ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Stability and asymptoticity of Volterra difference equations: A progress report
Authors: Saber Elaydi
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2009)

We survey some of the fundamental results on the stability and asymptoticity of linear Volterra difference equations. The method of Z-transform is heavily utilized in equations of convolution type. An example is given to show that uniform asymptotic stability does not necessarily imply exponential stabilty. It is shown that the two notions are equivalent if the kernel decays exponentially. For equations of nonconvolution type, Liapunov functions are used to find explicit criteria for stability. Moreover, the resolvent matrix is defined to produce a variation of constants formula. The study of asymptotic equivalence for difference equations with infinite delay is carried out in Section 6. Finally, we state some problems.
On the Minimum Weight of Simple Full-Length Array LDPC Codes
Authors: Kenji Sugiyama, Yuichi Kaji
Venue: IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences (2008)

We investigate the minimum weights of simple full-length array LDPC codes (SFA-LDPC codes). The SFA-LDPC codes are a subclass of LDPC codes, and constructed algebraically according to two integer parameters p and j. Mittelholzer and Yang et al. have studied the minimum weights of SFA-LDPC codes, but the exact minimum weights of the codes are not known except for some small p and j. In this paper, we show that the minimum weights of the SFA-LDPC codes with j = 4 and j = 5 are upper-bounded by 10 and 12, respectively, independent from the prime number p. By combining the results with Yang's lower-bound limits, we can conclude that the minimum weights of the SFA-LDPC codes with j = 4 and p >7 are exactly 10 and those of the SFA-LDPC codes with j = 5 are 10 or 12.
Flow processing and the rise of commodity network hardware
Authors: Adam Greenhalgh, Felipe Huici, Mickael Hoerdt, Panagiotis Papadimitriou, Mark Handley, Laurent Mathy
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2009)

The Internet has seen a proliferation of specialized middlebox devices that carry out crucial network functionality such as load balancing, packet inspection and intrusion detection. Recent advances in CPU power, memory, buses and network connectivity have turned commodity PC hardware into a powerful network platform. Furthermore, commodity switch technologies have recently emerged offering the possibility to control the switching of flows in a fine-grained manner. Exploiting these new technologies, we present a new class of network architectures which enables flow processing and forwarding at unprecedented flexibility and low cost.
Computer Forensics and Cyber Crime: An Introduction (2nd Edition), 2 edition
Authors: Marjie T. Britz
Venue:  (2008)

Completely updated in a new edition,this book fully defines computer-related crime and the legal issues involved in its investigation. Re-organized with different chapter headings for better understanding of the subject, it provides a framework for the development of a computer crime unit. Updated with new information on technology, this book is the only comprehensive examination of computer-related crime and its investigation on the market. It includes an exhaustive discussion of legal and social issues, fully defines computer crime, and provides specific examples of criminal activities involving computers, while discussing the phenomenon in the context of the criminal justice system. Computer Forensics and Cyber Crime 2e provides a comprehensive analysis of current case law, constitutional challenges, and government legislation. New to this edition is a chapter on Organized Crime & Terrorism and how it relates to computer related crime as well as more comprehensive information on Processing Evidence and Report Preparation. For computer crime investigators, police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, public defenders, and defense attorneys.
Has the paradigm shift in CS1 a harmful effect on data structures courses: a case study
Authors: Judith Gal-Ezer, Tamar Vilner, Ela Zur
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2009)

The ongoing debate among Computer Science educators about the advantages and disadvantages of the shift from the procedural to the Object-Oriented paradigm usually relates to the introductory course. Indeed, we were also concerned when in our institute we decided to implement this shift in our introductory course and started to teach Java, instead of a procedural paradigm. In our previous study we saw that the effect of the shift did not lower the achievements of students taking the CS1 course. Furthermore, we wanted to be equally sure that this was the case when students take Data Structures courses. This is the focus of the study presented in this paper. The results show that there is no significant difference in the achievements of students who came from different paradigm backgrounds. This encouraging result probably relates to the fact that our CS1 course focuses on the fundamentals of introductory Computer Science and does not only emphasize the language aspects.
Efficient query processing on graph databases
Authors: James Cheng, Yiping Ke, Wilfred Ng
Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) (2009)

