ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
On-line discussions: a key to enhancing student motivation and understanding?
Authors: T. Larkin-Hein
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

The use of the computer and other technologies (i.e. the Internet, world-wide web, etc.) are being aggressively used by many educators as tools in the learning process. This paper reports on an on-going research study at American University designed to address the role of student understanding in physics using an on-line discussion group format. In terms of gauging student understanding in physics, some critical questions are raised: (1) what factors serve to motivate students to participate in on-line discussions outside of class? (2) Can student motivation and performance be linked to students' individual learning styles? and (3) can student participation in on-line discussions be linked to enhanced understanding? To address these questions, formal learning style assessment data along with results from a survey conducted in an introductory course for nonmajors during the 2000 academic year are shared.
A robust proportionate affine projection algorithm for network echo cancellation
Authors: T. Gansler
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2000)

Echo cancelers which cover longer impulse responses (/spl ges/64 ms) are desirable. Long responses create a need for more rapidly converging algorithms in order to meet the specifications for network echo cancelers devised by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). In general, faster convergence implies a higher sensitivity to near-end disturbances, especially "double-talk." Previously, a fast converging algorithm called the proportionate NLMS (normalized least mean squares) algorithm (PNLMS) has been proposed. This algorithm exploits the sparseness of the echo path in order to increase the convergence rate. A robust version of PNLMS has also been presented which combines a double-talk detector with techniques from robust statistics to make the algorithm insensitive to double-talk. This paper presents a generalization of the robust PNLMS algorithm to a robust proportionate aAffine projection algorithm (APA) called PAPA that converges very fast.
A new cohort normalization using local acoustic information for speaker verification
Authors: T. Isobe
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1999)

This paper describes a new cohort normalization method for HMM based speaker verification. In the proposed method, cohort models are synthesized based on the similarity of local acoustic features between speakers. The similarity can be determined using acoustic information lying in model components such as phonemes, states, and the Gaussian distributions of HMMs. With the method, the synthesized models can provide an effective normalizing score for various observed measurements because the difference between the individual reference model and the synthesized cohort models is statistically reduced through fine evaluation of acoustic similarity in model structure level. In the experiments using telephone speech of 100 speakers, it was found that high verification performance can be achieved by the proposed method: the equal error rate (EER) was drastically reduced from 1.20% (obtained by the conventional speaker-selection based cohort normalization) to 0.30% (obtained by the proposed method on distribution-based selection) in a closed test. Furthermore, EER was also reduced from 1.40% to 0.70% in open test (reference speaker: 25, impostor: 75), when the other speakers than the reference speaker were used as impostors.
WebWiseTclTk: a safe-Tcl/Tk-based toolkit enhanced for the world wide web
Authors: Hemang Lavana, Franc Brglez
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th conference on Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1998 - Volume 6 (1998)

The WebWiseTclTk toolkit is an enhancement of the existing feature set of Safe-Tcl and Safe-Tk that does not compromise security. The toolkit re-defines the functionality of the auto_load mechanism in Tcl such that it works for packages located anywhere on the World Wide Web. It also re-introduces several commands not available in Safe-Tk such as toplevel and menu to provide a much richer feature set of Tk commands. The toolkit is written entirely in Safe-Tcl/Tk and uses the home policy for running applications as Tcl-plugins. The toolkit supports (1) creation of new Web-based Tcl applications with greatly enhanced functionality, and (2) migration of existing Tcl applications to the Web by merely writing an encapsulation script. We demonstrate the capabilities of the WebWiseTclTk toolkit by readily creating an encapsulation script for Web-based execution of the Tk Widget Demonstrations, distributed with the core Tcl/Tk.
Mixed Malvar-wavelets for non-stationary signal representation
Authors: J. A. Thripuraneni
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1996)

This paper develops algorithms for using the lapped orthogonal transforms (LOT) in the multiple bases representation (MBR) of non-stationary signals. We have previously developed speech algorithms using nonlapped mixed transforms. The major motivation for using lapped orthogonal transforms is their ability to eliminate blocking effects which show up as discontinuities in the reconstructed signal at the block boundaries. In addition, LOT based transforms improve the transform coding gain considerably. We test and compare the performance of the LOT in MBR algorithms that use a previously developed cascade structure to our newly developed parallel structure. We also discuss different dominant component (DC) picking strategies and introduce some new methods. Results and subjective evaluations are provided for real speech signals.
Images Restoration Using an Iterative Dynamic Programming Approach
Authors: Minglun Gong
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (2007)

