ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Information encoding in the inferior temporal visual cortex: contributions of the firing rates and the correlations between the firing of neurons
Authors: Edmund T. Rolls, Nikolaos C. Aggelopoulos, Leonardo Franco, Alessandro Treves
Venue: Biological Cybernetics (2004)

The encoding of information by populations of neurons in the macaque inferior temporal cortex was analyzed using quantitative information-theoretic approaches. It was shown that almost all the information about which of 20 stimuli had been shown in a visual fixation task was present in the number of spikes emitted by each neuron, with stimulus-dependent cross-correlation effects adding for most sets of simultaneously recorded neurons almost no additional information. It was also found that the redundancy between the simultaneously recorded neurons was low, approximately 4% to 10%. Consistent with this, a decoding procedure applied to a population of neurons showed that the information increases approximately linearly with the number of cells in the population.
An Operation Support System Architecture and Process for Optical Access Network Allocation During Service Provisioning
Authors: Kenichi Tayama, Takashi Inoue, Tsutomu Maruyama, Hiroshi Uno
Venue: Journal of Network and Systems Management (2004)

An operation support system architecture has been developed for network element allocation in optical access networks (OANs). Rather than deploying OAN elements to meet all potential customer demand, which would be very costly, only enough elements to meet current demand are installed. These elements are then allocated during service provisioning. The sequence of element allocation and re-allocation is controlled because OANs consist of various types of elements, including outside fibers, inside fibers, and equipment. Functions are provided for allocating each type of element; also provided is an allocation integration function to control the element allocation processes. Moreover, an efficient process for allocating the elements has been determined: first, the outside fiber is allocated, then the equipment, and finally the inside fiber.
Separating Complexity Classes Using Structural Properties
Authors: Harry Buhrman, Leen Torenvliet
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Annual Conference on Computational Complexity (2004)

We study the robustness of complete sets for various complexityclasses. A complete set A is robust if for any f(n)-dense set S ¿ P, A - S is still complete, where f(n) rangesfrom log(n), polynomial, to subexponential. We show thatrobustness can be used to separate complexity classes:for every \le _m^p-complete set A for EXP and any subexponentialdense sets S ¿ P, A - S is still Turingcomplete and under a reasonable hardness assumptioneven \le _m^p-complete.For EXP and the delta levels of the exponential hierarchywe show that for every Turing complete set Aand any log-dense set S ¿ P, A - S is still Turingcomplete.There exists a 3-truth-table complete set A forEEXPSPACE, and a log-dense set S ¿ P such thatA - S is not Turing complete. This implies that settlingthis issue for EEXP will either separate P fromPSPACE or PH from EXP.We show that the robustness results for EXP and thedelta levels of the exponential hierarchy do not relativize.
Order preserving encryption for numeric data
Authors: Rakesh Agrawal, Jerry Kiernan, Ramakrishnan Srikant, Yirong Xu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2004)

Encryption is a well established technology for protecting sensitive data. However, once encrypted, data can no longer be easily queried aside from exact matches. We present an order-preserving encryption scheme for numeric data that allows any comparison operation to be directly applied on encrypted data. Query results produced are sound (no false hits) and complete (no false drops). Our scheme handles updates gracefully and new values can be added without requiring changes in the encryption of other values. It allows standard databse indexes to be built over encrypted tables and can easily be integrated with existing database systems. The proposed scheme has been designed to be deployed in application environments in which the intruder can get access to the encrypted database, but does not have prior domain information such as the distribution of values and annot encrypt or decrypt arbitrary values of his choice. The encryption is robust against estimation of the true value in such environments.
Tutorial on ontological engineering: part 3: Advanced course of ontological engineering
Authors: Riichiro Mizoguchi
Venue: New Generation Computing (2004)

This article deals with advanced topics of ontological engineering to convince readers ontology is more than a rule base of terminological problems and is worth to consider a promising methodology in the next generation knowledge processing research. Needless to say, ontology in AI is tightly connected to ontology in philosophy. The first topic here is on philosophical issues which are very important to properly understand what an ontology is. After defining class, instance and is-a relation, we point out some typical inappropriate uses of is-a relation in existing ontologies and analyze the reasons why. Other topics are basic ontological distinction, part-of relation, and so on. As an advanced example of ontology, an ontology of representation is extensively discussed. To conclude this tutorial, a success story of ontological engineering is presented. It is concerned with a new kind of application of ontology, that is, knowledge systematization. An ontology-based framework for functional knowledge sharing has been deployed into a company for two years and has been a great success. Finally, future of ontological engineering is discussed followed by concluding remarks.
Measuring Maturity Goes beyond Process
Authors: Nancy Eickelmann
Venue: IEEE Software (2004)

