ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An experiment on short-term effects of animated versus static visualization of operations on program perception
Authors: Seppo Nevalainen, Jorma Sajaniemi
Venue: Proceedings of the second international workshop on Computing education research (2006)

Empirical evaluation of visualizations has so far been typically carried out by measuring the performance of participants that have been shown the visualization in relation to control group by grading programming tasks. Such studies tell little about what effects take place during the visualizations and how these effects build up into the learning effects. To address these issues, we are carrying out a series of experiments using visualization tools whose long-term effects are known.This paper presents a model of the cognitive phenomena that take place during visualization viewing sessions and describes an experiment where two visualization tools that differed in the amount of animation were used. The results show that even when participants were provided with rich visual information in the form of animations, they resorted heavily to the textual cues present on the screen. As the animation proceeded, participants started to follow visual cues more closely. However, if the names of the variables involved in the current operation were not in the visually cued area, participants tended to search for them in the program code. In the absence of animation, participants were more eager to browse the code in general.
Design Structural Stability Metrics and Post-Release Defect Density: An Empirical Study
Authors: Mahmoud O. Elish, David Rine
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (2006)

This paper empirically explores the correlations between a suite of structural stability metrics for object-oriented designs and post-release defect density. The investigated stability metrics measure the extent to which the structure of a design is preserved throughout the evolution of the software from one release to the next. As a case study, thirteen successive releases of Apache Ant were analyzed. The results indicate that some of the stability metrics are significantly correlated with post-release defect density. It was possible to construct statistically significant regression models to estimate post-release defect density from subsets of these metrics. The results reveal the practical significance and usefulness of some of the investigated stability metrics as early indicators of one of the important software quality outcomes, which is post-release defect density.
Requirements for in-situ authoring of location based experiences
Authors: Mark J. Weal, Eva Hornecker, Don G. Cruickshank, Danius T. Michaelides, David E. Millard, John Halloran, David C. De Roure, Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services (2006)

In this paper we describe an investigation into the requirements for and the use of in-situ authoring in the creation of location based pervasive and UbiComp experiences. We will focus on the co-design process with users that resulted in a novel visitor experience to a historic country estate. This has informed the design of new, in-situ, authoring tools supplemented with tools for retrospective revisiting and reorganization of content. An initial trial of these new tools will be discussed and conclusions drawn as to the appropriateness of such tools. Further enhancements as part of future trials will also be described.
GenI: natural language generation in Haskell
Authors: Eric Kow
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell (2006)

In this article we present GenI, a chart based surface realisation tool implemented in Haskell. GenI takes as input a set of first order terms (the input semantics) and a grammar for a given target language (e.g., English, French, Spanish, etc.) and generates sentences in the target language, whose semantic meaning corresponds to the input semantics.The aim of the article is not so much to present GenI or to describe how it is implemented. Rather, we will focus on the aspects of functional programming (higher order functions, monads) and Haskell (typeclasses) that we found important to its design.
Improving Multimedia Innovative Item Types for Computer Based Testing
Authors: Irene Cheng, Anup Basu
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006)

Instead of computer games, animations, cartoons, and videos being used only for entertainment by kids, there is now an interest in using some of these media for educational purposes as well. Along with content creation, multimedia has potential for use in "innovative testing. Rather than traditional paper-and- pencil tests, audio, video and graphics are being conceived as alternative means for more effective testing in the future [1,17,21,28,29,30,33,42,44,49,50]. For example, we would like to use animation and games to help in learning concepts; consider how image, graphics and audio tools can be used for innovative testing; and develop techniques for measuring the impact of multimedia in improving performance or arousing interest in students. In this paper we discuss some examples of multimedia item types for testing, followed by a strategy for adaptive testing using those item types. We also show how techniques for perceptual evaluations can be used to improve strategies for adaptive testing.
Enhancing Text Clustering Using Concept-based Mining Model
Authors: Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, Mohamed Kamel
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Most of text mining techniques are based on word and/or phrase analysis of the text. The statistical analysis of a term (word or phrase) frequency captures the importance of the term within a document. However, to achieve a more accurate analysis, the underlying mining technique should indicate terms that capture the semantics of the text from which the importance of a term in a sentence and in the document can be derived. A new concept-based mining model that relies on the analysis of both the sentence and the document, rather than, the traditional analysis of the document dataset only is introduced. The proposed mining model consists of a concept-based analysis of terms and a concept-based similarity measure. The term which contributes to the sentence semantics is analyzed with respect to its importance at the sentence and document levels. The model can efficiently find significant matching terms, either words or phrases, of the documents according to the semantics of the text. The similarity between documents relies on a new concept-based similarity measure which is applied to the matching terms between documents. Experiments using the proposed concept-based term analysis and similarity measure in text clustering are conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed concept-based mining model enhances the clustering quality of sets of documents substantially.
Guest Editors' Introduction: Lawyers and Technologists--Joined at the Hip?
Authors: James X. Dempsey, Ira Rubinstein
Venue: IEEE Security and Privacy (2006)

