ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Bandwidth extension for mixed asynchronous synchronous speech transmission
Authors: Jürgen Freudenberger
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS international conference on Signal processing, robotics and automation (2009)

Increasing the bandwidth of speech signals from the classical telephone bandwidth of 300-3400 Hz to the wider bandwidth of 50-7000 Hz results in increased intelligibility and naturalness. This work presents a low complexity and low latency bandwidth extension approach for speech coding that is suitable for mixed asynchronous and synchronous transmission. At the encoder, the speech signal is sampled at a rate of 16 kHz and decomposed into two subbands of equal bandwidth. The lower subband signal is transmitted using a synchronous connection oriented link. The signal of the higher subband is analyzed resulting in signal parameters that are transmitted asynchronously. This technique can be used with communication links that provide simultaneous data and narrow band speech transmission as for example with Bluetooth.
ORIENT: interactive agents for stage-based role-play
Authors: Ruth Aylett, Michael Kriegel, Mei Yii Lim, Joao Dias, Karin Leichtenstern, Wan Ching Ho, Paola Rizzo
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

We present a demonstration of the intelligent agent-based system ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology). We summarise the application domain: education for inter-cultural empathy; the technology used and the innovations this involves; and finally interaction with ORIENT.
WordPress For Dummies
Authors: Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Venue:  (2007)

Are you a wannabe blogger? A seasoned pro migrating your blog to WordPress? Looking to do more cool stuff with your existing WordPress blog? Then this fun guide is for you! WordPress for Dummies is a veritable smorgasbord of WordPress information, ideas, tools, resources, and instruction on everything you need to create and maintain your dream blog. Unlike other blog hosts, WordPress gives you the ability to create a blog that is tailored to your own tastes and needs. Sure, the codes, tags, and terminology can seem a little intimidating at first, but WordPress for Dummies breaks it all down to show you just how intuitive, friendly, and extensible the software really is. This easy-to-follow guide shows you how to: Sign up for a free WordPress account Set up and use a hosted blog with WordPress.com Install and set up the WordPress.Org and WordPress.MU software for single- and multi-user versions Find great themes, plugins, and consultants that will help you achieve JUST the kind of blog you want Use tags to work with WordPress templates Combat challenges with comments, trackback spam, and splogs Add special technologies to your blog, such as RSS feed, podcasting, vlogging, and photoblogging Find online support, tips, and resources for WordPress software Whether you want to keep family and friends updated on your latest adventures, post pictures of your new puppy, or communicate your passion with millions of readers worldwide, WordPress for Dummies is your passport to creating the kind of blog that will keep your visitors coming back for 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
On-line genetic algorithm-based fuzzy-neural sliding mode controller using improved adaptive bound reduced-form genetic algorithm
Authors: Ping-Zong Lin, Wei-Yen Wang, Tsu-Tian Lee, Chi-Hsu Wang
Venue: International Journal of Systems Science (2009)

In this article, a novel on-line genetic algorithm-based fuzzy-neural sliding mode controller trained by an improved adaptive bound reduced-form genetic algorithm is developed to guarantee robust stability and good tracking performance for a robot manipulator with uncertainties and external disturbances. A general sliding manifold, which can be non-linear or time varying, is used to construct a sliding surface and reduce control law chattering. In this article, the sliding surface is used to derive a genetic algorithm-based fuzzy-neural sliding mode controller. To identify structured system dynamics, a B-spline membership function fuzzy-neural network, which is trained by the improved genetic algorithm, is used to approximate the regressor of the robot manipulator. The sliding mode control with a general sliding surface plays the role of a compensator when the fuzzy-neural network does not approximate the dynamics regressor of the robot manipulator well in the transient period. The adjustable parameters of the fuzzy-neural network are tuned by the improved genetic algorithm, which, with the use of the sequential-search-based crossover point method and the single gene crossover, converges quickly to near-optimal parameter values. Simulation results show that the proposed genetic algorithm-based fuzzy-neural sliding mode controller is effective and yields superior tracking performance for robot manipulators.
Adobe Type Library Reference Book, 3rd edition
Venue:  (2007)