We study the problem of processing subgraph queries on a database that consists of a set of graphs. The answer to a subgraph query is the set of graphs in the database that are supergraphs of the query. In this article, we propose an efficient index, FG&ast;-index, to solve this problem. The cost of processing a subgraph query using most existing indexes mainly consists of two parts: the index probing cost and the candidate verification cost. Index probing is to find the query in the index, or to find the graphs from which we can generate a candidate answer set for the query. Candidate verification is to test whether each graph in the candidate set is indeed a supergraph of the query. We design FG&ast;-index to minimize these two costs as follows. FG&ast;-index consists of three components: the FG-index, the feature-index, and the FAQ-index. First, the FG-index employs the concept of Frequent subGraph (FG) to allow the set of queries that are FGs to be answered without candidate verification. We call this set of queries FG-queries. We can enlarge the set of FG-queries so that more queries can be answered without candidate verification; however, a larger set of FG-queries implies a larger FG-index and hence the index probing cost also increases. We propose the feature-index to reduce the index probing cost. The feature-index uses features to filter false results that are matched in the FG-index, so that we can quickly find the truly matching graphs for a query. For processing non-FG-queries, we propose the FAQ-index, which is dynamically constructed from the set of Frequently Asked non-FG-Queries (FAQs). Using the FAQ-index, verification is not required for processing FAQs and only a small number of candidates need to be verified for processing non-FG-queries that are not frequently asked. Finally, a comprehensive set of experiments verifies that query processing using FG&ast;-index is up to orders of magnitude more efficient than state-of-the-art indexes and it is also more scalable.
A Study of Relationship between Customer and Supplier in Cutlery Outsourcing
Authors: Xinna Qu, Kulwant S. Pawar
Venue: Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design IV: 11th International Conference, CSCWD 2007, Melbourne, Australia, April 26-28, 2007. Revised Selected Papers (2008)

The importance of having a `win-win' relationship between customer and supplier has many significant benefits to both parties and this point is increasingly emphasized by commentators within the context of outsourcing activities. Arguably, for many organizations outsourcing of non-core activities has a central strategic pillar survival in a fierce and competitive global environment and hence the need to develop effective customer and supplier relationships within outsourcing arrangement has become more crucial. However, establishing and maintaining a successful relationship is not easy. Many outsourcing relationship failures have been observed. This paper aims to examine the dominant relationship factors during the course of customersupplier interactions as well as attempt to identify practical approaches to building up and maintaining successful relationship within the context of outsourcing activities. The nature of relationships between a Chinese cutlery manufacturer and its western customers is explored in the form of four types of relationship models including the `middleman' model which was found to be effective in establishing and maintaining the good customer and supplier relationship. Conceivably, this can be seen as a `fast track' model for building zero to a high level relationship performance. Although the middleman might become `redundant' when the relationship between the two trading partners is mature and trustworthy, however its importance in the early stages should not be ignored.
Fuzzy relation based modeling for medical diagnostic decision support: Case studies
Authors: Kavishwar B. Wagholikar, Ashok W. Deshpande
Venue: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems (2008)

This paper investigates a variation to Adlassnig's fuzzy relation based model for medical diagnosis. The proposed model is an attempt to closely replicate a physician's perceptions of symptom-disease associations and his approximate-reasoning for diagnosis. For proof of principle, the algorithm is evaluated in two sample studies. First case study relates to selected cardiovascular diseases, wherein the required parameters are estimated by interviewing physicians, and an evaluation is performed on a dataset of 79 cases. In the second study, the algorithm is implemented using an alternative semiautomatic approach for a more complex problem of diagnosing common infectious diseases, wherein the parameters are derived from a dataset of 92 case records; for evaluation, jack-knife is performed along with a comparison with Independence Bayes, considered here as the reference standard. The proposed algorithm was found to be as accurate as Independence Bayes for diagnosing common infectious diseases from the small dataset. This result may indicate the utility of proposed algorithm to optimally model the diagnostic process for small datasets; especially, due to its computational simplicity. Further studies on a variety of datasets are needed to establish such a utility.
On the Complexity of Reconfiguration Problems
Authors: Takehiro Ito, Erik D. Demaine, Nicholas J. Harvey, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Martha Sideri, Ryuhei Uehara, Yushi Uno
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (2008)

