ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Quantifying security threats and their impact
Authors: Anis Ben Aissa, Robert K. Abercrombie, Frederick T. Sheldon, Ali Mili
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies (2009)

In earlier works, we present a computational infrastructure that allows an analyst to estimate the security of a system in terms of the loss that each stakeholder stands to sustain as a result of security breakdowns. In this paper, we illustrate this infrastructure by means of an e-commerce application.
The i-Walker: an intelligent pedestrian mobility aid
Authors: R. Annicchiarico, C. Barrué, T. Benedico, F. Campana, U. Cortés, A. Martínez-Velasco
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2008)

In this paper we focus on the development of an intelligent pedestrian mobility aid that we call i-Walker for elders. This target population includes, but is not limited to, persons with low vision, visual field neglect, spasticity, tremors, and cognitive deficits. SHARE-it will provide an Agent-based Intelligent Decision Support System to aid the elders.
Professional Windows Vista Gadgets Programming
Authors: Wei-Meng Lee
Venue: Programmer To Programmer (2007)

As an easy-to-use application that provides information at a glance, a gadget allows users to quickly and easily obtain weather information, RSS news feeds, and much more. In Windows Vista, there are two types of gadgetsSidebar and SideShow gadgets and Microsoft MVP author Wei-Meng Lee covers both. Youll begin by walking through the development of a simple gadget, and then each successive chapter breaks down the specific APIs that are relevant to enhancing a gadget so that you can clearly learn how a gadget is built. 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
Identifying novel constrained elements by exploiting biased substitution patterns
Authors: Manuel Garber, Mitchell Guttman, Michele Clamp, Michael C. Zody, Nir Friedman, Xiaohui Xie
Venue: Bioinformatics (2009)

Motivation: Comparing the genomes from closely related species provides a powerful tool to identify functional elements in a reference genome. Many methods have been developed to identify conserved sequences across species; however, existing methods only model conservation as a decrease in the rate of mutation and have ignored selection acting on the pattern of mutations. Results: We present a new approach that takes advantage of deeply sequenced clades to identify evolutionary selection by uncovering not only signatures of rate-based conservation but also substitution patterns characteristic of sequence undergoing natural selection. We describe a new statistical method for modeling biased nucleotide substitutions, a learning algorithm for inferring site-specific substitution biases directly from sequence alignments and a hidden Markov model for detecting constrained elements characterized by biased substitutions. We show that the new approach can identify significantly more degenerate constrained sequences than rate-based methods. Applying it to the ENCODE regions, we identify as much as 10.2% of these regions are under selection. Availability: The algorithms are implemented in a Java software package, called SiPhy, freely available at http://www.broadinstitute.org/science/software/. Contact: xhx@ics.uci.edu Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Solution of systems of nonlinear equations -- a semi-implicit approach
Authors: Jan Scheffel, Cristian Håkansson
Venue: Applied Numerical Mathematics (2009)

An iterative method for globally convergent solution of nonlinear equations and systems of nonlinear equations is presented. Convergence is quasi-monotonous and approaches second order in the proximity of the real roots. The algorithm is related to semi-implicit methods, earlier being applied to partial differential equations. It is shown that the Newton-Raphson and Newton methods are special cases of the method. The degrees of freedom introduced by the semi-implicit parameters are used to control convergence. When applied to a single equation, efficient global convergence and convergence to a nearby root makes the method attractive in comparison with methods as those of Newton-Raphson and van Wijngaarden-Dekker-Brent. An extensive standard set of systems of equations is solved and convergence diagrams are introduced, showing the robustness, efficiency and simplicity of the method as compared to Newton's method using linesearch.
UMTS Network Planning, Optimization, and Inter-Operation with GSM
Authors: Moe Rahnema
Venue:  (2007)