We've historically determined an organizationýs process maturity by conducting a maturity assessment that evaluates whether key process areas are documented and practiced. We've assumed that the higher the maturity level, the more cost effective the software development process. However, the maturity assessment doesnýt validate the critical assumption that cost is reduced and efficiencies are enjoyed; it validates only that KPAs are in place. This article examines evaluating process maturity on the basis of results, or the improvement in cost structure in the four quality-cost categories: prevention, appraisal, internal failures, and external failures.
Factors influencing the adoption of web-based shopping: the impact of trust
Authors: Craig Van Slyke, France Belanger, Christie L. Comunale
Venue: ACM SIGMIS Database (2004)

Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (e-commerce), one form of which is Web-based shopping, is defined as electronic-based economic transactions conducted between individual consumers and organizations. While this form of e-commerce is forecast to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future, it still represents only a small fraction of total consumer spending. To better take advantage of and be prepared for this economic phenomenon, organizations need to identify and understand factors that may impact consumers' decisions to engage in Web-based e-commerce. Recently, the importance of trust has been discussed in both the academic and practitioner press. The impact of trust on the use of e-commerce has been established empirically. The research reported here builds on those findings by establishing that not only is trust in Web merchants significantly related to purchase intentions via the Web, but this significance holds even when other, more traditional perceptions are considered. A survey of consumers was conducted and results indicate that trust in Web merchants is positively related to intentions to make purchases from Web merchants, even when the impact of other perceived innovation characteristics are considered. The research also contributes to the literature on technology adoption by verifying the impact of perceived innovation characteristics on adoption intentions.
Contribution of stretch reflexes to locomotor control: a modeling study
Authors: S. Yakovenko, V. Gritsenko, A. Prochazka
Venue: Biological Cybernetics (2004)

It is known that the springlike properties of muscles provide automatic load compensation during weight bearing. How crucial is sensory control of the motor output given these basic properties of the locomotor system? To address this question, a neuromuscular model was used to test two hypotheses. (1) Stretch reflexes are too weak and too delayed to contribute significantly to weight-bearing. (2) The important contributions of sensory input involve state-dependent processing. We constructed a two-legged planar locomotor model with 9 segments, driven by 12 musculotendon actuators with Hill-type force-velocity and monotonic force-length properties. Electromyographic (EMG) profiles of the simulated muscle groups during slow level walking served as actuator activation functions. Spindle Ia and tendon organ Ib sensory inputs were represented by transfer functions with a latency of 35 ms, contributing 30% to the net EMG profile and gated to be active only when the receptor-bearing muscles were contracting. Locomotor stability was assessed by parametric variations of actuator maximum forces during locomotion in open-loop (&#x201c;deafferented&#x201d;) trials and in trials with feedback control based on either sensory-evoked stretch reflexes or finite-state rules. We arrived at the following conclusions. (1) In the absence of sensory control, the intrinsic stiffness of limb muscles driven by a stereotyped rhythmical pattern can produce surprisingly stable gait. (2) When the level of central activity is low, the contribution of stretch reflexes to load compensation can be crucial. However, when central activity provides adequate load compensation, the contribution of stretch reflexes is less significant. (3) Finite-state control can greatly extend the adaptive capability of the locomotor system.
A Four Quadrant Analog Multiplier Employing Single CDBA
Authors: Ali Ümit Keskin
Venue: Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (2004)

The author proposes a new, fully-integrable four quadrant analog multiplier using a current differencing buffered amplifier (CDBA), a new universal active element. The use of CDBA in fully-integrated multiplier circuit design is attractive, since it simplifies the implementation and reduces the component count while maintaining good performance.
Efficient Verification of Hazard-Freedom in Gate-Level Timed Asynchronous Circuits
Authors: Curtis A. Nelson, Chris J. Myers, Tomohiro Yoneda
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

This paper presents an efficient method for verifying hazard freedomin timed asynchronous circuits. Timed circuits are a classof asynchronous circuits that utilize explicit timing informationfor optimization throughout the entire design process. In asynchronouscircuits, correct operation requires that there are no hazardsin the circuit implementation. Therefore, when designing anasynchronous circuit, each internal node and output of the circuitmust be verified for hazard-freedom to ensure correct operation.Current verification algorithms for timed asynchronous circuits requirean explicit state exploration often resulting in state explosionfor even modest sized examples. The goal of this work isto abstract the behavior of internal nodes and utilize this informationto make a conservative determination of hazard-freedom foreach node in the circuit. Experimental results indicate that thisapproach is substantially more efficient than existing timing verificationtools. These results also indicate that this method scaleswell for large examples. It is capable of analyzing circuits in lessthan a second that could not be previously analyzed. While thismethod is conservative in that some false hazards may be reported,our results indicate that the number of false hazards is small.
Optimal descriptions of orbit spaces and strata of finite groups
Authors: Thomas Bayer
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (2004)

