ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An Ensemble Approach to Robust Biometrics Fusion
Authors: Costin Barbu, Raja Iqbal, Jing Peng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (2006)

A clever information fusion algorithm is a key component in designing a robust multimodal biometrics algorithm. We present a novel information fusion approach that can be a very useful tool for multimodal biometrics learning. The proposed technique is a multiple view generalization of AdaBoost in the sense that weak learners from various information sources are selected in each iteration based on lowest weighted error rate. Weak learners trained on individual views in each iteration rectify the bias introduced by learners in preceding iterations resulting in a self regularizing behavior. We compare the classification performance of proposed technique with recent classifier fusion strategies in various domains such as face detection, gender classification and texture classification.
Performance Analysis of Color Image Watermarking Schemes Using Perceptually Redundant Signal Spaces
Authors: Chun-Hsien Chou, Kuo-Cheng Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

In this paper, the performance analysis of color image watermarking schemes employing perceptually redundant signal spaces is undertaken. A watermarking scheme that searches for perceptually redundant signal space for embedding transparent watermarks in color images is presented. The search is performed in the wavelet domain of the host color image. A color visual model based on the uniform color metric of the CIEDE2000 color difference equation is used to measure the perceptual redundancy inherent in each wavelet coefficient of various color spaces. Binary watermark signals are repeatedly embedded in qualified wavelet coefficients by the way of quantization index modulation. The watermarking schemes using the uniform and non-uniform color spaces for hiding watermarks are conducted to compare the robustness of the embedded watermark. Experimental results of the analysis show that the non-uniform color space can provide a certain part of color signals a large amount of perceptual redundancy for hiding high-strength watermark signals. The watermark embedded in the non-uniform space is always robust than that embedded in the uniform space.
On some properties of solutions of the biharmonic equation
Authors: Z. AbdulHadi, Y. Abu Muhanna, S. Khuri
Venue: Applied Mathematics and Computation (2006)

In the present paper, the properties of the linear complex operator L(f) = Zfz - Z-fz-, which is defined on the class of complex-valued C1 functions in the plane, are investigated. It is shown that harmonicity and biharmonicity are invariant under the linear operatorL. Results concerning starlikeness and convexity of biharmonic functions versus the corresponding harmonic functions are considered. The operator L can be manipulated to express the conditions in the definitions of starlikeness and convexity in a convenient way.
Collaborative Design: From Concept to Application
Authors: Frederic Danesi, Nicolas Gardan, Yvon Gardan
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Geometric Modeling and Imaging: New Trends (2006)

Collaborative work invests product design process to integrate as soon as possible all the partners and all necessary information in order to improve quality, delay and costs. Design is then defined as collaborative and can be optimized by allowing upstream integration of data, resources and knowledge. In this context. CAD model becomes a digital mock-up (DMU) which is at the centre of communication and interaction between all the actors ofthe project. Thus, collaborative work software and hardware solutions come out to manage data, design process, and by extension the entire product lifecycle. We believe then in a PLM solution (Produd Lifecycle Management) that integrates product, process and resources, and acting as a framework for an eflcient collaboration. Unfortunately only the DMU is concretizedfrom this ideal. Moreover, the tools are fm @om being operational, through lack of methodology, and the DMU is only wed as a basis for data conference. Actual collaborative design is reduced to asynchronous data exchanges through PDM, even if some people prefr to speak about "sharing" since the product is a mutual creation However, collaborative design has to allow cooperative work even in the early stages of design, despite of opposition between sharing and properties. The scope of this paper is to propose a state-of-the-art in the field of collaborative work applied to product design. We then show how actual tools, from CAD/CAM to PLM, can be wed in a case shuty of a prime manufacturer and subcontractor codesign. We end by introducing a working methodology to succeed in collaborative design we and implementation.
Semantic Web Infrastructure Using DataPile
Authors: Jakub Yaghob, Filip Zavoral
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (2006)

Years of research and development of technologies and tools do not lead to expected semantic web widespread. We consider practical nonexistence of an infrastructure for the semantic web operation as one of the main reasons of that status. In our paper we describe a proposal of such infrastructure based on the DataPile technology and relevant developed tools and their integration with web search engines and other tools.
Simulating air taxi networks
Authors: Philippe A. Bonnefoy
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

