ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Hmm-based non-intrusive speech quality and implementation of viterbi score distribution and hiddenness based measures to improve the performance of speech recognition
Authors: Robert F. Kubichek
Venue:  (2006)

This research focuses on techniques that could contribute towards improving the performance of objective speech quality measurement and computer speech recognition. The traditional method of speech quality measurement is time consuming and expensive. Fast and inexpensive computer-based methods have recently been developed, which assess quality by conducting a frame-by-frame comparison between the time-aligned input and output speech. These methods are referred to as input-output based quality (IOQ) measurement methods. In some situations the input speech is not accessible or is corrupted to serve as a reference. In these cases the quality measure is performed without using the input speech, and is referred to as output-based quality (OBQ) assessment. In this research, the reference and output speech records are modeled by using hidden Markov models (HMM). Although good performance was achieved on some test datasets, the algorithm does not perform consistently enough to be useful for real-world applications. In addition, the different initializations of the model parameters yield high variation in OBQ performance. Therefore, an effective measure is required to predict HMM effectiveness in order to select an appropriately trained model. This research investigates the Viterbi score distribution as a measure of HMM effectiveness. Experiments show that the performance of the HMM-based OBQ algorithm does not have a direct relationship with the Viterbi score. As another application, I extend Viterbi score distribution-based HMM selection to the task of isolated-word speech recognition to seek better performance. Conventional wisdom is that a model with higher Viterbi score should perform better than one with lower score, however this relationship has not previously been well documented. This research empirically shows that the classification rate is independent of the Viterbi score. The research also investigates a method to limit the hiddenness of an HMM, and explores applications in HMM-based OBQ and speech recognition. Test results show that decreasing the hiddenness of both the ergodic and left-right HMMs degrades the performance of the isolated-word speech recognizer. The final part of this research evaluates HMM-based distance measures to improve recognition rate.
Token Exchange System as incentive mechanism for e-Science Grid
Authors: Arun Anandasivam, Dirk Neumann
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (2007)

E-Science has a large demand for Grid resources. Research institutes of physics are interested in sharing their computational resources. Currently, Grid resources are not shared between the institutes over a billing system. It is based on an oral agreement. A high communication overhead at a political level is required to start and maintain cooperation. In this paper we propose a mechanism called Token Exchange System (TES). Our aim is to facilitate exchange of resources among the different research institutes without any face-to-face agreement. Furthermore, the mechanism has to set the right incentives so that members will share their resources fairly and free-riders are avoided. This approach is the combination of reputation mechanism and the payment mechanism in one coherent system. Since the e-Science community abhors real money as an exchange mechanism, this approach provides a solution to set incentives like payment mechanisms and to implement the advantages of reputation mechanisms.
Bijective counting of Kreweras walks and loopless triangulations
Authors: Olivier Bernardi
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (2007)

We consider lattice walks in the plane starting at the origin, remaining in the first quadrant i,j>=0 and made of West, South and North-East steps. In 1965, Germain Kreweras discovered a remarkably simple formula giving the number of these walks (with prescribed length and endpoint). Kreweras' proof was very involved and several alternative derivations have been proposed since then. But the elegant simplicity of the counting formula remained unexplained. We give the first purely combinatorial explanation of this formula. Our approach is based on a bijection between Kreweras walks and triangulations with a distinguished spanning tree. We obtain simultaneously a bijective way of counting loopless triangulations.
Bio-Medical Application of Information Systems
Authors: Tetsuya Matsuda, Akira Amano, Shinobu Mizuta
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Informatics Research for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure (2007)

Our laboratory focuses on the applications of information systems to biomedical researches in the COE program. We have constructed 3D morphology database system of human embryo and biomedical simulation system of the heart. The 3D morphology database system is assembled from a huge collection of human embryo samples and the 3D morphology is derived from real measurement data. By searching document data concerning embryo, parents and pregnancy, user can observe 3D morphological data of the embryo and compare them. For the simulation of the heart, we have designed and constructed a system dedicated to biomedical simulation by taking account of hierarchical structures of biological system from molecular scale to body scale. The wall motion simulation of the heart using our biomedical simulation system is based on cellular level model of cardiac muscle and physiological behavior of heart can be reproduced from cell to organ level.
Active names: flexible location and transport of wide-area resources
Authors: Amin Vahdat, Michael Dahlin, Thomas Anderson, Amit Aggarwal
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems - Volume 2 (1999)

