ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Multiple Description Coding of an Audio Stream by Optimum Recovery Transform
Authors: Akinori Ito, Shozo Makino
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

In this paper, we discuss the mathematical fundamentals of splitting one audio stream into two equal-quality streams. From a trivial consideration, it is found that the sum of errors of two recovered signals is equal to the power of the original signal if the orthogonal recovery is carried out. Next, we describe the optimum recovery transform. This method utilizes the covariance matrix of the signal. We carried out some experiments to recover a signal from one of the split signals. From the results of four kinds of split methods used, the correlating transform of the spectrum gave the best performance.
Embedded SLCCA for wavelet image coding
Authors: Junqiang Lan, Xinhua Zhuang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 1 (2003)

In 1997, we published a high performance scalable bit-rate-oriented wavelet image codec, significance linked connected component analysis (SLCCA). In term of coding efficiency, SLCCA outperforms EZW, SPHIT and JPEG2000, which are each an embedded image codec. SLCCA is optimized for any given bit rate. Although scalable, its coded bit stream is not fully embedded. In the paper, we provide an embedded SLCCA, which improves our previous work on embedded SLCCA. Like, we define a base layer and an enhancement layer for an image. The base layer encoded by SLCCA provides an acceptable image quality while achieving high coding efficiency and scalability. The enhancement layer provides more elaborate bit-rate adaptive granular picture quality enhancement for embedded image coding. The peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the new embedded SLCCA (called ESLCCA) consistently outperforms JPEG2000 that can be as high as 0.5 dB.
The Effect of Pictorial Illusion on Prehension and Perception
Authors: Angela M. Haffenden, Melvyn A. Goodale
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1998)

The present study examined the effect of a size-contrast illusion (Ebbinghaus or Titchener Circles Illusion) on visual perception and the visual control of grasping movements. Seventeen right-handed participants picked up and, on other trials, estimated the size of "poker-chip" disks, which functioned as the target circles in a three-dimensional version of the illusion. In the estimation condition, subjects indicated how big they thought the target was by separating their thumb and forefinger to match the target's size. After initial viewing, no visual feedback from the hand or the target was available. Scaling of grip aperture was found to be strongly correlated with the physical size of the disks, while manual estimations of disk size were biased in the direction of the illusion. Evidently, grip aperture is calibrated to the true size of an object, even when perception of object size is distorted by a pictorial illusion, a result that is consistent with recent suggestions that visually guided prehension and visual perception are mediated by separate visual pathways.
Fostering Participation in Learning Networks by Using Reward Systems and Face-to-Face Meetings
Authors: Hans G. K. Hummel, Colin Tattersall, Daniel Burgos, Francis Brouns, Rob Koper
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

This paper investigates conditions for increasing participation in learning networks, focusing on the influence of incentive mechanisms and face-to-face meetings on participation in the LN4LD (Learning Network for Learning Design. Repeated measurements show that the levels of both passive (accessing and reading information) and active participation (posting, replying and rating) are indeed significantly increased as a result of both interventions.
The impact of relational model bases on organizational decision making: cases in e-commerce and ecological economics
Authors: H. Roland Weistroffer, John W. Sutherland
Venue:  (2006)

This dissertation explores reifying the management science concept of organizations as a collection of decisions. Organizational management entails resource allocation activities that can be formulated in terms of elementary relational functions. All elasticity-type formulations, most generic "production" functions, and various projection models that organizations might require (such as sales forecasts) can all be represented by elementary relational functions. Therefore, information systems in organizations can be representative of relationships between decision requirements, as theorized in relational model bases. A relational model-base structure acts as an integrative device by relating an organization's elementary relational functions to each other, with all that is kept for any model being the current values for coefficients and the now prevailing parametric values for the state variables of the model. Anchoring management information systems around relational model bases is particularly appropriate for organizations that have some reliance on real-time management decision making by providing the answer to two requirements for such organizations: one being the requirement for more accurate and current real-time, operational decision making within the organization; the other being the integration of functions for decision-making purposes within an organization. Relational model bases thus enable more dynamic management and become a central information system type for organizations that have dynamic resource allocation requirements that can employ technical tactics around such relational model bases. The relational model base would reflect revealed needs in an organization as opposed to projected needs, easing an organization's reliance on forecasting and moving it toward real-time decision making. The case for the introduction of these information systems is further strengthened by the fact that relational model base-type structures are already operating in production environments within organizations. The methodology used in this dissertation involved modeling organizational decision requirements in particular organizational cases to determine the behavior of relational model bases within those prototypical organizations and the application of relational model bases to real-time decision making. The first organizational scenario is a recursive agribusiness e-commerce case, with the target application being precision agriculture. The second scenario is a non-recursive ecological economics case, with the target application being preservation of biodiversity through land (habitat) protection.
Using RDF to describe networks
Authors: Jeroen J. van der Ham, Freek Dijkstra, Franco Travostino, Hubertus M. A. Andree, Cees T. A. M. de Laat
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2006)

