ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of Multiple Tools Actions for Virtual Sculpting Using Implicit Surfaces
Venue: Proceedings of the Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2004 (TPCG'04) (2004)

This paper presents an approach to the interactivedeformation of soft objects. The soft objects arerepresented by implicit surfaces. Virtual tools are usedto interact with soft virtual clay. The effect of multiplesculpting actions can be accumulated together. Theway in which the tool deforms the clay can becontrolled explicitly by a parameter. This approach canbe used to build an interactive sculpting system. Thesurfaces are visualized using a constrained particlesmethod or polygonization displayed with astereoscopic viewer.
Optical and electrical properties of Si1-x-yGexCy strained layers thermally oxidized
Authors: A. Cuadras, J. Sancho, S. Bosch, B. Garrido, J. R. Morante, L. Fonseca, K. Pressel
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2004)

We have investigated how the concentration of Ge and C influences the thermal oxides of Si1-x-yGexCy strained epitaxial layers grown on silicon substrates. We present a reliable method to measure oxide thicknesses on these epilayers based on spectroscopic ellipsometry. We have studied the influence of Ge and C on the dielectric function of the layer by means of variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometry. We have modeled the dependence on the dielectric function of Ge and C by means of oscillators. We have found a shift of the peak centered at 3 eV towards lower energies in Si1-xGey as a function of larger thermal budgets, due to the strain relief of the layer. The presence of carbon partially inhibits this shift related to the thermal budget. We have also investigated the influence of Ge and C in the capacitance response of MOS devices. The thermal processing helps to stabilize the carbon in the layer as a substitutional impurity. Ge and C modify the ideal capacitance curves in the inversion and depletion regions due to interface states generation but not in the accumulation region.
Interactive Global Illumination for Quasi-Static Scenes
Authors: R. J. Garcia, C. Urena, M. Lastra, R. Montes, J. Revelles
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

This paper describes an approach to obtain interactiverecalculation of global illumination for scenes with smallmoving objects (with respect to the complete geometry), ona standard PC, using Density Estimation techniques.
Logical-Time Contracts for Reactive Embedded Components
Authors: Florence Maraninchi, Lionel Morel
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th EUROMICRO Conference (2004)

The "Design by contract" principle has been applied successfully in the context of object-oriented designs, since it was first proposed by B. Meyer for Eiffel. We claim that a simple pre-post specification is not sufficient for reactive software. We introduce a model of reactive components suitable for reactive embedded software, and a notion of logical-time contract for the specification and use of these components in synchronous compositions.
Quantifying the Reliability of Proven SPIDER Group Membership Service Guarantees
Authors: Elizabeth Latronico, Paul Miner, Philip Koopman
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (2004)

For safety-critical systems, it is essential to quantify thereliability of the assumptions that underlie provenguarantees. We investigate the reliability of theassumptions of the SPIDER group membership service withrespect to transient and permanent faults. Modeling12,600 possible system configurations, the probability thatSPIDER's Maximum Fault Assumption will not hold for anhour mission varies from less likely than 10{-11} to more likelythan 10{-3}. In most cases examined, a transient faulttolerance strategy was superior to the permanent faulttolerance strategy previously in use for the range oftransient fault arrival rates expected in aerospace systems.Reliability of the Maximum Fault Assumption (upon whichthe proofs are based) differs greatly when subjected toasymmetric, symmetric, and benign faults. This case studydemonstrates the benefits of quantifying the reliability ofassumptions for proven properties.
Edge-disjoint routing in plane switch graphs in linear time
Authors: Jan M. Hochstein, Karsten Weihe
Venue: Journal of the ACM (JACM) (2004)

By a switch graph, we mean an undirected graph G = (P &cupdot; W, E) such that all vertices in P (the plugs) have degree one and all vertices in W (the switches) have even degrees. We call G plane if G is planar and can be embedded such that all plugs are in the outer face. Given a set (s1, t1), &hellip;,(sk, tk) of pairs of plugs, the problem is to find edge-disjoint paths p1, &hellip;, pk such that every pi connects si with ti. The best asymptotic worst-case complexity known so far is quadratic in the number of vertices. In this article, a linear, and thus asymptotically optimal, algorithm is introduced. This result may be viewed as a concluding "keystone" for a number of previous results on various special cases of the problem.
Determining the Factors Which Engender Customer Trust in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Electronic Commerce
Authors: Fahim Akhter, Dave Hobbs, Zakaria Maamar
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology (2004)

