ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Essays on competition and technology strategies: lock-in strategy, software design strategy, and b2b supply chain management
Authors: Vidyanand Choudhary, Kevin Zhu
Venue:  (2008)

This dissertation focuses on competition and technology strategies in three scenarios. Chapter 1 examines whether a lock-in strategy will indeed benefit proprietary software vendors in the competition. Developing a two-period duopoly model, we find that the answer could be either way. Lock-in strategy may be counter-productive in competing against open source software. This is in contrast to the competition between two proprietary software providers, whereas lock-in strategy could be beneficial under certain conditions. We find that lock-in reduces social welfare, but certain customers may be better off with lock-in. Finally, we show that the lock-in strategy works differently for different types of customers in the software market (i.e. forward-looking vs. myopic customers). Chapter 2 examines the impact of competition from open source software on proprietary software providers. We use an analytical model to capture two important features of open source software: (1) its zero licensing price, and (2) its lower usability compared with proprietary software. We find that competition from open source software can induce the proprietary software provider to increase its software quality and price relative to the monopoly case when the proprietary software provider's cost of enhancing software quality is moderate. This result is different from those in prior literature. Surprisingly, we also find that competition from open source software can also lead to a reduction in social welfare. Chapter 3 studies information transparency in a two-level supply chain with competing firms in both upstream and downstream. We find that information transparency can create value for the overall e-market, yet it affects downstream manufacturers and upstream suppliers very differently: one side will be hurt, depending on the competition mode (Cournot or Bertrand) in the downstream. Unfortunately, it never unanimously benefits the two sides; conflict of interest persists. To deal with this issue, we propose a pricing mechanism for the e-market operator to internalize informational benefits among suppliers and manufacturers so that the online market can be sustainable. Finally, we find that information transparency reduces consumer surplus. This is a surprising result given expectation that IT could create substantial value to consumers.
Theory and Practice in AI and Law: A Response to Branting
Authors: Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2005: The Eighteenth Annual Conference (2005)

In this paper we use our previous work which has examined the different levels involved in reasoning about legal cases to examine some challenges to the relevance of current theoretical work in AI and Law made by Branting. In our model we view the process of legal reasoning as being divided into three distinct but interconnected levels of reasoning. These levels involve a bottom layer concerning facts about the world, a top layer concerning legal consequences, and a layer connecting the two, with conclusions at lower levels acting as premises for higher levels. We use our model to explain Branting's observations and show the relation with other strands of work from the AI and Law community.
Plenary lecture 1: integrating fuzzy regression and fuzzy time series into knowledge-based modelling
Authors: Anna Walaszek-Babiszewska
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Fuzzy systems (2009)

The regression methods and time series models have a long history of applications to data analysis and statistical inference dealing with randomness of the modelling systems. Modelling techniques based on fuzzy sets, especially fuzzy rule based models are suitable for modelling nonlinear and complex systems with imprecise information concerning the system structure and variables. The rules can be seen as local submodels of the system, operating in particular fuzzy regions. In this work we present the methods of the creating the probabilistic-fuzzy knowledge base and the inference procedure. The rules have fuzzy antecedents representing linguistic values of input variables and consequents in the form of fuzzy regression equations or fuzzy time series models. This approach can be seen as an extension of the concept of Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models. Such knowledge base and inference procedure, as parts of an expert system, are capable of supporting human decisions in control, prediction, diagnosis and in many fields of activity.
Keyword search over relational tables and streams
Authors: Alexander Markowetz, Yin Yang, Dimitris Papadias
Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) (2009)

Relational Keyword Search (R-KWS) provides an intuitive way to query relational data without requiring SQL, or knowledge of the underlying schema. In this article we describe a comprehensive framework for R-KWS covering snapshot queries on conventional tables and continuous queries on relational streams. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (i) We provide formal semantics, addressing the temporal validity and order of results, spanning uniformly over tables and streams; (ii) we investigate two general methodologies for query processing, graph based and operator based, that resolve several problems of previous approaches; and (iii) we develop a range of algorithms and optimizations covering both methodologies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of R-KWS, as well as the significant performance benefits of the proposed techniques, through extensive experiments with static and streaming datasets.
Boosting single-thread performance in multi-core systems through fine-grain multi-threading
Authors: Carlos Madriles, Pedro López, Josep M. Codina, Enric Gibert, Fernando Latorre, Alejandro Martinez, Raúl Martinez, Antonio Gonzalez
Venue: Proceedings of the 36th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (2009)

