ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The IS/IT outsourcing phenomenon in the public sector of a developing country: an exploration of critical issues
Authors: Abdulwahed Moh. Khalfan, Tom G. Gough
Venue: Advanced topics in global information management (2003)

This chapter presents an overview of a national case study exploring the IS/IT outsourcing phenomenon in the public sector of a developing country. The study is empirically based and provides a logical extension to earlier research studies/endeavors in the field of IS/ IT outsourcing. Kuwait, where the data collection for this study was carried out, has been used as an example of a developing country. The primary data on IS/IT outsourcing practices, obtained for the first time in Kuwait, were collected by means of Survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews supported by organizational documentation. The research seeks to identify the factors that give rise to the IS/IT outsourcing phenomenon, and the degree to which they influence the practices, procedures, and outcomes of IS/IT outsourcing arrangements in Kuwait. The overall research aimed to provide a comprehensive pragmatic picture of IS/IT outsourcing practices, including motivations, risk analysis, contract drafting and legal issues, vendor selection criteria, evaluation practices, decision-making processes, and post-evaluation experience. There is growing evidence within the Kuwaiti environment to suggest that public organizations are not achieving the desired benefits from their IS/IT outsourcing operations. IS/IT outsourcing projects in Kuwait are still undertaken in ways that are not clearly related to strategic change. It is clear that IS/ IT outsourcing is a multi-faceted phenomenon that should be studied broadly in context. The lesson is that the solutions must make sense for the particular context in which they will be implemented, considering all cultural and environmental factors. It was found that culture plays an important role throughout the outsourcing process. The findings of this study also suggest that there will be an increasing utilisation of IT outsourcing services in the public sector of Kuwait.
Some user-defined control functions for more readable APL programs
Authors: James A. Mason
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1975)

Some improved control statements for APL are presented, which the user can define and use without requiring either preprocessing or modification of the interpreter. A preprocessor is also given, however, in case improved execution time of programs using the control statements is desired.
Robust image authentication using content based compression
Authors: Ee-Chien Chang, Mohan S. Kankanhalli, Xin Guan, Zhiyong Huang, Yinghui Wu
Venue: Multimedia Systems (2003)

Image authentication is becoming very important for certifying data integrity. A key issue in image authentication is the design of a compact signature that contains sufficient information to detect illegal tampering yet is robust under allowable manipulations. In this paper, we recognize that most permissible operations on images are global distortions like low-pass filtering and JPEG compression, whereas illegal data manipulations tend to be localized distortions. To exploit this observation, we propose an image authentication scheme where the signature is the result of an extremely low-bit-rate content-based compression. The content-based compression is guided by a space-variant weighting function whose values are higher in the more important and sensitive region. This spatially dependent weighting function determines a weighted norm that is particularly sensitive to the localized distortions induced by illegal tampering. It also gives a better compactness compared to the usual compression schemes that treat every spatial region as being equally important. In our implementation, the weighting function is a multifovea weighted function that resembles the biological foveated vision system. The foveae are salient points determined in the scale-space representation of the image. The desirable properties of multifovea weighted function in the wavelet domains fit nicely into our scheme. We have implemented our technique and tested its robustness and sensitivity for several manipulations.
Test-decompression mechanism using a variable-length multiple-polynomial LFSR
Authors: Hong-Sik Kim, Yongjoon Kim, Sungho Kang
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2003)

A new test-decompression methodology using a variable-rank multiple-polynomial linear feedback shift register (MP-LFSR) is proposed. In the proposed reseeding scheme, a test cube with a large number of specified bits is encoded with a high-rank polynomial, while a test cube with a small number of specified bits is encoded with a low-rank polynomial. Therefore, according to the number of specified bits in each test cube, the size of the encoded data can be optimally reduced. A variable-rank MP-LFSR can be implemented with a slight modification of a conventional MP-LFSR. The experimental results on the largest ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed methodology can provide much better encoding efficiency than the previous methods with adequate hardware overhead.
Tracking changes in user interests with a few relevance judgments
Authors: Dwi H. Widyantoro, Thomas R. Ioerger, John Yen
Venue: Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management (2003)

Keeping track of changes in user interests from a document stream with a few relevance judgments is not an easy task. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method that integrates (1) pseudo-relevance feedback mechanism, (2) assumption about the persistence of user interests and (3) incremental method for data clustering. This approach has been empirically evaluated using Reuters-21578 corpus in a setting for information filtering. The experiment results reveal that it significantly improves the performances of existing user-interest-tracking systems without requiring additional, actual relevance judgments.
A logic you can count on
Authors: Silvano Dal Zilio, Denis Lugiez, Charles Meyssonnier
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (2004)

