ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
TODS: cluster object storage platform designed for scalable services
Authors: Feng Zhou, Chao Jin, Yinghui Wu, Weimin Zheng
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2004)

In this paper we present the design and implementation of Tsinghua Object Data Store (TODS), a cluster object storage system to support the building of scalable Internet services. TODS provides a unified, transparent and object-oriented view of the storage devices of the whole cluster, which greatly simplifies cluster service development. In the meantime, it is designed to be scalable and efficient. Services built on it can simply inherit these properties in a lot of cases. TODS supports ACID transactions, which facilitates the building of complex transactional services. TODS abstracts away from service logic most complexities of data management, which have often become major obstacles in developing high quality Internet services. The design principles, architecture and implementation of TODS are discussed. In our performance experiments, the system scales smoothly to a 36-node server cluster and achieves 11,160 in-memory reads per second and 396 transactions per second. We also demonstrate that the programming interface is significantly easier to use than that of RDBMS with a head-to-head comparative experiment.
The Complexity of Testing a Motivational Model of Action Selection for Virtual Humans
Authors: Etienne de Sevin, Daniel Thalmann
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

After implementing a motivational model of actionselection applied to autonomous virtual humansinspired by models of animalsý decision-making, theproblem consists of testing it in good conditions forvalidation. Indeed this model has to respect the sixcriteria that we define according to Tyrellýsrequirements for designing a mechanism of actionselection. So we use the real-time framework VHD++for advanced virtual human simulation and we definea simulated environment with many conflictingmotivations. Finally a video shows the first resultswhere the virtual humanýs decision-making follows thesix criteria and so validates our model in the simulatedenvironment.
Enhancement of information transmission efficiency by synaptic failures
Authors: Mark S. Goldman
Venue: Neural Computation (2004)

Many synapses have a high percentage of synaptic transmission failures. I consider the hypothesis that synaptic failures can increase the efficiency of information transmission across the synapse. I use the information transmitted per vesicle release about the presynaptic spike train as a measure of synaptic transmission efficiency and show that this measure can increase with the synaptic failure probability. I analytically calculate the Shannon mutual information transmitted across two model synapses with probabilistic transmission: one with a constant probability of vesicle release and one with vesicle release probabilities governed by the dynamics of synaptic depression. For inputs generated by a non-Poisson process with positive autocorrelations, both synapses can transmit more information per vesicle release than a synapse with perfect transmission, although the information increases are greater for the depressing synapse than for a constant-probability synapse with the same average transmission probability. The enhanced performance of the depressing synapse over the constant-release-probability synapse primarily reflects a decrease in noise entropy rather than an increase in the total transmission entropy. This indicates a limitation of analysis methods, such as decorrelation, that consider only the total response entropy. My results suggest that synaptic transmission failures governed by appropriately tuned synaptic dynamics can increase the information-carrying efficiency of a synapse.
High-Throughput 3D Structural Homology Detection via NMR Resonance Assignment
Authors: Christopher James Langmead, Bruce Randall Donald
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

One goal of the structural genomics initiative is the identification of new protein folds. Sequence-based structural homology prediction methods are an important means for prioritizing unknown proteins for structure determination. However, an important challenge remains: two highly dissimilar sequences can have similar folds & how can we detect this rapidly, in the context of structural genomics? High-throughput NMR experiments, coupled with novel algorithms for data analysis, can address this challenge. We report an automated procedure, called HD, for detecting 3D structural homologies from sparse, unassigned protein NMR data. Our method identifies 3D models in a protein structural database whose geometries best fit the unassigned experimental NMR data. HD does not use, and is thus not limited by sequence homology. The method can also be used to confirm or refute structural predictions made by other techniques such as protein threading or homology modelling. The algorithm runs in O(pn + pn^5/2 log (cn)+p log p) time, where p is the number of proteins in the database, n is the number of residues in the target protein and c is the maximum edge weight in an integer-weighted bipartite graph. Our experiments on real NMR data from 3 different proteins against a database of 4,500 representative folds demonstrate that the method identifies closely related protein folds, including sub-domains of larger proteins, with as little as 10-30% sequence homology between the target protein (or sub-domain) and the computed model. In particular, we report no false-negatives or false-positives despite significant percentages of missing experimental data.
BioSPRINT: Classification of Intron and Exon Sequences Using the SPRINT Algorithm
Authors: Kevin Crosby, Paula Gabbert
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

