ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Computational aspects of dynamic surfaces
Authors: Ronald Fedkiw
Venue:  (2003)

This thesis is concerned with various computational aspects of surface dynamics. By this I mean algorithms and data structures to support simulations of the physics taking place on or about two-dimensional manifolds. This includes internal dynamics (e.g. elastic forces) and external dynamics (e.g. collisions). The core of the thesis is simulating cloth motion, including the internal elastic dynamics, the external dynamics of contact and collision, and post-processing of the data for rendering. The contact and collision algorithm, based on the notion of a collision resolution pipeline where candidate trajectories are passed through several stages designed to resolve different classes of collisions, was subsequently adapted to rigid body simulation. Surface dynamics are also potentially the most important part of simulations of deformable objects, driving the deformation of the interior. Chapter 5 presents a tetrahedral mesh generation algorithm designed to support large surface deformations. Adaptivity is also discussed. Throughout the thesis implicit surfaces defined by level sets are used to represent geometry. Level sets are used in many other areas, especially computational fluid dynamics for simulations of the surface between distinct regions of flow (e.g. material boundaries). Their chief drawback is storage expense. Chapter 6 presents a data structure for efficiently storing level sets without needing to change algorithms designed for regular grids. An example application, an interactive sculpting tool, is presented to illustrate the structure.
From grammar to lexicon: unsupervised learning of lexical syntax
Authors: Michael R. Brent
Venue: Computational Linguistics (1993)

Imagine a language that is completely unfamiliar; the only means of studying it are an ordinary grammar book and a very large corpus of text. No dictionary is available. How can easily recognized, surface grammatical facts be used to extract from a corpus as much syntactic information as possible about individual words? This paper describes an approach based on two principles. First, rely on local morpho-syntactic cues to structure rather than trying to parse entire sentences. Second, treat these cues as probabilistic rather than absolute indicators of syntactic structure. Apply inferential statistics to the data collected using the cues, rather than drawing a categorical conclusion from a single occurrence of a cue. The effectiveness of this approach for inferring the syntactic frames of verbs is supported by experiments on an English corpus using a program called Lerner. Lerner starts out with no knowledge of content words---it bootstraps from determiners, auxiliaries, modals, prepositions, pronouns, complementizers, coordinating conjunctions, and punctuation.
Uncoercible e-Bidding Games
Authors: M. Burmester, E. Magkos, V. Chrissikopoulos
Venue: Electronic Commerce Research (2004)

The notion of uncoercibility was first introduced in e-voting systems to deal with the coercion of voters. However this notion extends to many other e-systems for which the privacy of users must be protected, even if the users wish to undermine their own privacy. In this paper we consider uncoercible e-bidding games. We discuss necessary requirements for uncoercibility, and present a general uncoercible e-bidding game that distributes the bidding procedure between the bidder and a tamper-resistant token in a verifiable way. We then show how this general game can be used to design provably uncoercible e-auctions and e-elections. Finally, we discuss the practical consequences of uncoercibility in other areas of e-commerce.
The Gender Factor Performing Visualization Tasks on Computer Media
Authors: Geoffrey S. Hubona, Gregory W. Shirah
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 4 - Volume 4 (2004)

There has been a recent trend to develop new, complex, and often predominantly visual, user interfaces as media front ends' to computer applications. This trend assumes that varied user groups have equivalent propensities to perceive, interpret, and understand the multi-dimensional spatial properties and relationships of objects visually presented through the on-screen medium. However, it is well known that there exist gender differences in certain spatial abilities, suggesting that there may be gender biases to effectively utilize certain visual cues presented through computer-mediated interfaces. We test this notion with three experiments (object matching, positioning, and resizing) using 2D and 3D computer screen media. Whereas female subjects under-perform male subjects in the object matching and positioning tasks, they outperform male subjects in the resizing task. Implications for thedesign of gender-effective user interface media are discussed.
Designing Mobile Information Services: User Requirements Elicitation with GSS Design and Application of a Repeatable Process
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 1 - Volume 1 (2004)

The main challenge in the first phase of designing mobile services is eliciting user requirements. We propose a repeatable process for eliciting user requirements based on the literature on requirements engineering and group support systems. We applied the repeatable process in three sessions to elicit user requirements for a mobile information service on a UMTS testbed. The sessions resulted in ideas for services that are highly valued by potential users and criteria for when they will or will not use the service.
Distributed Shared Arrays: Portable Shared-Memory Programming Interface for Multiple Computer Systems
Authors: Akira Nomoto, Yasuo Watanabe, Wataru Kaneko, Shugo Nakamura, Kentaro Shimizu
Venue: Cluster Computing (2004)

