ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Learning the task allocation game
Authors: Sherief Abdallah, Victor Lesser
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

The distributed task allocation problem occurs in domains like web services, the grid, and other distributed systems. In this problem, the system consists of servers and mediators. Servers execute tasks and may differ in their capabilities, e.g. one server may take more time than the other in executing the same task. Mediators act on behalf of users, which can potentially be other mediators, and are responsible for receiving tasks from users and allocating them to servers.This work introduces a new gradient ascent learning algorithm that outperforms state of the art multiagent learners on this problem. We experimentally show that our algorithm converges faster and is less sensitive to tuning parameters than other algorithms. We also provide an informal proof that WPL has the same convergence guarantee as the best known algorithm, GIGA-WoLF. We also show that our algorithm converges in Jordan's and Shapley's games where many other algorithms fail to converge. Finally, we verify the practicality of our algorithm in the distributed task allocation domain, comparing its performance to an optimal global solution.
VS-ISA: A Video Specific Instruction Set Architecture for ASIP Design
Authors: Zheng Shen, Hu He, Yanjun Zhang, Yihe Sun
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

This paper describes a novel video specific instruction set architecture for ASIP design. With SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions, and video specific instructions, an instruction set architecture is introduced to enhance the performance for video applications. Furthermore, we quantify the improvement on H.263 encoding. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of VS ISA (Video Specific Instruction Set Architecture), other DSPs (digital signal processors) and conventional SIMD media extensions in the context of video coding. Our evaluation results show that VS ISA improves the processor's performance by approximate 5x on H.263 encoding, and VS ISA outperforms other architectures by 1.6x to 8.57x in computing IDCT.
2005 Special issue: Methods for reducing interference in the Complementary Learning Systems model: Oscillating inhibition and autonomous memory rehearsal
Authors: Kenneth A. Norman, Ehren L. Newman, Adler J. Perotte
Venue: Neural Networks (2005)

The stability-plasticity problem (i.e. how the brain incorporates new information into its model of the world, while at the same time preserving existing knowledge) has been at the forefront of computational memory research for several decades. In this paper, we critically evaluate how well the Complementary Learning Systems theory of hippocampo-cortical interactions addresses the stability-plasticity problem. We identify two major challenges for the model: Finding a learning algorithm for cortex and hippocampus that enacts selective strengthening of weak memories, and selective punishment of competing memories; and preventing catastrophic forgetting in the case of non-stationary environments (i.e. when items are temporarily removed from the training set). We then discuss potential solutions to these problems: First, we describe a recently developed learning algorithm that leverages neural oscillations to find weak parts of memories (so they can be strengthened) and strong competitors (so they can be punished), and we show how this algorithm outperforms other learning algorithms (CPCA Hebbian learning and Leabra at memorizing overlapping patterns. Second, we describe how autonomous re-activation of memories (separately in cortex and hippocampus) during REM sleep, coupled with the oscillating learning algorithm, can reduce the rate of forgetting of input patterns that are no longer present in the environment. We then present a simple demonstration of how this process can prevent catastrophic interference in an AB-AC learning paradigm. . We then present a simple demonstration of how this process can prevent catastrophic interference in an AB-AC learning paradigm. ate of forgetting of input patterns that are no longer present in the environment. We then present a simple demonstration of how this process can prevent catastrophic interference in an AB-AC learning paradigm.
Optimizing Web Service Composition Based on QoS Negotiation
Authors: Wen-Li Dong, Hang YU
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE on International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (2006)

For economic and practical reasons, an automated QoS negotiation for platform and language independent Web Services provided by different providers which can be monitored and enforced by SLA, checks the agreed-upon service levels becomes increasingly important. This paper proposes a mechanism for Web Service composition based on SLA. This mechanism implements the optimizing Web Service composition combining performance optimization, price optimization, and payload optimization when meeting the requirements of SLA. In this mechanism, the WSLA describes SLS will be transmitted to Web Service composition manager and the negotiation will be carried out between different Web Services. The negotiation arithmetic is based on performance optimization, cost optimization, and payload balance optimization to optimize the Web Service composition. This will not only provide quantitative QoS guarantee for requestor, but also improve the performance-to-cost ratio. Based on service optimization rate, the candidate Web Services are ordered and selected to accomplish the required task. Simulation experiment provided by this paper shows our mechanism is better than the random Web Service composition used generally at present in the aspect of performance-to-cost ratio and the business volume.
eFlux: Simple Automatic Adaptation for Environmentally Powered Devices
Authors: Jacob Sorber, Alex Kostadinov, Matt Brennan, Mark Corner, Emery Berger
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications (2006)

