ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Based on ACO-Critical Chain Method
Authors: Kewen Li, Lina Gong, Jisong Kou
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering - Volume 02 (2009)

Based on the effective heuristic algorithm and critical chain method proposed by predecessors, the paper presents ACE-Critical chain method for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. First, ACO searches the solution space and generates activity lists to provide the critical chain for critical chain method; then critical chain method applies the project buffer and project flexible coefficient or activity flexible coefficient to adjust the project completed time, so that the project completed time will be more accurate. At the same time, the paper adopts the change of resource utilization rate to denote the heuristic information, and gives two flexible coefficients to modify the project completed time.
Research and Implementation of the Platform for Analyzing Data Quality
Authors: Hongyong Ruan, Dongjin Yu, Yong Cao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering - Volume 01 (2009)

With more and more redundant and dirty data accumulating in information systems nowadays, the problem of data quality is getting increasingly urgent. People usually analyze the data quality through the tools provided by the database management systems, which however bring much inconvenience and inefficiency. This article introduces a novel integrated platform for the data quality analysis, which loads, compares, and verifies the business data through the predefined regular expressions and the metamodel. Moreover, it presents a detailed analysis indexes containing the rules for evaluating the data quality. The implementation conducted in the labor market information system proves that the platform is quite applicable for the data quality analysis.
How many leads are necessary for a reliable reconstruction of surface potentials during atrial fibrillation?
Authors: María de la Salud Guillem, Andreas Bollmann, Andreu M. Climent, Daniela Husser, Jose Millet-Roig, Francisco Castells
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (2009)

In this study, we aimed at determining how many leads are necessary for accurately reconstructing ECG potentials during atrial fibrillation (AF) on the body surface. Although the standard ECG is appropriate for the detection of this arrhythmia, its accuracy for extracting other diagnostic features or constructing surface potential maps may not be optimal. We evaluated the suitability of the standard ECG in AF and proposed a new lead system for improving the information content of AF signals in limited lead systems. We made use of 64-lead body surface potential mapping recordings of 17 patients during AF and 18 healthy subjects. Lead selection was performed by making use of a lead selection algorithm proposed by Lux, and error curves were calculated for increasing number of selected leads for QRS complexes and P waves from healthy subjects and AF signals. From our results, at least 23 leads are needed in order to have the same degree of accuracy in the derivation of AF waves as the 12-lead ECG for a normal QRS complex (25% error). The 12-lead ECG allows a reconstruction of surface potentials with 53% error. If a limited lead set is to be chosen, a repositioning of only four electrodes from the standard ECG reduces reconstruction error in 11%. This repositioning of electrodes may include more right anterior electrodes and one posterior electrode.
A session generalization technique for improved web usage mining
Authors: Tahira Hasan, Sudhir P. Mudur, Nematollaah Shiri
Venue: Proceeding of the eleventh international workshop on Web information and data management (2009)

Generalization of web sessions is an effective approach used to overcome two major challenges in web usage mining, namely quality and scalability. Given a concept hierarchy, such as a website, generalization replaces actual page-clicks with their general concepts, i.e., nodes at higher levels. Presently known methods do this by choosing a level in the hierarchy, below which all the nodes are generalized to nodes at this level. The problem with this is that significant items may be coalesced, and insignificant ones may be retained. We present a usage driven generalization algorithm, which coalesces less significant pages into more general ones, independent of their level in the hierarchy. Based on actual usage set of sessions, item significance is estimated approximately but fast, using a small stratified sample of the large dataset. While providing scalability, the proposed generalization technique results in improved efficiency and quality of the discovered usage model, demonstrated through numerous experiments in our work.
Sensorless motion planning for medical needle insertion in deformable tissues
Authors: Ron Alterovitz, Kenneth Y. Goldberg, Jean Pouliot, I-Chow Hsu
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (2009)

