ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The HDRI Handbook: High Dynamic Range Imaging for Photographers and CG Artists +DVD
Authors: Christian Bloch
Venue:  (2007)

The HDRI Handbook reveals the secrets behind High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI). This cutting-edge imaging technology is a method to digitally capture and edit all light in a scene. It represents a quantum leap in imaging technology, as revolutionary as the leap from Black & White to Color imaging. If you are serious about photography, you will find that HDRI is the final step that places digital ahead of analog. The old problem of over- and underexposure in analog photography, which was never fully solved, is elegantly bypassed here. A huge variety of subjects can now be photographed for the first time ever. HDRI emerged from the movie industry, and was once Hollywood's best kept secret. It is now a mature technology available to everyone. The only problem was that it was poorly documented until now. The HDRI Handbook is the manual that was missing. Many questions remain open even for the computer graphics gurus that have been using HDRI for years. This is where The HDRI Handbook comes in. Included here is everything you need to build a comprehensive knowledge base that will enable you to become really creative with HDRI. This book is packed with practical hints and tips, software evaluations, workshops, and hands-on tutorials. Whether you are a photographer, 3D artist, compositor, or cinematographer, this book is sure to enlighten you. Topics include: Understanding the foundation of HDRI Tools for a High Dynamic Range Workflow How to capture HDR images: now and tomorrow Tone mapping for creating superior prints Image processing and compositing All 4 ways to shoot panoramic HDRIs Image based lighting and CG rendering World premiere of the Smart Dynamic Range toolkit Creative uses and unconventional applications 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
The analytical hierarchy process as a tool to select open source software
Authors: Rafa E. Al-Qutaish, Mohammad I. Muhairat, Basil M. Al-Kasasbeh
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS International Conference on Software engineering, parallel and distributed systems (2009)

Due to a high number of open source software over the internet, it is a challenge to determine which one - over a verity of alternatives - is the most appropriate for our intended needs. In this paper, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique along with the ISO 9126 will be integrated and applied to the selection process of open source software products. Thus, the intended features (i.e. the ISO 9126 quality characteristics) need to be identified in order to be taken into account to give a set of ranks for the intended open source software, that is, 'rank one' will be given to the most appropriate open source software product based on its intended features against the other alternatives of open source software products.
Exploring Getting Started with MS Outlook, 1st edition
Authors: Robert T. Grauer, Barbara Stover
Venue:  (2007)

The goal of the Exploring series has been to move students beyond the point and click, helping them understand the why and how behind each skill. Managing e-mail, appointments, contacts, tasks, composing messages, attaching files, and replying to an e-mail message. For professionals seeking to enhance their knowledge of Microsoft Outlook.
The ACM SIGCOMM 2009 technical program committee process
Authors: Konstantina Papagiannaki, Luigi Rizzo
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2009)

Selecting a technical program for a conference, and running the process so that decisions are well received by authors and participants, is a challenging task. We report our experience in running the SIGCOMM 2009 Technical Program Committee (TPC). The purpose of this article is to document the process that we followed, and discuss it critically. This should let authors get a better understanding of what led to the final acceptance or rejection of their work, and hopefully allow colleagues in charge of similar tasks make use of our experience.
Analysis of soft handoff algorithm for multi-cellular systems: A finite integral approach
Authors: Aniruddha Chandra, Sanjay Dhar Roy
Venue: International Journal of Communication Systems (2009)

In this paper the performance of soft handoff algorithm based on pilot signal strength measurements has been studied. In connection with the soft handoff it has been observed that the existing analytic expressions often involve integration in infinite limits. The expressions containing such kind of integrals have been meticulously transformed into finite range equations. Probability of outage, number of base stations (BS) in the active set, and number of active set updates are some of the performance metrics commonly considered in soft handoff. Accurate closed forms for all these performance indicators have been computed which, in turn, simplifies the calculation of several other metrics entailing them. Moreover, the underlying system model takes into account of more than two BS (specifically three) extending the traditional two BS model toward more complex but realistic characterization of soft handoff performance analysis framework. Copyright &copy; 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Closed form finite range integral expressions for performance indicators (such as, probability of outage, number of base stations in the active set, and number of active set updates) of soft handoff algorithm are computed. The underlying system model takes into account of three base stations. Copyright &copy; 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Learning complex background by multi-scale discriminative model
Authors: Yufei Zha, Duyan Bi, Yuan Yang
Venue: Pattern Recognition Letters (2009)

