ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Using Strongly Connected Components as a Basis for Autonomous Skill Acquisition in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Seyed Jalal Kazemitabar, Hamid Beigy
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks on Advances in Neural Networks (2009)

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has had a vast range of applications in recent years. Preparing mechanisms for autonomous acquisition of skills has been a main topic of research in this area. While different methods have been proposed to achieve this goal, few methods have been shown to be successful both in performance and also efficiency in terms of time complexity of the algorithm. In this paper, a linear time algorithm is proposed to find subgoal states of the environment in early episodes of learning. Having subgoals available in early phases of a learning task, results in building skills that dramatically increase the convergence rate of the learning process.
A case for an interleaving constrained shared-memory multi-processor
Authors: Jie Yu, Satish Narayanasamy
Venue: ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (2009)

Shared-memory multi-threaded programming is inherently more difficult than single-threaded programming. The main source of complexity is that, the threads of an application can interleave in so many different ways. To ensure correctness, a programmer has to test all possible thread interleavings, which, however, is impractical. Many rare thread interleavings remain untested in production systems, and they are the root cause for a majority of concurrency bugs. We propose a shared-memory multi-processor design that avoids untested interleavings to improve the correctness of a multi-threaded program. Since untested interleavings tend to occur infrequently at runtime, the performance cost of avoiding them is not high. We propose to encode the set of tested correct interleavings in a program's binary executable using Predecessor Set (PSet) constraints. These constraints are efficiently enforced at runtime using processor support, which ensures that the runtime follows a tested interleaving. We analyze several bugs in open source applications such as MySQL, Apache, Mozilla, etc., and show that, by enforcing PSet constraints, we can avoid not only data races and atomicity violations, but also other forms of concurrency bugs.
Visualizing Errors for Self-correcting Discrepancy between Thinking and Writing
Authors: Hidenobu Kunichika, Tsukasa Hirashima, Akira Takeuchi
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Learning by Effective Utilization of Technologies: Facilitating Intercultural Understanding (2006)

The aim of our research is to realize a system for supporting English composition in second language learning which allows learners to compose some sentences and gain appropriate awareness of their errors in the sentences with indirect information from the system. Learners often make errors, and they can learn from them. In order to learn from the errors, learners need to first be aware of the errors; preferably by themselves or by indirect information. However, learners may fail to notice the errors or they may lack correct awareness of their errors unless they are given good stimuli (i.e., indirect information) from the outside. This paper proposes a method when and how the system provides stimuli to the learners, describes its implementation briefly, and reports validity of the method. We adopt a method of visualizing learners' errors as indirect information for the learners.
Caregivers' requirements for in-home robotic agent for supporting community-living elderly subjects with cognitive impairment
Authors: Véronique Faucounau, Ya-Huei Wu, Mélodie Boulay, Marina Maestrutti, Anne-Sophie Rigaud
Venue: Technology and Health Care (2009)

Older people are an important and growing sector of the population. This demographic change raises the profile of frailty and disability within the world's population. In such conditions, many old people need aides to perform daily activities. Most of the support is given by family members who are now a new target in the therapeutic approach. With advances in technology, robotics becomes increasingly important as a means of supporting older people at home. In order to ensure appropriate technology, 30 caregivers filled out a self-administered questionnaire including questions on needs to support their proxy and requirements concerning the robotic agent's functions and modes of action. This paper points out the functions to be integrated into the robot in order to support caregivers in the care of their proxy. The results also show that caregivers have a positive attitude towards robotic agents. (the QuoVADis project)
A distributed virtual reality framework for Korea-Japan high-speed network test bed
Authors: Hiroaki Nishino, Shinji Yamabiraki, Tsuneo Kagawa, Kouichi Utsumiya, Yong-Moo Kwon, Yoshihiro Okada
Venue: International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (2009)

