ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Neural Correlates of British Sign Language Comprehension: Spatial Processing Demands of Topographic Language
Authors: Mairéad Macsweeney
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2002)

In all signed languages used by deaf people, signs are executed in "sign space" in front of the body. Some signed sentences use this space to map detailed "real-world" spatial relationships directly. Such sentences can be considered to exploit sign space "topographically." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the extent to which increasing the topographic processing demands of signed sentences was reflected in the differential recruitment of brain regions in deaf and hearing native signers of the British Sign Language. When BSL signers performed a sentence anomaly judgement task, the occipito-temporal junction was activated bilaterally to a greater extent for topographic than nontopographic processing. The differential role of movement in the processing of the two sentence types may account for this finding. In addition, enhanced activation was observed in the left inferior and superior parietal lobules during processing of topographic BSL sentences. We argue that the left parietal lobe is specifically involved in processing the precise configuration and location of hands in space to represent objects, agents, and actions. Importantly, no differences in these regions were observed when hearing people heard and saw English translations of these sentences. Despite the high degree of similarity in the neural systems underlying signed and spoken languages, exploring the linguistic features which are unique to each of these broadens our understanding of the systems involved in language comprehension.
Certain questions in solving block nonlinear optimization problems with coupling variables
Authors: Yu. P. Laptin, N. G. Zhurbenko
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2006)

A decomposition scheme for block nonlinear convex programming problems with coupling variables is considered. The possibility is examined of using approximated solutions of subproblems for generating subgradients of the functions that appear in the master problem. A regularization of the original problem that simplifies the master problem is considered.
An Effective Stratified Sampling Scheme for Environment Maps with Median Cut Method
Authors: Xing Mei, Marc Jaeger, Baogang Hu
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (2006)

Environment maps are extensively used as natural light sources in realistic rendering. We propose a stratified sampling scheme for environment maps by first stratifying the maps into a set of rectangular regions with Median Cut method, then estimating the contribution of the regions with Monte Carlo integration techniques. In this way, illumination, surface reflectance and spatial distribution are all taken into consideration for the generation of the light samples. Compared with the existing biased lighting techniques, the presented scheme produces unbiased rendering results with less noise and better shadow boundaries, particularly at low sampling rates. The proposed spatial distribution of the samples also helps to overcome the sampleclumping problem in traditional illumination-based importance sampling method. Experimental results indicate that the scheme is fast, simple to implement and effective.
Robust Tracking and Stereo Matching under Variable Illumination
Authors: Jingdan Zhang, Leonard McMillan, Jingyi Yu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 1 (2006)

Illumination inconsistencies cause serious problems for classical computer vision applications such as tracking and stereo matching. We present a new approach to model illumination variations using an Illumination Ratio Map (IRM). An IRM computes the intensity ratio of corresponding points in an image pair. We formulate IRM recovery as a Markov network, which assumes spatially varying illumination changes can be modeled as a locally smooth function with boundaries. We show that the IRM Markov network can be easily incorporated into low-level vision problems, such as tracking and stereo matching, by integrating IRM estimation with the optical flow field/disparity map solution process. This leads to a unified Markov network. We develop an iterative optimization algorithm based on Belief Propagation to efficiently recover the illumination ratio map and the optical field/disparity map at the same time. Experiments demonstrate that our methods are robust and reliable.
Encoding multimedia presentations for user preferences and limited environments
Authors: T. Lemlouma, N. Layaida
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 1 (2003)

This paper discusses a new approach of generating TV-like multimedia presentations that are adapted to the target user preferences and to limited devices. Three main points are discussed: 1) the encoding of video presentations from a SMIL specification, 2) the adaptation of the video content based on the user preferences, and 3) the delivery of adapted multimedia presentations. The used architecture includes a content server, an adaptation proxy and a set of small devices in the form of personal device assistants (PDA). These devices request the content through a wireless network. In order to show how the system behaves regarding the user preferences and capabilities, two negotiation dimensions are considered: the user language and the memory capability of the device. The first dimension is used to generate a content that can be understood by the target user, e.g. a video with subtitles written in the preferred language. The second dimension is chosen to solve the problem of the system blocking that usually happens when limited devices access rich multimedia presentations over the network.
An assessment of systems and software engineering scholars and institutions (2000-2004)
Authors: T. H. Tse, T. Y. Chen, Robert L. Glass
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2006)

