ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
On expected constant-round protocols for Byzantine agreement
Authors: Jonathan Katz, Chiu-Yuen Koo
Venue: Journal of Computer and System Sciences (2009)

In a seminal paper, Feldman and Micali show an n-party Byzantine agreement protocol in the plain model that tolerates t
Fractal finite element method based shape sensitivity analysis of mixed-mode fracture
Authors: R. M. Reddy, B. N. Rao
Venue: Finite Elements in Analysis and Design (2008)

In this paper, a new fractal finite element based method for continuum-based shape sensitivity analysis for a crack in a homogeneous, isotropic, and two-dimensional linear-elastic body subject to mixed-mode (modes I and II) loading conditions, is presented. The method is based on the material derivative concept of continuum mechanics, and direct differentiation. Parametric study is carried out to examine the effects of the similarity ratio, the number of transformation terms, and the integration order on the quality of the numerical solutions. Three numerical examples which include both mode-I and mixed-mode problems, are presented to calculate the first-order derivative of the J-integral or stress-intensity factors. The results show that first-order sensitivities of J-integral or stress-intensity factors obtained using the proposed method are in excellent agreement with the reference solutions obtained using the finite-difference method for the structural and crack geometries considered in this study.
Graph mining: laws, generators and tools
Authors: Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (2008)

How do graphs look like? How do they evolve over time? How can we generate realistic-looking graphs? We review some static and temporal 'laws,' and we describe the "Kronecker" graph generator, which naturally matches all of the known properties of real graphs. Moreover, we present tools for discovering anomalies and patterns in two types of graphs, static and time-evolving. For the former, we present the 'CenterPiece' subgraphs (CePS), which expects q query nodes (eg., suspicious and finds the node that is best connected to all q of them (eg., the master mind of a criminal group). We also show how to compute CenterPiece subgraphs efficiently. For the time evolving graphs, we present tensor-based methods, and apply them on real data, like the DBLP author-paper dataset, where they are able to find natural research communities, and track their evolution. Finally, we also briefly mention some results on influence and virus propagation on real graphs, as well as on the emerging map/reduce approach and its impact on large graph mining.
Effect of polishing pad with holes in electro-chemical mechanical planarization
Authors: Sukhoon Jeong, Sangjik Lee, Haedo Jeong
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2008)

Electro-chemical mechanical planarization (ECMP) process dissolves copper ions electrochemically by applying an anodic potential on the copper surface in an aqueous electrolyte, and then removes a copper (Cu) complex layer by the mechanical abrasion of a polishing pad or abrasives in the electrolyte. The ECMP process is a low pressure polishing method for metals such as copper, aluminium (Al) and tungsten (W) on dielectric materials such as silicon dioxide, low-k (LK) and ultra low-k (ULK) dielectrics, comparing to the amount of defects by the traditional Cu chemical mechanical planarization (CMP). The polishing pad used in the ECMP process is a conventional closed cell type pad (IC 1400K-groove pad) with holes. It supplies the aqueous electrolyte to the copper surface and removes the copper complex layer. The material removal rate (MRR) and MRR profile were simulated and tested according to the changes of the wafer overhang distance (WOD) from the platen and the electric contact area (ECA). In order to derive the design rule of the system, the experimental results are compared with the simulation results. After the ECMP process, it was verified that the within wafer non-uniformity (WIWNU) was lower than 2% using the relatively uniform ECA pad (C-type) under the smallest WOD condition. The experimental results well matched the simulated results.
The DIRAC AWEAR audio-visual platform for detection of unexpected and incongruent events
Authors: Jörn Anemüller, Jörg-Hendrik Bach, Barbara Caputo, Michal Havlena, Luo Jie, Hendrik Kayser, Bastian Leibe, Petr Motlicek, Tomas Pajdla, Misha Pavel, Akihiko Torii, Luc Van Gool, Alon Zweig, Hynek Hermansky
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (2008)

It is of prime importance in everyday human life to cope with and respond appropriately to events that are not foreseen by prior experience. Machines to a large extent lack the ability to respond appropriately to such inputs. An important class of unexpected events is defined by incongruent combinations of inputs from different modalities and therefore multimodal information provides a crucial cue for the identification of such events, e.g., the sound of a voice is being heard while the person in the field-of-view does not move her lips. In the project DIRAC ("Detection and Identification of Rare Audio-visual Cues") we have been developing algorithmic approaches to the detection of such events, as well as an experimental hardware platform to test it. An audio-visual platform ("AWEAR" - audio-visual wearable device) has been constructed with the goal to help users with disabilities or a high cognitive load to deal with unexpected events. Key hardware components include stereo panoramic vision sensors and 6-channel worn-behind-the-ear (hearing aid) microphone arrays. Data have been recorded to study audio-visual tracking, a/v scene/object classification and a/v detection of incongruencies.
A simple method for testing the electromigration resistance of solders
Authors: M. Saka, T. Kohara, T. Hasegawa, M. Yamashita
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2008)

