ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Haptic Gaze-Tracking Based Perception of Graphical User Interfaces
Authors: Simon Meers, Koren Ward
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (2007)

This paper presents a novel human-computer interface that enables the computer display to be perceived without any use of the eyes. Our system works by tracking the user's head position and orientation to obtain their "gaze' point on a virtual screen, and by indicating to the user what object is present at the gaze location via haptic feedback to the fingers and synthetic speech or Braille text. This is achieved by using the haptic vibration frequency delivered to the fingers to indicate the type of screen object at the gaze position, and the vibration amplitude to indicate the screen object's window-layer, when the object is contained in overlapping windows. Also, objects that are gazed at momentarily have their name output to the user via a Braille display or synthetic speech. Our experiments have shown that by browsing over the screen and receiving haptic and voice (or Braille) feedback in this manner, the user is able to acquire a mental two-dimensional representation of the virtual screen and its content without any use of the eyes. This form of blind screen perception can then be used to locate screen objects and controls and manipulate them with the mouse or via gaze control. Our experimental results are provided in which we demonstrate how this form of blind screen perception can effectively be used to exercise point-and-click and drag-and-drop control of desktop objects and open windows by using the mouse, or the user's head pose, without any use of the eyes.
An analysis of the gap between the knowledge and skills learned in academic software engineering course projects and those required in real: projects
Authors: S. Ludi
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. on 31st Annual - Volume 01 (2001)

This paper describes how the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, (SWEBOK) can be used as a guide to assess and improve software engineering courses. A case study is presented in which the guide is applied to a typical undergraduate software engineering course. The lessons learned are presented which the authors believe are generalizable to comparable courses taught at many academic institutions. A novel approach involving largescale software project simulation is also presented a way to overcome some of the course deficiencies identified by the guide.
TableSeer: automatic table metadata extraction and searching in digital libraries
Authors: Ying Liu, Kun Bai, Prasenjit Mitra, C. Lee Giles
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2007)

Tables are ubiquitous in digital libraries. In scientific documents, tables are widely used to present experimental results or statistical data in a condensed fashion. However, current search engines do not support table search. The difficulty of automatic extracting tables from un-tagged documents, the lack of a universal table metadata specification, and the limitation of the existing ranking schemes make table search problem challenging. In this paper, we describe TableSeer, a search engine for tables. TableSeer crawls digital libraries, detects tables from documents, extracts tables metadata, indexes and ranks tables, and provides a user-friendly search interface. We propose an extensive set of medium-independent metadata for tables that scientists and other users can adopt for representing table information. In addition, we devise a novel page box-cutting method to improve the performance of the table detection. Given a query, TableSeer ranks the matched tables using an innovative ranking algorithm - TableRank. TableRank rates each ⃭query, tableℂ pair with a tailored vector space model and a specific term weighting scheme. Overall, TableSeer eliminates the burden of manually extract table data from digital libraries and enables users to automatically examine tables. We demonstrate the value of TableSeer with empirical studies on scientific documents.
Second annual robotics summer camp for underrepresented students
Authors: Kelly R. Cannon, Katherine A. Panciera, Nikolaos P. Papanikolopoulos
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (2007)

The University of Minnesota Center for Distributed Robotics and the Digital Technology Center hosted the second annual Technology Day Camp, a week long camp targeting underrepresented students such as girls, African Americans, and Hispanics from the Twin Cities metro area. Students were surveyed prior to the camp revealing a strong proclivity towards math and science, but a resistance to the perceived lifestyle of computer scientists. With an emphasis on the college experience, building hardware, creating software, and interacting with robots, the camp implemented proposed changes from the previous year as well as new activities with a special emphasis on robotics. The successes and failures are discussed in an effort to provide insight for organizations hosting similar programs, new research questions are presented, and a materials list is provided.
A semantics for updates consisting of a sequence of programs
Authors: Mauricio, Claudia Zepeda
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Computers (2007)

When intelligent agents get new knowledge and this knowledge must be added or updated to their knowledge base, then it is important to avoid inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a semantics for updates consisting of a sequence of programs1. The semantics is proposed as an application of an extension of the notion of generalized answer sets. This extension is also introduced in this work.
Minimum-cost sensor placement with a given lifetime requirement
Authors: Jie Wang
Venue:  (2006)

