ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Splitting bisimulations and retrospective conditions
Authors: J. A. Bergstra, C. A. Middelburg
Venue: Information and Computation (2006)

We investigate conditional expressions in the setting of ACP, an algebraic theory about processes. We introduce ACPc, an extension of ACP with conditional expressions in which the conditions are taken from a free Boolean algebra over a set of generators, and also its main models, called full splitting bisimilation models. We add two simple mechanisms for condition evaluation to ACPc; and we show their connection with state operators and signal emission, mechanisms from other extensions of ACP usable for condition evaluation. To allow for looking back on conditions under which preceding actions have been performed, we add a retrospection operator on conditions to ACPc. The choice of conditions forces us to introduce a new variant of bisimulation. However, without the generality implied by that choice, it would not have been possible to extend ACPc with retrospection. The addition of retrospection is a basic way to increase expressiveness.
Impact of Parameter Variations on Circuits and Microarchitecture
Authors: Osman S. Unsal, James W. Tschanz, Keith Bowman, Vivek De, Xavier Vera, Antonio Gonzalez, Oguz Ergin
Venue: IEEE Micro (2006)

Parameter variations, which are increasing along with advances in process technologies, affect both timing and power. Variability must be considered at both the circuit and microarchitectural design levels to keep pace with performance scaling and to keep power consumption within reasonable limits. This article presents an overview of the main sources of variability and surveys variation-tolerant circuit and microarchitectural approaches.
Derivation modules of orthogonal duals of hyperplane arrangements
Authors: Joseph P. Kung, Hal Schenck
Venue: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics: An International Journal (2006)

Let A be an n × d matrix having full rank n. An orthogonal dual A¿ of A is a (d-n) × d matrix of rank (d¿n) such that every row of A¿ is orthogonal (under the usual dot product) to every row of A. We define the orthogonal dual for arrangements by identifying an essential (central) arrangement of d hyperplanes in n-dimensional space with the n × d matrix of coefficients of the homogeneous linear forms for which the hyperplanes are kernels. When n ¿ 5, we show that if the matroid (or the lattice of intersection) of an n-dimensional essential arrangement $${\mathcal A}$$ contains a modular copoint whose complement spans, then the derivation module of the orthogonally dual arrangement $${\mathcal A}$$ ¿ has projective dimension at least ¿ n(n+2)/4 ¿ - 3.
A Systematic Approach to Generate Inputs to Test UML Design Models
Authors: Trung T. Dinh-Trong, Sudipto Ghosh, Robert B. France
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (2006)

Practical model validation techniques are needed for model driven development (MDD) techniques to succeed. This paper presents an approach to generating inputs to test UML design models that are produced in the detailed design phase of an MDD project. A symbolic execution based approach is used to derive test input constraints from the paths of a Variable Assignment Graph, which integrates information from UML class and sequence diagrams. The constraints are solved using Alloy, a configuration constraint solver, to obtain the test inputs. The results of a pilot study carried out to explore the fault detection capability of the test inputs are reported.
What Lessons Can the Agile Community Learn from A Maverick Fighter Pilot?
Authors: Steve Adolph
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on AGILE 2006 (2006)

For the agile software development community, agility is defined by the values expressed in the agile manifesto. But in concrete terms, what does it mean for a software project to be agile? US Air Force Colonel John Boyd defined agility as the ability to operate the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop faster than an adversary. Agility therefore depends on the tempo at which we can exploit the OODA loop, and it is culture, not methodologies or tools that determine our OODA loop speed. This definition of agility has implications for the software development community. This short paper introduces Colonel Boyd, the OODA loop, the factors which influence OODA loop speed and the possible research opportunities into software engineering culture we are considering.
Adaptive splitting for stabilizing 1-D wavelet decompositions on irregular grids
Authors: Ward Van Aerschot, Maarten Jansen, Adhemar Bultheel
Venue: Signal Processing (2006)

