ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Reflections on the Academic Policy Analysis Process and the UK Identity Cards Scheme
Authors: Edgar A. Whitley, Ian R. Hosein, Ian O. Angell, Simon Davies
Venue: The Information Society (2006)

There is an increasing rhetoric from politicians for universities to become more involved in policy analysis and policy research. In this article, we reflect on our experiences of the analysis we conducted into the legislation to introduce biometric identity cards in the United Kingdom. We highlight how our work had direct consequences for the ongoing policy deliberation around this controversial piece of legislation. In particular, we highlight our role in the debate surrounding the government's figures for identity fraud and the concerns about the likely cost of the scheme to the government and taxpayer. We end the article by discussing some of the practical realities of such a foray into real politik.
Transition from analogue to digital broadcasting in UHF: the ATHENA concept
Authors: E. Pallis, C. Mantakas, V. Zacharopoulos, G. Mastorakis
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th WSEAS International Conference on Telecommunications and Informatics (2005)

In Sevilla European Council (21-22 June 2002), the European Commission recognised the importance of broadband access infrastructures for the successful deployment of Information Society (IS) throughout the Union by 2005, and identified the actions to be taken, among which is the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting (DSO). In a number of EU states where broadband networking infrastructures have already been disposed, DSO in UHF does not constitute a critical issue for the successful deployment of IS. In all other EU countries, however, where the low penetration of broadband access infrastructures hampers the successful deployment of IS, digital switchover arises as a unique opportunity to fill the gap and shorten the digital divide. In this respect, this paper presents an approach - that has been adopted and elaborated with the ATHENA FP6-507312 project - for the proper adoption of DSO that provides the basis for fast and successful establishment of broadband infrastructures, especially in the less developed regions. Taking into account the local and networking aspect (IP capabilities) of the new digital terrestrial television (Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting - DVB-T), it describes a Fusion environment that enables broadband access not only to digital TV bouquets, but also to Information Society services, besides being offered to all existing and potential service/content providers for open competition at all levels (technological, service, content creation and distribution).
Incremental Learning, Clustering and Hierarchy Formation of Whole Body Motion Patterns using Adaptive Hidden Markov Chains
Authors: Dana Kulić, Wataru Takano, Yoshihiko Nakamura
Venue: International Journal of Robotics Research (2008)

This paper describes a novel approach for autonomous and incremental learning of motion pattern primitives by observation of human motion. Human motion patterns are abstracted into a dynamic stochastic model, which can be used for both subsequent motion recognition and generation, analogous to the mirror neuron hypothesis in primates. The model size is adaptable based on the discrimination requirements in the associated region of the current knowledge base. A new algorithm for sequentially training the Markov chains is developed, to reduce the computation cost during model adaptation. As new motion patterns are observed, they are incrementally grouped together using hierarchical agglomerative clustering based on their relative distance in the model space. The clustering algorithm forms a tree structure, with specialized motions at the tree leaves, and generalized motions closer to the root. The generated tree structure will depend on the type of training data provided, so that the most specialized motions will be those for which the most training has been received. Tests with motion capture data for a variety of motion primitives demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm.
Efficient Exact Test for Rate-Monotonic Schedulability Using Large Period-Dependent Initial Values
Authors: Wan-Chen Lu, Kwei-Jay Lin, Hsin-Wen Wei, Wei-Kuan Shih
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2008)

Real-time systems using Rate Monotonic fixed priority scheduling can be checked for schedulability either by pessimistic schedulability conditions or exact testing. Exact testing provides a more precise result but cannot always be performed in polynomial time. Audsley et al. proposed one of the earliest methods by iteratively deriving the job response times. Other researchers have improved the efficiency of the exact test method by using different initial values. None of those proposed initial values uses the relationship between task periods. In this paper we define initial values using the largest and the second largest periods in a task set. We show that the new initial values can significantly reduce the efficiency of the exact test. This period-dependent initial values can also be applied to the schedulability test of multiframe task models and effectively reduce the number of iterations for testing.
Estimating tree crown size with spatial information of high resolution optical remotely sensed imagery
Authors: C. Song
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2007)

