ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Examining customers' trust in online vendors and their dropout decisions: An empirical study
Authors: Patrick Y. K. Chau, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Bill L. P. Lee, Anson K. K. Au
Venue: Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (2007)

Customer dropouts represent a critical challenge to online vendors and have severely constrained the proliferation of electronic retailing, which greatly depends on the customer eventually clicking on the ''confirm purchase'' button. In this study, we investigate the relationship between customers' trust in an online vendor and their dropouts in different stages of the purchase process. Using a well-established consumer decision-making process, we analyze salient online trust antecedents for each purchase stage, develop specific hypotheses, and test them empirically. Our results suggest that customers' trust in an online vendor has significant effects on their decisions to exit from the vendor's website, and that salient trust antecedents vary in different stages of the consumer decision process. According to our findings, customers by and large depend on general, subjective antecedents pertaining to personal traits or perceptions about the website's ease of use to assess the trustworthiness of an online vendor in the early stages but focus on specific, objective, transaction-oriented antecedents directly related to their purchase decision making in the later stages. Our results have important implications for research and practice which are also discussed in the paper.
Soft Real-Time Chains for Multi-Hop Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks
Authors: Bach D. Bui, Rodolfo Pellizzoni, Marco Caccamo, Chin F. Cheah, Andrew Tzakis
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE Real Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (2007)

Prioritized MAC protocols are needed to support soft real-time communication in wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce real-time chain, a new prioritized MAC protocol to support soft real-time data flows in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks. By avoiding packet collisions and limiting the effect of priority inversions, real-time chain is able to provide soft real-time and bandwidth guarantees. Furthermore, the use of multiple channels enables high spatial reuse and transmission rates. Finally, our approach can be integrated with a slightly modified version of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The protocol has been fully implemented on Crossbow MICAz hardware and its performance has been validated with a large set of both indoor and outdoor experiments.
A laboratory course for designing and testing spoken dialogue systems
Authors: D. Colton
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

The Spoken Dialogue Systems Laboratory at OGI gives students hands-on experience developing spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) in a rapid prototyping setting. The CSLU rapid prototyper (CSLUrp) allows students to quickly build and operate SDSs for dialogues of arbitrary complexity. CSLUrp consists of a graphical user interface that allows users to create SDSs with speech recognition, speech generation and arbitrary computation. When an application is designed, CSLUrp configures the system from the appropriate libraries in CSLUsh, the CSLU shell. The course explores CSLUrp in enough depth that students can craft and integrate their own low-level components (such as special purpose recognizers). In their final projects, students successfully built and demonstrated SDSs to do a variety of interesting tasks such as voice mail and directory assistance. Students found the course helpful and rated it highly.
Philosophy and goals of the DoD 2400 bps vocoder selection process
Authors: T. E. Tremain
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

Significant improvements in vocoder technology have made the current standard for 2400 bps voice communication obsolete. At the request of both military and civilian users of low rate communications equipment, the Department of Defense Digital Voice Processing Consortium began the process of selecting a new 2400 bps voice coding algorithm. The consortium's task was to compile the requirements of the various users and form a process of selection that could be used to choose an algorithm that would meet these requirements. Since no one algorithm could satisfy all users, a set of minimum requirements was developed. These requirements included measurements of the algorithm's performance in noisy and quiet environments as well as measurements of the hardware necessary for its operation. These minimum requirements, as well as objective goals, were documented and distributed to the user and developer communities. This paper describes the process of determining the requirements and goals of the new algorithm based on the needs of the users of this equipment.
Multiprocessors May Reduce System Dependability under File-Based Race Condition Attacks
Authors: Jinpeng Wei, Calton Pu
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (2007)

