ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Change analysis of land surface temperature based on robust statistics in the estuarine area of Pearl River (China) from 1990 to 2000 by Landsat TM/ETM+ data
Authors: J. Zhang, Y. Wang, Z. Wang
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2007)

The estuarine area of Pearl River that has taken great changes in land cover since 1990 is a typical area for studying the change of land surface temperature (LST). The LST of the years 1990 and 2000 in this area was estimated from the data of Landsat TM/ETM+ band 6, respectively, and three scales, corresponding to high, normal and low temperature ranges, were divided by a robust statistical method. The results show that the area of high temperature range in 2000 has an increase of 250 km2 compared with the year 1990. The urban-used land and the bare land are the main land cover types constituting the high temperature range area.
An Application of Quasigroups in All-Or-Nothing Transform
Authors: Stelios I. Marnas, Lefteris Angelis, George L. Bleris
Venue: Cryptologia (2007)

All-Or-Nothing (AON) is an encryption mode for block ciphers with the property that an adversary must decrypt the entire ciphertext in order to determine any plaintext block. In this article, we present a new encryption scheme with the AON property, based on operations defined by quasigroups. The proposed procedure is a reliable and secure preprocessing step to any other common encryption mode, aiming to slow down the brute force searches against block ciphers.
Polygon-based texture mapping for cyber city 3D building models
Authors: F. Tsai, H. -C. Lin
Venue: International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2007)

The three-dimensional building model is one of the most important components in a cyber city implementation. Currently, however, most building models do not have sufficient and accurate texture information. The lack of texture not only makes 3D building models less realistic in visualization, it may also fail to provide needed information in intricate applications. This study developed a polygon-based texture mapping system to produce near photo-realistic texture mappings for 3D building models. Textures of building exteriors were generated from mosaics of close-range photographs acquired with commodity digital cameras. The developed system integrated multiple digital photographs to create texture mosaics that were continuous in geometric outlines and smooth in colour shadings, and correctly mapped them onto corresponding building model façades. A test example demonstrated that the resultant building model had more complete and accurate texture features as well as a near-photo-realistic appearance.
MobileAERO: Using Tag Clouds for Mobile Knowledge Management
Authors: Olaf Thiele, Hartwig Knapp, Martin Schader, Nicolas Prat
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Networking (2008)

Aircraft engine repair and overhaul (AERO) is an area of professional activity that draws heavily upon an engineer's knowledge. While engine maintenance typically follows a structured process, engine repairs are subject to unstructured processes. Such knowledge intensive professions benefit most from mobile knowledge management applications, but access of unstructured knowledge on mobile devices has been challenging in the past. In this paper, we present an extension to our existing implementation that displays unstructured content on mobile devices using tag clouds.
SSDR - Reconfigurable Firewall: Reconfiguration Model Impact
Authors: Fabio Dacencio Pereira, Edward David Moreno Ordonez
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Information Security and Assurance (isa 2008) (2008)

There are a number of techniques and pieces of hardware and software aimed at promoting information security. This paper presents a security system dynamically reconfigurable in FPGAs. SSDR presents a robust architecture, which enables the implementation of specific and general security policies in order to guarantee services such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability, access control, and information audit. The main purposes of SSDR include guaranteeing a great security level by reaching time performance acceptable to a conventional computer network, besides a greater flexibility in relation to a configuration of functionalities and to the security policies. In this paper it will be presented the Reconfigurable Firewall module, highlighting its architecture, functionalities and performance, as well as focusing on the impact on the reconfigurable time according the model of project adopted.
Satellite-derived cloud top pressure product validation using aircraft-based cloud physics lidar data from the ATReC field campaign
Authors: S T. Bedka, W F. Feltz, A J. Schreiner, R E. Holz
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2007)

The primary objective of this study was to assess the accuracy of satellite-derived estimates of cloud-top height (CTH). These estimates were derived using hourly data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-12) Imager and Sounder instruments. In addition, CTHs were derived using data from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), located on the polar-orbiting Aqua platform. Cloud physics lidar (CPL) data taken during the Atlantic-THORPEX Regional Campaign (ATReC) were used as the reference data set. Two cases were examined, one containing clouds at many different levels (5 December 2003) and one consisting entirely of mid-level clouds (between 4 and 10 km, 28 November 2003). For the first case, 19.4% of the Sounder pixels and 28.0% of the Imager pixels were within ±0.5 km of the CPL measurement, while 51.5% of the Sounder pixels and 64.3% of the Imager pixels were within ±1.5 km. For the second case, 29.7% of the Sounder pixels and 39.9% of the Imager pixels were within ±0.5 km of the CPL measurement, while 85.2% of the Sounder pixels and 85.1% of the Imager pixels were within ±1.5 km. The results indicate that MODIS CTH retrievals may provide an improvement over heights derived using geostationary instruments, especially for cases where cloud heights are not highly variable.
Convex analysis can be helpful for the asymptotic analysis of monotone operators: Asymptotic analysis of monotone operators
Authors: J. -P. Penot, C. Z&#x0103;linescu
Venue: Mathematical Programming: Series A and B (2008)

