ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Sketch-Based Virtual Human Modelling and Animation
Authors: Chen Mao, Sheng Feng Qin, David Wright
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on Smart Graphics (2007)

Animated virtual humans created by skilled artists play a remarkable role in today's public entertainment. However, ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. We developed a new method and a novel sketching interface, which enable anyone who can draw to "sketch-out" 3D virtual humans and animation. We devised a "Stick Figure¿ Fleshing-out¿Skin Mapping" graphical pipeline, which decomposes the complexity of figure drawing and considerably boosts the modelling and animation efficiency. We developed a gesture-based method for 3D pose reconstruction from 2D stick figure drawings. We investigated a "Creative Model-based Method", which performs a human perception process to transfer users' 2D freehand sketches into 3D human bodies of various body sizes, shapes and fat distributions. Our current system supports character animation in various forms including articulated figure animation, 3D mesh model animation, and 2D contour/NPR animation with personalised drawing styles. Moreover, this interface also supports sketch-based crowd animation and 2D storyboarding of 3D multiple character interactions. A preliminary user study was conducted to support the overall system design. Our system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes.
A Search Engine Index for Multimedia Content
Authors: Mauricio Marin, Veronica Gil-Costa, Carolina Bonacic
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th international Euro-Par conference on Parallel Processing (2008)

We present a distributed index data structure and algorithms devised to support parallel query processing of multimedia content in search engines. We present a comparative study with a number of data structures used as indexes for metric space databases. Our optimization criteria are based on requirements for high-performance search engines. The main advantages of our proposal are efficient performance with respect to other approaches (sequentially and in parallel), suitable treatment of secondary memory, and support for OpenMP multithreading. We presents experiments for the asynchronous (MPI) and bulk-synchronous (BSP) message passing models of parallel computing showing that in both models our approach outperforms others consistently.
Vanishing Waves on Semi-closed Space Intervals and Applications in Mathematical Physics
Authors: Ghiocel Toma
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computational Science, Part II (2007)

Test-functions (which differ to zero only on a limited interval and have continuous derivatives of any order on the whole real axis) are widely used in the mathematical theory. Yet less attention was given to intuitive aspects on dynamics of such test functions or of similar functions considered as possible solution of certain equations in mathematical physics (as wave equation). This study will show that the use of wave equation on small space interval considered around the point of space where the sources of the generated field are situated can be mathematically represented by vanishing waves corresponding to a superposition of travelling test functions. As an important consequence, some directions for propagating the generated wave appears and the possibility of reverse radiation being rejected. Specific applications for other phenomena involving wave generation (as the Lorentz formulae describing the generation of a wave with different features after the interaction with the observer's material medium are also presented.
Fast parallel Particle-To-Grid interpolation for plasma PIC simulations on the GPU
Authors: George Stantchev, William Dorland, Nail Gumerov
Venue: Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (2008)

Particle-In-Cell (PIC) methods have been widely used for plasma physics simulations in the past three decades. To ensure an acceptable level of statistical accuracy relatively large numbers of particles are needed. State-of-the-art Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), with their high memory bandwidth, hundreds of SPMD processors, and half-a-teraflop performance potential, offer a viable alternative to distributed memory parallel computers for running medium-scale PIC plasma simulations on inexpensive commodity hardware. In this paper, we present an overview of a typical plasma PIC code and discuss its GPU implementation. In particular we focus on fast algorithms for the performance bottleneck operation of Particle-To-Grid interpolation.
The ODYSSEY approach to early simulation-based equivalence checking at ESL level using automatically generated executable transaction-level model
Authors: Maziar Goudarzi, Shaahin Hessabi, Naser MohammadZadeh, Nasim Zainolabedini
Venue: Microprocessors Microsystems (2008)