Attacks exploiting race conditions have been considered rare and "low risk". However, the increasing popularity of multiprocessors has changed this situation: instead of waiting for the victim process to be suspended to carry out an attack, the attacker can now run on a dedicated processor and actively seek attack opportunities. This change from fortuitous encountering to active exploiting may greatly increase the success probability of race condition attacks. This point is exemplified by studying the TOCTTOU (Time-of- Check-to-Time-of-Use) race condition attacks in this paper. We first propose a probabilistic model for predicting TOCTTOU attack success rate on both uniprocessors and multiprocessors. Then we confirm the applicability of this model by carrying out TOCTTOU attacks against two widely used utility programs: vi and gedit. The success probability of attacking vi increases from low single digit percentage on a uniprocessor to almost 100% on a multiprocessor. Similarly, the success rate of attacking gedit jumps from almost zero to 83%. These case studies suggest that our model captures the sharply increased risks, and hence the decreased dependability of our systems, represented by race condition attacks such as TOCTTOU on the next generation multiprocessors.
A Uniform Integrated Reasoning Approach Based on User, Context and Service Models for Context-Aware Service
Authors: Hong Ling, Peiqiang Tan, Zhengchuan Xu, Tao Dong
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Management of Mobile Business (2007)

With the development of wireless network, especially the advancement of sensor technology, more and more context information is captured. Contextawareness has been a key enabler for providing users with customized services in mobile commerce. The context-aware computing, in essence, is a process to support decision-making. A key capability of a proactive context-aware system is to infer the user's needs by constantly capturing and interpreting his/her context. From the last century, researchers have done a lot of researches about context aware services, but most of the researches are targeted at specific services domain, not brought forward a uniform reasoning process.
Circuit Failure Prediction and Its Application to Transistor Aging
Authors: Mridul Agarwal, Bipul C. Paul, Ming Zhang, Subhasish Mitra
Venue: Proceedings of the 25th IEEE VLSI Test Symmposium (2007)

Circuit failure prediction predicts the occurrence of a circuit failure before errors actually appear in system data and states. This is in contrast to classical error detection where a failure is detected after errors appear in system data and states. Circuit failure prediction is performed during system operation by analyzing the data collected by sensors inserted at various locations inside a chip. We demonstrate this concept of circuit failure prediction for a dominant PMOS aging mechanism induced by Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). NBTI-induced PMOS aging slows down PMOS transistors over time. As a result, the speed of a chip can significantly degrade over time and can result in delay faults. The traditional practice is to incorporate worst-case speed margins to prevent delay faults during system operation due to NBTI aging. A new sensor design integrated inside a flip-flop enables efficient circuit failure prediction at a low cost. Simulation results using 90nm and 65nm technologies demonstrate that this technique can significantly improve system performance by enabling close to best-case design instead of traditional worst-case design.
Active learning in the University of South Australia
Authors: K. J. McDermott
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (2000)

The authors analyse the justification, placing, validity and degree of success of some of their innovations in intra-mural experiential learning, in the light of their own theoretical understanding of the reasons for engaging in experience based methodologies for engineering education. These include: problem based learning for teams of first year students; student-managed investigations, seminars and peer assessment of papers in place of didactic teaching in mainstream second year subjects; practically based teaching in third year subjects; problem based learning for final year elective subjects; and team projects for industry clients. Evaluation has demonstrated high levels of student satisfaction in most instances. Students believe taking charge of their own learning is highly relevant to their preparation for the engineering profession. An exception was the attempt to engage first year students in medium scale, real life problem based learning from the outset. It is obvious in retrospect that neither secondary-educated students nor the university are adequately prepared for self-learning, problem based approaches.
An Integrated QoS-Aware Service Development and Management Framework
Authors: Jiehan Zhou, Eila Niemela, Pekka Savolainen
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (2007)

Quality-aware service delivery has been receiving increasing attention in both software architecture and service management. Our approach values software and service quality assurance, ranging from quality assessment in software architecting to quality matching in service discovery. This paper proposes an integrated QoS-aware service management method, which examines the "service as a software' development and the "software as a service' management against QoS requirements. Moreover, we design an integrated QoS-aware service management infrastructure which promises complete software and service workflow management coupled with a QoS ontology development. We develop the QoS property ontology from the viewpoints of technical quality and managerial quality information management.
System Prototype and Verification Using Metamodel-Based Transformations
Authors: Luis Pedro, Levi Lucio, Didier Buchs
Venue: IEEE Distributed Systems Online (2007)

Domain-specific modeling lets you express solutions at the problem domain's level of abstraction and in its idiom. However, this doesn't mean that you can easily or rapidly generate prototypes. In reality, domain-specific languages (DSLs) are difficult to design, implement, and maintain and are usually less efficient than hand-coded software. Mapping DSLs into the Concurrent Object-Oriented Petri Nets (CO-OPN) formal specification language provides the semantics necessary for developing prototypes of these DSLs.
Residual Matrix and Statistical Independence in a Contingency Table
Authors: Shusaku Tsumoto, Shoji Hirano
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining - Workshops (2006)