Energy management is a critical problem in designing mobile computing systems, especially when those systems depend on harvesting energy from environmental sources, such as solar or wind. Environmental sources are highly variable and difficult to predict, which is often complicated further by device mobility. In this demo, we present a simple approach for developing energy-aware applications using a high-level data flow oriented coordination language. This language, eFlux, is an extension of the Flux [1] coordination language, which provides a simple interface for specifying an energy adaptation policy, which can then be implemented automatically by the underlying runtime system. This approach allows a system designer to change the underlying adaptation algorithms (e.g. energy source prediction) without modifying the application. Also, the data flow programming style of Flux simplifies program profiling and performance prediction. In this demo, we will present our experience, to date, using eFlux, including both working system and simulation results. We will also demonstrate an energy-aware GPS tracking device for tracking threatened Wood Turtles in Western Massachusetts.
A Method for Teletext Display
Authors: Kaixiong Su, Yihong Peng
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (2006)

During these years, the population of Chinese cable TV consumers is increasing quickly. There are over thirty TV stations providing teletext service. At the same time, there are new requirements to teletext. This paper introduces the teletext standard of ETS300706[5] and it's display method on the OSD without VBI module. Teletext data extraction from MPEGII stream and data decoding in the set-top box are focused in this paper. A new method is used to cache packets quickly and display pages steadily on the OSD. The experiment shows that how the customers select their favorite page to watch from Teletext screen.
From Visualization to Manipulation of RNA Secondary and Tertiary Structures
Authors: Gilles Bailly, David Auber, Laurence Nigay
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Information Visualization (2006)

Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) is an important molecule which performs a wide range of functions in biological systems. We present a method for visualizing, exploring and editing RNA molecules. The method relies on the visualization of the 3D tertiary structure of RNA as well as on the automatic extraction and visualization of the 2D secondary structure. The 2D representation is used to navigate in the tertiary structure. The method has been implemented in a multi-surface interactive system, NAVRNA, that allows collaborative analysis of RNA.
Mathematical Server Sizing
Authors: Dick Brodine
Venue: Computer (2006)

Queuing theory can help determine the ideal number of servers in a farm.
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering
Venue: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (2006)

For a long time scientists have been committed to describe and organize information acquired by observations from the field. To improve the comprehension and testability of the observed information, Bacon's works proposed to organize the way that the experiences should be structured and somehow formalized, starting with the experimental method idea. From that point in time, the ideas regarding experimentation have been explored and evolved into different scientific areas, including physics, agriculture, medicine, engineering and social sciences among others. It has not been different in Software Engineering. By applying the scientific method to organize their experimental studies, software engineers have intensively worked to understand the application and evolution of software processes and technologies. Acquiring knowledge through different categories of experimental studies has supported researchers and practitioners to build a Software Engineering body of knowledge. Families of studies start to be planned and shared among the research community, composing a common research agenda to enlarge such body of knowledge. Based on this, evidence based software engineering is becoming a reality. Nowadays, besides the experimental studies, the experimentation approach represents an important tool to allow the transfer of software technology to the industry and to improve software processes. This is the context for the 5th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering.This symposium provides an important vehicle for the further development of our understanding about the methods and application of experimentation in Software Engineering. It represents a concrete opportunity for our community to discuss the advances in the field and develop research collaboration in a face-to-face setting. I hope our Software Engineering community can use these good moments to go one step further, looking for ways to better spread knowledge regarding the scientific method (experimentation) and its application into the Software Engineering context.The fifth symposium in the ISESE series is part of the Experimental Software Engineering International Week (ESEIW). It is an honor to see the conference for the first time in Brazil. As started in the last ISESE issue, we have a full two-day program of three tracks in each day. This is the second year that we have had to organize the three tracks in order to accommodate the number of excellent papers submitted from different continents and accepted for publication.
Ad hoc extensibility and access control
Authors: Úlfar Erlingsson, John MacCormick
Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (2006)

