ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
System-initiated digressive proposals in automated human-computer telephone dialogues: the use of contrasting politeness strategies
Authors: J. Wilkie, M. A. Jack, P. J. Littlewood
Venue: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (2005)

System-initiated digressive proposals may be used to introduce new and unexpected information into automated telephone services. These digressions may be viewed as particularly pronounced forms of unsolicited interruptions as they contain information not directly related to the caller's intended activity. In human-human conversation, interruptions are considered to be speech acts which intrinsically threaten both the positive and negative face wants of the addressee and conversants adopt specific verbal strategies to mitigate the negative impact of their interruptions. A question therefore arises whether the introduction of faceredressive expressions, based on human-human conversational strategies, into the design of system-initiated proposals in automated services can mitigate the negative impact of the interruptions. A usability experiment was conducted to examine the effectiveness of three contrasting politeness strategies for system-initiated digressions in a mass-market telephone banking dialogue using speech recognition technology. Participants (N = 111) experienced these proposals while using the automated service to perform banking tasks. Results indicated that all these system-initiated digressions--irrespective of politeness strategy employed--had a negative impact on the user attitudes towards the service. This paper reports these results and explores participants' perceptions of the politeness styles and registers employed in the system-initiated proposals.
Running Large-Scale Applications on Cluster Grids
Authors: Franco Frattolillo
Venue: International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (2005)

Grid computing enables the enormous, but often poorly utilized, computing resources existing on the Internet to be harnessed in order to solve large-scale problems. However, if they want to solve the problems of configuration and performance optimization of their large-scale applications, programmers wishing to exploit such computing resources have to deal with highly variable communication delays, security threats, machine and network failures, and the distributed ownership of the computing resources. On the other hand, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is still widely used to develop high performance parallel applications on high performance/cost ratio computing platforms, such as workstation clusters. However, workstations belonging to networked clusters cannot often be exploited since they are provided with private IP addresses, being hidden from the Internet by publicly addressable IP front-end machines. This paper presents an extension of PVM that enables such clustered machines hidden from the Internet to take part in a PVM computation as host machines. This way, programmers can exploit low-cost, networked computing resources, such as collections of clusters, widely available within departmental organizations, in a well-known programming environment, such as PVM, without having to tackle the problems affecting grid computing, which often ends up turning the development of parallel applications into a burdensome activity as well as penalizing application performance.
Joint Time-Domain Tracking of Channel and Frequency Offsets for MIMO OFDM Systems
Authors: Timo Roman, Mihai Enescu, Visa Koivunen
Venue: Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal (2004)

In this paper we address the problem of joint channel and frequency offset estimation and tracking in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM systems for mobile users. The proposed method stems from extended Kalman filtering and is suitable for time-frequency-space selective channels. Separate offset for each MIMO channel branch is considered because of the mobility and rich scattering. The channel taps and the frequency offsets are estimated in time-domain while the equalization is performed in frequency domain. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method tracks time-varying channels and frequency offsets with high fidelity. Realistic channel models are used in mobile scenarios. The proposed time-domain approach has improved performance and robustness in comparison to purely frequency domain processing. Computational complexity is lower as well.
RockTest: a programming contest management system
Authors: Michael P. Conlon
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2005)

RockTest is a software system to facilitate the activities of contestants and judges in computer programming competitions. RockTest was developed out of experience running programming competitions for high school students as a recruiting tool for the Computer Science Department. It has been proven reliable and has received enthusiastic reviews from the competitors, judges, and contest administrators at two universities who have used it.
Extended Golomb Rulers as the New Recovery Schemes in Distributed Dependable Computing
Authors: Kamilla Klonowska, Lars Lundberg, Hakan Lennerstad, Charlie Svahnberg
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 16 - Volume 17 (2005)

Clusters and distributed systems offer fault tolerance and high performance through load sharing. When all computers are up and running, we would like the load to be evenly distributed among the computers. When one or more computers break down the load on these computers must be redistributed to other computers in the cluster. The redistribution is determined by the recovery scheme. The recovery scheme should keep the load as evenly distributed as possible even when the most unfavorable combinations of computers break down, i.e. we want to optimize the worst-case behavior. We have previously defined recovery schemes that are optimal for some limited cases. In this paper we find a new recovery schemes that are based on so called Golomb rulers. They are optimal for a much larger number of cases than the previous results.
A new era for CAD
Authors: Gary Smith
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Physical design (2005)

