ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Synergy: a prototype collaborative environment to support the conceptual stages of the design process
Authors: Aggelos Liapis
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (2008)

Current product design projects typically involve more than one designer. In many cases there will be a team of designers participating in the design, along with the corresponding clients. This paper introduces a collaborative design environment focused to assist professional product designers when in remote collaboration during the early stages of the design process. This environment was designed on a platform-independent model that enables product designers to communicate and collaborate with each other across different operating systems and networks. The prototype consists of a series of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative tools, recording mechanisms, brainstorming tools, data mining features and project management services that enable professional product designers to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate on a design project. The main research issues include platform independency and customizability; distributed design management and coordination, design process representation, collaborative design communication and design visualization. Professional product designers and academics have tested the proposed environment successfully in a series of real-time use case scenarios.
Brief Announcement: Eventual Leader Election in the Infinite Arrival Message-Passing System Model
Authors: Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni, Roberto Baldoni
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international symposium on Distributed Computing (2008)

Emerging distributed systems have a dynamic structure that is self-defined at any time by entities that autonomously decide to locally run the same distributed application. As extreme, a distributed system might thus also cease its existence when no entity is currently active while at some later moment new entities arrive and connect to each other to form again the system. Therefore the set of entities that over time might form the system is potentially infinite. This infinite arrival model is the key distinguishing factor between dynamic systems and traditional distributed systems where, on the contrary, the set of system entities is fixed since the deployment of application components is controlled and managed. In this model not only the set of correct processes is not known in advance, but no finite set containing the set of correct processes is known in advance. This actually is a higher level of uncertainty to be mastered in dynamic systems. This makes the study of possible implementations of failure detectors, as ¿, of paramount importance and at the same time makes the problem of realizing such failure detector far from being trivial. The uncertainty posed by infinite arrival models brings to two different issues (1) discovering the finite set of processes currently running and (2) dealing with a possible infinite set of non-correct processes that may wake up at any time, covering with their up times the whole computation.
The Uniformity Principle for Σ-Definability with Applications to Computable Analysis
Authors: Margarita Korovina, Oleg Kudinov
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Computability in Europe: Computation and Logic in the Real World (2007)

In this paper we prove the Uniformity Principle for Σ---definability over the real numbers extended by open predicates. Using this principle we show that if we have a Σ K -formula, i.e. a formula with quantifier alternations where universal quantifiers are bounded by computable compact sets, then we can eliminate all universal quantifiers obtaining a Σ-formula equivalent to the initial one. We also illustrate how the Uniformity Principle can be employed for reasoning about computability over continuous data in an elegant way.
Constructing a Safety Case for Automatically Generated Code from Formal Program Verification Information
Authors: Nurlida Basir, Ewen Denney, Bernd Fischer
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (2008)

Formal methods can in principle provide the highest levels of assurance of code safety by providing formal proofs as explicit evidence for the assurance claims. However, the proofs are often complex and difficult to relate to the code, in particular if it has been generated automatically. They may also be based on assumptions and reasoning principles that are not justified. This causes concerns about the trustworthiness of the proofs and thus the assurance claims. Here we present an approach to systematically construct safety cases from information collected during a formal verification of the code, in particular from the construction of the logical annotations necessary for a formal, Hoare-style safety certification. Our approach combines a generic argument that is instantiated with respect to the certified safety property (i.e., safety claims) with a detailed, program-specific argument that can be derived systematically because its structure directly follows the course the annotation construction takes through the code. The resulting safety cases make explicit the formal and informal reasoning principles, and reveal the top-level assumptions and external dependencies that must be taken into account. However, the evidence still comes from the formal safety proofs. Our approach is independent of the given safety property and program, and consequently also independent of the underlying code generator. Here, we illustrate it for the AutoFilter system developed at NASA Ames.
A Complete Unsupervised Learning of Mixture Models for Texture Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiangrong Zhang, Xiaoyun Yang, Pengjuan Chen, Licheng Jiao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Congress on Image and Signal Processing, Vol. 2 - Volume 02 (2008)