A framework to practically constitute a Distributed Virtual Reality (DVR) system on a heterogeneous high-speed network environment is shown. The proposed approach essentially integrates a 'haptic' channel into traditional vision and acoustic modalities. The haptic technology empowers the reality of the DVR system by allowing users to touch virtual objects. The human touch sensation, however, is very sensitive to delays and jitters; therefore, we propose a hybrid DVR architecture to realise both data consistency by client-server and scalability by peer-to-peer models on a long-haul network. Some experiments using a Korea-Japan high-speed research network are described to validate the proposed method.
A simple three-party password-based key exchange protocol
Authors: Hui-Feng Huang
Venue: International Journal of Communication Systems (2009)

In three-party password-based key exchange (3PAKE) protocol, a client is allowed to share a human-memorable password with a trusted server such that two clients can agree on a secret session key for secure connectivity. Recently, many 3PAKE protocols have been developed. However, not all of them can simultaneously achieve security and efficiency. Without any server's public key, this article will propose a simple three-party password-based authenticated key exchange scheme. Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme is not only more efficient, but also is secure. Copyright &copy; 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In three-party password based key exchange protocol, a client is allowed to share a human-memorable password with a trusted server such that two clients can agree on a secret session key for secure connectivity. Recently, many three-party password based key exchange protocols have been developed. However, not all of them can simultaneously achieve security and efficiency. Without any server's public key, this article will propose a simple three-party password based authenticated key exchange scheme. Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme is not only more efficient, but also is secure. Copyright &copy; 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
SPSS 16.0 Base User's Guide, 1st edition
Venue:  (2007)

The SPSS Base 16.0 User's Guide is a comprehensive reference for using SPSS. At over 700 pages, the guide includes overviews of the interface and help section; editing, preparing, and transforming data; creating, handling, and transforming files; working with output and command syntax; performing a wide range of analysis techniques; creating charts and tables; customizing menus and toolbars; using the production and scripting facilities; and managing output. 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
Succession: Measuring transfer of code and developer productivity
Authors: Audris Mockus
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (2009)

Code ownership transfer or succession is a crucial ingredient in open source code reuse and in offshoring projects. Measuring succession can help understand factors that affect the success of such transfers and suggest ways to make them more efficient. We propose and evaluate several methods to measure succession based on the chronology and traces of developer activities. Using ten instances of offshoring succession identified through interviews, we find that the best succession measure can accurately pinpoint the most likely mentors. We model the productivity ratio of more than 1000 developer pairs involved in the succession to test conjectures formulated using the organizational socialization theory and find the ratio to decrease for instances of offshoring and for mentors who have worked primarily on a single project or have transferred ownership for their non-primary project code, thus supporting a theory-based conjectures and providing practical suggestions on how to improve succession.
Public governance as a socio-technical system: from concept to application
Authors: Terrence Maxwell, Sharon S. Dawes
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government (2009)

This paper further develops a recent conceptual framework designed to move from a micro to a macro view by analyzing the dynamics of digital age governance through the interaction of six social and technical dimensions. This exploratory research extends the original model by exploring the interplay of these dimensions through the development of causal loop diagrams depicting two case studies taken from US national security crises in the 1790s and 2000s. The exploration produced a revised conceptual model that puts socio-technical interaction and complexity at the intersection of the other dimensions. It also expands the "information" dimension to recognize the importance of information content and availability as well as information management. The work suggests that the importance of some relationships and variables identified in the original model may remain stable over time, while the salience and impact of others may be strongly affected by technological and other factors. The paper concludes with recommendations for further development and testing of a more formal model.
A decentralized, architecture-based framework for self-growing applications
Authors: Ada Diaconescu, Philippe Lalanda
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Autonomic computing (2009)

In large-scale, distributed software systems, an important management undertaking concerns the creation and runtime modification of application instances. This short paper proposes an autonomic framework that can produce and maintain coherent and adaptable application instances, in volatile execution environments. In the developed approach, decentralised, context-aware instantiation logic interprets a static architectural model and creates conforming instantiation solutions, customised for the current requirements. A local framework prototype implementing this approach was implemented based on a Service Oriented Component technology. Experimental results based on a Home Monitoring data-mediation scenario show the viability of the proposed solution and of the decentralised framework.
Combining appearance and motion for face and gender recognition from videos
Authors: Abdenour Hadid, Matti Pietikäinen
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2009)