This paper presents a study that focuses on the initial trust that is developed even before the occurrence of the first transaction between a consumer and an online company. The study reveals how initial trust is formed without any previous experience by interacting with the Web site interface. This study analyzes how important it is for the Web site to have a trusted interface to keep the customer interested in their business. The study tests the premise that "consumer initial trust is positively related to a trust inducing user interface" and investigates what other features are important in assessing whether or not purchase.
Better Online Algorithms for Scheduling with Machine Cost
Authors: György Dósa, Yong He
Venue: SIAM Journal on Computing (2004)

For most scheduling problems the set of machines is fixed initially and remains unchanged for the duration of the problem. Recently Imreh and Noga proposed adding the concept of machine cost to scheduling problems and considered the so-called list model problem. For this problem, we are given a sequence of independent jobs with positive sizes, which must be processed nonpreemptively on a machine. No machines are initially provided, and when a job is revealed the algorithm has the option to purchase new machines. The objective is to minimize the sum of the makespan and cost of machines. In this paper, we first present an online algorithm with a competitive ratio at most 1.5798, which improves the known upper bound 1.618. Then for a special case where every job size is no greater than the machine cost, we present an optimal online algorithm with a competitive ratio 4/3. Last, we present an algorithm with a competitive ratio at most 3/2 for the semionline problem with known largest size, which improves the known upper bound 1.5309.
Evolutionary design and adaptation of high performance digital filters within an embedded reconfigurable fault tolerant hardware platform
Authors: B. I. Hounsell, T. Arslan, R. Thomson
Venue: Soft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications (2004)

Finite impulse response filters (FIRs) are crucial devices for robust data communication and manipulation. Multiplierless filters have been shown to produce high performance systems with fast signal processing and reduced area. Furthermore, the distributed architecture inherent in multiplierless filters makes it a suitable candidate for fault tolerant design. Alternative approaches to the design of fault tolerant systems have been proposed using evolutionary algorithms (EAs) and the concept of evolvable hardware (EHW). This paper presents an evolvable hardware platform for the automated design and adaptation of multiplierless digital filters. Filters are realised within a dedicated programmable logic array (PLA) based on the Primitive Operator Filter design principle. The platform employs a genetic algorithm to autonomously configure the PLA for a given set of coefficients. The ability of the platform to adapt to increasing numbers of faults was investigated through the &#x201c;evolution&#x201d; of a 31-tap low-pass FIR filter. Results show that the functionality of filters evolved on the PLA was maintained despite an increasing number of faults covering up to 25% of the PLA area. Additionally, three PLA initialisation methods were investigated to ascertain which produced the fastest fault recovery times. It was shown that seeding a population of random configuration-strings with the best configuration currently obtained resulted in a 6 fold increase in fault recovery speed over other methods investigated.
Some Characterizations of Ellipsoids by Sections
Authors: Javier Alonso, Pedro Mart&#x00ed;n
Venue: Discrete Computational Geometry (2004)

We characterize ellipsoids among convex bodies in Ed looking at the sections parallel to two or three hyperplanes.
Specifying abstract data types by restriction
Authors: Theodore A. Linden
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1978)

Restrictions are one instance of mathematically-based relationships between types that can be used to simplify program specifications. Restriction of an abstract data type provides a theoretical justification for the concept of a hidden function that appears in some current specification methodologies. The use of type restrictions to simplify formal specifications is illustrated by the example of traversible stacks.
Modeling pFET currents after soft breakdown at different gate locations
Authors: B. Kaczer, A. De Keersgieter, R. Degraeve, F. Crupi, G. Groeseneken
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2004)

pMOSFET currents after soft gate oxide breakdown are studied as a function of the breakdown position. The analysis draws on analogies with post-soft breakdown processes in a nMOSFET. The pMOSFET breakdown path is modeled as a narrow region of SiO2 with lower electron and hole barriers. MEDICI simulations of a pMOSFET after soft breakdown assuming preferential electron conduction through the breakdown path consistently explain the presented experimental data for both gate-to-substrate and gate-to-extension breakdowns.
A Probabilistic-Based Design Methodology for Nanoscale Computation
Authors: R. Iris Bahar, Joseph Mundy, Jie Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

As current silicon-based techniques fast approach their practicallimits, the investigation of nanoscale electronics, devices andsystem architectures becomes a central research priority. It is expectedthat nanoarchitectures will confront devices and interconnectionswith high inherent defect rates, which motivates the searchfor new architectural paradigms.In this paper, we propose a probabilistic-based design methodologyfor designing nanoscale computer architectures based onMarkov Random Fields (MRF). The MRF can express arbitrarylogic circuits and logic operation is achieved by maximizing theprobability of state configurations in the logic network. Maximizingstate probability is equivalent to minimizing a form of energythat depends on neighboring nodes in the network. Once we developa library of elementary logic components, we can link themtogether to build desired architectures based on the belief propagationalgorithm. Belief propagation is a way of organizing theglobal computation of marginal belief in terms of smaller localcomputations. We will illustrate the proposed design methodologywith some elementary logic examples.
Collection selection for managed distributed document databases
Authors: Daryl D'Souza, James A. Thom, Justin Zobel
Venue: Information Processing and Management: an International Journal (2004)