General-purpose, commercial software platforms are increasingly used as system building blocks, even for dependable systems. One reason for their generality, usefulness, and popular adoption is that these software platforms can evolve through ad hoc extensions: behavior tweaks outside the scope of supported platform interfaces. Unfortunately, such use of internal platform implementation details is fundamentally incompatible with security and reliability. Even so, platforms that exclude ad hoc extensions---for instance, by enforcing full isolation and strict interfaces---will, most likely, either have their security enforcement circumvented or be relegated to a niche market. In this paper, we identify ad hoc extensions as well as the economic and technical factors surrounding their existence. Subsequently, we propose the enforcement of novel access-control policies for reconciling ad hoc extensibility with security and reliability.
Crystal ball&reg; and design for Six Sigma
Authors: Lawrence I. Goldman, Crystal Campbell
Venue: Proceedings of the 36th conference on Winter simulation (2004)

In today's competitive market, businesses are adopting new practices like Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), a customer driven, structured methodology for faster-to-market, higher quality, and less costly new products and services. Monte Carlo simulation and stochastic optimization can help DFSS practitioners understand the variation inherent in a new technology, process, or product, and can be used to create and optimize potential designs. The benefits of understanding and controlling the sources of variability include reduced development costs, minimal defects, and sales driven through improved customer satisfaction. This tutorial uses Crystal Ball Professional Edition, a suite of easy-to-use Microsoft&reg; Excel-based software, to demonstrate how stochastic simulation and optimization can be used in all five phases of DFSS to develop the design for a new compressor.
Grid as Human's Assistant: A Logical Solution Provider for Physical Problems
Authors: Umar Farooq, Wajeeha Khalil
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (2006)

This paper presents theoretical foundations of a new vision regarding virtual organizations. The proposed vision exploits the concept of virtual organizations for the solution of human centered problems; mostly exist and solved in physical world in physical manner. The idea facilitates a user by providing complete logical solution (s) for an initiated problem. The idea pinpoints the need for the participation of different business organizations in a problem solution; as total requirements might not be available in a single organization or a user might not favor all resources of a single organization. This paper presents a contemporary view for the creation of virtual organization over grid infrastructure to assist humans in the solution of hard problems in terms of time, selection and integration. Proposed context of virtual organization believes in the construction of MAS environment. The proposed idea is equipped with a layered architecture for the construction of virtual organizations; a point missing in conventional MAS environments.
TCP/IP Performance over 3G wireless links with rate and delay variation
Authors: Mun Choon Chan, Ramachandran Ramjee
Venue: Wireless Networks (2005)

Wireless link losses result in poor TCP throughput since losses are perceived as congestion by TCP, resulting in source throttling. In order to mitigate this effect, 3G wireless link designers have augmented their system with extensive local retransmission mechanisms. In addition, in order to increase throughput, intelligent channel state based scheduling have also been introduced. While these mechanisms have reduced the impact of losses on TCP throughput and improved the channel utilization, these gains have come at the expense of increased delay and rate variability. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the impact of variable rate and variable delay on long-lived TCP performance. We propose a model to explain and predict TCP's throughput over a link with variable rate and/or delay. We also propose a network-based solution called Ack Regulator that mitigates the effect of variable rate and/or delay without significantly increasing the round trip time, while improving TCP performance by up to 100%.
Use of the internet as a business tool by small and medium-sized enterprises (smes): a descriptive study of small minnesota-based manufacturers' internet usage
Authors: Cliff Butler
Venue:  (2006)

Because of its global reach, reduction of time restraints, and ability to reduce costs and increase sales, use of the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), and related technologies can be a competitive tool in the arsenal of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Countries the world over are interested in the successful adoption of the Internet by SMEs. Because a vast majority of jobs come from that sector, greater financial success of SMEs translates into greater job growth and, subsequently, higher tax revenue to the government. While SMEs in the United States were touted in the late 1990s and early 2000s as being advanced in their use of e-business/e-commerce, little empirical evidence exists that SMEs in the United States have optimized their use of the Internet and are engaging in a fully-integrated e-business process. This research investigated the level of Internet usage for business solutions by small Minnesota-based manufacturers through a telephone survey of a random sample of 300 firms with less than 500 employees and from data obtained from InfoUSA&reg; and from 14 Michigan-based SMEs that formed the basis for an earlier study. An existing survey instrument, used by an Australian academic, was first field and pilot tested.
Knowledge Discovery from Semi-Structured Data for Conceptual Organization
Authors: S. Gupta, R. Goyal, K. Shubham, L. Dey, A. Malik, S. Chaudhury, S. Bhattacharya
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (2006)

