ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Practical secrecy-preserving, verifiably correct and trustworthy auctions
Authors: D. C. Parkes, M. O. Rabin, S. M. Shieber, C. A. Thorpe
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet (2006)

We present a practical system for conducting sealed-bid auctions that preserves the secrecy of the bids while providing for verifiable correctness and trustworthiness of the auction. The auctioneer must accept all bids submitted and follow the published rules of the auction. No party receives any useful information about bids before the auction closes and no bidder is able to change or repudiate her bid. Our solution uses Paillier's homomorphic encryption scheme [25] for zero knowledge proofs of correctness. Only minimal cryptographic technology is required of bidders; instead of employing complex interactive protocols or multi-party computation, the single auctioneer computes optimal auction results and publishes proofs of the results' correctness. Any party can check these proofs of correctness via publicly verifiable computations on encrypted bids. The system is illustrated through application to first-price, uniform-price and second-price auctions, including multi-item auctions. Our empirical results demonstrate the practicality of our method: auctions with hundreds of bidders are within reach of a single PC, while a modest distributed computing network can accommodate auctions with thousands of bids.
An extensible dynamically-typed hierarchy of exceptions
Authors: Simon Marlow
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell (2006)

In this paper we address the lack of extensibility of the exception type in Haskell. We propose a lightweight solution involving the use of existential types and the Typeable class only, and show how our solution allows a fully extensible hierarchy of exception types to be declared, in which a single overloaded catch operator can be used to catch either specific exception types, or exceptions belonging to any subclass in the hierarchy. We also show how to combine the existing object-oriented framework OOHaskell with our design, such that OOHaskell objects can be thrown and caught as exceptions, with full support for implicit OOHaskell subtyping in the catch operator.
Neuronal Synchronization and Selective Color Processing in the Human Brain
Authors: Matthias M. Müller, Andreas Keil
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004)

In the present study, subjects selectively attended to the color of checkerboards in a feature-based attention paradigm. Induced gamma band responses (GBRs), the induced alpha band, and the event-related potential (ERP) were analyzed to uncover neuronal dynamics during selective feature processing. Replicating previous ERP findings, the selection negativity (SN) with a latency of about 160 msec was extracted. Furthermore, and similarly to previous EEG studies, a gamma band peak in a time window between 290 and 380 msec was found. This peak had its major energy in the 55- to 70-Hz range and was significantly larger for the attended color. Contrary to previous human induced gamma band studies, a much earlier 40- to 50-Hz peak in a time window between 160 and 220 msec after stimulus onset and, thus, concurrently to the SN was prominent with significantly more energy for attended as opposed to unattended color. The induced alpha band (9.8-11.7 Hz), on the other hand, exhibited a marked suppression for attended color in a time window between 450 and 600 msec after stimulus onset. A comparison of the time course of the 40- to 50-Hz and 55- to 70-Hz induced GBR, the induced alpha band, and the ERP revealed temporal coincidences for changes in the morphology of these brain responses. Despite these similarities in the time domain, the cortical source configuration was found to discriminate between induced GBRs and the SN. Our results suggest that large-scale synchronous high-frequency brain activity as measured in the human GBR play a specific role in attentive processing of stimulus features.
VHDL Implementation of Neurone Networks Using a Simplified Action Potential Waveform
Authors: Johan Iskandar, John D. Zakis
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Inteligence for Modelling Control and Automation and International Conference on Intelligent Agents Web Technologies and International Commerce (2006)

This paper describes a model of a neurone and a network of neurones based on their biological characteristics observed in their basic input and output relationships. Previous work has postulated that artificial neurones that are more biological in their function can form more robust and noise-tolerant neurone networks compared with conventional artificial neural networks (ANN). Existing neurone models are computationally intense because they are based on complex biological processes relating to biochemical and electrophysiological descriptions of neurone operations. Consequently building a neurone network by connecting these types of neurones becomes impractical. Therefore, a digital model of a neurone has been developed using the hardware description language VHDL. This digital neurone model was designed to be simple so as to be fast and not require large hardware resources. Although it is simple, it is biologically plausible because it uses a digitised action potential waveform and randomised 3D growth based on the properties of biological neurones. The network of digital neurones can then be synthesised into digital hardware using a commercial synthesis tool.
Spatio-Temporal Segmentation of Rheumatoid Arthritis Lesions in Serial MR Images of Joints
Authors: Kelvin K. Leung, Nadeem Saeed, Kumar Changani, Simon P. Campbell, Derek L. G. Hill
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (2006)

