ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Electrophysiological Correlates of Age and Gender Perception on Human Faces
Authors: Y. Mouchetant-Rostaing, M. H. Giard
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2003)

In a previous experiment using scalp event-related potentials (ERPs), we have described the neuroelectric activities associated with the processing of gender information on human faces (Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Bentin, Aguera, & Pernier, 2000). Here we extend this study by examining the processing of age on faces using a similar experimental paradigm, and we compare age and gender processing. In one session, faces were of the same gender (women) and of one age range (young or old), to reduce gender and age processing. In a second session, faces of young and old women were randomly intermixed but age was irrelevant for the task, hence, age discrimination, if any, was assumed to be incidental. In the third and fourth sessions, faces had to be explicitly categorized according to their age or gender, respectively (intentional discrimination). Neither age nor gender processing affected the occipito-temporal N170 component often associated with the detection of physiognomic features and global structural encoding of faces. Rather, the three age and gender discrimination conditions induced similar fronto-central activities around 145&ndash;185 msec. In our previous experiment, this ERP pattern was also found for implicit and explicit categorization of gender from faces but not in a control condition manipulating hand stimuli (Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Bentin, et al., 2000). Whatever their exact nature, these 145&ndash;185 msec effects therefore suggest, first, that similar mechanisms could be engaged in age and gender perception, and second, that age and gender may be implicitly processed irrespective of their relevance to the task, through somewhat specialized mechanisms. Additional ERP effects were found at early latencies (45&ndash;90 msec) in all three discrimination conditions, and around 200&ndash;400 msec during explicit age and gender discrimination. These effects have been previously found in control conditions manipulating nonfacial stimuli and may therefore be related to more general categorization processes.
Integral and integrable algorithms for a nonlinear shallow-water wave equation
Authors: Roberto Camassa, Jingfang Huang, Long Lee
Venue: Journal of Computational Physics (2006)

An asymptotic higher-order model of wave dynamics in shallow water is examined in a combined analytical and numerical study, with the aim of establishing robust and efficient numerical solution methods. Based on the Hamiltonian structure of the nonlinear equation, an algorithm corresponding to a completely integrable particle lattice is implemented first. Each "particle" in the particle method travels along a characteristic curve. The resulting system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations can have solutions that blow-up in finite time. We isolate the conditions for global existence and prove l1-norm convergence of the method in the limit of zero spatial step size and infinite particles. The numerical results show that this method captures the essence of the solution without using an overly large number of particles. A fast summation algorithm is introduced to evaluate the integrals of the particle method so that the computational cost is reduced from O(N2) to O(N), where N is the number of particles. The method possesses some analogies with point vortex methods for 2D Euler equations. In particular, near singular solutions exist and singularities are prevented from occurring in finite time by mechanisms akin to those in the evolution of vortex patches. The second method is based on integro-differential formulations of the equation. Two different algorithms are proposed, based on different ways of extracting the time derivative of the dependent variable by an appropriately defined inverse operator. The integro-differential formulations reduce the order of spatial derivatives, thereby relaxing the stability constraint and allowing large time steps in an explicit numerical scheme. In addition to the Cauchy problem on the infinite line, we include results on the study of the nonlinear equation posed in the quarter (space-time) plane. We discuss the minimum number of boundary conditions required for solution uniqueness and illustrate this with numerical examples.
Subband filters optimized for lost coefficient reconstruction
Authors: S. S. Hemami, R. M. Gray
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1995. on International Conference - Volume 02 (1995)

Packet-based transmission of subband coded images over lossy networks presents a reconstruction problem at the decoder. Accurate reconstruction of the high-energy low frequency subband coefficients is imperative in providing consumer-grade image quality. This paper introduces a family of one-dimensional quadrature mirror filters (QMFs) designed to minimize the mean-squared error of reconstructed low frequency coefficients for a given reconstruction algorithm to be implemented at the decoder. Mean-reconstruction, in which a missing coefficient is replaced with the average of its neighbors either horizontally or vertically, is selected for its simplicity and implementation ease. The resulting filters perform well as QMFs and provide the desired reconstruction properties in the event of loss. While the filters are developed using mean-reconstruction the filter design algorithm can be used with more sophisticated reconstruction techniques, providing that the mean-squared error can be expressed in the appropriate quadratic form.
Greedy is Good: On Service Tree Placement for In-Network Stream Processing
Authors: Zoe Abrams, Jie Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