It would not be inaccurate to call the 1990s the Cream Puff era of semiconductors. Plain old vanilla CMOS ruled the land. Other contenders, such as GAAS and Silicon on Insulator, played minor roles in the market place. The RTL Methodology drove EDA tool development for the entire decade. Movement from silicon node to silicon node was accomplished with incremental process improvements. Design Tool development, from EDA generation to EDA generation, added new analysis capability onto already existing tools. It all looked easy, so easy in fact that the Foundry vendors were able to make great strides without a significant investment in R&D. Welcome to the new ERA of CAD. This decade looks much more like the challenging 1970s and 1980s than the Cream Puff era of the 1990s. 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
Book review: User Models in Dialog Systems Edited by A. Kobsa and W. Wahlster (Springer-Verlag, 1989)
Venue: ACM SIGART Bulletin (1991)

User Models in Dialog Systems is informative and thought-provoking. The book is based upon a user modeling conference held in 1986. Since then, the various contributors have obviously worked at adding tutorial and review material to the chapters to supplement the research reports. This is very useful, especially since the primary effect of the book will be to promote the idea that interactive software systems can eventually become intelligent partners in goal-directed dialogs with humans. The book is by no means an engineering handbook; it is primarily theoretical, but includes sketches of requirements specifications and feasibility demonstrations.
Monitoring and control in scenario-based requirements analysis
Authors: Emmanuel Letier, Jeff Kramer, Jeff Magee, Sebastian Uchitel
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering (2005)

Scenarios are an effective means for eliciting, validating and documenting requirements. At the requirements level, scenarios describe sequences of interactions between the software-to-be and agents in the environment. Interactions correspond to the occurrence of an event that is controlled by one agent and monitored by another.This paper presents a technique to analyse requirements-level scenarios for unforeseen, potentially harmful, consequences. Our aim is to perform analysis early in system development, where it is highly cost-effective. The approach recognises the importance of monitoring and control issues and extends existing work on implied scenarios accordingly. These so-called input-output implied scenarios expose problematic behaviours in scenario descriptions that cannot be detected using standard implied scenarios. Validation of these implied scenarios supports requirements elaboration. We demonstrate the relevance of input-output implied scenarios using a number of examples.
A parallel and scalable algorithm for ADI method with pre-propagation and message vectorization
Authors: Akiyoshi Wakatani
Venue: Parallel Computing (2004)

It is hard to implement the ADI method in an efficient way on distributed-memory parallel computers. We propose "P-scheme" which parallelizes a tridiagonal linear system of equations for the ADI method, but its effectiveness is limited to the cases where the problem size is large enough mainly because of the communication cost of the propagation phase of the scheme.In order to overcome this difficulty, we propose an improved version of the P-scheme with "message vectorization" which aggregates several communication messages into one and alleviates the communication cost. Also we evaluate the effectiveness of message vectorization for the ADI method and show that the improved version of the P-scheme works well even for smaller problems and linear and super-linear speedups can be achieved for 8194 × 8194 and 16,386 × 16.386 problems, respectively.
From databases to modelling of functional pathways: Conference Reviews
Authors: Sergio Nasi
Venue: Comparative and Functional Genomics (2004)

This short review comments on current informatics resources and methodologies in the study of functional pathways in cell biology. It highlights recent achievements in unveiling the structural design of protein and gene networks and discusses current approaches to model and simulate the dynamics of regulatory pathways in the cell. Copyright &copy; 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
FPGA Implementations of the Massively Parallel GCA Model
Authors: Wolfgang Heenes, Rolf Hoffmann, Sebastian Kanthak
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 14 - Volume 15 (2005)

The GCA (Global Cellular Automata) model is a very interesting and flexible model which can be used to implement all kind of parallel algorithms. The GCA model consists of a field of cells similar the Cellular Automata model. Each cell has links to a set of remote cells which can be dynamically changed from generation to generation. A cell reads the remote neighbors' states and then changes its own state according to a local rule. The model is massively parallel because all cells can change their states independently and in parallel. We have investigated how the GCA model can be implemented efficiently in hardware using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) prototyping platform. We have implemented a fully parallel architecture where all cells operate fully in parallel and other architectures where the cells are stored in memories in order to handle a large number of cells. We are showing that in the fully parallel architecture a speed-up of around 190 is realistic on a modern FPGA platform compared to a software implementation on a PC. In the partially parallel architecture based on memories the speed-up will be lower but the number of cells is only restricted by the capacity of the memories.
Constructing Energy-Efficient Multicast Trees with Delay Constraints in Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Wen-Lin Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications - Volume 1 (2005)