Mostly, in image segmentation, we do not know the prior knowledge of the number of classes, while many clustering approaches need this prior knowledge. This fact makes the segmentation more difficult. In this paper, we introduce a complete unsupervised approach based on Gaussian mixture models, namely complete unsupervised learning of mixture models (LMM) for image segmentation. Firstly, a new feature extraction method, combining the texture features from the gray-level co-occurrence matrix with the textural information yielded through the undecimated wavelet decomposition, is used to efficiently represent the textural information in images. Then LMM is introduced for image segmentation, which can determine the number of classes automatically. Segmentation results on synthetic texture images and real image demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced method.
Task Construction for Model-Based Design of Embedded Control Software
Authors: Shige Wang, Kang G. Shin
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2006)

Constructing runtime tasks, or operating system-level processes/threads, from the components of software design models is crucial to the model-based development of embedded control software. A better method should explore more design choices and reduce the overheads of the runtime system to meet the timing and resource constraints of embedded control software. This paper presents a novel, two-step method for systematic and automatic construction of runtime tasks from software design models. It uses graph transformation to construct a task set meeting system-level end-to-end (e2e) timing constraints. Its first step decomposes the system-level e2e timing constraints into the components' timing constraints, which form a necessary condition for any valid and feasible schedule. The second step iteratively merges the components into tasks and sequences their executions. A thus-constructed task set is proven to meet both intercomponent precedence and system-level e2e timing constraints and to minimize runtime overheads by minimizing the total number of resultant tasks. Our evaluation results based on randomly generated software models have shown that the proposed method outperforms commonly used methods and is also scalable.
Improved Minkowsky Metric for Image Region Partition
Authors: Ionut Pirnog, Cristina Oprea, Constantin Paleologu, Dragos Nicolae Vizireanu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The Third International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (iccgi 2008) (2008)

In this paper we present an improved method for image partition. Image partition plays an important role in video segmentation techniques; it uses different region growth algorithms for separating an image into regions and objects. This enhances the characterization on an image using video descriptors and can be used in image retrieval or image comparison applications. The proposed segmentation method uses the Minkowsky metric for region detection. In addition, it uses different threshold values in order to achieve perceptually significant areas. The simulation results indicate good performances of the proposed method for colour image segmentation.
Effect of Tissue Thickness Variation in Volumetric Breast Density Estimation
Authors: Olivier Alonzo-Proulx, Albert H. Tyson, Gordon E. Mawdsley, Martin J. Yaffe
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on Digital Mammography (2008)

A method is presented for the estimation of dense breast tissue volume from full-field digital mammograms. The digital signal from the image is determined by using a physical signal propagation model that considers the incident x-ray spectrum and detector efficiency, assuming that the breast is composed of only adipose and fibroglandular tissue. The effect of an error in the breast thickness on the volumetric breast density (VBD) was studied using the model by replacing a curved thickness profile, as measured by optical photogrammetry on a compressed breast, by a constant thickness. It was found that a constant thickness approximation within 2% of the mean of the curved thickness is sufficient to keep the error within 5 %VBD units for breasts of 10%, 25%, 50% and 75% density. Relying on the thickness readout of mammography units typically induces large errors in the VBD estimation.
A conjecture about lower multiexponent of primitive matrices
Authors: Bolian Liu, Fengying Huang
Venue: Computers Mathematics with Applications (2008)

In this paper the conjecture on kth lower multiexponent of primitive matrices proposed by R.A. Brualdi and Liu are partly proved.
Automatic Generation of Symmetry-Breaking Constraints
Authors: Leo Liberti
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (2008)

Solution symmetries in integer linear programs often yield long Branch-and-Bound based solution processes. We propose a method for finding elements of the permutation group of solution symmetries, and two different types of symmetry-breaking constraints to eliminate these symmetries at the modelling level. We discuss some preliminary computational results.
Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of CLEFIA
Authors: Yukiyasu Tsunoo, Etsuko Tsujihara, Maki Shigeri, Teruo Saito, Tomoyasu Suzaki, Hiroyasu Kubo
Venue: Fast Software Encryption: 15th International Workshop, FSE 2008, Lausanne, Switzerland, February 10-13, 2008, Revised Selected Papers (2008)

This paper reports impossible differential cryptanalysis on the 128-bit block cipher CLEFIA that was proposed in 2007, including new 9-round impossible differentials for CLEFIA, and the result of an impossible differential attack using them. For the case of a 128-bit key, it is possible to apply the impossible differential attack to CLEFIA reduced to 12 rounds. The number of chosen plaintexts required is 2118.9 and the time complexity is 2119. For key lengths of 192 bits and 256 bits, it is possible to apply impossible differential attacks to 13-round and 14-round CLEFIA. The respective numbers of chosen plaintexts required are 2119.8 and 2120.3 and the respective time complexities are 2146 and 2212. These impossible differential attacks are the strongest method for attacking reduced-round CLEFIA.
Discriminant projection embedding for face and palmprint recognition
Authors: Yan Yan, Yu-Jin Zhang
Venue: Neurocomputing (2008)

