ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Polish Emotional Speech Database --- Recording and Preliminary Validation
Authors: Piotr Staroniewicz, Wojciech Majewski
Venue: Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions: COST Action 2102 International Conference Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008 Revised Selected and Invited Papers (2009)

The paper presents the state of the art review on emotional speech databases and designing of Polish database. The principles set for naturalness, choice of emotions, speakers selection, text material and validation procedure are presented. The six simulated emotional states: anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, surprise plus neutral state were chosen for recording by speakers from three groups: professional actors, amateur actors and amateurs. Linguistic material consists of ten short everyday life sentences. Amateurs database recordings are completed and next step will be recordings of professional actors. The database of over two thousand amateur speakers utterances was recorded and validated by perception listeners forced choice. The results of emotion recognition and the influence of musical education, gender and nationality for the group of over two hundred listeners are presented.
Neural Network Based Cellular Automata Model for Dynamic Spatial Modeling in GIS
Authors: Yogesh Mahajan, Parvatham Venkatachalam
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications: Part I (2009)

The emphasis on calibration method of neural network (NN) based cellular automata (CA) models has been limited to back propagation (BP) mostly and not much work has been done to study the effect of different NN training methods. In this article the dynamic annealing (DA) method for training NN has been compared with BP. Also the effect of various neighborhood sizes for CA has been analyzed in the context of dynamic spatial modeling for urban growth. The model has been implemented and verified for Thane city, Maharashtra state, India as this city has higher rate of urbanization compared to other cities in the state.
Poster abstract: Energy management in wireless healthcare systems
Authors: Priti Aghera, Simunic Rosing Tajana, Diana Fang, Kevin Patrick
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (2009)

We implemented and analyzed the battery lifetime optimization problem for wireless healthcare systems and showed that task assignment can play a major role in energy management. In the static case, where system parameters are fixed (e.g. processing and communication latency), the assignment of tasks to heterogeneous nodes in the system significantly affects performance and the level of available energy. Since task binding and scheduling problems are NP hard [1], heuristic algorithms are needed for practical solutions. Furthermore, the overall system characteristics are dynamically changing - the availability of the wireless network and its throughput, battery capacity of various nodes in the system, the user's needs, etc. To address the dynamic aspects of the system and the resource constrained nature of the mobile nodes, we will implement a heuristic algorithm to achieve a longer battery lifetime of the system. We plan to evaluate the performance of the heuristic and compare it against the optimal solutions produced by the ILP.
Morphology induction from limited noisy data using approximate string matching
Authors: Burcu Karagol-Ayan, David Doermann, Amy Weinberg
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Phonology and Morphology (2006)

For a language with limited resources, a dictionary may be one of the few available electronic resources. To make effective use of the dictionary for translation, however, users must be able to access it using the root form of morphologically deformed variant found in the text. Stemming and data driven methods, however, are not suitable when data is sparse. We present algorithms for discovering morphemes from limited, noisy data obtained by scanning a hard copy dictionary. Our approach is based on the novel application of the longest common substring and string edit distance metrics. Results show that these algorithms can in fact segment words into roots and affixes from the limited data contained in a dictionary, and extract affixes. This in turn allows non native speakers to perform multilingual tasks for applications where response must be rapid, and their knowledge is limited. In addition, this analysis can feed other NLP tools requiring lexicons.
Change of Landscape Patterns in the Huihe National Nature Reserve, Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia, Northern China
Authors: Yan-mei Chen, Ji-xi Gao, Yin-cui Hu, Shi-hai Lv
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Environmental Science and Information Application Technology - Volume 02 (2009)

For understanding the regional response to climate change, we explain the characteristics and change of landscape patterns at Huihe National Nature Reserve, Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia, China. By the visual interpretation method and three-period TM images, we generated landscape classification information with the support of the Arcmap software platform and in combination with ground investigation. The results are as follows: (1) There are four types of landscape in the nature reserve: steppe, wetland, sand and man-made landscapes. (2) The area of the steppe landscape has expanded, and the wetland landscape is gradually diminishing. The area of the sand landscape has remained stable. (3) According to landscape level analysis, there was obvious degradation of landscape in the nature reserve from 1995 to 2006. The change of landscape pattern is influenced mainly by climate change, and human disturbance plays a very important role. Environmental protection could slow the rate of degradation of the ecosystem.
Vibratory and Acoustical Factors in Multimodal Reproduction of Concert DVDs
Authors: Sebastian Merchel, M. Ercan Altinsoy
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design (2009)

