ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An improvement to a biometric.based multimedia content protection scheme
Authors: Daniel Socek, Michal Sramka, Oge Marques, Dubravko Ćulibrk
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Multimedia and security (2006)

A biometric-based method for multimedia content protection was recently proposed. The method relies on biometric data of the user and a layered encryption mechanism to achieve confidentiality of the multimedia content. Our analysis suggests that the method originally proposed has a few security related problems and several unnecessary performance bottlenecks. We point these out and propose corresponding security and performance improvements in order to make the scheme practical and efficient for the task it was originally designed for.
Locally testable codes and PCPs of almost-linear length
Authors: Oded Goldreich, Madhu Sudan
Venue: Journal of the ACM (JACM) (2006)

We initiate a systematic study of locally testable codes; that is, error-correcting codes that admit very efficient membership tests. Specifically, these are codes accompanied with tests that make a constant number of (random) queries into any given word and reject non-codewords with probability proportional to their distance from the code.Locally testable codes are believed to be the combinatorial core of PCPs. However, the relation is less immediate than commonly believed. Nevertheless, we show that certain PCP systems can be modified to yield locally testable codes. On the other hand, we adapt techniques that we develop for the construction of the latter to yield new PCPs.Our main results are locally testable codes and PCPs of almost-linear length. Specifically, we prove the existence of the following constructs:---Locally testable binary (linear) codes in which k information bits are encoded by a codeword of length k &sdot; exp(&Otilde;(&radic;(log k))). This improves over previous results that either yield codewords of exponential length or obtained almost quadratic length codewords for sufficiently large nonbinary alphabet.---PCP systems of almost-linear length for SAT. The length of the proof is n &sdot; exp(&Otilde;(&radic;(log n))) and verification in performed by a constant number (i.e., 19) of queries, as opposed to previous results that used proof length n(1 &plus; O(1/q)) for verification by q queries.The novel techniques in use include a random projection of certain codewords and PCP-oracles that preserves local-testability, an adaptation of PCP constructions to obtain &ldquo;linear PCP-oracles&rdquo; for proving conjunctions of linear conditions, and design of PCPs with some new soundness properties---a direct construction of locally testable (linear) codes of subexponential length.
Extending Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI) for Management of Mobile/Embedded XML Web Services
Authors: Vladimir Tosic, Hanan Lutfiyya, Yazhe Tang
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and E-Services (2006)

Management of Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services executing in mobile and/or embedded environments poses new challenges coming from limited available resources and from the need for characteristic management activities, such as handling context sensitivity. We determined management requirements, studied relevant tradeoffs, and designed a management infrastructure for monitoring of mobile/ embedded XML Web services. The infrastructure enables that some or all management activities are executed on a non-mobile/non-embedded gateway instead of a mobile/embedded provider Web service. Further, it contains support for managing contextsensitivity and for handling disruptions in quality of service (QoS) and intermittent connectivity. While our high-level architecture can be implemented upon several existing Web service management tools, we chose to develop a new version of our Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI). The suggested solutions are being verified using the new WSOI prototype and validated on case studies, such as emulation of track-tracking Web services.
Modeling High Availability
Authors: Kishor S. Trivede, Ranjith Vasireddy, David Trindale, Swami Nathan, Rick Castro
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (2006)

Carrier grade high availability platforms are designed t o enable the development and deployment of highly available services in the telecommunications industry. In order to build-in high availability and compare availabilities that differ in the sixth decimal place during the design phase, fairly detailed stochastic models are needed t o evaluate the design and perform design trade offs. Thas paper describes an availability model for a high availability platform using three-level hierarchical decomposition that mixes reliability block diagrams and Markov chains. The model is built and evaluated using the SHARPE software package. Sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the effects of critical parameters.
State Machine Based CDMA Stress Testing Service System
Authors: Lan Liu, Jun Lin, Zhitang Li, Jiachun Li
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Services Computing (2006)

This paper introduces a system model of CDMA stress testing service platform based on state machine technology. This system provides an efficient service oriented solution on protocol and stress testing of CDMA system. with high performance and automatic capability. The concurrent multitask mechanism and the state machine framework enable the high performance and automatic capability of this system. And the scalable distributed architecture offers the maximum flexibility of deployment.
WWW and multicultural democracy: evaluating U.S. History websites
Authors: Cecil Robinson, Douglas McKnight
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (2006)

