ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Implementing the Rensselaer 80/20 Model in professional education
Authors: G. Bowman
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (2000)

The Rensselaer 80/20 Model combines both asynchronous and synchronous activities to create a complete course. Asynchrony utilizes the World Wide Web and has students doing activities on their time and at their location. Synchrony brings students together in time for complementary activities using any number of technologies. The paper describes the application of the Rensselaer 80/20 Model to a course in Object-Oriented User Interface Development (OOUID) that is a part of our professional master's program. It brings together the "GuideOnTheSide" for asynchronous learning and a synchronous software product called LearnLinc both pioneered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Service Differentiation and QoS in a Scalable Content-Aware Load Balancing Algorithm
Authors: Katja Gilly, Salvador Alcaraz, Carlos Juiz, Ramon Puigjaner
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Simulation Symposium (2007)

This paper presents a complete solution of a scalable content-aware load balancing solution for cluster-based Web information systems that includes service differentiation and quality of service. The architecture is based on a farm of Web servers managed by a content-aware load balancer that differentiates the service required by the workload and implements a control admission under extreme overload. The results show that the burstiness in the workload has to be controlled on the Web servers in order to obtain the best response in terms of performance and overhead.
Ab-Initio Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Molten Ni-Based Superalloys
Authors: Mark Asta, Dallas Trinkle, Christopher Woodward
Venue: Proceedings of the HPCMP Users Group Conference (2006)

In the casting of single-crystal turbine blades, the composition (c) and temperature (T) dependencies of the liquid-phase molar volume (V (c, T)) play a critical role in driving convective instabilities and the associated formation of solidification defects. In support of a current effort aimed at the development of validated mathematical criteria for predicting the formation of solidification defects in Ni-based superalloys, ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations have been performed to calculate atomic volumes of Ni-Al-W melts. For elemental Ni and binary Ni-Al and Ni-W compositions, AIMD-calculated volumes agree to within 0.51.5% of recently measured values. For ternary Ni-Al-W melts, where direct experimental measurements are unavailable, AIMD results are in excellent agreement with the predictions of a recently proposed parametrization for V (c, T) in multicomponent superalloys. The results thus help to establish the accuracy of this recently proposed model in its application to the Ni-Al-W system.
Parity Problems in Planar Graphs
Authors: Mark Braverman, Raghav Kulkarni, Sambuddha Roy
Venue: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (2007)

We consider the problem of counting the number of spanning trees in planar graphs. We prove tight bounds on the complexity of the problem, both in general and especially in the modular setting. We exhibit the problem to be complete for Logspace when the modulus is 2^k, for constant k. On the other hand, we show that for any other modulus and in the non-modular case, our problem is as hard in the planar case as for the case of arbitrary graphs. This completely settles the question regarding the complexity of modular computation of the number of spanning trees in planar graphs. The techniques used rely heavily on algebraic-topology. In the spirit of counting problems modulo 2^k, we also exhibit a highly parallel \oplusL algorithm for finding the value of a Permanent modulo 2^k. Previously, the best known result in this direction was Valiant's result that this problem lies in P.
Low-rank minimum variance CDMA receiver in multipath channels
Authors: Xiaodong Cai
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2000)

The minimum variance receiver has been previously proposed to suppress the multiple-access interference (MAI) blindly in CDMA channels by minimizing the receiver's output variance based on constrained optimization. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity minimum variance receiver that achieves almost the same performance as the high-complexity one with the optimal constraint vector. The proposed receiver is a RAKE receiver followed by an equal gain combiner. The impulse response of the filter in each finger is obtained by the minimum variance criterion. The low-rank minimum variance receiver uses a reduced-rank approximation of the estimated data covariance matrix. Its performance is better than the full-rank version of the receiver. The receiver is implemented adaptively with the same structure as a generalized sidelobe canceler.
Glacier: highly durable, decentralized storage despite massive correlated failures
Authors: Andreas Haeberlen, Alan Mislove, Peter Druschel
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2 (2005)