This paper proposes a scheme to improve the stability of wavelet decompositions on 1-D irregular grids. Wavelet transforms on irregular grids are constructed using the lifting scheme. The filters in this scheme take the structure of the grid into account. Nice as it is, however, we undoubtedly bump into numerical stability issues directly related to the irregularity of the grid. Existing stabilizing methods concentrate on the filters used in the lifting scheme itself. While this may be effective in reducing the instability, they are inadequate when a highly irregular grid is involved. The approach presented in this paper is different, as it concentrates on the subsampling or subdivision. Grid locations in the multiscale transform are inserted in such an order that the irregularity of the grid at coarse scales is kept under control. This way, the proposed algorithm prevents instability at coarse scales, rather than healing it. Simulations illustrate that the proposed multiscale decomposition scheme is much more stable than the currently available transforms, especially at coarse scales, where effects of instability have a wide range.
A Formal Approach to Multi-Dimensional Sensitivity Analysis of Embedded Real-Time Systems
Authors: Razvan Racu, Arne Hamann, Rolf Ernst
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (2006)

System robustness is a major concern in the design of efficient and reliable state-of-the-art heterogenous embedded real-time systems. Due to complex component interactions, resource sharing and functional dependencies, one-dimensional sensitivity analysis cannot cover all effects that modifications of one system property may have on system performance. One reason is that the variation of one property can also affect the values of other system properties requiring new approaches to keep track of simultaneous parameter changes. In this paper we present a heuristic and a stochastic approach suited for the multi-dimensional sensitivity analysis of large heterogenous embedded systems with complex timing constraints.
The Focus Problem in Mobile Learning
Authors: Christoph Goth, Dirk Frohberg, Gerhard Schwabe
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technology in Education (2006)

Mobile learning has a lot of potential for supporting learning in situations such as in a museum, at a tourist sight or when exploring biological phenomena at a riverside. There learners can interact with their environment and still make use of the advantages of computational power. However, we have found many of such projects hindered by placing the technology too much in the focus of the learner. Instead of interacting with the environment, we found the learners interacting with the device, heads down and ignoring the environment. We found the issue of focus to be a massive problem, one which needs a completely new metaphor for the design of an educational and technical setting. Until now, the mobile devices have been interpreted as small desktops, always in the foreground of the learners' focus. Instead, we propose a different approach, deduced from the usage of mobile phones. Mobile applications need to be designed explicitly to free the learners' focus and push the application to the background. The good news is that the actual changes to be made in existing systems are not as fundamental as one may think.
Scalable and reliable data delivery in mobile ad hoc sensor networks
Authors: Bin Yu, Paul Scerri, Katia Sycara, Yang Xu, Michael Lewis
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2006)

This paper studies scalable data delivery algorithms in mobile ad hoc sensor networks with node and link failures. Many algorithms have been developed for data delivery and fusion in static microsensor networks, but most of them are not appropriate for mobile sensor networks due to their heavy traffic and long latency. In this paper we propose an efficient and robust data delivery algorithm for distributed data fusion in mobile ad hoc sensor networks, where each node controls its data flows and learns routing decisions solely based on their local knowledge. We analyze the localized algorithm in a formal model and validate our model using simulations. The experiments indicate that controlled data delivery processes significantly increase the probability of relevant data being fused in the network even with limited local knowledge of each node and relatively small hops of data delivery.
GridBuilder: A Tool for Creating Virtual Grid Testbeds
Authors: Stephen Childs, Brian Coghlan, Jason McCandless
Venue: Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (2006)

Grid software developers and Grid site administrators both require realistic testbeds where they can test applications and middleware before deployment on production infrastructure. Such testbeds should be dynamically reconfigurable to allow replication of real-world configurations. While the combination of service nodes needed for a particular application may vary greatly, there is a fixed set of node types which are used frequently: these are the building blocks needed to construct testbeds. We present GridBuilder: a web-based virtual machine (VM) manager that supports the rapid creation and customisation of Grid nodes based on standard configurations. GridBuilder allows users to create a library of filesystem images and then generate independent filesystems based on these images. Copy-on-write is used for fast initialisation and efficient use of disk space. GridBuilder uses standard Grid configuration tools to automatically configure the middleware on new Grid service nodes. Users can save and restore snapshots of nodes and can import images to create new node types.
Hiding Sensitive Association Rules with Limited Side Effects
Authors: Yi-Hung Wu Chia-Ming Chiang Arbee L. P. Chen
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2007)