UMTS Network Planning, Optimization, and Inter-Operation with GSM is an accessible, one-stop reference to help engineers effectively reduce the time and costs involved in UMTS deployment and optimization. Rahnema includes detailed coverage from both a theoretical and practical perspective on the planning and optimization aspects of UMTS, and a number of other new techniques to help operators get the most out of their networks. Provides an end-to-end perspective, from network design to optimization Incorporates the hands-on experiences of numerous researchers Single authorship allows for strong coherency and accessibility Details the complete iteration cycle of radio link budgeting for coverage planning and dimensioning Rahnema demonstrates detailed formulation of radio capacity and coverage in UMTS, and discusses the tradeoffs involved. He presents complete link budgeting and iterative simulations for capacity and coverage planning, along with practical guidelines. UMTS Network Planning contains seventeen cohesive and well-organized chapters which cover numerous topics, including: Radio channel structures, radio channel models, parameters, model tuning Techniques for capacity and coverage enhancements Complete treatment of power control, handoffs and radio resource practical management processes and parameters Detailed coverage of TCP protocol enhancement for operation over wireless links, particularly UMTS Application of GSM measurements to plan and re-engineer for UMTS radio sites Guidelines for site co-location with GSM, the QOS classes, parameters and inter-workings in UMTS AMR voice codecs and tradeoffs, core and access network design, architectural evolution, and protocols Comprehensive discussion and presentation of practical techniques for radio performance analysis, trending, and troubleshooting Perfect for professionals in the field and researchers specializing in network enhancement. Engineers working on other air interfaces and next generation technologies will find many of the techniques introduced helpful in designing and deploying future wireless networks as well. Students and professionals new to the wireless field will also find this book to be a good foundation in network planning, performance analysis, and optimization. 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 new softness display based on bi-elastic fabric
Authors: M. Bianchi, E. P. Scilingo, A. Serio, A. Bicchi
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

In this demo we show a new bi-elastic fabric-based display for rendering softness. It consists of a thin layer of bi-elastic fabric placed on the top of a hollow cylinder and tied to an external circular crown which can run outside over the cylinder. The crown can be moved upward and downward by means of a DC motor. The crown is connected to the female screw by means of four supports which slide along suitable loops. When the motor pulls down the crown, the fabric is stretched and its apparent stiffness increases. Conversely, when the motor pushes up the crown the fabric is relaxed and it feels softer. Subjects can touch the fabric and feel different levels of softness according to the stretching induced by the motor. Being the fabric deformable in a controlled way under the fingerpad, this new device is able to provide cues for a more reliable and realistic perception. During this demo the device will be controlled to provide subjects with different artificial degrees of softness.
Mastering the Processing of Preferences by Using Symbolic Priorities in Possibilistic Logic
Authors: Souhila Kaci, Henri Prade
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2008)

The paper proposes a new approach to the handling of preferences expressed in a compact way under the form of conditional statements. These conditional statements are translated into classical logic formulas associated with symbolic levels. Ranking two alternatives then leads to compare their respective amount of violation with respect to the set of formulas expressing the preferences. These symbolic violation amounts, which can be computed in a possibilistic logic manner, can be partially ordered lexicographically once put in a vector form. This approach is compared to the ceteris paribus-based CP-net approach, which is the main existing artificial intelligence approach to the compact processing of preferences. It is shown that the partial order obtained with the CP-net approach fully agrees with the one obtained with the proposed approach, but generally includes further strict preferences between alternatives (considered as being not comparable by the symbolic level logic-based approach). These additional strict preferences are in fact debatable, since they are not the reflection of explicit user's preferences but the result of the application of the ceteris paribus principle that implicitly, and quite arbitrarily, favors father node preferences in the graphical structure associated with conditional preferences. Adding constraints between symbolic levels for expressing that the violation of father nodes is less allowed than the one of children nodes, it is shown that it is possible to recover the CP-net-induced partial order. Due to existing results in possibilistic logic with symbolic levels, the proposed approach is computationally tractable. Key words: preference, priority, partial order, CP-net, possibilistic logic.
Mobility-based topology control of robot networks
Authors: Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Venue:  (2008)

A fundamental problem that arises in realizing large-scale wireless networks of mobile robots is that of controlling the communication topology. This thesis makes three contributions to the area of mobility-based topology control in robot networks. First, this work proposes local, geometric conditions on robot positions that guarantee global network connectivity. When combined with distributed controllers for mobile robots, these conditions maximize sensing coverage while maintaining connectivity. The key idea is the introduction of a new construct - a Neighbor-Every-Theta (NET) graph - in which each node has at least one neighbor in every angular sector of size &thetas;. We prove that for &thetas; < &pi;, NET graphs are guaranteed to have an edge-connectivity of at least floor &sqbl0;2pq&sqbr0; , even with an irregular radio communication range. The NET conditions are integrated into an artificial potential field-based controller for distributed deployment. Second, for robots communicating over unreliable wireless links, a coalescence behavior is introduced, in which disconnected robots recover connectivity by searching for others. Our contribution is an asymptotic analysis of coalescence time which quantifies the trade-off between the cost of maintaining connectivity and that of repairing connectivity - the first such guideline for designing controllers for robot networks. Finally, having shown how to construct and maintain robot networks with maximal coverage, we address a problem motivated by the performance of cheap, low-resolution cameras in complex outdoor environments. This variation of the sensor coverage problem is the first to address the case where the sensing performance of each robot carrying a camera depends on the local environmental conditions. We present a distributed reconfiguration algorithm for this case, and validate it using a network of real Cyclops cameras placed in environments with varying illumination and backgrounds.
Design and analysis of the film assembly of thermo-optic infrared focal plane arrays
Authors: Xu Yan, Fei Feng, Sheng Li, Yuelin Wang
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2009)

