ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The use of computer-based information systems by German managers to support decision making
Authors: George E. Vlahos, Thomas W. Ferratt, George Knoepfle
Venue: Information and Management (2004)

We surveyed German managers to investigate their use of information technology (IT), including their perception of the value provided by computer-based information systems (CBIS) and their satisfaction with CBIS in supporting decisions. Participants were predominantly male, the majority were older than 45, most had taken two or more college computer courses, and over 90% were middle and top-level managers. They represented a variety of functional areas. Results show that these managers were relatively heavy IT users, with over 10 h of use per week. Overall, there was a significant correlation between the amount of use of IT and perceived value of the CBIS, as well as between satisfaction with and perceived value of the CBIS. Hypothesis tests for task-technology fit (TTF) showed that the greatest TTF was related to resource allocation, evaluating alternatives, identifying problems, and making short-term decisions. For middle and top managers, information reporting systems (IRS), which provide regularly scheduled reports, had greater TTF than more flexible inquiry and analysis systems, such as decision support systems (DSS).
Toward a progress indicator for database queries
Authors: Gang Luo, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Curt J. Ellmann, Michael W. Watzke
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2004)

Many modern software systems provide progress indicators for long-running tasks. These progress indicators make systems more user-friendly by helping the user quickly estimate how much of the task has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing commercial RDBMSs provides a non-trival progress indicator for long-running queries. In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting such progress indicators. After discussing the goals and challenges inherent in this problem, we present a set of techniques sufficient for implementing a simple yet useful progress indicator for a large subset of RDBMS queries. We report an initial implementation of these techniques in PostgreSQL.
Pedagogic aspects of the design and content of an online course for the development of lexical competence: ADELEX
Authors: Carmen Pérez Basanta
Venue: ReCALL (2004)

This paper presents an online course for assessing and developing lexical competence which grew out of one simple question: How many words do our students have? We start by highlighting the importance of vocabulary teaching in the second language learning process and the beneficial effects of multimedia on developing lexis. The first response to the aforementioned query took the shape of a research study which evaluated the lexical competence of students in their final year of an English Philology degree course. As a result, the lecturers involved in the project undertook a further study entitled ADELEX &ndash; &lsquo;Assessing and Developing Lexical Competence through the Internet&rsquo; &ndash; aiming to develop a web-based course that would improve the vocabulary levels of our students (http://www.ugr.es/~inped/index.htm). The instructional design of the online vocabulary project, ADELEX, developed through Web Course Tools (WebCT), is detailed in the second part of the paper. First we set out its pedagogical objectives and describe the main characteristics of this modular course. We then address the issue of syllabus design describing its lexicographical, lexicological, semantic and discoursal contents, and offer a brief profile of its nine modules. Needless to say, we establish some methodological guidelines for the implementation of a virtual course which may help students control their own learning and provide constant feedback and interaction. In fact, learner autonomy is one of its main objectives. In addition, its teaching procedures are examined, emphasizing the tools of WebCT: online assignments, forums, online vs. on campus sessions, students&rsquo; projects, grading, test design, etc. An unavoidable research question is also addressed: how to assess lexical competence both at the diagnostic level, to obtain initial feedback, and at the achievement level, i.e. when a word can be said to be acquired in a web-based environment. The answer to this question has been to develop a complex system of computer-based tests (CBTs). Finally, we draw some pedagogic conclusions.
A Study of the Self-Organization Modeling of Distributed Manufacturing Network
Authors: Gang Li, Linyan Sun, Haiquan Li
Venue: Proceedings of the E-Commerce Technology for Dynamic E-Business, IEEE International Conference (2004)

Distributed manufacturing network provides flexibility and agility in responding to customer demand shifts. The fundamental premise of this philosophy is: Self-organization behavior emerges from the interactions between multiple autonomous business entities represented in it. Self-organization behavior in the distributed manufacturing network leads the system to find a reasonable solution for complex manufacturing problems and evolve with changes. This paper proposes a three layer conceptual model of the distributed manufacturing network and develops agent based approaches for the modeling and problem solving of self-organization distributed manufacturing network. The coordination mechanism based on stigmergy and swarm intelligence in the system provides a high degree of flexibility and adaptability.
Interposed proportional sharing for a storage service utility
Authors: Wei Jin, Jeffrey S. Chase, Jasleen Kaur
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (2004)

