ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Amygdala Surface Modeling with Weighted Spherical Harmonics
Authors: Moo K. Chung, Brendon M. Nacewicz, Shubing Wang, Kim M. Dalton, Seth Pollak, Richard J. Davidson
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality (2008)

Although there are numerous publications on amygdala volumetry, so far there has not been many studies on modeling local amygdala surface shape variations in a rigorous framework. This paper present a systematic framework for modeling local amygdala shape. Using a novel surface flattening technique, we obtain a smooth mapping from the amygdala surface to a sphere. Then taking the spherical coordinates as a reference frame, amygdala surfaces are parameterized as a weighted linear combination of smooth basis functions using the recently developed weighted spherical harmonic representation. This new representation is used for parameterizing, smoothing and nonlinearly registering a group of amygdala surfaces. The methodology has been applied in detecting abnormal local shape variations in 23 autistic subjects compared against 24 normal controls. We did not detect any statistically significant abnormal amygdala shape variations in autistic subjects. The complete amygdala surface modeling codes used in this study is available at http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~mchung/research/amygdala.
Dual Mode Fingertip Guiding Manipulator for Blind Persons Enabling Passive/Active Line-Drawing Explorations
Authors: Syed Muammar Syed Yusoh, Yoshihiko Nomura, Naomi Kokubo, Tokuhiro Sugiura, Hirokazu Matsui, Norihiko Kato
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (2008)

A fingertip guiding manipulator was developed as a haptic graphic display to help the visually impaired create mental images of line drawings. The latest model to be presented in this study equips dual mode fingertip-guiding function allowing either passive or active exploration. When using this manipulator, the person is assumed to pinch a knob by his/her fingertip: the knob is attached at the end of the manipulator. In the active mode, the fingertip guiding manipulator pulls his/her fingertip along line drawings. In the passive mode, it provides a kind of selective compliance, and allows the persons freely to move his/her fingertip in the only direction of the line drawings. For the sake of the dual mode function, it is expected that efficiency would be improved a lot comparing to the former model being equipped with the passive mode alone.
Web programing for conference and electronic publication management
Authors: Cioca Marius, Cioca Lucian-Ionel, Cioranu Cosmin
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering and data bases (2008)

Owing to the exponential increase in number of national and international conferences and to the increasing number of electronic publications on the Internet, this paper presents, in a clear and brief manner, the development of a digital infrastructure for conference and electronic publication management by using a web programing and the newest available technologies.
Neural Models for Prediction of Maximum Daily Particulate Matter PM10 Concentration in the Air in Big Cities as Ecological Safety Management Tools
Authors: J. Skrzypski, E. Jach-Szakiel, W. Kaminski
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 19th International Conference on Systems Engineering (2008)

The aim of the study was to examine the possibilities of the development of a prognostic instrument for the air quality management in cities. The study was focused on the development of the neural network models for prediction of the classes of the air quality state in relation to maximum daily dust PM10 concentration. The air quality class was predicted for the next day in relation to maximal daily concentrations. The models MLP and RBF were tested. The tests were carried out in the city of Lodz in central Poland. The results of the modelling were satisfactory. In the optimally constructed models false prognosis (in testing series) were only 7.4% in the case of predicting maximal daily concentration (test series) and 2.7% (training series). A low level of error prediction confirmed the fact, that the neural network models is an effective instrument of the air quality management in cities.
Interactive Hashing: An Information Theoretic Tool (Invited Talk)
Authors: Claude Crépeau, Joe Kilian, George Savvides
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information Theoretic Security (2008)

Interactive Hashing has featured as an essential ingredient in protocols realizing a large variety of cryptographic tasks, notably Oblivious Transfer in the bounded memory model. In Interactive Hashing, a sender transfers a bit string to a receiver such that two strings are received, the original string and a second string that appears to be chosen at random among those distinct from the first.This paper starts by formalizing the notion of Interactive Hashing as a cryptographic primitive, disentangling it from the specifics of its various implementations. To this end, we present an application-independent set of information theoretic conditions that all Interactive Hashing protocols must ideally satisfy. We then provide a standard implementation of Interactive Hashing and use it to reduce a very standard version of Oblivious Transfer to another one which appears much weaker.
The democratic potentials of information technology: Attitudes of European MPs towards new technology
Authors: Jens Hoff
Venue: Information Polity (2004)

