ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Optimal manipulator design for a cucumber harvesting robot
Authors: E. J. Van Henten, D. A. Van't Slot, C. W. J. Hol, L. G. Van Willigenburg
Venue: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (2009)

This paper presents a procedure and the results of an optimal design of the kinematic structure of a manipulator to be used for autonomous cucumber harvesting in greenhouses. The design objective included the time needed to perform a collision-free motion from an initial position to the target position as well as a dexterity measure to allow for motion corrections in the neighborhood of the fruits. The optimisation problem was solved using the DIRECT algorithm implemented in the Tomlab package. A four link PPRR type manipulator was found to be most suitable. For cucumber harvesting four degrees-of-freedom, i.e. three translations and one rotation around the vertical axis, are sufficient. The PPRR manipulator described in this paper meets this requirement. Although computationally expensive, the methodology used in this research was found to be powerful and offered an objective way to evaluate and optimise the kinematic structure of a robot to be used for cucumber harvesting.
Fundamentals of Stochastic Signals, Systems and Estimation Theory: With worked Examples, 2nd ed. edition
Authors: Branko Kovacevic, Zeljko Durovic
Venue:  (2008)

The main theme of this book deals with fundamental concepts underlying stochastic signal or linear stochastic systems, their modelling and analysis as well as model-based signal processing. Two popular stochastic models, the polynomial (or transfer function) model and the state space model are employed in schemes that lead to the estimation of unknown system parameters or states. The book is written for undergraduate and graduate students as well as practising engineers, specializing the the areas of electrical communications, signal processing and automatic control. Many examples illustrate the concepts of this book and the reader learns how to write software implementations of estimators on computers.
Initialisation for Visual Tracking in Urban Environments
Authors: Gerhard Reitmayr, Tom W. Drummond
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (2007)

Outdoor augmented reality systems often rely on GPS to cover large environments. Visual tracking approaches can provide more accurate location estimates but typically require a manual initialisation procedure. This paper describes the combination of both techniques to create an accurate localisation system that does not require any additional input for (re-)initialisation. The 2D GPS position together with average user height is used as an initial estimate for the visual tracking. The large gap in available GPS accuracy versus required accuracy for initialisation is overcome through a search procedure that tries to minimise search time by improving the likelihood of finding the correct estimate early. Re-initialisation of the visual tracking system after catastrophic failures is further improved by modelling the GPS error with a Gaussian process to provide a better estimate of the current location, thereby decreasing search time.
A Concise Introduction to Image Processing using C++, 1 edition
Authors: Meiqinq Wang, Choi-Hong Lai
Venue: Chapman & Hall/Crc Numerical Analysis And Scientific Computing (2008)

A Concise Intro to Image Processing using C++ presents state-of-the-art image processing methodology, including current industrial practices for image compression, image de-noising methods based on partial differential equations, and new image compression methods such as fractal image compression and wavelet compression. It includes elementary concepts of image processing and related fundamental tools with coding examples as well as exercises. With a particular emphasis on illustrating fractal and wavelet compression algorithms, the text covers image segmentation, object recognition, and morphology. An accompanying CD-ROM contains code for all algorithms.
Research on Edge Tracing Based on Scan-Line Algorithm
Authors: Weihua Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2009)

automated vehicle recognition is of great importance today in Intelligent Transportation Systems. In the process of the feature extraction of vehicle recognition system, the edge vector must be extracted first. However, there are many regions in an image, and it is difficult to extract the edge vectors of the regions of the image. Therefore a novel edge tracing method based on scan-line of image for vehicle recognition tasks is proposed. In particular, all of the edge vectors are extracted from the regions of the image at the same time. Experimental results are presented that show a short time in computation can be achieved.
Learning hand manipulative tasks: When instructional animations are superior to equivalent static representations
Authors: Paul Ayres, Nadine Marcus, Christopher Chan, Nixon Qian
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2009)

Cognitive load theory was used to argue why instructional animations are more effective in teaching human motor skills than static representations. A key aspect to this argument is the role played by the transitory nature of animation and the newly discovered human mirror-neuron system. In two experiments students were taught to tie knots or complete puzzle rings either through an animated presentation or an equivalent sequence of static diagrams. In both experiments students learnt more from the animation mode than the static one, thus supporting the general thesis of the paper.
Generating artificial populations using a multi-level fuzzy inference engine
Authors: Carlos R. García-Alonso, Gabriel M. Pérez-Alcalá
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation (2008)