A key problem in automated surveillance systems is to detect foreground accurately in image sequence. However, it is difficult in complex scenes. In this paper, we consider the problem as a labeling problem and present a multi-scale discriminative model to learn complex background for foreground detection. First, the static background is obtained by pixel-wise methods. At the same time, the periodic motions, such as swaying tree, water wave and moving shadow, will be wrongly detected as foreground, due to they have the same motion feature with true foreground. The detected results in this step are denoted as moving objects. Second, the pixels in the moving objects can be classified as dynamic background and foreground associated with the confidence by a boosted classifier. A Gaussian filter bank with different variances is exploited to form multi-scale images in different image spaces at the beginning, then a feature pool is obtained by kernel density estimation on the image sequence over time. The boosted classifier is trained by AdaBoost over the feature pool and the labeled positive and negative data. Third, Markov random field (MRF) model is used to infer the spatial and temporal coherence over the labels for foreground/background segmentation accurately. Experiments tested on the various videos show that the proposed method can be work well on the complex background.
Angle random forwarding (AnRaF) for wireless sensor networks: performances and realization
Authors: Fang Dong, Peiliang Qiu, Zhaoyang Zhang
Venue: Wireless Communications Mobile Computing (2009)

A novel random forwarding protocol for distributed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is reported in this paper. The proposed protocol features the utilization of azimuth angle of the nodes involved and opportunistic selection of the relaying node via contention among neighbors. First, the protocol with precise angle information is discussed and its multi-hop performance is evaluated by means of both simulation and analysis in terms of average number of hops to the sink node. Simulation results show that it performs well especially in network connectivity. As a complement, node mobility is also introduced to evaluate multi-hop performance in real environments. Then, a simple MAC scheme to ensure that the node with the highest angular advantage will be selected as a relay is proposed, and subsequently energy and latency performances based on it are evaluated. It is shown that our protocol can effectively deliver data with half number of active neighbors required in geographical random forwarding (GeRaF). Finally, a practical method is presented to estimate azimuth angle, combined with which, our forwarding protocol is shown to achieve the performance very close to the case with precise angle information. Copyright &copy; 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper was presented in part at IEEE Global Communication Conference (Globecom), Washington, DC, USA, 26&mdash;30 November 2007.
Cognitive Architectures: Where do we go from here?
Authors: Włodzisław Duch, Richard J. Oentaryo, Michel Pasquier
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference (2008)

Cognitive architectures play a vital role in providing blueprints for building future intelligent systems supporting a broad range of capabilities similar to those of humans. How useful are existing architectures for creating artificial general intelligence? A critical survey of the state of the art in cognitive architectures is presented providing a useful insight into the possible frameworks for general intelligence. Grand challenges and an outline of the most promising future directions are described.
Constraint-Based Learning of Distance Functions for Object Trajectories
Authors: Wei Yu, Michael Gertz
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2009)

With the drastic increase of object trajectory data, the analysis and exploration of trajectories has become a major research focus with many applications. In particular, several approaches have been proposed in the context of similarity-based trajectory retrieval. While these approaches try to be comprehensive by considering the different properties of object trajectories at different degrees, the distance functions are always pre-defined and therefore do not support different views on what users consider (dis)similar trajectories in a particular domain.In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to learning distance functions in support of similarity-based retrieval of multi-dimensional object trajectories. Our approach is more generic than existing approaches in that distance functions are determined based on constraints, which specify what object trajectory pairs the user considers similar or dissimilar. Thus, using a single approach, different distance functions can be determined for different users views. We present two learning techniques, transformed Euclidean distance and transformed Dynamic Time Warping. Both techniques determine a linear transformation of the attributes of multi-dimensional trajectories, based on the constraints specified by the user. We demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of our approach with applications to clustering and classification on real and synthetic object trajectory datasets from different application domains.
Success chances in argument games: a probabilistic approach to legal disputes
Authors: Régis Riveret, Antonino Rotolo, Giovanni Sartor, Henry Prakken, Bram Roth
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2007: The Twentieth Annual Conference (2007)