We prove the decidability of the quantifier-free, static fragment of ambient logic, with composition adjunct and iteration, which corresponds to a kind of regular expression language for semistructured data. The essence of this result is a surprising connection between formulas of the ambient logic and counting constraints on (nested) vectors of integers.Our proof method is based on a new class of tree automata for unranked, unordered trees, which may result in practical algorithms for deciding the satisfiability of a formula. A benefit of our approach is to naturally lead to an extension of the logic with recursive definitions, which is also decidable. Finally, we identify a simple syntactic restriction on formulas that improves the effectiveness of our algorithms on large examples.
Information Flows in Capacitated Supply Chains with Fixed Ordering Costs
Authors: Srinagesh Gavirneni
Venue: Management Science (2002)

Many organizations have only recently recognized that sharing information with other members in their supply chain can lead to signficant reduction in the total costs.Usually these information flows are incorporated into existing operating policies at the various parties.In this paper we argue that, in some cases, it may be necessary to change the way the supply chain is managed to make complete use of the information flows. We support this argument by analyzing a supply chain containing a capacitated supplier and a retailer facing i.i.d. demands. In addition there are fixed ordering costs between the retailer and the supplier.In this setting, we consider two models: (1) the retailer is using the optimal (s,S) policy and providing the supplier information about her inventory levels; and (2) the retailer, still sharing information on her inventory levels, orders in a period only if by the previous period the cumulative end-customer demand since she last ordered was greater than d. Thus, in Model 1, information sharing is used to supplement existing policies; while, in Model 2, we have redefined operating policies to make better use of the information flows. We will show, via a detailed computational study, that the total supply chain costs of Model 2 are 10.4% lower, on the average, than that of Model 1. We noticed that this reduction in costs is higher at higher capacities, higher supplier penalty costs, lower retailer penalty costs, moderate values of set-up cost, and at lower end-customer demand variances.
Datarover: a taxonomy based crawler for automated data extraction from data-intensive websites
Authors: H. Davulcu, S. Koduri, S. Nagarajan
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international workshop on Web information and data management (2003)

The advent of e-commerce has created a trend that brought thousands of catalogs online. Most of these websites are "taxonomy-directed". A Web site is said to be "taxonomy-directed" if it contains at least one taxonomy for organizing its contents and it presents the instances belonging to a category in a regular fashion. This paper describes the DataRover system, which can automatically crawl and extract products from taxonomy-directed online catalogs. DataRover utilizes heuristic rules to discover the structural regularities among: taxonomy segments, list-of-product and single-product pages and it uses these regularities to turn the online catalogs into a database of categorized products without the need for user interaction or the wrapper maintenance burden. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of the DataRover and point to its current limitations.
Lattice-based memory allocation
Authors: Alain Darte, Rob Schreiber, Gilles Villard
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Compilers, architecture and synthesis for embedded systems (2003)

We investigate the problem of memory reuse, for reducing the necessary memory size, in the context of compilation of dedicated processors. Memory reuse is a well-known concept when allocating registers (i.e., scalar variables). Its (recent) extension to arrays was studied mainly by Lefebvre and Feautrier (for loop parallelization) and by Quilleré and Rajopadhye (for circuit synthesis based on recurrence equations). Both consider affine mappings of indices to data, with modulo expressions in the first and (mainly) projections in the second. We develop a mathematical framework based on (integral) critical lattices that subsumes all previous approaches and gives new insights into the problem. Our technique consists first in building an abstract representation of conflicting indices (equivalent in a multi-dimensional space to the interference graph for register allocation), then in defining an integral lattice, admissible for the set of differences of conflicting indices, used to build a valid modular allocation. We also show the link with critical lattices, successive minima, and basis reduction, and we analyze various strategies for lattice-based memory allocation.
On Automated Lesson Construction from Electronic Textbooks
Authors: Gultekin Ozsoyoglu, Nevzat H. Balkir, Z. Meral Ozsoyoglu, Graham Cormode
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2004)

