ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Prior-based Segmentation and Shape Registration in the Presence of Perspective Distortion
Authors: Tammy Riklin-Raviv, Nahum Kiryati, Nir Sochen
Venue: International Journal of Computer Vision (2007)

Challenging object detection and segmentation tasks can be facilitated by the availability of a reference object. However, accounting for possible transformations between the different object views, as part of the segmentation process, remains difficult. Recent statistical methods address this problem by using comprehensive training data. Other techniques can only accommodate similarity transformations. We suggest a novel variational approach to prior-based segmentation, using a single reference object, that accounts for planar projective transformation. Generalizing the Chan-Vese level set framework, we introduce a novel shape-similarity measure and embed the projective homography between the prior shape and the image to segment within a region-based segmentation functional. The proposed algorithm detects the object of interest, extracts its boundaries, and concurrently carries out the registration to the prior shape. We demonstrate prior-based segmentation on a variety of images and verify the accuracy of the recovered transformation parameters.
Client-driven channel management for wireless LANs
Authors: Arunesh Mishra, Vladimir Brik, Suman Banerjee, Aravind Srinivasan, William Arbaugh
Venue: ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review (2006)

With the explosive growth in the density of 802.11 access points (APs) in the form of hotspots and public/home access networks, coordinating the shared use of spectrum has become an important problem. The irregular coverage topologies present in WLANs due to the vagaries of the indoor RF environment make the channel assignment algorithms in cellular networks inapplicable [1, 2].
Rapid and brief communication: 2D clustering based discriminant analysis for 3D head model classification
Authors: Bo Ma, Hau-San Wong
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2006)

This paper introduces a novel framework for 3D head model recognition based on the recently proposed 2D subspace analysis method. Two main contributions have been made. First, a 2D version of clustering-based discriminant analysis (CDA) is proposed, which combines the capability to model the multiple cluster structure embedded within a single class with the computational advantage that is characteristic of 2D subspace analysis methods. Second, we extend the applications of 2D subspace methods to the field of 3D head model classification by characterizing these models with 2D feature sets.
Advanced 3D Game Programming All in One
Authors: Kenneth C Finney
Venue:  (2005)

Coverage includes- Kenneth Finney teaches game design, development, and prototyping at the Art Institute of Toronto where he is Lead Faculty Member in the Game Art & Design program. He began programming in 1974 and remembers that old HP-1000 with its paper tape and punch cards with a perverse fondness. Finney had been a software engineer from the mid-'80s until the late '90s focusing on advanced technology development. He was a recipient of the prestigious Conference Board of Canada ITX (Innovation in Technology Excellence) Award in 1997 for his work on "InScan," a high-speed document scanning system. He has been an Associate Professor at Seneca College at York University in Toronto, teaching technical writers how to survive in a software development environment. Ken is the creator of the popular Tubettiworld "Online Campaign" Mod and the "QuicknDirty" game management tools for the Delta Force 2 game series from NovaLogic. He is currently working on completing a new and unique action/adventure game based on the original Tubettiworld design using the Torque Game Engine. A comprehensive guide to free or low-cost telephone service using Internet technologies. Suitable for all consumers interested in using this technology. Serves as a useful guide to the purchase and setup of Internet phones and the broadband Internet services required to support them. Written for consumers in simple language and in a hands-on, step-by-step sequence to help readers install and use their Internet phone service.
Flash Out of the Box
Authors: Robert Hoekman
Venue:  (2004)

If you believe the sky really is the limit when it comes to creating unparalleled user experiences and applications for the Web--then Macromedia Flash MX is sure to be your tool of choice. With Flash, you can integrate video, text, audio, and graphics into distinctive and compelling web content, stunningly interactive and expressive user interfaces, and rich applications for the Internet. Flash is all about helping you dramatically enhance the user experience. And Flash Out of the Box is all about helping you think outside of the box to get there--first, by diving into the Flash box and then becoming intimately acquainted with every nook and cranny of it. In Flash Out of the Box, you'll follow and work with a simple box through a "day in the life" style journey. You'll study, use, abuse, and transform the box as you move through exercises that teach you the basics of Flash, and much more, in an entertaining, unforgettable, task-oriented fashion. You'll learn to animate, work with video, load external assets, draw, mask, modularize, and many other things that will be essential as you move into more advanced techniques with other books. It's just you, Flash, and the box, mastering each technique along the way and adding others in a fashion that will let you practice and learn simultaneously. Most Flash tutorials you've looked at are tool-centric, focusing on Flash's individual features and how to use them (an approach that can quickly become tedious), whereas this innovative, engaging, and motivating book is uniquely user-centric. That means it concentrates on you and what you want and need to learn. Each successive lesson anticipates and builds upon your needs, capabilities, and questions as you evolve from Flash beginner to Flash master. Written in a fun and conversational tone, the highly accessible Flash Out of the Box makes learning Flash MX 2004 intuitive, logical, and, most of all, fun.
Risk analysis using Monte Carlo simulation and Bayesian networks
Authors: Cláudio Flores, Fernando Makiyama, Silvia Nassar, Paulo Freitas, Carlos Jacinto
Venue: Proceedings of the 38th conference on Winter simulation (2006)

