ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Converged service opportunities supporting the multi-site corporate enterprise
Authors: C. C. Wong, G. Kruse
Venue: BT Technology Journal (2007)

Convergence in the world of telecommunications offers an excellent opportunity for new context-aware services to serve customers better. Customer service is one of the most expensive corporate investments due to the fact that call centres are costly, service is often labour-intensive, and customer representatives require continual training to handle a broad diversity of service issues. Nevertheless, an emerging class of technologies offers the promise to decrease the cost of offering information and services and to improve service consistency. Examples of these technologies include instant messaging (IM), personalisation tools, case-based reasoning systems and intelligent agents or robots (bots) that effectively mimic human interaction. The popularity of IM has increased considerably in recent years. No longer the province of chatty teenagers, it is currently part and parcel of advanced communications networks at many corporations. IM capabilities can help corporate communications with customers in real time, to solve problems, answer questions, and increase sales and customer satisfaction. This paper investigates the use of IM bots in serving corporate customers on the move, the potential value they offer, as well as forecasting how they may deliver the promised benefits. The paper also discusses a prototype demonstrating the extension of a desktop IM to the mobile platform, coupled with context enablers to provide context-aware information and services delivery.
Efficient Evaluation of Inbreeding Queries on Pedigree Data
Authors: Brendan Elliott, S. Fatih Akgul, Stephen Mayes, Z. Meral Ozsoyoglu
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2007)

We consider pedigree data structured in the form of a directed acyclic graph, and use an encoding scheme, called NodeCodes, for expediting the evaluation of queries on pedigree graph structures. Inbreeding is the quantitative measure of the genetic relationship between two individuals. The inbreeding coefficient is related to the probability that both copies of any given gene are received from the same ancestor. In this paper we discuss the evaluation of the inbreeding coefficient of a given individual using NodeCodes. We implemented and tested our approach with both synthetic and real pedigree data. Experimental results show that the use of NodeCodes provides a good alternative for queries involving the inbreeding coefficient, with significant improvements over the traditional iterative evaluation methods.
Vulnerabilities of RFID systems in infant abduction protection and patient wander prevention
Authors: Mohamed K. Saad, Syed V. Ahamed
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2007)

This paper presents penetration attacks and abduction drills conducted in a healthcare facility relying on RFID security system to prevent infant abduction and patient wander. The objective is to provide a better understanding to the limitations and weaknesses existing in the current used technology that is applied in different hospitals, and to provide guidelines for healthcare facility administration to change their policies in a way that cover vulnerabilities that exist in the current RFID security systems.
Development and evaluation of a thermal display for material identification and discrimination
Authors: Hsin-Ni Ho, Lynette A. Jones
Venue: ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP) (2007)

The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a thermal display that assists in object identification in virtual environments by simulating the thermal cues associated with making contact with materials with different thermal properties. The thermal display was developed based on a semi-infinite body model. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the display. The first experiment compared the ability of subjects' to identify various materials, which were presented physically or simulated with the thermal display. The second experiment examined the capacity of subjects to discriminate between a real and simulated material based on thermal cues. In the third experiment, the changes in skin temperature that occurred when making contact with real and simulated materials were measured to evaluate how these compare to theoretical predictions. The results indicated that there was no significant difference in material identification and discrimination when subjects were presented with real or simulated materials. The changes in skin temperature were comparable for real and simulated materials and were related to the contact coefficient of the material palpated, consistent with the semi-infinite body model. These findings suggest that a thermal display is capable of facilitating object recognition when visual cues are limited.
NetBill security and transaction protocol
Authors: Benjamin Cox, J. D. Tygar, Marvin Sirbu
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st conference on USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce - Volume 1 (1995)

NetBill is a system for micropayments for information goods on the Internet. This paper presents the NetBill protocol and describes its security and transactional features. Among our key innovations are: • An atomic certified delivery method so that a customer pays if and only if she receives her information goods intact. • Outsourcing access control: different users can use different access control servers. • A credential mechanism allowing users to prove membership in groups. This supports discounts. • A structure for constructing pseudonyms to protect the identities of consumers.
Treating bugs as allergies: a safe method for surviving software failures
Authors: Feng Qin, Joseph Tucek, Yuanyuan Zhou
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 10 (2005)