In this paper, we propose a new supervised linear dimensionality reduction method called discriminant projection embedding (DPE). DPE can preserve within-class neighboring geometry and extract between-class relevant structures for classification effectively. The proposed method is applied to face and palmprint recognition and is examined using the AR and FERET face databases and the PolyU palmprint database. Experimental results show that DPE consistently outperforms other up-to-date supervised linear dimensionality reduction methods when the training sample size per class is small. This demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of DPE.
Integrated optical micro structures for signal processing in the position metrology
Authors: Andreas Kornfeld, Niko B&#x00e4;rsch, Dietmar Kracht, Andreas Ostendorf
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2008)

The miniaturisation of functional components and a high integration depth of sensor systems are the fundamental demands of the micro system technology. Within the, &#x2018;Sonderforschungsbereich 516,&#x2019; the development of a position sensor for a micro linear motor is also directed towards these goals; and so a sensor with a size smaller than 10&#x00a0;mm and a measurement accuracy of better than 100&#x00a0;nm is desirable. Additionally, the electromagnetic sensitivity should be minimised. An optical interferometric measurement principle meets these requirements. Light from both of the first diffraction orders from a grating on the motor armature is coupled into a glass-chip waveguide coupler. The interference of the signals results in a beat frequency signal when the grating is shifted. It can be detected as an intensity modulation at the three outputs. The velocity as well as the movement direction of the armature can be derived from the signal phases. The investigations were focused on the coupler design and its numerical field simulations as well as manufacturing and qualification of the coupler itself. Its geometry essentially affects the total sensor length. Refractive index modification by a femtosecond pulse laser was chosen for the creation of the waveguide coupler. This process does not restrict the waveguide geometry to the surface of the glass-chip, and enables arbitrarily positioning of waveguides in the substrate volume. Thus, it also enables non-planar cross section formations of three waveguides e.g. in the form of an equilateral triangle.
Visual correlation of network traffic and host processes for computer security
Authors: Chris L. North
Venue:  (2006)

Much computer communications activity is invisible to the user, happening without explicit permission. When system administrators investigate network communications activities, they have difficulty tracing them back to the processes that cause them. The strictly layered TCP/IP networking model that underlies all widely used, general-purpose operating systems makes it impossible to trace a packet seen on the network back to the processes that are responsible for generating and receiving it. The TCP/IP model separates the concerns of network routing and process ownership so that the layers cannot share the information needed to correlate packets to processes. But knowing what processes are responsible for communications activities can be a great help in determining whether that activity is benign or malicious. My solution combines a visualization tool, a kernel-level correlation engine, and middleware that ties the two together. My research enables security personnel to visually correlate packets to the processes they belong to helping users determine whether communications are benign or malicious. I present my discoveries about the system administrator community and relate how I created a new correlation technology. I conducted a series of initial interviews with system administrators to clarify the problem, researched available solutions in the literature, identified what was missing, and worked with users to build it. The users were my co-designers as I built a series of prototypes of increasing fidelity and conducted usability evaluations on them. I hope that my work will demonstrate how well the participatory design[10] approach works. My work has implications for the kernel structure of all operating system kernels with a TCP/IP protocol stack and network model. In light of my research, I hope security personnel will more clearly see sets of communicating processes on a network as basic computational units rather than the individual host computers. If kernel designers incorporate my findings into their work, it will enable much better security monitoring than is possible today making the Internet safer for all.
On the Urban Connectivity of Vehicular Sensor Networks
Authors: Hugo Conceição, Michel Ferreira, João Barros
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE international conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (2008)

