ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An integrated genetic algorithm complemented with direct search for optimum design of RC frames
Authors: Hyo-Gyoung Kwak, Jieun Kim
Venue: Computer-Aided Design (2009)

This paper presents an improved optimum design method for reinforced concrete (RC) frames using an integrated genetic algorithm (GA) with a direct search method. A conventional genetic algorithm occasionally has limitations due to a low convergence rate in spite of high computing times. The proposed method in this research uses a predetermined section database (DB) when determining trial sections for the next iteration. From an initial section determined by substituting calculated member forces into a regression formula, a direct search that determines a final discrete solution is followed within a limited range in the section database. Due to the fast convergence and the sequential determination of feasible trial sections close to the final optimum solution, an introduction of the search procedure at each iteration allows difficulties to be solved during the application of a conventional GA to large RC structures. Finally, the effectiveness of the introduced design procedure is verified through correlative tests of the introduced design procedure.
Ethics and the Practice of Software Design
Authors: Matteo Turilli
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy (2008)

The paper offers an analysis of the problem of integrating ethical principles into the practice of software design. The approach is grounded on a review of the relevant literature from Computer Ethics and Professional Ethics. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section reviews some key questions that arise when the ethical impact of computational artefacts is analysed. The inner informational nature of such questions is used to argue in favour of the need for a specific branch of ethics called Information Ethics. Such ethics deal with a specific class of ethical problems and Informational Privacy is introduced as a paradigmatic example. The second section analyses the ethical nature of computational artefacts. This section highlights the fact that this nature is impossible to comprehend without first considering designers, users, and patients alongside the artefacts they create, use and are affected by. Some key ethical concepts are discussed, such as freedom, agency, control, autonomy and accountability. The third section illustrates how autonomous computational artefacts are rapidly changing the way in which computation is used an perceived. The description of the ethical challenges posed to software engineers by this shift in perspective closes the section. The fourth and last section of the paper is dedicated to a discussion of Professional Ethics for software engineers. After establishing the limits of the professional codes of practice, it is argued that ethical considerations are best embedded directly into software design practise. In this context, the Value Sensitive Design approach is considered and insight into how this is being integrated into current research in ethical design methodologies is given.
Annotated Semantics for Nonmonotonic Reasonings in Artificial Intelligence I
Authors: Kazumi Nakamatsu, Atsuyuki Suzuki
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Advances in Logic Based Intelligent Systems: Selected Papers of LAPTEC 2005 (2005)

In this paper, we introduce an annotated logic program with strong negation abbreviated as ALPSN(Annotated Logic Program with Strong Negation) and its stable model semantics and stable class semantics. Then we provide four declarative annotated semantics for nonmonotonic reasonings : default theory, nonmonotonic ATMS, the Negation as Failure rule, the Closed World Assumption based on ALPSN in the subsequent papers.
Mobile computing in the public sector: practices, opportunities, and arduous challenges
Authors: Hans J (Jochen) Scholl
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government (2009)

Along with cloud computing and data-centric computing Mobile Computing can be seen as a third building block of a rapidly emerging new computing paradigm, in which human actors expect to be able to satisfy their information and electronic transaction needs (combined data/voice) at any time and at any place. For the public sector this shift has numerous and challenging implications, but also holds promises of huge productivity gains and ubiquitous service availability in unprecedented ways. This tutorial introduces practices, opportunities, and challenges in public-sector field force automation. The tutorial briefly touches on the widely under-researched area of emergency and disaster response management in the context of the rapidly changing computing paradigms.
A new robust reference watermarking scheme based on DWT-SVD
Authors: Gaurav Bhatnagar, Balasubramanian Raman
Venue: Computer Standards Interfaces (2009)

This paper presents a new semi-blind reference watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform(DWT) and singular value decomposition(SVD) for copyright protection and authenticity. We are using a gray scale logo image as watermark instead of randomly generated Gaussian noise type watermark. For watermark embedding, the original image is transformed into wavelet domain and a reference sub-image is formed using directive contrast and wavelet coefficients. We embed watermark into reference image by modifying the singular values of reference image using the singular values of the watermark. A reliable watermark extraction scheme is developed for the extraction of watermark from distorted image. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand a variety of attacks. We show that the proposed scheme also stands with the ambiguity attack also.
The Impact of Constraint Programming
Authors: Pascal Van Hentenryck
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2008)

