ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Securing uniqueness of rights e-documents: a deontic process perspective
Authors: Ronald M. Lee, Vu Nguyen, Anastasia Pagnoni
Venue: Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (2008)

We typically think of documents as carrying information. However, certain kinds of documents do more than that: they are not only informative but also performative in that they represent rights. When these documents are in paper form or some other physical medium, holding the document indicates holding the right. Since the document represents a right, a hazard is that by duplicating the document, one may fraudulently claim a new right. For this reason, physical documents that represent rights are both tamper resistant and copy resistant. However, problems arise when such performative documents are converted to electronic form: duplicates are bit for bit perfect and undetectable. Thus, the normal heuristic of uniqueness of the document token as representing the uniqueness of the right no longer holds for performative electronic documents. This is especially challenging when the rights are transferable, as with various financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. This paper presents an analysis, based on deontic logic, about the necessary requirements for electronic documents and their corresponding electronic procedures in order to guarantee the uniqueness of rights and prevention of fraud. A design is sketched, based on a notion we call digital parchment, which offers improved flexibility.
Towards compositional synthesis of evolving systems
Authors: Shiva Nejati, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Marsha Chechik, Sebastian Uchitel, Pamela Zave
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (2008)

Synthesis of system configurations from a given set of features is an important and very challenging problem. This paper makes a step towards this goal by describing an efficient technique for synthesizing pipeline configurations of feature-based systems. We identify and formalize a design pattern that is commonly used in featurebased development. We show that this pattern enables compositional synthesis of feature arrangements. In particular, the pattern allows us to add or remove features from an existing system without having to reconfigure the system from scratch. We describe an implementation of our technique and evaluate its applicability and effectiveness using a set of telecommunication features from AT&T, arranged within the DFC architecture.
Enabling Flexible Execution of Business Processes
Authors: S. Jablonski, M. Faerber, F. Jochaud, M. Götz, M. Igler
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: 2008 Workshops: ADI, AWeSoMe, COMBEK, EI2N, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent + QSI, ORM, PerSys, RDDS, SEMELS, and SWWS (2008)

Product development processes have been introduced and deployed in most engineering companies. Although these processes are generally well documented and understood it is still unclear how they can be supported by process management systems. In this paper we will propose a novel process management concept that better supports flexible cooperation between engineers in product development processes.
Efficient wireless reprogramming through reduced bandwidth usage and opportunistic sleeping
Authors: Rajesh Krishna Panta, Saurabh Bagchi, Issa M. Khalil
Venue: Ad Hoc Networks (2009)

Wireless reprogramming of a sensor network is useful for uploading new code or for changing the functionality of existing code. Reprogramming may be done multiple times during a node's lifetime and therefore a node has to remain receptive to future code updates. Existing reprogramming protocols, including Deluge, achieve this by bundling the reprogramming protocol and the application as one code image which is transferred through the network. The reprogramming protocol being complex, the overall size of the program image that needs to be transferred over the wireless medium increases, thereby increasing the time and energy required for reprogramming a network. We present a protocol called Stream that significantly reduces this bloat by using the facility of having multiple code images on the node. It pre-installs the reprogramming protocol as one image and equips the application program with the ability to listen to new code updates and switch to this image. For a sample application, the increase in size of the application image is 1 page (48 packets of 36bytes each) for Stream and 11 pages for Deluge. Additionally, we design an opportunistic sleeping scheme whereby nodes can sleep during the period when reprogramming has been initiated but has not yet reached the neighborhood of the node. The savings become significant for large networks and for frequent reprogramming. We implement Stream on Mica2 motes and conduct testbed and simulation experiments to compare delay and energy consumption for different network sizes with respect to the state-of-the-art Deluge protocol.
An Operational Transformation Algorithm and Performance Evaluation
Authors: Du Li, Rui Li
Venue: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2008)

Operational transformation (OT) is an optimistic concurrency control method that has been well established in realtime group editors and has drawn significant research attention in the past decade. It is generally believed that the use of OT automatically achieves high local responsiveness in group editors. However, no performance study has been reported previously on OT algorithms to the best of our knowledge. This paper extends a recent OT algorithm and studies its performance. By theoretical analyses and performance experiments, this paper proves that the worst-case execution time of OT only appears in rare cases, and shows that local responsiveness of OT-based group editors in fact depends on a number of factors such as the size of the operation log. The paper also reveals that these two results have general implications on OT algorithms and hence the design of OT-based group editors must pay attention to performance issues.
Multi-dimensional classification of biomedical text
Authors: Hagit Shatkay, Fengxia Pan, Andrey Rzhetsky, W. John Wilbur
Venue: Bioinformatics (2008)