Minimally invasive medical procedures such as biopsies, anesthesia drug injections, and brachytherapy cancer treatments require inserting a needle to a specific target inside soft tissues. This is difficult because needle insertion displaces and deforms the surrounding soft tissues causing the target to move during the procedure. To facilitate physician training and preoperative planning for these procedures, we develop a needle insertion motion planning system based on an interactive simulation of needle insertion in deformable tissues and numerical optimization to reduce placement error.We describe a 2-D physically based, dynamic simulation of needle insertion that uses a finite-element model of deformable soft tissues and models needle cutting and frictional forces along the needle shaft. The simulation offers guarantees on simulation stability for mesh modifications and achieves interactive, real-time performance on a standard PC. Using texture mapping, the simulation provides visualization comparable to ultrasound images that the physician would see during the procedure. We use the simulation as a component of a sensorless planning algorithm that uses numerical optimization to compute needle insertion offsets that compensate for tissue deformations. We apply the method to radioactive seed implantation during permanent seed prostate brachytherapy to minimize seed placement error.
A tool for minimizing update errors for workflow applications: The CARD model
Authors: Jangha Cho, Cheng Hsu
Venue: Computers and Industrial Engineering (2005)

Product Data Management, the ASP (application service provider) model of e-business, and other information enterprises involve complex database-driven processes that change frequently. Workflow management for these enterprises requires analysis of the causality of updates on the control logic of the processes and the semantics of the databases involved. Previous workflow analysis tends to focus on the former and leave the details of the database control to application developers. This practice could lead to inconsistent applications when the processes evolve and/or the underlying data and rules change. The field still needs an integrated causality analysis tool to facilitate the update problem. In this research, we develop a Control-Activity-Rule-Data (CARD) model of a decision support tool that helps workflow administrators analyze the effects of update in processes and/or databases on both control flow and data/rules flow. The CARD model contributes a new Workflow Information Resources Dictionary which represents data, rules, activities and control in a mutually independent but collectively integrated way to achieve the goal. An extended Workflow Causality Graph capable of representing workflow integrity rules enables the CARD model for implementation. An empirical validation of the model using three representative Product Data Management workflow cases at Samsung Electronics Corporation shows its correctness and relevance for practical applications.
Antenna location design for generalized distributed antenna systems
Authors: Xinzheng Wang, Pengcheng Zhu, Ming Chen
Venue: IEEE Communications Letters (2009)

A squared distance criterion for antenna location design in generalized distributed antenna systems (GDAS) is proposed to maximize the cell averaged ergodic capacity. The criterion requires the antenna port locations minimize the expectation of the squared distance between a randomly distributed user and the nearest antenna port. This is equivalent to codebook design in vector quantization. For uniform user distribution, we can easily derive analytical expressions for antenna locations. For more general user distribution, we can obtain numerical results using the codebook design algorithm. Applying the proposed criterion to circular-layout GDAS with uniform user distribution and linear cell with non-uniform user distribution, we achieve near optimal performance.
A novel minimum-size activation function and its derivative
Authors: Manuel Carrasco-Robles, Luis Serrano
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs (2009)

This brief presents two novel architectures, i.e., a nonlinear neural activation function and its derivative. Both are suitable for implementations of neurons in multilayer perceptron networks with an on-chip backpropagation learning algorithm. The activation function proposed shows minimal area and power consumption, can be considered as an approximation to the tanh(nx) function, and can be programmed to achieve any slope at the origin that is equal to or greater than 2. The derivative proposed also shows minimal area and maximizes its similarity, with the ideal derivative in the proximities of the origin being the best approximation for its degree of complexity. Both topologies are designed with subthreshold metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors in order to minimize power consumption. Likewise, they have been designed with balanced and fully differential topologies, so that external influences, offset, and distortion of even order are reduced. Moreover, a detailed analysis using the General Translinear Principle shows that the activation function is being affected by the body effect but the derivative function is immune to it. The activation function and the proposed derivative are thoroughly analyzed, and measured results are presented for our implementation on 0.5-µm AMI Semiconductor (AMIS) CMOS technology.
dsm.f90: A computer code for the solution of an inverse problem of ground water hydrology by the differential system method
Authors: Mauro Giudici, Chiara Vassena
Venue: Computers Geosciences (2006)

The identification of the transmissivity, T, of a confined aquifer, for which the 2D flow condition holds, can be obtained with the differential system method when several sets of data are available. If we consider stationary flow conditions, the necessary data are at least two couples of piezometric heads and source terms such that the two hydraulic gradients are not parallel at any point, and the value of T at one point only. The method has been implemented in the computer code dsm.f90, developed with the FORTRAN 90 programming language. The computer code allows the user to input several sets of data, an initial estimate of the T field or alternatively several starting points for the integration of the differential system. Moreover, the code performs several checks to identify the T field in a robust way and to avoid unphysical results, e.g. negative or very large values of T.
Power-efficient clock/data distribution technique for polyphase comb filter in digital receivers
Authors: Noha Younis, Mahmoud Ashour, Amin Nassar
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs (2009)