Data mining techniques have been widely used in various applications. However, the misuse of these techniques may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information. Researchers have recently made efforts at hiding sensitive association rules. Nevertheless, undesired side effects, e.g., nonsensitive rules falsely hidden and spurious rules falsely generated, may be produced in the rule hiding process. In this paper, we present a novel approach that strategically modifies a few transactions in the transaction database to decrease the supports or confidences of sensitive rules without producing the side effects. Since the correlation among rules can make it impossible to achieve this goal, in this paper, we propose heuristic methods for increasing the number of hidden sensitive rules and reducing the number of modified entries. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach, i.e., undesired side effects are avoided in the rule hiding process. The results also report that in most cases, all the sensitive rules are hidden without spurious rules falsely generated. Moreover, the good scalability of our approach in terms of database size and the influence of the correlation among rules on rule hiding are observed.
Extraction of Hand Gestures with Adaptive Skin Color Models and Its Applications to Meeting Analysis
Authors: Yingen Xiong, Bing Fang, Francis Quek
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006)

We present an adaptive skin color model for hand gesture tracking which is applied to cross-modal analysis of planning meetings. We build a skin color model with the Gaussian distribution and a skin color filter for each participant in meetings. By combining with the Vector Coherence Mapping (VCM) algorithm, we track hand motion and obtain 3D trajectories. The hand gesture stream is extracted from hand motion trajectories. Different skin color models are created for different people to handle the differences of skin color. We update each model dynamically to adapt changes of environments. A parallel system has been implemented to track and extract hand motion trajectories. Examples of hand motion gesture tracking in meeting environments are provided. The applications of the adaptive skin color model can increase the speed of hand tracking.
Approximate/perfect samplers for closed Jackson networks
Authors: Shuji Kijima, Tomomi Matsui
Venue: Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation (2005)

In this paper, we propose two samplers for the productform solution of basic queueing networks, closed Jackson networks with multiple servers. Our approach is sampling via Markov chain, but it is NOT a simulation of behavior of customers in queueing networks. We propose two of new ergodic Markov chains both of which have a unique stationary distribution that is the product form solution of closed Jackson networks. One of them is for approximate sampling, and we show it mixes rapidly. To our knowledge, this is the first approximate polynomial-time sampler for closed Jackson networks with multiple servers. The other is for perfect sampling based on monotone CFTP (coupling from the past) algorithm proposed by Propp and Wilson, and we show the monotonicity of the chain.
ICT and the transformation of the College of Business Education (CBE)
Authors: Severinus Magnus Hyera
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Technology for Education in Developing Countries (2006)

The College of Business Education is hosting a Capacity Building Project financed on a cost sharing basis between the College, Joensuuu University and the Finnish Embassy, Dar es Salaam. The objective of the project is to strengthen the practical skills of the Tutors in the application of ICT in the Colleges' training programmes. The mission statement of the College is to train highly competent and practice-oriented professionals to undertake relevant basic and applied research and to provide consultancy and advisory services to the public. To ensure the mission is achieved, the long-term plan states that, the College will establish a fully fledged department of ICT and strengthen it by training its staff and establishing institutional linkage and strategic cooperation with National, Regional and International institutions offering ICT programmes. When the project is completed, the College will be able to offer high quality programmes and courses to its customers which will improve deployability of CBE graduates particularly in the private and public institutions.
Towards robustness in query auditing
Authors: Shubha U. Nabar, Bhaskara Marthi, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Nina Mishra, Rajeev Motwani
Venue: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Very large data bases (2006)

We consider the online query auditing problem for statistical databases. Given a stream of aggregate queries posed over sensitive data, when should queries be denied in order to protect the privacy of individuals? We construct efficient auditors for max queries and bags of max and min queries in both the partial and full disclosure settings. Our algorithm for the partial disclosure setting involves a novel application of probabilistic inference techniques that may be of independent interest. We also study for the first time, a particular dimension of the utility of an auditing scheme and obtain initial results for the utility of sum auditing when guarding against full disclosure.The result is positive for large databases, indicating that answers to queries will not be riddled with denials.
Fast Similarity Search for High-Dimensional Dataset
Authors: Quan Wang, Suya You
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006)

This paper addresses the challenging problem of rapidly searching and matching high-dimensional features for the applications of multimedia database retrieval and pattern recognition. Most current methods suffer from the problem of dimensionality curse. A number of theoretical and experimental studies lead us to pursue a new approach, called Fast Filtering Vector Approximation (FFVA) to tackle the problem. FFVA is a nearest neighbor search technique that facilitates rapidly indexing and recovering the most similar matches to a high-dimensional database of features or spatial data. Extensive experiments have demonstrated effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Modeling Deformable Objects for Computer-Aided Sculpting (CAS)Modeling Deformable Objects for Computer-Aided Sculpting (CAS)
Authors: Philip C. Igwe, George K. Knopf
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Geometric Modeling and Imaging: New Trends (2006)