Motivation: Much current research in biomedical text mining is concerned with serving biologists by extracting certain information from scientific text. We note that there is no ‘average biologist’ client; different users have distinct needs. For instance, as noted in past evaluation efforts (BioCreative, TREC, KDD) database curators are often interested in sentences showing experimental evidence and methods. Conversely, lab scientists searching for known information about a protein may seek facts, typically stated with high confidence. Text-mining systems can target specific end-users and become more effective, if the system can first identify text regions rich in the type of scientific content that is of interest to the user, retrieve documents that have many such regions, and focus on fact extraction from these regions. Here, we study the ability to characterize and classify such text automatically. We have recently introduced a multi-dimensional categorization and annotation scheme, developed to be applicable to a wide variety of biomedical documents and scientific statements, while intended to support specific biomedical retrieval and extraction tasks. Results: The annotation scheme was applied to a large corpus in a controlled effort by eight independent annotators, where three individual annotators independently tagged each sentence. We then trained and tested machine learning classifiers to automatically categorize sentence fragments based on the annotation. We discuss here the issues involved in this task, and present an overview of the results. The latter strongly suggest that automatic annotation along most of the dimensions is highly feasible, and that this new framework for scientific sentence categorization is applicable in practice. Contact: shatkay@cs.queensu.ca
A buffer container class hierarchy using Ada 2005
Authors: Brad J. Moore
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM annual international conference on SIGAda annual international conference (2008)

This paper describes the design of a set of multi-purpose containers that implement a buffer abstraction. These buffers feature a multi-layered approach where specialized higher level abstractions can statically select their low level implementation. The lower level implementations include bounded, unbounded, and persistent buffer types, whereas higher level abstractions provide support for various synchronization needs, streaming capabilities, and remote usage capabilities. The design and implementation incorporates some of the new Ada 2005 features including interfaces (limited, protected, and task), object prefix notation, extended returns, and new uses for anonymous access types. In addition, the design utilizes remote interface capabilities, which is the subject of an Ada 2005 AI work item for WG9, the ISO Working group responsible for maintaining the Ada language standard.
Development of Virtual Agents with a Theory of Emotion Regulation
Authors: Tibor Bosse, Frank P. J. de Lange
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02 (2008)

In order to endow virtual agents with more realistic affective behavior, it is important to provide them not only the capability to generate and regulate emotions, but also the ability to reason about the emotion regulation processes of other agents. To this end, this paper introduces a computational model for a Theory of Emotion Regulation (ToER). The model has been implemented and tested using the modeling language LEADSTO. In addition, a virtual environment application has been developed, which is inhabited by agents that are equipped with the model for ToER. A first evaluation indicates that the model indeed enables the agents to show more realistic affective behavior.
The CAVA corpus: synchronised stereoscopic and binaural datasets with head movements
Authors: Elise Arnaud, Heidi Christensen, Yan-Chen Lu, Jon Barker, Vasil Khalidov, Miles Hansard, Bertrand Holveck, Hervé Mathieu, Ramya Narasimha, Elise Taillant, Florence Forbes, Radu Horaud
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (2008)

This paper describes the acquisition and content of a new multi-modal database. Some tools for making use of the data streams are also presented. The Computational Audio-Visual Analysis (CAVA) database is a unique collection of three synchronised data streams obtained from a binaural microphone pair, a stereoscopic camera pair and a head tracking device. All recordings are made from the perspective of a person; i.e. what would a human with natural head movements see and hear in a given environment. The database is intended to facilitate research into humans' ability to optimise their multi-modal sensory input and fills a gap by providing data that enables human centred audio-visual scene analysis. It also enables 3D localisation using either audio, visual, or audio-visual cues. A total of 50 sessions, with varying degrees of visual and auditory complexity, were recorded. These range from seeing and hearing a single speaker moving in and out of field of view, to moving around a 'cocktail party' style situation, mingling and joining different small groups of people chatting.
Skewed redundancy
Authors: Gordon B. Bell, Mikko H. Lipasti
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques (2008)

