ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Achieving high availability with commodity hardware and software
Authors: James E. Smith
Venue:  (2008)

Scaling integrated circuit technology into the deep submicron regime is expected to increase both soft and hard error rates significantly. Providing high availability in the presence of unreliable components will become an increasingly important requirement for a diverse set of systems. Traditionally, high availability systems have used specialized hardware and software that cater to a small subset of the application domain like banking and mission critical applications. However, custom designed hardware and/or software is not a viable solution for the cost-competitive commodity market because both commodity hardware and software are resistant to significant changes. I propose a set of techniques that can be used to adapt commodity hardware and software for use as building blocks for future high availability systems. I propose a new chip multiprocessor architecture called configurable isolation chip multiprocessor (CI CMP) that provides low-level isolation for fault containment and reconfiguration, through cost-effective modifications to commodity designs. Specifically, the CI CMP architecture introduces a minimal amount of hardware support for dynamic repartitioning of CMP hardware into multiple fault zones. Results show that the CI CMP architecture is superior both for low-availability and high-availability implementations, while still using general-purpose commodity components. To enable availability for commodity software, I propose using a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that can provide transparent redundancy to "off-the-shelf" software. Using a VMM enables fault tolerance with no changes to any commodity software, including the OS, runtime software and application software. The VMM manages the creation and synchronization of redundant threads and performs like ECC, chip kill, DRAM line sparing. A duplication cache can reduce the overheads of recovery in the event of a failure. Results show that for a diverse set of benchmarks the synchronization overhead lies between 3-14%. Finally, I propose techniques that can reduce the cost of full duplication of memory by duplicating only those memory pages that are written and sharing pages that are never read. Computational errors are not propagated to read only pages and they can be protected by traditional memory protection techniques duplication by 90% with less than 10% performance degradation.
ViGOR: a grouping oriented interface for search and retrieval in video libraries
Authors: Martin Halvey, David Vallet, David Hannah, Joemon M. Jose
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2009)

In this paper, we present ViGOR (Video Grouping, Organisation and Retrieval) a video retrieval system that allows users to group videos in order to facilitate video retrieval tasks. In this way users are able to visualise and conceptualise many aspects of their search tasks and carry out a localised search in order to solve a more global search problem. The main objective of this work is to aid users while carrying out explorative video retrieval tasks; these tasks can be often ambiguous and multi-faceted. Two user evaluations were carried out in order to evaluate the usefulness of this grouping paradigm for assisting users. The first evaluation involved users carrying out broad tasks on YouTube, and gave insights into the application of our interface to a vast online video collection. The second evaluation involved users carrying out focused tasks on the TRECVID 2007 video collection, allowing a comparison over a local collection, on which we could extract a number of content-based features. The results of our evaluations show that the use of the ViGOR system results in an increase in user performance and user satisfaction, showing the potential of a grouping paradigm for video search for various tasks in a variety of diverse video collections.
Conditional data mapping flip-flops for low-power and high-performance systems
Authors: Chen Kong Teh, Mototsugu Hamada, Tetsuya Fujita, Hiroyuki Hara, Nobuyuki Ikumi, Yukihito Oowaki
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2006)

This paper introduces a new family of low-power and high-performance flip-flops, namely conditional data mapping flip-flops (CDMFFs), which reduce their dynamic power by mapping their inputs to a configuration that eliminates redundant internal transitions. We present two CDMFFs, having differential and single-ended structures, respectively, and compare them to the state-of-tie-art flip-flops. The results indicate that both CDMFFs have the best power-delay product in their groups, respectively. In the aspect of power dissipation, the single-ended and differential CDMFFs consume the least power at data activity less than 50%, and are 31% and 26% less power than the conditional capture flip-flops at 25% data activity, respectively. In the aspect of performance, CDMFFs achieve small data-to-output delays, comparable to those of the transmission-gate pulsed latch and the modified-sense-amplifier flip-flop. In the aspect of timing reliability, CDMFFs have the best internal race immunity among pulse-triggered flip-flops. A post-layout case study is demonstrated with comparison to a transmission-gate flip-flop. The results indicate the single-ended CDMFF has 34% less in data-to-output delay and 28% less in power at 25% data activity, in spite of the 34% increase in size.
Model transformation of dependability-focused requirements models
Authors: Sadaf Mustafiz, Jorg Kienzle, Hans Vangheluwe
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (2009)

