ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A simulation framework for assessing the performance of cooperative transportation planning algorithms
Authors: Ralf Sprenger, Lars Mönch
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation (2008)

In this paper, we suggest a framework that allows for the simulation-based performance assessment of algorithms for cooperative transportation planning. Therefore, we consider a coupling architecture that connects simulation models of the logistic system and the transportation planning algorithms. The center point of this architecture is a black-board-type data layer between transportation planning system and the simulation engine. We provide detailed information on how the different subsystems communicate and how each system triggers events of the other systems. In a case study, we show how the suggested framework supports the required performance assessment.
On the Maximum Edge Coloring Problem
Authors: Giorgio Lucarelli, Ioannis Milis, Vangelis Th. Paschos
Venue: Approximation and Online Algorithms: 6th International Workshop, WAOA 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany, September 18-19, 2008. Revised Papers (2009)

We study the following generalization of the classical edge coloring problem: Given a weighted graph, find a partition of its edges into matchings (colors), each one of weight equal to the maximum weight of its edges, so that the total weight of the partition is minimized. We present new approximation algorithms for several variants of the problem with respect to the class of the underlying graph. In particular, we deal with variants which either are known to be NP-hard (general and bipartite graphs) or are proven to be NP-hard in this paper (complete graphs with bi-valued edge weights) or their complexity question still remains open (trees).
MLS-based scalar fields over triangle meshes and their application in mesh processing
Authors: Jingyi Jin, Michael Garland, Edgar A. Ramos
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games (2009)

A novel technique that uses the Moving Least Squares (MLS) method to interpolate sparse constraints over mesh surfaces is introduced in this paper. Given a set of constraints, the proposed technique constructs, directly on the surface, a smooth scalar field that interpolates or approximates the constraints. Three types of constraints: point-value, point-gradient and iso-contour, are introduced to provide flexible control of the scalar field design. Furthermore, the framework also provides the user control over the region of influence and rate of influence decrease of the constraints, through parameter adjustment. We demonstrate that the scalar fields resulted from this framework can be used in several mesh applications such as skin deformation, region selection and curve drawing.
Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use EXPERIENCE DESIGN Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love
Authors: David Lee King
Venue:  (2008)

Written for creative, tech-savvy, and business-minded individuals who want to increase the accessibility of their websites, this sensible guidebook explains the concepts behind designing experiences on the internet. From helping customers quickly find information and make their purchases to clearly communicating needs and interests, this resource will not only develop consumer loyalty but will encourage them to spread the word about the sites they frequent. Focusing on the three key areas of structure, community, and customers, designers will enable clients to focus on their own goals rather than on difficulties in navigating. Also included are tips on how to generate conversations with blogs, wikis, and podcasting to create a personal touch.
Version management alternatives for hardware transactional memory
Authors: Marc Lupon, Grigorios Magklis, Antonio González
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications, systems and architecture (2008)

Transactional Memory is a promising parallel programming model that addresses the programmability issues of lock-based applications using mechanisms that are transparent to developers. Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) implements these mechanisms in silicon to obtain better results than fine-grain locking solutions. One of these mechanisms is data version management, that decides how and where the modifications introduced by transactions are stored to guarantee their atomicity and durability. In this paper, we show that aborts are frequent especially for applications with coarse-grain transactions and many threads, and that this severely restricts the scalability of log-based HTMs. To address this issue, we propose the use of a gated store buffer to accelerate eager version management for log-based HTM. Moreover, we propose a novel design, where the store buffer is used to perform lazy version management (similar to Rock [12]) but overflowed transactions execute with a fallback log-based HTM that uses eager version management. Assuming an infinite store buffer, we show that lazy version management is better suited to applications with fine-grain transactions while eager version management is better suited to applications with coarse-grain transactions. Limiting the buffer size to 32 entries, we obtain 20.1% average improvement over log-based HTM for applications with fine-grain transactions (using lazy version management) and 54.7% for applications with coarse-grain transactions (using eager version management).
Energy- and area-efficient architectures through application clustering and architectural heterogeneity
Authors: Lukasz Strozek, David Brooks
Venue: ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) (2009)