In this paper, we study the problem concerning how to construct a delay-constrained multicast tree with minimum power-consumption so that real-time multimedia applications can be supported in ad hoc wireless networks. Based on a number of link-replacing strategies, we present a heuristic called ELR algorithm for determining a multicast tree for the problem. Our ELR algorithm begins with a two-level multicast tree and then iteratively replaces the high-power links with lower-power links in order to reduce the total power required by the multicast tree. The simulation results show that for a given delay constraint the multicast tree found by our ELR algorithm requires less power than the one found by the previous published method.
On the Masking Countermeasure and Higher-Order Power Analysis Attacks
Authors: Francois-Xavier Standaert, Eric Peeters, Jean-Jacques Quisquater
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC'05) - Volume I - Volume 01 (2005)

Masking is a general method used to thwart Differential Power Analysis, in which all the intermediate data inside an implementation are XORed with random Boolean values. As a consequence, the power consumption of the running implementation becomes unpredictable, making first-order power analysis attacks unpractical. Several recent works have shown that such protected designs are still susceptible to higher-order power analysis attacks. In this paper, we propose an extension of the previously introduced higher-order techniques, based on a more general power consumption model, and evaluate its actual feasibility. In particular, we discuss the number of power traces required to mount successful attacks. We also illustrate how this number is affected by parallel computations, making certain implementation contexts (e.g. smart cards, 8-bit processors) more susceptible than others (e.g. FPGAs, ASICs).
A Comparative Study of Three Moment-Based Shape Descriptors
Authors: M. Emre Celebi, Y. Alp Aslandogan
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC'05) - Volume I - Volume 01 (2005)

Shape is one of the fundamental visual features in the Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) paradigm. Numerous shape descriptors have been proposed in the literature. These can be broadly categorized as region-based and contour-based descriptors. Contourbased shape descriptors make use of only the boundary information, ignoring the shape interior content. Therefore, these descriptors cannot represent shapes for which the complete boundary information is not available. On the other hand, region-based descriptors exploit both boundary and internal pixels, and therefore are applicable to generic shapes. Among the region-based descriptors, moments have been very popular since they were first introduced in the 60's. In this paper we study and compare three moment-based descriptors: Invariant moments, Zernike moments, and radial Chebyshev moments. Experiments on the MPEG-7 shape databases show that radial Chebyshev moments achieve the highest retrieval performance.
Learning with attribute costs
Authors: Haim Kaplan, Eyal Kushilevitz, Yishay Mansour
Venue: Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (2005)

We study an extension of the "standard" learning models to settings where observing the value of an attribute has an associated cost (which might be different for different attributes). Our model assumes that the correct classification is given by some target function f from a class of functions cal F; most of our results discuss the ability to learn a clause (an OR function of a subset of the variables) in various settings:Offline: We are given both the function f and the distribution D that is used to generate an input x. The goal is to design a strategy to decide what attribute of x to observe next so as to minimize the expected evaluation cost of f(x). (In this setting there is no "learning" to be done but only an optimization problem to be solved; this problem to be NP-hard and hence approximation algorithms are presented.)Distributional online: We study two types of "learning" problems; one where the target function f is known to the learner but the distribution D is unknown (and the goal is to minimize the expected cost including the cost that stems from "learning" D), and the other where f is unknown (except that f∈cal F) but D is known (and the goal is to minimize the expected cost while limiting the prediction error involved in "learning" f).Adversarial online: We are given f, however the inputs are selected adversarially. The goal is to compare the learner's cost to that of the best fixed evaluation order (i.e., we analyze the learner's performance by a competitive analysis).
Foundations of web-based virtual medical university.: 3. distance web-based learning and planning, organizing and controlling of regular education via MUS-portal
Authors: Ganka Kossekova, Iva Hadjiiska, Deliana Kostadinova
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer systems and technologies (2004)

