ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A New Source Coding Scheme with Small Expected Length and Its Application to Simple Data Encryption
Authors: Xiaoyu Ruan, Rajendra S. Katti
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2006)

We present a new source coding scheme with smaller expected length than Shannon-Fano-Elias codes. The ordering of source symbols input to the proposed encoding algorithm can be arbitrary. We show that this property leads to exponential complexity for eavesdropping even though an adversary knows the code construction rule and the probability mass function of the source.
Governance of shared service centers in public administration: dilemmas and trade-offs
Authors: René W. Wagenaar
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet (2006)

Governments are seeking ways to improve the service provisioning to their citizens by using the Internet, whilst at the same time reducing the operational costs in their back-office and IT. The implementation of shared service centers is claimed to be a valuable organizational redesign that will lead to less redundancy in operations, less staff and more concentrated knowledge accumulation. However, the decision making and subsequent implementation is a complex task full of risks on failure. This is partly due to migration of legacy IT systems, but diverse expectations and interests among the actors involved appear to be most decisive. Triggered by the failure of P-Direct, a major shared service center for HRM within the Dutch central government, this paper discusses the risks involved and the dilemma's one faces in design and implementation of shared service centers. There are various scenarios one can think of for decision-making and implementation, that lie in the spectrum from central top-down steering to bottom-up emergent process growth. The authors propose a framework for strategic choice that may guide in the search for a successful implementation strategy, and that may help future empirical research in developing "best practices".
Non-invasive product metrics collection: an architecture
Authors: Marco Scotto, Alberto Sillitti, Giancarlo Succi, Tullio Vernazza
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 workshop on Quantitative techniques for software agile process (2004)

Software metrics are useful means in helping software engineers to develop large and complex software systems. In the past years, many software metrics have been proposed in order to represent several different concepts such as complexity, coupling, inheritance, reuse, etc. However, this requires the collection of large volumes of metrics and, without flexible and transparent tools, is nearly impossible to collect data accurately. This paper presents the design and the implementation of a tool for collecting and analyzing product metrics in a non-invasive way.
What's a situation in situated cognition?: a constructionist critique of authentic inquiry
Authors: Dor Abrahamson, Andrea A. diSessa, Paulo Blikstein, Uri Wilensky, David H. Uttal, Meredith M. Amaya, Loren M. Marulis, Allan M. Collins
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (2006)

Four papers by learning scientists engaged either in design research or cognitive-developmental studies consider concreteness, context, content, pedagogy, and situativity and their implications for design that fosters opportunities for students to learn subject matter through experiencing authentic scientific/mathematical inquiry. The authors furnish both theoretical considerations and recent classroom- and laboratory-based empirical findings to question prior interpretations of students' capacity to model and abstract from situations, to generate examples, to transfer, and to make insightful connections. The papers jointly suggest that even simple objects may nevertheless undergird emergent situativity that provides sufficient context to which learners can bring diverse personal resources. Model-based design may be as intellectually honest, culturally respectful, cognitively generative, and scientifically/mathematically authentic as learning that draws more directly on students' out-of-school resources. The authenticity of 'authentic inquiry' may depend more on engagement and reasoning it enables than on specific content and a priori "good-science" practices it recruits.
Modeling and Measuring Privacy Risks in QoS Web Services
Authors: Tao Yu, Yue Zhang, Kwei-Jay Lin
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and E-Services (2006)

The privacy issue for QoSWeb services is considered. As more Web services are constructed and deployed, many of our personal needs may be served by more than one service providers regardless of their platforms and implementation technologies. Service selection is performed by comparing the QoS attributes of all candidate services. Releasing private data without due control may raise the risk of allowing potential adversaries to collect, reveal or utilize one's data in undesirable ways. We propose a QoS model that quantifies a user's privacy risk in order to make the service selection process manageable. The privacy risk is derived using the percentage of the private data set to be released, and user-defined context-oriented weights that quantify the potential damage of privacy leaking in a specific context. We have included privacy risk cost as one of the QoS parameters by extending the end-to-end QoS composition algorithms developed previously.
A Unifying View of Sparse Approximate Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela, Carl Edward Rasmussen
Venue: The Journal of Machine Learning Research (2005)