Recently, the size of solder bump interconnects have been significantly reduced with the advent of high-density packaging, and thus the evaluation of electromigration in solder bumps has become necessary. The present paper proposes a simple method to test the electromigration resistance of Pb-free solders. One of the key points of the present method is the fabrication of a simple solder sample that can produce sufficient current density to cause electromigration. Moreover, the actual local temperature of a small area subjected to electromigration in the sample was measured by a direct method. A right-angled diamond-shaped hole was introduced in a thin film of solder using a focused-ion-beam system. A direct current was supplied to the film far from the hole, perpendicular to the diagonal of the hole. In this way, the current density was concentrated near to the corner of the hole, and the value of this was obtained through a theoretical analysis. It was noted that the steady temperature in the film along a line extending from the diagonal, remained constant, although the current density decreased gradually far from the corner. Therefore, the temperature at a position near the corner, where electromigration takes place, can easily be found by measuring the temperature far from the corner. The temperature was measured directly under current flow conditions by utilizing the chemical reagents with known melting points. Finally, by measuring the ratio of hillock volume to the time for the current supply as a measure of the atomic flux divergence due to electromigration, the corresponding resistances of some Pb-free solders to electromigration were evaluated.
Recognition of interval Boolean functions
Authors: Ondřej Čepek, David Kronus, Petr Kučera
Venue: Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (2008)

Interval functions constitute a special class of Boolean functions for which it is very easy and fast to determine their functional value on a specified input vector. The value of an n-variable interval function specified by interval [a,b] (where a and b are n-bit binary numbers) is true if and only if the input vector viewed as an n-bit number belongs to the interval [a,b]. In this paper we study the problem of deciding whether a given disjunctive normal form represents an interval function and if so then we also want to output the corresponding interval. For general Boolean functions this problem is co-NP-hard. In our article we present a polynomial time algorithm which works for monotone functions. We shall also show that given a Boolean function f belonging to some class ${\cal C}$ which is closed under partial assignment and for which we are able to solve the satisfiability problem in polynomial time, we can also decide whether f is an interval function in polynomial time. We show how to recognize a "renamable" variant of interval functions, i.e., their variable complementation closure. Another studied problem is the problem of finding an interval extension of partially defined Boolean functions. We also study some other properties of interval functions.
Cyclops: the AS-level connectivity observatory
Authors: Ying-Ju Chi, Ricardo Oliveira, Lixia Zhang
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2008)

In this paper we present Cyclops, a system that collects and displays information of AS-level connectivity extracted from looking glasses, route-servers and BGP tables and updates of hundreds of routers across the Internet. From an operational standpoint, Cyclops provides ISPs a view of how their connectivity is perceived from the outside, enabling a comparison between their observed connectivity and their intended connectivity. ISPs can use the tool to detect and diagnose BGP misconfigurations, route leakages or hijacks based on false AS path. From a research standpoint, Cyclops is able to provide a quick snapshot of the AS-level connectivity of each network, and provides mechanisms to infer the root cause of BGP (de)peerings, which is an important input to the study of AS-level topology models and inter-domain routing protocols.
Cross-Situation Trust Reasoning
Authors: Mozhgan Tavakolifard, Svein J. Knapskog, Peter Herrmann
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03 (2008)

We propose an ontology-based approach for inferences linking trust information in two different situations. That reasoning process can augment the typically sparse trust information, by inferring the missing information from other situational conditions, and can better support situation-aware trust management. Our work is more comprehensive in comparison with other models and considers various aspects of the relationship between situation-awareness and trust management.
A comparative study of survival models for breast cancer prognostication based on microarray data
Authors: B. Haibe-Kains, C. Desmedt, C. Sotiriou, G. Bontempi
Venue: Bioinformatics (2008)