Abstract--An electronic book may be viewed as an application with a multimedia database. We define an electronic textbook as an electronic book that is used in conjunction with instructional resources such as lectures. In this paper, we propose an electronic textbook data model with topics, topic sources, metalinks (relationships among topics), and instructional modules which are multimedia presentations possibly capturing real-life lectures of instructors. Using the data model, the system provides users a topic-guided multimedia lesson construction. This paper concentrates, in detail, on the use of one metalink type in lesson construction, namely, prerequisite dependencies, and provides a sound and complete axiomatization of prerequisite dependencies. We present a simple automated way of constructing lessons for users where the user lists a set of topic names (s)he is interested in, and the system automatically constructs and delivers the "best¿ user-tailored lesson as a multimedia presentation, where "best¿ is characterized in terms of both topic closures with respect to prerequisite dependencies and what the user knows about topics. We model and present sample lesson construction requests for users, discuss their complexity, and give algorithms that evaluate such requests. For expensive lesson construction requests, we list heuristics and empirically evaluate their performance. We also discuss the worst-case performance guarantees of lesson request algorithms.
Combining Hierarchy and Energy Drawing Directed Graphs
Authors: Liran Carmel, David Harel, Yehuda Koren
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2004)

Abstract- We present an algorithm for drawing directed graphs which is based on rapidly solving a unique one-dimensional optimization problem for each of the axes. The algorithm results in a clear description of the hierarchy structure of the graph. Nodes are not restricted to lie on fixed horizontal layers, resulting in layouts that convey the symmetries of the graph very naturally. The algorithm can be applied without change to cyclic or acyclic digraphs and even to graphs containing both directed and undirected edges. We also derive a hierarchy index from the input digraph, which quantitatively measures its amount of hierarchy.
The ART of compiler construction projects
Authors: John Aycock
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (2003)

Student projects in compiler construction courses are often limited to the implementation of toy languages, making the project's scope manageable but also restricting the number of interesting input programs. ART (Array Removal Transformation) is a language whose compiler translates array-based ART programs into array-less toy language programs which use only simple (non-aggregate) types. This allows algorithms to be expressed in toy languages that would not otherwise be feasible.ART's translation process creates large input files to stress-test student compilers, which are often not subjected to such testing.
Design and implementation of a fine-grained menu control processor for web-based information systems
Authors: Eric Jui-Lin Lu, Rai-Fu Chen
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2003)

Web-based information systems (WISs) have become mainstream systems on the Internet and are widely deployed by enterprises worldwide. Although it is extremely important to secure access to WISs, the development of access control for WISs is still in its infancy stage. In addition, existing access control models for web applications are not suitable for WISs. In this paper, we proposed an access control model, called X-Menu, for WISs. Also, a prototype had been designed and implemented. The proposed model provides fine-grained control up to the element level of documents and is flexible and secured. The maintenance cost of the proposed model is low, and the proposed model can prevent users from performing any unauthorized task.
Wearable virtual tablet: fingertip drawing on a portable plane-object using an active-infrared camera
Authors: Norimichi Ukita, Masatsugu Kidode
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (2004)

We propose the Wearable Virtual Tablet (WVT), where a user can draw a locus on a common object with a plane surface (e.g., a notebook and a magazine) with a fingertip. Our previous WVT[1], however, could not work on a plane surface with complicated texture patterns: Since our WVT employs an active-infrared camera and the reflected infrared rays vary depending on patterns on a plane surface, it is difficult to estimate the motions of a fingertip and a plane surface from an observed infrared-image. In this paper, we propose a method to detect and track their motions without interference from colored patterns on a plane surface. (1) To find the region of a plane object in the observed image, four edge lines that compose a rectangular object can be easily extracted by employing the properties of an active-infrared camera. (2) To precisely determine the position of a fingertip, we utilize a simple finger model that corresponds to a finger edge independent of its posture. (3) The system can distinguish whether or not a fingertip touches a plane object by analyzing image intensities in the edge region of the fingertip.
Synthesis of fully testable sequential machines
Authors: R. Thomas, S. Kundu
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on European design automation (1991)

A circuit consists of logic and memory elements. Testing of a circuit involves testing both. Typically, it takes long input sequences to initialize memory elements. Without initialization of memory elements, testing is not possible. In the classical approach to design for test, such as scan design, modifications are made to the circuit to obtain easy and full controllability and observability of the memory elements. We address the design for testability issue for non-scan designs, where both controllability and observabilities are reduced. In the process we end up with a design that is also suitable for concurrent checking. Concurrent checking is a verification process, which is performed concomitantly with normal operation. The technique described here incurs an area overhead but almost no performance penalty.
Distributed framework for deploying machine learning in network management and security
Authors: Boleslaw Szymanski
Venue:  (2003)