It is now widely recognized that technical design decisions about the Internet can have lasting impacts on public policy and individual rights. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig offered perhaps the most popular explanation of the "code is law" concept in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 2000), but a rich literature exists on technology's impact on society and policy.
Real-time classification of variable length multi-attribute motions
Authors: Chuanjun Li, Latifur Khan, Balakrishnan Prabhakaran
Venue: Knowledge and Information Systems (2006)

Multi-attribute motion data can be generated in many applications/ devices, such as motion capture devices and animations. It can have dozens of attributes, thousands of rows, and even similar motions can have different durations and different speeds at corresponding parts. There are no row-to-row correspondences between data matrices of two motions. To be classified and recognized, multi-attribute motion data of different lengths are reduced to feature vectors by using the properties of singular value decomposition (SVD) of motion data. The reduced feature vectors of similar motions are close to each other, while reduced feature vectors are different from each other if their motions are different. By applying support vector machines (SVM) to the feature vectors, we efficiently classify and recognize real-world multi-attribute motion data. With our data set of more than 300 motions with different lengths and variations, SVM outperforms classification by related similarity measures, in terms of accuracy and CPU time. The performance of our approach shows its feasibility of real-time applications to real-world data.
A hybrid generative and predictive model of the motor cortex
Authors: Cornelius Weber, Stefan Wermter, Mark Elshaw
Venue: Neural Networks (2006)

We describe a hybrid generative and predictive model of the motor cortex. The generative model is related to the hierarchically directed cortico-cortical (or thalamo-cortical) connections and unsupervised training leads to a topographic and sparse hidden representation of its sensory and motor input. The predictive model is related to lateral intra-area and inter-area cortical connections, functions as a hetero-associator attractor network and is trained to predict the future state of the network. Applying partial input, the generative model can map sensory input to motor actions and can thereby perform learnt action sequences of the agent within the environment. The predictive model can additionally predict a longer perception- and action sequence (mental simulation). The models' performance is demonstrated on a visually guided robot docking manoeuvre. We propose that the motor cortex might take over functions previously learnt by reinforcement in the basal ganglia and relate this to mirror neurons and imitation.
Usability Evaluation of a Mixed Reality Collaborative Tool for Design Review
Authors: Xiangyu Wang, Phillip S. Dunston
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (2006)

Formal usability evaluation of Mixed Reality (MR) environments to date has received very little attention in MR literature and research. While awareness of the need for usability evaluation of MR appears to be on the rise, the techniques needed to perform efficient, meaningful usability evaluation of these environments are not yet available. This paper presents how the usability of MR system interfaces could be evaluated by using a combination of heuristic evaluation and formative user testing. This paper demonstrates by applying in assessing an MR-based collaborative virtual environment prototype for mechanical design review - Mixed Reality-based collaborative virtual environment (MRCVE). The evaluation was implemented through a devised experiment where human subjects were invited to use the MRCVE system for identifying design errors collaboratively from virtual mechanical models. Usability suggestions were also identified for the interface of future versions of MRCVE.
Energy conservation for wireless ad hoc routing
Authors: David Tipper
Venue:  (2006)