This paper presents the findings of a five-year study of the top scholars and institutions in the Systems and Software Engineering field, as measured by the quantity of papers published in the journals of the field in 2000-2004. The top scholar is Hai Zhuge of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the top institution is Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. This paper is part of an ongoing study, conducted annually, that identifies the top 15 scholars and institutions in the most recent five-year period.
Root estimator of states
Authors: Y. I. Bogdanov
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Physics and Control - Volume 3 (2003)

A fundamental problem of statistical data analysis, distribution density estimation by experimental data, is considered. A new method with optimal asymptotic behavior, the root state estimator, is developed. The method proposed may be applied to its full extent to solve the statistical inverse problem of quantum mechanics, namely, estimating the psi function on the basis of the results of mutually complementing experiments. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Applying Protocol Analysis to Security Device Interfaces
Authors: Jonathan Herzog
Venue: IEEE Security and Privacy (2006)

Despite best efforts, general-purpose computing platforms and servers continue to be insecure. Due totheir complexity, furthermore, it seems unlikely that a completely secure system can be built in the foreseeable future. Fortunately, a promising alternative exists: the use of trusted cryptographic devicesand subsystems. Like smart cards, such devices hold and use secret cryptographic keys on behalf of a largergeneral-purpose system. Yet these devices are more than simply cryptographic coprocessors--they areresponsible for the secrecy of their keys and will withhold them from even the system itself. If the deviceis also tamper-resistant (which is common), its keys will (hopefully) be used only in ways the device permits.
UNIX on a micro
Authors: Cornelia Boldyreff
Venue: ACM SIGSMALL Newsletter (1981)

The earliest version of UNIX (circa 1969--70) developed at Bill Laboratories ran on DEC PDP-7 and PDP-9 computers. It was modeled on the Multics system; the operating system resulting from a joint development project undertaken in the mid-sixties by Bell Labs, MIT and General Electric (now Honeywell) which at the time it was conceived, was one of the first operating systems to be largely written in a high level language. The PDP-11 version of UNIX became operational in 1971. Dennis M Richie and Ken Thompson, joint developers of UNIX, cite its most important achievement was the demonstration that a powerful operating system for interactive use need not be expensive in either hardware of software development. They claim the main system software was developed in less than two man years. This was not done at the expense of operating facilities as the users of UNIX will testify; the system is characterised by its simplicity, elegance and ease of use.[1]
Dynamic Cloth Animation in Virtual Environments
Authors: Liu Zhibin, Li Zhanli
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Information Visualization (2006)

Dynamic cloth animation is an important problem invirtual reality, in which the reality and real-time effectbecomes the main problem to resolve. To achieve thereality of animation, two aspects ofresearch have beendone. The mass-spring model is one of the main adoptedmodels, hut it has the "super elastic " effect, In this paper, compared to the previous method of deal with this problem, a feasible method is proposed. Besides, how to design wind is also a keyproblem, in thispaper, a fitnction and an algorithm for wind is also proposed. To achieve the real-time effect, the idea of bounding boxes hierarchy is applied in collision detection and selfcollision detection. For collision detection, the authors describes a detailed algorithm; for self-collision, an algorithm is described that convert collision detection to self-collision detection. The simulation is executed with an average pc, and a live real-time result is achieved.
Local Steerable Phase (LSP) Feature for Face Representation and Recognition
Authors: ZHANG Xiaoxun, JIA Yunde
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

In this paper, we propose a novel local steerable phase (LSP) feature extracted from the face image using steerable filter for face representation and recognition. Steerable filter is a kind of oriented filters. It is rotated very efficiently by taking a suitable linear combination of basis filters and allows adaptive control over phase as well as orientation. Phase information provided by steerable filter is locally stable with respect to scale, noise and brightness changes. Furthermore, steerable filter is implemented within a Gaussian pyramid to make use of discriminative power in the scale-space of face images. Each face is represented as multiple "steerablefaces" of different scales and orientations. With simple down-sampling, all the steerablefaces are concatenated to an augmented feature vector for evaluating similarity between face images. A nearest-neighbor classifier based on local weighted phase-correlation is used for final decision rule. Experimental results on FERET and XM2VTS databases demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
Variationally universal hashing
Authors: Ted Krovetz, Phillip Rogaway
Venue: Information Processing Letters (2006)