The U.S. air transportation industry is about to experience the emergence of on-demand air taxi networks enabled by a new generation of Very Light Jets (VLJs). These new networks are unique in many ways and the top down design approach of air taxi enterprises generates challenging and complex questions. Simulation was found to be an essential technique for understanding, analyzing and evaluating the complex behavior of air taxi networks.The Air Taxi Network Simulator is a fast-time simulator that replicates the operations of fleets of air taxi aircraft over a network of hundreds of airports. Its capabilities include demand modeling, trip generation, aircraft routing and pilot assignment, unscheduled maintenance events with recovery mechanisms, etc. It provides key performance metrics that enable decision makers to test and evaluate various strategic and tactical scenarios.
On the complexity of computing Kostka numbers and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients
Authors: Hariharan Narayanan
Venue: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics: An International Journal (2006)

Kostka numbers and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients appear in combinatorics and representation theory. Interest in their computation stems from the fact that they are present in quantum mechanical computations since Wigner [15]. In recent times, there have been a number of algorithms proposed to perform this task [1---3, 11, 12]. The issue of their computational complexity has received at-tention in the past, and was raised recently by E. Rassart in [11]. We prove that the problem of computing either quantity is #P-complete. Thus, unless P = NP, which is widely disbelieved, there do not exist efficient algorithms that compute these numbers.
Ultrasound-Specific Segmentation via Decorrelation and Statistical Region-Based Active Contours
Authors: Greg Slabaugh, Gozde Unal, Tong Fang, Michael Wels
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 1 (2006)

Segmentation of ultrasound images is often a very challenging task due to speckle noise that contaminates the image. It is well known that speckle noise exhibits an asymmetric distribution as well as significant spatial correlation. Since these attributes can be difficult to model, many previous ultrasound segmentation methods oversimplify the problem by assuming that the noise is white and/or Gaussian, resulting in generic approaches that are actually more suitable to MR and X-ray segmentation than ultrasound. Unlike these methods, in this paper we present an ultrasound-specific segmentation approach that first decorrelates the image, and then performs segmentation on the whitened result using statistical region-based active contours. In particular, we design a gradient ascent flow that evolves the active contours to maximize a log likelihood functional based on the Fisher-Tippett distribution. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
XML Agents Technology for Building Collaborative Applications
Authors: Weichang Du, Hui Li
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (2006)

This paper describes an XML based agents technology for building web services based collaborative applications. The technology consists of XML Agents (XAs), XML Agent Hosts, and XML based Agent Communication Language (XACL). The XML based XAs and XACL messages are neutral to particular agent systems and programming languages. The XML Agent Hosts are implemented using Web Services technology. The hosts provide services to XML agents and agent communications that are represented as Web service requests, and provide runtime environments for performing visiting agents' behaviors that are implemented in multiple programming languages. Collaborative applications can be built using two types of agent collaborations, agent communications through XACL and agent visiting. XAs reside in different hosts can collaborate each other be exchanging XACL messages. Also XAs can "meet" face to face in a host supported by XAs' mobility. Mobile XAs support more dynamic collaborations by their dynamic behaviors with different collaboration partners in different hosts.
A k-hop Clustering Protocol for Dense Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
Authors: Giacomo Angione, Paolo Bellavista, Antonio Corradi, Eugenio Magistretti
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International ConferenceWorkshops on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

Dense Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET), i.e., geographical areas with relatively high and almost constant density of mobile terminals communicating in ad-hoc mode (such as in airport terminals, shopping malls, and university campuses) are becoming deployment scenarios of growing and growing commercial interest. The effective determination of k-hop clusters in MANET is crucial to efficiently support many relevant tasks, e.g., packet routing, and has recently started to be investigated. The paper claims that the assumption of dense MANET permits to propose novel k-hop clustering solutions that outperform existing ones in terms of both effectiveness and limited overhead. In particular, the paper presents an innovative k-clustering protocol, based on circle covering, and quantitatively evaluates its performance when adopting different decentralized heuristics. The proposed protocol, coupled with original heuristics considering the positions of neighbor cluster-heads, has demonstrated to achieve better performance than other solutions in the literature with a significantly lower message overhead.
Neural Correlates of Syntactic Ambiguity in Sentence Comprehension for Low and High Span Readers
Authors: Christian J. Fiebach, Sandra H. Vos, Angela D. Friederici
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004)