Decentralized storage systems aggregate the available disk space of participating computers to provide a large storage facility. These systems rely on data redundancy to ensure durable storage despite of node failures. However, existing systems either assume independent node failures, or they rely on introspection to carefully place redundant data on nodes with low expected failure correlation. Unfortunately, node failures are not independent in practice and constructing an accurate failure model is difficult in large-scale systems. At the same time, malicious worms that propagate through the Internet pose a real threat of large-scale correlated failures. Such rare but potentially catastrophic failures must be considered when attempting to provide highly durable storage. In this paper, we describe Glacier, a distributed storage system that relies on massive redundancy to mask the effect of large-scale correlated failures. Glacier is designed to aggressively minimize the cost of this redundancy in space and time: Erasure coding and garbage collection reduces the storage cost; aggregation of small objects and a loosely coupled maintenance protocol for redundant fragments minimizes the messaging cost. In one configuration, for instance, our system can provide six-nines durable storage despite correlated failures of up to 60% of the storage nodes, at the cost of an elevenfold storage overhead and an average messaging overhead of only 4 messages per node and minute during normal operation. Glacier is used as the storage layer for an experimental serverless email system.
Computations over data streams
Authors: Konstantinos Kalpakis
Venue:  (2005)

Several emerging applications demand computations over streaming data, where data can be seen at most once as they stream by, use small footprint summaries with fast per datum update time. We present novel summaries to estimate aggregate queries over streaming data, and adaptive computations for stream applications based on forgetting factors. Range-sum queries when represented as vectors, can be computed using inner products with the frequency distribution vector and are usually correlated. We present summaries which we call linear sketches, that are linear projections of the frequency distribution vector that exploit the correlation among a given set of query vectors in an optimal manner (in the mean squared error sense) to estimate them effectively. Linear sketches for common sets of range-sum queries were found to be closely related to classical linear transforms such as the Discrete Fourier Transform and the Discrete Sine Transform and can be maintained efficiently over streaming data. Experimental results using both synthetic and real data, demonstrate that our approach delivers significantly smaller errors than various other standard approaches. We provide extensions to multi-dimensional data streams and also show how any linear projection of the frequency distribution vector can be augmented by linear sketches to estimate answers to range-sum queries with smaller errors. Moreover, we consider F2 range queries that compute the second frequency moment or the size of the self-join over a given range. We present and analyze for the first time, stream summaries for estimating F2 range queries based on linear sketches. Stream computations are useful and important in sensor networks. We demonstrate how linear sketches can be used to estimate aggregate range queries in energy-constrained environments such as sensor networks. Experimental results show that linear sketching achieves significant improvements in lifetime of sensor networks by trading only a small loss in accuracy of the queries. To make stream computations adaptive to the non-stationarities, we use forgetting factors where each element in the data stream has a weight that determines its influence on the result and decays exponentially with time. We present the weighted k-means clustering algorithm using forgetting factors that maintains adaptive clusters over data streams. Further, we use adaptive clusters as buckets of histogram to answer weighted-count range queries. We also present a forgetting factor-based Recursive Least Squares algorithm for adaptive incremental model estimation for detecting outliers and change point over streams.
Nahalal: Cache Organization for Chip Multiprocessors
Authors: Zvika Guz, Idit Keidar, Avinoam Kolodny, Uri Weiser
Venue: IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (2007)

This paper addresses cache organization in Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). We show that in CMP systems it is valuable to distinguish between shared data, which is accessed by multiple cores, and private data accessed by a single core. We introduce Nahalal, an architecture whose novel floorplan topology partitions cached data according to its usage (shared versus private data), and thus enables fast access to shared data for all processors while preserving the vicinity of private data to each processor. Nahalal exhibits significant improvements in cache access latency compared to a traditional cache design.
A broader view on the limitations of information processing and communication by nature
Authors: Jozef Gruska
Venue: Natural Computing: an international journal (2007)

Several new and broader views on computation in Nature and by Nature, and on its limitations and barriers are presented and analysed briefly. Quantum information precessing, global network information processing and cosmology-based information processing theories are seen as three extreme, but well-founded approaches to computation by Nature. It is also emphasized that a search for barriers and limitations in information processing as well as attempts to overcome their barriers or to shift limitations, can have deep impacts on science, especially if they are accompanied by a search for limitations and barriers also in communication and security. It is demonstrated that a search for barriers in communications brings a lot of interesting and deep outcomes. Computational and communication complexity is shown to play an important role in evaluating various approaches to get through barriers that current physical theories impose. It is also argued that a search for barriers and limitations concerning feasibility in information processing and physical worlds are of equal or maybe even of larger importance than those to overcome the Church-Turing barrier and some communication barriers. It is also emphasized that relations between information processing in the real and virtual worlds, or between physical and information worlds, are likely very deep and more complex than realized. All that has even broader sense than usually realized because we are witnessing a radical shift in the main characterization of the current science in general. A shift from so called Galilean science dominated by mathematics, to the Informatics (based) science - an informatics methodology based science and technology.
Measuring windows NT: possibilities and limitations
Authors: Yasuhiro Endo, Margo I. Seltzer
Venue: Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop on The USENIX Windows NT Workshop 1997 (1997)

