition of the actual computations and an optional optimization phase.
Online Choice of Active Learning Algorithms
Authors: Yoram Baram, Ran El-Yaniv, Kobi Luz
Venue: The Journal of Machine Learning Research (2004)

This work is concerned with the question of how to combine online an ensemble of active learners so as to expedite the learning progress in pool-based active learning. We develop an active-learning master algorithm, based on a known competitive algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem. A major challenge in successfully choosing top performing active learners online is to reliably estimate their progress during the learning session. To this end we propose a simple maximum entropy criterion that provides effective estimates in realistic settings. We study the performance of the proposed master algorithm using an ensemble containing two of the best known active-learning algorithms as well as a new algorithm. The resulting active-learning master algorithm is empirically shown to consistently perform almost as well as and sometimes outperform the best algorithm in the ensemble on a range of classification problems.
Broken plural detection for arabic information retrieval
Authors: Abduelbaset Goweder, Massimo Poesio, Anne De Roeck
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

Due to the high number of inflectional variations of Arabic words, empirical results suggest that stemming is essential for Arabic information retrieval. However, current light stemming algorithms do not extract the correct stem of irregular (so-called broken) plurals, which constitute ~10% of Arabic texts and ~41% of plurals. Although light stemming in particular has led to improvements in information retrieval [5, 6], the effects of broken plurals on the performance of information retrieval systems has not been examined.We propose a light stemmer that incorporates a broken plural recognition component, and evaluate it within the context of information retrieval. Our results show that identifying broken plurals and reducing them to their correct stems does result in a significant improvement in the performance of information retrieval systems.
On-line multi-threaded scheduling
Authors: Esteban Feuerstein, Marcelo Mydlarz, Leen Stougie
Venue: Journal of Scheduling (2003)

On-line scheduling problems are studied with jobs organized in a number of sequences called threads. Each job becomes available as soon as a scheduling decision is made on all preceding jobs in the same thread.We consider two different on-line paradigms. The first one models a sort of batch process: a schedule is constructed, in an on-line way, which is to be executed later. The other one models a real-time planning situation: jobs are immediately executed at the moment they are assigned to a machine.The classical objective functions of minimizing makespan and minimizing average completion time of the jobs are studied.We establish a fairly complete set of results for these problems. One of the highlights is that List Scheduling is a best possible algorithm for the makespan problem under the real-time model if the number of machines does not exceed the number of threads by more than 1. Another one is a polynomial time best possible algorithm for minimizing the average completion time on a single machine under both on-line paradigms.
Comparative Genomics of Cyclin-Dependent Kinases Suggest Co-Evolution of the RNAP II C-Terminal Domain and CTD-Directed CDKs
Authors: Zhenhua Guo, John W. Stiller
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

We identify 101 Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) family members from animals, plants, yeasts and three protists with complete genome sequences. Comparative analyses suggest that cell-cycle CDKs are present in all organisms sampled in this study. In contrast, no clear orthologs of transcription-related CDKs are detected in the most putatively ancestral eukaryotes, Trypanosoma or Giardia. Kinases involved in C-terminal domain (CTD) of RNA polymerase II phosphorylation, CDK7, CDK8 and CDK9, all are recovered as well-supported and distinct orthologous families. Significantly, clear orthologs of CDK7 and CDK8 are restricted to those organisms belonging to groups in which the RNAP II CTD is strongly conserved suggesting co-evolution of the CTD and these CTD-directed CDKs. Alternatively, extensive CTD phosphorylation may occur in only a subset of eukaryotes and, when present, this interaction results in greater stabilizing selection on both CTD and CDK sequences. Overall, our results suggest that transcription-related kinases originated after cell-cycle related CDKs.
Parallel algorithms for mining frequent structural motifs in scientific data
Authors: Chao Wang, Srinivasan Parthasarathy
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Supercomputing (2004)

Discovery of important substructures from molecules is an important data mining problem. The basic motivation is that the structure of a molecule has a role to play in its biochemical function. There is interest in finding important, often recurrent, substructures both within a single molecule and across a class of molecules.Recently, we have developed a general purpose suite of algorithms -- the MotifMiner Toolkit -- that can mine for structural motifs in a wide area of biomolecular datasets. While the algorithms have proven to be extremely useful in their ability to identify novel substructures, the algorithms themselves are quite time consuming. There are two reasons for this: i) inherently the algorithm suffers from the curse of subgraph isomorphism; and ii) handling noise effects (e.g. protein structure data) results in a significant slowdown.To address this problem in this paper we propose parallelization strategies in a cluster environment for the above algorithms. We identify key optimizations that handle load imbalance, scheduling, and communication overheads. Results show that the optimizations are quite effective and that we are able to obtain good speedup on moderate sized clusters.
Semantic Matchmaking in Geo Service Chains: Reasoning with a Location Ontology
Authors: Rob Lemmens, Helbert Arenas
Venue: Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications, 15th International Workshop (2004)