This paper develops and evaluates new share-based scheduling algorithms for differentiated service quality in network services, such as network storage servers. This form of resource control makes it possible to share a server among multiple request flows with probabilistic assurance that each flow receives a specified minimum share of a server's capacity to serve requests. This assurance is important for safe outsourcing of services to shared utilities such as Storage Service Providers.Our approach interposes share-based request dispatching on the network path between the server and its clients. Two new scheduling algorithms are designed to run within an intermediary (e.g., a network switch), where they enforce fair sharing by throttling request flows and reordering requests; these algorithms are adaptations of Start-time Fair Queuing (SFQ) for servers with a configurable degree of internal concurrency. A third algorithm, Request Windows (RW), bounds the outstanding requests for each flow independently; it is amenable to a decentralized implementation, but may restrict concurrency under light load. The analysis and experimental results show that these new algorithms can enforce shares effectively when the shares are not saturated, and that they provide acceptable performance isolation under saturation. Although the evaluation uses a storage service as an example, interposed request scheduling is non-intrusive and views the server as a black box, so it is useful for complex services with no internal support for differentiated service quality.
Optimizing Top-k Selection Queries over Multimedia Repositories
Authors: Surajit Chaudhuri
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2004)

Repositories of multimedia objects having multiple types of attributes (e.g., image, text) are becoming increasingly common. A query on these attributes will typically request not just a set of objects, as in the traditional relational query model (filtering), but also a grade of match associated with each object, which indicates how well the object matches the selection condition (ranking). Furthermore, unlike in the relational model, users may just want the k top-ranked objects for their selection queries for a relatively small k. In addition to the differences in the query model, another peculiarity of multimedia repositories is that they may allow access to the attributes of each object only through indexes. In this paper, we investigate how to optimize the processing of top-k selection queries over multimedia repositories. The access characteristics of the repositories and the above query model lead to novel issues in query optimization. In particular, the choice of the indexes used to search the repository strongly influences the cost of processing the filtering condition. We define an execution space that is search-minimal, i.e., the set of indexes searched is minimal. Although the general problem of picking an optimal plan in the search-minimal execution space is NP-hard, we present an efficient algorithm that solves the problem optimally with respect to our cost model and execution space when the predicates in the query are independent. We also show that the problem of optimizing top-k selection queries can be viewed, in many cases, as that of evaluating more traditional selection conditions. Thus, both problems can be viewed together as an extended filtering problem to which techniques of query processing and optimization may be adapted.
Algorithms for recognizing coordinates in two variables over UFD's
Authors: Hassan El Houari, M'hammed El Kahoui
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (2004)

We give an easy and efficient algorithm to check whether a given polynomial f in K[x,y] is a coordinate, where K be a commutative field of characteristic zero, and if so to compute a coordinate's mate of f. Then we treat the same problem replacing the ground field K by a unique factorization domain A of characteristic zero. A notable feature of our method is that it always produces a mate of minimum degree.
Evolving Self-Organizing Behaviors for a Swarm-Bot
Authors: Marco Dorigo, Vito Trianni, Erol Şahin Roderich Groß, Thomas H. Labella, Gianluca Baldassarre, Stefano Nolfi, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Francesco Mondada, Dario Floreano, Luca M. Gambardella
Venue: Autonomous Robots (2004)

In this paper, we introduce a self-assembling and self-organizing artifact, called a swarm-bot, composed of a swarm of s-bots, mobile robots with the ability to connect to and to disconnect from each other. We discuss the challenges involved in controlling a swarm-bot and address the problem of synthesizing controllers for the swarm-bot using artificial evolution. Specifically, we study aggregation and coordinated motion of the swarm-bot using a physics-based simulation of the system. Experiments, using a simplified simulation model of the s-bots, show that evolution can discover simple but effective controllers for both the aggregation and the coordinated motion of the swarm-bot. Analysis of the evolved controllers shows that they have properties of scalability, that is, they continue to be effective for larger group sizes, and of generality, that is, they produce similar behaviors for configurations different from those they were originally evolved for. The portability of the evolved controllers to real s-bots is tested using a detailed simulation model which has been validated against the real s-bots in a companion paper in this same special issue.
Mobile ECG Detector through GPRS/Internet
Authors: Dong Jun, Zhu Hong-hai
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (2004)