Constraint programming is a success story for artificial intelligence. It quickly moved from research laboratories to industrial applications and is in daily use to solve complex optimization throughout the world. At the same time, constraint programming continued to evolve, addressing new needs and opportunities. This talk reviews some recent progress in constraint programming, including its hybridization with other optimization approaches, the quest for more autonomous search, and its applications in a variety of nontraditional areas.
A Jordan&#x2013;Brouwer Separation Theorem for Polyhedral Pseudomanifolds
Authors: Micha A. Perles, Horst Martini, Yaakov S. Kupitz
Venue: Discrete Computational Geometry (2009)

The Jordan Curve Theorem referring to a simple closed curve in the plane has a particularly simple proof in the case that the curve is polygonal, called the &#x201c;raindrop proof&#x201d;. We generalize the notion of a simple closed polygon to that of a polyhedral (d&#x2212;1)-pseudomanifold (d&#x2265;2) and prove a Jordan&#x2013;Brouwer Separation Theorem for such a manifold embedded in &#x211d;d . As a by-product, we get bounds on the polygonal diameter of the interior and exterior of such a manifold which are almost tight. This puts the result within the frame of computational geometry.
Tashi: location-aware cluster management
Authors: Michael A. Kozuch, Michael P. Ryan, Richard Gass, Steven W. Schlosser, David O'Hallaron, James Cipar, Elie Krevat, Julio López, Michael Stroucken, Gregory R. Ganger
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Automated control for datacenters and clouds (2009)

Big Data applications, those that require large data corpora either for correctness or for fidelity, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Tashi is a cluster management system designed particularly for enabling cloud computing applications to operate on repositories of Big Data. These applications are extremely scalable but also have very high resource demands. A key technique for making such applications perform well is Location-Awareness. This paper demonstrates that location-aware applications can outperform those that are not location aware by factors of 3-11 and describes two general services developed for Tashi to provide location-awareness independently of the storage system.
Olympus: an open-source framework for conversational spoken language interface research
Authors: Dan Bohus, Antoine Raux, Thomas K. Harris, Maxine Eskenazi, Alexander I. Rudnicky
Venue: Proceedings of the Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies (2007)

We introduce Olympus, a freely available framework for research in conversational interfaces. Olympus' open, transparent, flexible, modular and scalable nature facilitates the development of large-scale, real-world systems, and enables research leading to technological and scientific advances in conversational spoken language interfaces. In this paper, we describe the overall architecture, several systems spanning different domains, and a number of current research efforts supported by Olympus.
The role of task-specific adapted knowledge of response feedback in algebra problem solving online homework in a college remedial course
Authors: Harold O'Neil
Venue:  (2008)

Research has pointed out that online homework is an accepted alternative way to replace traditional paper-and-pencil homework. Students' self-efficacy (Nguyen, Hsieh, Allen, 2006) and achievement (Bulter Zerr, 2005; Zerr, 2007) can be improved by online homework with feedback. However, there is no study comparing the effects of different types of online homework feedback on undergraduate students' math problem solving skills and achievement. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the effects of different types of online homework feedback on algebra problem solving skills and achievement in a college remedial algebra course. Two types of feedback are verification feedback and task-specific adapted knowledge of response feedback. Verification feedback only gives participants information about the accuracy of their answers. Task-specific adapted knowledge of response feedback gives participants not only the accuracy of their answers, but also guidelines to help them correct their answers. Problem solving skills are measured by content understanding, problem solving strategies, and self-regulation. Achievement is measure by an online intervention homework assignment, a test, a final exam, and a final course grade. The participants were students in a remedial algebra course at a university in California. The homework questions with different types of feedback were delivered through online systems, MyMathLab (MyMathLab, 2007) and CourseCompass (CourseCompass, 2007). Fifty voluntary students were randomly assigned into the control group receiving verification feedback (n=21), or the experimental group receiving task-specific adapted knowledge of response feedback (n=29). All 50 students also learned individual help-seeking strategies. This study hypothesized that the experimental group would have better content understanding, greater problem solving strategies, higher self-regulation, and better achievement than the control group. However, the results of this study were unexpected. There were no significant differences between two groups in content understanding, problem solving strategies, self-regulation, and achievement. The fact that there were no differences between two groups could be due to either cognitive overload, or limited functionality of MyMathLab's tools, or learner control, or trial-and-error strategy. Results of this study suggest it will be better to improve computer software's design tools and design feedback in both visual and auditory modalities.
Plenary lecture 3: macrosonics: sound as a source of energy
Authors: Juan A. Gallego-Juarez
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Acoustics & music: theory & applications (2009)