The growing demand for the discovery of geo web services as parts of service chains necessitates semantic matchmaking between service descriptions. In this paper we propose a method for describing and matching services based on a geo location ontology and we demonstrate its power and its limitations with a simple user scenario. In a test environment using Protege and the Racer ontology reasoner we show some powerful constructs of Description Logics that allow us to distinguish different types of matches. We underline the importance of matching atomic concept conditions versus aggregated conditions. The use of OWL and OWL enabled tools prove to facilitate a powerful matchmaking environment.
Normal forms in BL and &#x0141;&#x03a0; algebras of functions
Authors: I. Perfilieva
Venue: Soft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications (2004)

Three types of normal forms are introduced for fuzzy logic functions: disjunctive, conjunctive and additive. Disjunctive and conjunctive normal forms are considered in two variants: infinite and finite. It is proved that infinite normal forms are universal representation formulas whereas finite normal forms are universal approximation formulas for any L-valued function where L is a support set of any complete BL-algebra. The additive normal form &#x201c;lies&#x201d; in the middle of the two others. For all of them the estimation of the quality of approximation is suggested.
High-Throughput Computational and Experimental Biology Strategy in Identifying Tumor Expressing CAMs
Authors: Anguraj Sadanandam, Michelle L. Varney, Rakesh K. Singh
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

Organ-specific homing of tumor cells includes receptor-ligand interactions of cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), which stimulate or inhibit the cellular growth. In this report we identified unique CAMs using sequence and pattern analysis with organ-specific peptides as query against mouse genome and proteome sequences. The peptides were seven amino acids in length, and were affinity selected against specific organs utilizing in vivo phage display peptide library in NOD-SCID mice. Various databases were used for the analyses including Local Mouse Cell Adhesion Molecule (LMCAM) database developed by keyword search. Thirty annotated CAMs corresponding to eleven different organ-specific peptides were identified using the bioinformatics analysis. One such identified protein, SEMA5A is reported for the first time to be expressed in human pancreatic cancer cell lines. This combined strategy of experimental and computation biology is an initial approach in identifying novel tumor-specific molecules, thereby paving the way for complete understanding of their role in various processes of tumor metastasis and making organ-specific targeting possible using these peptides.
Design space exploration of caches using compressed traces
Authors: Xianfeng Li, Hemendra Singh Negi, Tulika Mitra, Abhik Roychoudhury
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Supercomputing (2004)

Memory subsystem, in particular, cache design is important for both high performance and embedded computing systems. The trend towards increased customization for embedded systems, in addition, requires the design of an optimal cache configuration for each application. Trace driven simulation is widely used to evaluate cache performance. However, traces are storage inefficient and simulation is too slow especially when hundreds of design points need to be evaluated. Trace based simulation has two sources of redundancies: multiple occurrences of the same sequence in the trace and containment relationship among cache configurations. We exploit both the redundancies in a unified manner by simulating multiple cache configurations in a single pass directly over a compressed trace (which has already identified the repetitive sequences). Experimental results indicate that our approach achieves significant savings both in storage and in simulation time compared to existing methods.
WELL done and well liked: online information literacy skills and learner impressions of the web as a resource for foreign language learning
Authors: Fernando Rosell-Aguilar
Venue: ReCALL (2004)

One of the most common uses of the World Wide Web for foreign language learning is as a resource for students to find information when researching essay topics. When language instructors ask students to perform searches for information about a given issue it is assumed that students know how to perform those searches and appreciate the usefulness of the Web. However, we do not really know much about the relationship between learners and the Web: what processes are involved, how the students go about the search process and what their perceptions of the Web are. It is therefore essential that these assumptions are examined and researched. To find out more about these questions, a study was initiated with the aim of obtaining information on how foreign language higher education students interact with the Web in general and in the context of a search for content/reading tasks in particular. The goal was to produce a descriptive snapshot of student impressions and abilities at one given moment. For this purpose 198 students of Spanish at the University of Southampton were asked how they use the Web, what for, how they go about finding the information they need, what they perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of using the Web as a research tool for language learning, to compare it to other resources and what their perceptions of it are. To measure their degree of online information literacy, a scale was created. In this paper the details of the project will be presented, and the findings of the study discussed.
Parallel computation of natural convection in trapezoidal porous enclosures
Authors: B. V. Rathish Kumar, Bipin Kumar
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2004)