This paper is concerned with reducing communication costs when executing distributed user tasks in a sensor network. We take a service-oriented abstraction of sensor networks, where a user task is composed of a set of data processing modules (called services) with dependencies. Communications in sensor networks consume significant energy and introduce uncertainty in data fidelity due to high bit error rate. These constraints are abstracted as costs on the communication graph. The goal is to place the services within the sensor network so that the communication cost in performing the task is minimized. In addition, since the lifetime of a node, the quality of network links, and the composition of the service graph may change over time, the quality of the placement must be maintained in the face of these dynamics. In this paper, we take a fresh look at what is generally considered a simple but poor performance approach for service placement, namely the greedy algorithm. We prove that a modified greedy algorithm is guaranteed to have cost at most 8 times the optimum placement. In fact, the guarantee is even stronger if there is a high degree of data reduction in the service graph. The advantage of the greedy placement strategy is that when there are local changes in the service graph or when a hosting node fails, the repair only affects the placement of services that depend on the changes. Simulations suggest that in practice the greedy algorithm finds a low cost placement. Furthermore, the cost of repairing a greedy placement decreases rapidly as a function of the proximity of the services to be aggregated.
QoS Driven Parallelization of Resources to Reduce File Download Delay
Authors: Shaleeza Sohail Sanjay K. Jha, Salil S. Kanhere, Chun Tung Chou
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2006)

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for reducing the download time of large files over the Internet. Our approach, known as Parallelized File Transport Protocol (P-FTP), proposes simultaneous downloads of disjoint file portions from multiple file servers. P-FTP server selects file servers for the requesting client on the basis of a variety of QoS parameters, such as available bandwidth and server utilization. The sensitivity analysis of our file server selection technique shows that it performs significantly better than random selection. During the file transfer, P-FTP client monitors the file transfer flows to detect slow servers and congested links and adjusts the file distributions accordingly. P-FTP is evaluated with simulations and real-world implementation. The results show at least 50 percent reduction in download time when compared to the traditional file-transfer approach. Moreover, we have also carried out a simulation-based study to investigate the issues related to large scale deployment of our approach on the Internet. Our results demonstrate that a large number of P-FTP users has no adverse effect on the performance perceived by non-P-FTP users. In addition, the file servers and network are not significantly affected by large scale deployment of P-FTP.
Integrating complete-system and user-level performance/power simulators: the SimWattch approach
Authors: Jianwei Chen, M. Dubois
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (2003)

Evaluating architectural impact of applications with a significant operating system interaction calls for integrating detailed microarchitectural user-level simulation with system-level simulation tools. This paper reports on our experience in integrating Simics - a system-simulation tool - with Wattch - a microarchitectural performance and power modeling user-level simulation tool built on top of SimpleScalar We first present the technical challenges we had to resolve in designing SimWattch - the integrated tool. We then use it to identify the type of errors a user-level simulator typically does when predicting performance and power consumption while omitting operating system activity. This case study is based on SPEC95, and SPEC JVM98 applications and TPC-B. We find that if operating system effects are omitted, performance is usually overestimated while energy used is underestimated. However a surprising result is that IPC, power and resource occupancy predictions from a user-level simulator often follow the trends of predictions from simulations factoring in operating system effects.
Softgoal Traceability Patterns
Authors: Jesse Fletcher, Jane Cleland-Huang
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (2006)

Goal oriented methods help software engineers to model high-level systemic goals, propose and evaluate architectural solutions, and detect and resolve conflicts that occur. This paper describes a new technique, known as softgoal traceability patterns, for enabling reusable class mechanisms such as design patterns to be applied within a goal-oriented framework. Softgoal traceability patterns increase the reliability of a design in respect to its goals through the automated generation of design elements and the establishment of bidirectional traces between goals and design. These traces are used to monitor the integrity of the design in respect to architectural quality goals, and to support impact analysis when design changes are proposed. Softgoal traceability patterns are described using the well-known Observer pattern and then expanded with a more complex pattern that incorporates authentication.
A polynomial phase parameter estimation-phase unwrapping algorithm
Authors: B. J. Slocumb, J. Kitchen
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing,1994. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1994)

This paper describes a new approach for estimating the polynomial phase coefficients of an unknown signal with constant amplitude. Our approach uses linear regression on the unwrapped signal phase, a technique introduced by Tretter (1981) and further developed by Djuric and Kay (see IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol.38, no.12, p.2118-2126, 1990). The proposed technique expands upon the previous work by developing a recursion for conducting the phase unwrapping concurrently with the coefficient estimation. The unwrapping performance is improved because of the use of current coefficient estimates. A secondary result provided by the new algorithm is an instantaneous phase estimate. Simulations show improvements in mean-squared error threshold level of the coefficient estimates over the method of Djuric and Kay.
Techniques and applications of computation slicing
Authors: Neeraj Mittal, Vijay K. Garg
Venue: Distributed Computing (2005)

