ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Maps for Future Navigation Systems: Agile Design Exploration of User Interface Concepts
Authors: Volker Paelke, Karsten Nebe
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Part III: Ubiquitous and Intelligent Interaction (2009)

Maps have traditionally been used to support orientation and navigation. Navigation systems shift the focus from printed maps to interactive systems. The key goal of navigation systems is to simplify specific tasks, e.g. route planning or route following. While users of navigation systems need less skills in navigation specific activities, e.g. reading maps or manual route planning, they must now interact with the user interface of the navigation device, which requires a different set of skills. Current navigation systems aim to simplify the interaction by providing interfaces that use basic interaction mechanisms (e.g. button based interfaces on a touch-screen), exploiting the fact that many users are already familiar with such techniques. In the presentation of the information most navigation systems employ map-like displays, possibly combined with additional information, again to exploit familiarity. While such an approach can help with early adoption, it can also limit usefulness and usability. There is, however, a large opportunity to improve input, output and functionality of navigation systems. In this paper we expand a model of classical map based communication to identify possibilities where "dynamic maps" can enhance map based communication in navigation systems. We report on how an agile design exploration process was applied to examine the design space spanned by the new model and to develop system probes. We discuss the user feedback and its implications for future interface concepts for navigation systems.
Labor Market Institutions and Global Strategic Adaptation: Evidence from Lincoln Electric
Authors: Jordan I. Siegel, Barbara Zepp Larson
Venue: Management Science (2009)

Although one of the central questions in the global strategy field is how multinational firms successfully navigate multiple and often conflicting institutional environments, we know relatively little about the effect of conflicting labor market institutions on multinational firms' strategic choice and operating performance. With its decision to invest in manufacturing operations in nearly every one of the world's largest welding markets, Lincoln Electric offers us a quasi-experiment. We leverage a unique data set covering 1996--2006 that combines data on each host country's labor market institutions with data on each subsidiary's strategic choices and historical operating performance. We find that Lincoln Electric performed significantly better in countries with labor laws and regulations supporting manufacturers' interests and in countries that allowed the free use of both piecework and a discretionary bonus. Furthermore, we find that in countries with labor market institutions unfriendly to manufacturers, Lincoln Electric was still able to overcome most (although not all) of the institutional distance by what we term flexible intermediate adaptation.
Visual Analytic Methods for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk Assessment
Authors: Brian Drohan, Georges Grinstein
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Conference in Visualisation (2009)

The identification and case management of those at risk high for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC) involves the synthesis of data from self reported patient family history, quantitative risk model analysis, and current clinical standards of care. This paper describes an integrated interactive visualization and analysis approach for the presentation of these data that is suitable for large scale risk stratification. We describe this display of HBOC risk information integrated with a clinical decision support that is also potentially useful across other cancer syndromes.
Study on Application of 3S Technology in Land-Use Change Discover
Authors: Yuan Zhanliang, Mi Xiaofei, Zang Wenqian
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Environmental Science and Information Application Technology - Volume 03 (2009)

Land resources are essential to human survival. To ascertain the actual situation of land resources and information of land change serves as a basis for overall planning of land use and macroscopic decision making on land resources. Now widely used methods of survey affect by a number of factors, it is difficult to ascertain the exact space location of changed map spot. In recent years the integration of RS, GIS and GPS (3s) has become a very important research field in the land resource administration. This article based on the traditional analysis methods of land-use changes unified the 3S technology characteristic and the land utilization present situation has discussed based on the 3S technology land-use change investigation technical route.
Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-scale Geometric Analysis
Authors: Mingna Liu, Xin Yang, Yanfeng Shang
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (2009)