Tree crown size is a critical biophysical parameter that influences carbon, water and energy exchanges between forest ecosystems and the atmosphere. This study explores the potential of using spatial information of high resolution optical imagery in estimating mean tree crown diameter on a stand basis with an Ikonos image in the Blackwood Division of Duke Forest and its surrounding areas. The theory is based on the disc scene model that the ratio of image variances at two spatial resolutions is determined by the scene structure only. The mean tree crown diameter of a stand on the ground was estimated with a circular sampling plot made in the middle of the stand. The stands were then delineated in the panchromatic band of the Ikonos image. The relationship between mean tree crown diameter with image variance at a single spatial resolution, the ratio of image variances at two spatial resolutions, and the difference of image variances at two spatial resolutions were studied for conifer and hardwood stands, respectively. It was found that the ratio of image variances at 2 m and 3 m spatial resolutions best estimate conifer tree crown diameter (R 2 = 0.7282). Though the image variance at a single resolution and the difference of image variances at two spatial resolutions are also significantly correlated to conifer tree crown diameter, the R 2 is lower. Due to the continuity in canopy structure, the approach does not work well for hardwood stands.
GENESIS - A Framework for Automatic Generation and Steering of Testbeds of ComplexWeb Services
Authors: Lukasz Juszczyk, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (2008)

Nowadays, the importance of Web services is steadily increasing in domains where interoperability is of paramount importance. This trend is especially observable in complex computer systems which consist of a large number of interacting distributed components, often implemented using Web services. Large-scale systems and high complexity usually result in higher error-proneness in the development process. This should be addressed as early as possible during the development of complex service-oriented systems, ideally before they are actually deployed on a distributed infrastructure. In this paper we present GENESIS - a software framework for solving this problem. Our framework allows automatic generation and steering of testbeds of complex Web services, thereby empowering developers to specify functional and non-functional properties of Web services, to generate and deploy Web service instances on remote hosting environments, to enhance the functionality of the framework with plug-ins, and to control the behavior of the testbed during runtime.
Preliminary study on distribution of deep chlorophyll maximum and remote sensing model in the Bohai Sea of China
Authors: P. Xiu, Y. G. Liu, X. B. Yin
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2007)

Special characteristics of deep chlorophyll maximum in the Bohai Sea of China are examined in this study with data from four cruises measured in June and August of 2003, and 2005 separately. Measured data of 2003 are used to construct a new blue-to-green band-ratio ocean colour model to retrieve concentrations of DCM (deep chlorophyll maximum) from above-surface remote-sensing reflectance, then measured data of 2005 are used to validate this model. The validation result demonstrates that this model generally performs well in turbid coastal water areas with depth of DCM smaller than 7 m. The correlation coefficient between the model outputs and in situ data is 0.94 and the average relative error is 22.1% in June; the correlation coefficient is 0.96 and the average relative error is 9.67% in August. These results suggest that satellite sensors have the ability to detect the existence of DCM in coastal waters.
Genomic Survey of Cryptococcus neoformans-Induced Gene Expression Profiling in Human Brain Micro-Vascular Endothelial Cells
Authors: Ambrose Jong, Chun-Hua Wu, Wensheng Zhou, Han-Min Chen, Sheng-He Huang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technologies (2007)

Cryptococcus neoformans is able to infect brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMEC). We performed microarray analysis of the changes in gene expression of human BMEC (HBMEC) to dissect the pathogenesis of this infection. Changes in mRNA levels were monitored at 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24 hours. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed a fluctuation of gene groups during the pathogen-host interaction. Based on the time-course analysis, there are 91 and 89 genes that persistently increase and decrease their mRNA levels, respectively. The significant changes are immune responses to C. neoformans infection. Hierarchical cluster profile showed that 61 out of 66 listed interferon genes were changed at least at one time point. The active responses in expression of MHC genes were also detected at all stages of the interaction. Taken together, our infectomic studies with linear PCA approach suggest that HBMEC significantly changes its gene profiling and also actively participates in immuno-regulations in the central nervous system during C. neoformans infection.
Ternary CAM Compaction for IP Address Lookup
Authors: Yi-Ting Fang, Tzung-Chian Huang, Pi-Chung Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications - Workshops (2008)

Motivated by the high cost problem of ternary CAM, we proposed a new technique for providing a compaction routing table. With the comparisons with existing algorithms, our new technique can improve the use of ternary-CAM space under reasonable compressing time, performs well without consider the size of routing table size. And our scheme outperforms other existing schemes in terms of the use of the ternary-CAM space and the processing time.
A Performance Evaluation of H.264 FGS Sequences over Hybrid Networks
Authors: Anand Pulicat Gopalakrishnan, Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh, Hamid Jafarkhani
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Networking (2008)