Syntactically ambiguous sentences have been found to be difficult to process, in particular, for individuals with low working memory capacity. The current study used fMRI to investigate the neural basis of this effect in the processing of written sentences. Participants with high and low working memory capacity read sentences with either a short or long region of temporary syntactic ambiguity while being scanned. A distributed left-dominant network in the peri-sylvian region was identified to support sentence processing in the critical region of the sentence. Within this network, only the superior portion of Broca's area (BA 44) and a parietal region showed an activation increase as a function of the length of the syntactically ambiguous region in the sentence. Furthermore, it was only the BA 44 region that exhibited an interaction of working memory span, length of the syntactic ambiguity, and sentence complexity. In this area, the activation increase for syntactically more complex sentences became only significant under longer regions of ambiguity, and for low span readers only. This finding suggests that neural activity in BA 44 increases during sentence comprehension when processing demands increase, be it due to syntactic processing demands or by an interaction with the individually available working memory capacity.
Consistency Checking of UML Dynamic Models Based on Petri Net Techniques
Authors: Shuzhen Yao, Sol M. Shatz
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computing (2006)

To aid the development of high quality software applications, we present an approach for consistency checking of UML dynamic models based on Petri Net techniques. ECPN, an Extended Colored Petri Net, is used to formally describe state transitions of individual objects and interactions among objects, and is therefore capable of verifying the consistency of the models based on Petri Net theory. In this work, we consider UML sequence diagrams and statecharts. The approach begins with a flattening strategy for UML dynamic models and then discusses translation of statecharts with composite states to an ECPN notation. The coverability graph is used to drive the consistency checking process. The paper discusses all phases of the approach and illustrates the concept by an example.
Estimating Intrinsic Component Images using Non-Linear Regression
Authors: Marshall F. Tappen, Edward H. Adelson, William T. Freeman
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

Images can be represented as the composition of multiple intrinsic component images, such as shading, albedo, and noise images. In this paper, we present a method for estimating intrinsic component images from a single image, which we apply to the problems of estimating shading and albedo images and image denoising. Our method is based on learning estimators that predict filtered versions of the desired image. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require unnatural discretizations of the problem. We also demonstrate how to learn a weighting function that properly weights the local estimates when constructing the estimated image. For shading estimation, we introduce a new training set of real-world images. The accuracy of our method is measured both qualitatively and quantitatively, showing better performance on the shading/albedo separation problem than previous approaches. The performance on denoising is competitive with the current state of the art.
ReMarkables: A Web-Based Research Collaboration Support System Using Social Bookmarking Tools
Authors: Takashi Ishikawa, Piyanuch Klaisubun, Masahiro Honma, Zhengyu Qian
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (2006)

The paper describes design and implementation of a web-based Research Collaboration Support System (RCSS) using social bookmarking tools for scientific research communities. A key feature of the developed system ReMarkables is that it provides topic bookmarks function to build research communities in which the members can share bookmarks with specific tags and communicate with each other using mailing list and wiki pages associated with a topic bookmark list. Also, the system provides topic recommender function to promote the research collaboration using the topic bookmark list. The system is implemented as an extension of Connotea social bookmarking tools as open source software.
Information-theoretic analysis of steganalysis in real images
Authors: Oleksiy Koval, Svyatoslav Voloshynovskiy, Taras Holotyak, Thierry Pun
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Multimedia and security (2006)

In this paper we consider the problem of performance improvement of non-blind statistical steganalysis of additive steganography in real images. The proposed approach differs from the existing solutions in two main aspects:(a) a locally non-stationary Gaussian model is introduced via source splitting to represent the statistics of the cover image and (b)the detection of the hidden information is performed not from all but from those channels that allow to perform it with the required accuracy. We analyze the theoretically attainable bounds in such a framework and compare them to the corresponding limits of the existing state-of-the-art frameworks. The performed analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach.
Process-Based Design Verification for Systems Involving Shared Resources
Authors: K. S. Cheung, K. O. Chow
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Services Computing (2006)