Motivation: Survival prediction of breast cancer (BC) patients independently of treatment, also known as prognostication, is a complex task since clinically similar breast tumors, in addition to be molecularly heterogeneous, may exhibit different clinical outcomes. In recent years, the analysis of gene expression profiles by means of sophisticated data mining tools emerged as a promising technology to bring additional insights into BC biology and to improve the quality of prognostication. The aim of this work is to assess quantitatively the accuracy of prediction obtained with state-of-the-art data analysis techniques for BC microarray data through an independent and thorough framework. Results: Due to the large number of variables, the reduced amount of samples and the high degree of noise, complex prediction methods are highly exposed to performance degradation despite the use of cross-validation techniques. Our analysis shows that the most complex methods are not significantly better than the simplest one, a univariate model relying on a single proliferation gene. This result suggests that proliferation might be the most relevant biological process for BC prognostication and that the loss of interpretability deriving from the use of overcomplex methods may be not sufficiently counterbalanced by an improvement of the quality of prediction. Availability: The comparison study is implemented in an R package called survcomp and is available from http://www.ulb.ac.be/di/map/bhaibeka/software/survcomp/. Contact: bhaibeka@ulb.ac.be Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Efficiently finding unusual shapes in large image databases
Authors: Li Wei, Eamonn Keogh, Xiaopeng Xi, Melissa Yoder
Venue: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (2008)

Among the visual features of multimedia content, shape is of particular interest because humans can often recognize objects solely on the basis of shape. Over the past three decades, there has been a great deal of research on shape analysis, focusing mostly on shape indexing, clustering, and classification. In this work, we introduce the new problem of finding shape discords, the most unusual shapes in a collection. We motivate the problem by considering the utility of shape discords in diverse domains including zoology, microscopy, anthropology, and medicine. While the brute force search algorithm has quadratic time complexity, we avoid this untenable lethargy by using locality-sensitive hashing to estimate similarity between shapes which enables us to reorder the search more efficiently and thus extract the maximum benefit from an admissible pruning strategy we introduce. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach is empirically linear in time.
New perspectives on network calculus
Authors: Xiaoyue Jiang
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (2008)

Originated in communications engineering and theoretically rooted in idempotent analysis, the theory of network calculus (NetCal) presents an elegant methodology for offering performance guarantees in deterministic queuing systems. In this research we developed two new formulations of Net-Cal, each of which bears some unique insights. A fuzzy formulation maps NetCal's (min,+) convolution operator to the addition of fuzzy numbers. A conjugate perspective based on the notion of Legendre transform leads to a new NetCal formulation to be termed as CT-NetCal, which possesses some distinct advantages in modeling, computation and interpretation.
Reduction of atmospheric and topographic effect on Landsat TM data for forest classification
Authors: H. Huang, P. Gong, N. Clinton, F. Hui
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

The incident radiance in forested areas with rugged terrain varies greatly with the changes in solar elevation and azimuth, slope and aspect of the terrain, and the relative position of trees. The geotropic nature must be considered in the course of topographic correction. The Sun-Canopy-Sensor (SCS) model is introduced to substitute the cosine correction in a physical model. We used an atmospheric simulation code, MODTRAN, and a digital elevation model (DEM) to calculate the path radiance, downwards diffuse radiance and two-way transmittance of direct and diffuse light at different altitudes. Based on the atmospheric parameters derived above and the Lambertian assumption, surface reflectance in a forested area was retrieved from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery using a revised physical model. Meanwhile, a smoothed DEM was used to assess the effect of noise on the DEM and misregistration between the DEM and the satellite imagery. Correlation analysis, spectral comparison between sunlit and shaded slopes and a support vector machine (SVM) classification were performed to assess the effect of the revised radiometric correction algorithm. Results indicate that the revised physical model with smoothed DEM is more adequate for forested terrain and more consistent spectra for similar vegetation under different illuminations can be obtained. Finally, higher classification accuracy of forested land can be achieved with the revised correction algorithm compared with the SCS correction and the original physical correction model.
Evaluation of a system to spatially monitor hand planting of pine seedlings
Authors: Timothy P. McDonald, John P. Fulton, Matthew J. Darr, Thomas V. Gallagher
Venue: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (2008)

A tree-planting dibble was outfitted with an accelerometer, a GPS, and associated data acquisition hardware to form a system to map the locations of seedlings as they were planted. The system was worn by a planter and collected a stream of position and maximum acceleration data at 1-s intervals. An experiment was conducted to test the performance of the data acquisition system in which a planter was videotaped while using the instrumented dibble. The video provided information on timing of the dibble ground impacts that could be synchronized with the output of the dibble data acquisition system. The positions of the planted seedlings (194 total) were also mapped with a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS survey-grade system. Procedures were developed to process the instrumented dibble output data stream in two stages into a map of positions. The stages were (a) define the level of acceleration corresponding to an impact of the dibble with the ground, and (b) associate groups of impacts with the planting of individual seedlings. Results showed the procedures for detecting and mapping the seedling locations were robust and accurate in counting the number of seedlings and in defining their general location. Absolute accuracy of the seedling positions was, however, less than would be required to identify with certainty any individual seedling at some time in the future. Average deviation between dibble-defined and RTK position was 4.5m, three times the within-row spacing of the seedlings. The level of accuracy could be improved if a higher quality GPS were used in the data acquisition system. The procedures developed to interpret dibble output data were tested without modification on four other sites using different operators. Estimates of total numbers of tree planted based on the dibble output were found to be accurate to within 7%.
A Large-Scale Evaluation of an E-mail Management Assistant
Authors: Wayne Wobcke, Alfred Krzywicki, Yiu-Wa Chan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02 (2008)