Claims about the potential of the Internet within social studies and democratic education have been somewhat silent on issues of diversity. To address this problem, this study employed tenets of liberal and multicultural democratic theory, developed an evaluative coding scheme, and examined content of websites that preservice teachers (N = 20) selected as resources for U.S. History unit plans. Results indicate selected websites housed a large amount of redundant non-diverse information. Website content was available in local media resources, consisted of textbook accounts, and focused on traditional historical topics; only one of ten websites was diverse. A four-cluster model provides further support for a discussion about the Internet, as currently used and framed, leading to less diversity of ideas and voices within the classroom, anathema to the stated democratic purposes of the social studies.
Supporting Colocated Interactions Using RFID and Social Network Displays
Authors: Shin'ichi Konomi, Sozo Inoue, Takashi Kobayashi, Masashi Tsuchida, Masaru Kitsuregawa
Venue: IEEE Pervasive Computing (2006)

The DeaiExplorer RFID application helps colocated conference participants discover interpersonal connections by letting them mutually reveal their social networks on a large display device. The system responds to nearby participants and uses algorithms to dynamically derive interconnected social clusters from a publication database. The system was deployed at a recent international conference, providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analysis of this data reveals interesting implications for designing such RFID-based systems, highlighting new opportunities and key design challenges. This article is part of a special issue on Real-World Deployments.
A Unified Architecture for H.264 Multiple Block-Size DCT with Fast and Low Cost Quantization
Authors: Javier D. Bruguera, Roberto R. Osorio
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design (2006)

AVC/H.264 is the new international standard for video coding jointly developed by ISO-MPEG and ITU-T, which offers a substantial compression gain when compared with H.263 andMPEG-4 simple profile. One of the main characteristics of H.264 is the introduction of a integer version of the Discrete Cosine Transform initially applied to 4x4 pixels blocks, and later extended to 8x8 pixels for High Quality video encoding. In this work, a unified architecture is proposed for parallel 8x8 integer DCT and iDCT, also able to process 4x4 DCT, iDCT and Hadamard transform. A very fast quantization/de-quantization scheme is presented based on prediction that allows parallel quantization with a single multiplier. This architecture also implements all-zero detection, eliminating coefficients with high cost as specified in the standard and anticipates entropy encoding. The proposed design has been synthesized in AMS 0.35ì technology and achieves a maximum speed of 67 MHz.
A Business Collaboration Registry Model on Top of ebRIM
Authors: Birgit Hofreiter, Christian Huemer, Marco Zapletal
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (2006)

UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM) is a well accepted approach to define inter-organizational business processes. UMM models should be managed in a registry for two reasons: Firstly, business partners supporting the process can find it and bind to it. Secondly, a model - or more important parts thereof - may be reused in another model of an inter-organizational process. Accordingly, registering one model as one object in a registry is not appropriate. Those parts of a model that may be reused must become registry objects themselves. Extracting parts of a model results in objects that are logically inter-related. Thus, a registry model taking care of these inter-relationships is needed. In this paper we present a so-called business collaboration registry model that sits on top of the ebRIM (ebXML registry information model) in order to manage UMM business collaboration models in an ebXML registry. Furthermore, we outline the registry management functions for maintaining models in the registry.
Calibration of multivariate generalized hyperbolic distributions using the em algorithm, with applications in risk management, portfolio optimization and portfolio credit risk
Authors: Alec Kercheval
Venue:  (2005)

The distributions of many financial quantities are well-known to have heavy tails, exhibit skewness, and have other non-Gaussian characteristics. In this dissertation we study an especially promising family: the multivariate generalized hyperbolic distributions (GH). This family includes and generalizes the familiar Gaussian and Student t distributions, and the so-called skewed t distributions, among many others. The primary obstacle to the applications of such distributions is the numerical difficulty of calibrating the distributional parameters to the data. In this dissertation we describe a way to stably calibrate GH distributions for a wider range of parameters than has previously been reported. In particular, we develop a version of the EM algorithm for calibrating GH distributions. This is a modification of methods proposed in McNeil, Frey, and Embrechts (2005), and generalizes the algorithm of Protassov (2004). Our algorithm extends the stability of the calibration procedure to a wide range of parameters, now including parameter values that maximize log-likelihood for our real market data sets. This allows for the first time certain GH distributions to be used in modeling contexts when previously they have been numerically intractable. Our algorithm enables us to make new uses of GH distributions in three financial applications. First, we forecast univariate Value-at-Risk (VaR) for stock index returns, and we show in out-of-sample backtesting that the GH distributions outperform the Gaussian distribution. Second, we calculate an efficient frontier for equity portfolio optimization under the skewed-t distribution and using Expected Shortfall as the risk measure. Here, we show that the Gaussian efficient frontier is actually unreachable if returns are skewed t distributed. Third, we build an intensity-based model to price Basket Credit Default Swaps by calibrating the skewed t distribution directly, without the need to separately calibrate the skewed t copula. To our knowledge this is the first use of the skewed t distribution in portfolio optimization and in portfolio credit risk.
Measuring inconsistency in knowledgebases
Authors: John Grant, Anthony Hunter
Venue: Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2006)