Recent research has focused on extending standard requirements elicitation processes to address potential abnormal situations that can interrupt normal system interaction at run-time. We proposed a process, DREP, that extends use case-driven modelling with elements that allow the modelling of system behaviour in exceptional situations. This paper discusses the challenge of using the notions of exceptional behaviour and outcomes defined in use cases within a MDE process. In order to create a more formal specification model with activity diagrams, the use cases have to be well-formed to begin with. We describe precise transformation rules to systematically create an activity diagram corresponding to each use case. Special stereotypes are introduced to document partial or degraded outcomes and handling activities. The model resulting from the transformation unambiguously specifies the system interactions required to satisfy the user, as well as exceptional interactions that can lead to degraded service provision.
Knowledge Building in Inter-school Learning Communities: Reflections from a Case on Project Learning in Hong Kong
Authors: Christopher Tan, Percy Kwok
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Towards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences: Sharing Good Practices of Research, Experimentation and Innovation (2005)

The paper reports on 740 Primary (Grade) 5 students' knowledge building and sharing of e-learning resources in a recent project work, involving inter-school learning community of 4 prestigious Catholic primary schools in Hong Kong. By using an interactive web-based learning platform called Knowledge Community (KC) and adopting learning community approach of advancing both individual and communal knowledge through knowledge building discourse (Collins & Bielaczyc, 1997), the project helped gather groups of students from four schools, forming 72 communities to generate thematic discussion on environmental protection over a period of 7 months. Empirical data showed that students exercised higher-order thinking skills through interdisciplinary project learning in the Bloom taxonomy of knowledge (7.77%), comprehension (30.68%), application (25.15%), analysis (9.08%), synthesis (3.52%) and evaluation (23.79%). As a whole, the project has exemplified an inter-school learning community model in East Asia, with stresses on e-leadership in school's collaborative learning cultures, parental involvement in student learning and students' scaffold supports in computer-mediated communication environment.
Incorporating user motivations to design for video tagging
Authors: Lex van Velsen, Mark Melenhorst
Venue: Interacting with Computers (2009)

User video tagging can enhance the indexing of large collections of videos, or can provide the basis for personalizing output. However, before the benefits of tagging can be reaped, users must be motivated to provide videos with tags. This article describes a two-stage study that aimed at collecting the most important motivations for users to tag video material. First, focus groups with internet users were held to elicit all possible motivations to tag videos on the internet. Next, 125 persons ranked these motivations for two cases via an online survey and responded to statements that assessed their acceptance of personalized output, based on their tags. Motivations related to indexing appear to be far more important for people than motivations related to socializing or communication. Furthermore, people were moderately positive about personalized output, based on their tags. Finally, important user barriers to tagging are discussed.
SIDE: the summarization integrated development environment
Authors: Moonyoung Kang, Sourish Chaudhuri, Mahesh Joshi, Carolyn P. Rosé
Venue: Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technologies: Demo Session (2008)

In this type-II demo, we introduce SIDE (the Summarization Integrated Development Environment), an infrastructure that facilitates construction of summaries tailored to the needs of the user. It aims to address the issue that there is no such thing as the perfect summary for all purposes. Rather, the quality of a summary is subjective, task dependent, and possibly specific to a user. The SIDE framework allows users flexibility in determining what they find more useful in a summary, both in terms of structure and content. As an educational tool, it has been successfully user tested by a class of 21 students in a graduate course on Summarization and Personal Information Management.
Tracking the Lexical Zeitgeist with WordNet and Wikipedia
Authors: Tony Veale
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