In this paper, we explore flexible name resolution as a way of supporting extensibility for wide-area distributed services. Our approach, called Active Names, maps names to a chain of mobile programs that can customize how a service is located and how its results are transformed and transported back to the client. To illustrate the properties of our system, we implement prototypes of server selection based on end-to-end performance measurements, location-independent data transformation, and caching of composable active objects and demonstrate up to a five-fold performance improvement to end users. We show how these new services are developed, composed, and secured in our framework. Finally, we develop a set of algorithms to control how mobile Active Name programs are mapped onto available wide-area resources to optimize performance and availability.
Towards a Theor etical Fr amework for Studying the Effect of Mobile- ICT on Coor dination
Authors: David Tilson
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

The use of mobile information and communications technologies is increasing rapidly in modern organizations. We present a theory based framework for studying the effect of these technologies on coordination in organizations. Four temporal workstyles that embed the key contingencies of dependence and uncertainty from organizational theory, and a set of fundamental question about coordination and mobility, provide the basis for the framework. We apply the framework to four mini-cases of coordination that include some element of mobility to gain initial insight into the effects of m-ICTs. The next steps include a more extensive meta-study of the literature to bolster these initial findings and to provide a foundation for the creation of a design theory.
Low power real-time programmable DSP development platform for digital hearing aids
Authors: T. Stetzler
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1999)

This paper presents a new low power binaural wearable digital hearing aid platform based on the Texas Instruments TMS320C5000 fixed point digital signal processor. This platform is a real-time system capable of processing two input speech channels at a 32 kHz sampling rate for each channel and driving a stereo headphone output. It provides for frequency shaping, suppression, multiband amplitude compression, frequency dependent interaural time delay algorithms. Since the platform is a programmable solution capable of running at 1.8 V for MIPS intensive research and 1 V for actual hearing aid implementation, this platform will enable further research into improving the quality of life for the hearing impaired.
Merging dynamic functionality: integration of XML transformations
Authors: James Bailey, Ce Dong
Venue: Proceedings of the fourth Asia-Pacific conference on Comceptual modelling - Volume 67 (2007)

Integration of XML data is an increasingly important problem and many methods have recently been developed. In this talk, we examine the related and more challenging task of how to integrate for XSLT programs. XSLT is a primary language for XML transformation. Program integration can be particularly important for server-side XSLT application, where it is necessary to generate a global XSLT program, that is a combination of some initial XSLT programs and operates over a newly integrated XML database. This global program should inherit as much functionality from the initial XSLT programs as possible, since designing a brand new global XSLT program from scratch could be expensive, slow and error prone, especially when the initial XSLT programs are large and/or complicated. However, it is a challenging task to develop methods to support XSLT integration and a number of difficulties need to be resolved. In this talk, we report on our recent work, which aims to develop a novel framework for semiautomatic integration of XSLT programs.
An Efficient Data Transmission Protocol in a Wireless Sensor-Actuator Network
Authors: Kiyohiro Morita, Kenichi Watanabe, Naohiro Hayashibara, Makoto Takizawa
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (2007)

In a wireless sensor-actuator network (WSAN), sensor nodes and actuator nodes are interconnected with wireless channels. Messages sent by sensor nodes might be lost due to collision and noise if multiple sensor nodes simultaneously send the messages in a wireless channel. In sensing applications, sensed values are in nature required to be delivered to actuator nodes with some time constraints. If a message is detected to be lost by some receiver nodes, the sender node retransmits the message to the receiver nodes. It takes at least three rounds to detect and retransmit a lost message since the message is sent. The more number of messages are retransmitted, the more number of messages collide. We have to reduce the number of messages retransmitted to realize the efficient data transmission. We newly propose a redundant data transmission (RT) protocol where data in a message m_1 is redundantly forwarded to the destination node by another message m_2 sent by the receiver node of the message m_1. Even if the message m_1 is lost, the destination node can receive the data in the message m_1 if the destination node receives the message m_2 since the message m_2 carries the data in the message m_1. We evaluate the RT protocol compared with the CSMA protocol in terms of how much sensing data a node can receive in presence of messages loss.
Performance of Low-Level Motion Estimation Methods for Confocal Microscopy of Plant Cells in vivo
Authors: T. Roberts, S. McKenna, N. Wuyts, T. Valentine, A. Bengough
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing (2007)