A novel image restoration algorithm is presented in this paper. The restoration problem is formulated under the energy minimization framework and is solved using a dynamic programming-based approach. Through applying dynamic programming iteratively along both horizontal and vertical scanlines, the new algorithm can quickly converge to a near-globaloptimal solution, without suffering the so-called streak artifacts. Experiments on both grayscale and color images demonstrate that the presented algorithm can effectively remove Gaussian noise and impulse noise from corrupted images, as well as to restore images with missing intensity values.
Unsupervised learning of sigmoid perceptron
Authors: Z. Uykan
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 06 (2000)

A previous paper has derived a clustering-based upper bound on mean squared output error of radial basis function networks that explicitly depends on the network parameters. In this study we focus on single-hidden-layer-sigmoid perceptron. Using the analysis of the previous paper, this paper (i) presents a similar upper bound on output error of the sigmoid perceptron and the upper bound can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the number of sigmoid units, and (ii) proposes unsupervised type learning of input-layer (synaptic) weights in contrast to traditional gradient-descent type supervised learning, i.e., the proposed method minimizes the upper bound by a clustering algorithm for determining the input-layer weights in contrast to the gradient-descent type algorithm minimizing the output error, which is traditionally used in the design of the perceptron. The simulation results show that (i) the proposed hierarchical method requires less time for learning when compared to gradient-descent-type supervised algorithm, (ii) it yields comparable performance in comparison with radial basis function network, and (iii) the upper bounds minimized during the clustering are quite tight to the output error function.
Reading between the lines: lessons from the SDMI challenge
Authors: Scott A. Craver, Min Wu, Bede Liu, Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach, Drew Dean, Edward W. Felten
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10 (2001)

The Secure Digital Music Initiative is a consortium of parties interested in preventing piracy of digital music, and to this end they are developing architectures for content protection on untrusted platforms. SDMI recently held a challenge to test the strength of four watermarking technologies, and two other security technologies. No documentation explained the implementations of the technologies, and neither watermark embedding nor detecting software was directly accessible to challenge participants. We nevertheless accepted the challenge, and explored the inner workings of the technologies. We report on our results here.
Semantic based learning of syntax in an autonomous robot
Authors: Stephen Levinson
Venue:  (2006)

The ability to program a digital computer to use a natural language has evaded humans for over half a century. I believe that this is because all previous attempts have ignored the role of the physical world in language acquisition. It is the goal of the Language Acquisition Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to build a robot that is able to learn language as well as humans through embodied sensorimotor interaction with the physical world. I propose cognitive structures for an autonomous robot to enable it to learn the syntax of noun-verb sentences using its semantic understanding of the sentences' words. Specifically, production rules of syntax in Chomsky normal form will be explicitly represented using a hidden Markov model. These structures will be integrated into the robot's long-term associative memory, so that the representations of syntax that the robot acquires are dependent upon the robot's sensorimotor experience. The robot will then use this representation of syntax to produce sentences, some of which are novel, that describe what the robot observes.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer.
Demand Characteristics in Assessing Motion Sickness in a Virtual Environment: Or Does Taking a Motion Sickness Questionnaire Make You Sick?
Authors: Sean D. Young, Bernard D. Adelstein, Stephen R. Ellis
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2007)

The experience of motion sickness in a virtual environment may be measured through pre and postexperiment self-reported questionnaires such as the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). Although research provides converging evidence that users of virtual environments can experience motion sickness, there have been no controlled studies to determine to what extent the user's subjective response is a demand characteristic resulting from pre and posttest measures. In this study, subjects were given either SSQ's both pre and postvirtual environment immersion, or only postimmersion. This technique tested for contrast effects due to demand characteristics in which administration of the questionnaire itself suggested to the participant that the virtual environment may produce motion sickness. Results indicate that reports of motion sickness after immersion in a virtual environment are much greater when both pre and postquestionnaires are given than when only a posttest questionnaire is used. The implications for assessments of motion sickness in virtual environments are discussed.
Secure data aggregation and false data detection for wireless sensor networks
Authors: Hasan Cam
Venue:  (2006)

