ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Human facial illustrations: Creation and psychophysical evaluation
Authors: Bruce Gooch, Erik Reinhard, Amy Gooch
Venue: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (2004)

We present a method for creating black-and-white illustrations from photographs of human faces. In addition an interactive technique is demonstrated for deforming these black-and-white facial illustrations to create caricatures which highlight and exaggerate representative facial features. We evaluate the effectiveness of the resulting images through psychophysical studies to assess accuracy and speed in both recognition and learning tasks. These studies show that the facial illustrations and caricatures generated using our techniques are as effective as photographs in recognition tasks. For the learning task we find that illustrations are learned two times faster than photographs and caricatures are learned one and a half times faster than photographs. Because our techniques produce images that are effective at communicating complex information, they are useful in a number of potential applications, ranging from entertainment and education to low bandwidth telecommunications and psychology research.
A study of computer-integrated education in secondary schools in nyanza province, kenya
Authors: Florence Yukabet Odera
Venue:  (2003)

This study focuses on computer-integrated education in public secondary schools in the Nyanza Province, Kenya with the aim to investigate how computers are used in schools and to provide evidence on the obstacles that inhibit effective implementation of computers in instruction and learning. It examines different government and school policies regarding the use of computers in the classroom against the background of the use of computers in teaching and learning in developed and developing countries. Data were collected from the Ministry of Education, the directorate, curriculum specialist, principals and heads of department. An in-depth investigation was also conducted on a sample of computer teachers, principles and heads of department representing rural, urban and suburban areas and the collected data analysed through the use of descriptive statistical techniques. The research revealed that the Kenya Government has formulated a computer education implementation policy in support of the use of computers in secondary schools. However, no written policy document has been circulated to schools. It has further been revealed that the government has no funds for purchasing computers for schools and that no evaluation has been done to assess the effectiveness of computer education in schools. Principals reported that they have a computer policy and that they practise whole-school integration of computers in the teaching of computer literacy, administrative work and traditional subjects such as Accounting, English language, Mathematics and Science Education. Computer teachers regarded themselves competent with computer literacy skills and with the teaching of word processing, spreadsheets, data bases and programming. They are less confident to integrate computers into the teaching of traditional subjects, although some of them integrate computers into the teaching of various subject topics. Shortcomings such as a lack of teacher training in the use of computer technology in the teaching of subjects, a lack of adequate computers and a lack of suitable software were exposed by the study. Systematic pre-service and in-service training of teachers in CIE as well as a model for the re-training of teachers and school principals in CIE were proposed.
Starting an intergenerational technology design team: a case study
Authors: Kendra Knudtzon, Allison Druin, Nancy Kaplan, Kathryn Summers, Yoram Chisik, Rahul Kulkarni, Stuart Moulthrop, Holly Weeks, Ben Bederson
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children (2003)

This paper presents a case study of the first three months of a new intergenerational design team with children ages 10--13. It discusses the research and design methods used for working with children of this age group, the challenges and opportunities of starting a new team, and the lessons learned.
The ToxicFarm Integrated Cooperation Framework for Virtual Teams
Authors: Claude Godart, Pascal Molli, Gérald Oster, Olivier Perrin, Hala Skaf-Molli, Pradeep Ray, Fethi Rabhi
Venue: Distributed and Parallel Databases (2004)

Developing a collaboration solution, that scales to an entire organization, that offers an integrated collection of cooperation tools, that is general enough to address a large range of applications, and that is easy to deploy for most people, is still an open challenge. This paper presents ToxicFarm services that are an integral part of a framework for hosting Internet virtual teams. The originality of this work is in providing a synthesis between contributions from different domains, including version management in software engineering, process management in data engineering, and awareness in groupware tools. The paper describes the overall services offered, discusses design choices for their integration and implementation, presents relations with existing work and describes their use in several emerging e-business application domains, such as e-finance, e-learning and e-telecom.
From first contact to close encounters: a developmentally deep perceptual system for a humanoid robot
Authors: Paul Michael Fitzpatrick
Venue:  (2003)