A novel objective full-reference image quality assessment metric based on Multi-scale Geometric Analysis (MGA) of contourlet transform is proposed. Contourlet transform has excellent properties for image representation, such as multiresolution, localization and directionality, which are the key characteristics of human vision system. Utilizing multiresolution and directionality of MGA, we extract the distortion of structural information from different vision scale and edge direction. The degradation of image quality is evaluated based on the defined energy of structural distortion. Performance experiments are made on professional image quality database with five different distortion types. Compared with some state-of-the-art measures, the results demonstrate that the proposed method improves accuracy and robustness of image quality prediction.
Design and Implementation of Stored Procedure Router Based on Dynamic SQL
Authors: Teng Yingyan, He Zonggang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Forum on Information Technology and Applications - Volume 03 (2009)

The stored procedure router is designed to dynamically call stored procedure. It is based on dynamic SQL and coded by PL/SQL. Two tables are established according to stored procedure table and stored procedure parameter table before stored procedure router is called. The caller gets input and output parameters of stored procedure by visiting two tables, without direct contact stored procedure itself. Inputting stored procedure number and parameters can obtain result of executing stored procedure. Dynamic SQL statement based on these parameters is designed and executed. Input parameters and output parameters are bind the corresponding variables which begin to the colon in SQL statement.When invoking stored procedure coded by PL/SQL, it is convenient to use stored procedure router. Only modify content of table when stored procedure changes. It brings a great facilitate to secondary development staff and accelerate the system design process, improve the system design performance.
Engagement vs. Deceit: Virtual Humans with Human Autobiographies
Authors: Timothy Bickmore, Daniel Schulman, Langxuan Yin
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (2009)

We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories ("back stories") to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and retention in the intervention. A longitudinal randomized controlled experiment tested user attitudes towards the agent when it presented the stories in first person (as its own history) compared to third person (as happening to humans that it knew). Participants in the first person condition reported enjoying their interactions with the agent significantly more and completed more conversations with the agent, compared to participants in the third person condition, while ratings of agent dishonesty were not significantly different between the groups.
An improved Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (ANSGA-II) with adaptable parameters
Authors: Khoa Duc Tran
Venue: International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (2009)

Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are not easy to use because they require parameter tunings to achieve good solutions and performance for an arbitrary complex problem. This paper introduces a MOEA with adaptive population size, self-adaptive crossover and self-adaptive mutation for automating the process of adjusting parameter values to make the MOEA simple to use. The new MOEA is built on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and named as Adaptable NSGA-II (ANSGA-II). Simulation results on 13 multi-objective problems demonstrate that the ANSGA-II out-performs the NSGA-II in terms of finding diverse non-dominated solutions and converging to the true Pareto-optimal front.
Phonon absorbing boundary conditions for molecular dynamics
Authors: Murthy N. Guddati, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu
Venue: Journal of Computational Physics (2009)

With the goal of minimizing the domain size for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we develop a new class of absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) that mimic the phonon absorption properties of an unbounded exterior. The proposed MD-ABCs are extensions of perfectly matched discrete layers (PMDLs), originally developed as an absorbing boundary condition for continuous wave propagation problems. Called MD-PMDL, this extension carefully targets the absorption of phonons, the high frequency waves, whose propagation properties are completely different from continuous waves. This paper presents the derivation of MD-PMDL for general lattice systems, followed by explicit application to one-dimensional and two-dimensional square lattice systems. The accuracy of MD-PMDL for phonon absorption is proven by analyzing reflection coefficients, and demonstrated through numerical experiments. Unlike existing MD-ABCs, MD-PMDL is local in both space and time and thus more efficient. Based on their favorable properties, it is concluded that MD-PMDL could provide a more effective alternative to existing MD-ABCs.
Progressive fatigue effects on manual lifting factors
Authors: Anthony D. Banks, Fereydoun Aghazadeh
Venue: Human Factors in Ergonomics Manufacturing (2009)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of progressive fatigue on factors that previously have been associated with increased risk of low back pain in various occupational settings, during a repetitive lifting task where a freestyle lifting technique was used. A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate electromyography amplitude, kinematic, and kinetic parameters of repetitive freestyle lifting during a 2-hour lifting period. Subjective fatigue rating increased over time, indicating that the participant &ldquo;felt&rdquo; increasingly fatigued as the experiment progressed. Static composite strength decreased an average of 20&percnt; from the beginning to the end of the experiment. Effect of lifting posture (semi-squat, semi-stoop, and stoop) was observed on peak trunk flexion angle, trunk flexion angle at initiation of the lift, and knee angle at initiation of the lift indicating that, in freestyle lifting, participants assume quantitatively different lifting techniques. A significant effect of the time&ndash;posture interaction was observed on the dynamic leg lift floor to knuckle height strength, indicating that dynamic strength may change over time depending on lifting posture selected. &copy; 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Edge Detection Algorithm for Uneven Lighting Image Based on Vision Theory
Authors: Zhou Lei, Hua Gang, Xu Dongmei, Wu Haitao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Natural Computing - Volume 01 (2009)