Recent advances in low-cost, low-power micro-electro-mechanical systems and micro-electronic devices have made wireless sensor networks (WSNs) a reality. This dissertation is focused on designing sensor arrangement algorithms for surveilling a set of targets that meet the coverage and lifetime requirements with minimum cost. The coverage requirement requires that each target be watched by at least one sensor at any time in the duration equal to the minimum lifetime of sensors used in the network. The lifetime requirement requires that each target be watched by at least one sensor at any given moment for a preset period of time. Suppose we need to watch a set of targets in a 3-dimensional sensing field for a certain period of time, and suppose we may choose any number of sensors from a fixed set of sensor types and place them at selected sites, where different sensor type differs in sensing capacity, cost, and lifetime. We want to find a sensor arrangement to achieve the required coverage duration such that the total cost of sensors is minimum. This problem is known to be NP-hard. To solve this problem; we model it as an Integer Linear Programming problem. We then provide polynomial-time approximation solutions to the problem with proven approximation guarantees. We provide a polynomial-time best-fit scheduling algorithm based on the solutions we obtain to arrange sensors. We carry out extensive experiments and simulations to test the performance of our approximation algorithms and our scheduling algorithms.
Shootball: the ball sport using dynamic goals
Authors: Yoshiro Sugano, Yuya Mochizuki, Toshiya Usui, Naohito Okude
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (2007)

Shootball is a goal-based ball game played in a field surrounded by 4 screens linked to each other. The game uses a ball with an embedded wireless sensor. In shootball, players are given the ability to move the location of the goal on will. Various attack patterns for multi-directions can be performed by effectively utilizing this mechanic. In enjoying the gameplay of shootball, players shall be able to experience a creative style of play and team communication not seen in previous goal-based sports.
LAP: a little language for OS emulation
Authors: Donn M. Seeley
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2000)

LAP, the Linux Application Platform, is a Linux emulation package for BSD/OS which uses a "little language" [Salu98] to describe transformations from Linux data types and values to BSD/OS data types and values, and vice versa. The little language simplifies and regularizes the specification of transformations, making the emulation easier to maintain. This paper describes the language and its place in the framework of LAP.
The fractionally spaced vector constant modulus algorithm
Authors: M. A. Haun
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (1999)

The vector constant modulus algorithm (VCMA) was previously introduced as an extension of the constant modulus algorithm (CMA) which can equalize data from shaped sources having nearly Gaussian marginal distributions. Some simple changes in the structure of VCMA allow it to be used in fractionally spaced equalizers with their attendant benefits. Although developed with shell mapping in mind, VCMA can also equalize data from other shaping methods such as trellis shaping. Furthermore, the vector modulus concept from VCMA can be successfully applied to other algorithms based on constant modulus criteria, including reduced constellation algorithm (RCA) and multimodulus algorithm (MMA). Simulations have verified all of these results.
Certificate-based access control for widely distributed resources
Authors: Mary Thompson, William Johnston, Srilekha Mudumbai, Gary Hoo, Keith Jackson, Abdelilah Essiari
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 8 (1999)

We have implemented and deployed an access control mechanism that uses digitally-signed certificates to define and enforce an access policy for a set of distributed resources that have multiple, independent and geographically dispersed stakeholders. The stakeholders assert their access requirements in use-condition certificates and designate those trusted to attest to the corresponding user attributes. Users are identified by X.509 identity certificates. During a request to use a resource, a policy engine collects all the relevant certificates and decides if the user satisfies all the requirements. This paper describes the model, architecture and implementation of this system. It also includes some preliminary performance measurements and our plans for future development of the system.
Leveraging Computational Grid Technologies for Building a Secure and Manageable Power Grid
Authors: Himanshu Khurana, Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan, Von Welch
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

The US Power Industry is in the process of overhauling the Power Grid to make it more secure, reliable, and available. The IT systems that comprise a major part of this change need to address a number of security and management challenges for the data generated by power systems and for resources consumed by distributed applications. In this work we leverage the technologies developed by the Computational Grid to address these challenges. We identify striking similarities between the systems and use these similarities to suggest ways of addressing challenging problems; e.g., securing inter-control center communications and power grid infrastructures, and managing data and resources at control centers.
Map-Enhanced Detection and Tracking from a Moving Platform with Local and Global Data Association
Authors: Qian Yu, Gerard Medioni
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing (2007)