We provide a new unifying view, including all existing proper probabilistic sparse approximations for Gaussian process regression. Our approach relies on expressing the effective prior which the methods are using. This allows new insights to be gained, and highlights the relationship between existing methods. It also allows for a clear theoretically justified ranking of the closeness of the known approximations to the corresponding full GPs. Finally we point directly to designs of new better sparse approximations, combining the best of the existing strategies, within attractive computational constraints.
On the Brittleness of Software and the Infeasibility of Security Metrics
Authors: Steven M. Bellovin
Venue: IEEE Security and Privacy (2006)

How secure is a computer system? Bridges have a load limit, but it isn't determined (as "Calvin andHobbes" would have it) by building an identical bridge and running trucks over it until it collapses. In amore relevant vein, safes are rated for how long they'll resist attack under given circumstances. Can we dothe same for software?
Implementation of GIS Spatial Data Mining Based on Cloud Theory
Authors: Wang Xiao hui, Xie Jiancang, Li Jianxun, Luo Jungang, Liu Fuchao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology - Volume 01 (2006)

The transforms between qualitative concepts and their quantitative expressions plan an important role in spatial data mining & knowledge discovery (SDMKD), the cloud theory is this kind of powerful tools. Based on the cloud model, this paper presents a expression method for uncertain direction by using two-dimensional normal cloud, builds a data mining pattern through combining cloud theory and rough sets, proposes a GIS spatial data mining structure system. In this foundation, the process of data mining for GIS spatial data by generalizing attributes based on cloud theory and reducing attributes based on rough sets is given. Finally an example is explained and confirmed this method validity.
Toward an understanding of the impact of software personal assistants on human organizations
Authors: Steven Okamoto, Paul Scerri, Katia Sycara
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

Intelligent software personal assistants for human organizations are an active research area within the multiagent community. However, while many capabilities for these software personal assistants are imagined or already developed, there has been no quantification of how an organization's performance is improved by software personal assistants. Moreover, while intuitively organizations will adapt to take advantage of the new technology, there has been no work looking at how organizations should or will change in response to the new technology. This paper presents a first step toward addressing this oversight. Specifically, a computational model of the working of an organization and how software personal assistants will affect that organization is developed that allows effects of software personal assistants to be modeled. By varying the potential capabilities of the software personal assistants and the structure of the organization, we can explore the impact of the technology. Our results show that managing task contingencies can greatly improve organizational performance by as much as 45%.
Automating Invariant Verification of Behavioral Specifications
Authors: Masahiro Nakano, Kazuhiro Ogata, Masaki Nakamura, Kokichi Futatsugi
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Quality Software (2006)

We describe a method of automating invariant verification of behavioral specifications, which are algebraic specifications of abstract machines. The proposed method is based on fixed-point computation, which is one of the standard techniques for automatic (invariant) verification. One notable feature of the proposed method is to find and use as lemmas state predicates whose invariant proofs may (even mutually) depend on other state predicates whose invariant proofs may not be completed. Cr`eme is a tool based on the proposed method. We also report on a case study in which Cr`eme proves fully automatically that the NSLPK authentication protocol satisfies the secrecy property.
Querying Heterogeneous and Distributed Learning Object Repositories via Ontology-Based Mediation
Authors: Philipp Karger, Erica Melis, Carsten Ullrich
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

1We propose a mediator architecture that allows a learning system to retrieve learning objects (LOs) from heterogeneous repositories of LOs and not exclusively from its proprietary repository. A mediating component accepts queries formulated in a uniform query language, translates them into repository specific queries and passes them to each connected repository. For the translation of queries, an ontology-based queryrewriting method has been developed which uses the specified knowledge representation of the repository and an ontology mapping to compute the rewriting steps for translating. For distributing queries we realized a mediating architecture, which passes the translated queries to the repositories. This architecture has been integrated in the Web-based, user-adaptive and interactive e-learning environment Active Math.
SPiKE: engineering malware analysis tools using unobtrusive binary-instrumentation
Authors: Amit Vasudevan, Ramesh Yerraballi
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference - Volume 48 (2006)