This article looks at the attitudes of European MPs towards the importance of ICT for the future of their democracies. The article draws on data from a comparative survey on MPs' use of ICT carried out in seven European countries in 2001/2002. Four countries are chosen for a comparison on the basis of the diffusion of ICT in the respective countries, as it is imagined that experience with use of ICT is of major importance in explaining attitudes. The countries chosen are Denmark, Norway, Austria and Portugal; countries which are located at different ends of the scale concerning the diffusion and use of both PCs and Internet both among MPs and the populations at large; Denmark and Norway being in the European top 5, Austria in the middle and Portugal at the bottom. The statistical analyses carried out have two main conclusions. Firstly, there is - generally speaking - a very big and homogenous belief in the positive democratic potentials of ICT across the countries. Only on one point; namely concerning the question about whether ICT will enlarge the 'digital divide' do MPs express a certain degree of worry. Secondly, looking at differences within the individual countries it is shown that the degree of involvement with ICT is of greater importance for the evaluation of the democratic potentials of ICT, than other more traditional background factors such as age, gender and party affiliation.
A Flexible Tree-Based Routing Protocol with a Mesh Relaying Node in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks
Authors: Hyun-Ki Kim, Tae-Jin Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications (2007)

The IEEE 802.11 standard defines a medium access control protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In typical WLANs, access points (APs) are connected with one another in a wired manner. As a way to loosen this restriction wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which are rather independent of a backbone infrastructure, is emerging. Due to their inherent characteristics unlike ad hoc networks, it is unreasonable that the ad hoc network routing protocols are directly applied for the WMNs without any modification. The tree-based routing protocol (TRP) defined in the IEEE 802.11s is one of the routing protocols used in WMNs. The TRP, however, forwards data on the only one active path. In this paper, we propose a flexible tree-based routing protocol with a mesh relaying node (TRP-MRN) in WMNs. The TRP-MRN provides a concurrent multi-path establishment algorithm. We analyze the end-to-end delay of the TRP and the TRP-MRN and show that the TRP-MRN can effectively reduce the end-to-end delay and provide alternative routes via simulations.
Using Hidden Markov Models to Characterize Student Behaviors in Learning-by-Teaching Environments
Authors: Hogyeong Jeong, Amit Gupta, Rod Roscoe, John Wagster, Gautam Biswas, Daniel Schwartz
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2008)

Using hidden Markov models (HMMs) and traditional behavior analysis, we have examined the effect of metacognitive prompting on students' learning in the context of our computer-based learning-by-teaching environment. This paper discusses our analysis techniques, and presents evidence that HMMs can be used to effectively determine students' pattern of activities. The results indicate clear differences between different interventions, and links between students learning performance and their interactions with the system.
Exploiting Evidence Analysis in Plan Recognition
Authors: Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on User Modeling (2007)

Information graphics, such as bar charts and line graphs, that appear in popular media generally have a message that they are intended to convey. We have developed a novel plan inference system that uses evidence in the form of communicative signals from the graphic to recognize the graphic designer's intended message. We contend that plan inference research would benefit from examining how each of its evidence sources impacts the system's success. This paper presents such an evidence analysis for the communicative signals that are captured in our plan inference system, and the paper shows how the results of this evidence analysis are informing our research on plan recognition and application systems.
Model Transformations in Decidability Proofs for Monadic Theories
Authors: Wolfgang Thomas
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international workshop on Computer Science Logic (2008)

We survey two basic techniques for showing that the monadic second-order theory of a structure is decidable. In the first approach, one deals with finite fragments of the theory (given for example by the restriction to formulas of a certain quantifier rank) and --- depending on the fragment --- reduces the model under consideration to a simpler one. In the second approach, one applies a global transformation of models while preserving decidability of the theory. We suggest a combination of these two methods.
Illumination Invariant Face Recognition under Various Facial Expressions and Occlusions
Authors: Tiwuya H. Faaya, Önsen Toygar
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Image and Signal Processing (2008)

This paper presents a new approach that increases face recognition performance using various facial expressions in the presence of illumination variations and occlusions. The new approaches use PCA and LDA with the combination of the preprocessing techniques of histogram equalization and mean-and-variance normalization in order to nullify the effect of illumination changes and any occlusions present which are known to significantly degrade recognition performance. To be consistent with the research of others, our work has been tested on the JAFFE database and its performance has been compared with traditional PCA and LDA.
A Learning Algorithm for Multi-dimensional Trees, or: Learning Beyond Context-Freeness
Authors: Anna Kasprzik
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international colloquium on Grammatical Inference: Algorithms and Applications (2008)