In modern society, requirements on medical insurance are increased rapidly with economy grown and living conditions improved. As human being self-health being focused on and social medical grade being progressed, human bio-signals monitors whose features are portable, wireless, easy-diagnosing, low-cost and convenient at home, are more and more necessary. We therefore develop mobile wearable detector for wireless ECG transportation based on bluetooth protocol though GPRS/Internet to be used as self-ECG monitor. The paper introduces system architecture and its module, and describes wearable detector, bluetooth implementations in details. We believe that minimizing and wireless will be widely applied in medicine and health fields. GPS will be integrated into the detector in the future.
Establishing wireless conference calls under delay constraints
Authors: Amotz Bar-Noy, Grzegorz Malewicz
Venue: Journal of Algorithms (2004)

A prevailing feature of mobile telephony systems is that the cell where a mobile user is located may be unknown. Therefore, when the system is to establish a call between users, it may need to search, or page, all the cells that it suspects the users are located in, to find the cells where the users currently reside. The search consumes expensive wireless links and so it is desirable to develop search techniques that page as few cells as possible.We consider cellular systems with c cells and m mobile users roaming among the cells. The location of the users is uncertain as given by m probability distribution vectors. Whenever the system needs to find specific users, it conducts a search operation lasting some number of rounds (the delay constraint). In each round, the system may check an arbitrary subset of cells to see which users are located there. In this setting the problem of finding one user with minimum expected number of cells searched is known to be solved optimally in polynomial time.In this paper we address the problem of finding several users with the same optimization goal. This task is motivated by the problem of establishing a conference call between mobile users. We first show that the problem is NP-hard. Then we prove that a natural heuristic is an e/(e - 1 )-approximation solution.
Distribution of the contact-potential difference local values over the gate area of MOS structures
Authors: Henryk M. Przewlocki, Andrzej Kudla, Danuta Brzezinska, Hisham Z. Massoud
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2004)

The lateral distribution of the effective contact potential difference (ECPD or φMS) was determined experimentally for the first time over the gate area of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) structures. The photoelectric method for measuring φMS in MOS devices was modified to characterize its two-dimensional lateral distribution. It is found that φMS values are different at the gate center, gate edges, and gate corners. In square MOS gates, it is found that φMS values are highest in the center area of the gate, lower along the gate edges, and lowest at the gate corners. These results are confirmed by several independent photoelectric and electrical measurement methods. This lateral distribution of φMS is attributed to the nonuniform two-dimensional distribution of mechanical stress under the gate, which is known to influence the barrier height and φMS of MOS structures. A simple physical model is introduced relating the two-dimensional (2D) distribution of φMS to the 2D mechanical-stress distribution. The model predictions are in agreement with φMS distributions obtained experimentally using photoelectric and electrical characterization methods in Al/SiO2/ Si MOS structures.
Wireless data performance in multi-cell scenarios
Authors: T. Bonald, S. Borst, N. Hegde, A. Proutiére
Venue: Proceedings of the joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems (2004)

The performance of wireless data systems has been extensively studied in the context of a single base station. In the present paper we investigate the flow-level performance in networks with multiple base stations. We specifically examine the complex, dynamic interaction of the number of active flows in the various cells introduced by the strong impact of interference between neighboring base stations. For the downlink data transmissions that we consider, lower service rates caused by increased interference from neighboring base stations result in longer delays and thus a higher number of active flows. This in turn results in a longer duration of interference on surrounding base stations, causing a strong correlation between the activity states of the base stations. Such a system can be modelled as a network of multi-class processor-sharing queues, where the service rates for the various classes at each queue vary over time as governed by the activity state of the other queues. The complex interaction between the various queues renders an exact analysis intractable in general. A simplified network with only one class per queue reduces to a coupled-processors model, for which there are few results, even in the case of two queues. We thus derive bounds and approximations for key performance metrics like the number of active flows, transfer delays, and flow throughputs in the various cells. Importantly, these bounds and approximations are insensitive, yielding simple expressions, that render the detailed statistical characteristics of the system largely irrelevant.
Length normalization in XML retrieval
Authors: Jaap Kamps, Maarten de Rijke, Börkur Sigurbjörnsson
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

XML retrieval is a departure from standard document retrieval in which each individual XML element, ranging from italicized words or phrases to full blown articles, is a potentially retrievable unit. The distribution of XML element lengths is unlike what we usually observe in standard document collections, prompting us to revisit the issue of document length normalization. We perform a comparative analysis of arbitrary elements versus relevant elements, and show the importance of length as a parameter for XML retrieval. Within the language modeling framework, we investigate a range of techniques that deal with length either directly or indirectly. We observe a length bias introduced by the amount of smoothing, and show the importance of extreme length priors for XML retrieval. We also show that simply removing shorter elements from the index (by introducing a cut-off value) does not create an appropriate document length normalization. Even after increasing the minimal size of XML elements occurring in the index, the importance of an extreme length bias remains.
Placement Method Targeting Predictability Robustness and Performance
Authors: Cristinel Ababei, Kia Bazargan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