Malware -- a generic term that encompasses viruses, trojans, spywares and other intrusive code -- is widespread today. Malware analysis is a multi-step process providing insight into malware structure and functionality, facilitating the development of an antidote. Behavior monitoring, an important step in the analysis process, is used to observe malware interaction with respect to the system and is achieved by employing dynamic coarse-grained binary-instrumentation on the target system. However, current research involving dynamic binary-instrumentation, categorized into probe-based and just-in-time compilation (JIT), fail in the context of malware. Probe-based schemes are not transparent. Most if not all malware are sensitive to code modification incorporating methods to prevent their analysis and even instrument the system themselves for their functionality and stealthness. Current JIT schemes, though transparent, do not support multithreading, self-modifying and/or self-checking (SM-SC) code and are unable to capture code running in kernel-mode. Also, they are an overkill in terms of latency for coarse-grained instrumentation.To address this problem, we have developed a new dynamic coarse-grained binary-instrumentation framework codenamed SPiKE, that aids in the construction of powerful malware analysis tools to combat malware that are becoming increasingly hard to analyze. Our goal is to provide a binary-instrumentation framework that is unobtrusive, portable, efficient, easy-to-use and reusable, supporting multithreading and SM-SC code, both in user- and kernel-mode. In this paper, we discuss the concept of unobtrusive binary-instrumentation and present the design, implementation and evaluation of SPiKE. We also illustrate the framework utility by describing our experience with a tool employing SPiKE to analyze a real world malware.
Prediction of the electromagnetic noise of an asynchronous machine using experimental designs
Authors: M. Hecquet, A. Ait-Hammouda, M. Goueygou, P. Brochet, A. Randria
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2006)

The aim of this paper is to use an analytical multi-physical model-electromagnetic, mechanic and acoustic - in order to predict the electromagnetic noise of an asynchronous machine. This machine operating at variable speed generate vibrations that can be harmful for the machine itself and its environment. Thus, it is necessary for the manufacturer to take into account noise and vibration at the design stage. Acoustic measurements are performed in order to validate our multi-physical model. Afterwards, the experimental design method is used to build response surfaces of the noise with respect to the main factors.
Introduction: Experience Reports
Authors: James Shore
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on AGILE 2006 (2006)

I love stories. I love hearing them; I love telling them. Stories connect me to ideas in a way that dry recitals of facts and findings never could. Perhaps it's my love of stories that makes the experience reports track my favorite at conferences. A great experience report is a story: a personal account of what somebody experienced while trying an idea. Of course, there's more to an experience report than a story. Experience reports are grounded in facts. They're reported by people working on real projects under real constraints. Their stories tell us what they tried, what worked out... and what didn't. If experience is the best teacher, then perhaps these reports are the second-best teacher. We have an excellent program this year. We received nearly 100 proposals. Whittling the proposals down to the final 30 reports was a grueling process. Our 16-person review committee didn't just read every proposal; we personally conducted a phone interview with the primary author of every proposal. Once the papers were accepted, each paper was our experienced reviewers.
Using AnsProlog with Link Grammar and WordNet for QA with deep reasoning
Authors: Chitta Baral, Luis Tari
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Technology (2006)

Early question-answering (QA) approaches could only adequately answer fact-related questions and are insufficient in answering complex questions. More sophisticated QA systems utilize the semantics of words to answer complex questions. However, to answer certain kinds of complex questions, it is necessary to perform deep reasoning by utilizing the semantics of words as well as domain knowledge such as the effects and executability of actions. We propose a QA system that uses AnsProlog to represent domain knowledge and reason from the knowledge extracted by using Link Grammar and WordNet. We use the travel domain to illustrate our approach.
Third-party handshake protocol for efficient peer discovery and route optimization in IEEE 802.15.3 WPANs
Authors: Zhanping Yin, Victor C. M. Leung
Venue: Mobile Networks and Applications (2006)

Designed for high data rate wireless personal area networks, the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol fits well with emerging technologies like ultra-wideband. Peer discovery is essential in 802.15.3 piconets in w3:22 hich devices (DEVs) exchange MAC frames in a peer-to-peer manner. If two peer DEVs are unreachable, the standard peer discovery method will fail after unproductive backoff retransmissions, and a costly network layer routing is required. For DEVs uniformly distributed over the maximum coverage area of a piconet, such failures occur in up to 41.3% of intra-piconet peer discoveries. In this paper, we propose a novel third-party handshake protocol (3PHP) that provides more reliable and prompt peer discovery than the standard method. Especially, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP replaces network layer routing by an efficient MAC layer forwarding that utilizes the available self-learning rate information to establish optimal routes. The mean peer discovery time for 3PHP is 100 µs lower than the standard method between directly reachable DEVs. More significantly, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP has a much lower failure probability, and is up to 10 times faster than the standard method in establishing a peer-to-peer connection as the latter fails and network layer routing is invoked.
Preservation of Correctness During System Reconfiguration in Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS)
Authors: Bogumil Zieba, Marten van Sinderen
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International ConferenceWorkshops on Distributed Computing Systems (2006)

