ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Macs Portable Genius
Authors: Paul McFedries
Venue:  (2008)

Youre one of the legions of fans who enjoy the ease and simplicity of the Mac. But some functions still elude you. How do you synch your Mac with other devices? What are the best ways to organize your life and files with your Mac? Can you get more from your Mac hardware or upgrade it? The Portable Genius is here to help. With expert advice and a Mac-savvy attitude, the Macs Portable Genius guides you through getting the most out of your Mac.From the Introduction:"Welcome to Macs Portable Genius. This book is like a mini Genius Bar all wrapped up in an easy to use, easy to access, and eminently portable format. In this book you learn how to get more out of your Mac by learning how to access all the really powerful and timesaving features that arent obvious at a casual glance. In this book you learn how to avoid your Macs more annoying character traits and, in those cases where such behavior cant be avoided, you learn how to work around it. In this book you learn how to prevent Mac problems from occurring, and just in case your preventative measures are for naught, you learn how to fix many common problems yourself.This book is for Mac users who know the basics but want to take their Mac education to a higher level. Its a book for people who want to be more productive, more efficient, more creative, and more self-sufficient (at least as far as their Mac goes, anyway). Its a book for people who use a Mac every day, but would like to incorporate that Mac into more of their day-to-day activities. Its a book for people who pooh-pooh the notion that Mac users are a cult, but if someone decided to start an actual Mac cult, theyd join anyway. Its a book I had a blast writing, so I think its a book youll enjoy reading."
Performance Analysis of the ARIA Adaptive Media Processing Workflows using Colored Petri Nets
Authors: Maurizio Garelli, Marco Gribaudo
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2009)

Multimedia systems are one of the most complex and interesting applications that are nowadays proposed to the users. Their complexity derives mainly from the fact that multimedia systems have to process huge amounts of data, while respecting real-time deadlines. For this reason performance evaluation of the underlaying workflow is a key issue in the design process of a new Multimedia system. In this paper we consider the ARchitecture for Interactive Arts (ARIA), an adaptive media processing workflow, developed at the Arizona State University, and outline a semi-automatic procedure to translate its specification into Colored Petri Nets. We then provide guidelines on how to compute the parameters for the performance models, and apply the proposed methodology to a realistic example of a face recognition application.
Soft irregular shadow mapping: fast, high-quality, and robust soft shadows
Authors: Gregory S. Johnson, Warren A. Hunt, Allen Hux, William R. Mark, Christopher A. Burns, Stephen Junkins
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games (2009)

We introduce a straightforward, robust, and efficient algorithm for rendering high-quality soft shadows in dynamic scenes. Each frame, points in the scene visible from the eye are inserted into a spatial acceleration structure. Shadow umbrae are computed by sampling the scene from the light at the image plane coordinates given by the stored points. Penumbrae are computed at the same set of points, per silhouette edge, in two steps. First, the set of points affected by a given edge is estimated from the expected light-view screen-space bounds of the corresponding penumbra. Second, the actual overlap between these points and the penumbra is computed analytically directly from the occluding geometry. The umbral and penumbral sources of occlusion are then combined to determine the degree of shadow at the eye-view pixel corresponding to each sample point. An implementation of this algorithm for the Larrabee architecture yields from 27 to 33 frames per second in simulation for scenes from a modern game, and produces significantly higher image quality than other recent methods in the real-time domain.
Sharing information for product quality and food safety in China: barriers and enablers
Authors: Lei Zheng, Yuanfu Jiang, Tung-Mou Yang, Theresa A. Pardo
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (2008)

This paper examines the technological, managerial, and political barriers as well as enablers for the success of an information sharing initiative in China. A case in the product quality and food safety policy domain is studied. Furthermore, it compares the results of the case study in China with prior research conducted mainly in the western countries to identify similarities and differences, and discusses the impact of political, economic, social and cultural factors on those similarities and differences.
Human-centric product conceptualization using a design space framework
Authors: Yih Tng Chong, Chun-Hsien Chen, Kah Fai Leong
Venue: Advanced Engineering Informatics (2009)

Designing products to fit human needs, preferences and capabilities is an essential key to competitiveness. In contested product markets, the management of user-related knowledge is therefore critical. Studies have shown that the identification and implementation of user requirements are significant issues for determining successful product development, especially during the conceptual design phase. User requirements represented in a single or limited level of abstraction is inadequate for effective incorporation into the conceptual design process. Such representation of user needs is argued here to be associated with issues such as the errors of problem framing, which is a cause of inadmissible, uncreative or sub-optimal designs. In this paper, a human-centric knowledge organization structure, Design Space Framework, is established to facilitate the consistent incorporation of user information into the length of the product conceptualization process. The role of this structure in human-centric design is illustrated in a case study.
Conditional diagnosability of hypercubes under the comparison diagnosis model
Authors: Guo-Huang Hsu, Chieh-Feng Chiang, Lun-Min Shih, Lih-Hsing Hsu, Jimmy J. M. Tan
Venue: Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal (2009)