It is well-known that knowledgebases may contain inconsistencies. We provide a measure to quantify the inconsistency of a knowledgebase, thereby allowing for the comparison of the inconsistency of various knowledgebases, represented as first-order logic formulas. We use quasi-classical (QC) logic for this purpose. QC logic is a formalism for reasoning and analysing inconsistent information. It has been used as the basis of a framework for measuring inconsistency in propositional theories. Here we extend this framework, by using a first-order logic version of QC logic for measuring inconsistency in first-order theories. We motivate the QC logic approach by considering some formulae as database or knowledgebase integrity constraints. We then define a measure of extrinsic inconsistency that can be used to compare the inconsistency of different knowledgebases. This measure takes into account both the language used and the underlying domain. We show why this definition also captures the intrinsic inconsistency of a knowledgebase. We also provide a formalization of paraconsistent equality, called quasi-equality, and we use this in an extended example of an application for measuring inconsistency between heterogeneous sources of information and integrity constraints prior to merging.
Synergetic methods of data complexation
Authors: A. N. Voronin
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2006)

Synergetic methods of data complexation are proposed that make it possible to obtain a maximal amount of available information using a limited number of channels. Instead of reducers of degrees of freedom, a mechanism of discriminators of degrees of freedom is proposed that enables all the channels to take part in the development of a cooperative decision in accordance with their informativeness in a current situation.
Using MAP for Recovering the Architecture of Web Systems of a Spanish Insurance Company
Authors: Rafael Capilla
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Workshop on Software Technology and Engineering Practice (2005)

Software maintenance is a key activity for supporting the evolution of existing software systems but in many cases they are considered time consuming tasks. In certain systems (e.g. Web applications), changes must be performed very often and the time to carry out the maintenance activities is very short. In such cases, the need to count with suitable software architectures able to support the dynamicity of changes or new requirements becomes a need for every software project. In this work we describe how we applied the MAP method for building the architecture of a webbased application of a Spanish insurance company. One of the goals of the company was to reduce the maintenance costs of the existing systems, which motivated to move to a product line approach and fostering the usage of reusable components. We describe a case study carried out in a Spanish insurance company to obtain a single architecture valid for several applications belonging to the same domain.
Learning to classify documents according to genre: Special Topic Section on Computational Analysis of Style
Authors: Aidan Finn, Nicholas Kushmerick
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2006)

Current document-retrieval tools succeed in locating large numbers of documents relevant to a given query. While search results may be relevant according to the topic of the documents, it is more difficult to identify which of the relevant documents are most suitable for a particular user. Automatic genre analysis (i.e., the ability to distinguish documents according to style) would be a useful tool for identifying documents that are most suitable for a particular user. We investigate the use of machine learning for automatic genre classification. We introduce the idea of domain transfer&mdash;genre classifiers should be reusable across multiple topics&mdash;which does not arise in standard text classification. We investigate different features for building genre classifiers and their ability to transfer across multiple-topic domains. We also show how different feature-sets can be used in conjunction with each other to improve performance and reduce the number of documents that need to be labeled. &copy; 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
QoS analysis for component-based embedded software: Model and methodology
Authors: Hui Ma, I.-Ling Yen, Jia Zhou, Kendra Cooper
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2006)

Component-based development (CBD) techniques have been widely used to enhance the productivity and reduce the cost for software systems development. However, applying CBD techniques to embedded software development faces additional challenges. For embedded systems, it is crucial to consider the quality of service (QoS) attributes, such as timeliness, memory limitations, output precision, and battery constraints. Frequently, multiple components implementing the same functionality with different QoS properties (measurements in terms of QoS attributes) can be used to compose a system. Also, software components may have parameters that can be configured to satisfy different QoS requirements. Composition analysis, which is used to determine the most suitable component selections and parameter settings to best satisfy the system QoS requirement, is very important in embedded software development process. In this paper, we present a model and the methodologies to facilitate composition analysis. We define QoS requirements as constraints and objectives. Composition analysis is performed based on the QoS properties and requirements to find solutions (component selections and parameter settings) that can optimize the QoS objectives while satisfying the QoS constraints. We use a multi-objective concept to model the composition analysis problem and use an evolutionary algorithm to determine the Pareto-optimal solutions efficiently.
A dynamic multicasting policy based on proxy caching
Authors: Wei Shu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 1 (2003)

