ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Modeling and simulation of call centers
Authors: Athanassios N. Avramidis, Pierre L'Ecuyer
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

In this review, we introduce key notions and describe the decision problems commonly encountered in call center management. Main themes are the central role of uncertainty throughout the decision hierarchy and the many operational complexities and relationships between decisions. We make connections to analytical models in the literature, emphasizing insights gained and model limitations. The high operational complexity and the prevalent uncertainty suggest that simulation modeling and simulation-based decision-making could have a central role in the management of call centers. We formulate some common decision problems and point to recently developed simulation-based solution techniques. We review recent work that supports modeling the primitive inputs to a call center and highlight call center modeling difficulties.
Integrating multiple information representations in a single CAD/CAM/CAE environment
Authors: Bernhard Bettig, Vikram Bapat
Venue: Engineering with Computers (2006)

The number of Computer-Aided Design, Computer-Aided Manufacturing, and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) programs and their capabilities has risen greatly in recent times. The programming efforts continue to be significant as each application developer strives to integrate more functionality. This paper describes a study on module integration in CAD/CAM/CAE software that considers how software can be structured to enable and ease the integration. This paper deals specifically with the issue of which object-oriented data structure is best for integration to minimize code execution times, memory usage, and programming effort. That is, we are interested in identifying the ideal base class for information objects. The study compares scene-graph and Information Model representations, compares two object referencing approaches (by path and direct object references), four modes of information interpretation, and three integration schemes. The study concludes that the ideal system combines scene-graph and Information Model approaches into one new flexible approach in which the information object base class contains a generically traversable array holding schema and user attributes. In general, objects should be referenced by a path from the hierarchy root object. Object information should be interpreted into an application context by a third object or interface. New information objects from a secondary representation should be embedded into the information hierarchy of the primary representation when they do not need to reference other objects, otherwise multiple inheritance or Component Object Modeling should be used to combine the corresponding objects from multiple representations into a single new object.
Kernel Methods for Measuring Independence
Authors: Arthur Gretton, Ralf Herbrich, Alexander Smola, Olivier Bousquet, Bernhard Schölkopf
Venue: The Journal of Machine Learning Research (2005)

We introduce two new functionals, the constrained covariance and the kernel mutual information, to measure the degree of independence of random variables. These quantities are both based on the covariance between functions of the random variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). We prove that when the RKHSs are universal, both functionals are zero if and only if the random variables are pairwise independent. We also show that the kernel mutual information is an upper bound near independence on the Parzen window estimate of the mutual information. Analogous results apply for two correlation-based dependence functionals introduced earlier: we show the kernel canonical correlation and the kernel generalised variance to be independence measures for universal kernels, and prove the latter to be an upper bound on the mutual information near independence. The performance of the kernel dependence functionals in measuring independence is verified in the context of independent component analysis.
Developing a low-cost parallel processor system for real time microcomputer applications
Authors: Gary Croucher, Michael Wind, Al Childers
Venue: ACM SIGSMALL Newsletter (1981)

The authors detail their development, using available hardware and software technology, of a parallel processing environment for Furman University. Developmental stages included the design, construction, and testing of a 2708/2716/2758 EPROM programmer/reader, the design of general-purpose, microprocessor-driven "slave" computers (interfaceable in a variety of networks with a "master" computer, the departmental Apple II), the design of flexible operating systems within the slave computers, and the construction of slave computers for use in a variety of applications.
Decomposition of Lagrangian systems on the base of the technical controllability concept
Authors: V. Yu. Rutkovsky, S. D. Zemlyakov
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Physics and Control - Volume 4 (2003)

Consideration is given to control of the plant obeying Lagrange equations under bounded control actions. The notion of autonomous technical controllability of the plant is established and used to prove that the mathematical model of plant motion can be decomposed into individual subsystems.
Children Processing Music: Electric Brain Responses Reveal Musical Competence and Gender Differences
Authors: Stefan Koelsch, Tobias Grossmann, Thomas C. Gunter, Anja Hahne, Erich Schröger, Angela D. Friederici
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2003)