Most new words, or neologisms, bubble beneath the surface of widespread usage for some time, perhaps even years, before gaining acceptance in conventional print dictionaries [1]. A shorter, yet still significant, delay is also evident in the life-cycle of NLP-oriented lexical resources like WordNet [2]. A more topical lexical resource is Wikipedia [3], an open-source community-maintained encyclopedia whose headwords reflect the many new words that gain recognition in a particular linguistic sub-culture. In this paper we describe the principles behind Zeitgeist, a system for dynamic lexicon growth that harvests and semantically analyses new lexical forms from Wikipedia, to automatically enrich WordNet as these new word forms are minted. Zeitgeist demonstrates good results for composite words that exhibit a complex morphemic structure, such as portmanteau words and formal blends [4, 5].
AtelierM++: a fast and accurate marbling system
Authors: Hanli Zhao, Xiaogang Jin, Shufang Lu, Xiaoyang Mao, Jianbing Shen
Venue: Multimedia Tools and Applications (2009)

We present AtelierM++, a new interactive marbling image rendering system which allows artists to create marbling textures with real-time visual feedback on mega-pixel sized images. Marbling is a method of aqueous surface design, which can produce patterns similar to marble or other stone, hence the name. The system is based on the physical model of the traditional marbling process. We simulate real marbling by solving the Navier-Stokes equations on the graphics processing unit. We employ a third-order accurate but fast Unsplit semi-Lagragian Constrained Interpolation Profile method to reduce the numerical dissipation while retaining the stability. To simulate very sharp interface lines among different paints, a simple yet effective transformation function is applied to the paint concentrations. Several intuitive interfaces are implemented to provide flexible control for users. Extensive experimental results are shown to demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
vManage: loosely coupled platform and virtualization management in data centers
Authors: Sanjay Kumar, Vanish Talwar, Vibhore Kumar, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Karsten Schwan
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Autonomic computing (2009)

Management is an important challenge for future enterprises. Previous work has addressed platform management (e.g., power and thermal management) separately from virtualization management (e.g., virtual machine (VM) provisioning, application performance). Coordinating the actions taken by these different management layers is important and beneficial, for reasons of performance, stability, and efficiency. Such coordination, in addition to working well with existing multi-vendor solutions, also needs to be extensible to support future new management solutions potentially operating on different sensors and actuators. In response to these requirements, this paper proposes vManage, a solution to loosely couple platform and virtualization management and facilitate coordination between them in data centers. Our solution is comprised of registry and proxy mechanisms that provide unified monitoring and actuation across platform and virtualization domains, and coordinators that provide policy execution for better VM placement and runtime management, including a formal approach to ensure system stability from inefficient management actions. The solution is instantiated in a Xen environment through a platform-aware virtualization manager at a cluster management node, and a virtualization-aware platform manager on each server. Experimental evaluations using enterprise benchmarks show that compared to traditional solutions, vManage can achieve additional power savings (10% lower power) with significantly improved service-level guarantees (71% less violations) and stability (54% fewer VM migrations), at low overhead.
Passive, Streaming Inference of TCP Connection Structure for Network Server Management
Authors: Jeff Terrell, Kevin Jeffay, F. Donelson Smith, Jim Gogan, Joni Keller
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (2009)

We have developed a means of understanding the performance of servers in a network based on a real-time analysis of passively measured network traffic. TCP and IP headers are continuously collected and processed in a streaming fashion to first reveal the application-layer structure of all client/server dialogs ongoing in the network. Next, the representation of these dialogs are further processed to extract performance data such as response times of request-response exchanges for all servers. These data are then compared against archived historical distributions for each server to detect performance anomalies. Once found, these anomalies can be reported to server administrators for investigation.Our method uncovers nontrivial performance anomalies in arbitrary servers with no instrumentation of the server nor even knowledge of the server's function or configuration. Moreover, the entire process is completely transparent to servers and clients. We present the design of the tools used to perform this analysis, as well as a case study of the use of this method to uncover a significant performance anomaly in a UNC web portal.
Modeling channel popularity dynamics in a large IPTV system
Authors: Tongqing Qiu, Zihui Ge, Seungjoon Lee, Jia Wang, Qi Zhao, Jun Xu
Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh international joint conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems (2009)