Choosing the right font can be one of the hardest parts of your job as a digital designerthere are literally thousands to choose from. One of the largest and most respected collections of high-quality fonts is the Adobe Type Library, now available entirely in the cross-platform OpenType format, which promises to make font incompatibilities a thing of the past. Any designer who has struggled to find just the right typeface for a project will find this comprehensive reference an indispensable guide to Adobes vast selection of over 2,200 typefaces.Organized both alphabetically and by style, the newly revised and updatedAdobe Type Library Reference Book, Third Edition provides:Specimen pages displaying every font in Adobes enormous collection, including 60 new typefacesTypefaces from internationally renowned foundries and award-winning type designersDesign inspiration and expert advice on type selectionAn expanded section on the OpenType format to help you make the most of its expanded character set and layout capabilities Explanations and illustrations of the distinguishing characteristics of different type stylesfrom a graceful Garalde Oldstyle to Adobes new Opticalsas well as ornaments and symbolsA chart showing the Adobe Western 2 character set, including the right keyboard combinations to access different charactersListings for 31 Japanese fonts from Adobe 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
Conflict Management in Design Process: Focus on Changes Impact
Authors: K. Grebici, M. -Z. Ouertani, E. Blanco, L. Gzara-Yesilbas, D. Rieu
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Leading the Web in Concurrent Engineering: Next Generation Concurrent Engineering (2006)

Design has increasingly become a collaborative endeavour carried out by multiple actors with diverse kinds of expertise. A critical element of collaborative design is to manage conflict, emerging due to the multi-actors interaction, and particularly the impacts once the conflict is resolved. Indeed, the conflict resolution comes up with a solution which often implies modifications on the product and the process organisation. This paper deals with this problematic of changes impact on conflict management process. It quantifies key issues with regards to concurrent engineering that enables us to better manage the design process. Strategies to overlap coupled activities are proposed based on the dependencies between the handled data during the design process.
Haptical exploration of an unsteady flow
Authors: Bob Menelas, Mehdi Ammi, Luc Pastur, Patrick Bourdot
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

This paper investigates a human-centered approach for the exploration of large data sets resulting from CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations. In a VR (Virtual Reality) immersive environment we propose to couple haptic feedbacks with visual rendering. The proposed solution aims at identifying critical points of an unsteady fluid flow without resorting to any topology analysis such as eigen analysis of the vector field Jacobian. In a first step, while exploring the data volume, a vibration alerts the user on the presence of critical points in the local volume surrounding the probe position. In a second step, critical point properties are emphasized by means of a visuo-haptic feedback. A set of experiments confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Thanks to the combination of haptic feedbacks with the visual materialization of critical points and streamlines, users were able to easily localize, analyze and focus on specific critical points, selected by experts as representative of the flow topology.
Consensus answers for queries over probabilistic databases
Authors: Jian Li, Amol Deshpande
Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-eighth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems (2009)

We address the problem of finding a "best" deterministic query answer to a query over a probabilistic database. For this purpose, we propose the notion of a consensus world (or a consensus answer) which is a deterministic world (answer) that minimizes the expected distance to the possible worlds (answers). This problem can be seen as a generalization of the well-studied inconsistent information aggregation problems (e.g. rank aggregation) to probabilistic databases. We consider this problem for various types of queries including SPJ queries, Top-k ranking queries, group-by aggregate queries, and clustering. For different distance metrics, we obtain polynomial time optimal or approximation algorithms for computing the consensus answers (or prove NP-hardness). Most of our results are for a general probabilistic database model, called and/xor tree model, which significantly generalizes previous probabilistic database models like x-tuples and block-independent disjoint models, and is of independent interest.
Developing programming skills by using interactive learning objects
Authors: Jorge A. Villalobos, Nadya A. Calderon, Camilo H. Jiménez
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (2009)

After several years of teaching programming using an active learning approach, we present our Interactive Learning Objects (ILOs) as one of the components that reinforce our pedagogical model, by supporting the generation of high-level programming skills. In this paper, we suggest a multi-dimension taxonomy for ILOs and present the experimentation developed to evaluate the impact of these objects within our CS courses
A boundary element model for investigating the effects of eye tumor on the temperature distribution inside the human eye
Authors: E. H. Ooi, W. T. Ang, E. Y. K. Ng
Venue: Computers in Biology and Medicine (2009)