In order to improve the detection sensitivity of thermo-optic infrared focal plane arrays (TOFPA), we analyzed the optical characteristics of TOFPA and the influence of pairs of high/low index films (H/L, amorphous silicon and silicon nitride) with their extinction coefficients measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry. The results show that increasing the pairs initially increases and subsequently decreases the thermo-optic sensitivity of TOFPA because of the optical absorption of readout light, and slightly enhances the infrared absorption of the target source (8&#x2013;14&#x00a0;&#x03bc;m). Finally, the TOFPA with thermo-optic sensitivity 6.23% K&#x2212;1 and average infrared absorption 65.2%, employing an optimizing film assembly air| &#x2329;HL&#x232a;2 30.1H &#x2329;LH &#x232a;216L|substrate, is fabricated by micro electro-mechanical system technologies.
Spectral gradient projection method for monotone nonlinear equations with convex constraints
Authors: Zhensheng Yu, Ji Lin, Jing Sun, Yunhai Xiao, Liying Liu, Zhanhui Li
Venue: Applied Numerical Mathematics (2009)

A spectral gradient projection algorithm for monotone nonlinear equations with convex constraints is proposed. This new procedure is obtained by combining a modified spectral gradient method and a projection method. A relevant property of the presented method is that the computation of the iteration sequence does not require the solution of any subproblem. The algorithm is shown to be globally convergent under mild assumptions and it can be also applied to nonsmooth equations. Preliminary numerical tests show that the proposed method works quite well even for large scale problems.
The Non-Designer's Design and Type Books, Deluxe Edition, 1st edition
Authors: Robin Williams
Venue:  (2007)

Design and typographic insights from the author of The Non-Designers book series (over 700,000 copies in print!) This book offers decades of experience from one of the greatest computer book authors. Here in one volume, Robin Williams has joined together a new edition of her classic The Non-Designers Design Bookin glorious full color for the first timeand her best-selling The Non-Designers Type Book. Robin uses her straightforward and lighthearted style to define the principles that govern good design and type as well as the logic behind those principles. Using numerous examples, youll learn what looks best and why on your way to designing beautiful and effective projects. Whether you are a Mac user or a Windows user, a type novice or an experienced graphic designer, you will find inspiration and direction for the design quandaries and conundrums you are sure to encounter! These essential guides to design and type will teach you about: The four principles of design that underlie every design project Categories of type Working with color How to combine typefaces for maximum effect Readability and legibility The proper typographic treatment of punctuation Letter spacing, line spacing, and paragraph spacing Special characters and accent marks 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 Relative Timed Semantics for BPMN
Authors: Peter Y. H. Wong, Jeremy Gibbons
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2009)

We describe a relative-timed semantic model for Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). We define the semantics in the language of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). This model augments our untimed model by introducing the notion of relative time in the form of delays chosen non-deterministically from a range. We illustrate the application by an example. We also show some properties relating the timed semantics and BPMN's untimed process semantics by exploiting CSP refinement. Our timed semantics allows behavioural properties of BPMN diagrams to be mechanically verified via automatic model-checking as provided by the FDR tool.
A task-specific approach to computational imaging system design
Authors: Mark A. Neifeld
Venue:  (2008)