We use representations of maximal monotone operators for studying recession (or asymptotic) operators associated to maximal monotone operators. Such a concept is useful for dealing with unboundedness.
Liberating TCP: The Free and the Stunts
Authors: Jason Valdez, Mina Guirguis
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Networking (2008)

The performance of a TCP connection is typically dictated by what the network can provide rather than what the application would like to achieve. In particular, the Additive-Increase Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) mechanism employed by TCP hinges on its ability to meet specific throughput requirements since it has to respond to congestion signals promptly by decreasing its sending rate. The level and the timing of congestion signals impose strict limitations on the achievable throughput over short time-scales. To that end, this paper presents a new architecture, whereby a set of TCP connections (we refer to them as the Stunts) sacrifice their performance on behalf of another TCP connection (we refer to it as the Free) by picking up a delegated subset of the congestion signals and reacting to them in lieu of the Free connection. This gives the Free connection just enough freedom to meet specific throughput requirements as requested by the application, without affecting the level of congestion in the network. We evaluate our architecture via extensive simulation experiments.
Computer literacy: a student-oriented perspective
Authors: Mark E. Hoffman, David R. Vance
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2008)

Recent advances in Internet technology such as broadband access in the home have prompted a reconsideration of what a computer literacy course ought to be. We conducted a course where, similar to a university committee, students considered the question. Student committees reviewed relevant literature and standards, constructed syllabi, and designed and administered assignments. We present results and observations from the course. In addition to recommendations students consider valuable, we provide insights into how a course might be designed to evolve.
Site-based dynamic pruning for query processing in search engines
Authors: Ismail Sengor Altingovde, Engin Demir, Fazli Can, Özgür Ulusoy
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2008)

Web search engines typically index and retrieve at the page level. In this study, we investigate a dynamic pruning strategy that allows the query processor to first determine the most promising websites and then proceed with the similarity computations for those pages only within these sites.
Intrinsically conductive polymer thin film piezoresistors
Authors: M. Lillemose, M. Spieser, N. O. Christiansen, A. Christensen, A. Boisen
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2008)

We report on the piezoresistive effect in the intrinsically conductive polymer, polyaniline. A process recipe for indirect patterning of thin film polyaniline has been developed. Using a specially designed chip, the polyaniline thin films have been characterised with respect to resistivity and strain sensitivity using two- and four-point measurement method. We have found that polyaniline has a negative gauge factor of K=-4.9, which makes it a candidate for piezoresistive read-out in polymer based MEMS-devices.
Jigsaw: a tool for the small-scale reuse of source code
Authors: Rylan Cottrell, Robert J. Walker, Jörg Denzinger
Venue: Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering (2008)

Developers perform small-scale reuse tasks to save time and to increase the quality of their code. Due to the small scale of such tasks, the overhead in reusing source code can quickly outweigh the benefits. Existing approaches focus on locating source code for reuse but do not support the integration of the located code within the developer's system, thereby leaving the developer with the burden of performing these steps manually. This paper presents a tool, called Jigsaw, that uses the developer's context to help integrate the reused source code into the developer's own source code.
This Old House: Using Enterprise Architecture to Upgrade Old IT Systems
Authors: Linda Willbanks
Venue: IT Professional (2008)

To be most effective, companies must manage their IT resources and use them in their governance structure.
Laserpointer-interaction between art and science
Authors: Werner A. König, Joachim Böttger, Nikolaus Völzow, Harald Reiterer
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (2008)

We employ Laserpointer-Interaction as an intuitive, direct and flexible interaction concept particularly for large, highresolution displays which enforce physical navigation. We therefore demonstrate general applicability and suitability by applying Laserpointer-Interaction to a wide range of domains -- from scientific applications and formal experiments to artistic installations for the broad public.
Modeling visibility through vegetation
Authors: Marcos Llobera
Venue: International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2007)

