ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Arab children's reading preferences for e-learning programs
Authors: Asmaa Alsumait, Asma Al-Osaimi
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Information Science, Technology and Applications (2009)

Arab students are increasingly depending on e-learning education. Readability of e-learning program text has been shown to be influenced by a number of typographical variables including text type and size, screen line length, white space, etc. Therefore, it is very important to improve the reading efficiency and satisfaction. Combine the wrong screen line length with the wrong font type and size can slowdown reading and comprehension. Following simple design guidelines can improve students reading performance and satisfaction. However, guidelines that are built for English script cannot be simply applied for Arabic script due to differences in letters occupation and writing direction. The aim of this paper was to build a set of guidelines that can be used for Arabic e-learning programs designed for seven to nine years old students. An electronic story was designed to be tested for the best font type and size combination and the preferred screen line length. Results indicated that Arab students preferred the use of Simplified Arabic with size 14-point font size to ease and speed the reading. However, they found Arial Unicode MS with 14-point font size more attractive. Participants were able to read faster with 2/3 screen line length. A new direction for e-learning computer tutoring sound characters which plays a critical success factor in learner acceptance of e-learning was explored in this research. Results indicated that most of the participants' students preferred to listen to a female adult tutoring sound.
Review: Using the eigenvalue relaxation for binary least-squares estimation problems
Authors: Stéphane Chrétien, Franck Corset
Venue: Signal Processing (2009)

The goal of this paper is to survey the properties of the eigenvalue relaxation for least squares binary problems. This relaxation is a convex program which is obtained as the Lagrangian dual of the original problem with an implicit compact constraint and as such, is a convex problem with polynomial time complexity. Moreover, as a main practical advantage of this relaxation over the standard semi-definite programming approach, several efficient bundle methods are available for this problem allowing to address problems of very large dimension. The necessary tools from convex analysis are recalled and shown at work for handling the problem of exactness of this relaxation. Two applications are described. The first one is the problem of binary image reconstruction and the second is the problem of multiuser detection in CDMA systems.
Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics
Authors: Kevin Skoglund
Venue:  (2007)

In this sequel to the popular Ruby on Rails Essential Training, expert instructor Kevin Skoglund teaches comprehensive techniques for web developers who already feel comfortable with the fundamentals of Ruby and the Rails MVC framework. This training will help developers move toward creating full-featured Ruby on Rails applications. Kevin begins by explaining how to update software and projects to the latest versions. He then demonstrates alternative ways to interact with Ruby and your Rails applications and teaches the intermediate aspects of the Ruby language. Kevin provides step-by-step instructions for creating a custom blog and content management application. He uses this practical example to show how to work with database migrations, how to get more from ActiveRecord and avoid common pitfalls, how to create flexible controllers and views, and how to improve performance, security, and code management. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.Topics Include:Updating software and projectsUnderstanding code blocksCatching errors and raising exceptionsUsing migrations to manage database changesImproving performance with eager loading and cache countersDealing with form validations and model callbacksUsing partials and helpers to organize viewsSalting passwords for increased securityStoring session dataUnderstanding and defining custom and named routesPaginating and using plug-insDuration: 11.5 hoursOn 1 DVD-ROM 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
A corpus-based analysis of argument realization by preposition structures
Authors: Qibo Zhu
Venue: Natural Language Engineering (2009)

This article studies the issue of argument realization by preposition structures. By examining the preposition structures that are marked as frame elements in FrameNet, the article attempts to give corpus-based attestations to the hypothesized link between deep semantic arguments and their surface syntactic representations. Problems addressed in this article include how argument realization by preposition structures can be predictable from the target lexical unit and the frame it evokes, and why some noncentral prepositions get selected in the argument realization options. The investigation is primarily inspired by Fillmore's work in frame semantics. The source data for this study is derived from a preposition knowledge base that we have recently built by extracting all the semantically annotated preposition structures in FrameNet. The analysis shows that while there are various semantic–syntactic mapping possibilities, for most semantic arguments, the tendency of using central prepositions in their realization expressions is very strong. This is a clear indication that some preposition structures are linked to certain semantic arguments more than they are to others. A similar experiment was conducted using the annotated PropBank corpus to corroborate the supporting evidence found in FrameNet. The results of this study, together with the syntactic–semantic mapping lists of preposition structures can provide raw linguistic data for the study of preposition semantics, lexicography, argument realization, word sense disambiguation, and natural language understanding.
Technical communique: Synthesis of PID controllers for a class of time delay systems
Authors: Vilma A. Oliveira, Lúcia V. Cossi, Marcelo C. M. Teixeira, Alexandre M. F. Silva
Venue: Automatica (Journal of IFAC) (2009)