This thesis presents a perceptual system for a humanoid robot that integrates abilities such as object localization and recognition with the deeper developmental machinery required to forge those competences out of raw physical experiences. It shows that a robotic platform can build up and maintain a system for object localization, segmentation, and recognition, starting from very little. What the robot starts with is a direct solution to achieving figure/ground separation: it simply &lsquo;pokes around&rsquo; in a region of visual ambiguity and watches what happens. If the arm passes through an area, that area is recognized as free space. If the arm collides with an object, causing it to move, the robot can use that motion to segment the object from the background. Once the robot can acquire reliable segmented views of objects, it learns from them, and from then on recognizes and segments those objects without further contact. Both low-level and high-level visual features can also be learned in this way, and examples are presented for both: orientation detection and affordance recognition, respectively. The motivation for this work is simple. Training on large corpora of annotated real-world data has proven crucial for creating robust solutions to perceptual problems such as speech recognition and face detection. But the powerful tools used during training of such systems are typically stripped away at deployment. Ideally they should remain, particularly for unstable tasks such as object detection, where the set of objects needed in a task tomorrow might be different from the set of objects needed today. The key limiting factor is access to training data, but as this thesis shows, that need not be a problem on a robotic platform that can actively probe its environment, and carry out experiments to resolve ambiguity. This work is an instance of a general approach to learning a new perceptual judgment: find special situations in which the perceptual judgment is easy and study these situations to find correlated features that can be observed more generally. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Scalar Metric for Temporal Locality and Estimation of Cache Performance
Authors: Juha Alakarhu, Jarkko Niittylahti
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe - Volume 1 (2004)

A scalar metric for temporal locality is proposed. The metric is based on LRU stack distance. This paper shows that the cache hit rate can be estimated based on the proposed metric (an error of a few percents can be expected). The metric alleviates high-level memory system outlining and enables using stack processing in run-time locality analysis.
CodSim&mdash;A Combined Delay Fault Simulator
Authors: Wangqi Qiu, Xiang Lu, Zhuo Li, D. M. H. Walker, Weiping Shi
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems (2003)

Delay faults are an increasingly important test challenge. Traditional delay fault models are incomplete in that they only model a subset of delay defect behaviors. To solve this problem acombined delay fault (CDF) model has been developed, which models delay faults caused by the combination of spot defects, parametric process variation, and capacitive coupling. The spot defects are modeled as both resistive opens and shorts. The CDF model has been implemented in the CodSim delay fault simulator which gives more realistic delay fault coverage. The fault coverage of traditional test sets has been evaluated on the ISCAS85 circuits.
A public sector case study on evaluating and managing the benefits of IS/IT
Authors: Chad Lin, Graham Pervan
Venue: Technologies & methodologies for evaluating information technology in business (2003)

The issue of expected and actual benefits realized from IS/IT investments has generated a significant amount of debate in the IS/ IT literature among researchers, academics, and practitioners. This is as true in Australia as it is in the rest of the developed world. Thus, a detailed program of research into the current Australian practice and processes of IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits realization was initiated. As part of this research program, an in-depth case study of these practices and processes in a large government agency, with a mix of insourced and outsourced IS/IT activities, was conducted. A number of issues emerged from the analysis of the text data. Key issues are presented below in some detail.
Parallel bulk-loading of spatial data
Authors: Apostolos Papadopoulos, Yannis Manolopoulos
Venue: Parallel Computing (2003)

Spatial database systems have been introduced in order to support non-traditional data types and more complex queries. Although bulk-loading techniques for access methods have been studied in the spatial database literature, parallel bulk-loading has not been addressed in a parallel spatial database context. Therefore, we study the problem of parallel bulk-loading, assuming that an R-tree like access method need to be constructed, from a spatial relation that is distributed to a number of processors. Analytical cost models and experimental evaluation based on real-life and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the index construction time can be reduced considerably by exploiting parallelism. I/O costs, CPU time and communication costs are taken into consideration in order to investigate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
Asymmetric Cryptographic Algorithms
Authors: I. N. Kovalenko, A. I. Kochubinskii
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2003)

The concept of asymmetric cryptographic algorithms introduced by W. Diffie and M. Hellman in 1976 is considered. The problems of factorization of large integers and finding discrete logarithms for elements of finite large-order groups are presented. It is proved that asymmetric cryptographic algorithms based on the problem of finding a discrete logarithm for points of an elliptic curve over a finite field should be used in modern information technology.
Practical shadow mapping
Authors: Stefan Brabec, Thomas Annen, Hans-Peter Seidel
Venue: Journal of Graphics Tools (2002)

