ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Unconventional human computer interfaces
Authors: Steffi Beckhaus, Ernst Kruijff
Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes (2004)

This course focuses on how we can use the potential of the human body in experimental or unconventional interface techniques. It explores the biological or physiological characteristics of the separate parts of the body, from head to toe, and from skin to heart, showing how their sensor (input) and control (output) capabilities can be applied to human computer interfaces. We demonstrate a wide variety of applications that make use proven interfaces as well as extremely experimental systems. Example systems vary from desktop--based to mixed and virtual reality, with applications from areas like art, entertainment, and science.Participants will learn to look beyond the restrictions bound to traditional multimedia systems by discovering and understanding how the human body can deliver great potential for new kinds of applications and systems. Theory on the human body and practical knowledge on (hardware) interfaces is balanced with a good portion of examples to provide a foundation for assessing and using experimental and unconventional interaction.
Performance OpenGL: platform independent techniques or
Authors: Tom True, Brad Grantham, Bob Kuehne, Dave Shreiner
Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes (2004)

The OpenGL Application Programming Interface (API) is the most widely supported, cross-platform computer-graphics interface available to programmers today. Such broad support of OpenGL across different graphics hardware presents challenges in maximizing performance while still maintaining portability. This course focuses on teaching tools and techniques for the analysis and development of high-performance interactive graphics-applications.The course begins with an introduction to the stages of the OpenGL rendering pipeline, and the performance-limiting bottlenecks that can affect each stage of the pipeline. Simple, yet effective, techniques for determining which stage of the pipeline is limiting are presented.The course continues with a detailed analysis of each stage's operations, and the options that a programmer has control over. The interaction of those options with respect to performance is discussed, with an eye towards highlighting commonalities that aid performance across different platforms is presented along with empirical results to back up our observations.A brief departure into topics relating to object-oriented programming paradigms and how one's coding style can effect OpenGL's operation. Some suggestions for managing data in OpenGL with respect to encapsulation are presented.Continuing, the course introduces the concept of OpenGL's validation phase, and how this hidden operation can rob perfectly legitimate, well-written OpenGL applications of their performance. This discussion culminates with a discussion of state sorting.Finally, simple suggestions that are likely to help the performance of OpenGL applications are presented. These suggestions should be added into the programmer's tool box, providing simple optimizations that do not violate Professor Knuth's old adage of "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Mission-directed path planning for planetary rover exploration
Authors: Paul Tompkins
Venue:  (2005)

Robotic rovers uniquely benefit planetary exploration&mdash;they enable regional exploration with the precision of in-situ measurements, a combination impossible from an orbiting spacecraft or fixed lander. Mission planning for planetary rover exploration currently utilizes sophisticated software for activity planning and scheduling, but simplified path planning and execution approaches tailored for localized operations to individual targets. This approach is insufficient for the investigation of multiple, regionally distributed targets in a single command cycle. Path planning tailored for this task must consider the impact of large scale terrain on power, speed and regional access; the effect of route timing on resource availability; the limitations of finite resource capacity and other operational constraints on vehicle range and timing; and the mutual influence between traverses and upstream and downstream stationary activities. Encapsulating this reasoning in an efficient autonomous planner would allow a rover to continue operating rationally despite significant deviations from an initial plan. This research presents mission-directed path planning that enables an autonomous, strategic reasoning capability for robotic explorers. Planning operates in a space of position, time and energy. Unlike previous hierarchical approaches, it treats these dimensions simultaneously to enable globally-optimal solutions. The approach calls on a near incremental search algorithm designed for planning and re-planning under global constraints, in spaces of higher than two dimensions. Solutions under this method specify routes that avoid terrain obstacles, optimize the collection and use of rechargable energy, satisfy local and global mission constraints, and account for the time and energy of interleaved mission activities. Furthermore, the approach efficiently re-plans in response to updates in vehicle state and world models, and is well suited to online operation aboard a robot. Simulations exhibit that the new methodology succeeds where conventional path planners would fail. Three planetary-relevant field experiments demonstrate the power of mission-directed path planning in directing actual exploration robots. Offline mission-directed planning sustained a solar-powered rover in a 24-hour sun-synchronous traverse. Online planning and re-planning enabled full navigational autonomy of over 1 kilometer, and supported the execution of science activities distributed over hundreds of meters.
Using Static Analysis to Reduce Dynamic Analysis Overhead
Authors: Suan Hsi Yong, Susan Horwitz
Venue: Formal Methods in System Design (2005)