Many commonly used differential operators for edge detection which are effective and efficient on simple images can’t deal with relatively complex images. This paper put forward an edge detection algorithm for uneven lighting image based on vision theory. Firstly this paper introduces this vision theory, and established an effective computation model, through the preprocessing and threshold correction, the probability of losing edge at dark region and edge redundancy at bright region is reduced. At last, the algorithm based on modified Canny operator is given. Experiments indicated that this method, which is adaptive to complex image, has excellent brightness compatibility and has the ability to outstand the target. The division result is more consistent with person's visual feeling and has built a foundation for the following recognition.
Performance Improvement of Multimedia Kernels by Alleviating Overhead Instructions on SIMD Devices
Authors: Asadollah Shahbahrami, Ben Juurlink
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Advanced Parallel Processing Technologies (2009)

SIMD extension is one of the most common and effective technique to exploit data-level parallelism in today's processor designs. However, the performance of SIMD architectures is limited by some constraints such as mismatch between the storage and the computational formats and using data permutation instructions during vectorization. In our previous work we have proposed two architectural modifications, the extended subwords and the Matrix Register File (MRF) to alleviate the limitations. The extended subwords, uses four extra bits for every byte in a media register and it provides additional parallelism. The MRF allows flexible row-wise as well as column-wise access to the register file and it eliminates data permutation instructions. We have validated the combination of the proposed techniques by studying the performance of some multimedia kernels. In this paper, we analysis each proposed technique separately. In other words, we answer the following questions in this paper. How much of the performance gain is a result of the additional parallelism? and how much is due to the elimination of data permutation instructions? The results show that employing the MRF and extended subwords separately obtains the speedup less than 1 and 1.15, respectively. In other words, our results indicate that using either extended subwords or the MRF techniques is insufficient to eliminate most pack/unpack and rearrangement overhead instructions on SIMD processors. The combination of both techniques, on the other hand, yields much more performance benefits than each technique.
A Novel Quorum Based Location Management for Wireless Sensor Network with Mobile Sinks
Authors: Yi Li, Canfeng Chen, Jian Ma
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (2009)

Location service provides position of mobile destination to source node so that position based routing can be applied. Several quorum-based location services have been proposed. These location service protocols suffer from complex structure with high overhead, or host location foreknowledge, and difficulty in quorum construction. To overcome those deficiencies, we propose a novel quorum-based location service. In the proposed scheme, location databases are stored in the network nodes themselves, which form a self-organizing virtual backbone network. Quorum system is constructed on the virtual backbone network in conformity to irregular grid rule. Every mobile node will notify its location update information to irregular grid quorum system so that other hosts can obtain the mobile node location through irregular grid quorum system. The simulation results show that our proposed location service leads to high success rate, appropriate quorum size and good load.
Improving action selection in MDP's via knowledge transfer
Authors: Alexander A. Sherstov, Peter Stone
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2 (2005)

Temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied in several domains with large state sets. Large action sets, however, have received considerably less attention. This paper demonstrates the use of knowledge transfer between related tasks to accelerate learning with large action sets. We introduce action transfer, a technique that extracts the actions from the (near-)optimal solution to the first task and uses them in place of the full action set when learning any subsequent tasks. When optimal actions make up a small fraction of the domain's action set, action transfer can substantially reduce the number of actions and thus the complexity of the problem. However, action transfer between dissimilar tasks can be detrimental. To address this difficulty, we contribute randomized task perturbation (RTP), an enhancement to action transfer that makes it robust to unrepresentative source tasks. We motivate RTP action transfer with a detailed theoretical analysis featuring a formalism of related tasks and a bound on the suboptimality of action transfer. The empirical results in this paper show the potential of RTP action transfer to substantially expand the applicability of RL to problems with large action sets.
Novel automatic video cut detection technique using Gabor filtering
Authors: Tudor Barbu
Venue: Computers and Electrical Engineering (2009)

Video shot transition identification constitutes an important computer vision research field, being applied, as an essential step, in many other digital video analysis domains: video scene detection, video compression, video indexing, video content retrieval and video object tracking. This paper approaches the video cut transition detection domain, providing a novel feature-based automatic identification method. We propose a feature extraction technique that uses 2D Gabor filtering, computing tridimensional image feature vectors for the video frames. Most shot cut detection techniques use a thresholding operation to discriminate between the inter-frame difference metric values and thus identify the video break points. Our identification approach is not threshold-based, using an automatic unsupervised distance classification procedure instead of a threshold. Thus, we provide a region-growing based classification approach, that proves to be very efficient in clustering the distances between feature vectors of consecutive frames. The two resulted distance classes determine a satisfactory video shot detection.
A Sharable Storage Service for Distributed Computing Systems in Combination of Remote and Local Storage
Authors: Minhwan Ok
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (2009)

Traditional Grid data management systems have been developed on the supposition that the network bandwidth is unconstrained with dedicated broadband network lines and the storage space is enough for storing replicas. This paper proposes a storage service for distributed computing systems without the supposition, by adopting the concept of pervasive storage in the distributed computing. The Sharable Storage space is recognized as the application server's local storage. Whenever the user commits, data transfer is automatically performed using iSCSI protocol. The storage service is destined for numerous data transfer of relatively small files, and simulated under the condition of a restrictive network bandwidth. File preloading function could make the applications start early without dedicated broadband network lines. The computing sites could benefit from the proposed storage service than waiting until the whole file is transferred for replication and keeping the replica stored without the users' explicit note for reuse.
Progressive Transmission with Compact Complementary Quadtree
Authors: Dong-Shik Lee, Young-Mo Kim
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Information Processing - Volume 02 (2009)

This paper proposes a new progressive transmission with quadtree in order to improve progressive transmission of an image in two viewpoints of bitplane and spatial transmission, in addition to compression efficiency. The scheme of this paper is based on a compact complementary quadtree(CCQ) with a bit-plane coding. Basically, quadtree includes a function of progressive transmission with multilevel function. CCQ improves this function and this paper uses bitplane coding for efficient progressive transmission of bitplane and spatial. Experimental results demonstrate that the new scheme is quite competitive to and often outperforms other good image coders in the literature.
Learning object-specific grasp affordance densities
Authors: R. Detry, E. Baseski, M. Popovic, Y. Touati, N. Kruger, O. Kroemer, J. Peters, J. Piater
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 8th International Conference on Development and Learning (2009)

This paper addresses the issue of learning and representing object grasp affordances, i.e. object-gripper relative configurations that lead to successful grasps. The purpose of grasp affordances is to organize and store the whole knowledge that an agent has about the grasping of an object, in order to facilitate reasoning on grasping solutions and their achievability. The affordance representation consists in a continuous probability density function defined on the 6D gripper pose space - 3D position and orientation -, within an object-relative reference frame. Grasp affordances are initially learned from various sources, e.g. from imitation or from visual cues, leading to grasp hypothesis densities. Grasp densities are attached to a learned 3D visual object model, and pose estimation of the visual model allows a robotic agent to execute samples from a grasp hypothesis density under various object poses. Grasp outcomes are used to learn grasp empirical densities, i.e. grasps that have been confirmed through experience. We show the result of learning grasp hypothesis densities from both imitation and visual cues, and present grasp empirical densities learned from physical experience by a robot.