In a distributed document database system, a query is processed by passing it to a set of individual collections and collating the responses. For a system with many such collections, it is attractive to first identify a small subset of collections as likely to hold documents of interest before interrogating only this small subset in more detail. A method for choosing collections that has been widely investigated is the use of a selection index, which captures broad information about each collection and its documents. In this paper, we re-evaluate several techniques for collection selection.We have constructed new sets of test data that reflect one way in which distributed collections would be used in practice, in contrast to the more artificial division into collections reported in much previous work. Using these managed collections, collection ranking based on document surrogates is more effective than techniques such as CORI that are based on collection lexicons. Moreover, these experiments demonstrate that conclusions drawn from artificial collections are of questionable validity.
Profile-Based String Kernels for Remote Homology Detection and Motif Extraction
Authors: Rui Kuang, Eugene Ie, Ke Wang, Kai Wang, Mahira Siddiqi, Yoav Freund, Christina Leslie
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

We introduce novel profile-based string kernels for use with support vector machines (SVMs) for the problems of protein classification and remote homology detection. These kernels use probabilistic profiles, such as those produced by the PSI-BLAST algorithm, to define position-dependent mutation neighborhoods along protein sequences for inexact matching of k-length subsequences ("k-mers") in the data. By use of an efficient data structure, the kernels are fast to compute once the profiles have been obtained. For example, the time needed to run PSI-BLAST in order to build the pro- files is significantly longer than both the kernel computation time and the SVM training time. We present remote homology detection experiments based on the SCOP database where we show that profile-based string kernels used with SVM classifiers strongly outperform all recently presented supervised SVM methods. We also show how we can use the learned SVM classifier to extract "discriminative sequence motifs" ¿ short regions of the original profile that contribute almost all the weight of the SVM classification score ¿ and show that these discriminative motifs correspond to meaningful structural features in the protein data. The use of PSI-BLAST profiles can be seen as a semi-supervised learning technique, since PSI-BLAST leverages unlabeled data from a large sequence database to build more informative profiles. Recently presented "cluster kernels" give general semi-supervised methods for improving SVM protein classification performance. We show that our profile kernel results are comparable to cluster kernels while providing much better scalability to large datasets.
A hypergraph extension of the bipartite Turán problem
Authors: Dhruv Mubayi, Jacques Verstraëte
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (2004)

Let t, n be integers with n ≥ 3t. For t ≥ 3, we prove that in any family of at least t4(n2) triples from an n-element set X, there exist 2t triples A1, B1, A2, B2, ..., At, Bt and distinct elements a, b ∈ X such that Ai ∩ Ai = {a} and Bi ∩ Bi = {b}, for all i ≠ j, and Ai ∩ Bi = {Ai - {a} = Bj - {b} for i = j, φ for i ≠ j, When t = 2, we improve the upper bound t4(n 2) to 3(n 2) + 6n. This improves upon the previous best known bound of 3.5(n2) due to Füredi. Some results concerning more general configurations of triples are also presented.
The approximate GCD of inexact polynomials
Authors: Zhonggang Zeng, Barry H. Dayton
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (2004)

This paper presents an algorithm and its implementation for computing the approximate GCD (greatest common divisor) of multivariate polynomials whose coefficients may be inexact. The method and the companion software appear to be the first practical package with such capabilities. The most significant features of the algorithm are its robustness and accuracy as demonstrated in computational experiments. In addition, two variations of a squarefree factorization method for multivariate polynomials are proposed as an application of the GCD algorithm.
Perspective accurate splatting
Authors: Matthias Zwicker, Jussi Räsänen, Mario Botsch, Carsten Dachsbacher, Mark Pauly
Venue: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2004 (2004)

We present a novel algorithm for accurate, high quality point rendering, which is based on the formulation of splatting using homogeneous coordinates. In contrast to previous methods, this leads to perspective correct splat shapes, avoiding artifacts such as holes caused by the affine approximation of the perspective projection. Further, our algorithm implements the EWA resampling filter, hence providing high image quality with anisotropic texture filtering. We also present an extension of our rendering primitive that facilitates the display of sharp edges and corners. Finally, we describe an efficient implementation of the entire point rendering pipeline using vertex and fragment programs of current GPUs.
Discovery of ads web hosts through traffic data analysis
Authors: V. Bacarella, F. Giannotti, M. Nanni, D. Pedreschi
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGMOD workshop on Research issues in data mining and knowledge discovery (2004)