Self-configuring wireless ad hoc networks have attracted considerable attention in the last few years due to their valuable civil and military applications. One aspect of such networks that has been studied insufficiently is the energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is crucial to prolong the network lifetime and thus make the network more survivable. Nodes in wireless ad hoc networks are most likely to be driven by battery and hence operate on an extremely frugal energy budget. Conventional ad hoc routing protocols are focused on handling the mobility instead of energy efficiency. Energy efficient routing strategies proposed in literature either do not take advantage of sleep modes to conserve energy more efficiently, or incur much overhead in terms of control message and computing complexity to schedule sleep modes and thus are not scalable. In this dissertation, a novel strategy is proposed to manage the sleep of the nodes in the network so that energy can be conserved and network connectivity can be kept. The novelty of the strategy is its extreme simplicity. The idea is derived from the results of the percolation theory, typically called gossiping. Gossiping is a convenient and effective approach and has been successfully applied to several areas of the networking. In the proposed work, we will develop a sleep management protocol from gossiping for both static and mobile wireless ad hoc networks. Then the protocol will be extended to the asynchronous network, where nodes manage their own states independently. Analysis and simulations will be conducted to show the correctness, effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed work. The comparison between analytical and simulation results will justify them for each other. We will investigate the most important performance aspects concerning the proposed strategy, including the effect of parameter tuning and the impacts of routing protocols. Furthermore, multiple extensions will be developed to improve the performance and make the proposed strategy apply to different network scenarios.
Automatic Discovery of Action Taxonomies from Multiple Views
Authors: Daniel Weinland, Remi Ronfard, Edmond Boyer
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

We present a new method for segmenting actions into primitives and classifying them into a hierarchy of action classes. Our scheme learns action classes in an unsupervised manner using examples recorded by multiple cameras. Segmentation and clustering of action classes is based on a recently proposed motion descriptor which can be extracted efficiently from reconstructed volume sequences. Because our representation is independent of viewpoint, it results in segmentation and classification methods which are surprisingly efficient and robust. Our new method can be used as the first step in a semi-supervised action recognition system that will automatically break down training examples of people performing sequences of actions into primitive actions that can be discriminatingly classified and assembled into high-level recognizers.
Successful software project and products: An empirical investigation
Authors: Richard Berntsson-Svensson, Aybüke Aurum
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering (2006)

The circumstances surrounding the success and failure of software projects have been a topic of discussion among both practitioners and researchers for many years. A classical definition of project success is one that is within budget and on time. Some of the most common factors identified in the literature as leading to software project success are user involvement, management support and realistic requirements. Studies have indicated that managers have different perceptions from software practitioners when it comes to defining a successful software project. The observation of this difference of opinions has led us to the question: Could there be different perceptions about what effect various factors have on software project success among different industries? This paper presents an empirical study. Firstly, it begins with a detailed investigation of software product and project success factors. Secondly, it examines success factors for software projects and products across a selection of different industries, based on data collected from companies in Sweden and Australia. Thirdly, it studies how practitioners in industry define success factors for software projects and products.
An Adaptive Training Environment for UML
Authors: Maria Virvou, Kalliopi Tourtoglou
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

Adaptivity in training software systems is of great importance as it can adjust one single training environment to the needs of each individual trainee. ASSET is such a UML training software system as it provides adaptive support to both the trainer and the trainees. Specifically, it provides an environment that can be parameterised by the trainer to suit the training needs of his/her company or educational institution. The adaptive help to the trainer concerns mainly advice on the best schemes of collaboration between the trainees and the most efficient and productive forming of group as well. The adaptive help destined for the trainee refers to knowledge, user type and personality attributes. The special characteristic of ASSET is that it does not base its inferences on specific tests, but constantly monitors every action of the trainees during their interaction with the system.
Sampling binary contingency tables with a greedy start
Authors: Ivona Bezáková, Nayantara Bhatnagar, Eric Vigoda
Venue: Random Structures Algorithms (2007)

We study the problem of counting and randomly sampling binary contingency tables. For given row and column sums, we are interested in approximately counting (or sampling) 0/1 n x m matrices with the specified row/column sums. We present a simulated annealing algorithm with running time O((nm)2D3d max log 5(n + m)) for any row/column sums, where D is the number of nonzero entries and dmax is the maximum row/column sum. In the worst case, the running time of the algorithm is O(n11 log 5n) for an n x n matrix. This is the first algorithm to directly solve binary contingency tables for all row/column sums. Previous work reduced the problem to the permanent, or restricted attention to row/column sums that are close to regular. The interesting aspect of our simulated annealing algorithm is that it starts at a nontrivial instance, whose solution relies on the existence of short alternating paths in the graph constructed by a particular Greedy algorithm.&copy; 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2007
A Neuro-ForecastWater-Filling Scheme of Server Scheduling
Authors: Homayoun Yousefizadeh
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Systems and Networks Communication (2006)