The calculation of visibility patterns associated with past monuments and sites is an important element in modern landscape archaeology. These types of investigations have been limited by the inability of current viewshed routines to incorporate vegetation information. The following paper presents a new viewshed algorithm aimed at calculating the probability of locations being visible in the presence of vegetation. To this day, little work has been done to address this limitation, a notable exception is Dean's Permeability Index Model (1997). A review of Dean's model is provided here in the light of the new proposed algorithm. The new algorithm is based on mathematical principles found in Beer-Lambert's Attenuation Law, a physics law governing the attenuation of light through a medium. In addition to common viewshed parameters, the routine requires a 3D model of a tree/plant and a layer indicating the spatial distribution and density of vegetation on the landscape. The possibility of varying both, the spatial and density distribution of tree/plants, and the three-dimensional model representing vegetation makes the model well suited to investigate the impact that vegetation may have on visibility patterns.
Breaking the /spl Theta/(nlog/sup 2/ n) barrier for sorting with faults
Authors: T. Leighton, Yuan Ma
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE 34th Annual Foundations of Computer Science (1993)

We study the problem of constructing a sorting circuit, network, or PRAM algorithm that is tolerant to faults. For the most part, we focus on fault patterns that are random, e.g., where the result of each comparison is independently faulty with probability upper-bounded by some constant. All previous fault-tolerant sorting circuits, networks, and parallel algorithms require /spl Omega/(log/sup 2/ n) depth (time) and/or /spl Omega/(nlog/sup 2/ n) comparisons to sort n items. In this paper, we construct a passive-fault-tolerant sorting circuit with O(nlog nloglog n) comparators, a reversal-fault-tolerant sorting network with O(n log/sup log(2)/ /sup 3/ n) comparators, and a deterministic O(log n)-step O(n)-processor EREW PRAM fault-tolerant sorting algorithm. The results are based on a new analysis of the AKS circuit, which uses a much weaker notion of expansion that can be preserved in the presence of faults. Previously, the AKS circuit was not believed to be fault-tolerant because the expansion properties that were believed to be crucial for the performance of the circuit are destroyed by random faults. Extensions of our results for worst-case faults are also presented.
The Power of IP Protection and Software Licensing
Venue: Queue (2007)

Intellectual Property (IP) - which ranges from ideas, inventions, technologies, and patented, trademarked or copyrighted work and products - can account for as much as 80% of a software company's total market value. Since IP is considered a financial asset in today's business climate, the threats to IP create a real concern. In an interview with ACM Queuecast host Michael Vizard, Aladdin vice president Gregg Gronowski explains how Software Digital Rights Management solutions are the de-facto standard today for protecting software IP, preventing software piracy, and enabling software licensing and compliance. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Modified newton's method applied to potential field based navigation for nonholonomic robots in dynamic environments
Authors: Jing Ren, Kenneth a. Mcisaac, Rajni v. Patel
Venue: Robotica (2008)

This paper is to investigate inherent oscillations problems of Potential Field Methods (PFMs) for nonholonomic robots in dynamic environments. In prior work, we proposed a modification of Newton's method to eliminate oscillations for omnidirectional robots in static environment. In this paper, we develop control laws for nonholonomic robots in dynamic environment using modifications of Newton's method. We have validated this technique in a multirobot search-and-forage task. We found that the use of the modifications of Newton's method, which applies anywhere C2 continuous navigation functions are defined, can greatly reduce oscillations and speed up robot's movement, when compared to the standard gradient approaches.
Efficient key management for cryptographically enforced access control
Authors: Anna Zych, Milan Petković, Willem Jonker
Venue: Computer Standards Interfaces (2008)

Cryptographic enforcement of access control mechanisms relies on encrypting protected data with the keys stored by authorized users. This approach poses the problem of the distribution of secret keys. In this paper, a key management scheme is presented where each user stores a single key and is capable of efficiently calculating appropriate keys needed to access requested data. The proposed scheme does not require encryption of the same data (key) multiple times with the keys of different users or groups of users. It is designed especially for the purpose of access control. Thanks to that, the space needed for storing public parameters is significantly reduced. Furthermore, the proposed method supports flexible updates when user's access rights change.
Towards governance schemes for distributed software development projects
Authors: Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Software development governance (2008)

Growth in the adoption of distributed software development business models continues to outpace the development of robust governance schemes for them. In the absence of specific well-tested governance schemes, distributed software teams continue to employ the normative process frameworks, and software engineering practices that were primarily developed in the co-located context. In this position paper, we present a possible research direction for developing and testing governance schemes specifically suited for distributed software development projects. Our proposal draws examples from our recent research initiatives and presents an actionable road map for researchers and practitioners who are working towards establishing governance schemes for distributed software teams.
The CLOSER: automating resource management in java
Authors: Isil Dillig, Thomas Dillig, Eran Yahav, Satish Chandra
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on Memory management (2008)