Customizing architectures for particular applications is a promising approach to yield highly energy-efficient designs for embedded systems. This work explores the benefits of architectural customization for a class of embedded architectures typically used in energy- and area-constrained application domains, such as sensor nodes and multimedia processing. We implement a process flow that performs an automatic synthesis and evaluation of the different architectures based on runtime profiles of applications and determines an efficient architecture, with consideration for both energy and area constraints. An expressive architectural model, used by our engine, is introduced that takes advantage of efficient opcode allocation, several memory addressing modes, and operand types. By profiling embedded benchmarks from a variety of sensor and multimedia applications, we show that the energy savings resulting from various architectural optimizations relative to the base architectures (e.g., MIPS and MSP430) are significant and can reach 50&percnt;, depending on the application. We then identify the set of architectures that achieves near-optimal savings for a group of applications. Finally, we propose the use of heterogeneous ISA processors implementing those architectures as a solution to capitalize on energy savings provided by application customization while executing a range of applications efficiently.
Open innovation and the solver community
Authors: Margarida Cardoso, Isabel Ramos
Venue: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (2009)

This paper introduces a doctoral research on open innovation solver's behavior and group factors inducing it. The research is now finishing its first year and exploratory strategies are developed close to open innovation online communities, to prepare a systematic methodological approach. Research seeks to understand how solver's patterns of communication and group behavior influence their participation in an open innovation community, through collaborative IT platforms - and how it weights on their innovation production. A second question is about critical factors that influence solvers' participation, due to the present global economical crisis. By designing a model of the solver's group of belonging characteristics and reflecting that on a collaborative platform's functionalities, the project intends to present some propositions to ease participation in crowdsourcing innovation processes - through an online platform being designed and developed at University of Minho.
Design and implementation of a MicroBlaze-based warp processor
Authors: Roman Lysecky, Frank Vahid
Venue: ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) (2009)

While soft processor cores provided by FPGA vendors offer designers with increased flexibility, such processors typically incur penalties in performance and energy consumption compared to hard processor core alternatives. The recently developed technology of warp processing can help reduce those penalties. Warp processing is the dynamic and transparent transformation of critical software regions from microprocessor execution to much faster circuit execution on an FPGA. In this article, we describe an implementation of a warp processor on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro and Spartan3 FPGAs incorporating one or more MicroBlaze soft processor cores. We further provide a detailed analysis of the energy overhead of dynamically partitioning an application's kernels to hardware executing within an FPGA. Considering an implementation that periodically partitions the executing application once every minute, a MicroBlaze-based warp processor implemented on a Spartan3 FPGA achieves average speedups of 5.8&times; and energy reductions of 49&percnt; compared to the MicroBlaze soft processor core alone&mdash;providing competitive performance and energy consumption compared to existing hard processor cores.
Indirect estimation of elliptical stable distributions
Authors: Marco J. Lombardi, David Veredas
Venue: Computational Statistics Data Analysis (2009)

An indirect estimation approach for elliptical stable distributions is presented. The auxiliary model is another elliptical distribution, the multivariate Student-t distribution. It has parameters that have a one-to-one relationship with those of the elliptical stable, making the proposed indirect approach particularly suitable. The finite sample behaviour of the estimators is analyzed using a comprehensive Monte Carlo study. An application to 27 emerging markets stock indexes concludes the paper.
Template Protection for On-Line Signature-Based Recognition Systems
Authors: Emanuele Maiorana, Patrizio Campisi, Alessandro Neri
Venue: Biometrics and Identity Management: First European Workshop, BIOID 2008, Roskilde, Denmark, May 7-9, 2008. Revised Selected Papers (2008)

Security and privacy issues are considered as two of the major concerns related to the use of biometric data for authentication purposes. In this paper we propose two different approaches for the protection of on-line signature biometric templates. In the first one, cryptographic techniques are employed to protect signature features, making impossible to derive the original biometrics from the stored templates. In the second one, data hiding techniques are used to design a security scalable authentication system, embedding some dynamic signature features into a static representation of the signature itself. Extensive experimental results are provided to show the effectiveness of the presented protection methods.
Fixed Mobile Convergence: A Self-Aware QoS Architecture for Converging WiMAX and GEPON Access Networks
Authors: Brownson Obaridoa Obele, Minho Kang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The Second International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services, and Technologies (2008)