Industry has shifted towards multi-core designs as we have hit the memory and power walls. However, single thread performance remains of paramount importance since some applications have limited thread-level parallelism (TLP), and even a small part with limited TLP impose important constraints to the global performance, as explained by Amdahl's law. In this paper we propose a novel approach for leveraging multiple cores to improve single-thread performance in a multi-core design. The proposed technique features a set of novel hardware mechanisms that support the execution of threads generated at compile time. These threads result from a fine-grain speculative decomposition of the original application and they are executed under a modified multi-core system that includes: (1) mechanisms to support multiple versions; (2) mechanisms to detect violations among threads; (3) mechanisms to reconstruct the original sequential order; and (4) mechanisms to checkpoint the architectural state and recovery to handle misspeculations. The proposed scheme outperforms previous hardware-only schemes to implement the idea of combining cores for executing single-thread applications in a multi-core design by more than 10% on average on Spec2006 for all configurations. Moreover, single-thread performance is improved by 41% on average when the proposed scheme is used on a Tiny Core, and up to 2.6x for some selected applications.
New piezoelectric sensors with Gall Bladder stone material
Authors: V. R. Singh, Kanika Singh
Venue: International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication (2009)

Gall Bladder (GB) stones are studied as new sensor materials for biomedical and other applications. The GB material samples are analysed for knowing their chemical composition by using an X-Ray diffractometry and other techniques. &alpha;-Quartz is found to be present prominently in these stones to exhibit their piezoelectric (PZT) property, which is utilised to develop new PZT sensors for biomedical and other applications. This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Medical Measurements and Applications, 9 10 May 2008, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
The benefits of service choreography for data-intensive computing
Authors: Adam Barker, Paolo Besana, David Robertson, Jon B. Weissman
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international workshop on Challenges of large applications in distributed environments (2009)

As the number of services and the size of data involved in workflows increases, centralised orchestration techniques are reaching the limits of scalability. In the classic orchestration model, all data pass through a centralised engine, which results in unnecessary data transfer, wasted bandwidth and the engine to become a bottleneck to the execution of a workflow. Choreography techniques, although more complex to model offer a decentralised alternative and are the optimal architecture for data-centric workflows; data are passed directly to where they are required, at the next service in the workflow. While orchestration is the dominant architectural approach, there are relatively few choreography languages and even fewer concrete implementations. This papers contributions are twofold. Firstly we argue the case for choreography in data-intensive computing, and demonstrate through workflow patterns the advantages in terms of scalability when a choreography architecture is adopted. Secondly we introduce the Light Weight Coordination Calculus (LCC), a type of process calculus used to formally define choreographies, and the OpenKnowledge framework, a choreography-based architecture, providing the functionality for peers to coordinate in an open peer-to-peer system. Through LCC and the OpenKnowledge framework we practically demonstrate how choreography can be achieved in a lightweight manner with a comparatively simple process language.
The Road to Greener IT Pastures
Authors: Kirk W. Cameron
Venue: Computer (2009)

New techniques for energy efficiency improvements reduce cost in time and dollars as well as avoid potential disruptions to existing infrastructure.
How to avoid drastic software process change (using stochastic stability)
Authors: Tim Menzies, Steve Williams, Barry Boehm, Jairus Hihn
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (2009)

Before performing drastic changes to a project, it is worthwhile to thoroughly explore the available options within the current structure of a project. An alternative to drastic change are internal changes that adjust current options within a software project. In this paper, we show that the effects of numerous internal changes can out-weigh the effects of drastic changes. That is, the benefits of drastic change can often be achieved without disrupting a project.
Higher-level hardware synthesis of the KASUMI algorithm
Authors: Issam W. Damaj
Venue: Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2007)

Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs) continue to grow in size and currently contain several millions of gates. At the same time, research effort is going into higher-level hardware synthesis methodologies for reconfigurable computing that can exploit PLD technology. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness and extend one such formal methodology in the design of massively parallel algorithms. We take a step-wise refinement approach to the development of correct reconfigurable hardware circuits from formal specifications. A functional programming notation is used for specifying algorithms and for reasoning about them. The specifications are realised through the use of a combination of function decomposition strategies, data refinement techniques, and off-the-shelf refinements based upon higher-order functions. The off-the-shelf refinements are inspired by the operators of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and map easily to programs in Handel-C (a hardware description language). The Handel-C descriptions are directly compiled into reconfigurable hardware. The practical realisation of this methodology is evidenced by a case studying the third generation mobile communication security algorithms. The investigated algorithm is the KASUMI block cipher. In this paper, we obtain several hardware implementations with different performance characteristics by applying different refinements to the algorithm. The developed designs are compiled and tested under Celoxica's RC-1000 reconfigurable computer with its 2 million gates Virtex-E FPGA. Performance analysis and evaluation of these implementations are included.
Analytical solutions for a nonlinear coupled pendulum
Authors: Ligia Munteanu, Veturia Chiroiu, Stefania Donescu
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Mathematical and computational methods in science and engineering (2008)