In this study, coupled non-linear partial differential equations governing the natural convection from an isothermal wall of a trapezoidal porous enclosure have been solved numerically by finite element method (FEM) in conjunction with GMRES, a Krylov subspace based solver. In view of the enormous amount of computation, a parallel numerical algorithm for incomplete LU-conjugate gradient (ILU-CG) solver on eight-noded ANUPAM cluster under MIMD paradigm based on ANULIB message passing library has been developed. Parallel computations have been carried out for various values of flow and geometric parameters both under Darcian and non-Darcian assumptions on the porous model. Cumulative heat fluxes and Nusselt number (Nu) associated with convection process are presented through computer generated plots.
An Efficient Architecture for the Implementation of Message Passing Programming Model on Massive Multiprocessor
Authors: Ferid Gharsalli, Amer Baghdadi, Marius Bonaciu, Giedrius Majauskas, Wander Cesario, Ahmed A. Jerraya
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping (2004)

In this paper, we present a generic high performancearchitecture model for massive data transfer and computationapplications. This application-specific architecturebecomes crucial particularly for the design of emergingembedded video applications. Indeed, classic embeddedsystem architectures have limited resources (clock frequencyand memory) and consequently they cannot reachthe required performance needed by emerging application.Moreover, the mapping of high level programmingmodels (e.g. message passing) on fixed architectures introduceslots of software and communication overhead.This paper proposes an efficient architecture for the implementationof Message Passing Programming Modelfor MPSoC. Flexibility, scalability and high performanceof this architecture are illustrated through the implementationof a real time embedded DivX video encoder.
Multidimensional Data Visualization for Decay Study in Cultural Heritage: An Object-Oriented Implementation
Authors: Laura Chiappini, Rossella Cossu, Marco Di Lorenzo
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

The scope of this work has been to applymultidimensional data visualization techniques to thestudy of the ancient building decay events. With thisaim we have created new visual tools based on theshape variation (glyph), that with more traditionaltechniques based on the color have been implementedin object-oriented software programs using theinnovative and powerful Visualization Toolkit (VTK), afree C++ class library for visualization and 3Dcomputer graphics. The data used are climatic,chemical and environmental measurements detectedon/near the Roman Theatre in the city of Aosta,acquired in the ambit of an Italian research projectfocused on the restoration of ancient monuments.
A simulation optimization based control policy for failure prone one-machine, two-product manufacturing systems
Authors: J. P. Kenne, A. Gharbi
Venue: Computers and Industrial Engineering (2004)

This paper presents the optimal flow control for a one-machine, two-product manufacturing system subject to random failures and repairs. The machine capacity process is assumed to be a finite state Markov chain. The problem is to choose the production rates so as to minimize the expected discounted cost of inventory/backlog over an infinite horizon. We first show that for constant demand rates and exponential failure and repair time distributions of the machine, the hedging point policy is optimal. Next, the hedging point policy is extended to nonexponential failure and repair time distributions models. The structure of the hedging point policy is parameterized by two factors representing the thresholds of involved products. With such a policy, simulation experiments are coupled with experimental design and response surface methodology to estimate the optimal control policy. Our results reveal that the hedging point policy is also applicable to a wide variety of complex problems (i.e. nonexponential failure and repair time distributions) where analytical solutions may not be easily obtained.
Signal background estimation and baseline correction algorithms for accurate DNA sequencing
Authors: Lucio Andrade, Elias S. Manolakos
Venue: Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (2003)

Accurate identification of a DNA sequence depends on the ability to precisely track the time varying signal baseline in all parts of the electrophoretic trace. We propose a statistical learning formulation of the signal background estimation problem that can be solved using an Expectation-Maximization type algorithm. We also present an alternative method for estimating the background level of a signal in small size windows based on a recursive histogram computation. Both background estimation algorithms introduced here can be combined with regression methods in order to track slow and fast baseline changes occurring in different regions of a DNA chromatogram. Accurate baseline tracking improves cluster separation and thus contributes to the reduction in classification errors when the Bayesian EM (BEM) base-calling system, developed in our group (Pereira et al., Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2000), is employed to decide how many bases are "hidden" in every base-call event pattern extracted from the chromatogram.