ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Reliable Distributed Storage
Authors: Gregory Chockler, Rachid Guerraoui, Idit Keidar, Marko Vukolić
Venue: Computer (2009)

A distributed storage service lets clients abstract a single reliable shared storage device using a collection of possibly unreliable computing units. Algorithms that implement this abstraction offer certain tradeoffs and vary according to dimensions such as complexity, the consistency semantics provided, and the types of failures tolerated.
A pseudo-skeletonization algorithm for static handwritten scripts
Authors: Emli-Mari Nel, J. A. du Preez, B. M. Herbst
Venue: International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (2009)

This paper describes a skeletonization approach that has desirable characteristics for the analysis of static handwritten scripts. We concentrate on the situation where one is interested in recovering the parametric curve that produces the script. Using Delaunay tessellation techniques where static images are partitioned into sub-shapes, typical skeletonization artifacts are removed, and regions with a high density of line intersections are identified. An evaluation protocol, measuring the efficacy of our approach is described. Although this approach is particularly useful as a pre-processing step for algorithms that estimate the pen trajectories of static signatures, it can also be applied to other static handwriting recognition techniques.
Consensus Building in Collaborative Decision Making
Authors: Gloria Phillips-Wren, Eugene Hahn, Guisseppi Forgionne
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Collaborative Decision Making: Perspectives and Challenges (2008)

Developing consensus is crucial to effective collaborative decision making and is particularly difficult in cases involving disruptive technologies, a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. Collaborative decision making often involves multiple criteria. Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, such as the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and multiattribute utility theory (MUAT), rely on the accurate assignment of weights to the multiple measures of performance. Consensus weighting within MCDM can be difficult to achieve because of differences of opinion among experts and the presence of intangible, and often conflicting, measures of performance. The method presented in this paper can be used to develop a consensus weighting scheme within MCDM. This paper presents a statistically-based method for consensus building and illustrates its use in the evaluation of a capital project involving the purchase of mammography equipment as disruptive technology in healthcare management. An AHP architecture is proposed to evaluate the best decision from the proposed
Computational modeling of reconstructive surgery: The effects of the natural tension on skin wrinkling
Authors: A. Cavicchi, L. Gambarotta, R. Massabò
Venue: Finite Elements in Analysis and Design (2009)

A computational model is presented for the simulation of procedures of reconstructive surgery characterized by the excision of a cutaneous defect and the closure and suture of the wound edges. The skin is modeled as a plane membrane with zero flexural stiffness. The membrane undergoes large deformations and is characterized by a Fung type constitutive response in biaxial tension. Skin wrinkling, which is a typical outcome of the surgery in the form of extrusion of the wound edges and dog-ears, is considered through a modification of the elastic potential as originally proposed by Pipkin's Relaxed Energy Density theory [A.C. Pipkin, The relaxed energy density for isotropic elastic membranes, IMA J. Appl. Math. 36 (1986) 85-99; A.C. Pipkin, Relaxed energy density for large deformations of membranes, IMA J. Appl. Math. 52 (1994) 197-308]. The post-buckling analysis of a stretched annular membrane performed by Geminard et al. [Wrinkle formations in axi-symmetrically stretched membranes, Eur. Phys. J. E 15 (2004) 117-126] is used to validate the model under conditions similar to those of the surgery and to discuss the influence of a pre-existing tension in the membrane on the extension of the wrinkled regions. The model is applied to simulate different surgical procedures and investigate the effects of the natural state of the skin and the shape and size of the excisions. The results explain and validate current practice.
Improved manufacturability of ZrO2 MIM capacitors by process stabilizing HfO2 addition
Authors: J. Müller, T. S. Böscke, U. Schröder, M. Reinicke, L. Oberbeck, D. Zhou, W. Weinreich, P. Kücher, M. Lemberger, L. Frey
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2009)

A broad compositional range of the dielectric material Zr"1"-"xHf"xO"2 was evaluated with respect to its applicability in DRAM storage capacitors. The paper reports on phase composition, crystallization behavior, and electrical properties of the mixed system in planar metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors. Admixture of HfO"2 into ZrO"2 proved to stabilize the deposition process at high temperatures without degrading the dielectric properties of the film. Compared to pure ZrO"2 the 30-40% HfO"2 containing films showed improved scalability (capacitance equivalent thickness 0.73nm at 8*10^-^9A/cm^2) as well as improved reliability.
Mobile system energy conservation for adaptive multimedia applications
Authors: Albert F. Harris, Robin Snader, Robin Kravets
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (2008)

