ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Adopt & adapt: structuring, sharing and reusing asynchronous collaborative pedagogy
Authors: Miky Ronen, Dan Kohen-Vacs, Nohar Raz-Fogel
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (2006)

This paper presents a new approach for creating and conducting structured asynchronous collaborative activities and incorporating them in the existing instructional setting for all subjects and levels. CeLS is a web-based system designed to create and reuse Activity Structures; runable formats reflecting various collaborative instructional strategies e.g., creating and analyzing a common database, reaching an agreement, peer-product evaluation, contest, creating a group product. The unique feature in CeLS's design is its ability to use learners' products from previous stages and to conduct complex, multi-stage, structured activities. CeLS provides a sample of content-free Activity Structures and a searchable domain of all the activities that were implemented with students. Teachers can explore these examples, adopt them for personal use and adapt their structure and content to suit their specific needs. If none of the existing pre-designed resources seems to suit the needs, they can create new structures using basic building blocks.
The Eulerian distribution on involutions is indeed unimodal
Authors: Victor J. W. Guo, Jiang Zeng
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (2006)

Let In,k (respectively Jn,k) be the number of involutions (respectively fixed-point free involutions) of {1,...,n} with k descents. Motivated by Brenti's conjecture which states that the sequence In,0, In,1,..., In,n-1 is log-concave, we prove that the two sequences In,k and J2n,k are unimodal in k, for all n. Furthermore, we conjecture that there are nonnegative integers an,k such that Σk=0n-1 In,ktk= Σk=0⌊(n-1)/2⌋ an,ktk(1+t)n-2k-1.This statement is stronger than the unimodality of In,k but is also interesting in its own right.
End-user programming of reconfigurable systems: Experiences with Auto-adaptive and Reconfigurable Systems
Authors: Rob Hague, Peter Robinson
Venue: Software&mdash;Practice Experience (2006)

There is no ideal programming language. Each is better suited to some tasks rather than others. This is true not only for complete programs, but also for different stages such as architectural design, detailed implementation and maintenance. The situation is even more acute in the case of end-user programming languages, which cater for a much more varied user population. It would therefore be advantageous to allow the same program to be viewed, and edited, in a number of different languages. We have developed a system, Lingua Franca, that provides this facility for end-user programming languages in the setting of ubiquitous computing in the home. Copyright &copy; 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Retrofitting Zeroconf to Type-Safe Self-Organising Systems
Authors: P. Miseldine, A. Taleb-Bendiab
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (2006)

The notion of a self-organising system as used within this paper, is of a system that optimises and adapts its architectural composition based on evidence accrued from both internal and external influences. In this way, a self-organising system is defined to be a fluid, unbounded set of components that are organised and configured on demand and at runtime in reaction to the current configuration of the system's operating environment. This paper outlines current theory and assumption in component-based self-organisation, discussing the limitations that exist when producing such systems. The paper highlights, through example, how the introduction of type-safety at a network layer aided by Zeroconf and the author's own Neptune language can yield a powerful self-organisational model, concluding with its use within a healthcare agenda system.
Expectation and the Vestibular Control of Balance
Authors: Michel Guerraz, Brian L. Day
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005)

Recent experiments have shown that the visual channel of balance control is susceptible to cognitive influence. When a subject is aware that an upcoming visual disturbance is likely to arise from an external agent, that is, movement of the visual environment, rather than from self-motion, the whole-body response is suppressed. Here we ask whether this is a principle that generalizes to the vestibular channel of balance control. We studied the whole-body response to a pure vestibular perturbation produced by galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS; 0.5 mA for 3 sec). In the first experiment, subjects stood with vision occluded while stimuli were delivered either by the subject himself (self-triggered) or by the experimenter. For the latter, the stimulus was delivered either without warning (unpredictable) or at a fixed interval following an auditory cue (predictable). Results showed that GVS evoked a whole-body response that was not affected by whether the stimulus was self-triggered, predictable, or unpredictable. The same results were obtained in a second experiment in which subjects had access to visual information during vestibular stimulation. We conclude that the vestibular-evoked balance response is automatic and immune to knowledge of the source of the perturbation and its timing. We suggest the reason for this difference between visual and vestibular channels stems from a difference in their natural abilities to signal self-motion. The vestibular system responds to acceleration of the head in space and therefore always signals self-motion. Visual f low, on the other hand, is ambiguous in that it signals object motion and eye motion, as well as self-motion.
Invited Paper: Intelligent Data Mining Assistance via CBR and Ontologies
Authors: Michel Charest, Sylvain Delisle, Ofelia Cervantes, Yanfen Shen
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (2006)