The design of complex artificial populations is the first step in simulating evolution during the time span of socioeconomic variables as the family income. In this paper, a new hybrid model based on Monte-Carlo simulation and fuzzy inference is described to design environmental conditions, the basic socio-economic structure and to determine the causes for mortality in an artificial population. The model is based on three main databases that describe the characteristics of the environment, individuals and mechanisms (mortality). These expert-based characteristics guide the simulation model which has a fuzzy inference engine to evaluate fuzzy dependence relationships. These relationships have been formulated to automatically determine complex environmental and individual characteristics as well as mechanism parameters, and they are based on expert knowledge. An artificial population has been designed with satisfactory results when critical design factors are carefully adjusted.
Privacy-preserving data mashup
Authors: Noman Mohammed, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Ke Wang, Patrick C. K. Hung
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology (2009)

Mashup is a web technology that combines information from more than one source into a single web application. This technique provides a new platform for different data providers to flexibly integrate their expertise and deliver highly customizable services to their customers. Nonetheless, combining data from different sources could potentially reveal person-specific sensitive information. In this paper, we study and resolve a real-life privacy problem in a data mashup application for the financial industry in Sweden, and propose a privacy-preserving data mashup (PPMashup) algorithm to securely integrate private data from different data providers, whereas the integrated data still retains the essential information for supporting general data exploration or a specific data mining task, such as classification analysis. Experiments on real-life data suggest that our proposed method is effective for simultaneously preserving both privacy and information usefulness, and is scalable for handling large volume of data.
BAIS: A Bayesian Artificial Immune System for the effective handling of building blocks
Authors: Pablo Alberto Dalbem de Castro, Fernando J. Von Zuben
Venue: Information Sciences: an International Journal (2009)

Significant progress has been made in theory and design of Artificial Immune Systems (AISs) for solving hard problems accurately. However, an aspect not yet widely addressed by the research reported in the literature is the lack of ability of the AISs to deal effectively with building blocks (partial high-quality solutions coded in the antibody). The available AISs present mechanisms for evolving the population that do not take into account the relationship among the variables of the problem, potentially causing the disruption of high-quality partial solutions. This paper proposes a novel AIS with abilities to identify and properly manipulate building blocks in optimization problems. Instead of using cloning and mutation to generate new individuals, our algorithm builds a probabilistic model representing the joint probability distribution of the promising solutions and, subsequently, uses this model for sampling new solutions. The probabilistic model used is a Bayesian network due to its capability of properly capturing the most relevant interactions among the variables. Therefore, our algorithm, called Bayesian Artificial Immune System (BAIS), represents a significant attempt to improve the performance of immune-inspired algorithms when dealing with building blocks, and hence to solve efficiently hard optimization problems with complex interactions among the variables. The performance of BAIS compares favorably with that produced by contenders such as state-of-the-art Estimation of Distribution Algorithms.
ID-Based Authenticated Group Key Agreement Secure against Insider Attacks
Authors: Kyu Young Choi, Jung Yeon Hwang, Dong Hoon Lee
Venue: IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences (2008)

In 2004, Choi et al. proposed an ID-based authenticated group key agreement. Unfortunately, their protocol was found to be vulnerable to the insider attacks by Zhang, Chen and Shim. To prevent insider attacks, Shim presented a modification of Choi et al.'s protocol. In this letter, we first show that Shim's modification is still insecure against insider attacks. We then present a modification of Choi et al.'s protocol that resists insider attacks. The counter-measure uses an ID-based signature on transcripts in order to bind them in a session. This prevents any replay of transcripts. Especially, by applying ID-based batch verification, the proposed one still consists of two rounds and is computationally efficient.
An interactive display environment, or knitting sheep's clothing for a wolf
Authors: Robert P. O'Hara
Venue: Proceedings of the May 16-19, 1983, national computer conference (1983)

AIDE, An Interactive Display Environment, attempts to improve the usability of a traditional timesharing system by exploiting the use of a powerful personal computer with a large, high-resolution all-points-addressable (APA) display as a terminal. No changes to the timesharing system are required, and existing application programs dependent on alphanumeric display terminals run unchanged. A sample terminal session illustrates AIDE in use. Ways in which the timesharing system might be modified to further exploit the display are suggested.
Anatomy of a failure: how we knew when our design went wrong, and what we learned from it
Authors: William Gaver, John Bowers, Tobie Kerridge, Andy Boucher, Nadine Jarvis
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (2009)