As mobile systems become increasing prevalent, they are being called upon to run multimedia applications traditionally associated with the wired domain. Unfortunately, battery capacity is not keeping pace with system demand, driving the demand for energy efficiency. Unfortunately, the encapsulation of traditional layered designs limits the energy that can be saved because layers cannot cooperate. However, monolithic systems have been shown to be inefficient and unsealable. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a system consisting of multiple adaptive applications, and adaptive MAC and transport layers. We evaluate this system by implementing an adaptive video encoding application, showing that a layered approach sharing enough information can enable energy efficiency while maintaining sufficient isolation to allow the replacement of components without requiring a whole-system redesign.
Rational interpolation and mixed inverse spectral problem for finite CMV matrices
Authors: Leonid Golinskii, Mikhail Kudryavtsev
Venue: Journal of Approximation Theory (2009)

For finite-dimensional CMV matrices the mixed inverse spectral problem of reconstructing the matrix by its submatrix and a part of its spectrum is considered. A general rational interpolation problem which arises in solving the mixed inverse spectral problem is studied, and the description of the space of its solutions is given. We apply the developed technique to give sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the solution of the mixed inverse spectral problem.
Privacy and location anonymization in location-based services
Authors: Ling Liu
Venue: SIGSPATIAL Special (2009)

This article presents an overview of privacy problems and solutions to data in location based services, with the emphasis on understanding location privacy issues, alternative models, and architectures. It concludes with an outlook in location privacy research and its impact on mobile Internet, pervasive computing, and geo-spatial data management.
Designing an autonomous helicopter testbed: from conception through implementation
Authors: Kimon Valavanis
Venue:  (2008)

Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently being researched for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue, surveillance, reconnaissance, traffic monitoring, fire detection, pipe and electrical line inspection, and border patrol to name only a few of the application domains. Although small/miniature UAVs, including both Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) vehicles and small helicopters, have shown great potential in both civilian and military domains, including research and development, integration, prototyping, and field testing, these unmanned systems/vehicles are limited to only a handful of university labs. For VTOL type aircraft the number is less than fifteen worldwide! This lack of development is due to both the extensive time and cost required to design, integrate and test a fully operational prototype as well as the shortcomings of published materials to fully describe how to design and build a &ldquo;complete&rdquo; and &ldquo;operational&rdquo; prototype system. This dissertation overcomes existing barriers and limitations by describing and presenting in great detail every technical aspect of designing and integrating a small UAV helicopter including the on-board navigation controller, capable of fully autonomous takeoff, waypoint navigation, and landing. The presented research goes beyond previous works by designing the system as a testbed vehicle. This design aims to provide a general framework that will not only allow researchers the ability to supplement the system with new technologies but will also allow researchers to add innovation to the vehicle itself. Examples include modification or replacement of controllers, updated filtering and fusion techniques, addition or replacement of sensors, vision algorithms, Operating Systems (OS) changes or replacements, and platform modification or replacement. This is supported by the testbed&rsquo;s design to not only adhere to the technology it currently utilizes but to be general enough to adhere to a multitude of technology that have yet to be tested. This research will allow labs without the proper expertise to build a safe and reliable vehicle that can provide them access to real world data thus increasing the effectiveness and validity of their research. It will also allow researchers working in simulation to quickly enter into UAV development without utilizing thousands of man hours to create an unmanned vehicle. The presented research is designed to benefit the entire UAV researching community by allowing in depth access to an area of research that has been typically classified as too expensive and too time consuming to enter.
Privacy Protection and Technology Diffusion: The Case of Electronic Medical Records
Authors: Amalia R. Miller, Catherine Tucker
Venue: Management Science (2009)

This paper quantifies the effect of state privacy regulation on the diffusion of electronic medical records (EMRs). EMRs allow medical providers to store and exchange patient information using computers rather than paper records. Hospitals may be more likely to adopt EMRs if they can reassure patients that their confidentiality is legally protected. Alternatively, privacy protection may inhibit adoption if hospitals cannot benefit from easily exchanging patient information. We find that state privacy regulation restricting hospital release of health information reduces aggregate EMR adoption by hospitals by more than 24%. We present evidence that suggests that this is due to the suppression of network externalities.
Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Using Particle Swarms Optimization Algorithm Based Pareto Optimal Set
Authors: Yan Li, Pan-Pan Jing, De-Feng Hu, Bu-Han Zhang, Cheng-Xiong Mao, Xin-Bo Ruan, Xiao-Yang Miao, De-Feng Chang
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks - Part III (2009)

