ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Optimal Node Visitation in Acyclic Stochastic Digraphs with Multi-threaded Traversals and Internal Visitation Requirements
Authors: Theologos Bountourelis, Spyros Reveliotis
Venue: Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (2009)

The original definition of the problem of optimal node visitation (ONV) in acyclic stochastic digraphs concerns the identification of a routing policy that will enable the visitation of each leaf node a requested number of times, while minimizing the expected number of the graph traversals. The original work of Bountourelis and Reveliotis (2006) formulated this problem as a Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem, and since the state space of this SSP formulation is exponentially sized with respect to the number of the target nodes, it also proposed a suboptimal policy that is computationally tractable and asymptotically optimal. This paper extends the results of Bountourelis and Reveliotis (2006) to the cases where (i) the tokens traversing the graph can "split" during certain transitions to a number of (sub-)tokens, allowing, thus, the satisfaction of many visitation requirements during a single graph traversal, and (ii) there are additional visitation requirements attached to the internal graph nodes, which, however, can be served only when the visitation requirements of their successors have been fully met. In addition, the presented set of results establishes stronger convergence properties for the proposed suboptimal policies, and it provides a formal complexity analysis of the considered ONV formulations. From a practical standpoint, the extension of the original results performed in this paper enables their effective usage in the application domains that motivated the ONV problem, in the first place.
Wiring the wiregrass: a case study of information technology success factors' role in west georgia economic development
Authors: John A. Machnic
Venue:  (2008)

The focus of this case study is to look information technology critical success factors (CSFs) in west central Georgia organizations. In particular, it looks at what role they play in west central Georgia organizations and their possible influence in assisting in the economic development within the region. The research looks at whether these CSFs are present in local organizations and if these are similar to what exists today in the information technology literature. The study assesses CSFs in four areas. The first two areas concentrate on strategic planning CSFs, innovation, and technology transfer CSFs. The next two areas of the study focus on information technology worker motivational CSFs and critical success factors that assist a company with technology diffusion of innovation. The goal was to determine whether local organizations utilize CSFs in their planning processes and if so, are they unique to the area or are they similar to what exists in current IT literature. The research design is the case study method utilizing personal interviews with those IT individuals responsible for strategic planning and input at their organizations. The study found that local organizations indeed do utilize IT CSFs yet provide uniqueness to the west central Georgia area.
Geometric Associative Processing Applied to Pattern Classification
Authors: Benjamín Cruz, Humberto Sossa, Ricardo Barrón
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks - Part II (2009)

Associative memories (AM's) have been extensively used during the last 40 years for pattern classification and pattern restoration. In this paper Conformal Geometric Algebra (CGA) is used to develop a new associative memory (AM). The proposed AM makes use of CGA and quadratic programming to store associations among patterns and their respective classes. An unknown pattern is classified by applying an inner product between the pattern and the build AM. Numerical and real examples are presented to show the potential of the proposal.
Semantic Web Technology to Support Learning about the Semantic Web
Authors: Martin Dzbor, Enrico Motta
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Technology Rich Learning Contexts That Work (2007)

In this paper we describe ASPL, Advanced Semantic Platform for Learning, designed using the Magpie framework with an aim to support students learning about the Semantic Web research area. We describe the evolution of ASPL and illustrate how we used the results from a formal evaluation of the initial system to re-design the user functionalities. The second version of ASPL semantically interprets the results provided by a non-semantic web mining tool and uses them to support various forms of semantics-assisted exploration, based on pedagogical strategies such as performing lateral steps and query filtering.
Social lending
Authors: Ning Chen, Arpita Ghosh, Nicolas Lambert
Venue: Proceedings of the tenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce (2009)

Prosper, the largest online social lending marketplace with nearly a million members and $178 million in funded loans, uses an auction amongst lenders to finance each loan. In each auction, the borrower specifies D, the amount he wants to borrow, and a maximum acceptable interest rate R. Lenders specify the amounts ai they want to lend, and bid on the interest rate, bi, they're willing to receive. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how does the Prosper auction do in terms of the borrower's payment, when lenders are strategic agents with private true interest rates? The Prosper mechanism is exactly the same as the VCG mechanism applied to a modified instance of the problem, where lender i is replaced by ai dummy lenders, each willing to lend one unit at interest rate bi. However, the two mechanisms behave very differently -- the VCG mechanism is truthful, whereas Prosper is not, and the total payment of the borrower can be vastly different in the two mechanisms. We first provide a complete analysis and characterization of the Nash equilibria of the Prosper mechanism. Next, we show that while the borrower's payment in the VCG mechanism is always within a factor of O(log D) of the payment in any equilibrium of Prosper, even the cheapest Nash equilibrium of the Prosper mechanism can be as large as a factor D of the VCG payment; both factors are tight. Thus, while the Prosper mechanism is a simple uniform price mechanism, it can lead to much larger payments for the borrower than the VCG mechanism. Finally, we provide a model to study Prosper as a dynamic auction, and give tight bounds on the price for a general class of bidding strategies.
Proceedings of the 4th edition of the UPGRADE-CN workshop on Use of P2P, GRID and agents for the development of content networks
Venue: High Performance Distributed Computing (2009)