In this paper we use the Hermite-Biehler theorem to establish results on the design of proportional plus integral plus derivative (PID) controllers for a class of time delay systems. Using the property of interlacing at high frequencies of the class of systems considered and linear programming we obtain the set of all stabilizing PID controllers. As far as we know, previous results on the synthesis of PID controllers rely on the solution of transcendental equations. This paper also extends previous results on the synthesis of proportional controllers for a class of delay systems of retarded type to a larger class of delay systems.
A micro roller embossing process for structuring large-area substrates of laminated ceramic green tapes
Authors: Xuechuan Shan, Y. C. Soh, C. W. P. Shi, L. Jin, C. W. Lu
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2009)

This paper presents a micro roller embossing process for patterning large-area substrates of laminated green ceramic tapes. The aim of this research is to develop a large-area microstructure formation technique for green ceramic substrates using a thermal roller laminator, which is compatible with screen printing apparatus. A thin film nickel mold was developed via photolithographic patterning and nickel electroplating on a 75-&#x03bc;m-thick nickel film. The mold had an effective panel size of 150&#x00a0;mm&#x00a0;&#x00d7;&#x00a0;150&#x00a0;mm with the height of plated protrusive patterns being about 38&#x00a0;&#x03bc;m. Formation of micro patterns was successfully demonstrated over the whole panel area on laminated green ceramic tapes using roller embossing. Micro patterns for inductors, heaters as well as interconnection with 50&#x00a0;&#x03bc;m line-width were embossed on green ceramic substrates. By means of tuning process parameters including roller temperature, applied pressure and feeding speed, we have demonstrated that micro roller embossing is a promising method for patterning large-area green ceramic substrates.
IBM Lotus Notes 8.0 Quick Source Guide
Authors: Quick Source
Venue:  (2007)

Do you need an easy-to-follow software reference right at your fingertips? Our 6 page, tri-fold guides are the answer. These quick reference guides include step by step instructions to help users to learn software features more quickly, as well as full color screen graphics to highlight important features. Quick Source reference guides also include the software program s NEW features and gives you quick access to time saving shortcuts. The IBM Lotus Notes 8.0 Quick Source guide is a clear and concise tool for learning the features in Lotus Notes 8.0. Features contained in this guide include NEW features such as Using the Open List, Working with the Sidebar, and Displaying a Conversation. It also includes Setting Up the Home Page, Opening an Application, Viewing Mail, Forwarding a Message, Attaching a File to a Message, Viewing Contacts, Navigating in the Calendar, Creating a Personal To Do Item, Creating a Bookmark, and much more. 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
The price of uncertainty
Authors: Maria-Florina Balcan, Avrim Blum, Yishay Mansour
Venue: Proceedings of the tenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce (2009)

We study the degree to which small fluctuations in costs in well-studied potential games can impact the result of natural best-response and improved-response dynamics. We call this the Price of Uncertainty and study it in a wide variety of potential games (including fair cost-sharing games, set-cover games, routing games, and job-scheduling games), finding a number of surprising results. In particular, we show that in certain cases, even extremely small fluctuations can cause these dynamics to spin out of control and move to states of much higher social cost, whereas in other cases these dynamics are much more stable even to large degrees of fluctuation. We also consider the resilience of these dynamics to a small number of Byzantine players about which no assumptions are made. We show again a contrast between different games. In certain cases (e.g., fair cost-sharing, set-covering, job-scheduling) even a single Byzantine player can cause best-response dynamics to transition to states of substantially higher cost, whereas in others (e.g., the class of beta-nice games which includes routing, market-sharing and many others) these dynamics are much more resilient.
Distributed architectures for surrogate clustering in CDNs: a simulation-based analysis
Authors: Giancarlo Fortino, Alfredo Garro, Samuele Mascillaro, Wilma Russo, Marino Vaccaro
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th edition of the UPGRADE-CN workshop on Use of P2P, GRID and agents for the development of content networks (2009)