The field of high-amplitude acoustic waves, regardless of frequency, is known as Macrosonics. As well known, Acoustics may be divided into three main branches according to the frequency spectrum and the hearing characteristics imposed by the frequency. These are: Infrasonics (0-20 Hz), Sonics (20Hz-20kHz) and Ultrasonics (higher than 20 kHz). Besides frequency other wave parameters, as intensity, may influence broadly the generation, propagation and application of acoustic waves. Therefore another division of the acoustic field could be into two branches such as low and high-amplitude acoustics. Low-amplitude waves are those wherein the primary objective is transmitting information through or about the medium, without modifying it. On the contrary, high-amplitude waves are those which may produce permanent changes in the propagation medium and that, generally, are used to this purpose. Macrosonics is then the part of Acoustics devoted to high-amplitude waves and their applications. As high-amplitude waves are finite amplitude waves, their behaviour must be described by the equations of the nonlinear acoustics. The applications of macrosonic waves are generally based on the adequate exploitation of the nonlinear phenomena associated to the high amplitudes, such as wave distortion, acoustic saturation, radiation pressure, streaming, cavitation in liquids and the formation and motion of dislocations in solids. This lecture will review the later advances in the generation and application of macrosounds as well as the basic phenomena there involved.
A service-oriented framework for controlling invasive species in agriculture
Authors: Brahim Medjahed, Shamil Hadi, William I. Grosky
Venue: International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (2009)

The Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) has killed or infested millions of ash trees in the USA. It has the potential to decimate ash trees as a component of North American forests, which will have dramatic ecological and economic effects. Government agencies have joined forces to implement a long-term programme to contain and eventually eradicate the borer. One key requirement for the success of this programme is the underlying information-sharing infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based service-oriented framework, called Sentinel, to automate the dissemination of EAB-related information. We also present experiment results to assess the performance of our framework.
Genetic algorithms applied to the solution of hybrid optimal control problems in astrodynamics
Authors: Bradley J. Wall, Bruce A. Conway
Venue: Journal of Global Optimization (2009)

Many space mission planning problems may be formulated as hybrid optimal control problems, i.e. problems that include both continuous-valued variables and categorical (binary) variables. There may be thousands to millions of possible solutions; a current practice is to pre-prune the categorical state space to limit the number of possible missions to a number that may be evaluated via total enumeration. Of course this risks pruning away the optimal solution. The method developed here avoids the need for pre-pruning by incorporating a new solution approach using nested genetic algorithms; an outer-loop genetic algorithm that optimizes the categorical variable sequence and an inner-loop genetic algorithm that can use either a shape-based approximation or a Lambert problem solver to quickly locate near-optimal solutions and return the cost to the outer-loop genetic algorithm. This solution technique is tested on three asteroid tour missions of increasing complexity and is shown to yield near-optimal, and possibly optimal, missions in many fewer evaluations than total enumeration would require.
On-board vehicle data stream monitoring using mine-fleet and fast resource constrained monitoring of correlation matrices
Authors: Hillol Kargupta, Vasundhara Puttagunta, Martin Klein, Kakali Sarkar
Venue: New Generation Computing (2007)

This paper considers the problem of monitoring vehicle data streams in a resource-constrained environment. It particularly focuses on a monitoring task that requires frequent computation of correlation matrices using lightweight on-board computing devices. It motivates this problem in the context of the MineFleet Real-Time system and offers a randomized algorithm for fast monitoring of correlation (FMC), inner product, and Euclidean distance matrices among others. Unlike the existing approaches that compute all the entries of these matrices from a data set, the proposed technique works using a divide-and-conquer approach. This paper presents a probabilistic test for quickly detecting whether or not a subset of coefficients contains a significant one with a magnitude greater than a user given threshold. This test is used for quickly identifying the portions of the space that contain significant coefficients. The proposed algorithm is particularly suitable for monitoring correlation and related matrices computed from continuous data streams.
Next generation content networks: trends and challenges
Authors: Giancarlo Fortino, Carlo Mastroianni, Mukaddim Pathan, Athena Vakali
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th edition of the UPGRADE-CN workshop on Use of P2P, GRID and agents for the development of content networks (2009)