Understanding the channel popularity or content popularity is an important step in the workload characterization for modern information distribution systems (e.g., World Wide Web, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, video-on-demand systems). In this paper, we focus on analyzing the channel popularity in the context of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). In particular, we aim at capturing two important aspects of channel popularity - the distribution and temporal dynamics of the channel popularity. We conduct in-depth analysis on channel popularity on a large collection of user channel access data from a nation-wide commercial IPTV network. Based on the findings in our analysis, we choose a stochastic model that finds good matches in all attributes of interest with respect to the channel popularity. Furthermore, we propose a method to identify subsets of user population with inherently different channel interest. By tracking the change of population mixtures among different user classes, we extend our model to a multi-class population model, which enables us to capture the moderate diurnal popularity patterns exhibited in some channels. We also validate our channel popularity model using real user channel access data from commercial IPTV network.
Map Building including Qualitative Reasoning for Aibo Robots
Authors: David A. Graullera, Salvador Moreno, M. Teresa Escrig
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Artificial Intelligence Research and Development (2006)

The problem that a robot navigates autonomously through its environment, builds its own map and localizes itself in the map, is still an open problem. It is known as the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Map Building) problem. Most of the approaches to solve the SLAM problem divide the space into regions and compute the probability that the robot is in each region. We call them quantitative methods. The drawbacks of quantitative methods are that they have a high computational cost and a low level of abstraction. In order to fulfil these drawbacks qualitative models have been recently used. However, qualitative models are non deterministic. Therefore, the solution recently adopted has been to mix both qualitative and quantitative models to represent the environment and build maps. However, no reasoning process has been used to deal with the information stored in maps up to now, therefore maps are only static storage of landmarks. In this paper we propose a novel method for map building based on hybrid (qualitative + quantitative) representation which includes also a reasoning process. Distinctive landmarks acquisition for map representation is provided by the cognitive vision and infrared modules which compute differences from the expected data according to the current map and the actual information perceived. We will store in the map the relative orientation information of the landmarks which appear in the environment, after a qualitative reasoning process, therefore the map will be independent of the point of view of the robot. The simultaneous localization of the robot will be solved by considering the robot as another landmark inside the map, each time the robot is moving. This map building method has been tested on the Sony AIBO four legged robots on an unknown labyrinth, made of rectangular walls. The path planning strategy has been to explore the environment based on minimizing movements and maximizing the explored areas of the map.
On Overlappings of Digitized Straight Lines and Shared Steganographic File Systems
Authors: Maria Bras-Amorós, Josep Domingo-Ferrer
Venue: Transactions on Data Privacy (2008)

We consider the unbounded integer grid and the digitized version of the straight line <em>y=α x+β</em>, with <em>α,β ∈ ℜ </em> being the set of points <em>(i,[α i+β])</em>, <em>i∈ Ζ</em>, where <em>[·]</em> is the integer rounding operator (<em>[x]-0.5≤ x Applications of this problem are explained, with a special focus on a shared steganographic system with error correction.
Rob Milne's contribution to the Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards
Authors: Ian Ritchie
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Rob Milne: A Tribute to a Pioneering AI Scientist, Entrepreneur and Mountaineer (2006)

Notes on the contribution made by Rob Milne to the Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards, now renamed 'The Rob Milne Memorial Award'. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Drosophila gene expression pattern annotation using sparse features and term-term interactions
Authors: Shuiwang Ji, Lei Yuan, Ying-Xin Li, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Sudhir Kumar, Jieping Ye
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009)

The Drosophila gene expression pattern images document the spatial and temporal dynamics of gene expression and they are valuable tools for explicating the gene functions, interaction, and networks during Drosophila embryogenesis. To provide text-based pattern searching, the images in the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP) study are annotated with ontology terms manually by human curators. We present a systematic approach for automating this task, because the number of images needing text descriptions is now rapidly increasing. We consider both improved feature representation and novel learning formulation to boost the annotation performance. For feature representation, we adapt the bag-of-words scheme commonly used in visual recognition problems so that the image group information in the BDGP study is retained. Moreover, images from multiple views can be integrated naturally in this representation. To reduce the quantization error caused by the bag-of-words representation, we propose an improved feature representation scheme based on the sparse learning technique. In the design of learning formulation, we propose a local regularization framework that can incorporate the correlations among terms explicitly. We further show that the resulting optimization problem admits an analytical solution. Experimental results show that the representation based on sparse learning outperforms the bag-of-words representation significantly. Results also show that incorporation of the term-term correlations improves the annotation performance consistently.