Marginal distributions play an central role in statistical analysis of a contingency table. However, when the number of partition becomes large, the contribution from marginal distributions decreases. This paper focuses on a formal analysis of marginal distributions in a contingency table. The main approach is to take the difference between two matrices with the same sample size and the same marginal distributions, which we call difference matrix. The important nature of the difference matrix is that the determinant is equal to 0: when the rank of a matrix is r, the difference between a original matrix and the expected matrix will become r-1 at most. Since the sum of rows or columns of the will become zero, which means that the information of one rank correponds to information on the frequency of a contingency matrix. Interestingly, if we take an expected matrix whose elements are the expected values based on marginal distributions, the difference between an original matrix and expected matrix can be represented by linear combination of determinants of 2 × 2 submatrices.
Electric System-wide Measurements: North American Directions
Authors: S. E. Widergren, Z. Huang, J. E. Dagle
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

The western interconnected electric system of North America pioneered the concept of system-wide measurements, particularly applied to system dynamic issues. This involved the development and deployment of synchronized, sub-second measurement units and their associated data collection networks. More recently, the United States Department of Energy has collaborated with the North American Electric Reliability Council, electric utilities, reliability coordinators, equipment and software suppliers, and researchers to advance the use of phasors in the eastern interconnection of North America. This paper provides an overview of the status of system-wide monitoring in North America, the directions emerging for application of this data to situational awareness and system operations, as well as the institutional changes underway to organize the relevant parties and establish a viable infrastructure to support the information exchange required to fulfill each party's role.
Bark scale equalizer design using warped filter
Authors: Wang Peng
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2001. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2001)

Bark scale (also called critical band rate in the literature) has attracted increasing attention among audio engineers as a good measurement of the frequency resolving ability of the human auditory system. The warped filter technique has been applied to the Bark scale to construct an equalizer for a low-cost loudspeaker system. In a simulation, the resulting equalizer displays an overall better equalization effect than the conventional deconvolution-based equalizer.
Johnny can obfuscate: beyond mother's maiden name
Authors: William Cheswick
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (2006)

Challenge/response authentication is stronger than password authentication, but has traditionally required a device for computing the challenge. Though human computation is limited, people can compute simple responses to challenges. If the challenge and the corresponding response is obfuscated with decoy information, an authentication scheme might be strong enough for a number of applications. The signs used in major league baseball provide some interesting techniques for obfuscation.
Resilient Cluster Formation for Sensor Networks
Authors: Donggang Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2007)

Sensor nodes are often organized into clusters to facilitate many network operations such as data aggregation. Clustering has to be protected in hostile environments. Otherwise, an attacker can easily mislead a cluster-based application by attacking the clustering protocol. This paper proposes three techniques for resilient cluster formation. The simple neighbor validation provides a simple yet effective way to validate a sensor's neighbors; the priority-based selection organizes clusters based on the sensor's priority of being a cluster head; and the centralized detection further enhances the security by detecting misbehaving nodes. Another appealing benefit of this protocol is that a sensor node can make a clustering decision immediately once the neighborhood information is available. This further increases the difficulty of attacking the clustering protocol. The analysis also shows that the proposed protocol is efficient and effective in dealing with attacks.
Performance of Biometric Quality Measures
Authors: Patrick Grother, Elham Tabassi
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2007)

We document methods for the quantitative evaluation of systems that produce a scalar summary of a biometric sample's quality. We are motivated by a need to test claims that quality measures are predictive of matching performance. We regard a quality measurement algorithm as a black box that converts an input sample to an output scalar. We evaluate it by quantifying the association between those values and observed matching results. We advance detection error trade-off and error versus reject characteristics as metrics for the comparative evaluation of sample quality measurement algorithms. We proceed this with a definition of sample quality, a description of the operational use of quality measures. We emphasize the performance goal by including a procedure for annotating the samples of a reference corpus with quality values derived from empirical recognition scores.
CWO Data Mining
Authors: Mahnas Jean Mohammadi-Aragh, Derek Irby, Robert Moorhead, Rick Schumeyer
Venue: Proceedings of the HPCMP Users Group Conference (2006)