Let G ⊆ GL;n; (R be a finite matrix group and X⊆R n be a G-variety. We propose a new approach for computing a stratification of X with respect to the orbit type of Rn respectively of the quotient X/G and we present new algorithms for this task. For X = Rn these algorithms yield an optimal description of each stratum and of the orbit space in terms of polynomial equations and inequalities (optimal with respect to the number of inequalities). Moreover we show that the dimension d of a stratum ∑ ;d; of R;n;/G is an upper and lower bound for the number of inequalities needed for a description of ∑ ;d; and its closure, which improves the upper bound d(d+1)/2, which holds for general basic closed semialgebraic sets of dimension d. Additionally, our algorithms allow to compute strata of particular interest of X/G, which demands less computational resources. By performing computations as long as possible in Rn (and not in Rn/G) and by refining results of Procesi and Schwarz, it seems that our algorithms are more efficient than the present approach. We conclude by giving an application of our algorithms to the problem of constructing a potential for Nickel-Titanium alloys and compare the runtime with other algorithms.
Online algorithms for prefetching and caching on parallel disks
Authors: Rahul Shah, Peter J. Varman, Jeffrey Scott Vitter
Venue: Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures (2004)

Parallel disks provide a cost effective way of speeding up I/Os in applications that work with large amounts of data. The main challenge is to achieve as much parallelism as possible, using prefetching to avoid bottlenecks in disk access. Efficient algorithms have been developed for some particular patterns of accessing the disk blocks. In this paper, we consider general request sequences. When the request sequence consists of unique block requests, the problem is called prefetching and is a well-solved problem for arbitrary request sequences. When the reference sequence can have repeated references to the same block, we need to devise an effective caching policy as well. While optimum offline algorithms have been recently designed for the problem, in the online case, no effective algorithm was previously known. Our main contribution is a deterministic online algorithm threshold-LRU which achieves O((MD/L)2/3) competitive ratio and a randomized online algorithm threshold-MARK which achieves O(√(MD/L) log (MD/L)) competitive ratio for the caching/prefetching problem on the parallel disk model (PDM), where D is the number of disks, M is the size of fast memory buffer, and M+L is the amount of lookahead available in the request sequence. The best-known lower bound on the competitive ratio is Ω(≾MD/L) for lookahead L ≥ M in both models. We also show that if the deterministic online algorithm is allowed to have twice the memory of the offline then a tight competitive ratio of Θ(≾MD/L) can be achieved. This problem generalizes the well-known paging problem on a single disk to the parallel disk model.
Performance of Work Conserving Schedulers and Scheduling of Some Synchronous Dataflow Graphs
Authors: Udayan Kanade
Venue: Proceedings of the Parallel and Distributed Systems, Tenth International Conference (2004)

We know a lot about competitive or approximation ratiosof scheduling algorithms. This, though, cannot betranslated into direct bounds on the schedule produced bya scheduling algorithm, because often the optimal solutionis intractable. We derive a methodology to find absolutebounds on the scheduling of jobs with precedenceconstraints on parallel identical machines. Our boundshold for a large class of online and offline scheduling algorithms:the "work conserving" scheduling algorithms. Weapply this methodology to prove that an important class ofsynchronous dataflow graphs - the parallelized pipelines - has very good performance characteristics when scheduled by a work conserving scheduler. Real time guarantees andgranularity design for these dataflow graphs are discussed.We argue that parallelized pipelines should be dynamicallyscheduled on multiprocessor architectures.
Interviews with Leonard Kleinrock
Authors: Leonard Kleinrock
Venue: Computers in Entertainment (CIE) (2004)

Dr. Leonard Kleinrock created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred when his host computer at UCLA became the first node of the ARPANET in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet. Dr. Kleinrock was listed by the Los Angeles Times in 1999 as among the "50 People Who Most Influenced Business This Century." Others listed include Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, the Wright brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bill Gates. More information can be found at http://www.lk.ucla.edu
Quantum Circuit Synthesis Using Classes of GF(3) Reversible Fast Spectral Transforms
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (2004)