Technology scaling in integrated circuits has consistently provided dramatic performance improvements in modern microprocessors. However, increasing device counts and decreasing on-chip voltage levels have made transient errors a first-order design constraint that can no longer be ignored. Several proposals have provided fault detection and tolerance through redundantly executing a program on an additional hardware thread or core. While such techniques can provide high fault coverage, they at best provide equivalent performance to the original execution and at worst incur a slowdown due to error checking, contention for shared resources, and synchronization overheads. This work achieves a similar goal of detecting transient errors by redundantly executing a program on an additional processor core, however it speeds up (rather than slows down) program execution compared to the unprotected baseline case. It makes the observation that a small number of instructions are detrimental to overall performance, and selectively skipping them enables one core to advance far ahead of the other to obtain prefetching and large instruction window benefits. We highlight the modest incremental hardware required to support skewed redundancy and demonstrate a speedup of 6%/54% for a collection of integer/floating point benchmarks while still providing 100% error detection coverage within our sphere of replication. Additionally, we show that a third core can further improve performance while adding error recovery capabilities.
Integration of remote sensing and ecosystem modelling techniques to estimate forest net carbon uptake
Authors: F. Maselli, M. Chiesi, L. Fibbi, M. Moriondo
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

Estimates of forest gross primary production (GPP) can be obtained using a parametric model (C-Fix) that combines ground and remotely sensed data. A methodology is presented to convert these GPP estimates into values of net ecosystem exchange (NEE). The methodology is based on the use of a process model (BIOME-BGC) that, after proper calibration, simulates all main functions of forest ecosystems at the climax condition. The estimated photosynthesis and respirations are transformed into net carbon fluxes of actual forests by using a simplified approach that relies on the difference between actual and potential stand biomass. The methodology was applied to eight forest sites in Italy where flux measurements were available and GPP estimates had been previously produced. The comparison of the obtained NEE estimates to the ground data indicates the potential of the approach and the prospects for future investigation.
Two-Character Motion Control: Challenge and Promise
Authors: Sung Yong Shin
Venue: Motion in Games: First International Workshop, MIG 2008, Utrecht, The Netherlands, June 14-17, 2008. Revised Papers (2008)

The problem of two-character motion control is important, but has drawn limited attention from computer animation research community. This paper is intended to highlight this problem to the research community to attract more attention. We explore research issues in two-character motion control and discuss our experiences with emphasis on applications such as coupled dancing and kickboxing.
Scalable and topology-aware reconciliation on P2P networks
Authors: Vidal Martins, Esther Pacitti, Manal El Dick, Ricardo Jimenez-Peris
Venue: Distributed and Parallel Databases (2008)

Collaborative applications are characterized by high levels of data sharing. Optimistic replication has been suggested as a mechanism to enable highly concurrent access to the shared data, whilst providing full application-defined consistency guarantees. Nowadays, there are a growing number of emerging cooperative applications adequate for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. However, to enable the deployment of such applications in P2P networks, it is required a mechanism to deal with their high data sharing in dynamic, scalable and available way. Previous work on optimistic replication has mainly concentrated on centralized systems. Centralized approaches are inappropriate for a P2P setting due to their limited availability and vulnerability to failures and partitions from the network. In this paper, we focus on the design of a reconciliation algorithm designed to be deployed in large scale cooperative applications, such as P2P Wiki. The main contribution of this paper is a distributed reconciliation algorithm designed for P2P networks (P2P-reconciler). Other important contributions are: a basic cost model for computing communication costs in a DHT overlay network; a strategy for computing the cost of each reconciliation step taking into account the cost model; and an algorithm that dynamically selects the best nodes for each reconciliation step. Furthermore, since P2P networks are built independently of the underlying topology, which may cause high latencies and large overheads degrading performance, we also propose a topology-aware variant of our P2P-reconciler algorithm and show the important gains on using it. Our P2P-reconciler solution enables high levels of concurrency thanks to semantic reconciliation and yields high availability, excellent scalability, with acceptable performance and limited overhead.
Cooperative Data Management Services Based on Accountable Contract
Authors: Chen Wang, Surya Nepal, Shiping Chen, John Zic
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