The Navy Research Laboratory's Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) is a realistic, large-scene simulation that runs daily and generates massive amounts of data. The data must be analyzed and/or reduced to provide pertinent information. This may be achieved through data mining by performing feature detection and/or region-of-interest detection. Data reduction using data mining techniques is not a new idea, especially when the objects of interest are ocean eddies. There are on the order of 20 methods to "data mine for eddies. However, no one method has been tested on all models, few have been tried on multiple models or model types, and different methods require different data fields (e.g., salinity, temperature, horizontal velocity, vorticity). Our objective was to examine the most attractive eddy detection methods for NCOM and then determine which method provides the best results.
Descriptions of engineering: student and engineering practitioner perspectives
Authors: S. D. Sheppard
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

In this paper descriptions of two of the stakeholder groups in engineering (engineering students and engineer) are presented. These descriptions are at the national level and consist of demographic and practice data. They enable us to develop a picture of possible paths of engineering students as they enter the workforce. The years of focus are 1996 and 1997, the most recent years where there are complete data on both students and practitioners. In addition these descriptions serve as background for the next stages of the study of engineering education currently ongoing at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Bit Allocation Based on Motion Vector Analysis for H.264/AVC
Authors: Hussain M. Mohammed, Nikolaus Farber, Herbert Thoma
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Data Compression Conference (2007)

In this paper we present a bit allocation approach based on motion vector analysis for improved Rate-Distortion performance. Bit allocation is done at the macroblock level such that the macroblock with high priority is coded finely and the one with low priority is coded coarsely. In order to calculate macroblock priorities, first reference counts for each pixel are determined through motion vector analysis. A reference count of a pixel is defined as total number of pixels in the remaining GOP which use that pixel as a reference. Then macroblock wise reference counts is obtained by summing the pixel wise reference counts, which are then scaled and prioritized. Based upon the priority value the given fixed quant of each frame is modulated at the macroblock level. The algorithm is applied to H.264/AVC encoding and PSNR gains of up to 1.4 dB are achieved.
A hybrid input/output spectrum adaptation scheme for LD-CELP coding of speech
Authors: Siu-Pun Chui
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

This paper describes a hybrid input/output block adaptation scheme for the quantization of spectral parameters for low-delay CELP coders. In this scheme, line spectrum pair (LSP) coefficients are used as parameters for spectral adaptation and they are partitioned into two segments; LSPs in the first segment which corresponding to low frequency regions are backward adapted from the reproduction speech while LSPs in the second segment are adapted from input speech and quantized as side information to the decoder. The rationale behind this scheme is to compensate for the spectrum distortion introduced by conventional backward adaptation schemes operating at low bit rates. Simulation results show that the hybrid LSP adaptation scheme achieves transparent quantization at 12 bits for each analysis frame of 5 ms.
Ultraspherical Stieltjes Polynomials and Gauss-Kronrod Quadrature Behave Nicely for $\lambda< 0$
Authors: B. de la Calle Ysern, F. Peherstorfer
Venue: SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (2007)

We show that the zeros of the Stieltjes polynomials associated with the ultraspherical weight function with parameter $\lambda<0$ are real and simple and, except for two of them, belong to $(-1,1)$. We also prove that they strictly interlace with the zeros of the corresponding ultraspherical polynomials. Consequently, a Gauss-Kronrod quadrature formula with two nodes outside the interval $[-1,1]$ is obtained. We prove that the coefficients of such quadrature rules are positive. Finally, an asymptotic representation of Stieltjes polynomials which converges uniformly on the whole interval $[-1,1]$ is provided.
Teaching and learning in an era of equality: an engineering program for middle school girls
Authors: R. J. Dozier
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference,1997. on 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change. - Volume 01 (1997)

The Women in Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) program at Arizona State University, USA, was founded to improve the retention and recruitment of women in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). In the summer of 1996, WISE obtained a grant from the City of Tempe to develop an engineering program targeted at middle school girls to expose them to and to interest them in engineering. This program, WISE TEAMS (Teaming Engineering Advocates with Middle School Students), was a two-day commuter program consisting of hands-on engineering activities, career information and team building exercises. Among the thirty-eight participants for TEAMS, there were twelve underrepresented minorities. The content of the program is presented in this paper.