An important problem for computer scientists as well as geneticists involves classifying particular items into common groups. This paper focuses on classifying sequences of DNA as either an intron or an exon. Insights from this classification can reduce the time needed for laboratory work to distinguish between introns and exons. Using a classification tree based on the SPRINT algorithm, sequences from the Drosophila melanogaster and the Caenorhabditis elegans genomes were used for training and testing. A large test sample error rate of 15% was shown for the Drosophila melanogaster, whereas the Caenorhabditis elegans was only 1.6%.
Toric ideals of homogeneous phylogenetic models
Authors: Nicholas Eriksson
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (2004)

We consider the model of phylogenetic trees in which every node of the tree is an observed, binary random variable and the transition probabilities are given by the same matrix on each edge of the tree. The ideal of invariants of this model is a toric ideal in &Copf;[p;i1;…i;n;]. We are able to compute the Göbner basis and minimal generating set for this ideal for trees with up to 11 nodes. These are the first non-trivial Gröbner bases calculations in 211 = 2048 indeterminates. We conjecture that there is a quadratic Gröbner basis for binary trees, but that generators of degree n are required for some trees with n nodes. The polytopes associated with these toric ideals display interesting finiteness properties. We describe the polytope for an infinite family of binary trees and conjecture (based on extensive computations) that there is a universal bound on the number of vertices of the polytope of a binary tree.
An OGSI-compliant Grid Information Service - Its Architecture and Performance Study
Authors: Tianyi Zang, Wei Jie, Terence Hung, Zhou Lei, Stephen J. Turner, Wentong Cai, Ming Zhu, Constantine Katsinis
Venue: Proceedings of the High Performance Computing and Grid in Asia Pacific Region, Seventh International Conference (2004)

The Information Service is a key component of a Grid environment and critical to the operation of a computational Grid. This paper presents an Information Service that complies with the OGSI (Open Grid Services Infrastructure) framework. This Information Service is a hierarchical structure which consists of the Virtual Organization level, site level and node level. We propose two models of information data organization for the Information Service, i.e. source-data based model and meta-data based model. Two sets of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the Information Service. The experimental results show that the amount of data communicated between clients and the Information Service, and among the component services is the key factor to influence the scalability of the Information Service. We also found that the meta-data based model is an effective solution to improve the scalability of the Information Service
Enhanced SIP Communication Services by Context Sharing
Authors: Manuel Gortz, Ralf Ackermann, Ralf Steinmetz
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th EUROMICRO Conference (2004)

Communication plays a central in our society. It affects our private lives as well as business activities. Humans usually observe the environment and the communication partner with all their senses. The perceived information is evaluated to deduce the context of the targeted communication partner. However, distant interpersonal communication does not provide a priori knowledge of the called party's current situation, condition or mood - the callee's context. Current communication systems do not offer satisfying technical means to support context sharing between communication partners. The proposed solution in this paper is based on an enhancement of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for IP Telephony systems. Different mechanism of sharing context among communication peers have been investigated, implemented and evaluated.
Variations in use of meta tag descriptions by web pages in different languages
Authors: Timothy C. Craven
Venue: Information Processing and Management: an International Journal (2004)

Sets of top-ranking pages in 20 languages returned by the Google search engine were downloaded and analyzed for presence of meta tag descriptions and lengths of descriptions. Results showed significant differences in proportion of pages with descriptions and in lengths of descriptions depending on language; specifically, pages in major Western European languages showed higher proportions with descriptions, while pages in Chinese showed the lowest proportions. Descriptions were mostly in the languages of the pages, though English descriptions were provided on some non-English pages. With few exceptions, coding schemes adopted for diacritics and non-Roman characters were standard.
Is Open Source Right for You?: A Fictional Case Study of Open Source in a Commercial Software Shop
Authors: David Ascher
Venue: Queue (2004)

The media often present open source software as a direct competitor to commercial software. This depiction, usually pitting David (Linux) against Goliath (Microsoft), makes for fun reading in the weekend paper. However, it mostly misses the point of what open source means to a development organization. In this article, I use the experiences of GizmoSoft (a fictitious software company) to present some perspectives on the impact of open source software usage in a software development shop.
Notes on "A note on the transitive closure of a boolean matrix"
Authors: Lawrence Yelowitz
Venue: ACM SIGACT News (1978)