Recent innovations in drug therapies in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have made it highly desirable to obtain sensitive biomarkers of disease progression that can be used to quantify the performance of candidate disease modifying drugs. We present a spatio-temporal analysis technique to automatically quantify small changes in a bone in in-vivo serial MR images from an experimental model of RA. The technique integrates the time-domain information across all the time points by building a 5-dimensional feature space (3 spatial dimensions, 1 intensity dimension, and 1 temporal dimension) from the serial MR images after rigid image registration. The feature space is then delineated by the mean shift algorithm to give high-intensity bone lesions as 4D segmentations. We detected significant temporal changes in bone lesion volume in 5 out of 7 identified candidate bone lesion regions, and significant difference in bone lesion volume between male and female subjects in 1 out of 7 candidate bone lesion regions. We quantitatively compared this technique with a previous method using simulated and real MR images, and histology of the subjects. We found that this technique was more sensitive to small bone lesion changes than a previous method.
SysProf: Online Distributed Behavior Diagnosis through Fine-grain System Monitoring
Authors: Sandip Agarwala, Karsten Schwan
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

Runtime monitoring is key to the effective management of enterprise and high performance applications. To deal with the complex behaviors of today's multi-tier applications running across shared platforms, such monitoring must meet three criteria: (1) fine granularity, including being able to track the resource usage of specific application behaviors like individual client-server interactions, (2) real-time response, referring to the monitoring system's ability to both capture and analyze currently needed monitoring information with the delays required for online management, and (3) enterprise-wide operation, which means that the monitoring information captured and analyzed must span across the entire software stack and set of machines involved in request generation, request forwarding, service provision, and return. This paper presents the SysProf system-level monitoring toolkit, which provides a flexible, low overhead framework for enterprise-wide monitoring. The toolkit permits the capture of monitoring information at different levels of granularity, ranging from tracking the system-level activities triggered by a single system call, to capturing the client-server interactions associated with certain request classes, to characterizing the server resources consumed by sets of clients or client behaviors. The paper demonstrates the efficacy of SysProf by using it to manage two different enterprise applications: (1) detecting performance bottlenecks in a high performance shared network file service, and (2) enforcing service level agreements in a multi-tier auctioning web site.
Performance evaluation of open-source multiagent platforms
Authors: Luis Mulet, Jose M. Such, Juan M. Alberola
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

Nowadays, most multiagent platforms are internally designed as middleware and are usually implemented in Java and run on top of an operating system. This kind of design maximizes portability and reduces the development cost; however, it may lead to low performance and scalability. In this context, our research has the long-term goal of integrating into the operating system some key services which are currently supported by middleware platforms. The first step in achieving this goal is to study some well-known, open-source platforms in order to understand to what extent the internal design of a platform influences its performance.
ZigBee Routing Selection Strategy Based on Data Services and Energy-Balanced ZigBee Routing
Authors: Peng Ran, Mao-heng Sun, You-min Zou
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Services Computing (2006)

A mixed routing strategy of AODV and Tree Routing is designed in the ZigBee specification. But there is no method designed to balance these two Routing modes in order to achieve better performance. We realized the ZigBee protocol module in NS2. Simulations had been run to analyze the ZigBee network performance. According to the analysis, a strategy of ZigBee routing selection based on data services has been proposed. The simulation results show that such routing selection strategy has excellent network performance and low energy consumption. Additionally, the power control is not much considered in ZigBee Routing specification. But for the ad hoc wireless network application, power control is the most significant issue in ZigBee. So a power control strategy is proposed to improve the ZigBee routing, the simulation results show that this power control strategy will greatly balance the node energy, avoid that nodes use up all the battery power and die too early.
Sparse halves in triangle-free graphs
Authors: Peter Keevash, Benny Sudakov
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B (2006)

One of Erdös' favourite conjectures was that any triangle-free graph G on n vertices should contain a set of n/2 vertices that spans at most n2/50 edges. We prove this when the number of edges in G is either at most n2/12 or at least n2/5.
The Application of Optimal Control Theory in Stabilizing Mine Grid
Authors: Xin Gao, Gongxun Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Innovative Computing, Information and Control - Volume 1 (2006)