Conceptual organization of semi-structured documents can help in effective retrieval from collections of emails, product complaints, video descriptions etc. In this paper, we propose a conceptual organization scheme for grouping and categorizing semi-structured text data using natural language processing techniques. We propose a knowledge-discovery mechanism that extracts noun phrases from documents and arranges them into concept maps based on their co-occurrence. The emerging concept maps can be used for automatic grouping and conceptual categorization of documents. Further, Phrase structure Grammar is employed to extract relationships among these entities from documents and index the document collection with these relations.
A Multi-agent Framework for Resource Brokering of Multiple Concurrent Jobs in Grid Environment
Authors: Sarbani Roy, Sohini Dasgupta, Nandini Mukherjee
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of The Fifth International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (2006)

In this paper we present the design and implementation of a multiagent framework for executing multiple concurrent jobs in a Grid environment. Resource broker plays an imperative role in our framework. The aim of the resource broker is to find, select, reserve and allocate suitable resources to each job submitted by the client. Resource Broker always tries to optimize resource utilization and ensure fairness. The multiagent framework assists in executing multiple concurrent jobs in an adaptive execution environment. Services offered by the framework include resource brokering, performance analysis, local tuning and more importantly rescheduling depending on the changing resource requirements. Part of the framework makes use of mobile agents for scheduling and rescheduling purposes. The paper discusses the implementation of the resource brokering and also describes the implementation of a part of the framework which schedules and reschedules the jobs and manages the resources on the basis of some performance monitoring data.
Implementation and Performance Study of a New NAT/Firewall Signaling Protocol
Authors: Niklas Steinleitner, Henning Peters, Xiaoming Fu
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International ConferenceWorkshops on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

The NAT/Firewall NSIS Signaling Layer Protocol (NAT/Firewall NSLP) is a path-coupled signaling protocol for explicit Network Address Translator and firewall configuration within an extensible IP signaling framework currently being developed by the IETF Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) working group. This new protocol allows end hosts to signal along a path to configure NATs and firewalls according to the data flow needs. In this paper we present a first open source implementation and performance evaluation of NAT/Firewall NSLP. The performance study shows that our implementation scales well and is able to support firewall signaling for up to tens of thousands of flows in parallel even in a low-end PC testbed environment. The overall performance bottleneck is found to lie in the utilized firewall implementation, not depending on the NAT/Firewall NSLP implementation.
Prediction of Protein Functions Based on Protein-Protein Interaction Networks: A Min-Cut Approach
Authors: Md. Altaf-Ul-Amin, Toshihiro Koma, Ken Kurokawa, Shigehiko Kanaya
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (2005)

This paper presents an approach for prediction of protein functions based on protein-protein interaction networks. For the purpose of prediction, we not only consider the interactions of functionunknown proteins with function-known proteins but also the interactions of function-unknown proteins with function-unknown proteins. Prediction is performed in the context of the entire network. This is a min-cut approach because we try to assign function-unknown proteins to different functional groups in such a way so that the number of intergroup interactions becomes the minimum in the whole network. Also, we show some evaluation results by applying the proposed method to yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein-protein interaction network. However, this is a general method and can be applied to other organisms alike.
Dealing with semantic heterogeneity for improving web usage
Authors: F. Buccafurri, G. Lax, D. Rosaci, D. Ursino
Venue: Data Knowledge Engineering (2006)

Designing applications for supporting user activity on accessing Web information sources is one of the most appealing challenges for researchers in the Artificial Intelligence area. We meet the above goal by proposing an agent-based approach relying on a new model, called concept-graph, capable of representing user-behavior-dependent relationships among concepts and, importantly, dealing with structural and semantic heterogeneity of Web sources. The latter feature is a nice peculiarity of our approach, which witnesses how recent results coming from the Cooperative Information Systems area, can be profitably exploited in the recommender systems field. Finally, in order to test the validity of our approach, we have implemented the proposed framework in a Java prototype.