Many applications demand availability. Unfortunately, software failures greatly reduce system availability. Previous approaches for surviving software failures suffer from several limitations, including requiring application restructuring, failing to address deterministic software bugs, unsafely speculating on program execution, and requiring a long recovery time. This paper proposes an innovative, safe technique, called Rx, that can quickly recover programs from many types of common software bugs, both deterministic and non-deterministic. Our idea, inspired by allergy treatment in real life, is to rollback the program to a recent checkpoint upon a software failure, and then to reexecute the program in a modified environment. We base this idea on the observation that many bugs are correlated with the execution environment, and therefore can be avoided by removing the "allergen" from the environment. Rx requires few to no modifications to applications and provides programmers with additional feedback for bug diagnosis.
Cache for workflows
Authors: Ian Taylor, Andrew Harrison, Carlo Mastroianni, Matthew Shields
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Workflows in support of large-scale science (2007)

This paper discusses the motivation for the design of a decentralised data-caching scheme for Internet scale distributed computing applications. We provide three target applications in distributed cycle sharing applications, music information retrieval workflows and for workflow-based audio visual searching across distributed information servers. We argue that extensions are needed in existing toolkits to advance super peer topologies to support the caching of application data as well as adverts for specific applications. We discuss the Alchemist system that defines super peers style overlays for caching application-data by employing the use of dynamic groups, which are flexible in defining replicating, forwarding and security policies. This framework is built on top of existing technologies, such as P2PS and WSPeer and exploits standardised Web Services technologies as well as SOAP and more recently defined Web Services specifications. We present results to indicate the usefulness of such a data caching approach for distributing workflows and application data, and discuss future simulations that aim to sustain the evolution of the system.
Media synchronization control with prediction in a remote haptic calligraphy system
Authors: Yutaka Ishibashi, Toshio Asano
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (2007)

This paper presents a remote haptic calligraphy systemwhich can control a remote haptic interface device with another haptic interface device. In the system, a teacher can instruct a student at a remote location how to use a calligraphy brush while conveying the sense of force through a network. We also present media synchronization control with prediction in order to maintain a high quality of haptic transmission. Under the control, network delay jitter is absorbed by buffering, and the positional information is output by prediction if the information is lost or arrives significantly late. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the control by subjective assessment.
A Case for Compressing Traces with BDDs
Authors: Graham Price, Manish Vachharajani
Venue: IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (2006)

Instruction-level traces are widely used for program and hardware analysis. However, program traces for just a few seconds of execution are enormous, up to several terabytes in size, uncompressed. Specialized compression can shrink traces to a few gigabytes, but trace analyzers typically stream the the decompressed trace through the analysis engine. Thus, the complexity of analysis depends on the decompressed trace size (even though the decompressed trace is never stored to disk). This makes many global or interactive analyses infeasible. This paper presents a method to compress program traces using binary decision diagrams (BDDs). BDDs intrinsically support operations common to many desirable program analyses and these analyses operate directly on the BDD. Thus, they are often polynomial in the size of the compressed representation. The paper presents mechanisms to represent a variety of trace data using BDDs and shows that BDDs can store, in 1~GB of RAM, the entire data-dependence graph of traces with over 1 billion instructions. This allows rapid computation of global analyses such as heap-object liveness and dynamic slicing.
Examining the role of terminal middleware in convergence applications
Authors: S. Beddus, M. Hosking, D. Roxburgh
Venue: BT Technology Journal (2007)

This paper examines the role of terminal middleware in supporting future convergence applications. Convergence features are characterised based on locale or device factors and some typical examples are identified. A prototye illustrates a clear opportunity for network operators to add value in the areas of Web Services delivery, access control, request prioritisation and continuity management for mobile applications.
Preliminary design of ADL/C++: a specification language for C++
Authors: Sreenivasa Rao Viswanadha, Sriram Sankar
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies (COOTS) - Volume 2 (1996)

ADL/C++ is a specification language for associating behavior specifications as post-conditions with C++ (function) declarations. The language includes a clean subset of the C++ expression language and the semantics is relatively simple and informal. Most of the important features of C++ like member functions, virtual members, constructors, inheritance and exceptions can be specified in ADL/C++. In addition to being semi-formal documentation, ADL/C++ specifications can also be used for testing C++ implementations. We developed a method for validating tests of C++ implementations using ADL/C++ specifications.
Reaching for the Stars with Python
Authors: Perry Greenfield
Venue: Computing in Science and Engineering (2007)