Numerous studies investigated physiological correlates of the processing of musical information in adults. How these correlates develop during childhood is poorly understood. In the present study, we measured event-related electric brain potentials elicited in 5- and 9-year-old children while they listened to (major-minor tonal) music. Stimuli were chord sequences, infrequently containing harmonically inappropriate chords. Our results demonstrate that the degree of (in)appropriateness of the chords modified the brain responses in both groups according to music-theoretical principles. This suggests that already 5-year-old children process music according to a well-established cognitive representation of the major-minor tonal system and according to music-syntactic regularities. Moreover, we show that, in contrast to adults, an early negative brain response was left predominant in boys, whereas it was bilateral in girls, indicating a gender difference in children processing music, and revealing that children process music with a hemispheric weighting different from that of adults. Because children process, in contrast to adults, music in the same hemispheres as they process language, results indicate that children process music and language more similarly than adults. This finding might support the notion of a common origin of music and language in the human brain, and concurs with findings that demonstrate the importance of musical features of speech for the acquisition of language.
Some large deviations results for Latin hypercube sampling
Authors: Shane S. Drew, Tito Homem-de-Mello
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

Large deviations theory is a well-studied area which has shown to have numerous applications. The typical results, however, assume that the underlying random variables are either i.i.d. or exhibit some form of Markovian dependence. Our interest in this paper is to study the validity of large deviations results in the context of estimators built with Latin Hypercube sampling, a well-known sampling technique for variance reduction. We show that a large deviation principle holds for Latin Hypercube sampling for functions in one dimension and for separable multi-dimensional functions. Moreover, the upper bound of the probability of a large deviation in these cases is no higher under Latin Hypercube sampling than it is under Monte Carlo sampling. We extend the latter property to functions that preserve negative dependence (such as functions that are monotone in each argument). Numerical experiments illustrate the theoretical results presented in the paper.
Image classification with bags of local features
Authors: Erik G. Learned-Miller
Venue:  (2006)

Many classification techniques expect class instances to be represented as feature vectors, i.e. points in a feature space. In computer vision classification problems, it is often possible to generate an informative feature vector representation of an image, for example using global texture or shape descriptors. However, in other cases, it may be beneficial to treat images as variable size unordered sets or bags of features, in which each feature represents a localized salient image structure or patch. These local features do not require a segmentation, and can be useful for object recognition in the presence of occlusion and clutter. The local features are often used to find point correspondences between images to be later used for 3D reconstruction, object recognition, detection, or image retrieval. However, there are many cases when exact correspondences are difficult or even impossible to compute. Furthermore, point correspondences may not be necessary, unless one is interested in recovering the 3D shape of an object. If the correspondences are not computed, then this representation indeed constitutes an unordered set of local features. In this dissertation we present methods for object class recognition using bags of features without relying on point correspondences. We also show that using bags of features and more traditional feature vector representation of images together can improve classification accuracy. We then propose and evaluate several methods of combining the two representations. The proposed techniques are applied to a challenging marine science domain.
Performance Evaluation of Transcoding Algorithms for MPEG-2 to AVS-P2
Authors: Zhenyu Wu, Hongyang Yu, Bin Tang, Hong Hu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

The latest Chinese video coding standard AVS-P2 has been recently approved and is going to be adopted for numerous applications including HD-DVD and satellite broadcast. To allow interconnectivity between different video coding standards, transcoding will be a key factor. This paper assesses the performance of existing requantization techniques developed when applied to transcoding from MPEG-2 to AVS-P2 together with a new technique. The proposed transcoding algorithm is based on an improved mixed re-quantization technique, which gives a good compromise between complexity and quality.
Recommendation method for extending subscription periods
Authors: Tomoharu Iwata, Kazumi Saito, Takeshi Yamada
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2006)

Online stores providing subscription services need to extend user subscription periods as long as possible to increase their profits. Conventional recommendation methods recommend items that best coincide with user's interests to maximize the purchase probability, which does not necessarily contribute to extend subscription periods. We present a novel recommendation method for subscription services that maximizes the probability of the subscription period being extended. Our method finds frequent purchase patterns in the long subscription period users, and recommends items for a new user to simulate the found patterns. Using survival analysis techniques, we efficiently extract information from the log data for finding the patterns. Furthermore, we infer user's interests from purchase histories based on maximum entropy models, and use the interests to improve the recommendations. Since a longer subscription period is the result of greater user satisfaction, our method benefits users as well as online stores. We evaluate our method using the real log data of an online cartoon distribution service for cell-phone in Japan.
Computational Cost Analysis of Elliptic Curve Arithmetic
Authors: Serap Atay, Ahmet Koltuksuz, Huseyin Hybyl, Saban Eren
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology - Volume 01 (2006)