This paper describes the design and implementation of a parallel programming environment called &ldquo;Distributed Shared Array&rdquo; (DSA), which provides a shared global array abstract across different machines connected by a network. In DSA, users can define and use global arrays that can be accessed uniformly from any machines in the network. Explicit management of array area allocation, replication, and migration is achieved by explicit calls for array manipulation: defining array regions, reading and writing array regions, synchronization, and control of replication and migration. The DSA is integrated with Grid (Globus) services. This paper also describes the use of our model for gene cluster analysis, multiple alignment and molecular dynamics simulation. In these applications, global arrays are used for storing the distance matrix, alignment matrix and atom coordinates, respectively. Large array areas, which cannot be stored in the memory of individual machines, are made available by the DSA. Scalable performance of DSA was obtained compared to that of conventional parallel programs written in MPI.
A note on the minimization of symmetric and general submodular functions
Authors: H. Narayanan
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2003)

In this paper we relate the minimization problems for general submodular functions and symmetric submodular functions. We characterize the contractions and restrictions of symmetric submodular functions. The latter we show to be the same as posimodular functions. Finally, we prove the equivalence of various symmetric submodular function minimization problems and the general submodular function minimization problem. We also give a preprocessing algorithm for the general submodular function minimization problem which could lead to substantial size reduction.
A Graph-Based Approach for Timing Analysis and Refinement of OPS5 Knowledge-Based Systems
Authors: Albert Mo Kim Cheng, Hsiu-yen Tsai
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2004)

Abstract--This paper examines the problem of predicting the timing behavior of knowledge-based systems for real-time applications. In particular, we describe a suite of tools which analyze OPS5 programs to understand their timing properties. First, a graphical representation of an OPS5 program is defined and evaluated. This graph represents the logical control flows of an OPS5 program. Most of our analysis is based on this data structure. Second, we describe a novel tool which verifies that an OPS5 program can terminate in finite time. If the termination of the OPS5 program is not expected, the ¿culprit¿ conditions are detected. These conditions are then used to correct the problem by adding extra rules to the original program. Third, another tool is introduced to aid timing analysis of OPS5 programs. This tool generates a set of test data which maximize the program execution time. Other functions are also provided to facilitate the timing analysis.
PHIFACT a design space exploration program
Authors: F. Crowet, M. Davio, C. Dierieck, J. Durieu, G. Louis, C. Ykman-Couvreur
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on European design automation (1991)

PHIFACT is a program to synthesize combinational blocks for performance. This is mainly achieved by design space exploration at logic level. The basic multi-level architecture of the block is gradually constructed during a Boolean phase, where look ahead tools guarantee optimality. During a subsequent local restructuring phase, optimal circuits scattered in subregions of the design space are explored and selected. This is mainly based on a steepest descent method in various directions. Consequently either the complete design space, or selected subregions can be examined. Both progresses are intimately connected, placing PHIFACT in the forefront of logic synthesis tools for performance.
Unsupervised Learning of an Atlas from Unlabeled Point-Sets
Authors: Haili Chui, Anand Rangarajan, Jie Zhang, Christiana Morison Leonard
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2004)

Abstract--One of the key challenges in deformable shape modeling is the problem of estimating a meaningful average or mean shape from a set of unlabeled shapes. We present a new joint clustering and matching algorithm that is capable of computing such a mean shape from multiple shape samples which are represented by unlabeled point-sets. An iterative bootstrap process is used wherein multiple shape sample point-sets are nonrigidly deformed to the emerging mean shape, with subsequent estimation of the mean shape based on these nonrigid alignments. The process is entirely symmetric with no bias toward any of the original shape sample point-sets. We believe that this method can be especially useful for creating atlases of various shapes present in medical images. We have applied the method to create mean shapes from nine hand-segmented 2D corpus callosum data sets and 10 hippocampal 3D point-sets.
Eleven tips for moving to OpenOffice.org
Authors: Bruce Byfield
Venue: Linux Journal (2004)

Switching office suites is easier than it looks. 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
Competition between Internet Search Engines
Authors: Tridas Mukhopadhyay, Uday Rajan, Rahul Telang
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 8 - Volume 8 (2004)