The author describes how Python has helped scientists calibrate and analyze data from the Hubble Space Telescope, first as a means of scripting legacy applications, and, more recently, as a way of developing new applications in Python itself.
Vacuum systems laboratory development
Authors: D. M. Hata
Venue: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 03 (1998)

The implementation of new associate degree programs in semiconductor manufacturing at community colleges across the country has created a critical need for vacuum technology courses and supporting laboratories. Unfortunately few resources have been available to support technology-level courses in vacuum systems. This paper describes the results of a two-year project to develop a vacuum technology course, implement a vacuum systems laboratory, and provide faculty enhancement activities.
The discrete modal transform and its application to lossy image compression
Authors: Michail Krinidis, Nikos Nikolaidis, Ioannis Pitas
Venue: Image Communication (2007)

This paper introduces the discrete modal transform (DMT), a 1D and 2D discrete, non-separable transform for signal processing, which, in the mathematical sense, is a generalization of the well-known discrete cosine transform (DCT). A 3D deformable surface model is used to represent the image intensity and the introduced discrete transform is a by-product of the explicit surface deformation governing equations. The properties of the proposed transform are similar to those of the DCT. To illustrate these properties, the proposed transform is applied to lossy image compression and the obtained results are compared to those of a DCT-based compression scheme. Experimental results show that DMT, which includes an embedded compression ratio selection mechanism, has excellent energy compaction properties and achieves comparable compression results to DCT at low compression ratios, while being in general better than DCT at high compression ratios.
An iterative langevin solution for turbulent dispersion in the atmosphere
Authors: Jonas C. Carvalho, Marco Túllio M. B. de Vilhena, Mark Thompson
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2007)

In this work we present an alternative hybrid method to solve the Langevin equation and we apply it to simulate air pollution dispersion in inhomogeneous turbulence conditions. The method solves the Langevin equation, in semi-analytical manner, by the method of successive approximations or Picard's Iterative Method. Solutions for Gaussian and non-Gaussian turbulence conditions, considering Gaussian, bi-Gaussian and Gram-Charlier probability density functions are obtained. The models are applied to study the pollutant dispersion in all atmospheric stability and in low-wind speed condition. The proposed approach is evaluated through the comparison with experimental data and results from other different dispersion models. A statistical analysis reveals that the model simulates very well the experimental data and presents results comparable or even better than ones obtained by the other models.
A synchronized per-survivor MLSD receiver using differential Kalman filter
Authors: A. M. Rabiei
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2000)

This paper presents a maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) receiver which performs joint data detection, channel equalization and synchronization over a fast frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. An optimal per-survivor processing (PSP) technique is employed which is a combination of statistical channel modeling and differential Kalman filter. It is shown that by incorporating the synchronization parameters into the channel impulse response and modification of the resulting state space model by a differential approach, frequency synchronization can be achieved by a simple adaptive algorithm in addition to data detection and channel estimation. It is also shown that by applying the so called approach, the differential Kalman filter could be simplified to a simple LMS estimator without any considerable lack in performance.
The laboratory environment of the URI Integrated Computer Engineering Design (ICED) curriculum
Authors: A. K. Uht
Venue: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1998)

While many computer engineering curricula contain significant design projects encompassing either hardware or software, most do not integrate these experiences, are short-term in nature, lack exposure to industrial design tools, do not have hands-on experience, or lack continuity. URI's new ICED undergraduate curriculum addresses these issues through a comprehensive multi-year project. The project entails the design and construction of both the hardware and software of a computer, including the compiler, CPU, bus, memory, and I/O. An Ethernet-like network interface is also designed and built, and students' computers are interconnected. Hardware, software, and design-time tradeoffs are examined and made throughout the project. Computer engineering principles come to life in the investigation and design of real and integrated hardware and software. This paper describes the laboratory environment of the ICED curriculum. The pedagogical use of industrial CAD logic design and synthesis tools at multiple levels is given, including: state machine, VHDL, and gate levels. The physical hardware used to realize the system's logical design is discussed, including the use of both a high-density field programmable gate array (FPGA) and discrete digital and analog circuits. Mechanisms are described that provide correlation between analog signals, digital signals, corresponding assembly code, and high-level source code. Thus, the student is able to intimately investigate and to understand the impact of hardware, application software and compiler design decisions on computer system performance and cost.
Supporting Robust and Secure Interactions in Open Domains through Recovery of Trust Negotiations
Authors: Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Alberto Trombetta, Elisa Bertino
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2007)