Design technology is expected to rise to electronic system-level (ESL). This necessitates new techniques and tools for synthesizing ESL designs and for verifying them before and after ESL synthesis. A promising verification strategy for future very complex designs is to initially verify the design at the highest level of abstraction, and then check the equivalence of the lower level automatically generated models against that initial golden model. We present one such approach to simulation-based functional verification implemented in our ESL design methodology called ODYSSEY. Our ESL synthesis tool generates a transaction-level model (TLM) at TLM level 2 (i.e., design with partial timing) that corresponds to the input ESL design (which is at TLM level 3; i.e., sole functionality without timing). Both the ESL design and its generated TLM model can be simulated on a host machine with corresponding input stimuli to establish their functional equivalence. The TLM is in SystemC, and hence executable, and also models both hardware and software components in C++ to achieve higher simulation speed. We introduce an implementation of a TLM level 2 model that is tailored to our ESL design methodology and apply our approach to a number of benchmarks to evaluate the TLM simulation performance. Experimental results show that the approach suits early validation of the ESL synthesis process since its simulation performance is more than 4 orders of magnitude higher than simulations at lower levels and it is generated early in the design cycle. Also the co-simulation overhead - compared to simulating the original ESL design in C++ - depends on the partitioning quality in terms of communication to computation ratio.
Tverberg's theorem with constraints
Authors: Stephan Hell
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (2008)

The topological Tverberg theorem claims that for any continuous map of the (q-1)(d+1)-simplex @s^(^d^+^1^)^(^q^-^1^) to R^d there are q disjoint faces of @s^(^d^+^1^)^(^q^-^1^) such that their images have a non-empty intersection. This has been proved for affine maps, and if q is a prime power, but not in general. We extend the topological Tverberg theorem in the following way: Pairs of vertices are forced to end up in different faces. This leads to the concept of constraint graphs. In Tverberg's theorem with constraints, we come up with a list of constraints graphs for the topological Tverberg theorem. The proof is based on connectivity results of chessboard-type complexes. Moreover, Tverberg's theorem with constraints implies new lower bounds for the number of Tverberg partitions. As a consequence, we prove Sierksma's conjecture for d=2 and q=3.
Kernel Fisher NPE for Face Recognition
Authors: Guoqiang Wang, Zongying Ou, Fan Ou, Dianting Liu, Feng Han
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Neural Networks: Part II--Advances in Neural Networks (2007)

Neighborhood Preserving Embedding (NPE) is a subspace learning algorithm. Since NPE is a linear approximation to Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) algorithm, it has good neighborhood-preserving properties. Although NPE has been applied in many fields, it has limitations to solve recognition task. In this paper, a novel subspace method, named Kernel Fisher Neighborhood Preserving Embedding (KFNPE), is proposed. In this method, discriminant information as well as the intrinsic geometry relations of the local neighborhoods are preserved according to prior class-label information. Moreover, complex nonlinear variations of real face images are represented by nonlinear kernel mapping. Experimental results on ORL face database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Protoswarm: a language for programming multi-robot systems using the amorphous medium abstraction
Authors: Jonathan Bachrach, James McLurkin, Anthony Grue
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3 (2008)

Multi-robot systems are becoming increasingly prevalent, but programmability is a major barrier to their deployment. Present systems force programmers to think in terms of individual agents. Application code becomes entangled with details of coordination and robustness and often does not compose well or translate to other domains. We offer an alternate approach whereby the programmer controls a single virtual spatial computer which fills the environment space. The computations on this spatial computer are actually performed by a large number of locally-interacting individual agents. This abstracts the actual computational hardware behind the spatial computer interface, and allows the programmer to focus on a single model of global computation. We achieve this abstraction with two components: a language that embodies continuous space and time semantics and a runtime library that implements these semantics approximately. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with multi-agent algorithms in both simulation and on a group of 40 robots
Trying to Reduce Bottom-Out Hinting: Will Telling Student How Many Hints They Have Left Help?
Authors: Yu Guo, Joseph E. Beck, Neil T. Heffernan
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2008)

Many model-tracing intelligent tutoring systems give, upon demand, a series of hints until they reach the bottom-out hint that tells them exactly what to do (exact answer of the question). Since students don't know the number of hints available for a given question, some students might be surprised to, all of a sudden, be told the final answer; letting them know when the bottom out hint is getting close should help cut down on the incidence of bottom-out hinting. We were interested in creating an intervention that would reduce the chance that a student would ask for the bottom out hint. Our intervention was straightforward; we simply told them the number of hints they had not yet seen so that they could see they were getting close to the bottom out hint. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment where we randomly assigned classrooms to conditions. Contrary to what we expected, our intervention led to more, not less, bottom out hinting. We conclude that the many intelligent tutoring systems that give hints in this manner should not consider this intuitively appealing idea.
Search Strategies of Visually Impaired Persons Using a Camera Phone Wayfinding System
Authors: R. Manduchi, J. Coughlan, V. Ivanchenko
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (2008)