Sound and vibration perception are always coupled in live music experience. Just think of a rock concert or hearing (and feeling) a church organ sitting on a wooden pew. Even in classical concerts kettledrum and double bass are sensed not only with our ears. The air-borne sound causes seat vibrations or excites the skin surface directly. For some instruments (e.g. an organ) structure-borne sound is transmitted directly from the instrument to the listener.If concert recordings are played back with multimedia hi-fi systems at home, these vibratory information is missing in the majority of cases. This is due to low reproduction levels or to the limited frequency range of conventional loudspeakers. The audio signal on todays DVDs contains an additional channel for low frequency effects (LFE), which is intended for reproduction using a subwoofer. The generation of tactile components is still very restricted. An enhancement of such a systems might be possible using an electrodynamical shaker which generates whole body vibration (WBV) for a seated person.This paper describes a system implementing this approach. The generation of a vibrotactile signal from the existing audio channels is analyzed. Different parameters during this process (amplitude of the vibration, frequency range) are examined in relation to their perceptual consequences using psychophysical experiments.
Temperature reduction analysis in Sentry Tag cache systems
Authors: Mostafa Farahani, Amirali Baniasadi
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th MEDEA workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications, systems and architecture (2009)

Power and temperature management continue to impose challenging issues in high-performance processor design. Processor power density is growing and has made building efficient cooling systems expensive. While Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques aim at reducing cooling systems cost, previously suggested low-temperature design could potentially provide further temperature reductions or help DTM operate more effectively. Different processor components have different levels of impact on the overall temperature. Meantime, reducing the temperature of different processor components could result in both transient and steady temperature changes. In this paper, we study the temperature impact of exploiting Sentry Tag caches on cache temperature. We show that by using the Sentry Tag it is possible to reduce cache temperature effectively. In addition, we show that using Sentry Tag can impact transient temperature behavior which in turn enhances DTM efficiency.
Hardware Coprocessor Synthesis from an ANSI C Specification
Authors: Sumit Ahuja, Swathi T. Gurumani, Chad Spackman, Sandeep K. Shukla
Venue: IEEE Design Test (2009)

Editor's note:This article shows how design space exploration can be realized through high-level synthesis. It presents a case study of a hardware implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Rijndael algorithm. Starting from the algorithmic specification, the authors generate various architectures by using the C2R compiler.&#x2014;Philippe Coussy, Universit&#x00E9; de Bretagne-Sud
Evaluation of skyline algorithms in PostgreSQL
Authors: Hannes Eder, Fang Wei
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (2009)

In this paper, we present our work on evaluating the skyline algorithms BNL, SFS, and a variant of LESS in PostgreSQL. It is well known that the performance of skyline queries is sensitive to a number of parameters. From extensive experiments on skyline implementations we have discovered several rules, which are remarkably simple and useful, but hard to obtain from theoretical investigation. Our findings are beneficial for developing heuristics for the skyline query optimization, and in the meantime, provide some insight for a deeper understanding of the skyline query characteristics.
Predicting the fluency of text with shallow structural features: case studies of machine translation and human-written text
Authors: Jieun Chae, Ani Nenkova
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2009)

Sentence fluency is an important component of overall text readability but few studies in natural language processing have sought to understand the factors that define it. We report the results of an initial study into the predictive power of surface syntactic statistics for the task; we use fluency assessments done for the purpose of evaluating machine translation. We find that these features are weakly but significantly correlated with fluency. Machine and human translations can be distinguished with accuracy over 80%. The performance of pairwise comparison of fluency is also very high---over 90% for a multi-layer perceptron classifier. We also test the hypothesis that the learned models capture general fluency properties applicable to human-written text. The results do not support this hypothesis: prediction accuracy on the new data is only 57%. This finding suggests that developing a dedicated, task-independent corpus of fluency judgments will be beneficial for further investigations of the problem.
Computing Bond Types in Molecule Graphs
Authors: Sebastian Böcker, Quang B. Bui, Patrick Seeber, Anke Truss
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Computing and Combinatorics (2009)