The management of a global activity that has individual tasks as its components is very difficult, because an unexpected interruption in any individual task can create extra costs or even disrupt the whole activity. To resolve this problem, this work presents the development of a decision-support tool using Bayesian networks (BN). Our research illustrates how to model the relationship between the total time of a process and the time of the individual tasks selected as relevant. We use a Monte Carlo simulation to construct dynamic scenarios on the BN which allow us to track and manage a global activity. The BN is useful because the activities have random characteristics and the information about individual tasks can be propagated throughout the global activity scenario and associated with costs. This offers the administrator a tool for proactive task management and risk reduction.
Collected experience from implementing RSVP
Authors: Martin Karsten
Venue: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) (2006)

Internet quality of service (QoS) is still a highly debated topic for more than fifteen years. Even with the large variety of QoS proposals and the impressive research advances, there is little deployment yet of network layer QoS technology. One specific problem domain is QoS signalling, which has recently attracted increasing attention to bring forward new standardization approaches. In this paper, an extensive study of RSVP is presented, covering protocol design, software design, and performance aspects of the basic version of RSVP and of certain standardized and experimental extensions. This work is based on and presents the experience from implementing RSVP for UNIX systems and the ns-2 simulation environment. The implementation includes a variety of protocol extensions and incorporates several internal improvements. It has been subject to extensive functional and performance evaluations, the results of which are reported here.
Goal-based action selection and utility-based action bias
Authors: Kenji Matsumoto, Madoka Matsumoto, Hiroshi Abe
Venue: Neural Networks (2006)

According to artificial intelligence studies, goal-based and utility-based agents can select an action to attain a desired outcome. The goal-based agent sets a specific goal regardless of its utility at first, and selects the action that leads to that goal (goal-based action selection). The utility-based agent compares the utilities of different possible outcomes, and selects the action that causes the outcome with the highest utility (utility-based action bias). The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in implementing the goal-based action selection and the striatum is involved in implementing the utility-based action bias. Goal-based action selection may be temporarily dominant over the utility-based action bias in a new environment, whereas the utility-based action bias becomes dominant after acquisition of action utilities in the environment. This transition of dominance between the two decision systems may be enhanced by a reference-point shift based on the goal-setting process during goal-based action selection.
Saliency and semantic processing: Extracting forest cover from historical topographic maps
Authors: Stefan Leyk, Ruedi Boesch, Robert Weibel
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2006)

A multi-step recognition process is developed for extracting compound forest cover information from manually produced scanned historical topographic maps of the 19th century. This information is a unique data source for GIS-based land cover change modeling. Based on salient features in the image the steps to be carried out are character recognition, line detection and structural analysis of forest symbols. Semantic expansion implying the meanings of objects is applied for final forest cover extraction. The procedure resulted in high accuracies of 94% indicating a potential for automatic and robust extraction of forest cover from larger areas.
Game Character Development with Maya (New Riders Games)
Authors: Antony Ward
Venue:  (2004)

If you thought Angelina Jolie was responsible for Lara Croft's curves, think again! Long before the Hollywood actress brought the Tomb Raider heroine to life, Alias' 3D modeling software Maya was used to create the lovely Lara; Ms. Jolie simply filled in her curves! When you're ready to start creating equally compelling characters of your own, you need this comprehensive volume! In these pages, gaming-industry veteran Antony Ward uses a combination of informative narrative, hands-on tutorials, and a slew of illustrations and screen shots to show you how to use Maya to address the most complex element of game creation-developing great characters! As you follow along, Antony uses the development of two diverse characters-a female figure and a fantastical character with outrageous proportions, wings, and a demon-like face-to demonstrate the techniques involved in modeling detailing, optimizing, texturing, rigging, binding, and animating characters with Maya. The companion CD includes lesson files, scripts, an automatic rigging tool, demo software, and more!
L-SIM: simulating BPMN diagrams with a purpose built engine
Authors: Anthony Waller, Martin Clark, Les Enstone
Venue: Proceedings of the 38th conference on Winter simulation (2006)

