ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Complexity of Metric Temporal Logics with Counting and the Pnueli Modalities
Authors: Alexander Rabinovich
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (2008)

The common metric temporal logics for continuous time were shown to be insufficient, when it was proved in [7, 12] that they cannot express a modality suggested by Pnueli. Moreover no temporal logic with a finite set of modalities can express all the natural generalizations of this modality. The temporal logic with counting modalities ($\mathit{TLC}$) is the extension of until-since temporal logic $\mathit{TL}(\mbox{\bf{U}}, \mbox{{\bf{S}}})$ by "counting modalities" C n (X) and $\overleftarrow{C}_n$ (n ¿ ¿); for each n the modality C n (X) says that X will be true at least at n points in the next unit of time, and its dual $\overleftarrow{C}_n(X)$ says that X has happened n times in the last unit of time. In [11] it was proved that this temporal logic is expressively complete for a natural decidable metric predicate logic. In particular the Pnueli modalities $\mathit{Pn}_k(X_1,\ldots,X_k)$, "there is an increasing sequence t 1,...,t k of points in the unit interval ahead such that X i holds at t i ", are definable in $\mathit{TLC}$.In this paper we investigate the complexity of the satisfiability problem for $\mathit{TLC}$ and show that the problem is PSPACE complete when the index of C n is coded in unary, and EXPSPACE complete when the index is coded in binary. We also show that the satisfiability problem for the until-since temporal logic extended by Pnueli's modalities is PSPACE complete.
XPS studies of the ALD-growth of TaN diffusion barriers: Impact of the dielectric surface chemistry on the growth mechanism
Authors: F. Volpi, L. Cadix, G. Berthomé, E. Blanquet, N. Jourdan, J. Torres
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2008)

The introduction of SiOCH low-k dielectrics in the copper interconnections of sub-45nm node technologies is a challenge in terms of both material and process criteria. For instance, the deposition of a diffusion barrier between copper and dielectric is strongly dependent on the nature of the dielectric surface. In this study, we investigate the first steps of ALD TaN growth with respect to dielectric surface chemistry, using XPS measurements. Three different dielectrics have been tested: SiOCH, SiO"2 or SiOCH capped by a thin SiO"2 layer. We show that TaN can only grow over a monolayer-thick Ta"2O"5 formed at the early stages of deposition. A mechanism for the growth first steps is described, explaining the incubation delays observed for the appearing of Ta-O and Ta-N bonds. In addition, we show that a 3nm-thick SiO"2 layer is able to hide the effect of SiOCH chemistry and obtain similar growth rates on SiOCH and SiO"2.
Mashing Up Search Services
Authors: Daniele Braga, Stefano Ceri, Florian Daniel, Davide Martinenghi
Venue: IEEE Internet Computing (2008)

Mashup languages offer new graphic interfaces for service composition. Normally, composition is limited to simple services, such as RSS or Atom feeds, but users can potentially use visual mashup languages for complex service compositions, with typed parameters and well-defined I/O interfaces. Composing search services introduces new issues, however, such as determining the optimal sequence of search invocations and separately composing ranked entries into a globally ranked result. Enabling end users to mash up services through suitable abstractions and tools is a viable option for improving service-based computations.
Effects of stimulus difficulty and repetition on printed word identification: An fmri comparison of nonimpaired and reading-disabled adolescent cohorts
Authors: Kenneth R. Pugh, Stephen J. Frost, Rebecca Sandak, Nicole Landi, Jay G. Rueckl, R. Todd Constable, Mark S. Seidenberg, Robert K. Fulbright, Leonard Katz, W. Einar Mencl
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008)

Functional neuroimaging studies indicate that a primary marker of specific reading disability (RD) is reduced activation of left hemisphere (LH) posterior regions during performance of reading tasks. However, the severity of this disruption, and the extent to which these LH systems might be available for reading under any circumstances, is unclear at present. Experiment 1 examined the cortical effects of stimulus manipulations (frequency, imageability, consistency) that have known facilitative effects on reading performance for both nonimpaired (NI) and RD readers. Experiment 2 examined stimulus repetition, another facilitative variable, in an additional sample of adolescent NI and RD readers. For NI readers, factors that made words easier to process were associated with relatively reduced activation. For RD readers, facilitative factors resulted in increased activation in these same reading-related sites, suggesting that the LH reading circuitry in adolescent RD is poorly trained but not wholly disrupted.
e-Government in Africa: Promise and practice
Authors: Richard Heeks
Venue: Information Polity (2002)