In this paper, we present several methods that can greatly improve image quality when using the shadow mapping algorithm. Shadow artifacts introduced by shadow mapping are mainly due to low resolution shadow maps and/or the limited numerical precision used when performing the shadow test. These problems especially arise when the light source's viewing frustum, from which the shadow map is generated, is not adjusted to the actual camera view. We show how a tight-fitting frustum can be computed such that the shadow mapping algorithm concentrates on the visible parts of the scene and takes advantage of nearly the full available precision. Furthermore, we recommend uniformly spaced depth values in contrast to perspectively spaced depths in order to equally sample the scene seen from the light source.
A Fourier Spectrum-Based Approach to Represent Decision Trees for Mining Data Streams in Mobile Environments
Authors: Hillol Kargupta, Byung-Hoon Park
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2004)

Abstract--This paper presents a novel Fourier analysis-based approach to combine, transmit, and visualize decision trees in a mobile environment. Fourier representation of a decision tree has several interesting properties that are particularly useful for mining data streams from small mobile computing devices connected through limited-bandwidth wireless networks. This paper presents algorithms to compute the Fourier spectrum of a decision tree and outlines a technique to construct a decision tree from its Fourier spectrum. It offers a framework to aggregate decision trees in their Fourier representations. It also describes the MobiMine, a mobile data stream mining system, that uses the developed techniques for mining stock-market data from handheld devices.
A punched-card reader for the blind programmer with synthesized voice output
Authors: James C. Swail, Ching Y. Suen
Venue: Issue 22 (May 1977) (1977)

Through digital conversion of codes, a punched-card reader with synthesized voice output has been implemented. As soon as a column of holes passes the photocells, the machine will automatically pronounce the character.
Advances and Trends on Decentralized Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems
Authors: J. F. Sánchez-Blanco
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Computers (2004)

Due to the importance that has covered in our days, thestudy of logical control of discrete events systems (DES),this paper presents the main advances obtained on DecentralizedSupervisory Control of DES.This survey describesthe state of the art of such research field, to stablishthe trends that permit to realize future works and applications,in this control area.
On the Evolution of Clusters of Near-Duplicate Web Pages
Authors: Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Marc Najork
Venue: Proceedings of the First Conference on Latin American Web Congress (2003)

This paper expands on a 1997 study of the amount and distribution of near-duplicate pages on the World Wide Web. We downloaded a set of 150 million web pages on a weekly basisover the span of 11 weeks. We then determined which of these pages are near-duplicates of one another, and tracked how clusters of near-duplicate documents evolved over time. We found that 29.2% of allweb pages are very similar to other pages, and that 22.2% are virtually identical to other pages. We also found that clusters of near-duplicate documents are fairly stable: Two documents that are near-duplicates of one another are very likely to still be near-duplicates 10 weeks later. This result is of significant relevance to search engines: Web crawlers can be fairly confident that two pages that have been found to be near-duplicates of one another will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, and may thus decide to recrawl only one version of that page, or at least to lower the download priority of the other versions,thereby freeing up crawling resources that can be brought to bear more productively somewhere else.
An overview of systems design and development methodologies with regard to the involvement of users and other stakeholders
Authors: Shawren Singh, Paula Kotzé
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology (2003)

Systems development methodologies have been developed with the purpose of designing and developing effective information systems. This paper looks at different types of systems development methodologies with particular emphasis being placed on how the human component and other stakeholders are involved or catered for. One general critical flaw we have identified in these processes is that the interface design is not effectively conducted or implemented, but neither are the many other stakeholder issues addressed. This paper investigates this lack of attention and recommend some improvements.
An Improved Discrete Wavelet Transform Preconditioner for Dense Matrix Problems
Authors: Judith M. Ford
Venue: SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (2003)

We present a new preconditioning method for a class of dense matrices, based on sparse approximation in a discrete wavelet basis. We first prove theoretical results that enable us to reduce the cost of an existing wavelet-based preconditioner and then incorporate those ideas into the design of our new preconditioner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with numerical examples drawn from one-dimensional physical problems and indicate how the method could be incorporated into a Kronecker product--based strategy for solving problems in higher dimensions. A notable feature of our new method is that it enables an optimal wavelet level to be chosen automatically, making it more robust than previous wavelet preconditioners that depend on the user choosing an appropriate level. Thus we are now closer to the ultimate goal of a black-box preconditioner for dense matrices.
Describing software design in Ada
Authors: Grady Booch
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1981)