Recent advances in low-power computing and communication technologies have given rise to the proliferation of wireless sensor networks that often have a large number of low-cost sensor nodes with limited bandwidth, battery power, and processing capacity. Wireless sensor networks are expected to be used in a wide range of applications from habitat monitoring to military surveillance. For many of these applications, security is an essential requirement, and therefore the lack of proper security can curtail the widespread deployment of sensor networks.This dissertation addresses the security issues in wireless sensor networks, focusing on secure data aggregation and false data detection. A novel secure data aggregation protocol is proposed to prevent the redundant data transmission from sensor nodes to clusterheads. Data redundancy is eliminated using representative data items rather than actual sensor data. Representative data items also enable the proposed protocol to work in conjunction with security protocols in the sense that sensor nodes can send the actual data in encrypted form, without any need for decryption in cluster heads. Since secure data aggregation necessitates the existence of pairwise secret keys among neighboring sensor nodes and data aggregators, two key establishment protocols are proposed to provide secret key establishment for neighboring sensor nodes. In the key establishment protocols, memory and communication overhead of sensor nodes are reduced using the group-based key distribution and the events detected in the overlapping sensing regions of sensor nodes.False data detection is addressed in the presence of compromised data aggregators and sensor nodes. To detect the false data injected by compromised data aggregators and sensor nodes, false data detection and secure data aggregation are integrated. In addition to providing data integrity and confidentiality, the proposed algorithms also reduce significantly the amount of transmitted data with the help of data aggregation and early detection and dropping of false data.
The SMV algorithm selected by TIA and 3GPP2 for CDMA applications
Authors: Yang Gao
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 200. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2001)

During the years 1999 and 2000, the Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), managed a competition and a selection process for a new speech coding standard for CDMA applications. The new speech coding standard, which is coined Selectable Mode Vocoder (SMV), will become a service option in CDMA systems such as IS-95 and cdma2000, providing a higher quality, flexibility, and capacity over the existing speech coding service options, IS-96C, IS-127, and IS-733. Eight companies submitted candidates to selection phase. For all of the 36 test conditions, the Conexant SMV candidate was ranked at the top, or was statistically equivalent to other top-ranking candidates. The Conexant SMV candidate was chosen as the core speech coding technology for the SMV system. This paper describes the SMV algorithm developed by Conexant.
A Proposed Approach for Quality of Experience Assurance of IPTV
Authors: Marcio Nieblas Zapater, Graca Bressan
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Digital Society (2007)

IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) systems are being widely deployed by telecommunications service providers which intend to add TV services to their portfolio. Such services must have equal or higher quality levels than those currently offered by traditional TV players using other technologies, for example: cable or satellite. This paper proposes an approach for ensuring the desired quality requirements for IPTV services. The proposed approach is based on the use of Quality of Experience (QoE) concept that focuses on the quality perceived by the end user. This approach is broader than that oriented to Quality of Service (QoS) that primarily focuses on the performance measures from the network perspective. QoE takes into account how well a service meet customers' goals and expectations rather than focusing only on the network performance. At the bottom line, QoE is a measure of end-to-end performance at the service layer.
A Middleware for OSCAR and Wireless Sensor Network Environments
Authors: D. J. Ferreira, M. A. R. Dantas, A. R. Pinto, C. Montez, Martius Rodriguez
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications (2007)

There has been a steady increase in the use of mobile computing, especially with appliances such as sensors. The main challenge in this scenario is to increase network sen- sor lifetime. Cluster computing integration with wireless sensor networks can represent an interesting answer for high-performance computing to monitor several environ- ments. Computational resources available from cluster con- figurations are cost effective components to improve several classes of applications in many organizations. Scientific, industrial and commercial applications are more relying on cluster performance. OSCAR is a useful open software ap- proach to manage cluster of workstations. In this article, we present a middleware design and implementation that integrates an OSCAR cluster configuration with a wireless sensor network environment.
New Micropotentionstat for Measurement Responses from Thick-Film Sensors
Authors: P. Steffan, R. Vrba
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Systems (2007)