The Internet search engine market has seen a proliferation of entrants over the last few years. While Yahoo! was the early market leader, there has been entry by both lower quality engines and higher quality ones. Prior work on quality differentiation requires that low quality products have low prices, in order to survive in a market with high quality products. However, the price charged to users of search engines is typically zero. Therefore, consumers do not face a trade-off between quality and price. We develop a vertical differentiation model to show that even lower quality engines can survive in this market. A key property of the model is that, due to low costs users who try out one engine may also sample a lower quality engine in the same session. This "residual demand" allows lower quality products to survive in equilibrium.We consider a two-period dynamic game between an incumbent and an entrant who enters in the second period. The incumbent has the .rst mover advantage due to early entry and brand loyalty, while the entrant may have a cost advantage, based on superior technology. The interaction of these two effects determines which product has higher quality in equilibrium.We also consider the issue of strategic invesments in quality and show that incumbent may under-invest or over-invest in its quality depending on entrant's cost structure.
Interactive indexing of documents with a multilingual thesaurus
Authors: Ulrich Schiel, Ianna M. S. F. de Sousa
Venue: Effective databases for text & document management (2003)

With the growing significance of digital libraries and the Internet, more and more electronic texts become accessible to a wide and geographically disperse public. This requires adequate tools to facilitate indexing, storage and retrieval of documents written in different languages. We present a method for semi-automatic indexing of electronic documents and construction of a multilingual thesaurus, which can be used for query formulation and information retrieval. We use special dictionaries and user interaction in order to solve ambiguities and find adequate canonical terms in the language and an adequate abstract language-independent term. The abstract thesaurus is updated incrementally by new indexed documents and is used to search for documents using adequate terms.
VideoQA: question answering on news video
Authors: Hui Yang, Lekha Chaisorn, Yunlong Zhao, Shi-Yong Neo, Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia (2003)

When querying a news video archive, the users are interested in retrieving precise answers in the form of a summary that best answers the query. However, current video retrieval systems, including the search engines on the web, are designed to retrieve documents instead of precise answers. This research explores the use of question answering (QA) techniques to support personalized news video retrieval. Users interact with our system, VideoQA, using short natural language questions with implicit constraints on contents, context, duration, and genre of expected videos. VideoQA returns short precise news video summaries as answers. The main contributions of this research are: (a) the extension of QA technology to support QA in news video; and (b) the use of multi-modal features, including visual, audio, textual, and external resources, to help correct speech recognition errors and to perform precise question answering. The system has been tested on 7 days of news video and has been found to be effective.
Complex Spatial Relationships
Authors: Robert Munro, Sanjay Chawla, Pei Sun
Venue: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2003)

This paper describes the need for mining complex relationshipsin spatial data. Complex relationships are definedas those involving two or more of: multi-feature colocation,self-colocation, one-to-many relationships, self-exclusionand multi-feature exclusion. We demonstrate that even inthe mining of simple relationships, knowledge of complexrelationships is necessary to accurately calculate the significanceof results. We implement a representation of spatialdata such that it contains known 'weak-monotonic' properties,which are exploited for the efficient mining of complexrelationships, and discuss the strengths and limitations ofthis representation.
Dependent Sets of Constant Weight Binary Vectors
Authors: Neil J. Calkin
Venue: Combinatorics, Probability and Computing (1997)

We determine lower bounds for the number of random binary vectors, chosen uniformly from vectors of weight k, needed to obtain a dependent set.
Modeling and simulation issues in Monte Carlo calculation of electron interaction with solid targets
Authors: V. V. Ivin, M. V. Silakov, G. A. Babushkin, B. Lu, P. J. Mangat, K. J. Nordquist, D. J. Resnick
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2003)

Several Monte Carlo approaches for modeling electron-solid interaction have been investigated as to their impact on simulation accuracy and performance. An optimum set of models, including the Mott elastic scatter cross-section, the Moller inelastic scatter cross-section, and the continuous slow down approximation with the relativistic Bethe stopping power, have been identified as giving a good agreement with published experimental data while providing better simulation performance than more sophisticated approaches. It has been validated that the Mott cross-section should be used instead of Rutherford's for correct prediction of both electron transmission and backscatter coefficients in the cases of thin films for incident beam energy in the range of 10-100 keV. The use of the Gryzinski cross-section for modeling inelastic scatter did not provide any accuracy improvement because the predicted beam widening in resist was of the same order as given by a more simplistic Moller model. It is also necessary to use the relativistic Bethe stopping power for incident beam energies >30 keV.
A new approach for distributed computing in avionics systems
Authors: Miguel A. Sánchez-Puebla, Jesús Carretero
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international symposium on Information and communication technologies (2003)