The performance of various low-level motion estimation methods applied to fluorescence labelled growing cellular structures imaged using confocal laser scanning microscopy is investigated. This is a challenging and unusual domain for motion estimation methods. A selection of methods are discussed that can be contrasted in terms of how much spatial or temporal contextual information is used. The Lucas Kanade feature tracker, a spatially and temporally localised method, was, as one would expect, accurate around resolvable structure. It was not able to track the smaller, repetitive cell structure in the root tip and was somewhat prone to identifying spurious features. This approach is improved by developing a full multi-frame, robust, Bayesian method, and it is demonstrated that by using extra frames with motion constraints reduces such errors. Next, spatially global methods are discussed, including robust variational smoothing and Markov Random Field (MRF) modelling. A key conclusion that is drawn from investigation of these methods is that generic low-level (robust) smoothing functions do not provide good results in this application and that this is probably due to the large regions with little stable structure. Furthermore, contrary to recently reported successes, graph cuts and loopy belief propagation for MAP estimation of the MRF labels provided often poor and inconsistent estimates. The results suggest the need for greater emphasis on temporal smoothing for generic low-level motion estimation tools and more task specific, spatial constraints, perhaps in the form of high level models in order to accurately recover motion from such data. Finally, the form of the estimated growth is briefly discussed and related to contemporary biological models. We hope that this paper will assist non-specialists in applying state-of-the-art methods to this form of data.
Evolving fixed-weight networks for learning robots
Authors: E. Tuci, M. Quinn, I. Harvey
Venue: Proceedings of the Evolutionary Computation on 2002. CEC '02. Proceedings of the 2002 Congress - Volume 02 (2002)

Research in the field of evolutionary robotics has begun to investigate the evolution of learning controllers for autonomous robots. Research in this area has achieved promising results, but research to date has focussed on the evolution of neural networks incorporating synaptic plasticity. There has been little investigation of possible alternatives, although the importance of exploring such alternatives is recognised. This paper describes a first step towards addressing this issue. Using networks with fixed synaptic weights and 'leaky integrator' neurons, we evolve robot controllers capable of learning and thus exploiting regularities occurring within their environment.
Survey and Review
Authors: Fadil Santosa
Venue: SIAM Review (2007)

Cancer is scary business. Just think of the U.S. statistics&mdash;around 1.5 million new cases per year, and over half a million deaths. It is also expensive business. The NIH estimated the cost of cancer to the U.S. economy to be over &dollar;200 billion, of which &dollar;78 billion is direct medical costs and the rest is loss of productivity. It is so much in our consciousness that it is reflected in popular TV shows. In the first two seasons of the hit hospital drama &ldquo;House,&rdquo; almost twenty episodes dealt with patients diagnosed with or suspected to have a tumor or cancer. There is good news. The five-year relative survival rate has gone up from 51&percnt; for the years 1975-1977 to 66&percnt; for 1996-2002. Through research, scientists have developed better diagnostic methods and treatments for cancer. Mathematical modeling is central in the search for the cure for cancer. It can guide laboratory investigations and provide valuable insights into the development of effective treatments. This issue&rsquo;s Survey and Review article, &ldquo;Mathematical Models of Avascular Tumor Growth&rdquo; by Roose, Chapman, and Maini, provides a valuable introduction to the subject of tumor growth modeling. The reader is given a state-of-the-art review of the two main approaches to modeling&mdash;continuous and discrete. The continuous model involves a system of partial differential equations, while the discrete model is a cellular automaton. We hope that this well-written paper will inspire more mathematicians to join the effort to find a cure for cancer.
Remote testing and diagnosis of System-on-Chips using network management frameworks
Authors: Oussama Laouamri, Chouki Aktouf
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe (2007)

This paper presents a new approach that allows remote testing and diagnosis of complex (Systems-on-Chip) and embedded IP cores. The approach extends both on-chip design-for-test (DFT) architectures and network management protocols to take full benefits from existing networking infrastructures. By running intensive experimentation on ITC'99 and ITC'02 design benchmarks, the efficiency of the proposed testing and diagnosis methodology is analyzed.
Exploring the Adoption, Utility, and Social Influences of Social Bookmarking in a Corporate Environment
Authors: Laurie E. Damianos, Donna Cuomo, John Griffith, David M. Hirst, James Smallwood
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