We present an approach to detect and track moving objects from a moving platform. Moreover, given a global map, such as a satellite image, our approach can locate and track the targets in geo-coordinates, namely longitude and latitude. The map information is used as a global constraint for compensating the camera motion, which is critical for motion detection on a moving platform. In addition, by projecting the targets' position to a global map, tracking is performed in coordinates with physical meaning and thus the motion model is more meaningful than tracking in image coordinate. In a real scenario, targets can leave the field of view or be occluded. Thus we address tracking as a data association problem at the local and global levels. At the local level, the moving image blobs, provided from the motion detection, are associated into tracklets by a MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) Data Association algorithm. Both motion and appearance likelihood are considered when local data association is performed. Then, at the global level, tracklets are linked by their appearance and spatio-temporal consistence on the global map. Experiments show that our method can deal with long term occlusion and segmented tracks even when targets leave the field of view.
Proteus: A Semantic Context-Aware Adaptive Policy Model
Authors: Alessandra Toninelli, Rebecca Montanari, Lalana Kagal, Ora Lassila
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (2007)

The growing diffusion of portable devices enables users to benefit from anytime and anywhere impromptu collaboration. Appropriate policy models that take into account the dynamicity and heterogeneity of the new pervasive collaboration scenario are crucial to ensure secure sharing of information. Collaborating entities cannot be predetermined and resource availability frequently varies, even unpredictably, due to user/device mobility, thus complicating resource access control. Policies cannot be defined based on entity's identities/roles, as in traditional security solutions, or be specified a priori to face any operative run-time condition, and require continuous adjustments to adapt to the current situation. To address these issues this paper advocates the adoption of a semantic context-aware paradigm to policy specification. Context-awareness allows operations on resources to be controlled based on context visibility whereas semantic technologies allow the high-level description and reasoning about context/policies. The paper describes Proteus that, as a key feature, combines these two design guidelines to enable dynamic adaptation of policies depending on context changes. In particular, the paper shows how ontologies and logic programming rules can be used to leverage policy adaptation.
Microarchitecture Sensitive Empirical Models for Compiler Optimizations
Authors: Kapil Vaswani, Matthew J. Thazhuthaveetil, Y. N. Srikant, P. J. Joseph
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (2007)

This paper proposes the use of empirical modeling techniques for building microarchitecture sensitive models for compiler optimizations. The models we build relate program performance to settings of compiler optimization flags, associated heuristics and key microarchitectural parameters. Unlike traditional analytical modeling methods, this relationship is learned entirely from data obtained by measuring performance at a small number of carefully selected compiler/microarchitecture configurations. We evaluate three different learning techniques in this context viz. linear regression, adaptive regression splines and radial basis function networks. We use the generated models to a) predict program performance at arbitrary compiler/microarchitecture configurations, b) quantify the significance of complex interactions between optimizations and the microarchitecture, and c) efficiently search for 'optimal' settings of optimization flags and heuristics for any given microarchitectural configuration. Our evaluation using benchmarks from the SPEC CPU2000 suits suggests that accurate models (\le 5% average error in prediction) can be generated using a reasonable number of simulations. We also find that using compiler settings prescribed by a model-based search can improve program performance by as much as 19% (with an average of 9.5%) over highly optimized binaries.
Lightweight structured text processing
Authors: Robert C. Miller, Brad A. Myers
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (1999)

Text is a popular storage and distribution format for information, partly due to generic text-processing tools like Unix grep and sort. Unfortunately, existing generic tools make assumptions about text format (e.g., each line is a record) that limit their applicability. Custom-built tools are one alternative, but they require substantial time investment and programming expertise. We describe a new approach, lightweight structured text processing, which overcomes these difficulties by enabling users to define text structure interactively and manipulate the structure with generic tools. Our prototype system, LAPIS, is a web browser that can highlight, filter, and sort text regions described by the user. LAPIS has several advantages over other systems: (1) the ability to define custom structure with a simple, intuitive pattern language; (2) interactive specification, showing pattern matches in context and letting users choose the most convenient combination of manual selection and pattern matching; and (3) external parsers for standard text formats. The pattern language in LAPIS, text constraints, describes text structure in high-level terms, with region relationships like before, after, in, and contains. We describe an implementation of text constraints using a novel, compact representation of region sets as collections of rectangles, or region intervals. We also illustrate some examples of applying LAPIS to web pages, text files, and source code.
A highly-scaleable symmetric/asymmetric FIR processor
Authors: Wei-Lung Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1999)