As computer networks grow in frequency, size, and degree of segmentation, network management applications must not only provide efficiency, non-intrusiveness, and reliability, but also must be able to scale these characteristics over a wide range of architectures. In this thesis, we propose a distributed framework for network management middleware. The goal is to easily distribute functional agents to locations where they may carry on the actions of the management application closer to the managed node. In large networks with multiple managers, problems in a network usually draw attention and management traffic to the problem location. This added management traffic only exaggerates the problem. We show and quantify the benefits of the proposed distribution by implementing several real-time network managers using our distributed framework. We also propose and describe several management techniques, including congestion control and network parameter optimization, which use the distributed framework. The effects of the agent-based distribution that we developed also enables the application of centrally managed but functionally distributed agents to fields where scalable, centralized management was not practical. One such field is Intrusion Detection. Currently, intrusion detection processes are individually installed and independently managed preventing large-scaled distributed detection. We propose and describe here many intrusion detection methods targeting both host-based and network-based attacks. Consistent across our work is the application of intelligence or learning techniques, such as Perceptron-based neural networks, self organizing maps, and genetic algorithms. Our approaches strive to provide scalability. We study and provide a process for simulation-based scalability evaluation through application segmentation and its relationship to real networks. We have also formed a mathematical analysis of comparative scalability to analyze various application architectures. We compare our framework to traditional architectures of network management using all of these methods.
Information Jukebox &ndash; A semi-public device for presenting multimedia information content
Authors: Wolfgang Strauss, Monika Fleischmann, Jochen Denzinger, Christoph Groenegress, Yinlin Li
Venue: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2003)

The Information Jukebox is a digital enquiry kiosk aimed at browsing media files. It combines a novel gesture-based and hands-free interface with an expressive graphical user interface and an attractive physical design. The system was developed within the context of a media arts exhibition and thus had to meet both functional and semiotic requirements. Unlike comparable systems it offers a complete and playful solution for browsing media.
ANMoLe&mdash;An Adaptive Multimedia Content Delivery Middleware Architecture for Heterogeneous Mobile Multi-Device Neighborhoods
Authors: Anwar M. Haneef, Aura Ganz
Venue: Multimedia Tools and Applications (2004)

Despite the commercial onslaught of multipurpose portable devices such as integrated mobile phone-PDA combos, the need for multiple devices, with each device performing its own pre-defined and specialized function still exists today. The new generation of internet users has been expeditious in imbibing the new generation of divergent devices for their varying needs&mdash;cell phones for voice communication, pagers for text messaging and PDAs for notes. Content sources today assume that the end-device used to retrieve the content has certain minimum pre-defined capabilities. The architecture presented in this paper explores a new realm of content delivery where all the devices in a user's neighborhood of devices are united as a single entity for content delivery. This solution exploits the characteristic capabilities of these individual devices to render the retrieved content for the user&semi; or in cases where the target devices are limited in capabilities, modifies the content to suite the capabilities of the device. A comprehensive description of the testbed we have built based on this architecture is also described.
Variational grid adaptation based on the minimization of local truncation error: time-independent problems
Authors: Giovanni Lapenta
Venue: Journal of Computational Physics (2004)

A new approach to grid adaptation is presented. The method is based on two established foundations. First, the method is based upon variational grid adaptation, retaining all the well-known properties of robustness and regularity. Second, the adaptation method presented here is based on a general definition of the error detector obtained from the moving finite element (MFE) method. The error detector is general, applicable to any given problem, and does not require any a priori knowledge of the solution or of the physical behaviour of the system under investigation. The primary theoretical contribution of the present work is in establishing a link between various adaptation methods previously regarded as different and unrelated. We show that they all derive from the same approach and are all equivalent in the sense that the same grid is generated by all of them for the same problem, once the monitor functions are chosen according to our approach. The primary practical contribution of the present work is in prescribing a rigorous monitor function for previously published adaptation strategies. The choice proposed here is shown to outperform previous heuristic choices. The method is tested in a series of elliptic problems, where the adaptation strategy presented here can improve the accuracy by orders of magnitude.
Empirical Bayesian estimation of normal variances and covariances
Authors: Colin J. Champion
Venue: Journal of Multivariate Analysis (2003)

This paper derives and evaluates an algorithm for estimating normal covariances. A particular concern is the performance of the estimator when the dimension of the space exceeds the number of observations. The algorithm is simple, tolerably well founded, and seems to be more accurate for its purpose than the alternatives. Other topics discussed are the joint estimation of variances in one and many dimensions; the loss function appropriate to a variance estimator; and its connection with a certain Bayesian prescription.