Reconfiguration problems arise when we wish to find a step-by-step transformation between two feasible solutions of a problem such that all intermediate results are also feasible. We demonstrate that a host of reconfiguration problems derived from NP-complete problems are PSPACE-complete, while some are also NP-hard to approximate. In contrast, several reconfiguration versions of problems in P are solvable in polynomial time.
Shortest Gently Descending Paths
Authors: Mustaq Ahmed, Anna Lubiw, Anil Maheshwari
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Algorithms and Computation (2009)

A path from s to t on a polyhedral terrain is descending if the height of a point p never increases while we move p along the path from s to t. We introduce a generalization of the shortest descending path problem, called the shortest gently descending path (SGDP) problem, where a path descends, but not too steeply. The additional constraint to disallow a very steep descent makes the paths more realistic in practice. We give two approximation algorithms (more precisely, FPTASs) to solve the SGDP problem on general terrains.
Nonlinear process modeling and optimization based on multiway kernel partial least squares model
Authors: Liqing Di, Zhihua Xiong, Xianhui Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation (2008)

MKPLS (Multiway Kernel Partial Least Squares) methods are used to model the batch processes from process operational data. To improve the optimization performance, a batch-to-batch optimization strategy is proposed based on the idea of the similarity between the iterations during numerical optimization and successive batch runs. SQP (Sequential Quadratic Programming) coupling with MKPLS model is used to solve the optimization problem, and the plant data, instead of the MKPLS model predictions, are used in gradient calculation. The proposed strategy is illustrated on a simulated bulk polymerization of styrene. The results demonstrate that the optimization performance has been improved in spite of the model-plant mismatches.
Multilevel Training of Binary Morphological Operators
Authors: Nina S. T. Hirata
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2009)

The design of binary morphological operators that are translation-invariant and locally defined by a finite neighborhood window corresponds to the problem of designing Boolean functions. As in any supervised classification problem, morphological operators designed from training sample also suffer from overfitting. Large neighborhood tends to lead to performance degradation of the designed operator. This work proposes a multi-level design approach to deal with the issue of designing large neighborhood based operators. The main idea is inspired from stacked generalization (a multi-level classifier design approach) and consists in, at each training level, combining the outcomes of the previous level operators. The final operator is a multi-level operator that ultimately depends on a larger neighborhood than of the individual operators that have been combined. Experimental results show that two-level operators obtained by combining operators designed on subwindows of a large window consistently outperforms the single-level operators designed on the full window. They also show that iterating two-level operators is an effective multi-level approach to obtain better results.
Simulation and experimental studies on fuzzy vault fingerprint cryptography
Authors: A. J. Kotlarchyk, A. S. Pandya, H. Zhuang
Venue: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems (2008)

Fuzzy vault cryptography relies on the error-correcting capabilities of the underlying error-correction code (typically, Reed-Solomon). Therefore, any application of such a system can tolerate only a limited number of errors associated with the true data points. For fingerprint vault systems, poor alignment can cause valid extracted minutiae (true data points) to be regarded as errors because they are outside the matching threshold. Attempting to overcome this problem by increasing the matching threshold may result in additional matching of false (chaff) points in the vault, depending on the density of points in the vault. A simulation study was conducted in order to determine acceptable parameters and thresholds for a fingerprint vault cryptographic system to function successfully. Simulation results show that the variation of repeatable minutiae points must be below the matching threshold of the system for acceptable performance and therefore improving the quality of fingerprint alignment is critical to a successful implementation of the method. An experimental study was also conducted to confirm that if fingerprint alignment is not carefully considered, the fuzzy vault system for fingerprints is prone to failure.
Representing layout information in the CMSD specification
Authors: Frank Riddick, Y. Tina Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation (2008)