A three-dimensional boundary element model of the human eye is developed to investigate the thermal effects of eye tumor on the ocular temperature distribution. The human eye is modeled as comprising several regions which have different thermal properties. The tumor is one of these regions. The thermal effects of the tumor are simulated by taking it to have a very high metabolic heat generation and blood perfusion rate. Inside the tumor, the steady state temperature is governed by the Pennes bioheat equation. Elsewhere, in normal tissues of the eye, the temperature satisfies the Laplace's equation. To compute the temperature on the corneal surface, the surface boundary of each region is divided into triangular elements.
Interconnect agnostic checkpoint/restart in open MPI
Authors: Joshua Hursey, Timothy I. Mattox, Andrew Lumsdaine
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th ACM international symposium on High performance distributed computing (2009)

Long running High Performance Computing (HPC) applications at scale must be able to tolerate inevitable faults if they are to harness current and future HPC systems. Message Passing Interface (MPI) level transparent checkpoint/restart fault tolerance is an appealing option to HPC application developers that do not wish to restructure their code. Historically, MPI implementations that provided this option have struggled to provide a full range of interconnect support, especially shared memory support. This paper presents a new approach for implementing checkpoint/restart coordination algorithms that allows the MPI implementation of checkpoint/restart to be interconnect agnostic. This approach allows an application to be checkpointed on one set of interconnects (e.g., InfiniBand and shared memory) and be restarted with a different set of interconnects (e.g., Myrinet and shared memory or Ethernet). By separating the network interconnect details from the checkpoint/restart coordination algorithm we allow the HPC application to respond to changes in the cluster environment such as interconnect unavailability due to switch failure, re-load balance on an existing machine, or migrate to a different machine with a different set of interconnects. We present results characterizing the performance impact of this approach on HPC applications.
The ARC Programming Model -- Language Constructs for Coordination
Authors: Kevin Marth, Shangping Ren
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2009)

The ARC (Actor, Role, Coordinator) model addresses the coordination requirements of open, distributed applications deployed in dynamic environments. This paper introduces the ARC programming model and the ARC-PL programming language, including the syntax and informal semantics of new language constructs designed to enable modular coordination in the ARC model. Several well-known problems are solved to illustrate the expressiveness and modularity of the ARC programming model.
Solving Fuzzy PERT Using Gradual Real Numbers
Authors: Jérôme Fortin, Didier Dubois
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on STAIRS 2006: Proceedings of the Third Starting AI Researchers' Symposium (2006)

From a set of a partially ordered tasks, one goal of the project scheduling problem is to compute earliest starting dates, latest starting dates and floats of the different tasks, and to identify critical tasks. When durations of tasks are not precisely known, the problem is much trickier. Recently we provided polynomial algorithms to compute upper bound of activity floats in the interval-valued model. The aim of this paper is to extend those new algorithms to the fuzzy-valued problem. To this end, we use the new notion of gradual numbers [7], that represents soft boundaries of a fuzzy interval. We show that algorithms in the interval--valued case can be adapted to fuzzy intervals considering them as crisp intervals of gradual numbers.
Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimizer with Mutation
Authors: Ahmed Ali Abdala Esmin, Germano Lambert-Torres
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Advances in Logic Based Intelligent Systems: Selected Papers of LAPTEC 2005 (2005)

This paper presents a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimizers combining the idea of the particle swarm with concepts from Evolutionary Algorithms. The hybrid Particle Swarm Optimizers with Mutation (HPSOM) combine the traditional velocity and position update rules with the idea of numerical mutation. This model is tested and compared with the standard PSO on unimodal and multimodal functions. This is done to illustrate that PSOs with mutation operation have the potential to achieve faster convergence and the potential to find a better solution. The objective of this paper is to describe the HPSOM model and to test their potential and competetiveness on function optimization.
How are new citation-based journal indicators adding to the bibliometric toolbox?
Authors: Loet Leydesdorff
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2009)

The launching of Scopus and Google Scholar, and methodological developments in social-network analysis have made many more indicators for evaluating journals available than the traditional impact factor, cited half-life, and immediacy index of the ISI. In this study, these new indicators are compared with one another and with the older ones. Do the various indicators measure new dimensions of the citation networks, or are they highly correlated among themselves? Are they robust and relatively stable over time? Two main dimensions are distinguished&mdash;size and impact&mdash;which together shape influence. The h-index combines the two dimensions and can also be considered as an indicator of reach (like Indegree). PageRank is mainly an indicator of size, but has important interactions with centrality measures. The Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) indicator provides an alternative to the journal impact factor, but the computation is less easy. &copy; 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The IT Girl's Guide to Becoming a Web Goddess
Authors: Camille McCue
Venue:  (2007)