Conventions such as iGrid 2005 and SuperComputing show that there is increasing demand for more service options on networks. For such networks, large teams of experts are needed to configure and manage them. In order to make the full potential of hybrid networks available to the ordinary user, the complexity must be reduced.This paper presents the idea of the Network Description Language (NDL), which builds on Semantic Web techniques to create a distributed Topology Knowledge Base (TKB). The TKB can provide a collection of reachability graphs, showing connectivity rules among physical and/or virtual entities.Latching onto the Semantic Web provides network management with a new breed of tools--bots, compilers, browsers, both commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source. The approach appears to be applicable to the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) as well as other experimental communities.
Assessing Impacts of Changes to Business Rules through Data Exploration
Authors: Suzanne M. Embury, David Willmor, Lei Dang
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (2006)

The benefits of impact analysis in the maintenance and evolution of software systems are well known, and many forms of impact analysis, over different software life cycle objects, have been proposed. However, one form of impact from software change has yet to be explored by the research community: these are the impacts of changes to software on data. In particular, when the business rules enforced by a system change, it may be necessary to perform some cleanup or transformations on persistent data, in order to bring it into line with the new system functionality. Alternatively, the proposed new rule may itself have to be modified, if the data impacts are too costly to address. In this paper, we show how such impacts can arise, and propose an approach to assisting in their identification through user-driven exploration of hypothetical change-impact scenarios.
Lot-sizing within capacity-constrained manufacturing systems using time-phased planning
Authors: S. T. Enns, Pattita Suwanruji
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

Research on lot sizing has mostly assumed single echelon systems. Even when multiple echelon systems have been used, capacity constraints are seldom considered. However, in manufacturing capacity constraints can lead to significant queuing effects. Commonly used lot sizing policies like Lot-For-Lot (LFL) and Period Order Quantity (POQ) do not take these effects into account. This research compares these policies with a Fixed Order Quantity (FOQ) policy, within which lot sizes are based on minimizing estimated lot flowtimes at capacity-constrained machines. Simulation is used to study a small production and distribution network using time-phased planning. Results show that the FOQ policy performs better than both LFL and POQ when inventory levels and delivery performance are of concern.
The benefit of information technology in managing outcomes focused curriculum development across related degree programs
Authors: Brian R. von Konsky, Allan Loh, Mike Robey, Susan J. Gribble, Jim Ivins, David Cooper
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th Austalian conference on Computing education - Volume 52 (2006)

This paper describes an interactive, web-based tool that provides access to an Outcomes Database for managing an Outcomes Focused curriculum plan. The approach provides a rapid way to involve subject specialists, course controllers, curriculum designers and educational consultants in the curriculum design and review process. The Outcomes Database is used to capture the relationships between units (i.e. subjects), Unit Learning Outcomes, Course Learning Outcomes, Generic Graduate Attributes and assessments. This is undertaken across courses (i.e. undergraduate degree programs) sharing common units in Information Technology, Computer Science, and Software Engineering. Automatically generated database reports that show how units contribute to the development of the generic graduate attributes are compared to those derived manually on a unit-by-unit basis. Preliminary experience with this IT-based approach demonstrates that automatically generated database reports effectively highlight areas requiring further attention during subsequent curriculum development iterations. The tools and approach described here show how the Outcomes Database can assist in making the transition from an existing program to one using an Outcomes Focused approach.
Classification of Unattended and Stolen Objects in Video-Surveillance System
Authors: Silvia Ferrando, Gianluca Gera, Carlo Regazzoni
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Video and Signal Based Surveillance (2006)