We report new experiments conducted using a camera phone wayfinding system, which is designed to guide a visually impaired user to machine-readable signs (such as barcodes) labeled with special color markers. These experiments specifically investigate search strategies of such users detecting, localizing and touching color markers that have been mounted in various ways in different environments: in a corridor (either flush with the wall or mounted perpendicular to it) or in a large room with obstacles between the user and the markers. The results show that visually impaired users are able to reliably find color markers in all the conditions that we tested, using search strategies that vary depending on the environment in which they are placed.
State-Aware Performance Analysis with eXtended Stochastic Probes
Authors: Allan Clark, Stephen Gilmore
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th European Performance Engineering Workshop on Computer Performance Engineering (2008)

We define a mechanism for specifying performance queries which combine instantaneous observations of model states and finite sequences of observations of model activities. We realise these queries by composing the state-aware observers (called eXtended Stochastic Probes (XSP)) with a model expressed in a stochastically-timed process algebra. Our work has been conceived in the context of the process algebra PEPA. However the ideas involved are relevant to all timed process algebras with an underlying discrete-state representation such as a continuous-time Markov chain.
A Study on the Improvement of Query Processing Performance of OWL Data Based on Jena2
Authors: Sun-Young Heo, Eun-Gyung Kim
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology (2008)

The present web has not provided the function of more than the information store in that the collected and retrieved information should be interpreted and be purified though the present Web has a merit that can search correlated information easily through simple connections between documents. So, to overcome the limitation of the existing web like this, researches for Semantic web ontology languages (RDF, RDFS, OWL and so on) prescribed as standard of W3C and for the related technologies have conducted actively. Also, recently the interest for Jena2, Java framework, including rule-based inference engine and the programming environment for the languages like RDF, FDFS, OWL, SPARQL and so on has been heightened. Jena2 has problems that the performance for simple selection operation and the performance for the query that join operations are required slow down, and the performance in processing OWL data slows down because storing document information in a single table. This paper designed and realized OWL Translator to move to the relational database designing in this paper the data being in Multiple Translator and Jena Relational Database for storing each data information in a separate table after dividing the meaning of OWL documents into Class, Property, Individual to solve this problem. Also, this paper compared the processing performances of the engine quality realizing by using Multiple Translator and OWL Translator and the engine realizing by applying as it is the functions providing in Jena2 by using University Ontology providing in SPARQL engine of Jena2.
Dynamic Pricing Algorithms for Task Allocation in Multi-agent Swarms
Authors: Prithviraj Dasgupta, Matthew Hoeing
Venue: Massively Multi-Agent Technology: AAMAS Workshops, MMAS 2006, LSMAS 2006, and CCMMS 2007 Hakodate, Japan, May 9, 2006 Honolulu, HI, USA, May 15, 2007 Selected and Revised Papers (2008)

Over the past few years, emergent computing based techniques such as swarming have evolved as an attractive technique to design coordination protocols in large-scale distributed systems and massively multi-agent systems. In this paper, we consider a search-and-execute problem domain where agents have to discover tasks online and perform them in a distributed, collaborative manner. We specifically focus on the problem of distributed coordination between agents to dynamically allocate the tasks among themselves. To address this problem, we describe a novel technique that combines a market-based dynamic pricing algorithm to control the task priorities with a swarming-based coordination technique to disseminate task information across the agents. Experimental results within a simulated environment for a distributed aided target recognition application show that the dynamic pricing based task selection strategies compare favorably with other heuristic-based task selection strategies in terms of task completion times while achieving a significant reduction in communication overhead.
Senior Executives Commitment to Information Security --- from Motivation to Responsibility
Authors: Jorma Kajava, Juhani Anttila, Rauno Varonen, Reijo Savola, Juha Röning
Venue: Computational Intelligence and Security: International Conference, CIS 2006, Guangzhou, China, November 3-6, 2006, Revised Selected Papers (2007)

For senior executives, information security is a basic requirement for business success. Yet, despite being well-motivated, top managers often have only a superficial understanding of information security, which may lead them to make decisions that are not conducive to raising the organization's security level. Enhancing information security awareness among all employees has been found necessary, but the key to success is raising the awareness level of senior management. Playing a decisive role, they must assume overall responsibility for information security. The question is how to achieve this in an efficient and natural way.
Representation and Structure-Based Similarity Assessment for Agile Workflows
Authors: Mirjam Minor, Alexander Tartakovski, Ralph Bergmann
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Case-Based Reasoning: Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development (2007)