Content distribution networks (CDNs) are the most adopted solution for an efficient content delivery over the Internet. They are usually based on caching content, originally produced and stored in origin servers, into surrogate servers which are closer to final users so as to improve the average user perceived latency related to content requests. To further improve the performance of CDNs, new caching techniques should be designed which are not limited to stand-alone surrogate servers but involve coordination among a set of surrogate servers. In this paper we therefore propose the design and evaluation of several distributed architectures for clustering surrogate server: master/slave, multicast-based and peer-to-peer. An agent-oriented modeling and simulation methodology is exploited to model and evaluate the proposed architectures in significant scenarios. The results obtained from simulation show that the designed surrogate clustering architectures allow to improve performance with respect to caching techniques of conventional CDNs.
Design and Development of a Web-Based Content Creation Application for Problem-solving Exercises Based on Cognitive Apprenticeship
Authors: Tan Gek Hua
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 purpose of this short paper is to present and discuss an in-progress work by the author to design and develop an XML and web-based content creation application for content experts to author problem-solving exercises based on cognitive apprenticeship, an instructional approach developed by Collins, Brown and Newman (1989). Using a form-based editor, authors could easily input content data which will be output to a content data (XML) document. A content template (in Flash or other format) then reads the data and populates itself to become a piece of learning content. Such an approach separates the programming logic (encapsulated within the content template) and the content data (XML document). This not only allows content experts to easily create the Flash-based content without the need to own a copy of the software, but also eliminates the need for content experts to learn the use of a complex authoring tool. Since the content (an XML document) sits outside and is independent of the presentation layer (content template), such an approach allows reusability and deployment of content in other technologies, platforms and devices. Prototypes of the editor and content template have been developed by the author.
Automatic prediction of cognate orthography using support vector machines
Authors: Andrea Mulloni
Venue: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the ACL: Student Research Workshop (2007)

This paper describes an algorithm to automatically generate a list of cognates in a target language by means of Support Vector Machines. While Levenshtein distance was used to align the training file, no knowledge repository other than an initial list of cognates used for training purposes was input into the algorithm. Evaluation was set up in a cognate production scenario which mimed a real-life situation where no word lists were available in the target language, delivering the ideal environment to test the feasibility of a more ambitious project that will involve language portability. An overall improvement of 50.58% over the baseline showed promising horizons.
Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development
Authors: Anita Sarma, Larry Maccherone, Patrick Wagstrom, James Herbsleb
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (2009)

Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both technical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on techniques like code analysis or mining project archives. Social network analysis has been used to capture information about relations among people. Yet, each type of information is often far more useful when combined, as when the “goodness” of social networks is judged by the patterns of dependencies in the technical artifacts. To bring such information together, we have developed Tesseract, an interactive exploratory environment that utilizes cross-linked displays to visualize the myriad relationships between artifacts, developers, bugs, and communications. We evaluated Tesseract by (1) demonstrating its feasibility with GNOME project data (2) assessing its usability via informal user evaluations, and (3) verifying its suitability for the open source community via semi-structured interviews.
Analysis on paralinguistic prosody control in perceptual impression space using multiple dimensional scaling
Authors: Yoko Greenberg, Nagisa Shibuya, Minoru Tsuzaki, Hiroaki Kato, Yoshinori Sagisaka
Venue: Speech Communication (2009)

A multi-dimensional perceptual space for communicative speech prosodies was derived using a psychometric method from multi-dimensional expressions of impressions to characterize paralinguistic information conveyed by prosody in communication. Single word utterances of ''n'' were employed to allow freedom from lexical effects and to cover communicative prosodic variations as much as possible. The analysis of daily conversations showed that conversational speech impressions were manifested in the global F0 control of ''n'' as differences of average height (high-low) and dynamic patterns (rise, fall, gradual fall, and rise&fall). Using controlled single utterances of ''n'', multiple dimensional scaling analysis was applied to a mutual distance matrix obtained by 26 dimensional vectors expressing perceptual impressions. The result showed the three-dimensional structure of a perceptual impression space, and each dimension corresponded to different F0 control characteristics. The positive-negative impression can be controlled by average F0 height while confident-doubtful or allowable-unacceptable impressions can be controlled by F0 dynamic patterns. Unlike conventional categorical classification of prosodic patterns frequently observed in studies of emotional prosody, this control characterization enables us to flexibly and quantitatively describe prosodic impressions. These experimental results allow the possibility of input specifications for communicative prosody generation using impression vectors and control through average F0 height and F0 dynamic patterns. Instead of the generation of speech with categorical prototypical prosody, more adequate communicative speech synthesis can be approached through input specification and its correspondence with control characteristics.
An Ontological Approach for the Management of Rights Data Dictionaries
Authors: Roberto García, Jaime Delgado
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2005: The Eighteenth Annual Conference (2005)