In system synthesis, one need to derive from a given set of processes a system design which is correct in the sense that the system is well-behaved (that is, live, bounded and reversible). This is especially important for shared-resource systems, in which erroneous situations such as deadlock and capacity overflow are easily induced because of the sharing of common resources among different asynchronous processes. In this paper, a process-based method is proposed for verifying the well-behavedness of a system. The method can be performed at an early stage of system development, where functional requirements are elicited and interpreted as processes. By specifying the given processes as augmented marked graphs, we perform stepwise synthesis of these augmented marked graphs through the fusion of their common places which denote the shared resources. Liveness, boundedness and reversibility can be effectively checked by making use of the special properties of augmented marked graphs.
Control algorithms for observation systems
Authors: David Hung-Chang Du
Venue:  (2006)

This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part involves continuous multimedia streams such as those produced by MAST (Multi Axial Sub-assemblage Testing) experiments, which are characterized by well-defined temporal relationships between subsequent media units (MUs). The information present in these streams can only be presented correctly when these time-dependent relationships are maintained during presentation time. Even if these relationships change during transportation (e.g. due to network delays), they need to be reconstructed at the client (sink) before play out. Whereas most previous work addresses synchronization at the application level by modifying the end system, our goal is to leave the end system largely unchanged by simply adding a new synchronization middleware application control system. An automatic stream selection system is proposed that is based on a three dimensional streaming user interface that can be used with a video and data streaming collaborative system enabling all participants to view experiments over the Internet. When researchers are collaborating via the Internet they likely will have a diverse set of available resources. The stream selection interface handles user interaction with a three dimensional object. The crucial part of this interface is to determine the set of nearest camera positions to a query position. Once the set of nearest camera positions is known the appropriate video stream(s) can be selected for play out. The second part involves wireless sensor networks. Significant research has gone into designing communications and routing protocols which limit the amount of wasted energy. To further increase the lifespan of sensor networks, scheduling mechanisms have been proposed which cycle the sensors between active and sleep states. These scheduling mechanisms fall into two categories, deterministic and non-deterministic systems. The deterministic systems pre-compute a set of nodes which will be part of a coverage group for their entire lifespan. The non-deterministic systems leave all of the sensors in the same group but have them decide locally whether they can go back to sleep or not after awaking from a sleep interval. This thesis presents a deterministic system which can make its cover set choices in a distributed manner with limited communications.
Using Overlay Networks to Build Operating System Services for Large Scale Grids
Authors: Emmanuel Jeanvoine, Louis Rilling, Christine Morin, Daniel Leprince
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of The Fifth International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (2006)

Using grid resources to execute scientific applications requiring a large amount of computing power is attractive but not easy from the user point of view. Vigne is a grid operating system designed to provide users with a simplified view of a grid. Vigne deals with the huge number of nodes in a large-scale grid and with the nodes' dynamic behavior by using peer-to-peer overlays as a keystone. In this paper, we show why it is highly desirable to use structured and unstructured peer-to-peer overlays for building the high-level services of Vigne grid operating system. To show the interest of our approach, we detail the features of two Vigne services built on top of peer-to-peer overlays. We also present experimental results obtained on the Grid'5000 testbed showing the scalability of the Vigne infrastructure based on overlays and its practical interest for the implementation of Vigne distributed services.
Reinforcement learning for declarative optimization-based drama management
Authors: Mark J. Nelson, David L. Roberts, Charles L. Isbell,  Jr., Michael Mateas
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

A long-standing challenge in interactive entertainment is the creation of story-based games with dynamically responsive story-lines. Such games are populated by multiple objects and autonomous characters, and must provide a coherent story experience while giving the player freedom of action. To maintain coherence, the game author must provide for modifying the world in reaction to the player's actions, directing agents to act in particular ways (overriding or modulating their autonomy), or causing inanimate objects to reconfigure themselves "behind the player's back".Declarative optimization-based drama management is one mechanism for allowing the game author to specify a drama manager (DM) to coordinate these modifications, along with a story the DM should aim for. The premise is that the author can easily describe the salient properties of the story while leaving it to the DM to react to the player and direct agent actions. Although promising, early search-based approaches have been shown to scale poorly. Here, we improve upon the state of the art by using reinforcement learning and a novel training paradigm to build an adaptive DM that manages the tradeoff between exploration and story coherence. We present results on two games and compare our performance with other approaches.