Aiming at a realistic mobile connectivity model for vehicular sensor networks in urban environments, we propose the combination of large-scale traffic simulation and computational tools to characterize fundamental graph-theoretic parameters. To illustrate the proposed approach, we use the DIVERT simulation framework to illuminate the temporal evolution of the average node degree in this class of networks and provide an algorithm for computing the transitive connectivity profile that ultimately determines the flow of information in a vehicular sensor network.
In-Time Role-Specific Notification as Formal Means to Balance Agile Practices in Global Software Development Settings
Authors: Dindin Wahyudin, Matthias Heindl, Benedikt Eckhard, Alexander Schatten, Stefan Biffl
Venue: Balancing Agility and Formalism in Software Engineering: Second IFIP TC 2 Central and East European Conference on Software Engineering Techniques, CEE-SET 2007, Poznan, Poland, October 10-12, 2007, Revised Selected Papers (2008)

In global software development (GSD) projects, distributed teams collaborate to deliver high-quality software. Project managers need to control these development projects, which increasingly adopt agile practices. However, in a distributed project a major challenge is to keep all team members aware of recent changes of requirements and project status without providing too little or too much information for each role. In this paper we introduce a framework to define notification for development team members that allows a) measurement of notification effectiveness, efficiency, and cost; b) formalizing key communication in an agile environment; and c) providing a method and a tool to implement communication support. We illustrate, with an example scenario from an industry background, the concept and report results from an initial empirical evaluation. From the evaluation it follows that the concept allows determining and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of key communication in a global software development project in a sufficiently formal way without compromising the use of agile practices.
On Frequency Sensitive Competitive Learning for VQ Codebook Design
Authors: P. H. Espírito Santo, R. C. Albuquerque, D. C. Cunha, F. Madeiro
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 10th Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks (2008)

Vector quantization (VQ) plays an important role in many image coding systems. The present paper examines the application of frequency sensitive competitive learning for VQ codebook design. Simulation results are presented for: the influence of the initialization on codebook design; the normalized entropy of the codevectors; the number of multiplications spent in the codebook training; the "evolution" of the codebook by the end of each iteration of the algorithm; the quality of the designed codebooks in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio of the reconstructed images. A comparison with both LBG (Linde-Buzo-Gray) and non frequency sensitive competitive learning is presented.
O(n$^{3}$) g-inversion-free noniterative near-consistent linear system solver for minimum-norm least-squares and nonnegative solutions
Authors: S. K. Sen, Sagar Sen
Venue: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (2006)

Presented here is an O(mn$^{2})$ physically concise algorithm (solver) to obtain noniteratively a minimum-norm (m-) solution of the consistent under-/over-determined linear system Ax=b without computing any generalized inverse (g-inverse), where the matrix A is m &times; n. This m-solution is also the minimum-norm least-squares (mt-) solution of the consistent system. When the system is near-consistent/inconsistent, the algorithm can be used to obtain (i) the g-inversion-free mt-solution of the inconsistent system just by replacing A by A$^{t}$A and b by A$^{t}$b or (ii) the g-inversion-free mt-solution of a consistent system closest (in some sense) to the inconsistent system without modifying/premultiplying both sides of the system by A$^{t}$. It provides an in-built consistency check and an inconsistency index - a measure of degree of inconsistency, and the rank (that provides the information content of the system) of the matrix A. Further, if required, it can identify and prune/weed out redundant (linearly dependent) rows of (A, b), i.e., throw away redundant equations and convert A into a full row-rank matrix, thus potentially reducing the storage requirement, amount of computation and hence errors and computing time, while preserving the complete information of the contradiction-free system. In addition, the solver produces the unique projection operator P that projects the real n-dimensional space orthogonally onto the null space of A and that readily provides a means of computing any number of solutions desired. The solver also produces a relative error bound without computing any kind of g-inverse of A subject to a certain condition. It is also readily amenable to both error-free computation and parallel/vector implementation. In addition, it detects whether the system is unacceptable (excessively inconsistent) and prompts us to check the physical and the mathematical models for a possible reason and consequent correction before we continue further the solution process. A heuristic algorithm is presented, in which two of the outputs of the solver, viz., the solution vector and the projection operator are used as inputs for a nonnegative solution of the system noniteratively in O(mn$^{2}$) operations.
Computing behavior of finite fuzzy machines - Algorithm and its application to reduction and minimization
Authors: K. Peeva, Zl. Zahariev
Venue: Information Sciences: an International Journal (2008)

We define finite fuzzy machines and investigate their behavior. Algorithm and software are proposed for computing behavior, for establishing equivalence and redundancy of states and for solving reduction and minimization problems. Computational complexity of the algorithm is discussed. Testing examples are supplied. The results are valid for finite max-min, min-max and max-product fuzzy machines.