While many works consider moving faces only as collections of frames and apply still image-based methods, recent developments indicate that excellent results can be obtained using texture-based spatiotemporal representations for describing and analyzing faces in videos. Inspired by the psychophysical findings which state that facial movements can provide valuable information to face analysis, and also by our recent success in using LBP (local binary patterns) for combining appearance and motion for dynamic texture analysis, this paper investigates the combination of facial appearance (the shape of the face) and motion (the way a person is talking and moving his/her facial features) for face analysis in videos. We propose and study an approach for spatiotemporal face and gender recognition from videos using an extended set of volume LBP features and a boosting scheme. We experiment with several publicly available video face databases and consider different benchmark methods for comparison. Our extensive experimental analysis clearly assesses the promising performance of the LBP-based spatiotemporal representations for describing and analyzing faces in videos.
A Technique for the Prediction of Deadline-Violations in Inter-Organizational Business Processes
Authors: Johann Eder, Horst Pichler, Stefan Vielgut
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Databases and Information Systems IV: Selected Papers from the Seventh International Baltic Conference DB&IS'2006 (2007)

Workflow time management provides predictive features to forecast eventually upcoming deadline violations and proactive strategies to speed up late processes. Existing time management approaches assume that communication with external processes or services is conducted synchronously. This is not the case with inter-organizational processes which very frequently communicate in an asynchronous manner. Therefore weexamine diverse asynchronous communication patterns, show how to map them on an interval-based time model, and describe their application to inter-organizational workflow environments.
A model of quadratic approximation adapted to structural optimization
Authors: Yaghob Gholipour
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th WSEAS international conference on Applied mathematics (2008)

The practical problems of engineering optimization, especially in the field of structural engineering, are often implicit and nonlinear that the use of ordinary mathematical models of optimization are sometimes cumbersome. Some models of approximation methods have shown interesting results for some kind of optimization problems. Rigorous investigation on characteristics of the problems of engineering optimization, particularly, structural optimization demonstrates some especial kinds of convex approximation could be efficient to solve this type of problems. This research looks for an algorithm of optimization well adapted to engineering optimization. This algorithm substitutes the target and the constraints functions by some kinds of convex, quadratic and separable functions. The target function and constraints are evaluated approximately and substituted to original functions iteratively. The approximation is applied on the function and constraint curvature at its border and therefore it could be conservative. The first and second derivatives of stress and displacement constraints could be evaluated on a guide line without additional structural analysis. It reduces considerably the long procedure of numerical operations. This generic line joins the approximation points to the coordinate origin. In engineering application it has some interesting characteristics that contribute on the efficiency of the optimization model. This method is applied to some test problems of structural optimization with satisfaction.
OR FORUM--Rocket Science Retailing: The 2006 Philip McCord Morse Lecture
Authors: Marshall Fisher
Venue: Operations Research (2009)

Retailing is a huge industry. In the United States, retail business represents about 40% of the economy and is the largest employer. Retail supply chain management is still more art than science, but this is changing rapidly as retailers begin to apply analytic models to the huge volume of data they are collecting on consumer purchases and preferences. This industry-wide movement resembles the transformation of Wall Street that occurred in the 1970s when physicists and other “rocket scientists” applied their analytic skills to investment decisions. The Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER) (codirected by Ananth Raman, Harvard Business School, and myself) is a group of academics working with about 50 leading retailers to assess their progress towards rocket science retailing and to accelerate that progress through selected research projects. After some brief comments on the current state of industry practice in retail supply chain management, this paper will describe examples of COER research in four areas: assortment planning, pricing, inventory optimization, and store execution.
On the morphological processing of hue
Authors: E. Aptoula, S. Lefèvre
Venue: Image and Vision Computing (2009)

Although polar colour spaces are being increasingly used in the context of colour mathematical morphology, mainly due to their intuitiveness, the processing of the circular hue band continues to be their main drawback. In this paper, we discuss the two principal problems concerning the morphological processing of hue, first its lack of a lattice structure, which we propose to introduce by means of a distance based formulation from multiple representative reference hue points. And second, the distinction of chromatic from achromatic pixels, since the hue component is of no significance for ''low'' saturation levels. For this purpose, we present a new weighting scheme, based on the combination of saturation and luminance channels. Application results on texture classification, asserting the superior performance of this approach, are also included.
ZStream: a cost-based query processor for adaptively detecting composite events
Authors: Yuan Mei, Samuel Madden
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2009)