The row-oriented algorithm in [1] for obtaining transitive closure is Dijkstra's algorithm [2] (for obtaining all nodes reachable from a single node) applied to each row in turn. Furthermore, [1] does not work properly in the acyclic case unless the matrix is in triangular form initially. In general, it may be necessary to renumber the nodes (and correspondingly rearrange the matrix) to bring an acyclic adjacency matrix into triangular form (a technique such as topological sorting [3] can be used). Finally, if interest is in obtaining the nonredundant digraph of an acyclic digraph, [4] appears to be a more efficient algorithm than [5].
Expansion properties of (secure) wireless networks
Authors: Alessandro Panconesi, Jaikumar Radhakrishnan
Venue: Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures (2004)

We show that some topologies arising naturally in the context of wireless networking are low-degree, expander graphs.
The patent retrieval task in the fourth NTCIR workshop
Authors: Atsushi Fujii, Makoto Iwayama, Noriko Kando
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

This paper describes the Patent Retrieval Task in the Fourth NTCIR Workshop, and the test collections produced in this task. We perform the invalidity search task, in which each participant group searches a patent collection for the patents that can invalidate the demand in an existing claim. We also perform the automatic patent map generation task, in which the patents associated with a specific topic are organized in a multi-dimensional matrix.
Realistic Analysis of Limited Parallel Software / Hardware Implementations
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (2004)

Proposed real-time system implementationscombine reconfigurable hardware (for speed-up)with processor-memory architectures.Suchhardware can execute many functions in parallel,leading to a limited parallel system where a singlesoftware process can execute on the processorat any time, in parallel with a number of functionsimplemented on the reconfigurable hardware.This approach is not amenable to conventionalfixed priority timing analysis, as fundamentalassumptions are compromised, namelythat of a critical instant.This paper describesgeneralised fixed priority timing analysis for limitedparallel systems, illustrated by an examplesystem utilising Field Programmable Gate Arraysas the reconfigurable hardware resource.
On the integration of structure indexes and inverted lists
Authors: Raghav Kaushik, Rajasekar Krishnamurthy, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Raghu Ramakrishnan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2004)

Several methods have been proposed to evaluate queries over a native XML DBMS, where the queries specify both path and keyword constraints. These broadly consist of graph traversal approaches, optimized with auxiliary structures known as structure indexes; and approaches based on information-retrieval style inverted lists. We propose a strategy that combines the two forms of auxiliary indexes, and a query evaluation algorithm for branching path expressions based on this strategy. Our technique is general and applicable for a wide range of choices of structure indexes and inverted list join algorithms. Our experiments over the Niagara XML DBMS show the benefit of integrating the two forms of indexes. We also consider algorithmic issues in evaluating path expression queries when the notion of relevance ranking is incorporated. By integrating the above techniques with the Threshold Algorithm proposed by Fagin et al., we obtain instance optimal algorithms to push down top k computation.
Point Set Surface Editing Techniques Based on Level-Sets
Authors: Xiaohu Guo, Jing Hua, Hong Qin
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

In this paper we articulate a new modeling paradigm forboth local and global editing on complicated point set surfacesof arbitrary topology. In essence, the proposed techniqueleads to a novel point-set methodology that can unifythe topological advantage of the level-set methods and thesimplicity of point-sampled surfaces. Any user-specified regionof a point set surface in our system can be embeddedinto a grid-based level-set framework. The super-imposedgrid structure enables both powerful local surface editingand global scalar-field free-form deformation anywhereacross the point-sampled geometry. Furthermore, the underlyinglevel-set representation, coupled with the conceptof digital topology, greatly facilitates the topological modi-fication of the sculpted point-set geometry whenever necessaryduring shape deformation. We have developed a varietyof editing toolkits that can allow users to directly manipulatethe point-set surface through interactive sketching,smoothing, embossing, and global free-form deformationswith ease. We demonstrate the usefulness and efficacy of ourprototype system for the point-sampled geometry via manyexamples.
Design of Digital Control Systems with Dynamic Voltage Scaling
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (2004)

For real-time computer-controlled systems, controlperformances of tasks as well as energy consumption ofoverall system must be optimized. A control task does nothave a fixed period but a range of periods in whichcontrol performance varies. Hence when more than onecontrol tasks are scheduled on a single processor, anoptimization problem appears. Furthermore, when anenergy saving technique such as dynamic voltage scalingis used, its properties affect the control performance.Using a performance index that involves controlperformance and energy consumption, a static solution isproposed to obtain optimal processor speed and a set ofperiods for given control tasks in O(k). Also, a dynamicsolution is proposed to utilize system services of real-timeoperating systems to overcome unavoidable deficienciesof the static solution and to further reduce the energyconsumption of the overall system. The performances ofproposed solutions are revealed via simulation studies.
Real-Time Rendering of Seasonal Infuenced Trees
Venue: Proceedings of the Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2004 (TPCG'04) (2004)