The IT Girls Guides are the antidote to blah technical references that can poison womens enthusiasm for technology topics.Humorous expository text mixed with detailed exercises, real-world examples, relevant stories, and FAQs capitalizes on the initial attraction to draw in even casual readers. As the first-ever woman-focused technical reference, IT Girls Guides incorporate the latest thinking about how women learn. The emphasis on authentic author voice invites empathy and encourages readers to see themselves in the text. Such self-identification is reinforced and enhanced by the presentation of other womens stories, challenges, and successes through engaging chapter elements and representations of real women. This abundance of personality provides multiple entry points for readers and addresses the audiences various approaches to learning. Like the women it aims to serve, the IT Girls Guides series multitasks through the subject matter, covers lots of ground, and avoids the pitfall of boredom. In three distinct parts, The It Girl's Guide to Becoming a Web Goddess helps readers Learn the technology skills like CSS and HTML needed to create a website and is organized by type of site (family, small business, personal, medium business), Live with the technology (maintain the site, add features such as shopping cart functionality, add photos and using web analytics tools to analyze traffic and other site stats), and Love their new hobby:creating their own branded Web site, personalizing the site, and making the site really sing with eye-caching design. 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
Curvature-based anisotropic geodesic distance computation for&#x00a0; parametric and implicit surfaces
Authors: Joon-Kyung Seong, Won-Ki Jeong, Elaine Cohen
Venue: The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics (2009)

Distribution of geometric features varies with direction, including, for example, normal curvature. In this paper, this characteristic of shape is used to define a new anisotropic geodesic (AG) distance for both parametric and implicit surfaces. Local distance (LD) from a point is defined as a function of both the point and a unit tangent plane directions, and a total distance is defined as an integral of that local distance. The AG distance between points on the surface is the minimum total distance between them. The path between the points that attains the minimum is called the anisotropic geodesic path. Minimization of total distance to attain the AG distance is performed by associating the LD function with a tensor speed function that controls wave propagation in the convex Hamilton&#x2013;Jacobi (H&#x2013;J) equation solver. We present new distance metrics for both parametric and implicit surfaces based on the curvature tensor. In order to solve for the implicit AG, a bounded 3D H&#x2013;J equation solver was developed. We present a second metric for the AG distance, a difference curvature tensor, for parametric surfaces. Some properties of both new AG distances are presented, including parameterization invariance. This AG path differs from the usual geodesic in that minimal path, i.e., lowest cost path, roughly speaking, minimizes an integral of curvature along the curve. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed AG distances as shape discriminators is demonstrated in several applications, including surface segmentation and partial shape matching.
Face recognition in color images using major color component and topological relations of facial features
Authors: Kyunghwan Baek, Hernsoo Hahn
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS international conference on Computational intelligence, man-machine systems and cybernetics (2008)

In this paper, a real time face recognition for color image sequences is presented. The proposed algorithm applies three stages: a head region is estimated by the DCFR(Detection of Candidate for Face Regions) scheme in the first stage, the face region is searched inside the head region using the MCC(major color component) in the second stage and its faceness is tested by the TRFF (Topological Relations of Facial Features) scheme in the third stage. The MCC scheme detects the face region using the features of a face region with reference to the brightness and the lighting environment and the TRFF scheme considers the topological features of a global face region. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm shows the performance superior to the other methods' in recognition of faces in color image.
Within epsilon of optimal play in the cultaptation social learning game
Authors: Ryan Carr, Eric Raboin, Austin Parker, Dana Nau
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

Social learning, in which members of a society learn by observing the behavior of others, is an important foundation for human culture, and is observed in many other species as well. It seems natural to assume that social learning evolved due to the inherent superiority of copying others' success rather than learning on one's own via trial-and-error innovation. However, there has also been substantial work questioning this intuition [3, 5, 1, 6, 4]. For example, blindly copying information from others is not useful if the information is wrong---or if it once was right but has since become outdated. Under what conditions does social learning outperform trial-and-error learning, and what kinds of social-learning strategies are likely to perform well?