The new solution of the amperometric sensor measurement is given. It solves the problem of measurement of low currents (in order of nA) from electrochemical biosensors. However the sensitivity of integrated measurement system, which process output currents from biosensor, has to be in order of pA. There are leakage currents and noise constraints which could be avoided by on chip solution. The on-chip solution allows direct chip connection on the basic ceramic plate of biosensors. It means the idea is similar to hybrid integrated circuit. Main advantage of this solution is separating sensitive low potential and low current ASIC electronics placed just on the TFT sensor from control and supply electronics of portable device. Additional advantages of the sensors fabricated using TFT are low cost, small dimensions, good reproducibility, chemical, mechanical and electrical properties of electrodes and well accessible and ecological fabrication process.
Can social bookmarking enhance search in the web?
Authors: Yusuke Yanbe, Adam Jatowt, Satoshi Nakamura, Katsumi Tanaka
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2007)

Social bookmarking is an emerging type of a Web service that helps users share, classify, and discover interesting resources. In this paper, we explore the concept of an enhanced search, in which data from social bookmarking systems is exploited for enhancing search in the Web. We propose combining the widely used link-based ranking metric with the one derived using social bookmarking data. First, this increases the precision of a standard link-based search by incorporating popularity estimates from aggregated data of bookmarking users. Second, it provides an opportunity for extending the search capabilities of existing search engines. Individual contributions of bookmarking users as well as the general statistics of their activities are used here for a new kind of a complex search where contextual, temporal or sentiment-related information is used. We investigate the usefulness of social bookmarking systems for the purpose of enhancing Web search through a series of experiments done on datasets obtained from social bookmarking systems. Next, we show the prototype system that implements the proposed approach and we present some preliminary results.
Decision feedback blind symbol estimation by adaptive least squares smoothing
Authors: Qing Zhao
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (1999)

A decision feedback blind symbol estimation algorithm based on the least squares smoothing approach is proposed for single-input multiple-output finite impulse response systems. With the finite alphabet property, the input signal is estimated based on the past detected symbols and the least squares smoothing error of the observation. Implemented both time and order recursively, the proposed algorithm is adaptive to channel variation and has low complexity both in computation and in VLSI implementation. Based on a deterministic model, this algorithm has the finite sample convergence property, i.e., the input signal can be perfectly detected with a small set of data samples in the absence of noise.
Parameterization and implementation of orthogonal wavelet transforms
Authors: P. Rieder
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 03 (1996)

A method is presented that parameterizes orthogonal wavelet transforms with respect to their properties (i.e. compact support, vanishing moments, regularity, symmetry) and also takes into consideration a simple implementation of the transform. The parameter space is given by the rotation angles of the orthogonal 2/spl times/2 rotations used in the lattice filters that realize the different stages of the wavelet transform. The different properties of an orthogonal wavelet transform can be expressed in this parameter space. Then, restricting the parameter space to the rotation angles of simple CORDIC-based approximate rotations leads to a reduced parameter space. The wavelet transforms in this reduced parameter space are amenable to a very simple implementation (only a small number of shift and add operations).
Circuit design using evolutionary algorithms
Authors: T. Beielstein, J. Dienstuhl, C. Feist, M. Pompl
Venue: Proceedings of the Evolutionary Computation on 2002. CEC '02. Proceedings of the 2002 Congress - Volume 02 (2002)

We demonstrate the applicability of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to the optimization of circuit designs. We examine the design of a full-adder cell, and show the capability of design of experiments (DOE) methods to improve the parameter-settings of EAs.
Merging the Norwegian gazetteer with the ADL gazetteer
Authors: Øyvind Vestavik, Ingeborg T. Sølvberg
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2007)

We report on work in progress on the merging of the Norwegian Gazetteer and the ADL gazetteer to create a gazetteer with both detailed local coverage and global scope suitable for indexing articles from a local newspaper. We describe a mapping on the schema level, a strategy for identifying duplicates in the merged gazeetteer and some identified challenges.
A virtual classroom experiment for teaching the economic principles of engineering design
Authors: W. G. Sullivan
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

The objective of this project was to conduct and report on experiments to determine whether industrial case studies, web-based course materials, and communication enhanced by the Internet can improve the proficiency of student learning in engineering economy.
Deterministic regression smoothness priors TVAR modelling
Authors: J. P. Kaipio
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 03 (1999)

In this paper we propose a method for the estimation of time-varying autoregressive (TVAR) processes. The approach is essentially to regularize the heavily underdetermined unconstrained prediction equations with a smoothness priors type side constraint. The implementation of nonhomogeneous smoothness properties is straightforward. The method is compared to the usual deterministic regression approach (TVAR) in which the coefficient evolutions are constrained to a subspace. It is shown that the typical transient oscillations of TVAR can be avoided with the proposed method.