We present an algorithm for the visualization of treesduring the passing of the year, taking into account thechanging and vanishing of the treeýs leaves as well as theircolor changes. In combination with the Phong lighting algorithmthe color changes are directly integrated into thelighting model. In conjunction with the use of common offthe shelf hardware shader programs we aim for a performanceincrease allowing for fast realtime rendering oftrees. In contrast to earlier works we are able to rely on amore theoretical foundation of biological and chemical insights,taking into account botanic research results aboutbiochemical reactions influencing the leavesý pigments duringthe seasons. This permits us to make our algorithmas realistic as possible regarding the available informationand current research results in both biology and chemistry.
Derivatives for Multiple-Valued Functions Induced by Galois Field and Reed-Muller-Fourier Expressions
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (2004)

In classical mathematics, Newton-Leibniz differentialoperators determine coefficients in Taylor series. At thesame time, there are relationships between Fourier coefficients of a (differentiable) function and its derivative. By the analogy, Boolean differential operators are viewed ascoefficients of Taylor-Maclaurin series-like expressions forswitching functions, usually dented as Reed-Muller expressions.Spectral interpretation of these expressions, permitsto relate the Boolean difference to the coefficients in Fourierseries-like expressions for switching functions.This paper considers these two possible ways of introductionof differential operators for multiple-valued (MV)functions. We defined the Logic derivatives and Gibbsderivatives for MV functions as coefficients in Taylor-Maclaurin series for MV functions and through relationships to Fourier series-like coefficients, respectively.
A Rank Encoder: Adaptive Analog to Digital Conversion Exploiting Time Domain Spike Signal Processing
Authors: Philipp Häfliger, Elin Jørgensen Aasebø
Venue: Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (2004)

An electronic circuit is presented that encodes an array of analog input signals into a digital number. The digital output is a &lsquo;rank order code&rsquo; that reflects the relative strength of the inputs, but is independent of the absolute input intensities. In that sense, the circuit performs an adaptive analog to digital conversion, adapting to the average intensity of the inputs (i.e. effectively normalizing) and adapting the quantization levels to the spread of the inputs. Thus, it can convey essential information with a minimal amount of output bits over a huge range of input signals.As a first processing step the analog inputs are projected into the time domain, i.e. into voltage spikes. The latency of those spikes encodes the strength of the input. This conversion enables the circuit to conduct further analog processing steps by asynchronous logic.The circuit was implemented as a prototype on a VLSI chip, fabricated in the AMS 0.6 &mu;m process. The implementation takes 31 analog inputs that are delivered as frequency encoded spike trains by a 5 bit AER (address event representation) bus. The output is 128 bits wide and is read serially in 16-bit packages. Based on tests with one particular set of inputs with an entropy of 112.62 bits, it is estimated that the chip is able to convey 40.81 bits of information about that input set.Possible applications can be found in speech recognition and image processing.
Learning patterns to answer open domain questions on the web
Authors: Dmitri Roussinov, Jose Robles
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

While being successful in providing keyword based access to web pages, commercial search portals still lack the ability to answer questions expressed in a natural language. We present a probabilistic approach to automated question answering on the Web, based on trainable patterns, answer triangulation and semantic filtering. In contrast to the other "shallow" approaches, our approach is entirely self-learning. It does not require any manually created scoring and filtering rules while still performing comparably. It also performs better than other fully trainable approaches.
The Smarandache combinatorial sequences
Authors: Maohua Le
Venue: Smarandache Notions Journal (2004)

Let r be a positive integer with r > 1, and let SCS(r) denote the Smarandache combinatorial sequence of degree r. In this paper we prove that there has only the consecutive terms 1,2,...,r of SCS(r) are pairwise coprime.
Creating and Maintaining a Dynamic Resource: ArtWorld and Issues of Reliability and Community On-line
Authors: Lorna Hards, Veronica Sekules
Venue: Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications, 15th International Workshop (2004)

This paper, born of the experiences of the ArtWorld project, is concerned with the dynamic creation of an on-line world art teaching resource; the engagement of a local user group with all aspects of production and ways in which to continue this beyond the life of the project. It poses and attempts answers and practical solutions to questions regarding the creation of a sustainable virtual community space and the status of materials contributed by unknown users.