Most commercial data mining products provide a large number of models and tools for performing various data mining tasks, but few provide intelligent assistance for addressing many important decisions that must be considered during the mining process. In this paper, we propose the realization of a hybrid data mining assistant, based on the CBR paradigm and the use of an ontology, in order to empower the user during the various phases of the data mining process.
Adaptive compilation and inlining
Authors: Keith D. Cooper
Venue:  (2006)

Adaptive compilation uses a feedback-driven process to leverage additional compilation time into improved executable performance. Previous work on adaptive compilation has demonstrated its benefit at an inter-optimization level. This dissertation investigates the ability of adaptive techniques to improve the performance of individual compiler optimizations. We first examine the ability to use adaptive compilation with current commercial compilers. We use adaptive techniques to find good blocking sizes with the MIPSpro compiler. However, we also observe that current compilers are poorly parameterized for adaptive compilation. We then construct an adaptive inlining system that demonstrates the potential of adaptive compilation to improve individual optimizations. We design the inliner to accept condition strings that determine which call sites are inlined. We develop an adaptive controller for the inliner based on a detailed understanding of the search space that the condition strings provide. Our adaptive inlining system consistently finds good sets of inlining decisions and outperforms static techniques. In addition, we demonstrate the inability of static techniques to provide a universal inlining solution and the necessity of adaptive inlining. Adaptive inlining demonstrates the capacity of adaptive compilation to improve the performance of a single, carefully designed optimization.
Delay Tolerant Networking - Bundle Protocol Simulation
Authors: John Segui, Esther Jennings
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (2006)

In space exploration missions, the coordinated use of spacecraft as communication relays increases the efficiency of the endeavors. To conduct trade-off studies of the performance and resource usage of different communication protocols and network designs, JPL designed a comprehensive extendable tool, the Multi-mission Advanced Communications Hybrid Environment for Test and Evaluation (MACHETE). The design and development of MACHETE began in 2000 and is constantly evolving. Currently, MACHETE contains Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) protocol standards such as Proximity-1, Advanced Orbiting Systems (AOS), Packet Telemetry/Telecommand, Space Communications Protocol Specification (SCPS), and the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP). Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is an end-to-end network architecture designed to provide communication in and/or through highly stressed networking environments. Stressed networking environments include those with intermittent connectivity, large and/or variable delays, and high bit error rates. The DTN research group (DTNRG) leads the field in DTN research. Members of the DTNRG created the Bundle Protocol (BP) to implement the DTN architecture. The key capabilities of the bundle protocols include custody-based reliability, ability to cope with intermittent connectivity, ability to take advantage of scheduled and opportunistic connectivity, and late binding of names to addresses. In this paper, we report on the addition of MACHETE Bundle Protocol model needed to support DTN research. To illustrate the use of MACHETE with the additional BP model, we provide an example simulation and benchmark its performance. We demonstrate the use of the Bundle Protocol and discuss statistics gathered concerning the total time needed to simulate numerous bundle transmissions.
Filling the Gap - Extending Service Oriented Architectures with Semantics
Authors: Adrian Mocan, Matthew Moran, Emilia Cimpian, Michal Zaremba
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (2006)

The problems of integrating information and processes between businesses continue to represent a challenge for which no universal solution has been found. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents a technology leap in this direction, allowing businesses to define the functionality of their various systems as discrete, loosely coupled services, accessible through well defined interfaces. Augmenting the SOA approach with Semantics guarantees unambiguous Web Service descriptions and explicit meaning for the data they interchange. We describe an example to motivate semantic enhancement and present WSMX as a semantic execution environment addressing the search and integration challenges. We propose that using WSMX, complex collaboration scenarios can be built in a dynamic fashion, sustained by concrete solutions that solve heterogeneity issues at the data, process and protocol levels.
Adaptive visual tracking and recognition using particle filters
Authors: Shaohua Zhou, R. Chellappa, B. Moghaddam
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 1 (2003)