Processor fault diagnosis plays an important role in multiprocessor systems for reliable computing, and the diagnosability of many well-known networks has been explored. Lai et al. proposed a novel measure of diagnosability, called conditional diagnosability, by adding an additional condition that any faulty set cannot contain all the neighbors of any vertex in a system. We make a contribution to the evaluation of diagnosability for hypercube networks under the comparison model and prove that the conditional diagnosability of n-dimensional Hypercube Q"n is 3(n-2)+1 for n>=5. The conditional diagnosability of Q"n is about three times larger than the classical diagnosability of Q"n.
Managing Requirements Knowledge (MaRK_08)
Authors: Walid Maalej, Anil K. Thurimella, Hans-Jörg Happel, Björn Decker
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 First International Workshop on Managing Requirements Knowledge (2008)

MaRK_08 focuses on potentials and benefits of lightweight knowledge management approaches, such as ontology-based annotation, Semantic Wikis and rationale management techniques, applied to requirements engineering. Methodologies, processes and tools for capturing, externalizing, sharing and reusing of knowledge in (distributed) requirements engineering processes are discussed. Furthermore, the workshop is an interactive exchange platform between the knowledge management community, requirements engineering community and industrial practitioners. This proceeding includes selected and refereed contributions.
Identification using ANFIS with intelligent hybrid stable learning algorithm approaches and stability analysis of training methods
Authors: Mahdi Aliyari Shoorehdeli, Mohammad Teshnehlab, Ali Khaki Sedigh, M. Ahmadieh Khanesar
Venue: Applied Soft Computing (2009)

This paper proposes a novel hybrid learning algorithm with stable learning laws for Adaptive Network based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) as a system identifier and studies the stability of this algorithm. The new hybrid learning algorithm is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for training the antecedent part and forgetting factor recursive least square (FFRLS) for training the conclusion part. Two famous training algorithms for ANFIS are the gradient descent (GD) to update antecedent part parameters and using GD or recursive least square (RLS) to update conclusion part parameters. Lyapunov stability theory is used to study the stability of the proposed algorithms. This paper, also studies the stability of PSO as an optimizer in training the identifier. Stable learning algorithms for the antecedent and consequent parts of fuzzy rules are proposed. Some constraints are obtained and simulation results are given to validate the results. It is shown that instability will not occur for the leaning rate and PSO factors in the presence of constraints. The learning rate can be calculated on-line and will provide an adaptive learning rate for the ANFIS structure. This new learning scheme employs adaptive learning rate that is determined by input-output data. Also, stable learning algorithms for two common methods are proposed based on Lyapunov stability theory and some constraints are obtained.
Optimizing dynamic performance scaling for user interface performance
Authors: Kari Kolehmainen, Mika Hongisto, Teemu Kanstrén
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications, and Systems (2008)

In this paper we introduce a novel approach for measuring and estimating effect of performance scaling for user interface latency and power consumption. Growing demand for higher performance in battery powered devices such laptop PC's has spawned techniques for dynamically decreasing performance in order to save energy and yet preserve high peak performance. For the evaluation of this approach we analyse system that uses dynamic voltage and frequency scaling technology for reducing power consumption based on CPU load. We focus on analysing effect of different parameters of the dynamic performance scaling such as length of time between load predictions. By using this measurement approach we were able to distinguish clear differences in energy consumption as well as in user interface performance.
Automated Customer-Centric Performance Analysis of Generalised Stochastic Petri Nets Using Tagged Tokens
Authors: Nicholas J. Dingle, William J. Knottenbelt
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2009)

Since tokens in Generalised Stochastic Petri Net (GSPN) models are indistinguishable, it is not always possible to reason about customer-centric performance measures. To remedy this, we propose ''tagged tokens'' - a variant of the ''tagged customer'' technique used in the analysis of queueing networks. Under this scheme, one token in a structurally restricted net is ''tagged'' and its position tracked as it moves around the net. Performance queries can then be phrased in terms of the position of the tagged token. To date, the tagging of customers or tokens has been a time-consuming, manual and model-specific process. By contrast, we present here a completely automated methodology for the tagged token analysis of GSPNs. We first describe an intuitive graphical means of specifying the desired tagging configuration, along with the constraints on GSPN structure which must be observed for tagged tokens to be incorporated. We then present the mappings required for automatically converting a GSPN with a user-specified tagging structure into a Coloured GSPN (CGSPN), and thence into an unfolded GSPN which can be analysed for performance measures of interest by existing tools. We further show how our methodology integrates with Performance Trees, a formalism for the specification of performance queries. We have implemented our approach in the open source PIPE Petri net tool, and use this to illustrate the extra expressibility granted by tagged tokens through the analysis of a GSPN model of a hospital's Accident and Emergency department.
Improving Locality of BitTorrent with ISP Cooperation
Authors: Binbin Ruan, Wei Xiong, Hao Chen, Dejian Ye
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Electronic Computer Technology (2009)

