ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Object and event detection for semantic annotation and transcoding
Authors: M. Bertini, R. Cucchiara, A. Del Bimbo, A. Prati
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 1 (2003)

Video annotation provides a suitable way to describe, organize, and index stored videos. On the other hand, transcoding aims at adapting content to the user/client capabilities and requirements. Both cues are now mandatory, given the tremendous demand of multimedia access from remote clients, in particular nowadays that new terminals with limited resources (PDAs, HCCs, Smart phones) have access to the network. In this paper we propose a unified framework to define event-based and object-based semantic extraction from video to provide both semantic video annotation for video stored and semantic on-line transcoding from live cameras. Two case studies (highlights' extraction from soccer videos for the annotation and people behavior detection in domotic application for transcoding) and corresponding experimental results are reported.
Neural Mechanisms of Global and Local Processing: A Combined PET and ERP Study
Authors: H. J. Heinze, H. Hinrichs, M. Scholz, W. Burchert, R. Mangun
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1998)

The neural mechanisms of hierarchical stimulus processing were investigated using a combined event-related potentials (ERPs) and positron emission tomography (PET) approach. Healthy subjects were tested under two conditions that involved selective or divided attention between local and global levels of hierarchical letter stimuli in order to determine whether and where hemispheric differences might exist in the processing of local versus global information. When attention was divided between global and local levels, the N2 component of the ERPs (260- to 360-msec latency) elicited by the target stimuli showed asymmetries in amplitude over the two hemispheres. The N2 to local targets was larger over the left hemisphere, but the N2 to global targets tended to be slightly larger over the right hemisphere. However, the shorter-latency, sensory-evoked P1 component (90- to 150-msec latency) was not different for global versus local targets under conditions of divided attention. In contrast, during selective attention to either global or local targets, asymmetries in the N2 component were not observed. But under selective attention condi tions, the sensory-evoked P1 components in the extrastriate cortex were enlarged for global versus local attention. Increased regional cerebral blood flow in the posterior fusiform gyrus bilaterally was observed in the PET data during selective attention to either global or local targets, but neither these nor the P1 component showed any tendency toward hemispheric difference for global versus local attention. Neither were there any activations observed in the parietal lobe during selective attention to global versus local targets. Together these data indicate that early sensory inputs are not modulated to gate global versus local information differentially into the two hemispheres. Rather, later stages of processing that may be asymmetrically organized in the left and right hemispheres operate in parallel to process global and local aspects of complex stimuli (i.e., the N2 effect of the ERPs). This pattern of results supports models proposing that spatial frequency analysis is only asymmetric at higher stages of perceptual processing and not at the earliest stages of visual cortical analysis.
Understanding data lifetime
Authors: Mendel Rosenblum
Venue:  (2006)

This dissertation describes a comprehensive approach to dealing with protecting sensitive data in memory. It differs from previous work in the area in two ways. First, although removing sensitive data promptly after use is an important and widely accepted practice for ensuring secrecy on computers, prior work has largely ignored both the importance and pitfalls of removing sensitive data from memory. Second, no systematic approaches exist today to ensure the removal of sensitive data in memory, and even if there were, there are no methods today by which one could actually evaluate their efficacy. This dissertation describes a systematic approach to dealing with these issues by proposing techniques to directly measure the availability of retained data in computers and to fix the associated issues in systems software and applications. All together, the examination of software issues associated with protecting sensitive data in memory is a problem we call the data lifetime problem. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that: (1) Removing sensitive data from memory is an important aspect of computer security. Data can be retained in memory for a long time, and removing it is a hard problem particularly for large, complex pieces of software. Protecting sensitive data in memory is largely ignored in the design of systems today, and this lack of awareness can lead to serious security consequences. (2) Modern computer systems do a bad job of removing sensitive data from memory, and this can be precisely measured for complex pieces of software. This dissertation demonstrates a technique based on whole system simulation and hardware level taint analysis that provides a practical solution to the problem of diagnosing, measuring, and understanding data lifetime in large software systems. It also presents the only quantitative analysis of modern, real-world applications with respect to protecting sensitive data in memory. (3) Data lifetime can be minimized by architecting systems to directly address the problem of protecting sensitive data in memory, and that proper handling of sensitive data cannot be done purely by the application; systems support is required. It also demonstrates how such architectures can be effective at minimizing lifetime without compromising performance.
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Venue: International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2006)