In this paper, we describe the failure of a novel sensor-based system intended to evoke user interpretation and appropriation in domestic settings. We contrast participants' interactions in this case study with those observed during more successful deployments to identify 'symptoms of failure' under four themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. These themes provide a set of sensitivities or orientations that may complement traditional task-based approaches to evaluation as well as the more open-ended ones we describe here. Our system showed symptoms of failure under each of these themes. We examine the reasons for this at three levels: problems particular to the specific design hypothesis; problems relevant for input-output mapping more generally; and problems in the design process we used. We conclude by noting that, although interpretive systems such as the one we describe here may succeed in a myriad of different ways, it is reassuring to know that they can also fail, and fail incontrovertibly, yet instructively.
Comparability graph coloring for optimizing utilization of stream register files in stream processors
Authors: Xuejun Yang, Li Wang, Jingling Xue, Yu Deng, Ying Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming (2009)

A stream processor executes an application that has been decomposed into a sequence of kernels that operate on streams of data elements. During the execution of a kernel, all streams accessed must be communicated through the SRF (Stream Register File), a non-bypassing software-managed on-chip memory. Therefore, optimizing utilization of the SRF is crucial for good performance. The key insight is that the interference graphs formed by the streams in stream applications tend to be comparability graphs or decomposable into a set of multiple comparability graphs. We present a compiler algorithm that can find optimal or near-optimal colorings in stream IGs, thereby improving SRF utilization than the First-Fit bin-packing algorithm, the best in the literature.
Investigating the Comprehension Support for Effective Visualization Tools - A Case Study
Authors: Harkirat Padda, Ahmed Seffah, Sudhir Mudur
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Conferences on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (2009)

There is an increasing interest in computer-based visualizations to provide insights and ease understandings of complex information. However, many of the proposed visualization tools/techniques seldom find real use in practice. The main reason is that they do not adequately address the issue of easing comprehensibility of underlying information. Through a case study with two static software visualization tools – SA4J (Structural Analysis for Java) and Creole, we investigate the comprehension support of these tools with the help of a set of comprehension criteria that assess how efficiently and effectively users are able to grasp the underlying design intent along with applied interaction mechanisms.
Optimization of multi-project environment (OPMPE)
Authors: Lokman Hossain, Janaka Ruwanpura
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation (2008)

Construction business is project oriented and that is why every construction organization is dependent on projects. Typically they undertake multiple projects with limited multiple resources and information. Most importantly they need to take continuous and quick decisions to keep it going. The reason behind this is lack of tools and structured approach that can efficiently deal with multi-project environment (PME). Resulting is problem of wrong project selection, project slippage and under/over utilization of scares resources. This paper presents a simulation model (OPMPE) for optimizing MPE. The model is capable of analyzing and predicting future problems, assessing the cumulative impact and generates valuable statistics and information for quick decision-making. It will work together with the available scheduling tools and will help strengthening the overall planning and execution system for MPE. The application and of the model is demonstrated using a collection of real project data for building construction.
On Embedding a Graph in the Grid with the Maximum Number of Bends and Other Bad Features
Authors: Giuseppe Di Battista, Fabrizio Frati, Maurizio Patrignani
Venue: Theory of Computing Systems (2009)

Graph Drawing is (usually) concerned with the production of readable representations of graphs. In this paper, instead of investigating how to produce &#x201c;good&#x201d; drawings we tackle the opposite problem of producing &#x201c;bad&#x201d; drawings. In particular, we study how to construct orthogonal drawings with many bends along the edges and with large area. Our results show surprising contact points, in Graph Drawing, between the computational cost of niceness and the one of ugliness.
Data Replication and the Storage Capacity of Data Grids
Authors: Silvia Figueira, Tan Trieu
Venue: High Performance Computing for Computational Science - VECPAR 2008: 8th International Conference, Toulouse, France, June 24-27, 2008. Revised Selected Papers (2008)

Storage is undoubtedly one of the main resources in data grids, and planning the capacity of storage nodes is an important step in any data-grid design. This paper focuses on storage-capacity planning for data grids. We have developed a tool to calculate, for a specific scenario, the minimum capacity required for each storage node in a grid, and we have used this tool to show that different strategies used for data replication may lead to different storage requirements, affecting the storage-capacity planning.
Road Surface Texture Recognition Method Research Based on Wavelet Packet HMM
Authors: Hong Li, Jun Lin, Yanhui Feng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology - Volume 02 (2009)

