ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A Multi-Modal Approach to Story Segmentation for News Video
Authors: Lekha Chaisorn, Tat-Seng Chua, Chin-Hui Lee
Venue: World Wide Web (2003)

This research proposes a two-level, multi-modal framework to perform the segmentation and classification of news video into single-story semantic units. The video is analyzed at the shot and story unit (or scene) levels using a variety of features and techniques. At the shot level, we employ Decision Trees technique to classify the shots into one of 13 predefined categories or mid-level features. At the scene/story level, we perform the HMM (Hidden Markov Models) analysis to locate story boundaries. Our initial results indicate that we could achieve a high accuracy of over 95% for shot classification, and over 89% in F1 measure on scene/story boundary detection. Detailed analysis reveals that HMM is effective in identifying dominant features, which helps in locating story boundaries. Our eventual goal is to support the retrieval of news video at story unit level, together with associated texts retrieved from related news sites on the web.
Optimal and Near-Optimal Allocation of Precedence-Constrained Tasks to Parallel Processors: Defying the High Complexity Using Effective Search Techniques
Authors: Ishfaq Ahmad, Yu-Kwong Kwok
Venue: Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference on Parallel Processing (1998)

Automatic tool support for scheduling applications on multiprocessor platforms is of paramount importance both to guarantee critical application demands and to keep development costs down. In this paper, we present GAST, an object-oriented evaluation environment for multiprocessor assignment and scheduling techniques. GAST is based on a decomposition approach where existing assignment and scheduling techniques have been broken down into a set of common operations. By combining these operations into a complete scheduling process, GAST offers a powerful toolbox of existing assignment and scheduling techniques. GAST has been implemented on several popular operating systems and is accompanied by a graphic visualization tool that allows for flexible interaction with the application scheduling process.
Catastrophe Avoidance Models for Hazardous Materials Route Planning
Authors: Erhan Erkut, Armann Ingolfsson
Venue: Transportation Science (2000)

The most-widely used definition of risk in the hazardous materials transportation literature is the expected consequence of an incident (accident resulting in a release), which, for each edge of the network, is equal to the product of the incident probability and a quantifiable consequence (such as number of people evacuated). This definition ignores the risk-averse attitudes of many decision-makers when dealing with low probability/high consequence events. We suggest that avoiding a catastrophe (an incident with a very large consequence) may be a relevant issue in routing hazardous materials, and we introduce three different catastrophe-avoidance models. In the first model, catastrophe avoidance is achieved by minimizing the maximum population exposure. In the second model, the variance of the route consequence is incorporated into the decision. In the third model, an explicit disutility function is used. We show that all three models reduce to a standard shortest path problem. Each model avoids high-population areas of the transport network. We give numerical examples and discuss the similarities and the differences among the three models. The first of the three models suggested may be the most intuitive, and is the most tractable computationally. Implementation of the other two models may be difficult due to scaling issues. Nevertheless, these models offer theoretical insight that may be valuable to researchers.
Undergraduate participation in the development of the Alsos digital library for nuclear issues
Authors: Tom P. Whaley, Frank A. Settle, Elizabeth R. Blackmer
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2002)

Part of the National Science Digital Library, the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues is a web-based collection of annotated references to resources in five media that offer a broad, balanced perspective on nuclear issues. Undergraduate students have participated in important roles in the development of the content of the library and the computer system that supports access to and maintenance of the library. Working in a team, they create annotations, and work on the four tiers of the system: the user interface, the search engine, the database structure, and the metadata component.
Reputation in Marketing Channels: Repeated-Transactions Bargaining with Two-Sided Uncertainty
Authors: Darryl T. Banks, J. Wesley Hutchinson, Robert J. Meyer
Venue: Marketing Science (2002)