This paper describes the experiences and technical challenges encountered by the Lanner group in building a Java based simulation engine to simulate BPMN diagrams. It highlights the difference between conventional discrete simulation tools and the requirements for the BPMN engine. In particular the need for implicit rather then explicit queuing, the complexities of the patterns of parallel token flow and problems of valid but infeasible diagrams are discussed. Further the limitations of the BPMN standard for producing useful simulation models are highlighted, in particular the availability of resources.
A high performance backoff protocol for fast execution of composite web services
Authors: Jonghun Park
Venue: Computers and Industrial Engineering (2006)

Using web services to expose applications over the Internet is now a widely accepted practice. Currently, there are several ongoing efforts that provide ways to effectively compose web services distributed across different organizations. One of the problems underlying the deployment of such composite services on the web, however, is service co-allocation that arises when a composite service needs to ensure all the required component services to be available for execution at the same time. Motivated by this, this paper presents a new decentralized protocol, named web service co-allocation protocol (WSCP), which can facilitate fast execution of composite web services. The proposed framework is an enhancement of the famous two phase commit protocol through the incorporation of tentative hold phase as well as the employment of a new high performance backoff protocol developed to better address the dynamics of the service co-allocation problem. The simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant improvements over existing protocols.
A proposal of improved lip contour extraction method using deformable template matching and its application to dental treatment
Authors: Yujin Yokogawa, Nobuo Funabiki, Teruo Higashino, Masashi Oda, Yoshihide Mori
Venue: Systems and Computers in Japan (2007)

Studies of facial parts have been conducted in recent years in various fields of medical science and psychology, including studies of the lip contour and location. In fact, in the treatment of cleft lip patients in oral surgery, it is desirable to extract the precise lip contour and to identify its location on the face in order to plan the plastic surgery procedure and to follow up the site after surgery. Aiming at applications to dental treatment, in this study we attempt to extend the lip contour extraction procedure based on the deformable template to the case of a template with left&ndash; right asymmetry. An algorithm is also proposed for adjusting the hue and value thresholds in order to improve extraction accuracy and reduce the burden on the user. The proposal is evaluated using sample images of normal subjects and cleft lip patients. It is shown that the shape and location of the lip can be extracted precisely and automatically by the proposed method. In connection with application to dental clinics, we present an example of a quantitative evaluation of the lip shape by using the parameters extracted by the proposed method. &copy; 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 38(5): 80&ndash; 89, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002&sol;scj.10668
Algorithmic Computation and Approximation of Semantic Similarity
Authors: Ana G. Maguitman, Filippo Menczer, Fulya Erdinc, Heather Roinestad, Alessandro Vespignani
Venue: World Wide Web (2006)

Automatic extraction of semantic information from text and links in Web pages is key to improving the quality of search results. However, the assessment of automatic semantic measures is limited by the coverage of user studies, which do not scale with the size, heterogeneity, and growth of the Web. Here we propose to leverage human-generated metadata--namely topical directories--to measure semantic relationships among massive numbers of pairs of Web pages or topics. The Open Directory Project classifies millions of URLs in a topical ontology, providing a rich source from which semantic relationships between Web pages can be derived. While semantic similarity measures based on taxonomies (trees) are well studied, the design of well-founded similarity measures for objects stored in the nodes of arbitrary ontologies (graphs) is an open problem. This paper defines an information-theoretic measure of semantic similarity that exploits both the hierarchical and non-hierarchical structure of an ontology. An experimental study shows that this measure improves significantly on the traditional taxonomy-based approach. This novel measure allows us to address the general question of how text and link analyses can be combined to derive measures of relevance that are in good agreement with semantic similarity. Surprisingly, the traditional use of text similarity turns out to be ineffective for relevance ranking.
Improving modularity of reflective middleware with aspect-oriented programming
Authors: Nelio Cacho, Thais Batista, Alessandro Garcia, Claudio Sant'Anna, Gordon Blair
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Software engineering and middleware (2006)

Reflective middleware has been proposed as an effective way to enhance adaptability of component-oriented middleware architectures. To be effectively adaptable, the implementation of reflective middleware needs to be modular. However, some recently emerged applications such as mobile, pervasive, and embedded applications have imposed more stringent modularity requirements to the middleware design. They require support for the conception of a minimal middleware while promoting finegrained modularity of reflective middleware features. The key problem is that fundamental mechanisms for decomposing reflective middleware implementations, such as object-oriented ones, suffer from not providing the proper means to achieve the required level of localizing reflection-specific concerns. This paper presents a systematic investigation on how aspect-oriented programming scales up to improve modularity of typical reflection-specific crosscutting concerns. We have quantitatively compared Java and AspectJ implementations of an OpenORB-compliant reflective middleware using separation of concerns metrics.
Remarks on the k-error linear complexity of pn-periodic sequences
Authors: Wilfried Meidl, Ayineedi Venkateswarlu
Venue: Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2007)