The P2P flows have occupied the dominating network bandwidth in current Internet and have increased the operation cost of ISP due to abundant flows between different ISPs. An important issue under research is how to make P2P be ISP-friendliness when they are competing with other applications. In this paper, we take BitTorrent as a popular P2P application example and propose a scheme based on ISP cooperation to improve locality of BitTorrent. This scheme confines the flows of BitTorrent inside ISP as many as possible to reduce the cost of flows between different ISPs. The simulation results of our prototype shows that this scheme reduces the load of the link between ISPs while it also decreases the download time of BitTorrent. This scheme can be used as reference to other P2P applications to deal with ISP-friendliness issue.
Performance Evaluation of a Descent Algorithm for Bi-matrix Games
Authors: Haralampos Tsaknakis, Paul G. Spirakis, Dimitrios Kanoulas
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (2008)

In this paper we present an implementation and performance evaluation of a descent algorithm that was proposed in [1] for the computation of approximate Nash equilibria of non-cooperative bi-matrix games. This algorithm, which achieves the best polynomially computable &epsilon;-approximate equilibria till now, is applied here to several problem instances designed so as to avoid the existence of easy solutions. Its performance is analyzed in terms of quality of approximation and speed of convergence. The results demonstrate significantly better performance than the theoretical worst case bounds, both for the quality of approximation and for the speed of convergence. This motivates further investigation into the intrinsic characteristics of descent algorithms applied to bi-matrix games. We discuss these issues and provide some insights about possible variations and extensions of the algorithmic concept that could lead to further understanding of the complexity of computing equilibria. We also prove here a new significantly better bound on the number of loops required for convergence of the descent algorithm.
Note: Mosaicing of camera-captured document images
Authors: Jian Liang, Daniel DeMenthon, David Doermann
Venue: Computer Vision and Image Understanding (2009)

In this paper, we present a method for composing document mosaics from camera-captured images. We decompose the complexity of solving the 8-dof transformation between image pairs into two problems, that is, rectification and registration. This is achievable under a key assumption that sufficient text content forms orthogonal texture flows on the document surface. First, perspective distortion and rotation are removed from images using the texture flow information. Next, the translation and scaling are resolved by a Hough transform-like voting method. In the image composition part, our contribution is a sharpness based selection process which composes a seamless and blur free mosaic for text content. Experiments show that our approach can produce an accurate, sharp, and high resolution mosaic of a full document page from small image patches captured by a camera with various zooms and poses.
Opportunities beyond single-core microprocessors
Authors: Mark D. Hill
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming (2009)

Designers of future hardware and software face many challenges. Performance scaling of sequential cores is not what it once was. The best architectures for many cores, or equivalents, are not clear. Software, especially on clients, does not make abundant parallelism clear. Computer use and disposal is not so green. Smarter phones must not burn your pocket. Transistors and wires are getting less reliable. CMOS may run out of steam for technical or economic reasons. And the list goes on. But in challenges, optimists find opportunities. This panel will be about opportunities. I have invited experts with experience in academia, industry, and government to discuss the great possibilities ahead. I have asked them to identify two or three topics, where, at most, one is part of their current work. Then we will have a discussion.
The performance of product-driven manufacturing control: An emulation-based benchmarking study
Authors: Rémi Pannequin, Gérard Morel, André Thomas
Venue: Computers in Industry (2009)

Product-driven control may enable manufacturing companies to meet business demands more quickly and effectively. But a key point in making this concept acceptable by industry is to provide benchmarking environments in order to compare and analyze their efficiency on emulated large-scale industry-led case studies with regard to current technologies and approaches. In this paper, a benchmarking protocol is defined, in order to provide R&D practitioners with benchmarking services in a product-driven implementation project. A component-based generic architecture is proposed to support this protocol, enabling to model and compare various control architectures. This benchmarking protocol is applied to an automotive-industry case study in order to evaluate the impact of making the products interact with the local decision centers. Finally the experiments show that product-driven control can perform as good as traditional centralized control, and that its robustness depends mainly of the local decision-making processes.
Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness
Authors: Mary Chayko
Venue:  (2008)

Looks at the social implications of having constant access to others through cell phones, wireless computers, and other electronic devices.
Geometric structure of the magic number clusters Li$_n$Na$_{8-n}$, Na$_n$K$_{8-n}$, and K$_n$Li$_{8-n}$
Authors: R. Fournier
Venue: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (2008)