This paper presents an improved method for simultaneous tracking and recognition of human faces from video, where a time series model is used to resolve the uncertainties in tracking and recognition. The improvements mainly arise from three aspects: (i) modeling the inter-frame appearance changes within the video sequence using an adaptive appearance model and an adaptive-velocity motion model; (ii) modeling the appearance changes between the video frames and gallery images by constructing intra- and extra-personal spaces; and (iii) utilization of the fact that the gallery images are in frontal views. By embedding them in a particle filter, we are able to achieve a stabilized tracker and an accurate recognizer when confronted by pose and illumination variations.
Methodology for customer relationship management
Authors: Ricardo Chalmeta
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2006)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a customer-focused business strategy that dynamically integrates sales, marketing and customer care service in order to create and add value for the company and its customers.This change towards a customer-focused strategy is leading to a strong demand for CRM solutions by companies. However, in spite of companies' interest in this new management model, many CRM implementations fail. One of the main reasons for this lack of success is that the existing methodologies being used to approach a CRM project are not adequate, since they do not satisfactorily integrate and complement the strategic and technological aspects of CRM.This paper describes a formal methodology for directing the process of developing and implementing a CRM System that considers and integrates various aspects, such as defining a customer strategy, re-engineering customer-oriented business processes, human resources management, the computer system, management of change and continuous improvement.
Extended web services framework to meet non-functional requirements
Authors: Zafar U. Singhera, Abad Ali Shah
Venue: Workshop proceedings of the sixth international conference on Web engineering (2006)

Non-functional requirements/characteristics are important for providing effectively every kind of services including web services. A realistic web service must meet both functional and non-functional requirements of its consumers. Therefore, it is important that a web services framework is augmented so that non-functional characteristics of a web service can be determined at run-time and consumers are bound to a service that best meet their functional as well as non-functional requirements. In this paper, we propose an extension of the existing web services framework that enables a collection of functional and non-functional service characteristics at run-time, and usage of the collected data in discovery, binding, and execution of web services. Descriptions of new and enhanced components of the proposed framework are also presented. Typical publishing and usage scenarios in the proposed framework are also described.
MACLAW: A modular approach for clustering with local attribute weighting
Authors: A. Blansché, P. Gançarski, J. J. Korczak
Venue: Pattern Recognition Letters (2006)

This paper presents a new process for modular clustering of complex data, like remote sensing images. This method performs feature weighting in a wrapper approach. The proposed method is a modular clustering method that combines several extractors, which are local specialists, each one extracting one cluster only and using different feature weights. A new clustering quality criterion, adapted to independent clusters, is defined. The weight learning is performed through a cooperative coevolution algorithm, where each species represents one of the clusters to be extracted. A set of extracted clusters forms a partial soft clustering but can be transformed in a classic hard clustering. Some tests, on datasets from the UCI repository and on hyperspectral remote sensing image, have been performed and show the validity of the approach.
Building a Navigation Structure from a Fuzzy Relationship for Image Retrieval
Authors: Erwan Loisant, Jose Martinez, Hiroshi Ishikawa, Manabu Ohta, Kaoru Katayama
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (2005)

Going one step further feedback querying in integrating user into retrieval process, navigation is the more recent approach to find images in a large image collection using contentbased information. However, while properties extracted from images are usually fuzzy data, most of the time a navigation structure will deal with binary links from an image (or a group of images) to another. A trivial solution to get a binary relationship from fuzzy data is to apply a threshold, but this solution not only leads to a loss of information but fails to distinguish noise from interesting elements. In this paper, we propose two techniques to eliminate isolated elements and lead to a structure made of more compact subparts. The first one is based on a variable threshold depending on the number of neighbours. The second one, specific to Galois' lattice, is based on taking into account the existing navigation structure for binarisation of descriptions. Experiments showed that it improves the resulting structure by reducing the number of nodes without loosing information on image description, thus improving user experience.
Designing Workflow Components for e-Science
Authors: Frank Terpstra, Pieter Adriaans
Venue: Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (2006)

In this paper we present a general domain for the analysis of workflows and workflow components based on the notion of a collection of Turing machines sharing a set of tapes. We show that computationally equivalent workflows can be evaluated in terms of two dimensions: data complexity and process complexity. We show that this approach allows for the evaluation of various workflow architectures. Using this formal framework we prove that maximal simplicity, generality and consistency are mutually exclusive. Simplicity of and generality of workflow components leads to complexity of data structures and computational processes. This is an issue that deserves more attention from designers and users of workflow communication protocols. We define a formal version of the General Workflow Design Problem and show that this problem is decidable in the case of a finite number of topologies. Thus, automatic composition of workflows is possible in limited domains. Decidability for an infinite number of topologies remains an open question. We show how our findings from the formal framework manifest themselves in real world e-Science workflow environments.
Extending Proxy Caching Capability: Issues and Performance
Authors: Wei Hao, Jicheng Fu, Jiang He, I-Ling Yen, Farokh Bastani, Ing-Ray Chen
Venue: World Wide Web (2006)