Wavelet packet analysis method is appropriate to process nature texture signal and a hidden Markov model has good learning interpretability and needs only small training samples. A wavelet packet—HMM—based method on road surface state recognition was proposed. The wavelet packet analysis was adapted to extract characteristic entropies from the image signals. Thus, four kinds of data on road surface were trained respectively to get the HMM to identify road surface states. The result of experiments shows that the means is effective.
Techniques for Design and Implementation of Secure Reconfigurable PUFs
Authors: Mehrdad Majzoobi, Farinaz Koushanfar, Miodrag Potkonjak
Venue: ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS) (2009)

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) provide a basis for many security and digital rights management protocols. PUF-based security approaches have numerous comparative strengths with respect to traditional cryptography-based techniques, including resilience against physical and side channel attacks and suitability for lightweight protocols. However, classical delay-based PUF structures have a number of drawbacks including susceptibility to guessing, reverse engineering, and emulation attacks, as well as sensitivity to operational and environmental variations. To address these limitations, we have developed a new set of techniques for FPGA-based PUF design and implementation. We demonstrate how reconfigurability can be exploited to eliminate the stated PUF limitations. We also show how FPGA-based PUFs can be used for privacy protection. Furthermore, reconfigurability enables the introduction of new techniques for PUF testing. The effectiveness of all the proposed techniques is validated using extensive implementations, simulations, and statistical analysis.
Representing older people: towards meaningful images of the user in design scenarios
Authors: Mark Blythe, Andy Dearden
Venue: Universal Access in the Information Society (2009)

Designing for older people requires the consideration of a range of design problems, which may be related to difficult and sometimes highly personal matters. Issues such as fear, loneliness, dependency, and physical decline may be hard to observe or discuss in interviews. Pastiche scenarios and pastiche personae are techniques that employ characters to create a space for the discussion of new technological developments and user experience. This paper argues that the use of fictional characters can help to overcome restrictive notions of older people by disrupting designers&#x2019; prior assumptions. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences using pastiche techniques in two separate technology design projects that sought to address the needs of older people. In the first pastiche scenarios were developed by the designers of the system and used as discussion documents with users. In the second pastiche personae were used by groups of users themselves to generate scenarios which were scribed for later use by the design team. We explore how the use of fictional characters and settings can generate new ideas and undercut the potential in scenarios, for weak characterisation of &#x201c;the user&#x201d; to permit scenario writers to fit characters to technology rather than vice versa. To assist in future development of pastiche techniques in designing for older people, we provide an array of fictional older characters drawn from literary and popular culture.
Self-evolution framework of manufacturing systems based on fractal organization
Authors: Moonsoo Shin, Jungtae Mun, Mooyoung Jung
Venue: Computers and Industrial Engineering (2009)

The turbulent environment of modern times breeds a need to ensure flexibility and responsiveness for manufacturing systems. The conventional manufacturing systems, however, are not suitable for the dynamic environment because of their rigid structure. Thus, it is necessary to establish a novel manufacturing system which is capable of proactively perceiving the environment and of autonomously adapting to the changing environments. The purpose of this paper is to propose a self-evolution framework of manufacturing systems that facilitates continuous and quick adaptation. In a self-evolutionary manufacturing system, each production resource regulates its own goal, responding to the changes in its environment. Moreover, the organizational structure of the production resources is also dynamically transformed into a form suitable to the changed goal and the emerging environment. Especially, the proposed framework adopts fractal organization for its principal control architecture.
Hybrid model for people counting in a video stream
Authors: Amjad Hudaib, Khalid Kaabneh
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th WSEAS international conference on Computers (2008)

Counting people in a video stream for applications such as video surveillance or imaging statistical systems is considered a challenging task since video streams require complex computations and affected by noisy environment. This paper proposes a hybrid model for counting people using a video stream based on human skin detection and geometrical head recognition. This model is based on detecting single and multiple head-counts, while in motion by positioning the camera in different angle setups. A 45 and 90 camera positions will detect both the skin color information and the head shape of an object simultaneously. The experiments results indicated that the model accurately detects and counts people on real world environments and is robust to changes in viewpoint, scale, and object speed.