e-Government has already arrived in Africa, though it is essentially an imported concept based on imported designs. There are growing numbers of e-government projects, some of which are contributing to public sector reform and delivering gains of efficiency and/or effectiveness across a broad agenda. However, this positive picture must be set alongside significant challenges. e-Government is only slowly diffusing within Africa because of a lack of 'e-readiness for e-government' that can be charted along six dimensions. There is widespread recognition that this challenge must be met by strategic building of national infrastructure. Where e-government projects are introduced, they mainly end in failure; either partial or total. To address this tactical challenge, stakeholders must be sensitised to the large gaps that often exist between project design and African public sector reality. These large `design - reality gaps' can be seen to underlie failure. They arise particularly because e-government concepts and designs have their origins in the West; origins that are significantly different from African realities. Some best practices are outlined that may help to close design - reality gaps and, hence, may help to improve project success rates. This will only happen, though, if they too are appropriate to African realities.
Technical progress in designing and controlling of active microsystems
Authors: S. Demmig, R. Gehrking, M. Hahn, K. Wiedmann, B. Ponick, H. H. Gatzen, A. Mertens
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2008)

This paper reports on the particularities designing and controlling micro motors fabricated using thin-film techniques and the progress within the iterative development process derived by the results of the characterisations of the active parts. Presented are selected results derived from finite-element method simulations and measurements belonging to the domain of force and optical magnetic field measurements. Furthermore a control concept for micro linear motors is presented. A sliding mode controller is modified with regard to the dynamic which is substantiated by simulations and measurements.
Optimal Posture Control for a 7 DOF Haptic Device Based on Power Minimization
Authors: Ozgur Baser, E. Ilhan Konukseven, Tuna Balkan
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Haptics: Perception, Devices and Scenarios (2008)

The aim of this study is to put forward potential advantages of redundant haptic devices. The use of redundancy in haptic devices basically provides a larger workspace without changing kinematics parameters such as joint variables, joint offsets, effective link lengths and twist angles. Besides an increase in the workspace, redundant manipulators allow appropriate posture selection for different purposes, such as singularity avoidance, obstacle avoidance, inertia minimization, power minimization. These purposes can be considered either together or separately in order to determine optimal posture. The study in this paper is focused on optimal posture control of a 7 DOF haptic device based on power minimization. The designed haptic device has 4 DOF for positioning stage and 3 DOF for orientation stage.
Weak Pseudorandom Functions in Minicrypt
Authors: Krzysztof Pietrzak, Johan Sjödin
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th international colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, Part II (2008)

A family of functions is weakly pseudorandom if a random member of the family is indistinguishable from a uniform random function when queried on random inputs. We point out a subtle ambiguity in the definition of weak PRFs: there are natural weak PRFs whose security breaks down if the randomness used to sample the inputs is revealed. To capture this ambiguity we distinguish between public-coin and secret-coin weak PRFs.We show that the existence of a secret-coin weak PRF which is not also a public-coin weak PRF implies the existence of two pass key-agreement (i.e. public-key encryption). So in Minicrypt, i.e. under the assumption that one-way functions exist but public-key cryptography does not, the notion of public- and secret-coin weak PRFs coincide.Previous to this paper all positive cryptographic statements known to hold exclusively in Minicrypt concerned the adaptive security of constructions using non-adaptively secure components. Weak PRFs give rise to a new set of statements having this property. As another example we consider the problem of range extension for weak PRFs. We show that in Minicrypt one can beat the best possible range expansion factor (using a fixed number of distinct keys) for a very general class of constructions (in particular, this class contains all constructions that are known today).
Ontology Based Legislative Drafting: Design and Implementation of a Multilingual Knowledge Resource
Authors: Tommaso Agnoloni, Lorenzo Bacci, Enrico Francesconi
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Knowledge Engineering: Practice and Patterns (2008)

The DALOS project aims at ensuring coherence and alignment in the legislative language, providing law-makers with knowledge management tools to improve the control over the multilingual complexity of European legislation and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition into national laws.This paper describes the design and implementation activities performed on the basis of a set of parallel texts in different languages on a specific legal topic. Natural language processing techniques have been applied to automatically build lexicons for each language. Lexical and conceptual multilingual alignment has been accomplished exploiting terms position in parallel documents. An ontology describing entities involved in the chosen domain has been developed in order to provide a semantic description of terms in lexicons.A modular integration of such resources, represented in RDF/OWL standard format, allowed their effective and flexible access from a legislative drafting application prototype, able to enrich legal documents with terms mark-up and semantic annotations.
Mathematical Education Game Based on Augmented Reality
Authors: Hye Sun Lee, Jong Weon Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment (2008)