Dynamic analysis (instrumenting programs with code to detect and prevent errors during program execution) can be an effective approach to debugging, as well as preventing harm from being caused by malicious code. One problem with this approach is the runtime overhead introduced by the instrumentation. We define several techniques that involve using the results of static analysis to identify some cases where instrumentation can safely be removed. While we have designed the techniques with a specific dynamic analysis in mind (that used by the Runtime Type-Checking tool), the ideas may be of more general applicability.
High-Dynamic-Range Still-Image Encoding in JPEG 2000
Authors: Ruifeng Xu, Sumanta N. Pattanaik, Charles E. Hughes
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2005)

With the increasing use of high-dynamic-range (HDR) images, their storage and transmission motivate a careful study of appropriate data compression techniques. This article explores the use of JPEG 2000 in the compression of HDR still images. The authors first map the pixels from original floating-point values in the logarithm domain into integer values, and then encode the image using JPEG 2000 codec. This approach can compress an HDR image anywhere in the spectrum from very low bit rate to visually lossless. Our experiments demonstrate this to be a simple, effective and practical tool for HDR image encoding. At low bit rates, its compression quality is superior to other currently published techniques.
An Evaluation of the Suitability of FPGAs for Embedded Vision Systems
Authors: W. James MacLean
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05) - Workshops - Volume 03 (2005)

Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), is becoming increasingly attractive for digital signal processing problems, including image processing and computer vision tasks. The ability to exploit the parallelism often found in these problems, as well as the ability to support different modes of operation on a single hardware substrate, gives these devices a particular advantage over fixed architecture devices such as serial CPUs and DSPs. Further, development times are substantially shorter than dedicated hardware in the form of Application Specific ICs (ASICs), and small changes to a design can be prototyped in a matter of hours. On the other hand, designing with FPGAs still requires expertise beyond that found in many vision labs today. This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of FPGA technology, its suitability for image processing and computer vision tasks, and attempts to suggest some directions for the future.
Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation with Enhanced Transition Metric over Rayleigh Fading Channels
Authors: Kostas V. Koutsouvelis, Christos E. Dimakis, S. S. Kouris
Venue: Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal (2005)

This paper investigates the performance of a new Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation scheme over correlated flat fading channels with channel interleaving. The novelty of the scheme is based on the application of a new modified transition metric incorporated in the symbol-by-symbol MAP algorithm. We consider frequency non-selective, slow Rayleigh fading channels. Extensive simulation results together with EXIT chart analysis show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance compared to the conventional transition metric when channel state information is not available at the decoder.
Filtering of Shrew DDoS Attacks in Frequency Domain
Authors: Yu Chen, Kai Hwang, Yu-Kwong Kwok
Venue: Proceedings of the The IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks 30th Anniversary (2005)

The shrew Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are periodic, bursty, and stealthy in nature. They are also known as Reduction of Quality (RoQ) attacks. Such attacks could be even more detrimental than the widely known flooding DDoS attacks because they damage the victim servers for a long time without being noticed, thereby denying new visitors to the victim servers, which are mostly e-commerce sites. Thus, in order to minimize the huge monetary losses, there is a pressing need to effectively detect such attacks in real-time. stealthy Tracing Attackers Research Light TracE (STARLITE) is a customization and significant extension to BBN's Source Path Isolation Engine (SPIE.) The goal of STARLITE was to construct a prototype to integrate single packet traceback with stepping stone detection. The resulting prototype traces a packet to an ingress router, and then discovers if the flow of that packet is related to a flow in another connection. A successful correlation can then be continued until an ultimate source is located.
GASP IV can broaden your modeling perspective
Authors: A. Alan B. Pritsker
Venue: ACM SIGSIM Simulation Digest (1974)

Simulation modeling can be constrained by the simulation language with which you are familiar. GASP IV eliminates many constraints by combining discrete and continuous concepts into one language.
Noncentral quadratic forms of the skew elliptical variables
Authors: B. Q. Fang
Venue: Journal of Multivariate Analysis (2005)

In this paper the quadratic forms in the skew elliptical variables are studied. A family of the noncentral generalized Dirichlet distributions is introduced and their distribution functions and probability density functions are obtained. The moment generating functions of the quadratic forms in the skew normal variables are obtained. Sufficient and necessary conditions for the quadratic forms in the skew normal variables to have the noncentral generalized Dirichlet distributions are obtained. This leads to the noncentral Cochran's Theorem for the skew normal distribution.
A (acronyms)
Authors: Manuel Zahariev
Venue:  (2004)