The dynamics of the market requires workflow management systems that support agile workflows - workflows which are flexible concerning the adaptation to innovations. This paper presents a case-based approach to representation and index-based retrieval of past workflows in order to give authoring support for adaptation of recent workflow instances. The utility of the presented methods is demonstrated by an experimental evaluation.
HFilter: Hybrid Finite Automaton Based Stream Filtering for Deep and Recursive XML Data
Authors: Weiwei Sun, Yongrui Qin, Ping Yu, Zhuoyao Zhang, Zhenying He
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (2008)

XML filtering applications are gaining increasing popularity recently. Automata are generally adopted to construct query indexes for evaluating large numbers of XPath queries over XML streams. Usually only shallow data are observed in existing approaches. How to process deep and recursive XML data with low memory limitation efficiently is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose HFilter, a Hybrid Finite Automaton (HFA) based stream filtering approach, to solve this problem. We introduce the basic two-tier HFA (lazy DFA tier and NFA tier) first, which realizes data prefix sharing and memory overflow control to improve the filtering throughput. Then an optimized three-tier HFA with an extra pre-expanded DFA tier is put forward, which significantly reduces the restarting cost of HFA after memory overflow. Experiments show that our approaches work more efficiently than existing ones.
Contours extraction in grayscale images of sign language interpreter
Authors: Roumen Kountchev, Vladimir Todorov, Roumiana Kountcheva
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on Mathematical Methods and Computational Techniques in Electrical Engineering (2008)

This work presents one new approach for adaptive extraction of the contours of the sign language interpreter in video sequences. The aim of the processing is to obtain clear contour images, which retain the understandability of the interpreted signs and together with this, ensure very efficient compression of the processed video sequences. In the paper is presented the algorithm used in the consecutive stages of the image processing illustrated with some experimental results. The algorithm is based on two-stage filtration (noise filtration with local adaptive digital filtration, followed by uneven illumination correction with 2D linear digital filtration). The processing then continues with image segmentation. The presented approach is of great importance for video sign-language presentations, because in result of the usually used inter-frame compression their understandability is not so good, if they comprise quick movements of interpreter's hands. In order to avoid this, the new approach is based on the assumption that the color video sequences are substituted with similar ones, which contain the extracted contours only. The understandability of the represented signs is retained, because in this case instead of inter-frame lossy compression, is used intra-frame lossless compression. The obtained compression ratio is very high, which permits real-time implementations of the presented approach.
The effects of market-making on price dynamics
Authors: Sanmay Das
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 2 (2008)

This paper studies market-makers, agents responsible for maintaining liquidity and orderly price transitions in markets. Market-makers include major firms making markets on global stock exchanges, as well as software agents that run behind the scenes on novel electronic markets like prediction markets. We use a sophisticated model of market-making to build richer agent-based models of markets and show how these models can be useful both in understanding properties of existing markets and in predicting the impacts of structural changes. For example, we show how competition among market-makers can lead to significantly faster price discovery following a jump in the true value of an asset. We also show that myopic profit-maximization, apart from leading to poor market quality, is sub-optimal even for a monopolistic market-maker. This observation leads to an interesting characterization of the market-maker's exploration-exploitation dilemma as a tradeoff between price discovery and profit-taking.
Question Answering Summarization of Multiple Biomedical Documents
Authors: Zhongmin Shi, Gabor Melli, Yang Wang, Yudong Liu, Baohua Gu, Mehdi M. Kashani, Anoop Sarkar, Fred Popowich
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence on Advances in Artificial Intelligence (2007)

In this paper we introduce a system that automatically summarizes multiple biomedical documents relevant to a question. The system extracts biomedical and general concepts by utilizing concept-level knowledge from domain-specific and domain-independent sources. Semantic role labeling, semantic subgraph-based sentence selection and automatic post-editing are involved in the process of finding the information need. Due to the absence of expert-written summaries of biomedical documents, we propose an approximate evaluation by taking MEDLINE abstracts as expert-written summaries. Evaluation results indicate that our system does help in answering questions and the automatically generated summaries are comparable to abstracts of biomedical articles, as evaluated using the ROUGE measure.