Marketing channel interactions typically feature three characteristics that have not been incorporated together in an analytic study: (1) the parties can do business repeatedly over time, often under different terms of trade (e.g., prices may vary), (2) the terms that the seller offers one buyer may be different from those she offers another, giving each interaction the flavor of bilateral monopoly bargaining, and (3) the buyer and seller come to the interaction uncertain about the valuations each holds for the good, but they do know each other'sreputation for valuation. The seller might, for example, come to the bargaining table aware that the buyer has a strong reputation for being willing to pay only low prices, and the buyer might come aware that the seller is strongly reputed for high cost and is, therefore, willing to offer only high prices.The latter characteristic raises an interesting question: When engaged in a marketing channel interaction, what type of reputation is best for a buyer or seller to take to the bargaining table? In this paper, we answer that question by incorporating each of the characteristics that typify channel interactions in a formal game-theoretic bargaining model. We determine how the reputations that buyers and sellers bring to the bargaining table affect their equilibrium strategies and payoffs.Our analysis shows that, in general, the best reputation for the seller to take to the bargaining table is one that makes the buyer nearly certain in his belief that the seller's cost is high, a result that matches intuition. The best reputation for the buyer, however, is counterintuitive. We show that an increase in the buyer's reputed willingness to pay can actually cause the seller to offer alower price. The best reputation for the buyer to take to the bargaining table is, therefore, one that makes the seller believe that there is a significant chance that he is willing to pay a high price. This result is new to the literature and brings with it immediate managerial implications that we discuss. Our analysis also shows that modeling the buyer as a forward-looking strategic player yields different results than does following the normal convention of modeling the buyer as a nonstrategic price-taker. We discuss why future research on channels and on reference-dependent utility theory should consider these differences.
The use of web structure and content to identify subjectively interesting web usage patterns
Authors: Robert Cooley
Venue: ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) (2003)

The discipline of Web Usage Mining has grown rapidly in the past few years, despite the crash of the e-commerce boom of the late 1990s. Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to Web clickstream data in order to extract usage patterns. Yet, with all of the resources put into the problem, claims of success have been limited and are often tied to specific Web site properties that are not found in general. One reason for the limited success has been a component of Web Usage Mining that is often overlooked---the need to understand the content and structure of a Web site. The processing and quantification of a Web sites content and structure for all but completely static and single frame Web sites is arguably one of the most difficult tasks to automate in the Web Usage Mining process. This article shows that, not only is the Web Usage Mining process enhanced by content and structure, it cannot be completed without it. The results of experiments run on data from a large e-commerce site are presented to show that proper preprocessing cannot be completed without the use of Web site content and structure, and that the effectiveness of pattern analysis is greatly enhanced.
Factoring multivariate polynomials via partial differential equations
Authors: Shuhong Gao
Venue: Mathematics of Computation (2003)

A new method is presented for factorization of bivariate polynomials over any field of characteristic zero or of relatively large characteristic. It is based on a simple partial differential equation that gives a system of linear equations. As in Berlekamp's and Niederreiter's algorithms for factoring univariate polynomials, the dimension of the solution space of the linear system is equal to the number of absolutely irreducible factors of the polynomial to be factored, and any basis for the solution space gives a complete factorization by computing gcd's and by factoring univariate polynomials over the ground field. The new method finds absolute and rational factorizations simultaneously and is easy to implement for finite fields, local fields, number fields, and the complex number field. The theory of the new method allows an effective Hilbert irreducibility theorem, thus an efficient reduction of polynomials from multivariate to bivariate.
Quality Control for Products Supplied with Warranty
Authors: Jinfa Chen, David D. Yao, Shaohui Zheng
Venue: Operations Research (1998)

A batch of products is to be supplied to customers with warranty. The units in the batch are either defective or nondefective, with different lifetime distributions. The defect rate-the proportion of defects in the batch-is itself a random variable, known only in terms of its distribution. We develop a sequential quality control procedure that exploits the knowledge of the defect distribution gained through inspection, and strikes an optimal balance between the inspection repair cost and the warranty cost. We identify a simple threshold policy, and we prove its optimality for a very general class of warranty cost functions without imposing any restrictions on the type of distributions involved. The key to optimality is that the warranty cost, as a function of the number of inspected units and the conditional defect index, satisfies a so-called K-submodularity property, which is a strengthening of the usual notion of submodularity.
The particle swarm optimization algorithm: convergence analysis and parameter selection
Authors: Ioan Cristian Trelea
Venue: Information Processing Letters (2003)

The particle swarm optimization algorithm is analyzed using standard results from the dynamic system theory. Graphical parameter selection guidelines are derived. The exploration-exploitation tradeoff is discussed and illustrated. Examples of performance on benchmark functions superior to previously published results are given.
Integrating and customizing heterogeneous e-commerce applications
Authors: Anat Eyal, Tova Milo
Venue: The VLDB Journal &mdash; The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (2001)