The majority of today's computing takes place on interactive systems that use a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Performance of these systems is unique in that "good performance" is a reflection of a user's perception. In this paper, we explain why this unique environment requires a new methodological approach. We describe a measurement/diagnostic tool currently under development and evaluate the feasibility of implementing such a tool under Windows NT. We then present several issues that must be resolved in order for Windows NT to become a popular research platform for this type of work.
Performance Evaluation of Vision-Based Navigation and Landing on a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Authors: David Hubbard, Bryan Morse, Colin Theodore, Mark Tischler, Timothy McLain
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (2007)

A Rotorcraft UAV provides an ideal experimental platform for vision-based navigation. This paper describes the flight tests of the US Army PALACE project, which implements Moravec's pseudo-normalized correlation tracking algorithm. The tracker uses the movement of the landing site in the camera, a laser range, and the aircraft attitude from an IMU to estimate the relative motion of the UAV. The position estimate functions as a GPS equivalent to enable the rotorcraft to maneuver without the aid of GPS.With GPS data as a baseline, tests were performed in simulation and in flight that measure the accuracy of the position estimation.
25 years of FIE Proceedings: a look through the bookshelf
Authors: E. W. Ernst
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference on 1995. Proceedings., 1995 vol 1. - Volume 01 (1995)

Summary form only given. The Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference was launched in 1971. As engineering educators, we participate in a process. The notion of a destination is antithetical to what we see as continuous improvement in all phases of our life, including education. The issues of 1971 are similar to the issues of 1995. Issues considered then were educational technology, continuing education and lifelong learning, resources, learning theories, motivation, rewards and students. These issues remain, and we have added quality issues, design and the Internet. Though the issues are relatively constant, the problems are not. A problem then was the availability and proper use of the overhead projector; now it is presentation software. A problem then was the transition from the slide rule to the calculator for individual calculations, now it is the personal computer. A problem then was to be sure that each student learned as an individual, now it is to develop a learning environment where teamwork and quality are major concerns. A problem then was design, and while we have made much progress, we still have work to do. A problem then was evaluation teaching effectiveness of faculty-it still is, but we are starting to make some progress. This conference has has provided an international forum for the exchange of ideas and accomplishments. The ideas have been publicly shared, criticized evaluated extended and improved. Awards have been presented that recognized major contributions of our colleagues, and have emphasized the importance of quality in engineering education for the future of our society.
A generalization of the maximum a posteriori training algorithm for mixture priors
Authors: E. R. Buhrke
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2000)

Prior information about the operating environment of a speech recognizer is often general and abstract. Frequently information such as the number of speakers with foreign accents or the number of callers using cellular phones is readily available. Incorporating this information during model training is difficult. This paper generalizes the popular MAP training algorithm derived by Gauvain and Lee (1994) so that more prior information can be utilized during training. The priors are in the form of mixture distributions with each mixture component representing a unique property of the data and the mixing weights defined by the a priori constraints. Using the training algorithms derived here it is shown that significant performance improvements can be obtained.
A Dynamic QoS Management for Next Generation of Services
Authors: H. Huynh, E. Lavinal, N. Simoni
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (2007)

Heterogeneity, distribution, mobility, all these factors induce changes in the way of conceiving services. Dynamicity and service virtualization are key needs. Service composition was established to be a first promising answer. Henceforth, in previous work, we proposed to combine different service components to create a Virtual Private Service Network (VPSN) providing a personalized global service. In this paper, we address the self-maintenance of these overlay service networks by proposing the use of Virtual Service Communities (VSCs) constituted of functionally equivalent service elements with differentiated levels of QoS. These VSCs are self-organized by using a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach. Our purpose is to proactively maintain the end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) to meet the Service Level Agreement. Automatic actions are started following QoS degradation in order to achieve autonomous management. A case study is described in order to illustrate our proposition and an implementation is presented to validate it.
Multi-stage redundancy reduction: effective utilisation of small protein data sets
Authors: John Hawkins, Mikael Bodén
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 workshop on Intelligent systems for bioinformatics - Volume 73 (2006)

