ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A low-power parallel design of discrete wavelet transform using subthreshold voltage technology
Authors: Michael B. Henry, Syed I. Haider, Leyla Nazhandali
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems (2008)

The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is a means to analyze the frequency content of a signal and has extensive uses, including the JPEG2000 codec. Many portable and battery operated applications of DWT are expected in the near future that require a low power implementation of this transform. In this paper, a parallel VLSI implementation of a 2D lifting-based DWT processor is presented that is scalable from 2 to 256 parallel units. This design benefits from an efficient data distribution module to the parallel units, which constitutes a small overhead, and is able to significantly benefit from voltage scaling to achieve energy efficiency. In our design, the number of parallel units is increased and their speed is reduced through voltage scaling, while maintaining a constant throughput. Our results show that the optimal operating voltage of the parallel units, for a target throughput of 200MHz,4 is 386mV. This is below the threshold voltage, which is the voltage that turns the transistors on. Since operating a circuit in subthreshold voltage consumes 100+ times less power than running it at nominal voltage, our design is able to provide the same throughput as a reference pipelined implementation with 26 times less power consumption.
Using model checkers in an introductory course on operating systems
Authors: Roelof Hamberg, Frits Vaandrager
Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (2008)

During the last three years, we have been experimenting with the use of the Uppaal model checker in an introductory course on operating systems for first-year Computer Science students at the Radboud University Nijmegen. The course uses model checkers as a tool to explain, visualize and solve concurrency problems. Our experience is that students enjoy to play with model checkers because it makes concurrency issues tangible. Even though it is hard to measure objectively, we think that model checkers really help students to obtain a deeper insight into concurrency. In this article, we report on our experiences in the classroom, explain how mutual exclusion algorithms, semaphores and monitors can conveniently be modeled in Uppaal, and present some results on properties of small, concurrent patterns.
Privacy with Web Serivces: Intelligence Gathering and Enforcement
Authors: Peter Bodorik, Dawn Jutla
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03 (2008)

This paper focuses on agent-based enterprise information technology infrastructure support for privacy in the Web Services Architecture (WSA) in order to enforce privacy policies on Private Information (PI) used by applications. We provision the Web Services Platform (WSP) with mechanisms to not only enforce privacy policies on PI used by a web service, but also gather intelligence about PI that is exchanged in invoking and executing web services. Gathered information written in logs is then analyzed by a Privacy Agent to update a privacy Knowledge Base (KB) that captures information on applications, web services they invoke, context of invocation, and PI stored, managed, and used by the enterprise. This loop – observe execution of web services, update the knowledge base with observations, and then update rules governing privacy enforcement, provides for adaptive learning about the use of PI in the organization and also enforcement of privacy policies in web services executions.
Comparative evaluation of overlap strategies with study of I/O overlap in MPI-IO
Authors: Christina M. Patrick, SeungWoo Son, Mahmut Kandemir
Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (2008)

Many scientific applications use parallel I/O to meet the low latency and high bandwidth I/O requirement. Among many available parallel I/O operations, collective I/O is one of the most popular methods when the storage layouts and access patterns of data do not match. The implementation of collective I/O typically involves disk I/O operations followed by interprocessor communications. Also, in many I/O-intensive applications, parallel I/O operations are usually followed by parallel computations. This paper presents a comparative study of different overlap strategies in parallel applications. We have experimented with four different overlap strategies 1) Overlapping I/O and communication; 2) Overlapping I/O and computation; 3) Overlapping computation and communication; and 4) Overlapping I/O, communication, and computation. All experiments have been conducted on a Linux Cluster and the performance results obtained are very encouraging. On an average, we have enhanced the performance of a generic collective read call by 38%, the MxM benchmark by 26%, and the FFT benchmark by 34%.
Mu: channel UI to optimize the widget control in internet tv
Authors: Seungchul Shin, Jinho Yim, Sangkon Song
Venue: Proceeding of the 1st international conference on Designing interactive user experiences for TV and video (2008)