A broad spectrum of electronic commerce applications is currently available on the Web, providing services in almost any area one can think of. As the number and variety of such applications grow, more business opportunities emerge for providing new services based on the integration and customization of existing applications. (Web shopping malls and support for comparative shopping are just a couple of examples.) Unfortunately, the diversity of applications in each specific domain and the disparity of interfaces, application flows, actor roles in the business transaction, and data formats, renders the integration and manipulation of applications a rather difficult task. In this paper we present the Application Manifold system, aimed at simplifying the intricate task of integration and customization of e-commerce applications. The scope of the work in this paper is limited to web-enabled e-commerce applications. We do not support the integration/customization of proprietary/legacy applications. The wrapping of such applications as web services is complementary to our work. Based on the emerging Web data standard, XML, and application modeling standard, UML, the system offers a novel declarative specification language for describing the integration/customization task, supporting a modular approach where new applications can be added and integrated at will with minimal effort. Then, acting as an application generator, the system generates a full integrated/customized e-commerce application, with the declarativity of the specification allowing for the optimization and verification of the generated application. The integration here deals with the full profile of the given e-commerce applications: the various services offered by the applications, the activities and roles of the different actors participating in the application (e.g., customers, vendors), the application flow, as well as with the data involved in the process. This is in contrast to previous works on Web data integration that focused primarily on querying the data available in the applications, mostly ignoring the additional aspects mentioned above.
Architectural design of array processors for multi-dimensional discrete Fourier transform
Authors: S. Sedukhin, S. Peng
Venue: Highly parallel computaions: algorithms and applications (2001)

In this chapter, the design of systolic array processors (SAPs) for computing multi-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (r-D DFT) is considered. We introduce two approaches of design: one uses the data For the first approach, we investigated three different computational schemes for designing SAPs for 2-D DFT. The systematic method guarantees to find optimal SAPs from a large solution space in terms of the number of processing elements and I/O channels, the processing time, topology, pipeline period, etc. This approach is difficult to extend to the 3-D case since the 6-D data dependency graph for the 3-D DFT cannot be reduced easily. Therefore, for the 3-D DFT we propose another approach: the dimensional splitting method. Using this method, computing of the r-D DFT with r ≥ 2 is done iteratively with each iteration handling the 1-D DFTs of different dimensions. Finally, an application of the proposed SAPs to the prime-factor DFT is presented.
Clothes Make the Person? The Tailoring of Legitimating Accounts and the Social Construction of Identity
Authors: W. E. Douglas Creed, Maureen A. Scully, John R. Austin
Venue: Organization Science (2002)

We empirically explore the legitimating accounts for and against policies precluding workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, focusing on how agents working at both the national level and within organizations use broader cultural accounts in building their legitimating accounts in local settings. The diffusion perspective in institutional theory has portrayed how agents import 'ready-to-wear' cultural accounts. In contrast, translation theory depicts how agents interpret and adapt cultural accounts as they fashion them into legitimating accounts for a local setting. An alternative would theorize accounts that are neither strictly borrowed nor idiosyncratically tailored. We advanced a third perspective, drawing on frame analysis as it is used in social movement theory. Framing theory attends to both the importance of cultural building blocks and the embedded ways in which agents relate to and shape systems of meaning and mobilize collective action to change social arrangements. We find that legitimating accounts are intertwined with the construction of social identities, which serve to legitimate, on the one hand, an account maker's participation in the discourse and set of claims, and on the other hand, the involvement of proponents and crucial audiences. We suggest that the mobilizing potential of legitimating accounts rests in part on their messages becoming 'autocommunicational,' so that listeners identify themselves with the message.
The construction of consistent possibility and necessity measures
Authors: K. David Jamison, Weldon A. Lodwick
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2002)

Given a general measure µ (finite or infinite), we develop possibility and necessity measures as upper and lower estimators of µ. We provide a method for constructing such fuzzy measures and show that the measure can be approximated with arbitrary closeness using fuzzy measures constructed this way. Using the extension principle, these consistent possibility and necessity measures are used to produce possibility and necessity measures on the range space of a measurable function which are consistent with the measure on the range space induced by the measurable function. This induced measure can be approximated with arbitrary closeness by extending consistent possibility and necessity measures constructed on the domain space.
On the zeros and turning points of special functions
Authors: Javier Segura
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2003)