In this article, we study the performance of transmitting H.264 video sequences over hybrid networks formed by a collection of wired and wireless links. We use the Gilbert-Elliott error model to simulate the wireless transmission channel. Taking the effects of fading into consideration, our numerical results show that the quality of the reconstructed video sequences is seriously degraded. We then investigate how the addition of FEC techniques like the Reed-Solomon codes and the use of MIMO techniques help improve the performance of wireless links and consequently the quality of reconstructed video transmitted over such links.
On complexity reduction of neuro-fuzzy systems
Authors: Krzysztof Cpałka, Leszek Rutkowski
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International Conference on Systems Theory & Scientific Computation (2006)

In the paper we develop a new method for complexity reduction of neuro-fuzzy systems. In subsequent stages we reduce number of inputs, number of rules and number of antecedents. The method is tested using Iris problem and Pima Indians Diabetes problem.
Interactive story authoring: A viable form of creative expression for the classroom
Authors: Mike Carbonaro, Maria Cutumisu, Harvey Duff, Stephanie Gillis, Curtis Onuczko, Jeff Siegel, Jonathan Schaeffer, Allan Schumacher, Duane Szafron, Kevin Waugh
Venue: Computers Education (2008)

The unprecedented growth in numbers of children playing computer games has stimulated discussion and research regarding what, if any, educational value these games have for teaching and learning. The research on this topic has primarily focused on children as players of computer games rather than builders/constructors of computer games. Recently, several game companies, such as BioWare Corp. and Bethesda Softworks, have released game story creation tools to the public, along with their games. However, a major obstacle to using these commercial tools is the level of programming experience required to create interactive game stories. In this paper, we demonstrate that a commercial game story construction tool, BioWare Corp.'s Aurora Toolset, can be augmented by our new tool, ScriptEase, to enable students in two grade ten English classes to successfully construct interactive game stories. We present evidence that describes the relationship between interactive story authoring and traditional story authoring, along with a series of factors that can potentially affect success at these activities: gender, creativity, intellectual ability, previous experiences with programming, time playing computer games, and time spent online. Results indicate that students can successfully construct sophisticated interactive stories with very little training. The results also show no gender differences in the quality of these interactive stories, regardless of programming experience or the amount of time per week playing computer games or participating in general online activities, although a subset of female students did show a slightly higher level of performance on interactive story authoring. In the educational context of this study, we show that ScriptEase provides an easy-to-use tool for interactive story authoring in a constructionist learning environment.
A first insight into object-aware hardware transactional memory
Authors: Behram Khan, Matthew Horsnell, Ian Rogers, Mikel Lujan, Andrew Dinn, Ian Watson
Venue: Proceedings of the twentieth annual symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures (2008)

The contribution of this paper is the first Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) where the object structure is recognized and harnessed. Our approach is similar to hardware support of paged virtual memory using a virtually addressed cache and a TLB, and is based on a cache hierarchy that allows the addressing of objects by unique object identifiers. The object-aware HTM allows cache overflows of uncommitted data. It also enables a novel commit and conflict detection mechanism. In this preliminary evaluation, the Lee-TM application exhibits overflows that in most previous HTMs would have had to be handled by software, impacting on performance. The simulation provides an insight into the scalability characteristics of the proposed HTM, which uses object and field granularity, lazy versioning and lazy conflict detection. For example, with 32 cores the broadcast of write sets is at under 5% of the bus bandwidth, showing the potential of object-aware HTM systems.
Asymmetrically banked value-aware register files for low-energy and high-performance
Authors: Shuai Wang, Hongyan Yang, Jie Hu, Sotirios G. Ziavras
Venue: Microprocessors Microsystems (2008)

Designing high-performance low-energy register files is of critical importance to the continuation of current performance advances in wide-issue and deeply pipelined superscalar microprocessors. In this paper, we propose a new microarchitecture, the asymmetrically banked value-aware register file (AB-VARF), to exploit the prevailing narrow-width register values for low-latency and energy-efficient register file designs. The register bit-widths of different banks in our AB-VARF register files are specifically customized to capture different narrow-width values. Augmented with a value width predictor, the register renaming logic is slightly tuned to rename predicted narrow-width registers to the corresponding narrow-width banks. Our experimental evaluation with SPEC CINT2000 benchmark suite shows that AB-VARF reduces the energy consumption by 78.4% over a conventional register file, on the average, at the cost of a 0.7% performance loss to an ideal 1-cycle monolithic register file.
Computer Graphics for Artists: An Introduction, 1 edition
Authors: Andrew Paquette
Venue:  (2008)