Proxy caching is an effective approach to reduce the response latency to client requests, web server load, and network traffic. Recently there has been a major shift in the usage of the Web. Emerging web applications require increasing amount of server-side processing. Current proxy protocols do not support caching and execution of web processing units. In this paper, we present a weblet environment, in which, processing units on web servers are implemented as weblets. These weblets can migrate from web servers to proxy servers to perform required computation and provide faster responses. Weblet engine is developed to provide the execution environment on proxy servers as well as web servers to facilitate uniform weblet execution. We have conducted thorough experimental studies to investigate the performance of the weblet approach. We modify the industrial standard e-commerce benchmark TPC-W to fit the weblet model and use its workload model for performance comparisons. The experimental results show that the weblet environment significantly improves system performance in terms of client response latency, web server throughput, and workload. Our prototype weblet system also demonstrates the feasibility of integrating weblet environment with current web/proxy infrastructure.
Generic Object Recognition Using a Combination of ICA and Shape Cues
Authors: Manisha Kalra, Sukhendu Das, Amitava Datta
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Video and Signal Based Surveillance (2006)

This paper addresses the problem of Generic Object Recognition by modeling the perceptual capability of human beings. In contrast to the traditional approaches, we have approached the recognition problem by proposing a framework which involves two stages of processing. First, an intelligent generic recognizer based on independent component analysis (ICA) is employed to reduce the search space to a few rank-ordered samples. It is shown that ICA captures the appearance characteristics of objects. Shape cues (distance transform based matching) are then used to verify the result of the appearance-based classifier and identify the correct object class and pose. Experiments were conducted using objects with complex appearance and shape characteristics. Sensitivity of recognition to the number of independent components and number of learning samples is analyzed on COIL-100 database. The performance of the generic classifier using ICA with and without shape matching is also analyzed.
Variational Surface Interpolation from Sparse Point and Normal Data
Authors: Jan Erik Solem, Henrik Aanaes, Anders Heyden
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2007)

Many visual cues for surface reconstruction from known views are sparse in nature, e.g., specularities, surface silhouettes, and salient features in an otherwise textureless region. Often, these cues are the only information available to an observer. To allow these constraints to be used either in conjunction with dense constraints such as pixel-wise similarity, or alone, we formulate such constraints in a variational framework. We propose a sparse variational constraint in the level set framework, enforcing a surface to pass through a specific point, and a sparse variational constraint on the surface normal along the observed viewing direction, as is the nature of, e.g., specularities. These constraints are capable of reconstructing surfaces from extremely sparse data. The approach has been applied and validated on the shape from specularities problem.
A Parameterized Probabilistic Model of Network Evolution for Supervised Link Prediction
Authors: Hisashi Kashima, Naoki Abe
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

We introduce a new approach to the problem of link prediction for network structured domains, such as the Web, social networks, and biological networks. Our approach is based on the topological features of network structures, not on the node features. We present a novel parameterized probabilistic model of network evolution and derive an efficient incremental learning algorithm for such models, which is then used to predict links among the nodes. We show some promising experimental results using biological network data sets.
Application of wavelets to acoustic resonance-elastic targets surrounded by biologics
Authors: J. Wilbur, S. G. Kargl
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1993. ICASSP-93 Vol 4., 1993 IEEE International Conference on - Volume 04 (1993)

The application of wavelets is to study the resonance characteristics of an elastic target and more specifically the leaky Lamb waves in the acoustic scattering response from a thin shell. The authors also address the application of wavelets to acoustic backscattering from submerged thin shells surrounded by dispersive scatterers, e.g., biologics. The subsonic branch of the lowest order antisymmetric leaky Lamb wave contributes strongly to the backscatter from thin spherical shells in a frequency range designated as the midfrequency enhancement. This prominent contribution in the free-field backscattering from the shell is easily isolated by wavelet decomposition. Likewise, a wavelet decomposition can extract the midfrequency enhancement in the scattered field when the shell is surrounded by a diffuse collection of non-elastic scatterers.