In order to make system as possible as near target value in given time according to requisite control effect,....ontrol function can be selected based on the principle of optimal control in this paper. According to maximum principle of Hamilton function, required optimal control can be obtained from the solution of the nonlinear differential equation. Reason stabilization running on interior area power grid of mining office of steady running mechanism was researched using this optimal control, and dynamic characters of the whole mining office power grid analyzed. Applying optimal control theory, steady measure can be carried into execution together in south and north grid so as to prevent the change of system from the load disturbance effectively. Finally, the example as improvement of the power grid of interior mining office illustrates that the stability of power grid is both to guarantee the security production of mine and to increase economic benefits.
Hot topic: physical-layer network coding
Authors: Shengli Zhang, Soung Chang Liew, Patrick P. Lam
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking (2006)

A main distinguishing feature of a wireless network compared with a wired network is its broadcast nature, in which the signal transmitted by a node may reach several other nodes, and a node may receive signals from several other nodes simultaneously. Rather than a blessing, this feature is treated more as an interference-inducing nuisance in most wireless networks today (e.g., IEEE 802.11). The goal of this paper is to show how the concept of network coding can be applied at the physical layer to turn the broadcast property into a capacity-boosting advantage in wireless ad hoc networks. Specifically, we propose a physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme to coordinate transmissions among nodes. In contrast to "straightforward" network coding which performs coding arithmetic on digital bit streams after they have been received, PNC makes use of the additive nature of simultaneously arriving electromagnetic (EM) waves for equivalent coding operation. PNC can yield higher capacity than straight-forward network coding when applied to wireless networks. We believe this is a first paper that ventures into EM-wave-based network coding at the physical layer and demonstrates its potential for boosting network capacity. PNC opens up a whole new research area because of its implications and new design requirements for the physical, MAC, and network layers of ad hoc wireless stations. The resolution of the many outstanding but interesting issues in PNC may lead to a revolutionary new paradigm for wireless ad hoc networking.
Modeling the Performance of Border Inspections with Electronic Travel Documents
Authors: Paola Bracchi, Bojan Cukic, Vittorio Cortellessa
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (2006)

Increased security risk in international travel has resulted in the creation of new programs to determine the admissibility of foreign travelers at official ports of entry within a country. Primary program goals are improving border security and, at the same time, facilitating the flow of legitimate travelers. Major program requirements include the adoption of machine readable travel documents (i.e., passports, visas, etc.), the use of biometric identifiers, and the interoperability among multiple information systems for travelers' identity verification and background checks. Performance analysis of a border inspection system early in its development life-cycle is essential to predict its ability to meet established performance goals, to identify key performance drivers and potential bottlenecks and to suggest possible design improvements. This paper presents our experience with performance evaluation of a hypothetical inspection system. We adopt an analytical modeling technique based on Layered Queuing Networks. Compared with similar studies which use extensive simulations, we observe that our methodology achieves comparably accurate results while being simpler and less costly.
Issues in event analysis for recursive simulation
Authors: John B. Gilmer,  Jr., Frederick J. Sullivan
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

Recursive simulation allows decisionmaking entities within a simulation to themselves use simulation as a way of projecting their situation into the future. In these imagined futures, events occur that can significantly affect the entity, and if the information about those events can be captured and related to the entity's present, better decisionmaking may result. This paper explores this concept, and some of the issues that arise, in the context of force on force military simulation.
Modular development of certified program verifiers with a proof assistant
Authors: Adam Chlipala
Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (2006)

I report on an experience using the Coq proof assistant to develop a program verification tool with a machine-checkable proof of full correctness. The verifier is able to prove memory safety of x86 machine code programs compiled from code that uses algebraic datatypes. The tool's soundness theorem is expressed in terms of the bit-level semantics of x86 programs, so its correctness depends on very few assumptions. I take advantage of Coq's support for programming with dependent types and modules in the structure of my development. The approach is based on developing a library of reusable functors for transforming a verifier at one level of abstraction into a verifier at a lower level. Using this library, it's possible to prototype a verifier based on a new type system with a minimal amount of work, while obtaining a very strong soundness theorem about the final product.
Learning tree patterns for syntactic parsing
Authors: András Hócza
Venue: Acta Cybernetica (2006)