Novel quantum circuit synthesis using reversibleDavio expansions is introduced. The new method uses twoplanes to synthesize the quantum circuits: 1) reversiblebutterfly circuit plane, and 2) plane of quantum gates toperform additions and multiplications. Since the reductionof power consumption is a major requirement for circuitdesign of future technologies, such as in quantum circuits,the main features of several future technologies willinclude reversibility, and thus the new synthesis methodusing reversible butterfly circuits can play an importantrole in the synthesis of circuits that consume minimalpower.
Timed automata with urgent transitions
Authors: Roberto Barbuti, Luca Tesei
Venue: Acta Informatica (2004)

We propose an extension to the formalism of timed automata by allowing urgent transitions. An urgent transition is a transition which must be taken within a fixed time interval from its enabling time and it has higher priority than other non-urgent transitions enabled in the same state. We give a set of rules formally describing the behavior of urgent transitions and we show that, from a language theoretic point of view, the addition of urgency does not improve the expressive power of timed automata. From a specification point of view, the use of urgent transitions allows shorter and clear specifications of behaviors involving urgency and priority. We use timed automata with urgent transitions for specifying a multicast protocol for mobile computing.
A Multiresolution Approach for Internet GIS Applications
Authors: Anselmo C. Paiva, Elvis Rodrigues da Silva, Fabio Luiz Leite Jr., Claudio de Souza Baptista
Venue: Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications, 15th International Workshop (2004)

The rise of the Internet has created an infrastructure ideally suited to the widespread distribution and dissemination of geographical information. As Internet GIS applications are being demanded by users, it is necessary to investigate new strategies for data compression, multi-resolution, interfaces and so on. This paper describes an approach for multiresolution, which aims to reduce delays caused by the transmission and visualization of large vector maps over the Internet. This approach is implemented on the iGIS framework, which consists of a tool for rapid Web GIS application development, and it was designed in a multi-tier architecture.
Adapative Error Protection for Energy Efficiency
Authors: Lin Li, N. Vijaykrishnan, Mahmut Kandemir, Mary Jane Irwin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

With dramatic scaling in feature sizes, noise resilience is becomingone of the most important design parameters, similar to performanceand energy efficiency. Noise resilience is particularly problematicin long on-chip buses of complex single chip systems suchas on-chip multiprocessors. While one might opt to employ a verypowerful error protection scheme, this may not be very energy efficientas noise behavior typically varies over time. In this paper, wepropose an adaptive error protection scheme for energy efficiency,where the type of the coding scheme is modulated dynamically.The idea behind this strategy is to monitor the dynamic variationsin noise behavior and use the least powerful (and hence the mostenergy efficient) error protection scheme required to maintain theerror rates below a pre-set threshold. Our detailed experimental resultsobtained through simulation show that this adaptive strategyachieves the same level of error protection as the most powerfulstrategy experimented, without experiencing the latter's energy inefficiency.Based on our results, we recommend system designersto adopt adaptive protection schemes in environments where bothenergy and reliability are important.
Universities marginalize online courses
Authors: George P. Schell
Venue: Communications of the ACM (2004)

Why should faculty members develop online courses if the effort may be detrimental to their promotion or tenure?
A systematic approach for encryption and authentication with fault tolerance
Authors: Chang N. Zhang, Chunren Lai
Venue: Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (2004)

In most studies, data security and fault tolerance are implemented separately. Solutions for each often require considerable software and/or hardware overhead. This paper proposes a systematic approach to integrate authentication and encryption with error detection/correction. Two hash functions in the row direction and in the column direction of a message matrix are introduced to provide intermediate values for the digital signature and serve as checksums for error detection/correction. By sharing the same computation, the total computation overhead is significantly reduced. The proposed approach can detect and correct up to three errors and apply to most cryptosystems.
Learning O-O concepts in CS I using game projects
Authors: Chuck Leska, John Rabung
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (2004)

Teaching object-oriented design and programming in CS1 can benefit from problems that stimulate student interest, that yield to natural analysis under an object-oriented approach, and that provide a basis for extension and reuse. Our project endeavors to design, develop, and implement a set of games that spawn such problems spanning nearly the entirety of concepts presented in our CS1 course.
A method for specifying structured programs
Authors: David Marca
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1979)

This paper briefly describes the "Structured Programming Design Method" (SPDM). A synopsis of structured flowcharts is given together with enhancements that make the language more practical. The concept of an author-reader review cycle is introduced and combined with structured flowcharts to form the method. Benefits and shortcomings are discussed, and comparisons are made with other kinds of design documentation.
A note on the transitive closure of a boolean matrix
Authors: R. K. Shyamasundar
Venue: ACM SIGACT News (1978)

A row oriented algorithm is given for obtaining the transitive clousure of a Boolean matrix.