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 4th edition of the UPGRADE-CN workshop that takes place this year at the ACM/IEEE HPDC 2009 Symposium, in Munich, Germany. The mission of the workshop is to provide a forum to discuss recent enhancements of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and more general Content Networks (CNs). The three previous editions, which took place respectively at HPDC 2006 in Paris, HPDC 2007 in Monterey (CA), USA, and Boston (MA), USA have already confirmed the vitality of this research field and the necessity to exploit novel models and software technologies to improve the performance of content-oriented networks and make them suited for academic and industrial applications. In particular, P2P and Grid computing paradigms, often with the support of mobile agents that convey crucial information, are demonstrating their suitability in supporting the development of high-performance systems over large-scale, dynamic and heterogeneous environments. The fourth edition of UPGRADE-CN includes 6 research papers selected through an accurate review process, one invited talk that presents original ideas and results on GRID-oriented systems, and a panel session on trends and future challenges of next generation content networks. The workshop opens with the invited talk given by Michael Schiffers (Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich) on "The Role of Virtual Organizations in Grids: Impacts and Challenges". The first session of the workshop includes three talks on content delivery networks focused on surrogate clustering, evaluation of CDN utility and delivery of live events. The second session comprises three talks with a particular focus on networking for content distribution. They present architectures and mechanisms for multicast and wireless-based content delivery. Finally a panel session on next generation content networks in which panelists will discuss new emerging technologies and paradigms (agents, P2P, GRID, mobile computing and cloud computing) for content networks is run. The quality and variety of the topics covered by UPGRADE-CN papers provide a useful overview over the current research efforts in the field of content-oriented distributed systems and prove the vitality of this research area. We thank the members of the program committee and the reviewers. Their work guaranteed an accurate review process and assured a selection of high quality papers. We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking and that the workshop will offer you a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.
User-interface design, culture, and the future
Authors: Aaron Marcus
Venue: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces (2002)

This paper introduces the cultural anthropologist Hofstede's culture dimensions and considers how they might affect user-interface designs. Examples from the Web illustrate the cultural dimensions User-interface designers have identified basic components of user interfaces. An initial mapping of culture dimensions to user-interface components seeks to help user-interface designers cope with global product and service development. Ultimately, tools might emerge to facilitate tuning designs per culture.
Response dynamics of integrate-and-fire neuron models
Authors: Todd W. Troyer
Venue:  (2008)

One of the fundamental problems in neuroscience is characterizing the transfer function that converts noisy synaptic inputs into output firing rates. A common assumption is that the membrane time constant is the dominant factor governing the time course of firing rate responses. However, previous studies have shown that neural response times can be faster than expected from voltage dynamics alone. If the membrane time constant does not solely determine response time, what are the parameters that describe the transformation of inputs into output firing rates? We investigate this question using integrate-and-fire models (IF). Noisy synaptic inputs are modeled as a white noise process with drift, characterized by a time-varying mean and variance. We use linear perturbation techniques to analyze the response dynamics of several different IF models, for signals encoded in the mean and the variance of the input, and for models operating in two qualitatively different regimes of behavior. In the perfect integrate-and-fire model (PIF), the sub-threshold membrane dynamics perfectly mimic the integral of the input current. We show that the PIF produces a perfect replica of the time-varying input rate for Poisson distributed input. Next, we survey the response properties of the leaky integrate-and-fire model (LIF). Our survey covers a wide range of baseline input parameter values and studies perturbations in both the mean or variance of the input. We find that response dynamics are highly dependent on regime, as well as which input parameter encodes the signal. Additionally we investigate how synaptic dynamics affect LIF response. We find a striking reduction in the overall gain for variance-encoded signals. Mean encoded signals elicit responses with finite high-frequency gain across regimes, and reduced resonances. Finally, we focus on nonlinear responses, examining the time course of onset and offset responses for two different IF models, the LIF and the more realistic exponential integrate-and-fire model (EIF). The responses of the models differ in that the EIF shows a slight delay before responding to a step increase in input, a delay that is not found for the LIF nor for the response to step decreases in input for either model.
Sequential prediction under incomplete feedback
Authors: Gábor Lugosi
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Artificial Intelligence Research and Development (2007)