Writing correct distributed programs is hard. In spite of extensive testing and debugging, software faults persist even in commercial grade software. Many distributed systems should be able to operate properly even in the presence of software faults. Monitoring the execution of a distributed system, and, on detecting a fault, initiating the appropriate corrective action is an important way to tolerate such faults. This gives rise to the predicate detection problem which requires finding whether there exists a consistent cut of a given computation that satisfies a given global predicate.Detecting a predicate in a computation is, however, an NP-complete problem in general. In order to ameliorate the associated combinatorial explosion problem, we introduce the notion of computation slice. Formally, the slice of a compuation with respect to a predicate is a (sub)computation with the least number of consistent cuts that contains all consistent cuts of the computation satisfying the predicate. Intuitively, slice is a concise representation of those consistent cuts of a computation that satisfy a certain condition. To detect a predicate, rather than searching the state-space of the computation, it is much more efficient to search the state-space of the slice.We prove that the slice of a computation is uniquely defined for all predicates. We also present efficient algorithms for computing the slice for several useful classes of predicates. For an arbitrary predicate. we establish that the problem of computing the slice is NP-complete in general. Nonetheless, for such a predicate, we develop an efficient heuristic algorithm for computing an approximate slice. Our experimental results demonstrate that slicing can lead to an exponential improvement over existing techniques for predicate detection in terms of time and space.
Evaluation of Service Composition Planning with OWLS-XPlan
Authors: Matthias Klusch, Andreas Gerber
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (2006)

In this paper, we present the implementation, evaluation, and application of our OWL-S service composition planner OWLS-XPlan. Services in OWL-S 1.1 and ontologies are converted to initial state and goal descriptions in PDDL 2.1, which are then used by the fast heuristic FF planner XPlan for generating an execution complete composition plan. Results of experimental evaluation of XPlan shows its top performance compared with other selected AI planners. OWLS-XPlan is used in an agent based eHealth system for medical patient transport planning.
Web presentation system using RST events
Authors: Arturo Nakasone, Helmut Prendinger, Mitsuru Ishizuka
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

Constructing presentations as stories is about presenting events that receive their relevance and meaning within the context of the presentation, and about means to define a well-structured relationship between events and the whole presentation scheme. Information in the form of annotated web content has become the most preferred source to create functional and interesting presentations because of its flexibility and availability. Nevertheless, due to the large and diverse amount of information contained in the web, the automatic construction of presentations becomes increasingly difficult in terms of the content annotation and selection in order to define events and the arrangement of such events in a coherent and story-like manner.In this paper, we present a novel method for the construction of web presentations by implementing a simple event annotation scheme based on Rhetorical Structure Theory and an ontology-based reasoning engine that handles event sequencing to produce presentations in the form of dialogs between character agents.
Use of Workflow Technology Tools to Analyze Medical Data
Authors: Vojtech Huser, Roberto A. Rocha, Brent C. James
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (2006)

Workflow editors and engines can be used to model medical processes and execute them on real coded medical data from large data repositories. Such framework re-uses existing workflow technology and applies it to the healthcare domain. It satisfies many requirements for collaboration of champion clinicians with data analysts and developers of future potential decision support modules. Results enable to have insights into differences in workflows, data collection patterns and patient structure among different hospitals or providers. The methodology can provide support to descriptive clinical research studies, quality improvement teams and decision support development teams.
A secure distributed framework for achieving k-anonymity
Authors: Wei Jiang, Chris Clifton
Venue: The VLDB Journal &mdash; The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (2006)

k-anonymity provides a measure of privacy protection by preventing re-identification of data to fewer than a group of k data items. While algorithms exist for producing k-anonymous data, the model has been that of a single source wanting to publish data. Due to privacy issues, it is common that data from different sites cannot be shared directly. Therefore, this paper presents a two-party framework along with an application that generates k-anonymous data from two vertically partitioned sources without disclosing data from one site to the other. The framework is privacy preserving in the sense that it satisfies the secure definition commonly defined in the literature of Secure Multiparty Computation.
Tomography in Abstract Hilbert Spaces
Authors: V. I. Man'Ko, G. Marmo, A. Simoni, F. Ventriglia
Venue: Open Systems Information Dynamics (2006)

