ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The price of democracy in coalition formation
Authors: Georgios Chalkiadakis, Edith Elkind, Maria Polukarov, Nicholas R. Jennings
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1 (2009)

Whenever rational agents form coalitions to execute tasks, doing so via a decentralized negotiation process---while more robust and democratic---may lead to a loss of efficiency compared to a centralized solution. To quantify this loss, we introduce the notion of the Price of Democracy (PoD), which measures the amount of resources needlessly committed to the task(s) at hand. After defining this concept for general coalitional games, we instantiate it in the setting of weighted voting games, a simple but expressive class of coalitional games that can be used to model resource allocation in multiagent scenarios. We approach the problem of forming winning coalitions in this setting from a non-cooperative perspective, and put forward an intuitive deterministic bargaining process, which exhibits no delay of agreement (i.e., the agents are guaranteed to form a winning coalition in round one) and allows for efficient computation of bargaining strategies. We show a tight bound of 3/2 on the PoD of our process if two rounds of bargaining are allowed, and demonstrate that this bound cannot improve with more rounds. We then generalize our bargaining process to settings where multiple coalitions are allowed to be formed, show that this generalization also exhibits no delay of agreement, and discuss the PoD in such settings.
Turbine stage design aided by artificial intelligence methods
Authors: Krzysztof Kosowski, Karol Tucki, Adrian Kosowski
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

We propose a general, efficient system for designing turbine cascades and stages in real 3D-flow conditions. The presented algorithms involve application of evolutionary algorithms, as well as Artificial Neural Networks. Results of the design process are shown to be highly optimised in terms of efficiency, whereas computation time is reduced by several orders of magnitude in comparison to methods relying on Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations.
Coding capacity of synchronous neuronal activity: reliable sparse code by synchrony within a dendritic compartment
Authors: Márton A. Hajnal
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Neural networks (2009)

Functional role of synchronous synaptic inputs to a dendritic compartment was studied. The framework of time-wise sparse coding and voltage-wise signal to noise ratios is layed out. The proportion of width of excitatory postsynaptic potential to the average period of a constantly firing input neuron define the available capacity of sparse coding in time. The reliability of transmission nonlinearly amplified if a small proportion of input neurons fire closely synchronous to each other. The asynchronous baseline, the salient synchronous peak and the theoretical maximum voltage at full synchronization determine the frame of signal to noise analysis. The available headroom between background and full sync peak and the signal to noise ratio are demonstrated to widen significantly when level of synchrony increases. Jitter reduces the signal to noise ratio and available headroom; at high synchrony level independently from input rate.
Research on Stability Region for a Type of Production Inventory Control System
Authors: Yongchang Wei, Hongwei Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks on Advances in Neural Networks (2009)

This paper focus on the stability analysis of the Automatic pipeline, variable inventory and order based production control system. Traditionally, dynamics of production inventory control system has been studied with transfer functions in frequency domain and the stability analysis is usually based on a fixed production delay. In this paper, state space representations are derived directly by a group of difference equations. The linear system theory is used to determine the stability region. The most significant point is that the region is independent on the production delay. Furthermore, two commonly used production ordering strategies are analyzed by the given region.
A team of presentation agents for edutainment
Authors: Bernardina De Carolis, Veronica Rossano
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (2009)

This paper presents the development of a presentation team that shows, explains and provides useful advices to children in the domain of "healthy nutrition". Agents of the team are endowed with different roles and personality traits so as to explain domain concepts from different viewpoints. In order to develop a system independent from the domain and the bodies of the agents, explanations and pieces of advice are generated and not statically scripted. The presentation plan is distributed to the various team actors and it is adapted to the characteristics of the interlocutor. To test the system and to evaluate the efficacy of the team in this domain we used a family of characters already present in the cartoon world: the Smurfies.
The ultimate haptic device: First step
Authors: Guillaume Millet, Sinan Haliyo, Stephane Regnier, Vincent Hayward
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