EMMA is an e-mail management assistant based on Ripple Down Rules, providing a high degree of classification accuracy while simplifying the task of maintaining the consistency of the rule base. A Naive Bayes algorithm is used to improve the usability of EMMA by suggesting keywords to help the user define rules. In this paper, we report on an experimental evaluation of EMMA on 16 998 pre-classified messages. The aim of the evaluation was to show that the Ripple Down Rule technique used in EMMA applies to large-scale data sets in realistic organizational contexts. The results showed conclusively that EMMA attained the agreed success criteria for the evaluation and that the knowledge acquisition method used in EMMA outperforms standard machine learning methods.
PowerPoint Multimedia Presentations in Computer Science Education: What Do Users Need?
Authors: Elke I. Reuss, Beat Signer, Moira C. Norrie
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society on HCI and Usability for Education and Work (2008)

PowerPoint is one of the most frequently used tools to present multimedia for educational purposes. Nevertheless, little is known about the users' needs when using PowerPoint during lecturing. Our study focused on the presenter's needs in this context of use. We interviewed nine university lecturers from the computer science department by means of a questionnaire. The results show that users require features that are not yet realised with PowerPoint. For example, the control and use of other media should be adequately integrated. Or the navigation within the slide collection should be improved to better meet the users' needs. Based on our findings, we outline required system features and suggest solutions in form of a prototype.
A new approach for epileptic seizure detection using adaptive neural network
Authors: Gülay Tezel, Yüksel özbay
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

This paper presents new neural network models with adaptive activation function (NNAAF) to detect epileptic seizure. Our NNAAF models included three types named as NNAAF-1, NNAAF-2 and NNAAF-3. The activation function of hidden neuron in the model of NNAAF-1 is sigmoid function with free parameters. In the second model, NNAAF-2, activation function of hidden neuron is sum of sigmoid function with free parameters and sinusoidal function with free parameters. In the third model, NNAAF-3, hidden neurons' activation function is Morlet Wavelet function with free parameters. In addition, we implemented traditional multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network (NN) model with fixed sigmoid activation function in the hidden layer to compare NNAAF models. The proposed models were trained and tested using 5-fold cross-validation to prove robustness of these models and to find the best model. We achieved 100% average sensitivity, average specificity, and approximately 100% average classification rate in all the models. It was seen that their speeds and the number of maximum iteration were changed for each model. The training time and the number of maximum iteration were reduced on about 50% using NNAAF-3 model. Hence it can be remarkable that NNAAF-3 is more suitable than the other models for real-time application.
Alternative interval estimation for parameters of bivariate exponential model with time varying covariate
Authors: Jayanthi Arasan, Mary Lunn
Venue: Computational Statistics (2008)

This paper investigates several alternative methods of constructing confidence interval estimates based on the bootstrap and jackknife techniques for the parameters of a parallel two-component system model with dependent failure and a time varying covariate, when data is censored. This model is an extension of the bivariate exponential model. Bootstrap confidence interval techniques, the bootstrap-t, bootstrap-percentile and BCa methods are compared with the confidence interval based on the jackknife via coverage probability study using simulated data. The results clearly indicate that the jackknife technique works far better than any of the bootstrap techniques when dealing with censored data.
Study of multi-branch structure of Universal Learning Networks
Authors: Shingo Mabu, Kaoru Shimada, Kotaro Hirasawa, Jinglu Hu
Venue: Applied Soft Computing (2009)

In this paper, multi-branch structure of Universal Learning Networks (ULNs) is studied to verify its effectiveness for obtaining compact models, which have neurons connected with other neurons using more than two branches having nonlinear functions. Multi-branch structure has been proved to have higher representation/generalization ability and lower computational cost than conventional neural networks because of the nonlinear function of the multi-branches and the reduction of the number of neurons to be used. In addition, learning of delay elements of multi-branch ULNs has improved their potential to build up a compact dynamical model with higher performances and lower computational cost when applied for identifying dynamical systems.