Dynamic server scheduling schemes in queuing systems accommodating delay-sensitive traffic need to address the tradeoff between efficiency and fairness. For delay-sensitive traffic, threshold-exceeding delay or equivalently loss is used as a measure of efficiency. In this paper, a pair of dynamic server scheduling schemes for queuing systems accommodating delaysensitive traffic are compared. Each scheme consists of two components. The first component attempts at forecasting the arriving traffic patterns of the sources sharing the server bandwidth and the second component makes the assignment of server bandwidth among the sources. The schemes utilize BFGS and resilient backpropagation learning in perceptron neural networks to forecast the arriving traffic patterns, respectively. Once the traffic patterns are forecast, the schemes rely on water-filling to make the server bandwidth assignments max-min fair. Our simulations reveal the efficiency and fairness characteristics of the schemes.
Securing Membership Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Yunfang Feng, Zhiyuan Liu, Jun Li
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Technology (2006)

Lack of online trusted dealer and group membership dynamics make the membership control become a challenging task in wireless ad hoc network. Based on the threshold cryptography (and verifiable secret sharing), we propose a secure membership control scheme using a new threshold signature based on the RSA variant. Compared with other proposed solutions based on RSA, the scheme does not need the operation of t-bounded coalition offsetting; moreover, it provides verifiable GMC issuance and share acquisition, which is only achieved in threshold DSA before.
Reliability of interconnection networks modeled by a product of graphs
Authors: C. Balbuena, P. García-Vázquez, X. Marcote
Venue: Networks (2006)

The product graph Gm&ast;Gp of two given graphs Gm and Gp, defined by J.C. Bermond et al. [J Combin Theory, Series B 36 (1984) 32&ndash;48] in the context of the so-called (&Delta;,D)-problem, is one interesting model in the design of large reliable networks. This work deals with product graphs for which we provide bounds for the connectivity parameter &kappa;. Moreover, we state sufficient conditions that guarantee these product graphs to be maximally connected or superconnected. As a consequence, we deduce that even small networks with low reliability may lead to larger networks with high levels of fault-tolerance. &copy; 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 48(3), 114&ndash;120 2006
Derivation and Analysis of Basic Computational Operations of Thalamocortical Circuits
Authors: A. Rodriguez, J. Whitson, R. Granger
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004)

Shared anatomical and physiological features of primary, secondary, tertiary, polysensory, and associational neocortical areas are used to formulate a novel extended hypothesis of thalamocortical circuit operation. A simplified anatomically based model of topographically and nontopographically projecting (''core'' and ''matrix'') thalamic nuclei, and their differential connections with superficial, middle, and deep neocortical laminae, is described. Synapses in the model are activated and potentiated according to physiologically based rules. Features incorporated into the models include differential time courses of excitatory versus inhibitory postsynaptic potentials, differential axonal arborization of pyramidal cells versus interneurons, and different laminar afferent and projection patterns. Observation of the model's responses to static and time-varying inputs indicates that topographic ''core'' circuits operate to organize stored memories into natural similarity-based hierarchies, whereas diffuse ''matrix'' circuits give rise to efficient storage of time-varying input into retrievable sequence chains. Examination of these operations shows their relationships with well-studied algorithms for related functions, including categorization via hierarchical clustering, and sequential storage via hash- or scatter-storage. Analysis demonstrates that the derived thalamocortical algorithms exhibit desirable efficiency, scaling, and space and time cost characteristics. Implications of the hypotheses for central issues of perceptual reaction times and memory capacity are discussed. It is conjectured that the derived functions are fundamental building blocks recurrent throughout the neocortex, which, through combination, gives rise to powerful perceptual, motor, and cognitive mechanisms.
Computational formula of depth for Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces
Authors: Xiao-Ming Zeng, X. J. Chen
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2006)

In this paper, by introducing the concept of neighbor points and using the first-order difference of control points of Catmull-Clark surfaces, we obtain the rate of convergence of control meshes of Catmull-Clark surface. By the result of convergence we derive a computational formula of subdivision depth for Catmull-Clark surfaces.