Widgets are no-frills, quick-access, single-function applications whose simplicity and ease of use make them a viable option for deploying web services on TVs. In this paper, we propose a channel-based widget interface for TVs. When it comes to TVs, radios and other devices, channel is the most established and familiar control method. Accordingly, applications of this concept for IPTV will facilitate new web services while maintaining the traditional user experience. We also propose the channel-based interface that allocates web services to specific channels enabling the user to access services through the channels and add/delete web services. In addition to the web service interface, this paper introduces some design issues, channel allocation methods and, through comparative analysis against other current IPTVs, provides evidence to the improved accessibility of the proposed method.
Sliding-window top-k queries on uncertain streams
Authors: Cheqing Jin, Ke Yi, Lei Chen, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Xuemin Lin
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Query processing on uncertain data streams has attracted a lot of attentions lately, due to the imprecise nature in the data generated from a variety of streaming applications, such as readings from a sensor network. However, all of the existing works on uncertain data streams study unbounded streams. This paper takes the first step towards the important and challenging problem of answering sliding-window queries on uncertain data streams, with a focus on arguably one of the most important types of queries---top-k queries. The challenge of answering sliding-window top-k queries on uncertain data streams stems from the strict space and time requirements of processing both arriving and expiring tuples in high-speed streams, combined with the difficulty of coping with the exponential blowup in the number of possible worlds induced by the uncertain data model. In this paper, we design a unified framework for processing sliding-window top-k queries on uncertain streams. We show that all the existing top-k definitions in the literature can be plugged into our framework, resulting in several succinct synopses that use space much smaller than the window size, while are also highly efficient in terms of processing time. In addition to the theoretical space and time bounds that we prove for these synopses, we also present a thorough experimental report to verify their practical efficiency on both synthetic and real data.
Data Transformation Services over Grids with Real-Time Bound Constraints
Authors: Alfredo Cuzzocrea
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

Data and Knowledge Grids represent emerging and attracting application scenarios for Grid Computing, and pose novel and previously-unrecognized challenges to the research community. Basically, Data and Knowledge Grids found on high-performance Grid infrastructures and add to the latter meaningful data- and knowledge-oriented abstractions and metaphors that perfectly marry with innovative requirements of modern complex Intelligent Information Systems. To this end, service-oriented architectures and paradigms are the most popular ones for Grids, and on the whole represent an active and widely-recognized area of Grid Computing research. In this paper, we introduce the so-called Grid-based RTSOA frameworks, which essentially combine Grid Computing with real-time service management and execution paradigms, and put the basis for novel research perspectives in data-intensive e-science Grid applications with real-time bound constraints. This novel framework is then specialized to the particular context of Data Transformation services over Grids, which play a relevant role for both Data and Knowledge Grids. Finally, we complete the main contribution of the paper with a rigorous theoretical model for efficiently supporting Grid-based RTSOA frameworks, with particular emphasis to the context of Data Transformation services over Grids, along with its preliminary experimental assessment.
GIS design application for "Sierra Morena Honey" designation of origin
Authors: S. Serrano, F. J. Jiménez-Hornero, E. Gutiérrez de Ravé, M. L. Jodral
Venue: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (2008)

The quality label ''Protected Designation of Origin'' (PDO) protects and controls product quality. It is a normalized mode of typification and valuation. On the basis of the model proposed by Persano Oddo et al. [Persano Oddo, L., Piana, M.L., Barbattini, R., Ferrazzi, P., Longhitano, N., Piro, R., Ricciardelli D'Albore, G., Sabatini A.G., 2002. ''La valorizzazione del miele attraverso le denominazioni di origine geografica'', proc. of Atti del Convegno AMA ''Il ruolo della ricerca in apicoltura'', Bologna, 14-16 March, pp. 185-216] and the design of Bernardinelli et al. [Bernardinelli, I., Della Vedova, G., Milani, N., 2005. ''Un approccio metodologico per la gestone del nomadismo in apicultura mediante i GIS: Esperienza nelle Valli del Natisone (Friuli Venecia Giulia)''. Ati dell' Incontro-Siminario Mappatura delle aree nettarifere. Firenze], a Geographic Information System (GIS) was created for the management of honey produced in Sierra Morena (Andalusia, Southern Spain), and its development phases are presented in this work. Beekeeping is an activity closely related to this territory, and the GIS tool will be of great assistance in its management. A powerful, easy-to-update, and inexpensive open source code-based GIS web site was created to fulfill the needs of a work team characterizing the honeys entering the Protected Designation of Origin. The application is called SMHGIS (Sierra Morena Honey Geographic Information System). Extension and area delimitation aspects and orographic, orogenesic, climatic, and agronomic (nectar sources) features have been considered. An ordnance survey map of the area (1/10,000), data of the apiary census and honey production, and analysis and data for the characterization of honey subject to designation were used. The aim of this work is to describe the design and possibilities of GIS as a visualization tool for honey characterization and, secondly, as a management tool for the regulation of a Protected Designation of Origin.
Databases and the silification of health
Authors: Justin Zobel
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Developments in databases and computing are helping to create a revolution in health and in biomedical research. Many aspects of medicine are increasingly data-centric, from basics such as record-keeping to diagnosis and biological discovery. Drivers of change include massive curated biological data sets, consolidations of medical knowledge into systematised online repositories, innovations in data linkage, change of practice in hospitals, and new diagnostic technologies. However, the volumes of data means that new database and computational innovations are required if the data's value is to be fully exploited. This talk reviews the biomedical mechanisms that are creating data and explores achievements and challenges for database researchers in future health.
Integration of Intelligent Agents Supporting Automatic Service Composition in Ambient Intelligence
Authors: Maria J. Santofimia, Francisco Moya, Felix J. Villanueva, David Villa, Juan C. Lopez
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02 (2008)