We study the relationship between robustness,predictability andperformance of VLSI circuits. It is shown that predictability andperformance are conflicting objectives. Performance and robustnessare statically conflicting objectives but they are statistically non-conflicting.We propose and develop means for changing a standard timing-driven partitioning-based placement algorithm in order to design more predictable and robust circuits without sacrificingmuch of performance.
Two formulas for Smarandache LCM ratio sequences
Authors: Maohua Le
Venue: Smarandache Notions Journal (2004)

In this paper we give two reduction formulas for Smarandache LCM ratio sequences SLRS(3) and SLRS(4).
Towards a Technique for Reverse Engineering Web Transactions from a User's Perspective
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension (2004)

Many Web sites could improve their users' experiencethrough systematic analysis of transaction paths, so thatusers' expectations and site design are more closelyaligned. This paper outlines preliminary steps towards atechnique for reverse engineering Web transactions froma user's perspective. The result of the reverse engineeringactivity is a conceptual model that is based on extensionsto the transaction design portion of the Ubiquitous WebApplications (UWA) framework. In particular, changes tothe definition of an "activity," redefinitions of the"PropertySet" associated with an activity, andrefinements to the UWA Organization and Executionmodels are proposed.
Virtual Physics for Virtual Reality
Venue: Proceedings of the Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2004 (TPCG'04) (2004)

We consider the problem of giving virtual reality objectsphysical behaviour. We wish to do this in a way which allowsusers to construct new objects from simpler ones andhave the correct composite behaviour emerge. Our approachuses a graph structure to model, dynamically, theway one object can influence another. It uses a lightweightmessage system to cause actions between objects. It hasroutines to encode each kind of general physical behaviour.Any given object can have multiple independent behavioursand these behaviours can be extended to give a richer rangeof outcomes. These outcomes arise from the creative useto which the objects are put by the user, rather than frompredetermined actions built-in when the VE was designed.In addition, we replace hierarchical geometry modellingwith a much flatter structure. We explain the approach, describethe implementation, suggest enhancements and offera range of tests which demonstrate the concepts in action.
Discovering 1-FT Routes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Rajesh Venkatasubramanian, John P. Hayes
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (2004)

Transmitting messages in mobile wireless networkstypically involves on-demand route discovery implementedvia network-wide broadcast.Due to the dynamic nature ofthe network topology the life-time of a route is very short,so a source frequently requires a new route to an olddestination.Simultaneous discovery of multiple routes canreduce the overhead due to repeated route discoverybroadcasts.Previously proposed multipath protocols donot guarantee discovery of alternative paths if they exist.We propose a multiple route discovery algorithm(ALTDSR) that finds a (multihop) primary path between asource and a destination, and a set of alternative paths.Weintroduce dominator relationships between primary andnon-primary path nodes.Using dominators, wecharacterize alternative paths that bypass an intermediatenode on the primary path.We develop algorithms thatguarantee finding a set of alternative paths to tolerate anysingle node fault on the primary path, if such a set ofalternative paths exists.We present simulation resultswhich show that under mobility conditions, ALTDSRdelivers substantially more packets (around 75% more)than dynamic source routing (DSR) with moderateincrease in routing overhead.
Describing and Reasoning on Web Services using Process Algebra
Authors: Gwen Salaün, Lucas Bordeaux, Marco Schaerf
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (2004)

We argue that essential facets of web services,and especially those useful to understand their interaction,can be described using process-algebraic notations. Web servicedescription and execution languages such as BPEL are essentiallyprocess description languages; they are based on primitives forbehaviour description and message exchange which can also befound in more abstract process algebras. One legitimate questionis therefore whether the formal approach and the sophisticatedtools introduced for process algebra can be used to improve theeffectiveness and the reliability of web service development. Ourinvestigations suggest a positive answer, and we claim that processalgebras provide a very complete and satisfactory assistanceto the whole process of web service development. We showon a case study that readily available tools based on processalgebra are effective at verifying that web services conformtheir requirements and respect properties. We advocate theiruse both at the design stage and for reverse engineering issues.More prospectively, we discuss how they can be helpful to tacklechoreography issues.