While automatic garbage collection has relieved programmers from manual memory management in Java-like languages, managing resources remains a considerable burden and a source of performance problems. In this paper, we present a novel technique for automatic resource management based on static approximation of resource lifetimes. Our source-to-source transformation tool, CLOSER, automatically transforms program code to guarantee that resources are properly disposed and handles arbitrary resource usage patterns. CLOSER generates code for directly disposing any resource whose lifetime can be statically determined; when this is not possible, CLOSER inserts conditional disposal code based on interest-reference counts that identify when the resource can be safely disposed. The programmer is only required to identify which types should be treated as resources, and what method to invoke to dispose each such resource. We successfully applied CLOSER on a moderate-sized graphics application that requires complex reasoning for resource management.
Fast exact and heuristic methods for role minimization problems
Authors: Alina Ene, William Horne, Nikola Milosavljevic, Prasad Rao, Robert Schreiber, Robert E. Tarjan
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies (2008)

We describe several new bottom-up approaches to problems in role engineering for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). The salient problems are all NP-complete, even to approximate, yet we find that in instances that arise in practice these problems can be solved in minutes. We first consider role minimization, the process of finding a smallest collection of roles that can be used to implement a pre-existing user-to-permission relation. We introduce fast graph reductions that allow recovery of the solution from the solution to a problem on a smaller input graph. For our test cases, these reductions either solve the problem, or reduce the problem enough that we find the optimum solution with a (worst-case) exponential method. We introduce lower bounds that are sharp for seven of nine test cases and are within 3.4% on the other two. We introduce and test a new polynomial-time approximation that on average yields 2% more roles than the optimum. We next consider the related problem of minimizing the number of connections between roles and users or permissions, and we develop effective heuristic methods for this problem as well. Finally, we propose methods for several related problems.
Speech Enhancement Using Gain Function of Noisy Power Estimates and Linear Regression
Authors: Soojeong Lee, Soonhyob Kim
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technologies (2007)

Speech enhancement algorithm is proposed based on calculating the ratio of the average noisy power spectrum in time-frequency bins to the normalized time-frequency average. If the ratio is greater than the linear regression estimator threshold, speech is considered to be present. The algorithm has the advantage of being computationally simple and it produces significantly less residual noise. We evaluated the algorithm under various noise conditions to demonstrate its general superiority to conventional methods.
Variable pricing business solutions in a decomposed business environment
Authors: D. Flaxer, R. Z. Cao, C. Tian, W. Ding, J. Lee
Venue: Enterprise Information Systems (2007)

Evolving business models and technology advances have facilitated the creation of innovative pricing strategies. Variable pricing represents the ability to configure a pricing schedule from a set of pricing options such as fixed cost, usage, shared benefit, and performance. The objective of variable pricing is to improve a pricing schedule for the mutual benefits of the provider and consumer, based on an evaluation of criteria that results in the setting of a price as a function of the expected value to be derived, as well as the time and materials used. In this paper, we focus on the variable pricing of 'business solutions', which is abstractly defined as the capabilities that enable or add value to the purposes of an enterprise. In a decomposed business environment, the structure of a business is partitioned into discrete business components that are assigned specific purposes and are endowed with resources to meet them. Business components interact to achieve business goals, and do so by exposing their capabilities through business services they offer. Business services have suitable levels of granularity offering constituent units of function, which, when selectively chosen and composed, form business solutions. We assert that business services are also suitable units for variable pricing, the implication being that pricing for a given business solution is an evaluation of the variable pricing of its assemblage of business services. The benefits of this 'variable price composition' approach offer greater accuracy for the pricing plan, coupled with increased flexibility to compose, modify, calculate and articulate pricing for business solutions.
Uniqueness of certain association schemes
Authors: Eiichi Bannai, Etsuko Bannai, Hideo Bannai
Venue: European Journal of Combinatorics (2008)

We prove the uniqueness of the two association schemes which appear in recent work of Henry Cohn and others in connection with their study of universally optimal spherical codes in Euclidean spaces: one is the class 4 association scheme with 40 vertices in R^1^0 and the other one is the class 3 association scheme with 64 vertices in R^1^4. We prove the uniqueness mainly by geometric considerations with some computational help.