Laying the foundations of virtual Web-based medical university is the most important task within the project for self-evaluation and improvement of the quality education in the Medical University - Sofia (MUS). To fulfil this, a new university on-line operating PHP-based information system with dynamic database referred to as "MUS-portal", has been developed. The paper presents the useful options of two modules of MUS portal: 1) for e-Learning in different disciplines and 2) for planning, organizing and controlling of regular education.
A New Blind Deconvolution Algorithm Based on a Gradient Method with Phase Spectral Constraints
Authors: Eiji Uchino, Noriaki Suetake, Morihiko Sakano
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (2004)

A new blind deconvolution method with additional phase spectral constraints for the blurred image is discusssed in this paper. The blurred image is a convolution of an original image and a point-spread function (PSF). The proposed method is based on the following iterative procedures, i.e., a projection onto a frequency space satisfying phase spectrum constraints, a minimization of a cost function and a projection onto an image space satisfying the support and nonnegativity constraints. This method restores the original image and the PSF stably with high accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by applying it to some blind deconvolution problems of images. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is drastically improved in comparison with the conventional blind deconvolution method.
Optimal control of an elliptic system with conjugation conditions and Neumann boundary conditions
Authors: I. V. Sergienko, V. S. Deineka
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2005)

New optimal control problems for distributed systems whose state is described by Neumann boundary-value problems with conjugation conditions and non-unique solutions are constructed and analyzed. Highly accurate computation schemes for discretization of optimization problems are proposed for the case where the control set coincides with a complete Hilbert space.
Feature Uncertainty Arising from Covariant Image Noise
Authors: R. Matt Steele, Christopher Jaynes
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05) - Volume 1 - Volume 01 (2005)

Uncertainty estimates related to the position of image features are seeing increasing use in several computer vision problems. Many of these have been recast from standard least squares model fitting to techniques that minimize the Mahalanobis distance, which weighs each error vector by covariance of the observations. These include structure from motion and traditional geometric camera calibration. Uncertainty estimates previously derived for the case of corner localization are based on implicit assumptions that preclude sophisticated image noise models. Uncertainties associated with these features tend to be overerestimated. In this work, we introduce a new formulation for feature location uncertainty that supports arbitrary pixel covariance to derive a more accurate positional uncertainty estimate. The method is developed and evaluated in the case of a traditional interest operator that is in widespread use. Results show that uncertainty estimates based on this new formulation better reflect the error distribution in feature location.
On Even Triangulations of 2-Connected Embedded Graphs
Authors: Huaming Zhang, Xin He
Venue: SIAM Journal on Computing (2005)

Recently, Hoffmann and Kriegel proved an important combinatorial theorem [SIAM J. Discrete Math., 9 (1996), pp. 210--224]: Every 2-connected bipartite plane multigraph G without 2-cycle faces has a triangulation in which all vertices have even degree (this is called an even triangulation). Combined with the classical Whitney's theorem, this result implies that every such graph has a 3-colorable plane triangulation. Using this theorem, Hoffmann and Kriegel significantly improved the upper bounds of several art gallery and prison guard problems. A complicated O(n2) time algorithm was obtained in [SIAM J. Discrete Math., 9 (1996), pp. 210--224] for constructing an even triangulation of G. Hoffmann and Kriegel conjectured that there is an O(n3/2) time algorithm for solving this problem.In this paper, we develop a simple proof of the above theorem. Our proof reveals and relies on a natural correspondence between even triangulations of G and certain orientations of G. Based on this new proof, we obtain a very simple O(n) time algorithm for finding an even triangulation of G. We also extend our proof to show the existence of even triangulations for similar graphs on high genus surface.
Heuristic scheduling for bag-of-tasks applications in combination with QoS in the computational grid
Authors: Chuliang Weng, Xinda Lu
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2005)

The computational grid provides a promising platform for the deployment of various high-performance computing applications. One issue in implementing computational grid environments is how to effectively utilize various resources in the system, such as CPU cycle, memory, communication network, and data storage. A heuristic Qsufferage is presented to schedule the bag-of-tasks application in the grid environment. The algorithm considers the location of each task's input data, while makespan and response ratio are chosen as metrics for performance evaluation. The result of the experiment shows that Qsufferage algorithm can obtain better performance compared to the other four existing algorithms.