Elliptic curves are proposed for the asymmetrical cryptography by Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller in 1986 separately. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is utilized by hardware embedded solutions on mobile equipments and smart cards after 2000. Currently, software implementation of ECC faces the computational speed problem. One of the proposed solutions is to do the arithmetic operations on different Euclidean coordinate systems. This paper concentrates on the research of this technique and delineates the performance results of the implementation of the aforementioned technique on the different cryptographic libraries such as CRYMPIX, GMP and MIRACL.
Auditory Cortex Accesses Phonological Categories: An MEG Mismatch Study
Authors: Colin Phillips, Thomas Pellathy, Alec Marantz, Elron Yellin, Kenneth Wexler, David Poeppel, Martha McGinnis, Timothy Roberts
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2000)

The studies presented here use an adapted oddball paradigm to show evidence that representations of discrete phonological categories are available to the human auditory cortex. Brain activity was recorded using a 37-channel biomagnetometer while eight subjects listened passively to synthetic speech sounds. In the phonological condition, which contrasted stimuli from an acoustic /d&aelig;/-/t&aelig;/ continuum, a magnetic mismatch field (MMF) was elicited in a sequence of stimuli in which phonological categories occurred in a many-to-one ratio, but no acoustic many-to-one ratio was present. In order to isolate the contribution of phonological categories to the MMF responses, the acoustic parameter of voice onset time, which distinguished standard and deviant stimuli, was also varied within the standard and deviant categories. No MMF was elicited in the acoustic condition, in which the acoustic distribution of stimuli was identical to the first experiment, but the many-to-one distribution of phonological categories was removed. The design of these studies makes it possible to demonstrate the all-or-nothing property of phonological category membership. This approach contrasts with a number of previous studies of phonetic perception using the mismatch paradigm, which have demonstrated the graded property of enhanced acoustic discrimination at or near phonetic category boundaries.
Data mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI accelerator
Authors: Thomas Legler, Wolfgang Lehner, Andrew Ross
Venue: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Very large data bases (2006)

The new SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence accelerator is an engine that supports online analytical processing. It performs aggregation in memory and in query runtime over large volumes of structured data. This paper first briefly describes the accelerator and its main architectural features, and cites test results that indicate its power. Then it describes in detail how the accelerator may be used for data mining. The accelerator can perform data mining in the same large repositories of data and using the same compact index structures that it uses for analytical processing. A first such implementation of data mining is described and the results of a performance evaluation are presented. Association rule mining in a distributed architecture was implemented with a variant of the BUC iceberg cubing algorithm. Test results suggest that useful online mining should be possible with wait times of less than 60 seconds on business data that has not been preprocessed.
A Web-Based Examination and Evaluation System for Computer Education
Authors: Liang Zhang, Yue-ting Zhuang, Zhen-ming Yuan, Guo-hua Zhan
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

A web-based operational skills examination and evaluation system is designed and implemented for computer courses. It consists of four systems, including preparation, examination, monitor and auto-grading subsystem. Various techniques involving DCOM, mark-method and fuzzy-match are adopted in this system, and a universal approach is generalized to enable auto-grading system suitable for different operated results. This system has been successfully applied in operational skills' evaluation and training, such as programming, editing documents, using Microsoft Windows.
Evaluation and Optimization of Joint Scheduling, Power Control, and Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
Authors: Reizel Casaquite, Won-Joo Hwang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology - Volume 02 (2006)

Cross-layer design is an extensive research area in ad hoc wireless networks, particularly under energy constraints. In this paper, we formulate an optimal link scheduling and power control that supports a particular data rate while satisfying the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) and the maximum transmission power constraints at each node. We also present an optimization problem considering the energy consumed of each node in the routing path and the delay associated on each transmission as link costs. The problem is to minimize the energy link cost and the end-to-end delay for all nodes lying in the routing path subject to certain constraints. We provide numerical examples for our schemes and relationships between the parameters. An overview of our intended routing algorithm for ad hoc networks is also given. This paper is a preliminary step towards our distributed joint scheduling, power control and routing algorithm for ad hoc networks using cross layer approach.
Semantic Grid Services in K-Wf Grid
Authors: Marian Babik, Emil Gatial, Ondrej Habala, Ladislav Hluchy, Michal Laclavik, Martin Maliska
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge, and Grid (2006)