In this paper, the motion of two pendulums coupled by an elastic spring is studied. By extending the linear equivalence method (LEM), the solutions of its simplified set of nonlinear equations are written as a linear superposition of Coulomb vibrations. The inverse scattering transform is applied next to exact set of equations. By using the Θ - function representation, the motion of pendulum is describable as a linear superposition of cnoidal vibrations and additional terms, which include nonlinear interactions among the vibrations. Comparisons between the LEM and cnoidal solutions and comparisons with the solutions obtained by the fourth-order Runge-Kutta scheme are performed. Finally, an interesting phenomenon is put into evidence with consequences for dynamic of pendulums.
A partition function algorithm for interacting nucleic acid strands
Authors: Hamidreza Chitsaz, Raheleh Salari, S. Cenk Sahinalp, Rolf Backofen
Venue: Bioinformatics (2009)

Recent interests, such as RNA interference and antisense RNA regulation, strongly motivate the problem of predicting whether two nucleic acid strands interact. Motivation: Regulatory non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) such as microRNAs play an important role in gene regulation. Studies on both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells show that such ncRNAs usually bind to their target mRNA to regulate the translation of corresponding genes. The specificity of these interactions depends on the stability of intermolecular and intramolecular base pairing. While methods like deep sequencing allow to discover an ever increasing set of ncRNAs, there are no high-throughput methods available to detect their associated targets. Hence, there is an increasing need for precise computational target prediction. In order to predict base-pairing probability of any two bases in interacting nucleic acids, it is necessary to compute the interaction partition function over the whole ensemble. The partition function is a scalar value from which various thermodynamic quantities can be derived. For example, the equilibrium concentration of each complex nucleic acid species and also the melting temperature of interacting nucleic acids can be calculated based on the partition function of the complex. Results: We present a model for analyzing the thermodynamics of two interacting nucleic acid strands considering the most general type of interactions studied in the literature. We also present a corresponding dynamic programming algorithm that computes the partition function over (almost) all physically possible joint secondary structures formed by two interacting nucleic acids in O(n6) time. We verify the predictive power of our algorithm by computing (i) the melting temperature for interacting RNA pairs studied in the literature and (ii) the equilibrium concentration for several variants of the OxyS–fhlA complex. In both experiments, our algorithm shows high accuracy and outperforms competitors. Availability: Software and web server is available at http://compbio.cs.sfu.ca/taverna/pirna/ Contact:cenk@cs.sfu.ca; backofen@informatik.uni-freiburg.de Supplementary information:Supplementary data are avaliable at Bioinformatics online.
Mining discourse markers for Chinese textual summarization
Authors: Samuel W. K. Chan, Tom B. Y. Lai, W. J. Gao, Benjamin K. T'sou
Venue: NAACL-ANLP 2000 Workshop on Automatic Summarization (2000)

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorical structure and Discourse Markers. Encouraging results are reported.
Cost-Based Sampling of Individual Instances
Authors: William Klement, Peter Flach, Nathalie Japkowicz, Stan Matwin
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (2009)

In many practical domains, misclassification costs can differ greatly and may be represented by class ratios, however, most learning algorithms struggle with skewed class distributions. The difficulty is attributed to designing classifiers to maximize the accuracy. Researchers call for using several techniques to address this problem including; under-sampling the majority class, employing a probabilistic algorithm, and adjusting the classification threshold. In this paper, we propose a general sampling approach that assigns weights to individual instances according to the cost function. This approach helps reveal the relationship between classification performance and class ratios and allows the identification of an appropriate class distribution for which, the learning method achieves a reasonable performance on the data. Our results show that combining an ensemble of Naive Bayes classifiers with threshold selection and under-sampling techniques works well for imbalanced data.
Sams Teach Yourself Gadgets in 24 Hours, 1st edition
Authors: Derek Torres
Venue: Sams Teach Yourself (2009)