The mixed alkali clusters Li$_n$Na$_{8-n}$, Li$_n$K$_{8-n}$, and Na$_n$K$_{8-n}$ were studied by Kohn-Sham theory with a gradient corrected (PBE) exchange-correlation functional. Geometry optimization was done with a Tabu Search algorithm to find possible global minima, followed by local optimization with a quasi-Newton method. For the pure clusters and all Na$_n$K$_m$ mixed clusters, the predicted global minimum is a dodecahedron having D$_{2d}$ symmetry in its ideal form. There are various structures among the predicted global minima of Li$_n$Na$_m$ and Li$_n$K$_m$: they all have in common that the Li$_n$ subunit achieves maximal coordination and forms a compact core at, or near, the center of the cluster. The clusters Li$_n$Na$_m$ and Li$_n$K$_m$ all have near zero asphericity, in line with the prediction of the ellipsoidal jellium model for 8 electrons, and the asphericity in nonzero but small in all other clusters. The clusters Li$_4$Na$_4$, Na$_4$K$_4$, and K$_4$Na$_4$ each have the four atoms of the lighter element near the center of mass and these clusters are more stable than those of other compositions. Calculated ionization potentials and static dipole polarizabilities agree rather well with experimental values but do not allow a structure assignment to be made.
Multipoint Padé approximants to complex Cauchy transforms with polar singularities
Authors: Laurent Baratchart, Maxim Yattselev
Venue: Journal of Approximation Theory (2009)

We study diagonal multipoint Pade approximants to functions of the form F(z)=&int; d&lambda;(t) / z-t + R(z), where R is a rational function and &lambda; is a complex measure with compact regular support included in ℝ, whose argument has bounded variation on the support. Assuming that interpolation sets are such that their normalized counting measures converge sufficiently fast in the weak-star sense to some conjugate-symmetric distribution &sigma;, we show that the counting measures of poles of the approximants converge to ^&sigma;, the balayage of &sigma; onto the support of &lambda;, in the weak* sense, that the approximants themselves converge in capacity to F outside the support of &lambda;, and that the poles of R attract at least as many poles of the approximants as their multiplicity and not much more.
Clustering aided approach for decision making in computationally expensive multiobjective optimization
Authors: Timo Aittokoski, Sami Ayramo, Kaisa Miettinen
Venue: Optimization Methods Software (2009)

Typically, industrial optimization problems need to be solved in an efficient, multiobjective and global manner, because they are often computationally expensive (as function values are typically based on simulations), they may contain multiple conflicting objectives, and they may have several local optima. Solving such problems may be challenging and time consuming when the aim is to find the most preferred Pareto optimal solution. In this study, we propose a method where we use an advanced clustering technique to reveal essential characteristics of the approximation of the Pareto optimal set, which has been generated beforehand. Thus, the decision maker (DM) is involved only after the most time consuming computation is finished. After the initiation phase, a moderate number of cluster prototypes projected to the Pareto optimal set is presented to the DM to be studied. This allows him/her to rapidly gain an overall understanding of the main characteristics of the problem without placing too much cognitive load on the DM. Furthermore, we also suggest some ways of applying our approach to different types of problems and demonstrate it with an example related to internal combustion engine design.
Real-Time Object Tracking for Augmented Reality Combining Graph Cuts and Optical Flow
Authors: Jonathan Mooser, Suya You, Ulrich Neumann
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (2007)

We present an efficient and accurate object tracking algorithm based on the concept of graph cut segmentation. The ability to track visible objects in real-time provides an invaluable tool for the implementation of markerless Augmented Reality. Once an object has been detected, it's location in future frames can be used to position virtual content, and thus annotate the environment. Unlike many object tracking algorithms, our approach does not rely on a preexisting 3D model or any other information about the object or its environment. It takes, as input, a set of pixels representing an object in an initial frame and uses a combination of optical flow and graph cut segmentation to determine the corresponding pixels in each future frame. Experiments show that our algorithm robustly tracks objects of disparate shapes and sizes over hundreds of frames, and can even handle difficult cases where an object contains many of the same colors as its background. We further show how this technology can be applied to practical AR applications.
On the NBC-complexes and β-invariants of abstract convex geometries
Authors: Masataka Nakamura
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2009)

An (abstract) convex geometry is a combinatorial abstraction of convexity which is a Moore family with the closure operator satisfying the anti-exchange property. A number of results of matroids on the NBC-complexes (or broken circuit complexes) happen to have some exact analogues in convex geometries: for instance, the Whitney-Rota's formula of the characteristic function of a matroid, Brylawski's decomposition of the NBC-complexes, etc. A @b-invariant of a convex geometry is derived from the characteristic function in the same way as that of a matroid. We introduce a merging of two convex geometries, which is called a 1-sum, and exhibit the resultant value of the @b-invariant of a 1-sum.