In this paper, we propose a dynamic multicasting policy based on the phased proxy caching to reduce the network bandwidth from the central server to the clients. In the proposed multicasting policy, for an object, a multicasting channel is allocated only if there are more than two active unicast streams for that object. So, the length of a multicasting window varies with the arrival rate of that object and moreover, proxy caching is applied to the multicasting policy by caching objects step by step starting from the initial portion of the objects; for each object, caching is done either partially or fully depending on the streams' arrival rate.
High-Throughput Multicast Routing Metrics in Wireless Mesh Networks
Authors: Sabyasachi Roy, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas, Saumitra Das, Y. Charlie Hu
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

The stationary nature of nodes in a mesh network has shifted the main design goal of routing protocols from maintaining connectivity between source and destination nodes to finding high-throughput paths between them. In recent years, numerous link-quality-based routing metrics have been proposed for choosing high-throughput paths for unicast protocols. In this paper we study routing metrics for high-throughput tree or mesh construction in multicast protocols. We show that there is a fundamental difference between unicast and multicast routing in how data packets are transmitted at the link layer, and accordingly there is a difference in how the routing metrics for each of these primitives are designed. We adapt certain routing metrics for unicast for high-throughput multicast routing and propose news ones not previously used for high-throughput. We then study the performance improvement achieved by using different link-quality-based routing metrics via extensive simulation and experiments on a mesh network testbed, using ODMRP as a representative multicast protocol. Our testbed experiment results show that ODMRP enhanced with linkquality routing metrics can achieve up to 17.5% throughput improvement as compared to the original ODMRP.
Robotics-based location sensing using wireless Ethernet
Authors: Andrew M. Ladd, Kostas E. Berkis, Algis Rudys, Lydia E. Kavraki, Dan S. Wallach
Venue: Wireless Networks (2005)

A key subproblem in the construction of location-aware systems is the determination of the position of a mobile device. This article describes the design, implementation and analysis of a system for determining position inside a building from measured RF signal strengths of packets on an IEEE 802.11b wireless Ethernet network. Previous approaches to location-awareness with RF signals have been severely hampered by non-Gaussian signals, noise, and complex correlations due to multi-path effects, interference and absorption. The design of our system begins with the observation that determining position from complex, noisy and non-Gaussian signals is a well-studied problem in the field of robotics. Using only off-the-shelf hardware, we achieve robust position estimation to within a meter in our experimental context and after adequate training of our system. We can also coarsely determine our orientation and can track our position as we move. Our results show that we can localize a stationary device to within 1.5 meters over 80% of the time and track a moving device to within 1 meter over 50% of the time. Both localization and tracking run in real-time. By applying recent advances in probabilistic inference of position and sensor fusion from noisy signals, we show that the RF emissions from base stations as measured by off-the-shelf wireless Ethernet cards are sufficiently rich in information to permit a mobile device to reliably track its location.
Genetic Algorithm Based Optimal Block Mapping Method for LSB Substitution
Authors: Rongrong Ji, Hongxun Yao, Shaohui Liu, Liang Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

The least-significant-bit (LSB) substitution which is commonly used in steganography would degrade the quality of host image significantly when embedding high-capacity information. To overcome this drawback, we present an optimal block mapping LSB method based on genetic algorithm, which is out of researchers' concern but fundamentally important. Additionally we discuss the rule to select the best block size. The main idea is to minimize the degradation of the stego image by finding a best mapping function between host and secret image blocks at global scope. The experimental result is promising. The advantage of our method over most commonly used LSB strategy is obvious in enhancing PSNR value while having a secluded statistic peculiarity.
Image Compression System Based on Improved Zerotree Method
Authors: Zhang Zhong
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (2006)

Based on Zerotree method, hybrid self-adapting arithmetic encoder is used compared with Shaprio's single base encoder. Rejecting significant coefficients' sequence according to their amplitudes is adopted. Simulation result is given and reconstructed image effect based on improved scheme is perfect