An improved particle swarms optimization algorithm based on Pareto Optimal set is proposed to optimize the reactive power in power system, which is a multiple objectives optimization problem. The proposed algorithm develops the new fitness assignment and random inertia weight strategy, problem-specific linkages can be learned by examining a randomly chosen collection of points in the search space, the improved algorithm also has the ability to avoid getting trapped in local optima due to prematurity, applying it to the calculation of the power systems of IEEE6-bus and IEEE14-bus, the calculation results prove its effectiveness.
MedLDA: maximum margin supervised topic models for regression and classification
Authors: Jun Zhu, Amr Ahmed, Eric P. Xing
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning (2009)

Supervised topic models utilize document's side information for discovering predictive low dimensional representations of documents; and existing models apply likelihood-based estimation. In this paper, we present a max-margin supervised topic model for both continuous and categorical response variables. Our approach, the maximum entropy discrimination latent Dirichlet allocation (MedLDA), utilizes the max-margin principle to train supervised topic models and estimate predictive topic representations that are arguably more suitable for prediction. We develop efficient variational methods for posterior inference and demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively the advantages of MedLDA over likelihood-based topic models on movie review and 20 Newsgroups data sets.
A scenario-based stochastic programming model for the control or dummy wafers downgrading problem
Authors: Shu-Hsing Chung, Yi-Shu Yang
Venue: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (2009)

The subject of this paper is to study a realistic planning environment in wafer fabrication for the control or dummy (C-D) wafers problem with uncertain demand. The demand of each product is assumed with a geometric Brownian motion and approximated by a finite discrete set of scenarios. A two-stage stochastic programming model is developed based on scenarios and solved by a deterministic equivalent large linear programming model. The model explicitly considers the objective to minimize the total cost of C-D wafers. A real-world example is given to illustrate the practicality of a stochastic approach. The results are better in comparison with deterministic linear programming by using expectation instead of stochastic demands. The model improved the performance of control and dummy wafers management and the flexibility of determining the downgrading policy. Copyright &copy; 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Copyright Licenses Reasoning an OWL-DL Ontology
Authors: Roberto García, Rosa Gil
Venue: Proceeding of the 2009 conference on Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channelling the Legal Information Flood (2009)

In order to extract the full potential from Internet-wide content sharing and reuse, the underlying copyright issues must be taken into account. The novel requirements are not satisfied by traditional Digital Rights Management. Open licensing initiatives seem more appropriate, but they lack the required computerised support. Our proposal facilitates interoperation while providing a rich framework that accommodates copyright law and copes with custom licensing schemes. It is based on the Description Logic variant of the Web Ontology Language (OWL-DL) and constitutes an ontology that conceptualizes the copyright domain. The ontology provides the building blocks for flexible machine-understandable licenses and facilitates implementation because DL reasoners can be directly used for license checking. However, some preliminary transformations of the licenses models are required in order to overcome the Open World Assumption inherent in OWL-DL, which limits DL-based license reasoning.
Parallel method of moments analysis of microstrip structures using the MPI library
Authors: Eugenio Jimenez, Francisco Cabrera
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on European computing conference (2008)

In this paper we will present a parallel Method of Moments (MoM for short) technique using the MPI library. Here, the MoM is used to analyze microstrip structures. The main goals to achieve are efficient parallel coefficient computation and efficient linear equation system solving. The efficiency and accuracy of the parallel-processing MoM code is analyzed trough several examples.
On the number of α-power-free binary words for 2<α≤7/3
Authors: Vincent D. Blondel, Julien Cassaigne, Raphaël M. Jungers
Venue: Theoretical Computer Science (2009)

We study the number u"@a(n) of @a-power-free binary words of length n, and the asymptotics of this number when n tends to infinity, for a fixed rational number @a in (2,7/3]. For any such @a, we prove a structure result that allows us to describe constructively the sequence u"@a(n) as a 2-regular sequence. This provides an algorithm that computes the number u"@a(n) in logarithmic time, for fixed @a. Then, generalizing recent results on 2^+-free words, we describe the asymptotic behaviour of u"@a(n) in terms of joint spectral quantities of a pair of matrices that one can efficiently construct, given a rational number @a. For @a=7/3, we compute the automaton and give sharp estimates for the asymptotic behaviour of u"@a(n).
A Personalized Agents Platform Design and Implementation for Personalized Education
Authors: Apple W. P. Fok, Xin Xiao, Yuanchun Shi, Horace H. S. Ip
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Towards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences: Sharing Good Practices of Research, Experimentation and Innovation (2005)