Acronyms are a significant and the most dynamic area of the lexicon of many languages. Building automated acronym systems poses two problems: acquisition and disambiguation. Acronym acquisition is based on the identification of anaphoric or cataphoric expressions which introduce the meaning of an acronym in text; acronym disambiguation is a word sense disambiguation task, with expansions of an acronym being its possible senses. It is proposed here that acronyms are universal phenomena, occurring in all languages with a written form, and that their formation is governed by linguistic preferences, based on regularities at the character, phoneme, word and phrase levels. A universal explanatory theory of acronyms is presented, which rests on a set of testable hypotheses, and is manifested through a set of violable, ordered rules. The theory is developed based on examples from fifteen languages, with six different writing systems. A dynamic programming algorithm is implemented based on the explanatory theory of acronyms. The algorithm is evaluated on lists of acronyms-expansion pairs in Russian Spanish, Danish, German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, and Swedish and achieves excellent performance. A two-pass greedy algorithm for automatic acronym acquisition is designed, which results in good performance for specific domains. A hybrid, machine learning algorithm&mdash;using features generated through dynamic programming acronym-expansion matching&mdash;is proposed and results in good performance on noisy, parsed, newspaper text. A machine learning algorithm for acronym sense disambiguation is presented, which is trained and evaluated automatically on information downloaded following search engine lookup. The algorithm achieves good performance on deciding whether an acronym occurs with a certain sense in a given context, and good accuracy when picking the correct sense for an acronym in a given context. All algorithms presented allow for efficient, readily usable implementations that can be included as components in larger natural language frameworks. Technologies developed have applicability beyond acronym acquisition and disambiguation, to aspects of the more general problems of anaphora resolution and word sense disambiguation, within information extraction or natural language understanding systems.
Labeling Schemes for Small Distances in Trees
Authors: Stephen Alstrup, Philip Bille, Theis Rauhe
Venue: SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (2005)

We consider labeling schemes for trees, supporting various relationships between nodes at small distance. For instance, we show that given a tree T and an integer k we can assign labels to each node of T such that given the label of two nodes we can decide, from these two labels alone, if the distance between v and w is at most k and, if so, compute it. For trees with n nodes and $k\geq 2$, we give a lower bound on the maximum label length of $\log n + \Omega(\log \log n)$ bits, and for constant k, we give an upper bound of log n + O(log log n). Bounds for ancestor, sibling, connectivity, and bi- and triconnectivity labeling schemes are also presented.
Indirect supervised learning of strategic generation logic
Authors: Kathleen R. Mckeown
Venue:  (2005)

The Strategic Component in a Natural Language Generation (NLG) system is responsible for determining content and structure of the generated output. It takes a knowledge base and communicative goals as input and provides a document plan as output. The Strategic Generation process is normally divided into two subtasks: Content Selection and Document Structuring. An implementation for the Strategic Component uses Content Selection rules to select the relevant knowledge and Document Structuring schemata to guide the construction of the document plan. This implementation is better suited for descriptive texts with a strong topical structure and little intentional content. In such domains, special communicative knowledge is required to structure the text, a type of knowledge referred as Domain Communicative Knowledge. Therefore, the task of building such rules and schemata is normally recognized as tightly coupled with the semantics and idiosyncrasies of each particular domain. In this thesis, I investigate the automatic acquisition of Content Selection rules and the automatic construction of Document Structuring schemata from an aligned Text-Knowledge corpus. These corpora are a collection of human-produced texts together with the knowledge data a generation system is expected to use to construct texts that fulfill the same communicative goals as the human texts. They are increasingly popular in learning for NLG because they are readily available and do not require expensive hand labelling. To facilitate learning I further focus on domains where texts are also abundant in anchors (pieces of information directly copied from the input knowledge base). In two such domains, medical reports and biographical descriptions, I have found aligned Text-Knowledge corpus for my learning task. While aligned Text-Knowledge corpora are relatively easy to find, they only provide indirect information about the selected or omitted status of each piece of knowledge and their relative placement. My methods, therefore, involve Indirect Supervised Learning (ISL), as my solution to this problem, a solution common to other learning from Text-Knowledge corpora problems in NLG. ISL has two steps; in the first step, the Text-Knowledge corpus is transformed into a dataset for supervised learning, in the form of matched texts. In the second step, supervised learning machinery acquires the CS rules and schemata from this dataset. My main contribution is to define empirical metrics over rulesets or schemata based on the training material. These metrics enable learning Strategic Generation logic from positive examples only (where each example contains indirect evidence for the task).
Initial Performance Evaluation of the Cray SeaStar Interconnect
Authors: Ron Brightwell, Kevin Pedretti, Keith D. Underwood
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on High Performance Interconnects (2005)