This volume serves as the written record of the Twelfth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-06) held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 20- 23, 2006. The KDD conference provides a forum for novel research results and important applications in the area of data mining and knowledge discovery. The vibrancy, excitement and breadth of the field is reflected by the strong lineup of research papers, invited talks, tutorials and workshops at the conference.KDD received a record number 457 Research Track submissions this year. The program committee accepted 50 papers for oral presentation at the conference and 55 for poster presentation. The Industrial and Government Applications Track received 74 submissions and accepted seven for oral presentation and eight for poster presentation.In addition to paper presentations, the conference also featured eight tutorials, nine workshops, one panel and invited talks by Rakesh Agrawal, Andrew Moore, and John Stankovic. The Industrial and Government Applications track this year also included invited talks by Michael Cavaretta, Jeff Jonas, William Kahn, and Andrew McCallum.
Secure Distributed k-Anonymous Pattern Mining
Authors: Wei Jiang, Maurizio Atzori
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Privacy-Preserving Data Mining is an important area that studies privacy issues of data mining. When the goal is to share data mining results, two privacy-related problems may arise. The first one is how to compute the data-mining results among several parties without sharing the data. Cryptography-based primitives are the basic tool used to develop ad-hoc secure multi-party computation protocols that share information as less as possible during the computation under different adversary models. The second one is how to produce data mining results that provably do not contain threats to the anonymity of individuals. The concept of k-anonymity has been used to discover anonymity-preserving frequent patterns, and centralized algorithms have been developed. In this paper and for the first time, we study how to produce anonymity-preserving data mining results in a distributed environment. We present two privacy-preserving strategies and show their feasibility through experimental analysis.
Successive Convex Matching for Action Detection
Authors: Hao Jiang, Mark S. Drew, Ze-Nian Li
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

We propose human action detection based on a successive convex matching scheme. Human actions are represented as sequences of postures and specific actions are detected in video by matching the time-coupled posture sequences to video frames. The template sequence to video registration is formulated as an optimal matching problem. Instead of directly solving the highly non-convex problem, our method convexifies the matching problem into linear programs and refines the matching result by successively shrinking the trust region. The proposed scheme represents the target point space with small sets of basis points and therefore allows efficient searching. This matching scheme is applied to robustly matching a sequence of coupled binary templates simultaneously in a video sequence with cluttered backgrounds.
A Flexible, Syntax Independent Representation (SIR) for System Level Design Models
Authors: Ines Viskic, Rainer Domer
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design (2006)

System Level Design (SLD) is widely seen as a solution for bridging the gap between chip complexity and design productivity of Systems on Chip (SoC). SLD relieves the designer from detailed manual implementation by raising the level of abstraction in design models. There are many different modeling approaches to SLD. With the abundance of design languages and supporting tools, a designer can create a multitude of models of the same system that are difficult to compare and evaluate against each other. Also, it is not unusual for the same system model to comply to specification guidelines in one simulation tool, and exceed them in another. This paper presents an approach to circumvent this problem by describing a design model using a Syntax Independent Representation (SIR). Such representation of the model complies to modeling guidelines shared by various SLD languages but is not restricted by their syntactic compositions. Further, the same structure can represent models on different levels of abstraction. Our multidimensional and multipurpose SIR structure can be projected onto planes of modeling languages including SpecC and SystemC, as demonstrated by experimental results shown in this work.
The Hedgehog: a novel optical tracking method for spatially immersive displays
Authors: A. Vorozcovs, W. Stuerzlinger, A. Hogue, R. S. Allison
Venue: Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (2006)

Existing commercial technologies do not adequately meet the requirements for tracking in fully enclosed Virtual Reality displays. We present a novel six degree of freedom tracking system, the Hedgehog; which overcomes several limitations inherent in existing sensors and tracking technology. The system reliably estimates the pose of the user's head with high resolution and low spatial distortion. Light emitted from an arrangement of lasers projects onto the display walls. An arrangement of cameras images the walls and the two-dimensional centroids of the projections are tracked to estimate the pose of the device. The system is able to handle ambiguous laser projection configurations, static and dynamic occlusions of the lasers, and incorporates an auto-calibration mechanism due to the use of the SCAAT (single constraint at a time) algorithm. A prototype system was evaluated relative to a state-of-the-art motion tracker and showed comparable positional accuracy (1-2 mm RMS) and significantly better absolute angular accuracy (0.1,° RMS).
A Hybrid Negotiation Mechanism among Agent Strategies
Authors: Yichuan Jiang, Toru Ishida
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge, and Grid (2006)