Personalized Education (PE) addresses the opportunities and necessities of integrating a diverse range of technologies to support individualized learning. This paper introduces a multi-agents architecture, based on the Smart Platform [1] and the detailed agent design for a PE System (PES). Specifically, to deliver personalized education services, PES consists of seven personalized education agents (PEAs) that coordinate with each other to provide a range of supportive functions that include personalized content search, static and dynamic user modeling, learning plan generation, as well as recommendations and communication services. A prototype of PES has been implemented using a combination of JAVA and.NET technologies and experimental results show that the proposed framework of personalized agents are able to deliver the required services in a flexible and efficient manner in terms of functionality, scalability, load-balancing and robustness.
Cambridge Studies in Intellectual Property Rights, 1st edition
Authors: Mark J. Davison
Venue: The Legal Protection Of Databases (2007)

Mark Davison examines several legal models designed to protect databases, and specifically, the E.U. Directive--the history of its adoption and its transposition into national laws. Davison compares the Directive with various American legislative proposals, as well as the principles of misappropriation that are behind them. In addition, the book contains a commentary on the appropriateness of the various models in the context of arguments for international agreement on the topic. 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
Self-deceptive decision making: normative and descriptive insights
Authors: Jonathan Y. Ito, David V. Pynadath, Stacy C. Marsella
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

Computational modeling of human belief maintenance and decision-making processes has become increasingly important for a wide range of applications. We present a frame-work for modeling the psychological phenomenon of self-deception in a decision-theoretic framework. Specifically, we model the self-deceptive behavior of wishful thinking as a psychological bias towards the belief in a particularly desirable situation or state. By leveraging the structures and axioms of Expected Utility (EU) Theory we are able to operationalize both the determination and the application of the desired belief state with respect to the decision-making process of expected utility maximization. While we categorize our framework as a descriptive model of human decision making, we show that in certain circumstances the realized expected utility of an action biased by wishful thinking can exceed that of an action motivated purely by the maximization of perceived expected utility. Finally, we show that our framework of self-deception and wishful thinking has the descriptive flexibility to account for the inconsistencies high-lighted by the Common Ratio Effect and the Allais Paradox.
An agent-based simulation model for analyzing the governance of the Brazilian Financial System
Authors: Rosalvo Ermes Streit, Denis Borenstein
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

Regulation can play an important role in effectively managing systemic risk while providing accountability to all affected governments. IMF points out weak governance structures as one of the main causes for financial/economical crisis. However, research in this area is still limited. One of the reasons is the inherent complexity of the public sector governance notion. In this research, the regulatory governance of the financial sector is conceived as a complex system, in which governance is perceived as a phenomenon resulting from the interactions among all the actors that influence or are influenced by regulatory activities within the financial sector. An agent-based simulation was developed to analyze and evaluate the emergent behaviors from the governance in the Brazilian finance sector under different macroeconomics variables and different attitudes, perceptions and desires of economic and political actors. The agent-based model is combined with an econometric model, which is intended to characterize the macroeconomic environment. The regulatory environment is modeled by computational agents using BDI (beliefs-desires-intentions) architecture. The agents have beliefs about their environment and desires they want to satisfy, thus leading them to create intentions to act. The agents' behavior was modeled using fuzzy rules built by means of content analysis of newspapers and in-depth interviews with experts from the financial area. Computational experiments demonstrate the potential of the agent-based model simulation in the study of complex environments involving regulatory governance.
Digitizing the flea market: eBay as a data source for historic collections
Authors: Snowden Becker
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2009)

The online auction site eBay has overtaken face-to-face transactions as the primary means of doing business for collectors and sellers of unique and ephemeral materials. Historical societies, museums, and archives also increasingly collect ephemera as records of social and cultural history. This presentation argues that the digitized flea market, as epitomized by eBay, replaces in-person sales while also providing a stream of rich information about a previously invisible, unquantifiable marketplace. Furthermore, identifying factors that influence collectibles buyers' behavior in online auction sales can also shed light on factors affecting user behaviors in digital libraries. Data from a survey of over 1,000 recent home movie auction listings on eBay suggest how eBay may be used as a data source by collectors, as well as the users and designers of digital libraries.