In this paper, we deal with restoring missing information in molecule databases: Some data formats only store the atoms' configuration but omit bond multiplicities. As this information is essential for various applications in chemistry, we consider the problem of recovering bond type information using a scoring function for the possible valences of each atom--the Bond Type Assignment problem. We prove the NP-hardness of Bond Type Assignment and give an exact fixed-parameter algorithm for the problem where bond types are computed via dynamic programming on a tree decomposition of the molecule graph. We evaluate our algorithm on a set of real molecule graphs and find that it works fast and accurately.
Admissible Strategies in Infinite Games over Graphs
Authors: Marco Faella
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2009 (2009)

We consider games played on finite graphs, whose objective is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of accepting traces. We focus on the states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We compare several criteria for establishing what is the preferable behavior of Player 1 from those states, eventually settling on the notion of admissible strategy.As the main result, we provide a characterization of the goals admitting positional admissible strategies. In addition, we derive a simple algorithm for computing such strategies for various common goals, and we prove the equivalence between the existence of positional winning strategies and the existence of positional subgame perfect strategies.
Towards an integrated robot with multiple cognitive functions
Authors: Nick Hawes, Aaron Sloman, Jeremy Wyatt, Michael Zillich, Henrik Jacobsson, Geert-Jan M. Kruijff, Michael Brenner, Gregor Berginc, Danijel Skočaj
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2 (2007)

We present integration mechanisms for combining heterogeneous components in a situated information processing system, illustrated by a cognitive robot able to collaborate with a human and display some understanding of its surroundings. These mechanisms include an architectural schema that encourages parallel and incremental information processing, and a method for binding information from distinct representations that when faced with rapid change in the world can maintain a coherent, though distributed, view of it. Provisional results are demonstrated in a robot combining vision, manipulation, language, planning and reasoning capabilities interacting with a human and manipulable objects.
Faster Pairings on Special Weierstrass Curves
Authors: Craig Costello, Huseyin Hisil, Colin Boyd, Juan Gonzalez Nieto, Kenneth Koon-Ho Wong
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference Palo Alto on Pairing-Based Cryptography (2009)

This paper presents efficient formulas for computing cryptographic pairings on the curve y 2 = c x 3 + 1 over fields of large characteristic. We provide examples of pairing-friendly elliptic curves of this form which are of interest for efficient pairing implementations.
Complementary responses to mean and variance modulations in the perfect integrate-and-fire model
Authors: Joanna Pressley, Todd W. Troyer
Venue: Biological Cybernetics (2009)

In the perfect integrate-and-fire model (PIF), the membrane voltage is proportional to the integral of the input current since the time of the previous spike. It has been shown that the firing rate within a noise free ensemble of PIF neurons responds instantaneously to dynamic changes in the input current, whereas in the presence of white noise, model neurons preferentially pass low frequency modulations of the mean current. Here, we prove that when the input variance is perturbed while holding the mean current constant, the PIF responds preferentially to high frequency modulations. Moreover, the linear filters for mean and variance modulations are complementary, adding exactly to one. Since changes in the rate of Poisson distributed inputs lead to proportional changes in the mean and variance, these results imply that an ensemble of PIF neurons transmits a perfect replica of the time-varying input rate for Poisson distributed input. A more general argument shows that this property holds for any signal leading to proportional changes in the mean and variance of the input current.
Introduction: Applications of Management Science and Operations Research Models and Methods to Problems in Health Care
Venue: Interfaces (2009)

Over the last decade or so, the health-care industry in the United States, Canada, and around the world has started to solve important problems using traditional management science and operations research (MS/OR) models and methods, such as mathematical programming, simulation, queueing theory, and decision analysis. In recent years, the results of modeling efforts have been significant and have begun to positively affect the delivery of health care. This special issue documents eight successful applications of MS/OR methods to solving actual problems in health care.
Cryptographic Combinatorial Clock-Proxy Auctions
Authors: David C. Parkes, Michael O. Rabin, Christopher Thorpe
Venue: Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 13th International Conference, FC 2009, Accra Beach, Barbados, February 23-26, 2009. Revised Selected Papers (2009)