A power-efficient clock/data distribution technique for the input registers of the polyphase comb decimation filter is presented. A general form of the proposed technique is developed with respect to the decimation factor. Both proposed and conventional comb filters are implemented using Xilinx Spartan3 low-power field-programmable gate array family. The implementation results show that applying the proposed technique reduces the dynamic power consumption of the second- and third-order polyphase comb filters up to 62.87% and 57.6%, respectively, depending on the decimation factor and the number of quantizer bits. For a particular power consumption, a higher input sampling rate can be utilized by applying the proposed technique. Consequently, the signal-to-noise ratio of a second-order ΣΔ modulator is increased using second- and third-order modified filters by 21.6 and 20.5 dB, respectively, depending on the decimation factor and the number or quantizer bits.
Analysis of the impact of background traffic on the performance of 802.11 power saving mechanism
Authors: Yong He, Ruixi Yuan, Xiaojun Ma, Jun Li
Venue: IEEE Communications Letters (2009)

In our previous work [5, 6], we have identified the issue that the performance of 802.11 power saving mechanism degrades significantly with the presence of background traffic. In this letter, we propose a simple model to theoretically analyze the impact of background streams on the power performance of an individual mobile station in power saving mode (PSM). By reasonable assumptions on medium access details, we develop a set of mathematical formulas which gives the ratio of prolonged data retrieval time under condition of background traffic within a beacon period. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed model for analysis of 802.11 PSM.
Defining ETL worfklows using BPMN and BPEL
Authors: Zineb El Akkaoui, Esteban Zimanyi
Venue: Proceeding of the ACM twelfth international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP (2009)

Decisional systems are crucial for enterprise improvement. They allow the consolidation of heterogeneous data from distributed enterprise data stores into strategic indicators. An essential component of this data consolidation is the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. In the research literature there has been very few work defining conceptual models for ETL processes. At the same time, there are currently many tools that manage such processes. However, each tool uses its own model, which is not necessarily able to communicate with the models of other tools. In this paper, we propose a platform-independent conceptual model of ETL processes based on the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) standard. We also show how such a conceptual model can be implemented using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a standard executable language for specifying interactions with web services.
A probabilistic LDPC-coded fault compensation technique for reliable nanoscale computing
Authors: Chris Winstead, Sheryl Howard
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs (2009)

A method is proposed for computing with unreliable nanoscale devices that have a high rate of transient errors. Errors are corrected using a probabilistic circuit in which device noise is leveraged as a computational asset. Example designs that achieve a low output bit error probability are presented. The effect of permanent defects is also evaluated, and transient device noise is found to be beneficial for correcting hard defects for defect rates of as high as 0.1% and transient fault rates above 1%. When compared with existing fault-tolerant methods, the sample design requires considerably fewer redundant gates to achieve reliable operation. These results predict that some degree of engineered randomness may prove to be a useful signal-processing feature in future nanoelectronic systems.
Differentiated Service Based Cross-Layer Coordinated Distributed Scheduling Algorithm for WMN
Authors: Xuekang Sun, Li Gao, Jin Liang, Xuerong Gou
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Multimedia Information Networking and Security - Volume 02 (2009)

In this paper, we propose a new coordinated distributed scheduling algorithm based on the Proportional Scheduling (PS) approach, which is called PCDS, for Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). In which, a cross-layer design and some metrics which include service priority and staying time are introduced in order to meet different QoS demands and maintain fairness. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the network throughput, reduce transmission delay and guarantee the system fairness.
Microvascular flow estimation by contrast-assisted ultrasound B-scan and statistical parametric images
Authors: Po-Hsiang Tsui, Chih-Kuang Yeh, Chien-Cheng Chang
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (2009)