The traditional approach to imaging system design places the sole burden of image formation on optical components. In contrast, a computational imaging system relies on a combination of optics and post-processing to produce the final image and/or output measurement. Therefore, the joint-optimization (JO) of the optical and the post-processing degrees of freedom plays a critical role in the design of computational imaging systems. The JO framework also allows us to incorporate task-specific performance measures to optimize an imaging system for a specific task. In this dissertation, we consider the design of computational imaging systems within a JO framework for two separate tasks: object reconstruction and iris-recognition. The goal of these design studies is to optimize the imaging system to overcome the performance degradations introduced by under-sampled image measurements. Within the JO framework, we engineer the optical point spread function (PSF) of the imager, representing the optical degrees of freedom, in conjunction with the post-processing algorithm parameters to maximize the task performance. For the object reconstruction task, the optimized imaging system achieves a 50% improvement in resolution and nearly 20% lower reconstruction root-mean-square-error (RMSE) as compared to the un-optimized imaging system. For the iris-recognition task, the optimized imaging system achieves a 33% improvement in false rejection ratio (FRR) for a fixed alarm ratio (FAR) relative to the conventional imaging system. The effect of the performance measures like resolution, RMSE, FRR, and FAR on the optimal design highlights the crucial role of task-specific design metrics in the JO framework. We introduce a fundamental measure of task-specific performance known as task-specific information (TSI), an information-theoretic measure that quantifies the information content of an image measurement relevant to a specific task. A variety of source-models are derived to illustrate the application of a TSI-based analysis to conventional and compressive imaging (CI) systems for various tasks such as target detection and classification. A TSI-based design and optimization framework is also developed and applied to the design of CI systems for the task of target detection, it yields a six-fold performance improvement over the conventional imaging system at low signal-to-noise ratios.
The role of graphical and text based argumentation tools in hypermedia learning
Authors: Joerg Zumbach
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2009)

In this study, the effects of visualization tools on argumentation skills, knowledge acquisition, and motivation during learning with a hypermedia learning environment were examined. Participants in this experiment had to complete an argumentation task on environmental issues by using a hypermedia learning environment as resource. In one condition, participants were provided with a graphical mind mapping tool in order to complete an argumentation task. In a second condition, a two-columned text editor has been given. A control group received no argumentation task and no corresponding support device. Results suggest that a graphical argumentation support device can enhance learners' motivation, but has no influence on knowledge acquisition or quality of arguments, whereas both argumentation support devices led to superior results compared to the control group. Overall, results reveal that the assignment of an argumentation task to hypermedia learning environments was an effective instructional strategy that led to enhanced knowledge acquisition compared to learning without an argumentation task.
Neural Network-Based IMC-PID Controller Design for Main Steam Temperature of a Power Plant
Authors: Mehdi Abbaszadeh Naseri, Alireza Yazdizadeh
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks - Part II (2009)

The main steam temperature in a power plant is a typical process with nonlinear, dead time, time-varying parameters. Different methods have been employed to control this process, among which one may refer to conventional Internal Mode Control (IMC). In this paper a new neural network-based adaptive IMC-PID controller is proposed. Two neural networks (NN) are employed to identify the plant's model and to tune the parameters of the IMC-PID controller. The parameters of IMC-PID controller are calculated by a neural network, while another neural network is used to identify the plant. The weights of both neural networks are adjusted on-line and this will compensate the characteristics variation and uncertain non-linearity of the process. To show the performance of the proposed method, it is applied to a steam power plant. The simulations results show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Simulating the Influences of Aging and Ocular Disease on Biometric Recognition Performance
Authors: Halvor Borgen, Patrick Bours, Stephen D. Wolthusen
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Biometrics (2009)

Many applications of ocular biometrics require long-term stability, yet only limited data on the effects of disease and aging on the error rates of ocular biometrics is currently available. Based on pathologies simulated using image manipulation validated by opthalmology and optometry specialists, the present paper reports on the effects that selected common ocular diseases and age-related pathologies have on the recognition performance of two widely used iris and retina recognition algorithms, finding the algorithms to be robust against many even highly visible pathologies, permitting acceptable re-enrolment intervals for most disease progressions.
Using Chaotic Neural Network to Forecast Stock Index
Authors: Bo Ning, Jiutao Wu, Hui Peng, Jianye Zhao
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks on Advances in Neural Networks (2009)

In this paper, a new scheme based on chaotic neural network for stock index prediction is proposed. The data from a Chinese stock market, Shenzhen stock market, are applied as a case study. The chaotic neural network is used to learn the non-linear stochastic and chaotic patterns in the stock system and forecast a new index with former indexes. The validity of the scheme is analyzed theoretically, and the simulation results show that it has a good performance.