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) [1] have emerged to overcome the inherent limitations of the Internet in terms of user perceived Quality of Service (QoS) when accessing Web content. They offer infrastructure and mechanisms to deliver content and services in a scalable manner, and enhance users' Web experience. However, modern applications do not just perform retrieval or access operations on content but also create content, modify and manage content, and actively place content at appropriate locations. In order to deal with such new requirements, along with the proliferation, formation, and consolidation of the CDN landscape, new forms of Content Networks (CNs) are coming into picture. Thus, distribution and management of content is introducing new challenges in this domain through raising new issues in the architecture, design and implementation of CNs. Moreover, the evolution of next-generation CNs in a large-scale heterogeneous environment demands for a paradigm shift within the research community in terms of the technologies used. Therefore, the integrated uses of existing emerging as well as stable technologies (e.g. agent, P2P, grid, data mining) are anticipated to augment the effectiveness and boost the efficiency of future CN infrastructures [2, 3, 4]. The aim of this panel session is to discuss about new ideas and results in the content networking domain. It will capture the state-of-the-art in content networking domain in terms of organizational structure, content distribution mechanisms, request redirection techniques, and performance measurement methodologies. It will also identify potential research directions and technologies that will drive innovations within this domain. In particular, the talks will be focused on agents for content management and delivery, P2P-based CNs, mobile multimedia CDNs, integration between CDNs and cloud computing, and content delivery on wireless networks.
Letters: Comment on "Facial expression recognition based on two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projections" [Neurocomputing 71 (2008) 1730-1734]
Authors: Zilan Hu
Venue: Neurocomputing (2009)

In this note, we show that the mathematical formulation of the two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projections (2D-DLPP) proposed in the paper [R. Zhi, Q. Ruan, Facial expression recognition based on two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projections, Neurocomputing 71 (2008) 1730-1734] is not very sound. The rigorous version is thus given. We also point out that 2D-DLPP can be viewed from the perspective of the discriminant locality preserving projections (DLPP).
Control of an actuated car door providing outstanding haptic interaction
Authors: Michael Strolz, Alexander Mortl, Michael Graf, Martin Buss
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

Actuated car doors are a promising way to increase the convenience of access to cars. In this paper, an advanced door concept which can easily be integrated into conventional car doors is presented. Using a linear, non-backdrivable actuator and various sensors, both automatic and manual door operations can be realized. The principal part is the realization of a high-quality haptic interaction of the car door for the manual operation. We implemented and tested four different impedance control schemes, of which impedance control with actuator force feedback performed best. This control scheme was subsequently used to haptically render different supportive dynamics and effects. An experimental evaluation with 16 participants revealed a predominant approval of the haptic sensation of the actuated car door.
Foundations of the Formal Sciences V: Infinite Games
Authors: S. Bold, B. Loewe, T. Rasch
Venue:  (2007)

Infinity can feature in games in various forms: we can play games of infinite length, with infinitely many players, or allow for infinitely many moves or strategies. Games of infinite length have been thoroughly investigated by mathematicians ard have played a central role in mathematical logic. However, their applications go far beyond mathematics: they feature prominently in theoretical computer science, philosophical "Gedankenxperiments", as limit cases in economical applications, and in many other applications. The conference "Foundations of the Formal Sciences V" focused on games of infinite length, but was very open to include other notions of infinity in games as well. It brought together researchers from the various areas that employ infinitary game techniques to talk about similarities and dissimilarities of the different approaches and develop cross-cultural bridges. This volume contains the fully refereed proceedings of the conference and provides a healthy and interesting mixture of research papers and surveys for a broad audience.
Representing and Combining Calendar Information by Using Finite-State Transducers
Authors: Jyrki Niemi, Kimmo Koskenniemi
Venue: Proceeding of the 2009 conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing: Post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop FSMNLP 2008 (2009)

This paper elaborates a model for representing various types of semantic calendar expressions (SCEs), which correspond to the disambiguated intensional meanings of natural-language calendar phrases. The model uses finite-state transducers (FSTs) to mark denoted periods of time on a set of timelines also represented as an FST. In addition to an overview of the model, the paper presents methods to combine the periods marked on two timeline FSTs into a single timeline FST and to adjust the granularity and span of time of a timeline FST. The paper also discusses advantages and limitations of the model.