Ada is a tool suitable for the efficient and reliable development of solutions to a large problem domain. To combat the FORTRAN mind set and exploit the full power of the language, top down functional methodo logies are insufficient, and thus an object-oriented methodology is required. This paper provides some observations on such a methodology with subsequent representation of software design in the Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE).
Cl_matcont: a continuation toolbox in Matlab
Authors: A. Dhooge, W. Govaerts, Yu. A. Kuznetsov, W. Mestrom, A. M. Riet
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing (2003)

CL_MATCONT is a Matlab continuation package for the numerical study of a range of parameterized nonlinear problems. In the case of ODEs it allows to compute curves of equilibria, limit point, Hopf points, limit cycles and period doubling bifurcation points of limit cycles. All curves are computed by the same function that implements a prediction-correction continuation algorithm based on the Moore - Penrose matrix pseudo-inverse. The continuation of bifurcation points of equilibria and limit cycles is based on bordering methods and minimally extended systems. Hence no additional unknowns such as singular vectors and eigenvectors are used and no artificial sparsity in the systems is created.The inherent sparsity of the discretized systems for the computation of limit cycles and their bifurcation points is exploited by using the standard Matlab sparse matrix methods.CL_MATCONT furthermore allows to compute solution branches to underdetermined systems of nonlinear equations and parameterized boundary value problems.
R-Histogram: quantitative representation of spatial relations for similarity-based image retrieval
Authors: Yuhang Wang, Fillia Makedon
Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia (2003)

Representation of relative spatial relations between objects is required in many multimedia database applications. Quantitative representation of spatial relations taking into account shape, size, orientation and distance is often required. This cannot be accomplished by assimilating an object to elementary entities such as the centroid or the minimum bounding rectangle. Thus many authors have proposed numerous representations based on the notion of histograms of angles. However, they can only represent directional relations, but not the topological spatial relations "inside" and "overlap." Moreover, distance information is not explicitly taken into account. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a new histogram representation called R-Histogram that extends the histogram of angles by incorporating both angles and labeled distances. Dissimilarity between images is then defined by the distance between corresponding R-Histograms. A prototype Query By Example (QBE) system using the R-Histogram has been implemented. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated with experiments on two databases of 2000 synthetic images.
Scheduling methods for broadcasting multiple continuous media data
Authors: Tomoki Yoshihisa, Masahiko Tsukamoto, Shojiro Nishio
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Multimedia databases (2003)

Recently, various schemes for broadcasting continuous media data such as music or movies have been studied. These schemes reduce the waiting time for playing the data under the continuity condition, i.e., playing continuous media data without any intermittence until the end of the data. These schemes usually employ multiple channels to broadcast the data. However, most clients are not able to receive data from multiple channels concurrently. In this paper, we propose methods for reducing client waiting time for multiple data via a single channel. In our proposed methods, we divide each data into several segments and produce a schedule that includes the first segment of each data more frequent than the rest. By changing the number of segments according to the playback ratio, client waiting time is effectively reduced.
Mockup-driven Fast-prototyping Methodology for Web Requirements Engineering
Authors: Jia Zhang, Carl K. Chang, Jen-Yao Chung
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Computer Software and Applications (2003)

Web application development differs from thedevelopment of traditional software in several significantways; therefore requirements engineering for webapplications entails new demands accordingly. This paperproposes an extreme web requirements engineering - mockup-driven fast-prototyping methodology to helpelicit and finalize system requirements, as well asfacilitate adjustment to quickly changing userrequirements typical to web applications. Supporting theinclusion of customer feedback early in the developmentprocess, this strategy minimizes the risk of wastingvaluable development efforts because of ambiguous orincomplete specifications. Real-life experiences of the useof the methodology in industry are reported as examples.
The Limits of Speculative Trace Reuse on Deeply Pipelined Processors
Authors: Maurício L. Pilla, Amarildo T. da Costa, Felipe M. G. França, Bruce R. Childers, Mary Lou Soffa
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (2003)

Trace reuse improves the performance of processors by skipping the execution of sequences of redundant instructions. However, many reusable traces do not have all of their inputs ready by the time the reuse test is done. For these cases, we developed a new technique called Reuse through Speculation on Traces (RST), where trace inputs may be predicted. This paper studies the limits of RST for modern processors with deep pipelines, as well as the effects of constraining resources on performance.We show that our approach reuses more traces than the non-speculative trace reuse technique, with speedups of 43% over a non-speculative trace reuse and 57% when memory accesses are reused.