The tomographic description of a quantum state is formulated in an abstract infinite-dimensional Hilbert space framework, the space of the Hilbert-Schmidt linear operators, with trace formula as scalar product. Resolutions of the unity, written in terms of over-complete sets of rank-one projectors and of associated Gram-Schmidt operators taking into account their non-orthogonality, are then used to reconstruct a quantum state from its tomograms. Examples of well known tomographic descriptions illustrate the exposed theory.
Anxiety Reduction through Detachment: Subjective, Physiological, and Neural Effects
Authors: Raffael Kalisch, Katja Wiech, Hugo D. Critchley, Ben Seymour, John P. O'doherty, David A. Oakley, Philip Allen, Raymond J. Dolan
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005)

The ability to volitionally regulate emotions helps to adapt behavior to changing environmental demands and can alleviate subjective distress. We show that a cognitive strategy of detachment attenuates subjective and physiological measures of anticipatory anxiety for pain and reduces reactivity to receipt of pain itself. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we locate the potential site and source of this modulation of anticipatory anxiety in the medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate and anterolateral prefrontal cortex, respectively.
Research of Flexible Protocol Development Software Framework Based on Network Processor
Authors: WANG YongJun, HUANG QingYuan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology - Volume 01 (2006)

With rapid progress of WWW application, new network protocols and advanced network services come forth more quickly. To develop and deploy kinds of new protocols, Network Processors (NPs) would be good choice, which can be programmed easily and quickly according to specific products and deployment needs. But in fact, its difficult to develop software for NPs because of their complex design, architectural heterogeneity, and demanding performance constraints. In this paper, the programming view of NPs is studied and a flexible protocol development software framework is proposed, which considers function partition of protocol into two parts for specific NP and general-purpose processor, then emphasizes the design of integrated coordinated NPs software development toolkits. Eventually, as a case, extension of new function of MPLS VPN protocol is presented to prove the efficiency of the methodology.
Universal Designated Multi Verifier Signature without Random Oracles
Authors: G. Shailaja, K. Phani Kumar, Ashutosh Saxena
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Technology (2006)

In this paper, we present a strong universal designated multi verifier signature scheme based on bilinear pairings, which does not resort to random oracles. The security of the proposed scheme relies on the hardness of solving q- Strong Diffie-Hellman problem. The proposed scheme is more efficient than the existing universal designated multi verifier signature schemes. The signing and the designation phases of the proposed scheme are pairing-free and thus the scheme is ideal for devices with constrained computational capabilities. The proposed scheme finds several applica- tions such as in certification systems, software licensing and fair distributed contract signing etc.
Wearable Computer for Ubiquitous Informal Communication
Authors: Shunichi Tano, Tatsuhiro Takayama, Mitsuru Iwata, Tomonori Hashiyama
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International ConferenceWorkshops on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

The rapid progress of information technology has spurred development of various communication support systems. In particular, the importance of informal communication has lately drawn considerable attention because informal information can be intuitive, emotional, personal, honest, and subjective, traits that may be very difficult to get from formal media. We analyzed the features of informal communication and clarified the requirements of an informal communication support system. Next, we designed an informal communication support system whose basic architecture is a combination of a wearable computer, a see-through head mounted display, a bone conduction speaker, and a 3D-pen. The user can write graffiti such as a handwritten memo or make a voice memo and place it in a realworld context such as at a certain location (by GPS), environmental sound, the real object (by RFID) and so on. The informal information is thus shared with others on the peer-to-peer self-organized network. We demonstrated the prototype system and conducted a preliminary evaluation.
Data warehousing and data mining techniques for intrusion detection systems
Authors: Anoop Singhal, Sushil Jajodia
Venue: Distributed and Parallel Databases (2006)

This paper describes data mining and data warehousing techniques that can improve the performance and usability of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Current IDS do not provide support for historical data analysis and data summarization. This paper presents techniques to model network traffic and alerts using a multi-dimensional data model and star schemas. This data model was used to perform network security analysis and detect denial of service attacks. Our data model can also be used to handle heterogeneous data sources (e.g. firewall logs, system calls, net-flow data) and enable up to two orders of magnitude faster query response times for analysts as compared to the current state of the art. We have used our techniques to implement a prototype system that is being successfully used at Army Research Labs. Our system has helped the security analyst in detecting intrusions and in historical data analysis for generating reports on trend analysis.