Agents will adopt different strategies in the multiagent systems. However, the strategies of agents may produce conflicts. While agents coordinate with each other in the operations, they will negotiate about their strategies to reduce conflicts. This paper models the agent strategy negotiation mechanism in three kinds of agent coordination forms: order, cooperation and non-cooperation. In the order form, an agent can order another agent to do something, so the junior agent will follow the strategy of the superior agent; in the cooperation form, two agents may cooperate to behave, so they will negotiate about their social strategies in the operations; in the non-cooperation form, the agents may behave without considering other agents' behaviors, so the agents will adopt their own respective favorite strategy. With the presented framework, the strategy negotiation among different agents can be modeled well.
A directional gossip protocol for path discovery in MANETs
Authors: Roberto Beraldi
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International ConferenceWorkshops on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

In this paper we present a gossip based protocol for path discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). While in the classical gossip algorithm each node forwards a packet with the same probability, our proposal is characterized by a variable gossiping probability, which is high enough only for sustaining the spreading process towards the destination. No external location service, e.g. via GPS, is required to determine the gossip probability at each node; rather, the estimation is done from the "inside" of the network by using periodic beacons. The paper reports a simulation study and a mathematical model for better understanding the property of the directional gossip process.
Voice over Sensor Networks
Authors: Rahul Mangharam, Anthony Rowe, Raj Rajkumar, Ryohei Suzuki
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium (2006)

Wireless sensor networks have traditionally focused on low duty-cycle applications where sensor data are reported periodically in the order of seconds or even longer. This is due to typically slow changes in physical variables, the need to keep node costs low and the goal of extending battery lifetime. However, there is a growing need to support real-time streaming of audio and/or low-rate video even in wireless sensor networks for use in emergency situations and shortterm intruder detection. In this paper, we present FireFly, a time-synchronized sensor network platform for real-time data streaming across multiple hops. FireFly is composed of several integrated layers including specialized low-cost hardware, a sensor network operating system, a real-time link layer and network scheduling which together provide efficient support for applications with timing constraints. In order to achieve high end-to-end throughput, bounded latency and predictable lifetime, we employ hardware-based time synchronization. Multiple tasks including audio sampling, networking and sensor reading are scheduled using the Nano- RK RTOS. We have implemented RT-Link, a TDMA-based link layer protocol for message exchange on well-defined time slots and pipelining along multiple hops. We use this platform to support 2-way audio streaming concurrently with sensing tasks. For interactive voice, we investigate TDMA-based slot scheduling with balanced bi-directional latency while meeting audio timeliness requirements. Finally, we describe our experimental deployment of 42 nodes in a coal mine, and present measurements of the end-to-end throughput, jitter, packet loss and voice quality.
WiMAX channel: PHY model in network simulator 2
Authors: Leonardo Betancur, Roberto C. Hincapié, Roberto Bustamante
Venue: Proceeding from the 2006 workshop on ns-2: the IP network simulator (2006)

The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX is oriented to fixed broadband wireless metropolitan access. This work presents a novel proposal for the PHY layer and propagation model that allows a faster and more detailed the link level simulations execution. This paper describes the development process for the model and the implementation details in NS2 (Network Simulator NS2 v 2.8) for PMP (point multi point) topologies. We show the parameters used, the channel model, the PHY layer model and the SER (Symbol Error Rate) calculation method. We also present typical simulation scenarios and the results obtained.
Electro-optical characterization of switchable Bragg gratings based on nematic liquid crystal-photopolymer composites with spatially ordered structure
Authors: G. Zharkova, I. Samsonova, S. Streltsov, V. Khachaturyan, A. Petrov, N. Rudina
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2005)

The composite materials with spatially alternating polymer-rich and nematic liquid crystal-rich layers have been obtained and optical effects in these materials studied. The periodic structure of the composites and small sizes of their structural elements enable improved operating parameters of electro-optical devices: increased contrast ratio, shorter switching times, and lower reorientation fields. The composite materials obtained may also find applications in switchable diffractive optics.
Smoothing and transporting video in QoS IP networks: Research Articles
Authors: Khaled Shuaib, Abderrahmane Lakas, Farag Sallabi
Venue: International Journal of Communication Systems (2006)