Globally convergent fixed point iterations, together with bounds on differences of zeros from Sturm methods, are used to build efficient algorithms for the computation of the zeros of special functions satisfying first-order linear difference-differential equations. Bounds on the spacing between the zeros are obtained as a by-product. Turning points can also be computed in a similar way; new analytical information is also obtained in this case which, for instance, can be used to prove a conjecture by Elbert on the turning points of Bessel functions.
An innovative design approach to build virtual environment systems
Authors: M. Oliveira, J. Crowcroft, M. Slater
Venue: Proceedings of the workshop on Virtual environments 2003 (2003)

A Virtual Environment (VE) presents a complex problem with interesting non-trivial challenges for software development. The majority of existing systems supporting VE are based on monolithic architectures, making maintenance and software reuse difficult at best. When a novel concept or idea requires implementation, it is not possible to extend an existing system by replacing or incrementing the necessary functionality. This leads to a proliferation of VE systems.This paper identifies some of the major problems in the current development trend of VE systems that result in incremental innovation with little overall progress. However, component methodology and other software engineering principles are not widely employed in system design. We present the Java Adaptive Dynamic Environment (JADE) as an innovative design approach to building VE systems.The paper discusses some of the major elements of the JADE component framework, such as the kernel, the namespace, the event model and how to configuration takes place. In addition, a simple maze dungeon game is discussed demonstrating the runtime reconfiguration of the supporting VE system.
Compactons in discrete nonlinear Klein-Gordon models
Authors: P. G. Kevrekidis, V. V. Konotop
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2003)

In this short communication we study compactons in the setting of discrete nonlinear Klein-Gordon (DNKG) chains. The temporal and spatial dependences of the solutions are separated resulting in an array of coupled nonlinear algebraic equations for the spatial dependence and an ordinary differential equation for the temporal dependence. The corresponding equations are studied and their potential for supporting exact discrete solutions with compact support is identified. Finally, a particular set of KG nonlinearities of relevance to applications is studied, its discrete compacton solutions are obtained and their stability properties are examined.
Enterprise models, strategic transformations and possible solutions
Authors: Kemal A. Delic
Venue: Ubiquity (2002)

A simple three-layer model may foster better understanding of enterprise architecture.
Trash-Flow Allocation: Planning Under Uncertainty
Authors: G. H. Huang, B. W. Baetz, G. G. Patry
Venue: Interfaces (1998)

The materials in trash, or municipal solid waste (MSW), may be recycled, composted, incinerated, or landfilled. Transporting these materials to waste-management facilities consumes part of the operating budget of a municipality. Many factors, the majority uncertain, may influence the planning of waste-flow allocation. MSW managers want to know (1) whether the existing pattern is close to the optimal, and (2) if not, what is the optimal? We used a gray linear-programming (GLP) model to address these questions for the regional municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth, Ontario. This approach can effectively reflect the interactive relationships between uncertain system components. It can also bring uncertain information into the optimization process and resulting solutions, permitting feasible decision alternatives to be generated. The region's waste managers have used the results to verify or adjust the existing waste-flow allocation pattern. They may also be used to formulate related local policies.
Control of Chaos: Methods and Applications. I. Methods
Authors: B. R. Andrievskii, A. L. Fradkov
Venue: Automation and Remote Control (2003)

The problems and methods of control of chaos, which in the last decade was the subject of intensive studies, were reviewed. The three historically earliest and most actively developing directions of research such as the open-loop control based on periodic system excitation, the method of Poincare map linearization (OGY method), and the method of time-delayed feedback (Pyragas method) were discussed in detail. The basic results obtained within the framework of the traditional linear, nonlinear, and adaptive control, as well as the neural network systems and fuzzy systems were presented. The open problems concerned mostly with support of the methods were formulated. The second part of the review will be devoted to the most interesting applications.
The virtual web-based supply chain
Authors: Ashok Chandrashekar, Philip Schary
Venue: Managing virtual web organizations in the 21st century: issues and challenges (2002)

The virtual Web-based supply chain is emerging as a new form of industrial organization. This paper discusses the concept as a juncture of three forces: the virtual organization, Web-based communication and the application service provider (ASP). The virtual organization is a familiar concept in many industries, even without electronic connections. Web-based communication provides access and networks with new institutions. The ASP makes rapid change and flexible connections feasible. Together they establish focus, flexibility and rapid response to change in demand and customer requirements. Casting it in a strategic framework of structure, process and organization provides a basis for projecting its future.