Systems for Ambient Intelligence environments demand at some stage a service composition task, as a mean of adaptability to the context changes. However, in contrast to what ubiquitous and pervasive computing propose, users generally ﬁnd themselves involved in the service composition task, by selecting or deciding what to compose and how. This paper proposes the use of Intelligent Agents for the automation of the composition task, providing transparency from the user point of view.
A fast Bayesian change point analysis for the segmentation of microarray data
Authors: Chandra Erdman, John W. Emerson
Venue: Bioinformatics (2008)

Motivation: The ability to detect regions of genetic alteration is of great importance in cancer research. These alterations can take the form of large chromosomal gains and losses as well as smaller amplifications and deletions. The detection of such regions allows researchers to identify genes involved in cancer progression, and to fully understand differences between cancer and non-cancer tissue. The Bayesian method proposed by Barry and Hartigan is well suited for the analysis of such change point problems. In our previous article we introduced the R package bcp (Bayesian change point), an MCMC implementation of Barry and Hartigan's method. In a simulation study and real data examples, bcp is shown to both accurately detect change points and estimate segment means. Earlier versions of bcp (prior to 2.0) are O(n2) in speed and O(n) in memory (where n is the number of observations), and run in ~45 min for a sequence of length 10 000. With the high resolution of newer microarrays, the number of computations in the O(n2) algorithm is prohibitively time-intensive. Results: We present a new implementation of the Bayesian change point method that is O(n) in both speed and memory; bcp 2.1 runs in ~45 s on a single processor with a sequence of length 10 000—a tremendous speed gain. Further speed improvements are possible using parallel computing, supported in bcp via NetWorkSpaces. In simulated and real microarray data from the literature, bcp is shown to quickly and accurately detect aberrations of varying width and magnitude. Availability: The R package bcp is available on CRAN (R Development Core Team, 2008). The O(n) version is available in version 2.0 or higher, with support for NetWorkSpaces in versions 2.1 and higher. Contact: chandra.erdman@yale.edu
Combining declarative, procedural, and predictive knowledge to generate, execute, and optimize robot plans
Authors: Freek Stulp, Michael Beetz
Venue: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (2008)

One of the main challenges in motor control is expressing high-level goals in terms of low-level actions. To do so effectively, motor control systems must reason about actions at different levels of abstraction. Grounding high-level plans in low-level actions is essential semantic knowledge for plan-based control of real robots. We present a robot control system that uses declarative, procedural and predictive knowledge to generate, execute and optimize plans. Declarative knowledge is represented in PDDL, durative actions constitute procedural knowledge, and predictive knowledge is learned by observing action executions. We demonstrate how learned predictive knowledge enables robots to autonomously optimize plan execution with respect to execution duration and robustness in real-time. The approach is evaluated in two different robotic domains.
Relating spectral shape to cyanobacterial blooms in the Laurentian Great Lakes
Authors: T. T. Wynne, R. P. Stumpf, M. C. Tomlinson, R. A. Warner, P. A. Tester, J. Dyble, G. L. Fahnenstiel
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

A change in the spectral shape at 681 nm is used to distinguish blooms of cyanobacteria from blooms of other phytoplankton via MERIS satellite sensor imagery. During large cyanobacterial blooms, the spectral shape around 681 nm is not a positive quantity as scattering due to cyanobacteria overwhelms the fluorescence signal, thus creating a negative spectral shape. This relationship is consistent in both remotely sensed and in situ data.
Track and cut: simultaneous tracking and segmentation of multiple objects with graph cuts
Authors: Aurélie Bugeau, Patrick Pérezz
Venue: Journal on Image and Video Processing (2008)