Developing mechanisms for the efficient exchange of information between simulations and other manufacturing tools is a critical problem. For many areas of manufacturing, neither representations for the information nor mechanisms for exchanging the information have been agreed upon. Manufacturing plant layout is one such area. The Core Manufacturing Simulation Data (CMSD) specification is being developed to address some of these issues, through the definition of neutral representations for the "core" manufacturing entities that need to be exchanged between simulations and other applications, through the creation of a Unified Modeling Language information model that defines the relationships between the core manufacturing entities, and through the definition of eXtensible Modeling Language Schemas based on the information model to facilitate the exchange of information that adheres to the model. This paper describes an effort to extend the CMSD specification to cover the definition and exchange of layout information.
Managing requirements specifications for product lines - An approach and industry case study
Authors: Magnus Eriksson, Jürgen Börstler, Kjell Borg
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2009)

Software product line development has emerged as a leading approach for software reuse. This paper describes an approach to manage natural-language requirements specifications in a software product line context. Variability in such product line specifications is modeled and managed using a feature model. The proposed approach has been introduced in the Swedish defense industry. We present a multiple-case study covering two different product lines with in total eight product instances. These were compared to experiences from previous projects in the organization employing clone-and-own reuse. We conclude that the proposed product line approach performs better than clone-and-own reuse of requirements specifications in this particular industrial context.
Automatic and Accurate Extraction of Road Intersections from Raster Maps
Authors: Yao-Yi Chiang, Craig A. Knoblock, Cyrus Shahabi, Ching-Chien Chen
Venue: Geoinformatica (2009)

Since maps are widely available for many areas around the globe, they provide a valuable resource to help understand other geospatial sources such as to identify roads or to annotate buildings in imagery. To utilize the maps for understanding other geospatial sources, one of the most valuable types of information we need from the map is the road network, because the roads are common features used across different geospatial data sets. Specifically, the set of road intersections of the map provides key information about the road network, which includes the location of the road junctions, the number of roads that meet at the intersections (i.e., connectivity), and the orientations of these roads. The set of road intersections helps to identify roads on imagery by serving as initial seed templates to locate road pixels. Moreover, a conflation system can use the road intersections as reference features (i.e., control point set) to align the map with other geospatial sources, such as aerial imagery or vector data. In this paper, we present a framework for automatically and accurately extracting road intersections from raster maps. Identifying the road intersections is difficult because raster maps typically contain much information such as roads, symbols, characters, or even contour lines. We combine a variety of image processing and graphics recognition methods to automatically separate roads from the raster map and then extract the road intersections. The extracted information includes a set of road intersection positions, the road connectivity, and road orientations. For the problem of road intersection extraction, our approach achieves over 95% precision (correctness) with over 75% recall (completeness) on average on a set of 70 raster maps from a variety of sources.
Research on Processes Simulation and Reconfiguration for Piston Production Lines
Authors: Jun Zhou, Shuchun Zhao, Puhong Li, Hao Zhou, Qingyuan Zhang, Zihe Shang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computer Modeling and Simulation (2009)

A piston production line is built in virtual simulation environment based the existing processes and layout. Its simulation result is shown with figure and graphic. Based on those results, some reconfiguring advices are supplied and also simulated on virtual environment. After reconfiguring the piston production line, many results are obtained by simulation, and it is shown that: the work-piece in processing (WIP) is reduced obviously, and its machines, labors and processes are decreased evidently
Timing analysis and optimization implications of bimodal CD distribution in double patterning lithography
Authors: Kwangok Jeong, Andrew B. Kahng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (2009)

Double patterning lithography (DPL) is in current production for memory products, and is widely viewed as inevitable for logic products at the 32nm node. DPL decomposes and prints the shapes of a critical-layer layout in two exposures. In traditional single-exposure lithography, adjacent identical layout features will have identical mean critical dimension (CD), and spatially correlated CD variations. However, with DPL, adjacent features can have distinct mean CDs, and uncorrelated CD variations. This introduces a new set of 'bimodal' challenges for timing analysis and optimization. We assess the potential impact of DPL on timing analysis error and guardbanding, and find that the traditional 'unimodal' characterization and analysis framework may not be viable for DPL. For example, using 45nm models, we find that different DPL mask layout solutions can cause 50ps skew in clock distribution that is unseen by traditional analyses. Different mask layouts can also result in 20% or more change in timing path delays. Such results lead to insights into physical design optimizations for clock and data path placement and mask coloring that can help mitigate the error and guardband costs of DPL.