One of the most actual problems on web crawling -- the most expensive task of any search engine, in terms of time and bandwidth consumption -- is the detection of useless segments of Internet. In some cases such segments are purposely created to deceive the crawling engine while, in others, they simply do not contain any useful information. Currently, the typical approach to the problem consists in using a human-compiled blacklist of sites to avoid (e.g., advertising sites and web counters), but, due to the strongly dynamical nature of Internet, keeping them manually up-to-date is quite unfeasible. In this work we present a web usage statistics-based solution to the problem, aimed at automatically -- and, therefore, dynamically -- building blacklists of sites that the users of a monitored web-community consider (or appear to consider) useless or uninteresting. Our method performs a linear time complexity analysis on the traffic information which yields an abstraction of the linked web which can be incrementally up-dated, therefore allowing a streaming computation. The crawler can use the list produced in this way to prune out such sites or to give them a low priority before the (re-)spidering activity starts and, therefore, without analysing the content of crawled documents.
Dynamic Quarantine of Internet Worms
Authors: Cynthia Wong, Chenxi Wang, Dawn Song, Stan Bielski, Gregory R. Ganger
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (2004)

If we limit the contact rate of worm traffic, can we alleviateand ultimately contain Internet worms? This papersets out to answer this question. Specifically, we are interestedin analyzing different deployment strategies of ratecontrol mechanisms and the effect thereof on suppressingthe spread of worm code. We use both analytical modelsand simulation experiments. We find that rate control at individualhosts or edge routers yields a slowdown that is linearin the number of hosts (or routers) with the rate limitingfilters. Limiting contact rate at the backbone routers,however, is substantially more effective-it renders a slow-downcomparable to deploying rate limiting filters at everyindividual host that is covered. This result holds true evenwhen susceptible and infected hosts are patched and immunizeddynamically. To provide context for our analysis, weexamine real traffic traces obtained from a campus computingnetwork. We observe that rate throttling could be enforcedwith minimal impact on legitimate communications.Two worms observed in the traces, however, would be significantlyslowed down.
A variational method in design optimization and sensitivity analysis for aerodynamic applications
Authors: H. Ibrahim, N. Tiwari
Venue: Engineering with Computers (2004)

Variational method is applied to the state equations in order to derive the costate equations and their boundary conditions. Thereafter, the analyses of the eigenvalues of the state and costate equations are performed. It is shown that the eigenvalues of the Jacobean matrices of the state and the transposed Jacobean matrices of the costate equations are analytically and numerically the same. Based on the eigenvalue analysis, the costate equations with their boundary conditions are numerically integrated. Numerical results of the eigenvalues problems of the state and costate equations and of a maximization problem are finally presented.
An Information System for Material Microstructures
Authors: Kathrin Roberts, Frank Mucklich, Ralf Schenkel, Gerhard Weikum
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2004)

This paper presents an information system thatsupports a materialographic laboratory in classifyingmaterial samples based on microstructure images. Thesystem uses database and Web technologies to manageits information and make it accessible to Internetusers. Its core is a classifier, based on support vectormachines, that provides an automatic diagnosis of thematerial class of a given sample. The classifier usestexture features from an underlying image analysis, theso-called Haralick parameters, and stereologicfeatures such as fractal dimension, Euler parameter,etc. In addition to the classifier, the system provides asensitivity analysis that allows the user to understandwhich features are most influential for certainclassification decisions. The system is fully operationaland can be used on the Web.
Automatic re-scheduling of dependencies in a RPC-based grid
Authors: Thierry Gautier, Hamid-Reza Hamidi
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Supercomputing (2004)

RPC-based Grid infrastructures emphasize on the composition of services on a large number of computing resources. The key issue to reach high performance is to enable exploitation of parallelism on services invocations and communications. Moreover, this process should be transparent to reuse legacy codes. In this paper we present Homa an IDL compiler and a run-time support for automatic detection of the parallelism of invocations and their data dependencies on a set of CORBA objects. On homogeneous computational grids, such as clusters, Homa is accompanied by a predictable cost model. For instance, in the case of a application with a small parallel time, among p processors the speed up of Homa versus CORBA is asymptotically O(p). Also we describe how Homa can efficiently use data parallel objects. The illustrations on a case study in computational chemistry validate the cost model on a computational grid. For service-based Metacomputing, Homa offers high automation and transparency to detect parallelism for scheduling algorithms.