We survey various variants of the randomized sequential forecasting problem when the forecaster has limited access to the past outcomes of the sequence to be predicted. This problem has various applications in on-line learning, learning in games, and information theory.
Locally Adaptive Total Variation Regularization
Authors: Markus Grasmair
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision (2009)

We introduce a locally adaptive parameter selection method for total variation regularization applied to image denoising. The algorithm iteratively updates the regularization parameter depending on the local smoothness of the outcome of the previous smoothing step. In addition, we propose an anisotropic total variation regularization step for edge enhancement. Test examples demonstrate the capability of our method to deal with varying, unknown noise levels.
Does ICT investment widen the growth gap?
Authors: Hwan-Joo Seo, Young Soo Lee, Jeong Hun Oh
Venue: Telecommunications Policy (2009)

This paper builds a model of cumulative growth to examine the dynamic interdependent relationship between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment and economic growth for a sample of 29 countries in the 1990s. We confirm the following facts: First, there is a positive correlation between ICT investment and economic growth. Second, non-ICT investment has as much influence on the growth gap as ICT investment. Third, those countries with a solid economic infrastructure and open trade regime experience more active ICT investments. Fourth, those countries with a comparatively lower productivity level can reduce the gap using knowledge spillovers from more advanced countries. Fifth, reinforcement of patent rights has a positive influence on economic growth by stimulating the accumulation of ICT capital. Finally, ICT investment does not have a strong interdependent relationship with economic growth, while non-ICT investment has a cumulative causal relationship with economic growth and plays a key role in the process of widening the growth gap.
SmartTutor: Creating IDE-based interactive tutorials via editable replay
Authors: Ying Zhang, Gang Huang, Nuyun Zhang, Hong Mei
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (2009)

Interactive tutorials, like Eclipse's cheat sheets, are good for novice programmers to learn how to perform tasks (e.g., checking out a CVS project) in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Creating these tutorials often requires programming effort that is time-consuming and difficult. In this paper, we propose an approach using editable replay of user actions to help authors create interactive tutorials with little programming effort. User actions of performing a task can be recorded, edited, and presented as a tutorial. The tutorial can be replayed interactively for mentoring. We present our SmartTutor implementation in the Eclipse IDE and conduct a preliminary evaluation on it, which demonstrates efficiency gains for the tutorial authors.
An Axiomatic Approach to Qualitative Decision Theory with Binary Possibilistic Utility
Authors: Paul Weng
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

Binary possibilistic utility unifies two previously proposed qualitative decision models: optimistic and pessimistic utilities. All these decision models have been axiomatized in a von Neumann-Morgenstern setting. These axiomatizations have shown the formal similarity of these qualitative utilities and expected utility. Unfortunately in this framework, the representation of uncertainty has to be clearly assumed to be given. In a more general setting, without this restriction, optimistic and pessimistic utilities have been axiomatized à la Savage. This paper proposes a study of the axiomatics of binary possibilistic utility in a Savagean framework.
Moving object detection in the H.264/AVC compressed domain for video surveillance applications
Authors: Chris Poppe, Sarah De Bruyne, Tom Paridaens, Peter Lambert, Rik Van de Walle
Venue: Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (2009)

In this paper a novel method is presented to detect moving objects in H.264/AVC [T. Wiegand, G. Sullivan, G. Bjontegaard, G. Luthra, Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 13 (7) (2003) 560-576] compressed video surveillance sequences. Related work, within the H.264/AVC compressed domain, analyses the motion vector field to find moving objects. However, motion vectors are created from a coding perspective and additional complexity is needed to clean the noisy field. Hence, an alternative approach is presented here, based on the size (in bits) of the blocks and transform coefficients used within the video stream. The system is restricted to the syntax level and achieves high execution speeds, up to 20 times faster than the related work. To show the good detection results, a detailed comparison with related work is presented for different challenging video sequences. Finally, the influence of different encoder settings is investigated to show the robustness of our system.
Classification of electroencephalographic seizure recordings into ictal and interictal files using correlation sum
Authors: Maria Tito, Mercedes Cabrerizo, Melvin Ayala, Armando Barreto, Ian Miller, Prasanna Jayakar, Malek Adjouadi
Venue: Computers in Biology and Medicine (2009)