The access network has remained the bottleneck in efforts to deliver bandwidth intensive new-generation applications and services to subscribers. In the wired access network, GEPON is a promising technology for relieving this bottleneck while GEPON's counterpart in wireless access networks, is WiMAX. A converged quadruplet-services (video, voice, data and mobility) enabled network, which takes full advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these remarkable technologies, no doubt makes an attractive new-generation access network solution. In this paper, therefore, we present an architecture for such a convergence and we elaborate on how control and data packets are formatted, switched and forwarded or transported; how scheduling and bandwidth resource allocation is done; and on how quality of service is provisioned and guaranteed end-to-end in the converged access network architecture
A real-time quantitative assessment of self-assembled quantum dots by reflection high-energy electron diffraction
Authors: Chandani Rajapaksha, Alex Freundlich
Venue: Microelectronics Journal (2009)

A method for in-situ quantitative characterization of quantum dots during growth is provided using the readily available reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED). RHEED patterns of uncapped self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dots are investigated theoretically and experimentally. Previously predicted intensity fringes along chevron tails of quantum dot's RHEED diffraction spots are observed experimentally. Post-growth atomic force microscopic images and theoretical RHEED images of the same are obtained parallel to experimental data. The bounding facets of the quantum dots are determined using the angle between the chevrons. The size (height) of the quantum dots is determined using the periodicity of intensity fringes along the chevrons during growth.
Automatic test generation for combinational threshold logic networks
Authors: Pallav Gupta, Rui Zhang, Niraj K. Jha
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2008)

We propose an automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) framework for combinational threshold networks. The motivation behind this work lies in the fact that many emerging nanotechnologies, such as resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs), single electron transistor (SET), and quantum cellular automata (QCA), implement threshold logic. Consequently, there is a need to develop an ATPG methodology for this type of logic. We have built the first automatic test pattern generator and fault simulator for threshold logic which has been integrated on top of an existing computer-aided design (CAD) tool. These exploit new fault collapsing techniques we have developed for threshold networks. We perform fault modeling, backed by HSPICE simulations, to show that many cuts and shorts in RTD-based threshold gates are equivalent to stuck-at faults at the inputs and output of the gate. Experimental results with the MCNC benchmarks indicate that test vectors were found for all testable stuck-at faults in their threshold network implementations.
Detecting Violent Scenes in Movies by Auditory and Visual Cues
Authors: Yu Gong, Weiqiang Wang, Shuqiang Jiang, Qingming Huang, Wen Gao
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia: Advances in Multimedia Information Processing (2008)

To detect violence in movies, we present a three-stage method integrating visual and auditory cues. In our method, those shots with potential violent content are first identified according to universal film-making rules. A modified semi-supervised learning technique based on semi-supervised cross feature learning (SCFL) is exploited, since it is capable to combine different types of features and use unlabeled data to improve the classification performance. Then, typical violence-related audio effects are further detected for the candidate shots, and we manage to transform the confidences outputted by the classifiers of various audio events into a shot-based violence score. Finally, the first two-stage probabilistic outputs are integrated in a boosting way to generate the final inference. The experimental results on four typical action movies preliminarily show the effectiveness of our method.
Collective Optimization
Authors: Grigori Fursin, Olivier Temam
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers (2008)

Iterative compilation is an efficient approach to optimize programs on rapidly evolving hardware, but it is still only scarcely used in practice due to a necessity to gather a large number of runs often with the same data set and on the same environment in order to test many different optimizations and to select the most appropriate ones. Naturally, in many cases, users cannot afford a training phase, will run each data set once, develop new programs which are not yet known, and may regularly change the environment the programs are run on.In this article, we propose to overcome that practical obstacle using Collective Optimization, where the task of optimizing a program leverages the experience of many other users, rather than being performed in isolation, and often redundantly, by each user. Collective optimization is an unobtrusive approach, where performance information obtained after each run is sent back to a central database, which is then queried for optimizations suggestions, and the program is then recompiled accordingly. We show that it is possible to learn across data sets, programs and architectures in non-dynamic environments using static function cloning and run-time adaptation without even a reference run to compute speedups over the baseline optimization. We also show that it is possible to simultaneously learn and improve performance, since there are no longer two separate training and test phases, as in most studies. We demonstrate that extensively relying on competition among pairs of optimizations (program reaction to optimizations) provides a robust and efficient method for capturing the impact of optimizations, and for reusing this knowledge across data sets, programs and environments. We implemented our approach in GCC and will publicly disseminate it in the near future.
The art of the meta-aspect protocol
Authors: Tom Dinkelaker, Mira Mezini, Christoph Bockisch
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Aspect-oriented software development (2009)