This paper describes a video surveillance system aimed at the automatic identification of events of interest, especially of abandoned and stolen objects in a guarded indoor environment. In particular the implemented system combines three phases of data processing: object extraction, object recognition and tracking, and decision about actions. Extracted objects are classified as "human" or "non-human" and static or dynamic, an event of interest following from a split between a "human" and a static "non-human" object, finally static "nonhuman" is analyzed to discriminate between abandoned or stolen object.
Enforcing Interaction Properties in AOSD-Enabled Systems
Authors: Constantin Serban, Shmuel Tyszberowicz
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (2006)

The construction and maintenance of large and complex software systems depend on the existence of global principles describing the structure and the interaction among its various components. Due to their critical nature, such principles have to be explicitly formulated and strictly verified and enforced throughout the lifetime of the software product. Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) provides necessary tools for the formulation of such principles as aspects--called here structural aspects, and for their compile-time verification and dynamic enforcement. This enforcement, however, becomes problematic when aspects are also used as a vehicle for programming the components themselves, due to aspect interference. In this paper we show how the aspects embedded in system's components--called here programming aspects--can interact unfavourably with other components thus invalidating the role of the structural aspects. We present a number of methods that address this problem, and we introduce a DirectedPairWiseWeaver tool we have developed in order to prevent this interference.
Advanced Metadata for Privacy-Aware Representation of Credentials
Authors: P. Ceravolo, E. Damiani, S. De Capitani di Vimercati, C. Fugazza, P. Samarati
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (2005)

SemanticWeb languages like OWL and RDFS promise to be viable means for representing metadata describing users and resources available over the Internet. Recently, interest has been raised on the use of such languages to represent individual data items contained in Personally Identifiable Information (PII), supporting fine-grained release. To achieve this goal, the informative content of a credential must be dissected into atomic components so that users can selectively single out those to be released. In this paper, we outline methodologies for taking advantage of a distributed ontology-based framework for controlled release at both policy writing and evaluation time.
An emotion model using emotional memory and consciousness occupancy ratio
Authors: Sung June Chang, In Ho Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Augmented tele-existence (2005)

This paper focuses on general emotion model which can be used in cyber characters in VR. Our model shows the various kinds of emotional transition whose factors are ranged from single variable to multiple variables by emotional memory and Consciousness Occupancy Ratio (COR). This model also shows emotional memory recall which is an established theory in Psychology. In the last part, the simulation using a simple interactive agent successfully displays emotional and mental transitions similar to those of the real creature.
Beyond Bags of Features: Spatial Pyramid Matching for Recognizing Natural Scene Categories
Authors: Svetlana Lazebnik, Cordelia Schmid, Jean Ponce
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

This paper presents a method for recognizing scene categories based on approximate global geometric correspondence. This technique works by partitioning the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computing histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. The resulting "spatial pyramid" is a simple and computationally efficient extension of an orderless bag-of-features image representation, and it shows significantly improved performance on challenging scene categorization tasks. Specifically, our proposed method exceeds the state of the art on the Caltech-101 database and achieves high accuracy on a large database of fifteen natural scene categories. The spatial pyramid framework also offers insights into the success of several recently proposed image descriptions, including Torralba's "gist" and Lowe's SIFT descriptors.
Performance Improvement for H.264 Video Encoding using ILP Embedded Processor
Authors: Ali R. Iranpour, Krzysztof Kuchcinski
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design (2006)

In this paper, we examine the impact of instruction level parallelism (ILP) on the full H.264 video encoding application and give quantitative performance measures of a superscalar architecture. Most research efforts have concentrated on the data intensive parts, such as kernels but these are taking less time from the entire execution as encoders are using new, more efficient algorithms. This important fact cannot be neglected since new video encoding standards have been proposed and the amount of other than data intensive computations has increased significantly. We observed significant improvement for the entire application when using superscalar architecture with out-of-order execution scheme. Tradeoffs in superscalar performance are also evaluated with combinations of measurements from SimpleScalar simulator.
Continuous Software Test Distributed Execution and Integrated into the Globus Toolkit
Authors: Christoph Reich, Bettina Scharpf
Venue: Proceedings of the Proceedings of The Fifth International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (2006)