The strongest well-known measure for the quality of a universal hash-function family H is its being ε-strongly universal, which measures, for randomly chosen h ∈ H, one's inability to guess h(m') even if h(m) is known for some m ≠ m' We give example applications in which this measure is too weak, and we introduce a stronger measure for the quality of a hash-function family, ε-variationally universal, which measures one's inability to distinguish h(m') from a random value even if h(m) is known for some m ≠ m'. We explain the utility of this notion and provide an approach for constructing efficiently compu table ε-VU hash-function families.
A hazard analysis of human factors in safety-critical systems engineering
Authors: Les Chambers
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Australian workshop on Safety critical systems and software - Volume 55 (2006)

Safety incident studies often cite human factors as a major cause of accidents. At Bhopal in 1984 human error - the failure to follow safe operating procedures - instigated the deaths of thousands of people from cyanide poisoning. In this case, human factors introduced a common cause fault that disabled four separate safety measures designed to prevent cyanide gas from venting to the atmosphere.From this and other case studies I have taken the view that the competence and motivation of people responsible for the design and operation of safety-critical systems is our first and last line of defence against loss of life and property. The circumstances and influences that cause people to embrace or ignore best practice in safety-critical systems engineering invites detailed analysis.In this paper I assert that lack of competence and safety awareness in developers and operators is a hazard that can have catastrophic consequences. However, by taking a risk management approach we can reduce the severity and frequency of accidents by developing insights into why individuals and organisations might choose to adopt international standards for best practice in safety-related systems engineering, and why they might not.
Deploying Digital Media Libraries in Multi-Service Access Networks
Authors: Koert Vlaeminck, Filip De Turck, Bart Dhoedt, Piet Demeester
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006)

A current important trend is the introduction of new services in the access and aggregation network, close to the end user. A major opportunity for such service enabled access networks is providing users with fast and reliable storage, allowing them to transparently access and share their digital media library anytime, anywhere, while guaranteeing data retention. An important issue in deploying such a service is where to put the storage servers, in order to minimize deployment cost without sacrificing performance. This paper presents and evaluates two algorithms for solving the storage server placement problem, minimizing the deployment cost while guaranteeing a low delay for accessing the digital media libraries from any access node. The base algorithm, referred to as SSPA (Storage Server Placement Algorithm), assumes the access and aggregation network has unlimited bandwidth. SSPA provides a lower bound on the required number of servers, respecting a maximum delay constraint. The extended algorithm, SSPA, solves the storage server placement problem, respecting both a maximum delay constraint and bandwidth constraints of the network links. It will be shown that the algorithms produce close to optimal results relatively fast.
Neuroscience: New Insights for AI?
Authors: Tomaso Poggio
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Understanding the processing of information in our cortex is a significant part of understanding how the brain works and of understanding intelligence itself, arguably one of the greatest problems in science today. In particular, our visual abilities are computationally amazing and we are still far from imitating them with computers. Thus, visual cortex may well be a good proxy for the rest of the cortex and indeed for intelligence itself. But despite enormous progress in the physiology and anatomy of the visual cortex, our understanding of the underlying computations remains fragmentary. This position paper is based on the very recent, surprising realization that we may be on the verge of developing an initial quantitative theory of visual cortex, faithful to known physiology and able to mimic human performance in difficult recognition tasks, outperforming current computer vision systems. The proof of principle was provided by a preliminary model that, spanning several levels from biophysics to circuitry to the highest system level, describes information processing in the feedforward pathway of the ventral stream of primate visual cortex. The thesis of this paper is that -- finally -- neurally plausible computational models are beginning to provide powerful new insights into the key problem of how the brain works, and how to implement learning and intelligence in machines.
Viscosity methods for zeroes of accretive operators
Authors: Paul-Emile Maingé
Venue: Journal of Approximation Theory (2006)

This paper deals with the general iteration method Xn+1 := αn Tn xn + (1-αn) JrnAxn, for calculating a particular zero of A, an m-accretive operator in a Banach space X, Tn being a sequence of nonexpansive self-mappings in X. Under suitable conditions on the parameters and X, we state strong and weak convergence results of (Xn). We also show how to compute a common zero of two m-accretive operators in X.
The Attacking Method for DC Components Watermarking
Authors: Pei-Wei Tsai, Shu-Chuan Chu, Ching-Sung Lu, Jui-Fang Chang, Hsing-Yuan Liao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia (2006)