Composite (or Complex) event processing (CEP) systems search sequences of incoming events for occurrences of user-specified event patterns. Recently, they have gained more attention in a variety of areas due to their powerful and expressive query language and performance potential. Sequentiality (temporal ordering) is the primary way in which CEP systems relate events to each other. In this paper, we present a CEP system called ZStream to efficiently process such sequential patterns. Besides simple sequential patterns, ZStream is also able to detect other patterns, including conjunction, disjunction, negation and Kleene closure. Unlike most recently proposed CEP systems, which use non-deterministic finite automata (NFA's) to detect patterns, ZStream uses tree-based query plans for both the logical and physical representation of query patterns. By carefully designing the underlying infrastructure and algorithms, ZStream is able to unify the evaluation of sequence, conjunction, disjunction, negation, and Kleene closure as variants of the join operator. Under this framework, a single pattern in ZStream may have several equivalent physical tree plans, with different evaluation costs. We propose a cost model to estimate the computation costs of a plan. We show that our cost model can accurately capture the actual runtime behavior of a plan, and that choosing the optimal plan can result in a factor of four or more speedup versus an NFA based approach. Based on this cost model and using a simple set of statistics about operator selectivity and data rates, ZStream is able to adaptively and seamlessly adjust the order in which it detects patterns on the fly. Finally, we describe a dynamic programming algorithm used in our cost model to efficiently search for an optimal query plan for a given pattern.
Two decades of ripple down rules research
Authors: Debbie Richards
Venue: The Knowledge Engineering Review (2009)

Ripple Down Rules (RDR) were developed in answer to the problem of maintaining medium to large rule-based knowledge systems. Traditional approaches to knowledge-based systems gave little thought to maintenance as it was expected that extensive upfront domain analysis involving a highly trained specialist, the knowledge engineer, and the time-poor domain expert would produce a complete model capturing what was in the expert’s head. The ever-changing, contextual and embrained nature of knowledge were not a part of the philosophy upon which they were based. RDR was a paradigm shift, which made knowledge acquisition and maintenance one and the same thing by incrementally acquiring knowledge as domain experts directly interacted with naturally occurring cases in their domain. Cases played an integral part of the acquisition process by motivating the capture of new knowledge, framing the context in which new knowledge would apply and ensuring that previously correctly classified cases remained so by requiring that the classification of the new case distinguish it from the system’s classification and be justified by features of the new case. RDR has moved beyond its first representation which handled single classification tasks within the domain of pathology to support multiple conclusions across a wide range of domains such as help-desk support, email classification and RoboCup and problem types including configuration, simulation, planning and natural language processing. This paper reviews the history of RDR research over the past two decades with a view to its future.
RPC chains: efficient client-server communication in geodistributed systems
Authors: Yee Jiun Song, Marcos K. Aguilera, Ramakrishna Kotla, Dahlia Malkhi
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation (2009)

We propose the RPC chain, a simple but powerful communication primitive that allows an application to reduce the performance effects of wide-area links on enterprise and data center applications that span multiple sites. This primitive chains together multiple RPC invocations so that the computation can flow from one server to the next without involving the client every time. We demonstrate that RPC chains can significantly reduce end-to-end latency and network bandwidth in a storage application and a web application.
Representing Case Variations for Learning General and Specific Adaptation Rules
Authors: Fadi Badra, Jean Lieber
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on STAIRS 2008: Proceedings of the Fourth Starting AI Researchers' Symposium (2008)

Adaptation is a task of case-based reasoning systems that is largely domain-dependant. This motivates the study of adaptation knowledge acquisition (AKA) that can be carried out thanks to learning processes on the variations between cases of the case base. This paper studies the representation of these variations and the impact of this representation on the AKA process, through experiments in an oncology domain.