The computer game industry has been grown rapidly due to the development of graphics and communication industry. The computer games have been taking on various forms with its development. Currently, the computer games are not only used for amusement but also used for other purposes. The computer games that try to provide users more than fun are called serious games. Many researchers have developed serious games for various fields such as education, medical treatment. Education especially stands out among those fields. This paper suggests a mathematical education game developed using Augmented Reality. It is a board game for kindergarten and elementary students. Augmented Reality is used to extend user's experience and to increase the usability of the system.
A computational model of perceptual grouping and 3D surface completion in the mime effect
Authors: Riadh Mtibaa, Masanori Idesawa, Yutaka Sakaguchi, Fumihiko Ishida
Venue: Neural Networks (2008)

We propose a computational model of perceptual grouping for explaining the 3D shape representation of an illusory percept called ''mime effect.'' This effect is associated with the generation of an illusory, volumetric perception that can be induced by particular distributions of inducing stimuli such as cones, whose orientations affect the stability of illusory perception. The authors have attempted to explain the characteristics of the shape representation of the mime effect using a neural network model that consists of four types of cells-encoding (E), normalizing (N), energetic (EN), and geometric (G) cells. E cells represent both the positions and orientations of inducing stimuli and the mime-effect shape, and N cells regulate the activity of E cells. The interactions of E cells generate dynamics whose mode indicates the stability of illusory perception; a stable dynamics mode indicates a stable perception, whereas a chaotic dynamics mode indicates an unstable perception. EN cells compute the Liapunov energetic exponent (LEE) from an energy function of the system of E cells. The stable and chaotic dynamics modes are identified by strictly negative and strictly positive values of LEE, respectively. In case of stability, G cells perform a particular surface interpolation for completing the mime effect shape. The authors confirm the model behaviour by means of computer-simulated experiments. The relation between the model behaviour and the shape representation in the human brain is also discussed.
Polynomial Time Probabilistic Learning of a Subclass of Linear Languages with Queries
Authors: Yasuhiro Tajima, Yoshiyuki Kotani
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international colloquium on Grammatical Inference: Algorithms and Applications (2008)

We show a probabilistic learnability of a subclass of linear languages with queries. Learning via queries is an important problem in grammatical inference but the power of queries to probabilistic learnability is not clear yet. In probabilistic learning model, PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) criterion is an important one and many results have been shown in this model. Angluin has shown the ability of replacement from equivalence queries to random examples in PAC criterion but there are also many hardness results. We have shown that the class of simple deterministic languages is polynomial time learnable from membership queries and a representative sample. Also, we have shown that a representative sample can be constructed from polynomial number of random examples with the confidence probability. In this paper, we newly define a subclass of linear languages called strict deterministic linear languages and show the probabilistic learnability with membership queries in polynomial time. This learnability is derived from an exact learning algorithm for this subclass with membership queries, equivalence queries and a representative sample.
Improvements to Single Energy Absorptiometry Method for Digital Mammography to Quantify Breast Tissue Density
Authors: Serghei Malkov, Jeff Wang, John Shepherd
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on Digital Mammography (2008)

We report on the improvements of the design and characteristics of a single energy absorptiometry (SXA) method to quantify the volume of dense breast tissue from mammograms. The method consists of including a breast tissue equivalent phantom in the unused portion of the mammogram as a reference for breast composition. The phantom contains nine lead positioning markers which solve for the orientation of the paddle by a 3D reconstruction least square technique. The volumetric breast density was calculated by comparing image pixel values to the fat/fibroglandular references at the same thickness and using an elaborated calibration map. The breast density precision and accuracy were determined by multiple scans of a test phantom at different compression thicknesses and paddle-tilt angles. We also estimated the error contribution due to thickness and tilt angle variations.
Towards an Information Model That Supports Service-Aware, Self-managing Virtual Resources
Authors: Claire Fahy, Steven Davy, Zohra Boudjemil, Sven Meer, Javier Rubio Loyola, Joan Serrat, John Strassner, Andreas Berl, Hermann Meer, Daniel Macedo
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments (2008)

The AUTOI project is creating a virtual communication resource overlay with autonomic characteristics to adapt the services and resources offered to meet changing user needs, business goals, and environmental conditions. Self-knowledge enables the network to reconfigure itself in the face of change to adapt its services according to business goals. The requirements of an information model, to support self-knowledge (concepts, characteristics and behaviour) are presented. This information model plus ontologies provide a common language to represent the self-management of the overlay. This position paper details the requirements in specifying such an information model and language, and describes how the model and language will be used within the project.
Separation of Z Operations
Authors: Ramsay Taylor
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Abstract State Machines, B and Z (2008)