The outcome of a legal dispute, namely, the decision of its adjudicator, is uncertain, and both parties develop their strategies on the basis of their appreciation of the probability that the adjudicator will accept their arguments or the arguments of their adversary. Costs and gains have to be balanced in light of this uncertainty in order to identify the most convenient strategies. This paper provides a probabilistic approach embedded into an argumentation framework to capture this uncertainty and its use to determine the expected utility to engage in a legal dispute.
Essential Phenomena of General Intelligence
Authors: Marc Pickett, Don Miner, Tim Oates
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference (2008)

We present a set of cognitive phenomena that should be exhibited by a generally intelligent system. To date, we know of few systems that address more than a handful of these phenomena, and none that are able to explain all of them. Thus, these phenomena should motivate a system's design, test its generality, and can be used to point out fundamental shortcomings. The phenomena encourage autonomous learning, development of representations, and domain independence, which we argue are critical for general intelligence.
Interactive reformulation of long queries
Authors: James Allan
Venue:  (2008)

We present new ways of interacting with a user based on query analysis and reformulation. Our goal is to not only improve retrieval performance but also help the user understand the retrieval process and collection she is searching. We do this by providing users information reflecting the potential impact their decisions will have on the retrieval process. This way, users can make more informed choices from the options presented to them by the retrieval system. Unlike most previous work in user interaction where a one-procedure-fits-all strategy was pursued, user interaction must be invoked only when there is potential for improvement. This is important as tedious user interaction can have an unfavorable impact on user experience. We present techniques for selective user interaction and show their utility in the context of two interaction techniques we have developed. Our results show that user interaction can be avoided in a vast number of cases without much deterioration in performance. User interaction can be made more productive by providing users with an optimally-sized set of high quality options. We present efficient techniques to determine such a set. When faced with a decision to interact with a user given a particular query, it is beneficial to determine the best interaction technique suited for that query. We solve this problem by obtaining implicit feedback from the user. By utilizing all the interaction-related techniques described in this thesis, we show through simulations and user studies that users can obtain better performance with less effort.
Large-scale uncertainty management systems: learning and exploiting your data
Authors: Shivnath Babu, Sudipto Guha, Kamesh Munagala
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2009)

The database community has made rapid strides in capturing, representing, and querying uncertain data. Probabilistic databases capture the inherent uncertainty in derived tuples as probability estimates. Data acquisition and stream systems can produce succinct summaries of very large and time-varying datasets. This tutorial addresses the natural next step in harnessing uncertain data: How can we efficiently and quantifiably determine what, how, and how much to learn in order to make good decisions based on the imprecise information available. The material in this tutorial is drawn from a range of fields including database systems, control and information theory, operations research, convex optimization, and statistical learning. The focus of the tutorial is on the natural constraints that are imposed in a database context and the demands of imprecise information from an optimization point of view. We look both into the past as well as into the future; to discuss general tools and techniques that can serve as a guide to database researchers and practitioners, and to enumerate the challenges that lie ahead.
A measure & conquer approach for the analysis of exact algorithms
Authors: Fedor V. Fomin, Fabrizio Grandoni, Dieter Kratsch
Venue: Journal of the ACM (JACM) (2009)

For more than 40 years, Branch & Reduce exponential-time backtracking algorithms have been among the most common tools used for finding exact solutions of NP-hard problems. Despite that, the way to analyze such recursive algorithms is still far from producing tight worst-case running time bounds. Motivated by this, we use an approach, that we call &ldquo;Measure & Conquer&rdquo;, as an attempt to step beyond such limitations. The approach is based on the careful design of a nonstandard measure of the subproblem size; this measure is then used to lower bound the progress made by the algorithm at each branching step. The idea is that a smarter measure may capture behaviors of the algorithm that a standard measure might not be able to exploit, and hence lead to a significantly better worst-case time analysis. In order to show the potentialities of Measure & Conquer, we consider two well-studied NP-hard problems: minimum dominating set and maximum independent set. For the first problem, we consider the current best algorithm, and prove (thanks to a better measure) a much tighter running time bound for it. For the second problem, we describe a new, simple algorithm, and show that its running time is competitive with the current best time bounds, achieved with far more complicated algorithms (and standard analysis). Our examples show that a good choice of the measure, made in the very first stages of exact algorithms design, can have a tremendous impact on the running time bounds achievable.
CAPM Exam Success Series: Certification Study System, 2.0 edition
Authors: Tony Johnson
Venue:  (2009)