This paper addresses dynamic reconfiguration of distributed systems that use a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware. The objective of dynamic reconfiguration is to evolve incrementally from one system configuration to another at run-time in order to e.g., ensure the reliability of the system. The correctness notion of a distributed system is introduced that assures that the system parts that interact with entities under reconfiguration do not fail because of reconfiguration. We analyse the OMG specification of pub/sub systems - DDS (Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems) with respect to its support for the correctness preservation during reconfiguration. We notice that the DDS specification defines such an architecture and behaviour of the pub/sub system that automatically preserves correctness. This differentiates the DDS from other middleware technologies that require that the correctness preservation is guaranteed on application level or by reconfiguration manager/controller. We give several examples of automatic correctness preservation supported by the DDS.
Improving Coverage in Functional Testing
Authors: Jessica Chen, Guy-V. Jourdan, Wenxin Ma, Hasan Ural
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Quality Software (2006)

Input-Predicate/Output (IP/O)_{n}-chains coverage criterion, originally proposed for black-box testing of telecommunications software, is adapted to white-box testing of programs written in block-structured languages. This criterion is based on the analysis of the effects of inputs on predicates and outputs in a program. It requires that each such effect in a program is examined at least once during testing and thus provides a means of capturing the implemented functionality and checking the consistency of the program with respect to its functional requirements. It is shown that its fault-detecting ability is higher than the all-uses criterion, and compares favorably with the required k-tuples^+ criterion.
Simulating and visualizing the human arterial system on the TeraGrid
Authors: Suchuan Dong, Joseph Insley, Nicholas T. Karonis, Michael E. Papka, Justin Binns, George Karniadakis
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2006)

We present a Grid solution to a grand challenge problem, the simulation and visualization of the human arterial system. We implemented our simulation and visualization system on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid and demonstrated it at the iGrid 2005 conference in San Diego, California. We discuss our experience in running on a computational Grid and present observations and suggestions for improving similar experiences.
Advanced Techniques for Scheduling, Reservation, and Access Management for Remote Laboratories
Authors: Philipp Wieder, Oliver Waldrich, Wolfgang Ziegler
Venue: Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (2006)

In Grid and Service Oriented Architecture-based environments the use of technologies supporting Service Level Agreements, advance reservation, and Virtual Organisations mark the start of a new way accessing distributed resources or services. Experience made so far indicate the potential for overcoming the limitations of the hitherto best effort approaches. In this paper we propose an approach that integrates remote laboratories as another resource into the Grid. We show how techniques developed for compute, storage, or network resources in Grids may be used for managing access to Collaborative Remote Laboratories. In particular we discuss how existing technologies for advance reservation, Service Level Agreements, and Virtual Organisations can help to set up, configure, and manage remote laboratories and provide support in the preparation of collaborative control of and mutual access to laboratory equipment.
Accelerating VOD Streaming with Adaptive Proxy- Assisted Scheduling, Caching and Patching
Authors: Li Zimu, Wu Jianping, Qin Shaohua
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Systems and Networks Communication (2006)

Delivering real-time VOD streaming media to a large number of users consumes significant amount of network bandwidth and server resources without scalability. Under a wireless content delivery network architecture, we study the bandwidth consumption of streaming multiple media objects from a VOD server through proxies to multiple clients based on which we propose an adaptive segment-based and proxy-assisted scheduling, caching and patching scheme called MBP (Multicast Batched Patching) with application-layer multicast strategy to accelerate VOD streaming effectively and efficiently in a wireless network environment. By introducing a simple transmission cost model, we investigate the overall cost of network consumption of our proposal. Simulations show that our scheme has a better scalability and can reduce the overall transmission cost significantly whereas small amount of cache space is needed at proxies.