Based on the radix-4 Booth algorithm, we developed a highly-scaleable symmetric/asymmetric finite impulse response (FIR) architecture which comprises preprocessing unit, data latches, configurable connection units, double Booth decoders, coefficient registers, a path control unit, and a post-processing unit. In order to achieve scaleability, the configurable connection units between data latches and the double Booth decoders have been effectively addressed. The precision of filter coefficients is adjustable by using a path control unit. The double Booth decoder with single and double Booth decoding is efficiently implemented. Especially, the proposed architecture only employs data-path controls to accomplish the scaleable operations without changing word lengths and components of data latches and filter taps. A practical FIR processor, which can accommodate dynamic ranges of 8 and 16 bits of input data and filter coefficients was implemented by using the COMPASS 5 V cell library in the TSMC 0.6 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. This processor supports ten different operation modes of asymmetric, symmetric, and anti-symmetric filter coefficients at 64, 63, 32, or 16 taps for various industrial applications.
SPI agility: How to navigate improvement projects: Research Sections
Authors: Ivan Aaen, Anna Börjesson, Lars Mathiassen
Venue: Software Process: Improvement and Practice (2007)

In this study, we argue that today's changing business environment calls for agile Software Process Improvement (SPI) practices. The study combines experiences from 18 SPI projects executed from 1998 to 2002 at Ericsson in Gothenburg with insights from SPI and agility theory. We suggest that agile SPI practices are both effective and flexible; they employ adaptive governance mechanisms at the corporate level; and they combine different tactics on the project level. We identify and compare two different tactics for SPI projects. Inspired by procedural thinking, the first tactic, the supertanker, employs process-push and aims for efficient process development and diffusion. On the basis of adaptive thinking, the second tactic, the motorboat, facilitates practice-pull and aims for adaptive process development and diffusion. We also discuss how agile SPI practices require understanding of the different types of waters in which the two tactics navigate effectively. Copyright &copy; 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fault tolerance in a distributed CHORUS/MiX system
Authors: Sunil Kittur, Douglas Steel, Francois Armand, Jim Lipkis
Venue: Proceedings of the 1996 annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (1996)

Within a distributed system, resources may be shared between nodes. The system should continue to operate even if individual nodes fail due to hardware or software errors. This may result in the loss of resources that were hosted on the failed node, but it may be possible to continue to provide access to some resources by hosting them on another node. This paper describes mechanisms that allow the failover of resources from failed nodes. Failover is currently restricted to disk volumes and file systems. The failover mechanisms maintain the correct semantics at the UNIX system call level for operations from surviving nodes that were in progress at the time of the failure, including non-idempotent operations. Minimal resource and performance overheads are imposed for the normal running case, and in contrast to replication techniques, state is recovered and rebuilt at the time of a failover.
Planning and learning for weakly-coupled distributed agents
Authors: Victor Lesser
Venue:  (2006)

Stochastic planning has gained popularity over classical planning in recent years by offering principled ways to model the uncertainty inherent in many real world applications. In particular, Markov decision process (MDP) based approaches are particularly well suited to problems that involve sequential decision making. Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) are a multi-agent extension of the MDP framework to decentralized decision making. While elegant and expressive, this model has been shown to be intractable. Many real world problems exhibit additional structure that can be leveraged for computational gain. The focus of this thesis is on a class of problems in which the agents are largely independent but may interact by constraining each other's actions. The best-known solution concepts in game theory are that of computing Nash equilibrium and performing strategy elimination. This dissertation addresses both of these solution concepts. First, we show that finding a Nash equilibrium where each agent achieves reward at least k is NP-hard. Then, we present the Multi-Agent Action Elimination (MAAE) algorithm which performs iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We show experimentally that it is able to solve much larger problems than the general purpose algorithm by pruning a large portion of the policy space. In situations where the agent does not have a model of the environment, it has to learn to act with just the reward as feedback. In this dissertation, we explore reinforcement learning based approaches. In particular, we develop the Bound-Based Exploration with Soft Pruning algorithm (BBESP). It is a Q-learning based algorithm that carries over many of the key ideas from our planning algorithm. It uses learned bounds to perform soft pruning of actions as well as focusing an agent's exploration. We show that this approach learns faster than traditional Q-learning on this class of problems.