In many important bioinformatics problems the data sets contain considerable redundancy due to the evolutionary processes which generate the data and biases in the data collection procedures. The standard practice in bioinformatics involves removing the redundancy such that there is no more than at most forty percent similarity between sequences in a data set. For small data sets this can dilute the already impoverished data beyond the boundary of practicality. One can choose to include all available data in the process by just ensuring that only the training and test samples have the required redundancy gap. However, this encourages overfitting of the model by exposure to a highly redundant training sets. We outline a process of multi-stage redundancy reduction, whereby the paucity of data can be effectively utilised without compromising the integrity of the model or the testing procedure.
Critical IS professional activities and skills/knowledge: A perspective of IS managers
Authors: Jen-Her Wu, Yi-Cheng Chen, Jack Chang
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2007)

This study utilized the activity competency model to investigate the perceived importance of critical professional activities and skills/knowledge required by three levels of information system (IS) managers. Our findings indicated that the perceived importance of critical IS professional activities were significantly different among the management levels, but not significantly different for various industry types. Carrying a critical IS activity out involves the use of a number of different skills and/or knowledge. A portfolio of the professional activities and the needed skills/knowledge at each management level are identified. The results of this study have implications for IS professional development and training. They can also serve as a guideline for recruiting the right IS managers and developing IS curriculums.
sMonitor: a non-intrusive client-perceived end-to-end performance monitor of secured internet services
Authors: Jianbin Wei, Cheng-Zhong Xu
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical Conference (2006)

End-to-end performance measurement is fundamental to building high-performance Internet services. While many Internet services often operate using HTTP over SSL/TLS, current monitors are limited to plaintext HTTP services. This paper presents sMonitor, a non-intrusive server-side end-to-end performance monitor that can monitor HTTPS services. The monitor passively collects live packet traces from a server site. It then uses a size-based analysis method on HTTP requests to infer characteristics of client accesses and measures client-perceived pageview response time in real time. We designed and implemented a prototype of sMonitor. Preliminary evaluations show measurement error of less than 5%.
On the Relationship between the Convergence Rates of Iterative and Continuous Processes
Authors: Raphael Hauser, Jelena Nedic´
Venue: SIAM Journal on Optimization (2007)

Considering iterative sequences that arise when approximate solutions $x_k$ to a numerical problem are updated by $x_{k+1} = x_k+v(x_k)$, where $v$ is a differentiable vector field, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for such discrete processes to converge to a stationary point of $v$ at different Q-rates in terms of a similar notion of fast convergence for the corresponding continuous processes.
Improved power-law detection of transients
Authors: Zhen Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2001. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2001)

A power-law statistic operating on DFT data has emerged as a basis for a remarkably robust detector of transient signals having unknown structure, location and strength. In this paper we offer a number of improvements to the original power-law detector. Specifically, the power-law detector requires that its data be pre-normalized and spectrally white; a CFAR and self-whitening version is developed and analyzed. Further, it is noted that transient signals tend to be contiguous both in temporal and frequency senses, and consequently new power-law detectors in the frequency and the wavelet domains are given. The resulting detectors offer exceptional performance and are extremely easy to implement. There are no parameters to tune, and they may be considered "plug-in" solutions to the transient detection problem.
The rendezvous algorithm: multiclass semi-supervised learning with Markov random walks
Authors: Arik Azran
Venue: Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Machine learning (2007)

We consider the problem of multiclass classification where both labeled and unlabeled data points are given. We introduce and demonstrate a new approach for estimating a distribution over the missing labels where data points are viewed as nodes of a graph, and pairwise similarities are used to derive a transition probability matrix P for a Markov random walk between them. The algorithm associates each point with a particle which moves between points according to P. Labeled points are set to be absorbing states of the Markov random walk, and the probability of each particle to be absorbed by the different labeled points, as the number of steps increases, is then used to derive a distribution over the associated missing label. A computationally efficient algorithm to implement this is derived and demonstrated on both real and artificial data sets, including a numerical comparison with other methods.