We generalize a learning algorithm by Drewes and Högberg [1] for regular tree languages based on a learning model proposed by Angluin [2] to recognizable tree languages of arbitrarily many dimensions, so-called multi-dimensional trees. Trees over multi-dimensional tree domains have been defined by Rogers [3,4]. However, since the algorithm by Drewes and Högberg relies on classical finite state automata, these structures have to be represented in another form to make them a suitable input for the algorithm: We give a new representation for multi-dimensional trees which establishes them as a direct generalization of classical trees over a partitioned alphabet, and show that with this notation Drewes' and Högberg's algorithm is able to learn tree languages of arbitrarily many dimensions. Via the correspondence between trees and string languages ("yield operation") this is equivalent to the statement that this way even some string language classes beyond context-freeness have become learnable with respect to Angluin's learning model as well.
Developing Intelligent Agent Applications with JADE and JESS
Authors: Bala M. Balachandran
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, Part III (2008)

Agent systems differ from more traditional software systems because agents are intended to be independent autonomous, reactive, pro-active and sociable software entities. Due to these unique characteristics developing agent systems has been a very challenging task for agent researchers and application developers. JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework) is an agent development tool, implemented in JAVA and FIPA-compliant. Although JADE provides all the mandatory components (FIPA) for the development of autonomous agents, it lacks the ability to include intelligent behaviour to individual agents. JESS (Java Expert System Shell), a rule-based programming environment written in Java, provides a powerful tool for developing systems with intelligent reasoning abilities. This paper examines the use of both JADE and JESS for the development intelligent agent systems and shares the experience of the authors in the development of a Personal Travel Assistant (PTA).
An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Software Vulnerability Announcements on Firm Stock Price
Authors: Rahul Telang, Sunil Wattal
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2007)

Security defects in software cost millions of dollars to firms in terms of downtime, disruptions, and confidentiality breaches. However, the economic implications of these defects for software vendors are not well understood. Lack of legal liability and the presence of switching costs and network externalities may protect software vendors from incurring significant costs in the event of a vulnerability announcement, unlike such industries as auto and pharmaceuticals, which have been known to suffer significant loss in market value in the event of a defect announcement. Although research in software economics has studied firms' incentives to improve overall quality, there have not been any studies which show that software vendors have an incentive to invest in building more secure software. The objectives of this paper are twofold. 1) We examine how a software vendor's market value changes when a vulnerability is announced. 2) We examine how firm and vulnerability characteristics mediate the change in the market value of a vendor. We collect data from leading national newspapers and industry sources, such as the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), by searching for reports on published software vulnerabilities. We show that vulnerability announcements lead to a negative and significant change in a software vendor's market value. In our sample, on average, a vendor loses around 0.6 percent value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. We find that a software vendor loses more market share if the market is competitive or if the vendor is small. To provide further insight, we use the information content of the disclosure announcement to classify vulnerabilities into various types. We find that the change in stock price is more negative if the vendor fails to provide a patch at the time of disclosure. Also, more severe flaws have a significantly greater impact. Our analysis provides many interesting implications for software vendors as well as policy makers. In particular, our study provides some evidence of the value of secure software.
A Semantic Foundation for Role-Related Concepts in Enterprise Modelling
Authors: Joao Paulo Andrade Almeida, Giancarlo Guizzardi
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 12th International IEEE Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (2008)

In this paper, we provide a semantic foundation for role-related concepts in Enterprise Modelling. We use a conceptual modelling framework to provide a well-founded underpinning for these concepts. We review a number of Enterprise Modelling approaches in light of the concepts described. This allows us to understand the various approaches, to contrast them and to identify problems in the definition and/or usage of these concepts.
Cross-Language Retrieval with Wikipedia
Authors: Péter Schönhofen, András Benczúr, István Bíró, Károly Csalogány
Venue: Advances in Multilingual and Multimodal Information Retrieval: 8th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 19-21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers (2008)

We demonstrate a twofold use of Wikipedia for cross-lingual information retrieval. As our main contribution, we exploit Wikipedia hyperlinkage for query term disambiguation. We also use bilingual Wikipedia articles for dictionary extension. Our method is based on translation disambiguation; we combine the Wikipedia based technique with a method based on bigram statistics of pairs formed by translations of different source language terms.
Approximation results for flow shop scheduling problems with machine availability constraints
Authors: Mikhail A. Kubzin, Chris N. Potts, Vitaly A. Strusevich
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2009)