Trust negotiation supports authentication and access control across multiple security domains by allowing parties to use non-forgeable digital credentials to establish trust. By their nature trust negotiation systems are used in environments that are not always reliable. In particular, it is important not only to protect negotiations against malicious attacks, but also against failures and crashes of the parties or of the communication means. To address the problem of failures and crashes, we propose an efficient and secure recovery mechanism. The mechanism includes two recovery protocols, one for each of the two main negotiation phases. In fact, because of the requirements that both services and credentials have to be protected on the basis of the associated disclosure policies, most approaches distinguish between a phase of disclosure policy evaluation from a phase devoted to actual credentials exchange. We prove that the protocols, besides being efficient, are secure with respect to integrity, and confidentiality and are idempotent. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort for achieving robustness and fault tolerance of trust negotiation systems.
What Do Young Adults Expect When They Go Online? Lessons for Development of an STD/HIV and Pregnancy Prevention Website
Authors: Sheana Salyers Bull, Stephanie Phibbs, Sally Watson, Mary McFarlane
Venue: Journal of Medical Systems (2007)

We used participatory research to develop a theoretically based online STD/HIV and pregnancy prevention intervention that would be entertaining and captivating for 15---25 year olds while delivering key messages about condom use. We conducted six focus groups with 15---25 year olds attending reproductive health clinics and completed a content analysis with focus group data. Youth had expectations that websites contain features such as graphics and flash technology. They would participate in research online if their confidentiality was assured and if they could receive an instant incentive. Limited access to high-end bandwidth capability requires use of compressed graphics and music to reach diverse audiences. Youth suggested approaches to frame role-model delivered messages about HIV/STD and pregnancy risk, condom attitudes, norms and self-efficacy for negotiation. These data allowed for development of a dynamic, interactive and relatively low bandwidth site that retains fidelity to key theoretical constructs in STD/HIV and pregnancy prevention.
Detection of seizure signals in newborns
Authors: B. Boashash
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1999)

This paper considers a system design for processing a multidimensional biomedical signal formed by EEG, ECG, EOG and motion recorded from a newborn, for the purpose of detection of epileptic seizures in newborns as an extension of the method reported in Boashash et al. (1997) and Roessgen et al. (1998). We describe the proposed design, and discuss how the signals will be analysed and fused to detect the occurrence of seizure. We also discuss the role of modelling in refining the signal processing unit.
Generalized value decomposition and structured multiattribute auctions
Authors: Yagil Engel, Michael P. Wellman
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce (2007)

Multiattribute auction mechanisms generally either remain agnostic about traders' preferences, or presume highly restrictive forms, such as full additivity. Real preferences often exhibit dependencies among attributes, yet may possess some structure that can be usefully exploited to streamline communication and simplify operation of a multiattribute auction. We develop such a structure using the theory of measurable value functions, a cardinal utility representation based on an underlying order over preference differences. A set of local conditional independence relations over such differences supports a generalized additive preference representation, which decomposes utility across overlapping clusters of related attributes. We introduce an iterative auction mechanism that maintains prices on local clusters of attributes rather than the full space of joint configurations. When traders' preferencesare consistent with the auction's generalized additive structure, the mechanism produces approximately optimal allocations, atapproximate VCG prices.
Extended RSA cryptosystem and digital signature schemes in the domain of Gaussian integers
Authors: H. Elkamchouchi, K. Elshenawy, H. Shaban
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th International Conference on Communication Systems - Volume 01 (2002)

This paper proposes extensions for the RSA cryptosystem and digital signature schemes to the domain of Gaussian integers. The required arithmetic and the use of it in the proposed extensions are illustrated. Also, numerical examples are given. The proposed extensions have many advantages over the classical RSA cryptosystem and digital signature.