Recently the first author presented exact formulas for the number of 2 n -periodic binary sequences with given 1-error linear complexity, and an exact formula for the expected 1-error linear complexity and upper and lower bounds for the expected k-error linear complexity, k ¿ 2, of a random 2 n -periodic binary sequence. A crucial role for the analysis played the Chan---Games algorithm. We use a more sophisticated generalization of the Chan---Games algorithm by Ding et al. to obtain exact formulas for the counting function and the expected value for the 1-error linear complexity for p n -periodic sequences over $${\mathbb{F}_{p, p}}$$ prime. Additionally we discuss the calculation of lower and upper bounds on the k-error linear complexity of p n -periodic sequences over $${\mathbb{F}_{p}}$$ .
Quantification in tail-recursive function definitions
Authors: Sandip Ray
Venue: Proceedings of the sixth international workshop on the ACL2 theorem prover and its applications (2006)

We investigate the logical issues behind axiomatizing equations that contain both recursive calls and quantifiers in ACL2. We identify a class of such equations, named extended tail-recursive equations, that can be uniformly introduced in the logic. We point out some potential benefits of this axiomatization, and discuss the logical impediments behind introducing more general quantified formulas.
A system for automatic face obscuration for privacy purposes
Authors: Rita Cucchiara, Andrea Prati, Roberto Vezzani
Venue: Pattern Recognition Letters (2006)

This work proposes a method for automatic face obscuration capable of protecting people's identity. Since face detection heavily benefits from the possibility to exploit tracking, multi-camera people tracking has been integrated with a face detector based on colour clustering and Hough transform. Moreover, the multiple viewpoints provided by multiple cameras are exploited in order to always obtain a good-quality image of the face. The identity of people in different views is kept consistent by means of a geometrical, uncalibrated approach based on homographies. Experimental results show the accuracy of the proposed approach.
Theoretical aspects of microprogramming: a review of relevant papers at the 2nd symposium on microprocessing and microprogramming (Venice, October 1976)
Authors: G. Chroust
Venue: ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter (1976)

Despite the fact that there is nothing as practical as a good theory such theories seem to lag behind practical applications. The reason is that theoretical investigations need a certain distance and maturity in order to produce good theories. They provide, however, valuable guidelines, even if, due to the necessary simplifications, the results are not directly applicable: they play a valuable role as signal posts.
Modeling Web-search scenarios exploiting user and source profiles
Authors: Luigi Palopoli, Domenico Rosaci, Giorgio Terracina, Domenico Ursino
Venue: AI Communications (2001)

In this paper we propose a user profile based approach for supporting Web-oriented search. Differently from traditional syntax-based approaches, our method is semantic driven. Indeed, for each user, a profile is constructed and handled for representing her/his interests. Whenever a user submits a query, a classical Web search engine is activated for determining a (probably large) set of answer data sources. After this, the user profile is exploited for determining the subset of those data sources which best conforms to user interests. In order to semantically compare the content of a data source with a user profile, a formal inference framework, provided by a specialized probabilistic variant of Description Logics, is exploited.
A survey on peer-to-peer key management for mobile ad hoc networks
Authors: Johann Van Der Merwe, Dawoud Dawoud, Stephen McDonald
Venue: ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) (2007)

The article reviews the most popular peer-to-peer key management protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The protocols are subdivided into groups based on their design strategy or main characteristic. The article discusses and provides comments on the strategy of each group separately. The discussions give insight into open research problems in the area of pairwise key management.
Quasi-affine symmetric designs
Authors: Sanjeevani Gharge, Sharad Sane
Venue: Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2007)

A symmetric design with parameters v = q 2(q + 2), k = q(q + 1), ¿ = q, q ¿ 2, is called a quasi-affine design if its point set can be partitioned into q + 2 subsets P 0, P 1,..., P q , P q+1 such that the induced structure in every point neighborhood is an affine plane of order q (repeated q times). A quasi-affine design with q ¿ 3 determines its point neighborhoods uniquely and dual of such a design is also a quasi-affine design. These structural properties pave way for definition of a strongly quasi-affine design and it is also shown that associated with every quasi-affine design is a unique strongly quasi-affine design from which the given quasi-affine design is obtained by certain unique cutting and pasting operation. This investigation also enables us to associate a unique 2-regular graph with q + 2 vertices and in turn, a unique colored partition of the integer q + 2. These combinatorial consequences are finally used to obtain an exponential lower bound on the number of non-isomorphic solutions of such symmetric designs improving the earlier lower bound of 2.