Alternative semantics for aspect-oriented abstractions can be defined by language designers using extensible aspect compiler frameworks. However, application developers are prevented from tailoring the language semantics in an application-specific manner. To address this problem, we propose an architecture for aspect-oriented languages with an explicit meta-interface to language semantics. We demonstrate the benefits of such an architecture by presenting several scenarios in which aspect-oriented programs use the meta-interface of the language to tailor its semantics to a particular application execution context.
An assessment of organizational size and sense and response capability on the early adoption of disruptive technology
Authors: Gary Garrison
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2009)

This study used the results from a survey of 73 senior executives, representing their Fortune 1000 or INC 500 firm, to better understand the relationship between an organization's size and its technological-sensing and response capability on the early adoption of disruptive technology. Results indicated that an organization's size, measured by number of employees and annual sales, was shown to be an impediment to an organization's response capability despite its increased capability to sense the technology earlier than smaller firms.
Signal Space Diversity in Decode-and-Forward Cooperative Communication
Authors: Wei Ning, Zhang Zhongpei, Li Shaoqian
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 WRI International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing - Volume 01 (2009)

In Decode-and-Forward (DF) cooperative communication, cooperative nodes decode and retransmit each others' data to achieve spatial diversity. However, asymmetric inter nodes channel can cut down the performance of plain DF; and besides, simple signal retransmission for each other in plain DF is not an efficient diversity manner. In this paper, we propose a new DF cooperative scheme based on signal-space diversity, which can defeat the effect of asymmetric inter nodes channel and utilize diversity more efficiently. Compared with plain DF cooperative scheme, the new cooperative scheme only adds a rotation and superposition operation on local and relay symbols before relaying, which only introduce a little more complexity at cooperation nodes. Simulation results show the new cooperative scheme achieves better bit-error rate performance than the plain DF cooperative scheme.
Graphene based transistors: physics, status and future perspectives
Authors: Kaustav Banerjee, Yasin Khatami, Chaitanya Kshirsagar, S. Hadi Rasouli
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 international symposium on Physical design (2009)

Graphene is a single-atom thick layer of graphite, which is one of the well known allotropes of carbon. While Graphene is a 2-D material, it can be either rolled-up to form carbon nanotubes (CNT) or simply patterned to form graphene nano-ribbons (GNR), which essentially display 1-D transport characteristics. Due to their outstanding electrical properties, CNTs and GNRs are considered as a possible replacement for Silicon. This talk will start with a brief overview of the physics of these carbon nanomaterials, discuss various device structures--their relative advantages and drawbacks and their fabrication related challenges. It will then discuss various design challenges arising due to the chirality problem (presence of metallic CNTs in CNFETs), ambipolar conduction in both CNFET and GNRFET, edge scattering in GNRFETs, channel quantization/screening effect in CNFETs, and source/drain extension and other parasitics that play a central role in restricting the performance of these transistors well below their theoretically predicted limits. This talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the scaling implications and comparison with conventional CMOS to provide a possible roadmap into the future.
Beyond the skin bag: on the moral responsibility of extended agencies
Authors: F. Allan Hanson
Venue: Ethics and Information Technology (2009)

The growing prominence of computers in contemporary life, often seemingly with minds of their own, invites rethinking the question of moral responsibility. If the moral responsibility for an act lies with the subject that carried it out, it follows that different concepts of the subject generate different views of moral responsibility. Some recent theorists have argued that actions are produced by composite, fluid subjects understood as extended agencies (cyborgs, actor networks). This view of the subject contrasts with methodological individualism: the idea that actions are produced only by human individuals. This essay compares two views of responsibility: moral individualism (the ethical twin of methodological individualism), and joint responsibility (associated with extended agency theory). It develops a view of what joint responsibility might look like, and considers the advantages it might bring relative to moral individualism as well as the objections that are sure to be raised against it.