We describe a single-axis haptic interface which is based on a dual-stage actuator technique and which is aimed at achieving perfect transparency to a human user. The paper shows how all parasitic forces arising from inertia and friction can be brought below human detection thresholds, yet, the system is able to output significant torque. It has a stage with a large motor coupled to a distal stage with a smaller motor via a viscous coupler based on the principle of eddy current induction. The paper also describes its control principle and preliminary results.
Emergent application integration of ubiquitous information systems (UBIS)
Authors: David Bell
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Services integration in pervasive environments (2009)

UUbiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between hardware devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting content to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be discovered and accessed in a dynamic, ad-hoc manner. This paper explores how a number of banking systems can be modelled using the Web ontology language and re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. A proof-of-concept intelligent middleware architecture is built to further test and explore how human-devices-application connections can be made sporadically and not limited to pre-configured access to specific applications and data.
The role of an IT research professor: an essay-in-progress
Authors: Jan H. Kroeze, Philip D. Pretorius
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association (2009)

In academia the future is research, both for academic staff and students. Connecting students to the future, therefore, does not end with teaching courses. We should also teach research and research teaching, and, of course, conduct research as a way of teaching by example. Indeed, until recently it has been assumed that all lecturers at tertiary institutions should teach, conduct research and do community service. There are indications that this idealistic goal may be unrealistic, especially in smaller universities where few academic staff members have to cope with various taught programmes and a high student to teacher ratio. Some universities seem to have realised this predicament and have started to advertise positions for research professors in the recent past. According to our knowledge, NWU (VTC) is the first institution in South Africa to create a full-time research professorship in a school of IT. This short paper is an attempt to clarify the expectations, roles and duties of such a position. The paper explores the various aspects of an IT research professorship in terms of conducting, leading and managing research. It is suggested that the main task should be to undertake research, including cooperation and co-authoring with colleagues and postgraduate students. Supervision and co-supervision of dissertations and theses is another primary task. Publishing at least one or two research outputs from doctoral and master's students' dissertations should be high on the agenda. Using and promoting the article model for theses could enhance the number of outputs dramatically. A research professor will typically also be involved in research-related administrative matters such as serving on the university's research ethics committee. Creating and enhancing a research culture in the department or school poses a challenge, especially where members of the academic personnel have huge heavy teaching loads. A regular research colloquium could be used to stimulate ideas by giving feedback on progress with research activities such as postgraduate studies, the writing of papers and articles, and discussion of new research projects. Encouraging lecturers to research topics that they feel passionate about could go a long way to incite new research endeavours. The research professor should, therefore, join tea time conversations and listen attentively in order to hear what makes his/her colleagues tick! Since the paper is a work in progress, feedback and suggestions from our national colleagues will be welcomed and included in an article to be submitted to an accredited journal. We would also like to thank Prof Dewald Roode for so generously sharing his vast tacit knowledge on this topic with us.
Mean field approach for tracking similar objects
Authors: C. Medrano, J. E. Herrero, J. Martínez, C. Orrite
Venue: Computer Vision and Image Understanding (2009)

In this paper, we consider the problem of tracking similar objects. We show how a mean field approach can be used to deal with interacting targets and we compare it with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Two mean field implementations are presented. The first one is more general and uses particle filtering. We discuss some simplifications of the base algorithm that reduce the computation time. The second one is based on suitable Gaussian approximations of probability densities that lead to a set of self-consistent equations for the means and covariances. These equations give the Kalman solution if there is no interaction. Experiments have been performed on two kinds of sequences. The first kind is composed of a single long sequence of twenty roaming ants and was previously analysed using MCMC. In this case, our mean field algorithms obtain substantially better results. The second kind corresponds to selected sequences of a football match in which the interaction avoids tracker coalescence in situations where independent trackers fail.
Bridging ICT and CS: educational standards for computer science in lower secondary education
Authors: Torsten Brinda, Hermann Puhlmann, Carsten Schulte
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2009)