The microbubbles destruction/replenishment technique has been previously applied to estimating blood flow in the microcirculation. The rate of increase of the time-intensity curve (TIC) due to microbubbles flowing into the region of interest (ROI), as measured from B-mode images, closely reflects the flow velocity. In previous studies, we proposed a new approach called the time-Nakagami-parameter curve (TNC) obtained from Nakagami images to monitor microbubble replenishment for quantifying the microvascular flow velocity. This study aimed to further explore some effects that may affect the TNC to estimate the microflow, including microbubble concentration, ultrasound transmitting energy, attenuation, intrinsic noise, and tissue clutter. In order to well control each effect production, we applied a typical simulation method to investigate the TIC and TNC. The rates of increase of the TIC and TNC were expressed by the rate constants βI and βN, respectively, of a monoexponential model. The results show that βN quantifies the microvascular flow velocity similarly to the conventional βI. Moreover, the measures of βI and βN are not influenced by microbubble concentration, transducer excitation energy, and attenuation effect. Although the effect of intrinsic signals contributed by noise and blood would influence the TNC behavior, the TNC method has a better tolerance of tissue clutter than the TIC does, allowing the presence of some clutter components in the ROI. The results suggest that the TNC method can be used as a complementary tool for the conventional TIC to reduce the wall filter requirements for blood flow measurement in the microcirculation.
A novel cell segmentation method and cell phase identification using Markov model
Authors: Xiaobo Zhou, Fuhai Li, Jun Yan, Stephen T. C. Wong
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (2009)

Optical microscopy is becoming an important technique in drug discovery and life science research. The approaches used to analyze optical microscopy images are generally classified into two categories: automatic and manual approaches. However, the existing automatic systems are rather limited in dealing with large volume of time-lapse microscopy images because of the complexity of cell behaviors and morphological variance. On the other hand, manual approaches are very time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an effective automated, quantitative analysis system that can be used to segment, track, and quantize cell cycle behaviors of a large population of cells nuclei effectively and efficiently. We use adaptive thresholding and watershed algorithm for cell nuclei segmentation followed by a fragment merging method that combines two scoring models based on trend and no trend features. Using the context information of time-lapse data, the phases of cell nuclei are identified accurately via a Markov model. Experimental results show that the proposed system is effective for nuclei segmentation and phase identification.
Investigating the quality of student approaches to using technology in experiences of learning through writing
Authors: Robert A. Ellis
Venue: Computers Education (2006)

This study reports on the student experience of learning through writing in an undergraduate science subject. During their writing experience, 52 first year university science students used a writing database, bulletin board and word-processor. Using quantitative questionnaires developed from student learning research, this study investigates the quality of the approaches adopted by students to the use of the technologies and how this related to the quality of their whole experience and performance measures. The results show that students who adopted a surface or reproductive approach tended to achieve relatively poorer learning outcomes and lower performance measures than students who adopted approaches which reflected understanding. The findings have important implications for teachers introducing technologies into writing processes for the purpose of improving students' learning outcomes.
Using the Snesim program for multiple-point statistical simulation
Authors: Yuhong Liu
Venue: Computers Geosciences (2006)

Traditionally, there are two mainstream avenues for geostatistical modeling: pixel-based two-point simulation and object-based simulation. Each is good at either data conditioning or reproducing geological shapes, but none is good at both. Multiple-point simulation combines the strengths of these two avenues. As an advanced pixel-based technique, it inherits the flexibility of pixel-based techniques by building the model one pixel at a time, hence data conditioning is easily achieved; it is also capable of reproducing curvilinear geological shapes through borrowing multiple-point statistics from a training image. The snesim code provides such a multiple-point simulation program. A training image is used to represent the prior geological knowledge, which is scanned to obtain the conditioning probability values for the central node belonging to a facies category given any multiple-point conditioning data event. These training probability values are stored in a search tree a prior to simulation. Then in a sequential simulation mode, at each uninformed node, according to its specific conditioning data event a probability value is retrieved from the search tree, and a value is simulated from it. There are many input parameters to the snesim program, the impact of which might not be immediately clear to people who are not familiar with the code. In this paper, we aim at bringing important aspects of this program and providing practical guidelines to using the program. Sensivity analyses are performed on the important input parameters. The results are analyzed and recommendations are provided on how to set these parameters appropriately.
User acceptance of hedonic digital artifacts: A theory of consumption values perspective
Authors: Ofir Turel, Alexander Serenko, Nick Bontis
Venue: Information and Management (2010)

Hedonic digital artifacts have become prevalent in today's society. Their users typically pay for them, and in exchange are generally provided with benefits involving enjoyment. Today's research on technology adoption and use, though, has focused mostly on organizational or personal aids that provide efficiency and effectiveness and are free of charge for users. To bridge this gap, we identified several value drivers of hedonic digital artifacts and measured them in the context of mobile phone ringtones using the theory of consumption values. Hypothesis testing was performed using PLS on data collected from 422 ringtone users. Results confirmed that the overall value of hedonic digital artifacts is a third-order composite assessment, which successfully predicted behavioral usage and positive word-of-mouth intentions. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.