In this paper we present design and development of the semantic grid services for the flood forecasting simulations. We will highlight the corresponding architecture and the process of service annotation, discovery and composition in the project K-WfGrid [12]. We will describe in detail the challenges of the flood-forecasting application and corresponding design and development of the service oriented model, which is based on the well known Web Service Resource Framework (WSRF). Semantic descriptions of the WSRF services will be presented as well as the architecture, which exploits semantics in discovery and composition of services. Further, we will demonstrate how experience management solutions can help in the process of discovery and composition. The system provides a unique approach in Semantic Grids by combining the advances of semantic web services and grid architectures.
Modal relationships as stylistic features: Examples from Seljuk and Celtic patterns: Special Topic Section on Computational Analysis of Style
Authors: Mine Özkar, Nyssim Lefford
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2006)

Styles in creative works cannot adequately be represented by categories based on formal features. Instead, styles could be studied in terms of modal relationships between the features to provide a basis for definitions of structure in generative models. Modal relationships are more flexible and robust under the dynamic conditions of the artist's creative process. This article illustrates through the examples of Seljuk and Celtic patterns how these modal relationships emerge, why they are essential to detailed descriptions of style, and how they might be identified. &copy; 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Energy-based swing-back control for continuous brachiation of a multilocomotion robot: Research Articles
Authors: Hideki Kajima, Yasuhisa Hasegawa, Masahiro Doi, Toshio Fukuda
Venue: International Journal of Intelligent Systems (2006)

We propose an energy-based control method for a multilocomotion robot to improve the stability of continuous brachiation. The target continuous brachiation is an effective locomotion from one bar to another exchanging a kinetic energy with potential energy like a pendulum. Our control strategy for the continuous brachiation is to control the swing-back action so that the robot pumps up the feasible energy to grasp a target bar, and then the locomotion action is designed based on the symmetric motion of a pendulum in order to conserve the total energy: summation of the kinetic and potential energy. The proposed controller is implemented on a new type of mobile multilocomotion robot named &ldquo;Gorilla Robot III&rdquo; whose dimensions are mimicking those of a gorilla. Continuous brachiation on various uniform ladders is experimentally achieved with this robot. The experimental results show the validity of our control algorithm. &copy; 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 21: 1025&ndash;1043, 2006.
To memory safety through proofs
Authors: Hongwei Xi
Venue:  (2006)

The need for memory manipulation through pointers is essential in many applications and especially in those that involve systems programming. However, it is also commonly understood that the use (or probably misuse) of pointers is often a rich source for program errors. Therefore, approaches that can effectively enforce safe use of pointers in programming are highly sought after. Traditional approaches to enforcing memory safety of programs rely heavily on runtime checks of memory accesses and on garbage collection, both of which may entail excessive run-time cost and thus are often not appropriate for systems programming and embedded applications. In this work, we are interested in a more fundamental approach to ensuring memory safety at compile time. It is not surprising that one of the greatest obstacles to statically ensuring memory safety has been the lack of a good way to model the highly dynamic nature of imperative data structures created with heavy use of pointers such as linked lists and trees. In this work, we show that the use of stateful views can enable us to model memory layout of these sophisticated data structures and thus capture many more invariants in pointer-rich programs while retaining practical type-checking. For instance, the interesting invariant can be readily captured in our language that each node in a doubly-linked binary tree points to its children that point back to the node itself. This is convincingly demonstrated in an implementation of splay trees. With its root in the recently developed framework Applied Type System ( ATS ), the type system imposes a level of abstraction on program states and then relies on a form of linear logic to reason about stateful views. To support practical type-checking, the programmer may need to construct proofs that attest to the validity of constraints generated during type-checking. Additionally, we address the issue of memory sharing by introducing locks, which can readily resolve the conflict between linearity and sharing. We consider the design and then the formalization of the type system to constitute the primary contribution of this dissertation. With various realistic examples based on a prototype implementation of the type system we argue that stateful views can significantly facilitate program verification in the presence of explicit use of pointers and pointer arithmetic.
Geometry of synthesis: a structured approach to VLSI design
Authors: Dan R. Ghica
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (2007)

We propose a new technique for hardware synthesis from higher-order functional languages with imperative features based on Reynolds's Syntactic Control of Interference. The restriction on contraction in the type system is useful for managing the thorny issue of sharing of physical circuits. We use a semantic model inspired by game semantics and the geometry of interaction, and express it directly as a certain class of digital circuits that form a cartesian, monoidal-closed category. A soundness result is given, which is also a correctness result for the compilation technique.