Recently, the importance of computer science education in secondary schools has been coming more and more into focus. Students' interests and motivation to pursue a career in CS related fields are highly influenced by school. Also beliefs in the nature of CS are influenced, and necessary foundations in knowledge and skills are built. However, a major problem is the gap between information and communication technologies (ICT) and computer science (CS). Often pupils have only experiences in ICT, and therefore develop inadequate beliefs about CS. We propose educational standards for CS in lower high school in order to bridge ICT and CS.
A recursive group decision-making procedure for choosing qualified individuals
Authors: Miguel A. Ballester, José Luis García-Lapresta
Venue: International Journal of Intelligent Systems (2009)

In this paper, we introduce a new group decision procedure that follows a recursive pattern. In the first stage, the members of a group show their opinions on all the individuals of that group, regarding a specific attribute, by means of assessments within the unit interval. Taking into account this information, some aggregation operators and a family of thresholds, a subgroup of individuals is selected: Those members whose collective assessment reach a specific threshold. Now only the opinions of this qualified subgroup are taken into account, and a new subgroup emerges in the implementation of the aggregation phase. We analyze when this recursive procedure converges providing a final subgroup of qualified members, taking into account some extended ordered weighted averaging operators. &copy; 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The need for flexible object invariants
Authors: Alexander J. Summers, Sophia Drossopoulou, Peter Müller
Venue: International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in Object-Oriented Programming (2009)

Specification and verification of object oriented programs usually features in some capacity the concept of an object invariant, used to describe the consistent states of an object. Unavoidably, an object's invariant will be broken at some points in its lifetime, and as a result, invariant protocols have been suggested, which prescribe the times at which object invariants may be broken, and the points at which they have to be re-established. The fact that currently available invariant protocols do not handle well some known examples, together with the fact that object invariants and invariant protocols can largely be encoded through methods' pre- and post- conditions has recently raised the question of whether they still have a role to play, or should be replaced by more explicit pre- and post-conditions for methods. In this paper we argue that invariant protocols express programmers' intuitions, lead to better design, allow more succinct specifications and proofs, and allow the expression of properties which involve many objects in a localised manner. In particular, the resulting verification conditions can be made simpler and more modular through the use of invariant-based reasoning. We also argue that even though encoding invariant protocols through methods' pre- and post-conditions is possible, such an encoding loses important information, and as a result makes specifications less explicit and program evolution (whereby the program evolves after the encoding has taken place) more error-prone. Finally, we show that such encodings often cannot express properties over inaccessible objects, whereas an appropriate invariant protocol can handle them simply.
Self-Organizing Multiagent Approach to Optimization in Positioning Problems
Authors: Sana Moujahed, Olivier Simonin, Abderrafiâa Koukam, Khaled Ghédira
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

The facility positioning Deployment, location and siting are used as synonyms problem concerns the location of facilities such as bus-stops, fire stations, schools, so as to optimize one or several objectives. This paper contributes to research on location problems by proposing a reactive multiagent approach. Particularly, we deal with the p-median problem, where the objective is to minimize the weighted distance between the demand points and the facilities. The proposed model relies on a set of agents (the facilities) situated in a common environment which interact and attempt to reach a global optimization goal: the distance minimization. The interactions between agents and their environment, which is based on the artificial potential fields approach, allow us to locally optimize the agent's location. The optimization of the whole system is then obtained from a self-organization of the agents. The efficiency of the proposed approach is confirmed by computational results based on a set of comparisons with the k-means clustering technique.
Exploring spatially prioritized parameters of Feng-Shui from tomb footprint
Authors: Jung-Sup Um
Venue: International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2009)

Geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial regression modeling techniques were used to evaluate the spatially prioritized relationships between grave density and various spatial parameters for a total of 5549 grave locations. Solar radiation was the most important predictor of grave density in the Feng-Shui locations. Similarly, spatial clustering technology identified the fact that high concentrations of grave necessarily accompany the significantly increasing trends of solar radiation. The results of the regression analyses indicate that the grave density could be explained by the four landform parameters alone yielding R 2 values of 0.751. In contrast to the typical theory, slope and aspect were not a dominant determining factor upon the dependent variable of grave density. Also, the significantly increasing trends of grave density were not observed in line with a southern direction. A clear verification has been made for the hidden assumptions in Feng-Shui's long history that its approach is found to be more appropriate in avoiding shadow conditions, rather than exploring the ideal landform location.
A Framework for Review, Annotation, and Classification of Continuous Video in Context
Authors: Tobias Lensing, Lutz Dickmann, Stéphane Beauregard
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Smart Graphics (2009)

We present a multi-modal video analysis framework for life-logging research. Domain-specific approaches and alternative software solutions are referenced, then we briefly outline the concept and realization of our OS X-based software for experimental research on segmentation of continuous video using sensor context. The framework facilitates visual inspection, basic data annotation, and the development of sensor fusion-based machine learning algorithms.
Using Graphical Representations to Improve the Usability of Email Clients
Authors: Dimitrios Rigas, Saad Alharbi
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering: Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering (2008)

With the versatility of email and the growing number of email messages, email clients have become difficult to use. Information visualization has been employed by many studies for various purposes such as the employment of the management features to email clients. Nevertheless, graphical presentation of email data has not been significantly considered to improve the usability of email clients. This paper describes an empirical study that aimed to investigate whether the usability of email clients can be improved by visualising email data. Two experimental e-mail visualisation approaches were developed especially for this experimental programme, both of them graphically presenting email messages based on a dateline together with other email data. Thirty users were required to perform ten experimental tasks in the two experimental visualisations and in a typical email client. Tasks accomplishment time and number of actions carried out whilst performing the tasks in order to evaluate the usability of each email version. The results indicated that the graphical presentation of email messages can significantly improve the usability of email clients. However, it can also negatively affect the usability if the email data was hidden extensively to reduce the graphical complexity in the inbox.
Simulation of Multiphysics Multiscale Systems, 6th International Workshop
Authors: Valeria V. Krzhizhanovskaya
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Science: Part I (2009)

Modeling and Simulation of Multiphysics Multiscale Systems (SMMS) poses a grand challenge to computational science. To adequately simulate numerous intertwined processes characterized by different spatial and temporal scales spanning many orders of magnitude, sophisticated models and advanced computational techniques are required. The aim of the SMMS workshop is to encourage and review the progress in this multidisciplinary research field. This short paper describes the scope of the workshop and gives pointers to the papers reflecting the latest developments in the field.
Toward automated haptic modeling using commercial haptic interfaces: surface normal estimation and static model identification
Authors: Mark A. Judd, Travis L. Brown, Mark B. Colton
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

The use of commercial haptic interfaces to create models of the feel of physical objects has the potential to transform the field of haptic modeling by broadening the availability of haptic modeling technology. In this paper we develop methods that enable general haptic interfaces to actuate and measure the dynamic properties of physical objects and generate models of their behavior. Specifically, methods are presented that allow commercial haptic interfaces to 1) estimate interaction forces without the use of force sensors, 2) estimate surface normal directions, and 3) actuate objects and identify haptic models from experimental data. Results are presented for two 1-D push buttons, one foam ball, and one inflatable vinyl ball. Initial results suggest that the methods have promise, but challenges must be overcome related estimating forces without the use of force sensors.
Modeling learning patterns of students with a tutoring system using Hidden Markov Models
Authors: Carole Beal, Sinjini Mitra, Paul R. Cohen
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Technology Rich Learning Contexts That Work (2007)

The current paper focuses on modeling actions of high school students with a mathematics tutoring system with Hidden Markov Models. The results indicated that including a hidden state estimate of learner engagement increased the accuracy and predictive power of the models, both within and across tutoring sessions. Groups of students with distinct engagement trajectories were identified, and findings were replicated in two independent samples. These results suggest that modeling learner engagement may help to increase the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems since it was observed that engagement trajectories were not predicted by prior math achievement of students.