This paper describes an ongoing technology investigation to assess the value and utility of social bookmarking on a corporate intranet. We hypothesize that social bookmarking would be useful in this environment for resource management, information sharing and discovery, expert finding, and social networking. We discuss features of the prototype system deployed and early analysis of findings on adoption, usage, and social influences. We conclude with our challenges and plans for future development and integration into the enterprise.
Reducing unwanted traffic in a backbone network
Authors: Kuai Xu, Zhi-Li Zhang, Supratik Bhattacharyya
Venue: Proceedings of the Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet on Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet Workshop (2005)

This paper studies the techniques a backbone ISP can employ to reduce unwanted traffic on its network. For this purpose, we extract likely sources of exploit (thus unwanted) traffic from packet traces collected on backbone links using an Internet traffic behavior profiling methodology we developed earlier. We first study the characteristics of exploit traffic from several aspects, such as network origins and severity. Based on these characteristics, we propose several heuristic rules that an ISP may pursue for reducing unwanted traffic, and evaluate their cost and performance. Using packet traces collected from backbone links, we demonstrate that simple blocking strategies could potentially reduce substantial exploit traffic in a backbone network.
Persistent Code Caching: Exploiting Code Reuse Across Executions and Applications
Authors: Vijay Janapa Reddi, Dan Connors, Robert Cohn, Michael D. Smith
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (2007)

Run-time compilation systems are challenged with the task of translating a program's instruction stream while maintaining low overhead. While software managed code caches are utilized to amortize translation costs, they are ineffective for programs with short run times or large amounts of cold code. Such program characteristics are prevalent in real-life computing environments, ranging from Graphical User Interface (GUI) programs to large-scale applications such as database management systems. Persistent code caching addresses these issues. It is described and evaluated in an industry-strength dynamic binary instrumentation system - Pin. The proposed approach improves the intra-execution model of code reuse by storing and reusing translations across executions, thereby achieving inter-execution persistence. Dynamically linked programs leverage inter-application persistence by using persistent translations of library code generated by other programs. New translations discovered across executions are automatically accumulated into the persistent code caches, thereby improving performance over time. Inter-execution persistence improves the performance of GUI applications by nearly 90%, while inter-application persistence achieves a 59% improvement. In more specialized uses, the SPEC2K INT benchmark suite experiences a 26% improvement under dynamic binary instrumentation. Finally, a 400% speedup is achieved in translating the Oracle database in a regression testing environment.
Predicate Elimination Technique in Binary Translation for IA-64 Architecture
Authors: Zong-Yu Song, Ming Su
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence--Workshops (2006)

EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architectures, such as the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), support novel features such as explicit instruction-level parallelism and predicated instructions. While these features promise to make code more efficient, the fact that these new architectural features means that EPIC code is more difficult to analyze than code for more traditional architectures. This paper describes a technique for removing predication instructions from optimized binary programs in a way that is guaranteed to preserve program semantics, and thereby improve the quality of binary translation for IA-64.
An Abstract Decision Procedure for Satisfiability in the Theory of Recursive Data Types
Authors: Clark Barrett, Igor Shikanian, Cesare Tinelli
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2007)

The theory of recursive data types is a valuable modeling tool for software verification. In the past, decision procedures have been proposed for both the full theory and its universal fragment. However, previous work has been limited in various ways. In this paper, we present a general algorithm for the universal fragment. The algorithm is presented declaratively as a set of abstract rules which are terminating, sound, and complete. We show how other algorithms can be realized as strategies within our general framework. Finally, we propose a new strategy and give experimental results showing that it performs well in practice.
Design competitions: does "multidisciplinary" contribute to the team building experience?
Authors: M. L. Davis
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1996)

Design-and-build competitions are useful in teaching the creative and practical aspects of engineering design. The civil engineering students at Michigan State University participate in three design competitions: the Waste-management Education and Research Consortium (WERC) International Environmental Design contest, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Concrete Canoe Competition, and the American Institute of Steel Construction/ASCE Steel Bridge Competition. Each competition offers a different level of multidisciplinary experience. The environmental competition demands consideration of business, economic, regulatory, health, safety, and community relations aspects of design alternatives. The concrete canoe competition requires consideration of a variety of subdisciplines of civil engineering such as hydrodynamics, materials engineering, and construction management. The steel bridge contest provides virtually no multidisciplinary interaction. The nature of each contest, size of project team, degree of faculty involvement, resource commitment and the mechanics of team building are presented. The value of the multidisciplinary aspect of each competition in team building is assessed.