We present a cryptographic protocol for conducting efficient, provably correct and secrecy-preserving combinatorial clock-proxy auctions. The "clock phase" functions as a trusted auction despite price discovery: bidders submit encrypted bids, and prove for themselves that they meet activity rules, and can compute total demand and thus verify price increases without revealing any information about individual demands. In the sealed-bid "proxy phase", all bids are revealed the auctioneer via time-lapse cryptography and a branch-and-bound algorithm is used to solve the winner-determination problem. Homomorphic encryption is used to prove the correctness of the solution, and establishes the correctness of the solution to any interested party. Still an NP-hard optimization problem, the use of homomorphic encryption imposes additional computational time on winner-determination that is linear in the size of the branch-and-bound search tree, and thus roughly linear in the original (search-based) computational time. The result is a solution that avoids, in the usual case, the exponential complexity of previous cryptographically-secure combinatorial auctions.
The benefits of Geo-Tagging and microblogging in m-Learning: a use case
Authors: Christian Safran, Victor Manuel Garcia-Barrios, Martin Ebner
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (2009)

The recent years have shown the remarkable potential use of Web 2.0 technologies in education, especially in the context of informal learning. The application of Wikis for collaborative work is one example for this theory applied. The support of learning in those fields of education, which are strongly based on visual location-based information, could also benefit from Geo-Tagging, a technique that has become popular lately, and m-Learning, which allows learning in-the-field. This paper presents first developments on the combination of these three concepts into a geospatial Wiki for higher education, TUGeoWiki. Our solution proposal supports mobile scenarios where textual data and images are managed and retrieved in-the-field as well as some desktop scenarios in the context of collaborative e-Learning. Within this scope, one critical issue arises while adding and updating textual information via the collaborative interface, which can be cumbersome in mobile scenarios. To solve this problem, we integrated another popular concept into our solution approach, Microblogging. Thus, the information pushed via short messages from mobile clients or microblogging tools to our m-Learning environment enables the creation of Wiki-Micropages as basis for subsequent collaborative learning scenarios.
Modelling and a segmented dynamic programming-based heuristic approach for the slab stack shuffling problem
Authors: Lixin Tang, Huizhi Ren
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2010)

This paper studies the slab stack shuffling (SSS) problem in the slab yard, which is a key logistics problem between the continuous casting stage and the hot rolling mill in the steel industry. The problem is to choose appropriate slabs for a sequence of rolling items, from their respective candidate slab sets (families) with a view to reducing the resulting shuffling workload. Although the SSS problem has been investigated by a few researchers, the problem under consideration has several new features. One of them is that the shuffled slab will not return the original stack but remain at the new position. Another requires that every selected slab be taken out in time, which will result in balancing the crane workloads among the storage areas of the slab yard to a degree. In addition, the local similarity of slab families is also considered, the closer the items in the rolling sequence, the more the common slabs between the corresponding families. For the problem, an integer programming model is proposed by considering the above features and requirements. For small-scaled problem, a dynamic programming approach is first constructed to obtain its optimal solution. For the practical scale, due to its intractability, we propose a segmented dynamic programming (SDP)-based heuristic, which partitions the sequence of items into a series of segments, each of which corresponds to a subproblem. The subproblems are solved sequentially using the dynamic programming. And the reassignment strategy of common slabs and the exchange strategy of candidate slabs are designed to improve the heuristic. Two interesting properties of the problem are also derived to speed up the SDP-based heuristic approach. The experiment results show that the heuristic is very close to the optimum in average solution quality for the small-scaled problem, obviously better than the CP Optimizer for the medium scale, and can reduce the crane workload by 10.76% on average for the practical scale.
ccT on Stage: Generalised Uniform Equivalence Testing for Verifying Student Assignment Solutions
Authors: Johannes Oetsch, Martina Seidl, Hans Tompits, Stefan Woltran
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (2009)

The tool ccT is an implementation for testing various parameterised notions of program correspondence between logic programs under the answer-set semantics, based on reductions to quantified propositional logic. One such notion is relativised uniform equivalence with projection, which extends standard uniform equivalence via two additional parameters: one for specifying the input alphabet and one for specifying the output alphabet. In particular, the latter parameter is used for projecting answer sets to the set of designated output atoms, i.e. ignoring auxiliary atoms during answer-set comparison. In this paper, we discuss an application of ccT for verifying the correctness of students' solutions drawn from a laboratory course on logic programming, employing relativised uniform equivalence with projection as the underlying program correspondence notion. We complement our investigation by discussing a performance evaluation of ccT, showing that discriminating among different back-end solvers for quantified propositional logic is a crucial issue towards optimal performance.