Real-time traffic such as voice and video, when transported over the Internet, demand stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. The current Internet as of today is still used as a best effort environment with no quality guarantees. An IP-based Internet that supports different QoS requirements for different applications has been evolving for the past few years. Video streams are bursty in nature due to the instant variability of the video content being encoded. To help mitigate the transport of bursty video streams with minimal loss of information, rate-adaptive shapers (RASs) are usually being used to reduce the burstiness and therefore help preserve the desired quality. When transporting video over a QoS IP network, each stream is classified under a specific traffic profile to which it must conform, to avoid packet loss and picture quality degradation. In this paper we study, evaluate and propose RASs for the transport of video over a QoS IP network. We utilize the encoding video parameters for choosing the appropriate configuration needed to support the real-time transport of Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoded video streams. The performance evaluation of the different RASs is based on the transport of MPEG-4 video streams encoded as VBR. The performance is studied based on looking at the effect of various parameters associated with the RASs on the effectiveness of smoothing out the burstiness of video and minimizing the probability of packet loss. Copyright &copy; 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Do we really have provable Best Practices that ensure Software Quality?
Authors: J. Barrie Thompson
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Quality Software (2006)

In 1999 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) released a document entitled "Harmonization of Professional Standards" [1] which had been developed by a small working group within the Technical Committee for Education (IFIP TC3). The purpose of the document was to set out what could become an international standard for professional practice in Information Technology. The IFIP Harmonization document highlights six areas for consideration with regard to professional standards.
Efficient algorithms for bichromatic separability
Authors: Pankaj K. Agarwal, Boris Aronov, Vladlen Koltun
Venue: ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG) (2006)

A closed solid body separates one point set from another if it contains the former and the closure of its complement contains the latter. We present a near-linear algorithm for deciding whether two sets of n points in &#x211D;3 can be separated by a prism, near-quadratic algorithms for separating by a slab or a wedge, and a near-cubic algorithm for separating by a double wedge. The latter three algorithms improve the previous best known results by an order of magnitude, while the prism separability algorithm constitutes an improvement of two orders of magnitude.
Very sparse random projections
Authors: Ping Li, Trevor J. Hastie, Kenneth W. Church
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2006)

There has been considerable interest in random projections, an approximate algorithm for estimating distances between pairs of points in a high-dimensional vector space. Let A in Rn x D be our n points in D dimensions. The method multiplies A by a random matrix R in RD x k, reducing the D dimensions down to just k for speeding up the computation. R typically consists of entries of standard normal N(0,1). It is well known that random projections preserve pairwise distances (in the expectation). Achlioptas proposed sparse random projections by replacing the N(0,1) entries in R with entries in -1,0,1 with probabilities 1/6, 2/3, 1/6, achieving a threefold speedup in processing time.We recommend using R of entries in -1,0,1 with probabilities 1/2√D, 1-1√D, 1/2√D for achieving a significant √D-fold speedup, with little loss in accuracy.
HO-RSVP: a protocol providing QoS support for seamless handover between wireless networks
Authors: Shouwen Lai, Yuanchen Ma, Hui Deng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international workshop on Quality of service security for wireless and mobile networks (2006)

RSVP is basically designed for fixed networks and does not provide mobility support. In order to provide QoS support for mobility in a wireless environment, we present a new resource reservation protocol for seamless handover. HO-RSVP integrates with Mobile IPv4 to maintain a continuous QoS guarantee between two mobile nodes. In the protocol, the resource reservation remains unaffected in the unchanged segments of the signal path in case of mobility. It is only necessary to make a new reservation in the changed segments. The protocol can also prevent the mobile node from moving to a performance-degraded access network through resource pre-reservation before handover. When the receiver is mobile, resource reservation can be refreshed in the data path for the sender after handover. When the sender is mobile, a procedure is initiated to tear down the old reservation after handover
Cowos: A Model of Collective Work Situations to Support Modelling and Simulation Based Approaches of Work Organisation Learning
Authors: Neil Taurisson, Pierre Tchounikine
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

This paper describes an operational model of collective work situations. This model is rooted in the CHAT theory. It allows creating multi-agent simulations where the agents' behaviour is defined in terms that make salient organization issues, and allows building learning situations that focus on making students consider explicitly these issues.
Robust fault-tolerant control for a class of nonlinear singular systems with uncertainty
Authors: Gang Hu, Junchao Ren, Cenfeng Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Physics and Control - Volume 4 (2003)

A design method of robust fault-tolerant feedback controller is put forward for a class on nonlinear singular systems with uncertainty. It is shown that the proposed state feedback systems are of integrity and robustness in the presence of all admissible parameter perturbations against the sensor or actuator failures. The controller can be obtained by solving LMI, which is tractable. Numerical examples are given illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.