The Cray SeaStar is a new network interface and router for the Cray Red Storm and XT3 supercomputer. The SeaStar was designed specifically to meet the performance and reliability needs of a large-scale, distributed-memory scientific computing platform. In this paper, we present an initial performance evaluation of the SeaStar. We first provide a detailed overview of the hardware and software features of the SeaStar, followed by the results of several low-level micro-benchmarks. These initial results indicate that SeaStar is on a path to achieving its performance targets.
Color Characterization and Balancing by a Nonlinear Line Attractor Network for Image Enhancement
Authors: Ming-Jung Seow, Vijayan K. Asari
Venue: Neural Processing Letters (2005)

A novel method to map high dynamic range scenes to low dynamic range images utilizing the concept of color characterization, enhancement, and balancing is described in this letter. Each pixel of the image is first characterized by extracting the relationship of the red, green, and blue components along with its corresponding neighbors using a nonlinear line attractor network to form an associative memory. Then, the illumination enhancement process is performed using a hyperbolic tangent function to provide dynamic range compression to each pixel in the image. The slope of the hyperbolic tangent function is controlled using a parameter that is determined by the local and global statistics of the image to facilitate the change of the intensity level. A color balancing process restores the original color characteristics of the image based on learned associative memory matrices which eliminate image distortion due to improper recombination of red, green and blue components after enhancement. Experiments conducted on images captured at extremely uneven lighting environments show that the proposed method outperforms other image enhancement algorithms.
Human-Centered Multimedia: Culture, Deployment, and Access
Authors: Alejandro Jaimes
Venue: IEEE MultiMedia (2006)

Cultural setting is an intrinsic part of what we're trying to capture and use in multimedia systems. However, being in our own culture (both everyday culture and professional culture) we forget that multimedia interfaces and communication are culture-specific. This article gives some great insights that stem from diversity in countries (and cultures) as well as inside the interdisciplinary multimedia community.
Characteristics of streaming media stored on the Web
Authors: Mingzhe Li, Mark Claypool, Robert Kinicki, James Nichols
Venue: ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) (2005)

Despite the growth in multimedia, there have been few studies that focus on characterizing streaming audio and video stored on the Web. This investigation used a customized Web crawler to traverse 17 million Web pages from diverse geographic locations and identify nearly 30,000 streaming audio and video clips available for analysis. Using custom-built extraction tools, these streaming media objects were analyzed to determine attributes such as media type, encoding format, playout duration, bitrate, resolution, and codec. The streaming media content encountered is dominated by proprietary audio and video formats with the top four commercial products being RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, MP3 and QuickTime. The distribution of the stored playout durations of streaming audio and video clips are long-tailed. More than half of the streaming media clips encountered are video, encoded primarily for broadband connections and at resolutions considerably smaller than the resolutions of typical monitors.
Automating Functional Harmonic Analysis: The Funchal System
Authors: Ricardo Scholz, Vitor Dantas, Geber Ramalho
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2005)

Functional harmonic analysis is an important task in music composition, accompaniment, arrangement and others. However, the solutions are still not satisfactory. The proposed process is divided into two levels: the former extends one of previous works in the domain to carry out a richer analysis of chord grids and is where the very analysis is performed, and the latter is devoted to correct some conceptual inconsistencies concerning enharmonic spelling of chords. Both levels use an engine to make inferences on some rule bases, which can be easily improved by addition of new rules. Keywords: functional harmonic analysis, roman numeral harmonic analysis.
Trading End-to-End Latency for Composability
Authors: Slobodan Matic, Thomas A. Henzinger
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium (2005)

The periodic resource model for hierarchical, compositional scheduling abstracts task groups by resource requirements. We study this model in the presence of dataflow constraints between the tasks within a group (intragroup dependencies), and between tasks in different groups (intergroup dependencies). We consider two natural semantics for dataflow constraints, namely, RTW (Real-Time Workshop) semantics and LET (logical execution time) semantics. We show that while RTW semantics offers better end-to-endlatency on the task group level, LET semantics allows tighter resource bounds in the abstraction hierarchy and therefore provides better composability properties. This result holds both for intragroup and intergroup dependencies, as well as for shared and for distributed resources.