This study provides a performance evaluation of the correlation sum in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity in its ability to classify seizure files from non-seizure files. The main thrust of the study is whether computable properties (''metrics'') of EEG tracings over time allow a seizure to be detected. This study evaluates raw intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings with the intent to detect a seizure and classify different EEG epoch files. One hundred twenty-six iEEG files from eleven sequential patients are processed and the correlation sum is extracted from non-overlapping scrolling windows of 1-s duration. The novelty of this research is in defining a generalized nonlinear approach to classify EEG seizure segments by introducing nonlinear decision functions with the flexibility in choosing any degree of complexity and with any number of dimensions, lending resiliency to data overlap and opportunity for multidimensional data analysis. A singular contribution of this work is in determining a 2-D decision plane, in this case, where duration is one dimension and window-based minima of the correlation sum is the second dimension. Also, experimental observations clearly indicate that a significant drop in the magnitude of the correlation sum signal actually coincides with the clinical seizure onset more so than the electrographic seizure onset as provided by the medical experts. The method with k-fold cross validation performed with an accuracy of 91.84%, sensitivity of 92.31%, and specificity of 91.67%, which makes this classification method most suitable for offline seizure detection applications.
Read my lips: speech distortions in musical lyrics can be overcome (slightly) by facial information
Authors: Dominic W. Massaro, Alexandra Jesse
Venue: Speech Communication (2009)

Understanding the lyrics of many contemporary songs is difficult, and an earlier study [Hidalgo-Barnes, M., Massaro, D.W., 2007. Read my lips: an animated face helps communicate musical lyrics. Psychomusicology 19, 3-12] showed a benefit for lyrics recognition when seeing a computer-animated talking head (Baldi^(R)) mouthing the lyrics along with hearing the singer. However, the contribution of visual information was relatively small compared to what is usually found for speech. In the current experiments, our goal was to determine why the face appears to contribute less when aligned with sung lyrics than when aligned with normal speech presented in noise. The first experiment compared the contribution of the talking head with the originally sung lyrics versus the case when it was aligned with the Festival text-to-speech synthesis (TtS) spoken at the original duration of the song's lyrics. A small and similar influence of the face was found in both conditions. In the three experiments, we compared the presence of the face when the durations of the TtS were equated with the duration of the original musical lyrics to the case when the lyrics were read with typical TtS durations and this speech embedded in noise. The results indicated that the unusual temporally distorted durations of musical lyrics decreases the contribution of the visible speech from the face.
Elements of Compiler Design, 1st edition
Authors: Alexander Meduna
Venue:  (2007)

Maintaining a balance between a theoretical and practical approach to this important subject, Elements of Compiler Design serves as an introduction to compiler writing for undergraduate students. From a theoretical viewpoint, it introduces rudimental models, such as automata and grammars, that underlie compilation and its essential phases. Based on these models, the author details the concepts, methods, and techniques employed in compiler design in a clear and easy-to-follow way. From a practical point of view, the book describes how compilation techniques are implemented. In fact, throughout the text, a case study illustrates the design of a new programming language and the construction of its compiler. While discussing various compilation techniques, the author demonstrates their implementation through this case study. In addition, the book presents many detailed examples and computer programs to emphasize the applications of the compiler algorithms. After studying this self-contained textbook, students should understand the compilation process, be able to write a simple real compiler, and easily follow advanced books on the subject. 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
A Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm Based on Genetic Selection Strategy
Authors: Qin Tang, Jianyou Zeng, Hui Li, Changhe Li, Yong Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks - Part III (2009)

The standard particle swarm optimization algorithm (simply called PSO) has many advantages such as rapid convergence. However, a major disadvantage confronting the PSO algorithm is that they often converge to some local optimization. In order to avoid the occurrence of premature convergence and local optimization of the PSO algorithm, a particle swarm optimization algorithm based on genetic selection stra-tegy, simply called GSS-PSO, is singled out in this paper. GSS-PSO not only retains the rapid convergence charactering of the standard PSO algorithms, but also scales up their global search ability. At last, we experimentally tested the efficiency of our new GSS-PSO algorithm using eight classical functions. The experimental results show that our new GSS-PSO algorithm is generally better than the PSO algorithm.