Historically, a typical avionics system architecture has been designed as a federated architecture of black-boxes with well-defined functions and implemented on fully dedicated computers. The new Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture relies on an architecture more similar to conventional computers, where several general-purpose processors are connected through a bus and all the Inputs/Outputs (I/O) come from the I/O units (like Remote Interface Units, RIUs) through the bus to the processors. This architecture imposes a heavy traffic on data networks, which cannot be satisfied by traditional buses such as the MIL-STD-1553, but still requires determinism, which cannot be provided by general-purpose networks. In this paper, we describe the basics of IMA and the communication network designed for the new Airbus 380. The preliminary evaluation results show the feasibility of the IMA approach.
Pointing gesture recognition based on 3D-tracking of face, hands and head orientation
Authors: Kai Nickel, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (2003)

In this paper, we present a system capable of visually detecting pointing gestures and estimating the 3D pointing direction in real-time. In order to acquire input features for gesture recognition, we track the positions of a person's face and hands on image sequences provided by a stereo-camera. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), trained on different phases of sample pointing gestures, are used to classify the 3D-trajectories in order to detect the occurrence of a gesture. When analyzing sample pointing gestures, we noticed that humans tend to look at the pointing target while performing the gesture. In order to utilize this behavior, we additionally measured head orientation by means of a magnetic sensor in a similar scenario. By using head orientation as an additional feature, we observed significant gains in both recall and precision of pointing gestures. Moreover, the percentage of correctly identified pointing targets improved significantly from 65% to 83%. For estimating the pointing direction, we comparatively used three approaches: 1) The line of sight between head and hand, 2) the forearm orientation, and 3) the head orientation.
A Task-Oriented Reconfigurable Software Architecture for e-Commerce Document Exchange
Authors: Stefan Böttcher, Christian Dannewitz
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 7 - Volume 7 (2004)

Within the area of data transfer and messaging over the world wide web, there coexists a growing number of protocols that fulfill different tasks, however an accepted standard for all tasks does not exist. For applications in areas like e-procurement, this becomes an even more challenging problem, as they are confronted with rapidly changing technology standards as well as with changing messaging requirements. To overcome this problem, we present areconfigurable architecture that not only allows to exchange protocols according to future needs of web-based e-commerce systems, but also allows to specify for each individual task, which protocol of a given protocol stack shall be used to fulfill this specific task. Thereby, our architecture allows for an individual mapping of tasks to protocols or evenprotocol-independent software-components that are most appropriate to fulfill these tasks. This results in a highly reconfigurable stack of task-oriented modules where modules can be exchanged, removed, and integrated easily and independently. Therefore, we consider our architecture to be a significant step towards a reconfigurable software architecture for web-based e-commerce systems that can easily be adapted to both, currently unknown future application needs and future software components.
A Combinatorial Approach to the Two-Sided Exit Problem for Left-Continuous Random Walks
Authors: Philippe Marchal
Venue: Combinatorics, Probability and Computing (2001)

We present a combinatorial lemma that provides a new approach to the two-sided exit problem and related questions for left-continuous random walks (i.e., random walks on the integers whose negative steps have size &minus; 1). Some applications to random walks on the circle are also derived.
Visualization and User-Modeling for Browsing Personal Photo Libraries
Authors: Baback Moghaddam, Qi Tian, Neal Lesh, Chia Shen, Thomas S. Huang
Venue: International Journal of Computer Vision (2004)

We present a user-centric system for visualization and layout for content-based image retrieval. Image features (visual and/or semantic) are used to display retrievals as thumbnails in a 2-D spatial layout or &ldquo;configuration&rdquo; which conveys all pair-wise mutual similarities. A graphical optimization technique is used to provide maximally uncluttered and informative layouts. Moreover, a novel subspace feature weighting technique can be used to modify 2-D layouts in a variety of context-dependent ways. An efficient computational technique for subspace weighting and re-estimation leads to a simple user-modeling framework whereby the system can learn to display query results based on layout examples (or relevance feedback) provided by the user. The resulting retrieval, browsing and visualization can adapt to the user's (time-varying) notions of content, context and preferences in style and interactive navigation. Monte Carlo simulations with machine-generated layouts as well as pilot user studies have demonstrated the ability of this framework to model or &ldquo;mimic&rdquo; users, by automatically generating layouts according to their preferences.
Constructing federated databases in coordinated supply chains
Authors: Timon Chih-Ting Du, Hsun-Ming Lee, Ane Chen
Venue: Decision Support Systems (2003)

Supply chain partnering is one approach in decreasing the risk of maintaining high inventories and improving due date requirements. Whether or not such partnerships run smoothly depends on the sharing of information, and successful information sharing is determined by the manner in which previously independent databases are coordinated. This study proposes the construction of attribute correspondence matrices (ACMs) for databases by extending the conventional schema coordination from peer-to-peer relationships into vertical relationships, i.e. supply chain relationships. Using ACMs, companies in the supply chain can share data with both upstream and downstream partners without leaking information to competitors.