Data management services, such as Amazon S3 and SimpleDB, become increasingly popular for businesses to "outsource" data management functionalities. However, to benefit from such services, subscribing businesses and data management service providers must trust each other for their data and operations. One cornerstone for establishing such mutual trust is accountability support, which enables misbehavior detections so that a service provider and consumer can independently validate data integrity and agreed performance metrics. Currently, the lack of accountability support limits the expansion of data management services. The paper proposes a new service model for building accountable data management services where service providers and consumers can use witnesses to audit their behaviors. As such accountability support comes at the cost of overall data service performance, the paper particularly tackles the challenge on how to balance data service performance and accountability.
Operational land cover change detection using change vector analysis
Authors: C. C. Kontoes
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

This research study introduces the use of a change detection and classification algorithm that relies on the change vector analysis (CVA) method. Its implementation aims to ensure adequate response to operational production needs and allow optimized data processing over extended and environmentally complex areas. Automatic change class labelling relies on the use of a (3n+2)-dimensional feature space, where n denotes the number of sensor bands. Such enhanced feature space allows for a finer and more accurate definition of change classes of the 'from-to' type. Moreover, and to efficiently address the problem of change area overestimation, the proposed method takes into account specific evidence derived from the pixel's geographic neighbourhood, the latter defined as a 3×3 pixel kernel. The performance of this integrated algorithmic approach has been tested and validated in the framework of the CORINE Land Cover-Greece 2000 and the ESA/GSE Forest Monitoring projects in three test sites located in the outskirts of the city of Ptolemais, Thasos island and the suburbs of Athens in Greece. Its implementation in such highly fragmented and dynamically changing landscape environments has resulted in qualified and accurate land cover change maps, achieving an overall level of classification accuracy of 88-96%. Compared to visual image interpretation, the method requires half the effort. In conclusion, the proposed method has proved effective and can be recommended for use in the framework of operational projects.
Dynamic composition and optimization of Web services
Authors: Liangzhao Zeng, Anne H. Ngu, Boualem Benatallah, Rodion Podorozhny, Hui Lei
Venue: Distributed and Parallel Databases (2008)

Process-based composition of Web services has recently gained significant momentum for the implementation of inter-organizational business collaborations. In this approach, individual Web services are choreographed into composite Web services whose integration logics are expressed as composition schema. In this paper, we present a goal-directed composition framework to support on-demand business processes. Composition schemas are generated incrementally by a rule inference mechanism based on a set of domain-specific business rules enriched with contextual information. In situations where multiple composition schemas can achieve the same goal, we must first select the best composition schema, wherein the best schema is selected based on the combination of its estimated execution quality and schema quality. By coupling the dynamic schema creation and quality-driven selection strategy in one single framework, we ensure that the generated composite service comply with business rules when being adapted and optimized.
Patterning of narrow porous SiOCH trenches using a TiN hard mask
Authors: M. Darnon, T. Chevolleau, D. Eon, R. Bouyssou, B. Pelissier, L. Vallier, O. Joubert, N. Posseme, T. David, F. Bailly, J. Torres
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2008)

For the next technological generations of integrated circuits, the traditional challenges faced by etch plasmas (profile control, selectivity, critical dimensions, uniformity, defects, ...) become more and more difficult, intensified by the use of new materials, the limitations of lithography, and the recent introduction of new device structures and integration schemes. Particularly in the field of the interconnect fabrication, where dual-damascene patterning is performed by etching trenches and vias in porous low-k dielectrics, the main challenges are in controlling the profile of the etched structures, minimizing plasma-induced damage, and controlling the impact of various types of etch stops and hard mask materials. Metallic hard masks can help thanks to their high selectivity toward low-k materials, and by avoiding low-k exposure to potentially degrading ashing plasmas. In this paper, we will present some key issues related to the patterning of narrow porous SiOCH trenches with a metallic (TiN) hard mask. Narrow trenches (down to 40 nm width) can be opened into TiN with a critical dimensions bias (around 10 nm) attributed to carbon and silicon containing deposits on the photoresist and TiN sidewalls during the etching. Porous SiOCH etching using a TiN hard mask instead of the conventional SiO"2 hard mask may lead to severe profile distortions, attributed to TiF"x compounds which settle on the trenches sidewalls. A chuck temperature of 60^oC and fluorine-rich plasmas are required to minimize those distortions. An etching process leading to almost straight porous SiOCH profiles presenting a slight bow has been developed. However a wiggling phenomenon has been evidenced for the etching of narrow and deep trenches. This phenomenon is attributed to the highly compressive residual stress in the TiN hard mask, which is released when the dielectric is not mechanically strong enough to withstand it.