RDDOnto provides an ontological approach to the Rights Data Dictionary (RDD) part of MPEG-21one of the main Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Management standardisation efforts. In order to build the ontology, the terms defined in the RDD specification have been modelled using OWL, trying to capture the greatest part of its semantics. The ontology allows formalising a great part of the standard and simplifying its verification, consistency checking and implementation. During the RDDOnto construction, some integrity problems were detected, which even have led to standard corrigenda. Additional checks were possible using Description Logic reasoning in order to test the standard consistency. Moreover, RDDOnto is now helping on how new terms can be added to the RDD and to integrate the RDD with other parts of MPEG-21 also mapped to OWL. Finally, there are the implementation facilities provided by the ontology. They have been used to develop MPEG-21 licenses searching, validation and checking. Existing ontology-enabled tools as semantic query engines or logic reasoners facilitate this.
Automatic image analysis process for the detection of concealed weapons
Authors: Richard Gesick, Caner Saritac, Chih-Cheng Hung
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies (2009)

The goal of this research is to develop a process, using current imaging hardware and without human intervention, that provides an accurate and timely detection alert of a concealed weapon and its location in the image of the luggage. There are several processes in existence that are able to highlight or otherwise outline a concealed weapon in baggage but so far those processes still require a highly trained operator to observe the resulting image and draw the correct conclusions. We attempted three different approaches in this project. The first approach uses edge detection combined with pattern matching to determine the existence of a concealed pistol. Rather than use the whole body of the weapon which varies significantly, the trigger guard was used since it is fairly consistent in dimensions. While the processes were reliable in detecting a pistol's presence, on any but the simplest of images, the computational time was excessive and a substantial number of false positives were generated. The second approach employed Daubechie wavelet transforms but the results have so far been inconclusive. A third approach involving an algorithm based on the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is proposed.
Self-spawning neuro-fuzzy system for rule extraction
Authors: Zhi-Qiang Liu, Tao Guan, Ya-Jun Zhang
Venue: Soft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications (2009)

In this paper we propose self-spawning neuro-fuzzy system (SSNFS), a new neuro-fuzzy system to derive fuzzy rules from data. The SSNFS model is based on a generic definition of incremental perceptron and a new learning algorithm that is capable of both structural (rule) learning and parametric learning. It constructs the fuzzy system by detecting a suitable number of rule patches and their positions and shapes in the input space. Initially the rule base consists of one single fuzzy rule; during the iterative learning process the rule base expands according to a supervised spawning validity measure. The rule induction process terminates when a given stop criterion is satisfied. SSNFS is very general since it does not require the prior knowledge about the input space and can be used in any application based on the scatter-partitioning fuzzy system. To demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our algorithm, we present a synthetic example and real-world modelling problems.
Spectral analysis of the pupillary light reflex to chromatic stimuli mediated by intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells
Authors: Wioletta Nowak, Minoru Nakayama
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Mathematics and computers in biology and chemistry (2009)

A new photoreception process based on intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGC) contributes to the Pupillary Light Reflex (PLR). This reflex is controlled by two antagonistic iris muscles, the sphincter (the parasympathetic component) and the dilator (the sympathetic component). ipRGC activity and PLR, when tested using long pulse light stimuli were shown to be dependent on the wavelengths and the photopic levels of the stimuli. It is interesting how these dependencies interact in the case of flickering stimuli, which increase the level of the response gain of the dilator in comparison to pulse stimuli. To test these dependencies, a spectral analysis was proposed and conducted, and then compared to the traditionally used reflex amplitude analysis. The dependence of the pupil response on wavelength and the photopic level of the light stimuli for both long pulse and flickering stimuli patterns was examined. All three light factors (stimuli pattern, wavelength and photopic level) produced significant effects on both PLR parameters. When tested using ANOVA, the wavelength factor makes the greatest contribution to PLR response, and the stimuli pattern makes the smallest contribution. The results confirm that PLR reflects the ipRGC activity mechanism and that the proposed spectral analysis can be considered as a new, additional approach for testing the ipRGC activity mechanism.