Machine code and assembly language programs are structured using various branches and decision points, but between these they contain blocks of instructions that are simply sequentially composed. Most work on formal program analysis has focused on the behavior of the branch points -- primarily because composing the blocks of sequential code to determine their overal effect on the system is often intellectually trivial. This processs is also computationaly simple, but it is not computationally trivial. The aim of this work is to produce a system of rules that can be efficiently implemented and allow us to determine the overal behaviour of sequentially composed operations.To identify those sequential compositions that are trivial we will use techniques inspired by Separation logic[2, 1]. Separation logic itself is a very general, abstract collection of higher order logic statements but the simple observation at the heart of separation logic will be used: if two operations refer to completely disjoint parts of the state space they can be reasoned about independently. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Three Global Exponential Convergence Results of the GPNN for Solving Generalized Linear Variational Inequalities
Authors: Xiaolin Hu, Zhigang Zeng, Bo Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks (2008)

The general projection neural network (GPNN) is a versatile recurrent neural network model capable of solving a variety of optimization problems and variational inequalities. In a recent article [IEEE Trans. Neural Netw., 18(6), 1697-1708, 2007], the linear case of GPNN was studied extensively from the viewpoint of stability analysis, and it was utilized to solve the generalized linear variational inequality with various types of constraints. In the present paper we supplement three global exponential convergence results for the GPNN for solving these problems. The first one is different from those shown in the original article, and the other two are improved versions of two results in that article. The validity of the new results are demonstrated by numerical examples.
Epistemic logic and explicit knowledge in distributed programming
Authors: Andreas Witzel, Jonathan A. Zvesper
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3 (2008)

In this paper we propose an explicit form of knowledge-based programming. Our initial motivation is the distributed implementation of game-theoretical algorithms, but we abstract away from the game-theoretical details and describe a general scenario, where a group of agents each have some initially private bits of information which they can then communicate to each other. We draw on existing literature to give a formal model using modal logic to represent the knowledge of the agents as well as how that knowledge changes as they communicate. We sketch an implementation which enables processes in a distributed system to explicitly evaluate knowledge formulae. Then we prove that the implementation captures the formal model, and therefore correctly reflects the general scenario. Finally we look at how our approach lends itself to generalisations, and discuss application perspectives.
Opportunity-Based Topology Control in Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Yunhuai Liu, Qian Zhang, Lionel Ni
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The 28th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2008)

Topology control is an effective method to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Traditional approaches are based on the assumption that a pair of nodes is either "connected" or "disconnected". These approaches are called connectivity-based topology control. In real environments however, there are many intermittently connected wireless links called lossy links. Taking a succeeded lossy link as an advantage, we are able to construct more energy-efficient topologies. Towards this end, we propose a novel opportunity-based topology control. We show that opportunity-based topology control is a problem of NPhard. To address this problem in a practical way, we design a fully distributed algorithm called CONREAP based on reliability theory. We prove that CONREAP has a guaranteed performance. The worst running time is O(jEj) where E is the link set of the original topology, and the space requirement for individual nodes is O(d) where d is the node degree. To evaluate the performance of CONREAP, we design and implement a prototype system consisting of 50 BerkeleyMica2 motes. We also conducted comprehensive simulations. Experimental results show that compared with the connectivity-based topology control algorithms, CONREAP can improve the energy efficiency of a network up to 6 times.
Linking business rules to object-oriented software using JAsCo
Authors: María Agustina Cibrán, Maja D'Hondt, Davy Suvée, Wim Vanderperren, Viviane Jonckers
Venue: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (2005)

Object-oriented software applications that support a particular business or domain consist of substantial core application functionality and business rules. Since business rules tend to evolve frequently, it is important to separate them from the core application. However, current approaches that support business rules at the implementation level only separate the business rules themselves and not the code that links them to the core application. We observe that this code crosscuts the core application. As a result, Aspect-Oriented Programming is required to separate and encapsulate the linking code. In addition to this, we identify several other requirements for obtaining highly flexible and configurable business rules. In previous work we conducted an experiment with AspectJ for separating the business rule links. Although this delivered satisfactory results for some of the requirements, many others were not fulfilled. This paper shows how JAsCo, an aspect-oriented implementation language combining the advantages of AspectJ's expressiveness with the plug-and-play characteristics of components, succeeds in fulfilling the remaining requirements.