This paper considers two-machine flow shop scheduling problems with machine availability constraints. When the processing of a job is interrupted by an unavailability period of a machine, we consider both the resumable scenario in which the processing can be resumed when the machine next becomes available, and the semi-resumable scenario in which some portion of the processing is repeated but the job is otherwise resumable. For the problem with several non-availability intervals on the first machine under the resumable scenario, we present a fast (32)-approximation algorithm. For the problem with one non-availability interval under the semi-resumable scenario, a polynomial-time approximation scheme is developed.
Transforming Descriptions and Diagrams to Sketches in Information System Design
Authors: Barbara Tversky, James E. Corter, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Doris Zahner, Yun Jin Rho
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference (2008)

Sketching is integral to information systems design. Designers need to become fluent in translating verbal descriptions of systems to a variety of kinds of sketches, notably sequential and logical, and to translate among the kinds. Here, we investigated these cognitive skills in design students, asking them to design a system configuration starting from either a sequential diagram or a sequential description. Although the two source descriptions were logically equivalent, the diagram led to designs that corresponded more closely to the source description --- that is, designs with fewer omissions of crucial components and links. Text descriptions led to more variable and less accurate designs, most likely because they require more cognitive steps from problem representation to problem solution.
NMUS: Structural Analysis for Improving the Derivation of All MUSes in Overconstrained Numeric CSPs
Authors: R. M. Gasca, C. Valle, M. T. Gómez-López, R. Ceballos
Venue: Current Topics in Artificial Intelligence: 12th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence, CAEPIA 2007, Salamanca, Spain, November 12-16, 2007. Selected Papers (2007)

Models are used in science and engineering for experimentation, analysis, model-based diagnosis, design and planning/sheduling applications. Many of these models are overconstrained Numeric Constraint Satisfaction Problems (NCSP), where the numeric constraints could have linear or polynomial relations. In practical scenarios, it is very useful to know which parts of the overconstrained NCSP instances cause the unsolvability.Although there are algorithms to find all optimal solutions for this problem, they are computationally expensive, and hence may not be applicable to large and real-world problems. Our objective is to improve the performance of these algorithms for numeric domains using structural analysis. We provide experimental results showing that the use of the different strategies proposed leads to a substantially improved performance and it facilitates the application of solving larger and more realistic problems.
The Theory and Practice of Logistics Infrastructure Capability: Evidence from China
Authors: Changbing Jiang, Yang Peng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposiums on Information Processing (2008)

Logistic infrastructure (LI) is an important area of urban competition capability. The connotation of Logistics Infrastructure Capability (LIC) is analyzed in this paper. Compared with the extensive research on LIC in developed world, empirical work is still rare in developing world. In this paper the theory of LIC is firstly overviewed. Then a new evaluation index system for LIC evaluation is set up which contains factors that reflect the economic development level, transportation accessibility, turnover volume of freight traffic and conveyance availability. Secondly, an empirical study is carried out by using hierarchy cluster analysis method to classify LIC into 3 clusters for 31 major provinces or regions in People's Republic of China. Thirdly, according to the characteristics of the 3 clusters, suggestions are proposed for improving their LIC. Finally, after comparing different LIC of 31 major provinces or regions in People's Republic of China, this paper focuses on that different logistics infrastructure including Hub, Central Distribution Center & Cross Docking Center, Regional Distribution Center or Distribution Center should be build reasonably in order to meet the customer’s requirement in the 3 different cluster regions.
Automatic Detection of Learnability under Unreliable and Sparse User Feedback
Authors: Yvonne Moh, Wolfgang Einhäuser, Joachim M. Buhmann
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th DAGM symposium on Pattern Recognition (2008)

Personalization for real-world machine-learning applications usually has to incorporate user feedback. Unfortunately, user feedback often suffers from sparsity and possible inconsistencies. Here we present an algorithm that exploits feedback for learning only when it is consistent. The user provides feedback on a small subset of the data. Based on the data representation alone, our algorithm employs a statistical criterion to trigger learning when user feedback is significantly different from random. We evaluate our algorithm in a challenging audio classification task with relevance to hearing aid applications. By restricting learning to an informative subset, our algorithm substantially improves the performance of a recently introduced classification algorithm.