Gadgets are small programs that can be placed in the sidebar of Windows Vista, and are used to perform one specific function. (In the land of the Mac they are called Widgets.) Oftentimes they combine the convenience of the desktop with the flexibility of the Web, bringing together information from both sources. They have proven to be one of the most popular features of Windows Vista, and are being used both by individuals for their personal use as well as by organizations for business purposes. Sams Teach Yourself Gadgets in 24 Hours will appeal equally to the power user as well as to the corporate developer. It will leadyou step by step through the process of how to program all the major types of gadgets. Using the proven Sams Teach Yourself format,you will be shown through several real world examples how to apply that knowledge to your own needs.
A Research of Physical Activity's Influence on Heart Rate Using Feedforward Neural Network
Authors: Feng Xiao, Ming Yuchi, Jun Jo, Ming-Yue Ding, Wen-Guang Hou
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks - Part III (2009)

Heart rate (HR) signal analysis is widely used in the medicine and medical research area. Physical activities (PA) are commonly recognized to greatly affect the changes of heart rate. However, the direct relationship between heart rate and physical activities is hard to describe. In this paper, a model using feedforward neural network with the function of HR prediction is designed. This model reflects the effect how PA affect HR. Experiments was conducted based on the reallife signals from a healthy male. The mean absolute error of the predicted heart rate was relatively small. The result shows the potential of the proposed method.
A Controller Area Network Gateway to ZigBee- A Proposition of an Architecture to Extend CAN
Authors: Paul A. Kuban
Venue:  (2007)

Controller Area Network is employed widely in modern automobiles, medical instrumentation, building automation, and manufacturing control systems. DeviceNet is one example of a commercial SCADA network that is based on the CAN specification. Commercially known as "ZigBee," the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard is designed to operate at low data rates with secure, low cost network configurations. Two key elements of the standard are low power operation and inherent security implementation. This work proposes an architecture to extend CAN to the wireless domain of IEEE 802.15.4, thereby providing a low cost, low power, efficient, and secure wireless network interface compatible with many existing SCADA infrastructure networks, in addition to the countless other installations incorporating a CAN backbone. An architectural model for such an extension mechanism is proposed which includes additions to the CAN protocol stack. New protocols are recommended for the tunneling of messages and for enhancing reliability. This work is directed towards developers of products involving CAN and 802.15.4, as well as researchers in the field of wireless personal area networks. 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
HunPos: an open source trigram tagger
Authors: Péter Halácsy, András Kornai, Csaba Oravecz
Venue: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the ACL on Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions (2007)

In the world of non-proprietary NLP software the standard, and perhaps the best, HMM-based POS tagger is TnT (Brants, 2000). We argue here that some of the criticism aimed at HMM performance on languages with rich morphology should more properly be directed at TnT's peculiar license, free but not open source, since it is those details of the implementation which are hidden from the user that hold the key for improved POS tagging across a wider variety of languages. We present HunPos, a free and open source (LGPL-licensed) alternative, which can be tuned by the user to fully utilize the potential of HMM architectures, offering performance comparable to more complex models, but preserving the ease and speed of the training and tagging process.
Multi-level clustering architecture and protocol designs for wireless sensor networks
Authors: Barnabas C. Okeke, K. L. Eddie Law
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th Annual International Conference on Wireless Internet (2008)

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensors for measuring and gathering data in a variety of environments. These sensors, with the size and battery constraints, usually have limited transmission ranges due to the low-power wireless radio transceivers. In a sensor network, sensed data should be collected at a centralized location, called sink, for processing and analysis. With limited transmssion distances, sensed data may require multiple relays to reach the sink. In this paper, a novel multi-level clustering (MLC) wireless sensor network design and its associated operating protocol will be presented. Energy optimization is always a critical factor in the designs and deployments of wireless sensor networks. The goal is to create an energy-efficient and effective routing protocol for the networks. Cluster creation in this paper is different from the well-known Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) design. Cluster-heads in our proposed design form a tree with a goal to reach all sensor nodes in a network. Subsequently, all sensed data in the tree can be delivered to the sink while LEACH can not offer this guarantee. Energy savings may be improved with different numbers of levels in the hierarchical clustering architecture. To validate the proposed design, thorough simulations have been carried out. Upon comparing to a multi-hop LEACH protocol, the proposed design offers consistent wider coverage area and longer life span of a wireless sensor network.