This paper presents a new method to both track and segment multiple objects in videos using min-cut/max-flow optimizations. We introduce objective functions that combine low-level pixel wise measures (color, motion), high-level observations obtained via an independent detection module, motion prediction, and contrast-sensitive contextual regularization. One novelty is that external observations are used without adding any association step. The observations are image regions (pixel sets) that can be provided by any kind of detector. The minimization of appropriate cost functions simultaneously allows "detection-before-track" tracking (track-to-observation assignment and automatic initialization of new tracks) and segmentation of tracked objects. When several tracked objects get mixed up by the detection module (e.g., a single foreground detection mask is obtained for several objects close to each other), a second stage of minimization allows the proper tracking and segmentation of these individual entities despite the confusion of the external detection module.
Cognitive Agents Integrating Rules and Reinforcement Learning for Context-Aware Decision Support
Authors: Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02 (2008)

While context-awareness has been found to be effective for decision support in complex domains, most of such decision support systems are hard-coded, incurring significant development efforts. To ease the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, this paper presents a class of cognitive agents based on self-organizing neural model known as TD-FALCON that integrates rules and learning for supporting context-aware decision making. Besides the ability to incorporate a priori knowledge in the form of symbolic propositional rules, TD-FALCON performs reinforcement learning (RL), enabling knowledge refinement and expansion through the interaction with its environment. The efficacy of the developed Context-Aware Decision Support (CaDS) system is demonstrated through a case study of command and control in a virtual environment.
Computational and mathematical approaches to societal transitions
Authors: Jos Timmermans, Hans Haan, Flaminio Squazzoni
Venue: Computational Mathematical Organization Theory (2008)

After an introduction of the theoretical framework and concepts of transition studies, this article gives an overview of how structural change in social systems has been studied from various disciplinary perspectives. This overview first leads to the conclusion that computational and mathematical approaches and their practical form, modeling, up till now, have been almost absent in the research and theorizing of structural change or transitions in social systems. Second, this review of the social science literature suggests numerous theoretical constructs relevant for transition modeling. Relevant concepts include the conceptualization of the micro-to-macro link, the importance of explaining both stability and change, quantitative and qualitative definitions of structural change, the use of dichotomies, synchronic and diachronic reasoning in explaining structural change, definitions of basic patterns of social change, the conceptualization of resistance to change and intentional and normative aspects of social change. This article employs these theoretical concepts to describe and discuss the models presented in this special issue in order to develop an understanding of what exactly entails a computational or mathematical approach to societal transitions.
Transaction time indexing with version compression
Authors: David Lomet, Mingsheng Hong, Rimma Nehme, Rui Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Immortal DB is a transaction time database system designed to enable high performance for temporal applications. It is built into a commercial database engine, Microsoft SQL Server. This paper describes how we integrated a temporal indexing technique, the TSB-tree, into Immortal DB to serve as the core access method. The TSB-tree provides high performance access and update for both current and historical data. A main challenge was integrating TSB-tree functionality while preserving original B+tree functionality, including concurrency control and recovery. We discuss the overall architecture, including our unique treatment of index terms, and practical issues such as uncommitted data and log management. Performance is a primary concern. To increase performance, versions are locally delta compressed, exploiting the commonality between adjacent versions of the same record. This technique is also applied to index terms in index pages. There is a tradeoff between query performance and storage space. We discuss optimizing performance regarding this tradeoff throughout the paper. The result of our efforts is a high-performance transaction time database system built into an RDBMS engine, which has not been achieved before. We include a thorough experimental study and analysis that confirms the very good performance that it achieves.
Rural development within the EU LEADER+ programme: new tools and technologies
Authors: Ren&#x00e9; Victor Valqui Vidal
Venue: AI Society (2008)

This paper reports on the LEADER+ programme and on the work carried out supporting rural communities in EU countries under the LEADER+ programme. This is a programme that supports development in particularly vulnerable rural regions of the European countries that are members of the EU. It supports creative and innovative projects that can contribute to long-term and sustainable development in these regions. In this paper, we will focus on three specific areas: networking, facilitation of groups, and information and communication technologies. Some case studies are shortly described.