Computer Graphics for Artists: an introduction is an application-independent, reader-friendly primer for anyone with a serious desire to understand 3D Computer Graphics Opening with the first and most basic elements of computer graphics, the book rapidly advances into progressively more complex concepts. Each of the elements, however simple, are important to understand because each is an essential link in a chain that allows an artist to master any computer graphics application. With this accomplished, the artist can use technology to satisfy his goals, instead of the technology being master of the artist. All students wanting to learn more about computer graphics from an artistic viewpoint, particularly those intending to pursue a career in computer game design or film animation, will find this book invaluable
User perception model for wearable supervision systems
Authors: Damien Perritaz, Christophe Salzmann, Denis Gillet
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology (2007)

Wearable supervision systems ease the deployment of advanced mobile solutions for the control of industrial plants. These systems are used to provide operators with the adequate information to perform the required manual operations on industrial plants. This paper presents the adaptation strategy developed to ensure that the operator perceives accurately the plant state relayed by a distant server despite the varying network conditions. The information provided to the user is mainly in the form of Augmented Reality video rendered in a Head Mounted Display. Using experimental subjective testing, the user video Quality of Perception is modeled to determine continuously the best encoding parameters values resulting from the compromise between the fluidity and the level of detail for real-time interaction with the plant. This model is then used by an adaptation scheme to reject output bitrate disturbances due to the variations of the spatial and temporal video content. The proposed approach adapts in real-time the parameters values of the video encoder to track a given reference bitrate.
Inductively coupled sensor/actuator system for digital closed-loop control applications at high operating temperatures
Authors: Armin Kiefer, Leonhard M. Reindl
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd WSEAS International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Signal and Telecommunications (2008)

This paper presents a sensor/actuator system for high-temperature applications with the complete measurement electronics and sensors integrated into the actuator. The data transmission is implemented as point-to-point Power Line Communication (PLC), between the sensor/actuator system and its control unit. A separable transformer serves as an inductively coupled contactless connector for both power and bidirectional PLC-data, allowing for a perfect hermetic seal. We discuss the increased requirements for the measurement electronics at high operating temperatures and we present a special ratiometric self-calibration technique to eliminate temperature drifts that is also suitable for integration into an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC).
Monotone method for fuzzy differential equations
Authors: Rosana Rodríguez-López
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2008)

We develop the monotone iterative technique to approximate the extremal solutions for the initial value problem relative to a fuzzy differential equation in a fuzzy functional interval. To our procedure, it is crucial to have at our disposal fuzzy comparison results and several properties of sets of fuzzy functions and fuzzy numbers, including a compactness result in spaces of fuzzy functions, which are useful from the point of view of applications.
Feature generation from digital images using pseudo-fractal algorithm and its four modifications
Authors: Marcin Janaszewski, Edward Kacki
Venue: Machine Graphics Vision International Journal (2007)

The main aim of the paper is to present the authors' original method of feature generation from digital images and to report on a comparison of five various algorithms, which implemented that method. The algorithms are based on an idea by the same authors', which consists in producing a quantitative description of similarity intensity between various parts of an image in various scales. To develop it the algorithms take advantage of fractal coding based on an Iterated Function System. Therefore, the generated features can rightly be called similarity features. In this paper we show that similarity features, when combined with other well known ones, can improve recognition results in some image classification tasks. After presenting how the algorithm works, we compare their properties and report the classification results obtained in two different pattern recognition experiments. Moreover, the paper contains a discussion of the obtained results, and of possible future applications of the similarity features.
An agent-based modelling approach to evaluation of multiple-use management strategies for coastal marine ecosystems
Authors: A. D. McDonald, L. R. Little, R. Gray, E. Fulton, K. J. Sainsbury, V. D. Lyne
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2008)

The general objective of the multiple-use management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework is to develop and demonstrate practical science-based methods that support, under existing statutory arrangements, integrated regional planning and management of coastal and marine ecosystems. In the present paper multiple-use MSE is focused on four sectors: oil and gas, conservation, fisheries, and urban and industrial development. A selection of cross-sectoral development scenarios, management strategies and computer representations, provided by the relevant interest groups, is represented. These include prospective future sectoral activities and their impacts, and the sectoral response to alternative management policies and strategies. The agent-based modelling software InVitro is well placed for analysing prospective social and ecological impacts of multiple-use management strategies in a risk-assessment framework such as MSE. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the tradeoffs that can be recognised and quantified using the MSE framework. The example explores the implications of a change in management strategy that not only has a direct impact on the targeted sectors, but also indirect impacts, not all of which are to be expected.