This article shows how the idea of continuous software testing [23] of a world wide working group can be well integrated into the Grid Computing paradigm using the Globus Toolkit [14]. This kind of testing assumes a lot of computational resources provided by a regression test center. The interaction with the test center is done through web services implemented by the new developed Unit Test Center Grid Web Service (UTCGWS). UTCGWS is the interface to the developer IDEs and does compiling, deploying, distributing regression test and information managing. For the distribution of unit tests in a grid environment a simple distribution algorithm has been developed.
On the unlinking conjecture of independent polynomial functions
Authors: Subir Kumar Bhandari, Ayanendranath Basu
Venue: Journal of Multivariate Analysis (2006)

The celebrated U-conjecture states that under the Nn(0, In) distribution of the random vector X = (X1,...,Xn) in Rn, two polynomials P(X) and Q(X) are unlinkable if they are independent [see Kagan et al., Characterization Problems in Mathematical Statistics, Wiley, New York, 1973]. Some results have been established in this direction, although the original conjecture is yet to be proved in generality. Here, we demonstrate that the conjecture is true in an important special case of the above, where P and Q are convex nonnegative polynomials with P(0) = 0.
Model-based end-to-end available bandwidth inference using queueing analysis
Authors: Xiaojun Hei, Brahim Bensaou, Danny H. K. Tsang
Venue: Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (2006)

End-to-end available bandwidth estimation between Internet hosts is important to understand network congestion and enhance the performance of Quality-of-Service (QoS) demanding applications. In this paper, we investigate model-based available bandwidth measurement via the use of an active probing stream. A general end-to-end measurement framework, which unifies the current research approaches and highlights insights for measurement practice, is proposed. Within this framework, the end-to-end available bandwidth is inferred based on the measurement of the performance metrics of an active probing stream. We study two probing streams: Poisson and periodic probing. Of particular interest to our investigations is the Squared Coefficient of Variation (SCV) of the inter-probing packet arrival time at the receiver. The performance comparison of the available bandwidth measurements based on loss models and delay models indicates that the delay-based measurement exhibits many advantages over the loss-based measurements, such as accuracy, overhead and robustness. We conducted a comparison study between the proposed SCV-baged probing scheme, namely, SCVProbe, and Pathload using ns-2 simulation in terms of probing accuracy, convergence time and overhead. Our evaluation results indicate that SCVProbe achieves similar or even better measurement accuracy than Pathload with much less probing time and smaller overhead.
A Closed Form Solution to Natural Image Matting
Authors: Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, Yair Weiss
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 1 (2006)

Interactive digital matting, the process of extracting a foreground object from an image based on limited user input, is an important task in image and video editing. From a computer vision perspective, this task is extremely challenging because it is massively ill-posed - at each pixel we must estimate the foreground and the background colors, as well as the foreground opacity ("alpha matte") from a single color measurement. Current approaches either restrict the estimation to a small part of the image, estimating foreground and background colors based on nearby pixels where they are known, or perform iterative nonlinear estimation by alternating foreground and background color estimation with alpha estimation. In this paper we present a closed form solution to natural image matting. We derive a cost function from local smoothness assumptions on foreground and background colors, and show that in the resulting expression it is possible to analytically eliminate the foreground and background colors to obtain a quadratic cost function in alpha. This allows us to find the globally optimal alpha matte by solving a sparse linear system of equations. Furthermore, the closed form formula allows us to predict the properties of the solution by analyzing the eigenvectors of a sparse matrix, closely related to matrices used in spectral image segmentation algorithms. We show that high quality mattes can be obtained on natural images from a surprisingly small amount of user input.
Computer science apprenticeship: creating support for intermediate computer science students
Authors: Amnon Shabo, Mark Guzdial, John Stasko
Venue: Proceedings of the 1996 international conference on Learning sciences (1996)

In recent studies of students in intermediate computer science courses, we have noted a number of misconceptions and other learning problems. Supporting intermediate computer science students has not been explored in the literature as well as supporting novice and expert programmers. We are developing an approach focussed on providing a cognitive apprenticeship in computer science. Our approach has four technological components: interactive notes module, a collaborative tool, a case library and problem-solving activities accompanied with various scaffolding features including annotated links to the other modules and drawing upon existing resources. Our first focus is on undergraduate Computer Graphics where we are beginning to evaluate our materials.