This product is for those taking the CAPM Exam after July 31, 2009. This aligns with the PMBOK Guide Fourth Edition.The CAPM Exam Success Series: Certification Study System is the complete product family for the CAPM Exam Success Series based on the Fourth Edition PMBOK Guide (currently used in 43 countries). This includes a 450 page manual including exam style questions exercises, quick quizzes, matching exercises for ITTO's and terminology, Scheduling and Earned Value Exercises, a complete 150 question exam simulation test and CD-ROM as well as supplemental material that can be downloaded via the internet as new information related to the PMP Exam becomes available. Also included is a 450 exam style questions book, three audio CD's (including Terms & Definitions, Processes, and How to apply for the exam), a 23 test exam simulation CD-ROM with over 3500 questions, three laminated 11" by 17" double sided placemats, 400 flashcards, a set of braindumps and a portable carry bag for all the products.
Experimental Research on Multimedia Teaching for Sports Aerobics
Authors: Si-min Li, Jin-hai Sun
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on MultiMedia and Information Technology (2008)

Along with the development of modern education technology, the applying of multi-media teaching in sports aerobics more and more arises teacher's concerns. With the method of documentary, on the basis of the literature re-organization, an experimental research on multi-media teaching for sports aerobics were discussed. The results indicated: (1) the multi-media teaching for sports aerobics, which takes the students' study as the center, pays great attention to the learning environment design is helpful in making the student to establish the correct technical movement concept, and then raise the utilization rate of effective time in class, and increase the teaching information capacity the grades, (2) the sports aerobics received in the experiment group are better than those of the students in the opposite one, and (3) the multi-media teaching has its unique superiority in theoretical knowledge and the technical skill instruction aspects of sports aerobics compared to conventional teaching methods.
Algebraic and topological closure conditions for classes of pseudo-Boolean functions
Authors: Stephan Foldes
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2009)

We examine classes of real-valued functions of 0-1 variables closed under algebraic operations as well as topological convergence, and having a certain local characteristic (requiring that any function not in the class should have a k-variable minor not belonging to this class). It is shown that for k=2, the only 4 maximal classes with these properties are those of submodular, supermodular, monotone increasing and monotone decreasing functions. All the 13 locally defined closed classes are determined and shown to be intersections of the 4 maximal ones. All maximal classes for k>=3 are determined and characterized by the sign of higher order derivatives of the functions in the class.
Legal Knowledge Representation: A Twofold Experience in the Domain of Intellectual Property Law
Authors: Giuseppe Contissa, Migle Laukyte
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2008: The Twenty-First Annual Conference (2008)

This paper analyzes the representation of legal knowledge, and of Intellectual Property (or IP) law in particular. This is done by looking at two ways of representing the IP domain: through an IP ontology and by way of rule representation. And although these two solutions differ in many respects, they share the conceptual problems specific to this domain. This paper is based on research conducted under the EU-funded project ALIS (IST-2004-2.4.9).
Relation between motivations and personality traits for autonomous virtual humans
Authors: Etienne de Sevin
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

By modifying the intensity of the motivations to test the adaptability of our model of action selection in real-time, we provide evidence of a relationship between motivations and personality traits. These modifications imply a tendency to satisfy more or less some motivations and give to the virtual human distinctiveness in its behaviors. By defining specific set of motivation intensity, we can give to the virtual human some corresponding personality traits such as greediness, laziness or uncleanness in order to obtain more distinct and believable virtual humans.
Simulation-based switching algorithm for inventory management in a multi-echelon supply chain
Authors: Galina Merkuryeva, Olesya Vecherinska
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS international conference on System science and simulation in engineering (2008)

Cyclic or non-cyclic planning policies are traditionally used to manage inventories in a multiechelon supply chain. Evaluation of the difference between performances of cyclic and non-cyclic planning policies allows analysing an efficiency of a specific planning policy at the product life cycle specific stage, and provides a control mechanism to switch from one to another policy. The paper is aimed is to present simulation-based switching algorithm that provide estimating the difference between the total costs of cyclic and non-cyclic planning policies with optimal parameters and decision making about application of an appropriate one. Simulation-based switching algorithm contains two phases: cost comparison analysis in the first phase, and advanced analysis based on additional costs of a cyclic solution (ACCS) in the second phase. A numerical example and a prototype of a switching module are described in the paper.