This paper presents a method for parsing Hungarian texts using a machine learning approach. The method collects the initial grammar for a learner from an annotated corpus with the help of tree shapes. The PGS algorithm, an improved version of the RGLearn algorithm, was developed and applied to learning tree patterns with various phrase types described by regular expressions. The method also calculates the probability values of the learned tree patterns. The syntactic parser of learned grammar using the Viterbi algorithm performs a quick search for finding the most probable derivation of a sentence. The results were built into an information extraction pipeline.
HINT- A Hybrid Intelligent System for Telecommunications
Authors: Maysa Rezende, Ricardo Freitas, Gilberto Nakamiti
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (2006)

This work presents a computational tool used to support marketing specialists to produce marketing campaigns for Telecommunication companies. The system uses Case-based Reasoning (CBR), Rule-Based Reasoning (RBR) and Data Mining (DM) to help identifying better marketing strategies, based on conditions, criteria, knowledge, and past experiences.
Using drawings and interviews to diagram entering preservice teachers' preconceived beliefs about technology integration
Authors: Elizabeth Keren-Kolb, Barry Fishman
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (2006)

There is concern that colleges of education are not adequately preparing teachers to use technology in their classrooms. Programs find it hard to properly train preservice teachers for a variety of reasons, both structural and pedagogical. One reason is that students bring their prior beliefs about teaching with them into their preservice programs. In the past we lacked sufficient tools to uncover these entering beliefs. This study employs drawings and interviews to uncover preservice secondary teachers' prior beliefs and knowledge about the use of technology in teaching. These methods offer a counterpoint to quantitative approaches often used to study preservice teacher beliefs regarding technology. Our analysis of the data from preservice teacher interviews resulted in a diagram that illuminates incoming teachers' orientation toward their future technology-infused teaching. This study provides methodological guidance for examining and improving teachers' learning about technology integration.
Evaluating effectiveness of interaction techniques across immersive virtual environmental systems
Authors: Anthony Steed, Chris Parker
Venue: Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (2005)

This paper presents the results of a formal experiment to compare different interaction techniques across two types of immersive display: an immersive projection technology (IPT) and a head-mounted display (HMD). Our aim is to investigate the effectiveness of two widely used interaction metaphors, virtual hand and ray casting, on these two display technologies. Our motivation is that design and evaluation of interaction techniques for immersive egocentric display systems has been undertaken almost exclusively on HMDs. We argue that basing interaction for IPTs on techniques developed for other types of immersive systems is a flawed approach, as there are some categorical differences between the experience given by an IPT and an HMD. For example, an IPT user has a much wider field of view than an HMD user.We have chosen two types of interaction tasks to study: simple selection of objects both near to and at some distance from the user, and manipulation of objects involving a change of both position and orientation. As previous studies have found, we find that ray casting is preferable for selection and virtual hand is preferable for manipulation for a HMD. We show that this is also the case for the IPT. More interestingly, while we find performance on selection tasks is much better on the IPT, for manipulation tasks there is little difference between the two display technologies.
Content-coverage Based Trust-oriented Evaluation Method for Information Retrieval
Authors: Qiang Ma, Hisashi Miyamori, Yutaka Kidawara, Katsumi Tanaka
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge, and Grid (2006)

In this paper, we propose a trust-oriented evaluation method for information retrieval methods based on computing the content coverage of the search results. At first, for a user given query, we collect the related resources available on the Internet. We then sketch out an overview (called topic-sketch) of these resources. We compute the content coverage of the search results to evaluate the retrieval methods to see whether they comprehensively find and provide us information, by comparing the resource overviews and each result. In other words, the content coverage is also useful for estimating the content comprehensibility provided by a Web page on a certain topic. Therefore, we can also use the content coverage as a measure to re-rank the search results. Some preliminary experimental results are shown in this paper to validate our method.
Interference Problem between Web Services Caused by Data Dependencies
Authors: Teng TENG, Gang HUANG, Hong MEI
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and E-Services (2006)

Web services are usually encapsulated or implemented by components in the backend or legacy systems. Since many legacy systems are data-centric or data-intensive, their components have more or less data dependencies between each other. If such explicit or implicit data dependencies were ignored or not dealt with carefully, they would cause unexpected behaviors and even errors of web services. In this paper, we propose a middleware-based approach to the detection and solution of interferences between web services caused by data dependencies between backend components. With a demonstration on J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition), this paper makes three contributions: Firstly, it investigates such an interference problem neglected by current research and practice with a real case of J2EE-enabled web services. Secondly, it enhances a J2EE application server to automatically detect interferences between web services caused by data dependencies among Enterprise JavaBeans. Thirdly, it proposes four solution patterns of the interferences, which are successfully applied to a real case.