Software tools for modeling complex freeform objects require the designer to use sophisticated procedures and complex protocols that do not inherently support the creative design process. Typical tasks include tedious control point manipulation and manual surface patch stitching operations. An interactive computer-aided sculpting (CAS) framework based upon deformable geometric models is described in this paper. The technique exploits the topology and learning algorithm of a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) to generate an adaptive volumetric mesh comprised of hexahedral elements. The pre-ordered lattice of the SOFM maintains the relative connectivity of neighbouring nodes in the mesh as it transforms under external and internal forces. Prior to virtual sculpting, the shape primitive is either retrieved from the object database or created by fitting a deformable mesh to representative surface points. Material and dynamic properties are incorporated into the deformable solid model by treating the surface and interior nodes as point masses connected with a network of springs. Illustrations are provided to demonstrate the virtual sculpting framework.
Efficient Two-stage Fuzzy Clustering of Microarray Gene Expression Data
Authors: Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Ujjwal Maulik, Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Technology (2006)

This article presents an efficient two-stage clustering method for clustering microarray gene expression time series data. The algorithm is based on the identification of genes having significant membership to multiple classes. A recently proposed variable string length genetic scheme and an iterated version of well known fuzzy C-means algorithm are utilized as the underlying clustering techniques. The performance of the two-stage clustering technique has been compared with the hierarchical clustering algorithms, those are widely used for clustering gene expression data, to prove its effectiveness on some publicly available gene expression data.
An activity framework for fostering reflection in project-based engineering design classes
Authors: Jennifer Turns
Venue: Proceedings of the 1996 international conference on Learning sciences (1996)

Employers of engineering school graduates frequently lament that their new employees do not have adequate design abilities. Such sentiments are echoed in almost all major reports on engineering education. Two approaches for addressing this issue are to provide students with more engineering design experiences and to find ways to enhance the learning the results from existing experiences. This paper focuses on the second approach since providing students with more design experiences can be costly and, at the same time, evidence suggests that students do not always capitalize effectively on the potential learning opportunities stemming from such experiences. This paper proposes a framework for reflective activities that students can perform in order to enhance their learning from engineering design experiences. More specifically, this paper presents 1) some data suggesting that learning opportunities may arise through project based engineering design experiences but may not go unpursued, 2) a framework for reflective activities designed to facilitate students in pursuing these learning opportunities, 3) two slightly different instantiations of that activity, and 4) the proposed evaluation.
Mining Generalized Associations of Semantic Relations from Textual Web Content
Authors: Tao Jiang Ah-Hwee Tan
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2007)

Traditional text mining techniques transform free text into flat bags of words representation, which does not preserve sufficient semantics for the purpose of knowledge discovery. In this paper, we present a two-step procedure to mine generalized associations of semantic relations conveyed by the textual content of Web documents. First, RDF (Resource Description Framework) metadata representing semantic relations are extracted from raw text using a myriad of natural language processing techniques. The relation extraction process also creates a term taxonomy in the form of a sense hierarchy inferred from WordNet. Then, a novel generalized association pattern mining algorithm (GP-Close) is applied to discover the underlying relation association patterns on RDF metadata. For pruning the large number of redundant overgeneralized patterns in relation pattern search space, the GP-Close algorithm adopts the notion of generalization closure for systematic overgeneralization reduction. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through empirical experiments conducted on an online database of terrorist activities.
Extended radar view and modification director: awareness mechanisms for synchronous collaborative authoring
Authors: Minh Hong Tran, Yun Yang, Gitesh K. Raikundalia
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th Australasian User interface conference - Volume 50 (2006)

Providing effective support for group awareness is a critical requirement of synchronous collaborative authoring tools. This paper reports our work on developing new awareness mechanisms including Extended Radar View (ERV) and Modification Director (MD) for Co Word, a synchronous collaborative authoring tool that is developed based on Microsoft® Word. ERV supports awareness for collaborative authoring tasks by showing both users' telecarets-eye views--the locations of working areas--and over-the-shoulder views--the locations of viewing areas in a shared Word document. MD keeps track of changes in the document, and notifies users when their text is modified by other people. This paper also reports an ongoing user-based study that is conducted to evaluate the usefulness of ERV and MD. The preliminary results show that ERV is useful in supporting group awareness, and ERV is preferred to a conventional radar view. MD was found useful to some extent in supporting awareness for collaborative authoring.