In this paper we present two methods to remove the watermark from the carrier image, which is embedded in dc components of the discrete cosine transform based image using the method presented by Huang et al. [1] The first method, which we present, removes the watermark via varying the energies in frequency domain and redeeming the luminance in spatial domain; the second method we present removes the watermark through diversifying the intensity of dc components in transform domain. Both the two methods can remove the watermark and avoid to be detected that the image was hidden a watermark by the detection criterion. In addition, though we cleaned the watermark from the watermarked image, the PSNR of the cleaned image (compared with the original carrier image) is still high.
Hybrid Function-Based Shape Modeling and Web Visualization
Authors: Alexei Sourin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Cyberworlds (2006)

We have proposed and implemented function-based extensions of X3D and its predecessor VRML which allow for defining time-dependent geometric shapes, their appearance and transformations with analytically defined parametric, implicit and explicit functions. The function-defined shapes can be used together with the standard X3D and VRML shapes. Besides defining shapes by analytical functions, we have developed interactive function-based shape modeling tools. We have also extended these interactive shape modeling tools to work on the Grid. Function-defined models can be efficiently rendered at the Media Grid Portal.
Intraclass Retrieval of Nonrigid 3D Objects: Application to Face Recognition
Authors: Georgios Passalis Ioannis A. Kakadiaris
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2007)

As the size of the available collections of 3D objects grows, database transactions become essential for their management with the key operation being retrieval (query). Large collections are also precategorized into classes so that a single class contains objects of the same type (e.g., human faces, cars, four-legged animals). It is shown that general object retrieval methods are inadequate for intraclass retrieval tasks. We advocate that such intraclass problems require a specialized method that can exploit the basic class characteristics in order to achieve higher accuracy. A novel 3D object retrieval method is presented which uses a parameterized annotated model of the shape of the class objects, incorporating its main characteristics. The annotated subdivision-based model is fitted onto objects of the class using a deformable model framework, converted to a geometry image and transformed into the wavelet domain. Object retrieval takes place in the wavelet domain. The method does not require user interaction, achieves high accuracy, is efficient for use with large databases, and is suitable for nonrigid object classes. We apply our method to the face recognition domain, one of the most challenging intraclass retrieval tasks. We used the Face Recognition Grand Challenge v2 database, yielding an average verification rate of 95.2 percent at 10-3 false accept rate. The latest results of our work can be found at http://www.cbl.uh.edu/UR8D/.
Fifteen years of functional pearls
Authors: Richard S. Bird
Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (2006)

In 1991, when the Journal of Functional Programming was inaugurated, the editors, Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler, asked me to contribute a regular column to be called Functional Pearls. The idea was to emulate the very successful series of essays that Jon Bentley had written under the title Programming Pearls in the Communications of the ACM. A possible alternative model for the column was Martin Rem's Small Programming Exercises that appeared regularly in the Science of Computer Programming in the 1980s. In Rem's articles, various programming tasks were posed in one issue, and solved in the subsequent one. It was felt that similar material could be adapted to a functional style, using equational reasoning rather than the Dijkstra-Hoare framework to derive the final product. After all, one reason that functional programming stimulated the interest of many at that time was that it was good for equational reasoning, a slogan captured in Mark Jone's GOFER system (Good For Equational Reasoning).I agreed to the suggestion, but only under the proviso that other contributors to the column should be sought. Counting to the end of the present year, 2006, about 64 pearls will have appeared in JFP, of which I have written 14. There are also various pearls that have been presented at ICFP and at MPC (Mathematics of Program Construction). The pearls range in content, from (hopefully) instructive exercises in program calculation - my own area of interest, to attractive presentations of new functional data structures - of which Ralf Hinze and Chris Okasaki were the main contributors, as well as interesting algorithms in their own right, such as Runciman's Lazy wheel sieves, and Huet's Zipper.This talk will review a little of the history of Functional Pearls, and tentatively try to suggest what ingredients make a good pearl and how pearls differ from normal research papers. Indeed, my brief from the Program Chair for this talk was expressed as follows: "Well done Functional Pearls are often the highlight of an ICFP conference, but many of the submitted ones somehow miss the mark, by being too trivial, too complicated, or somehow not quite the elegant solution one hopes for. So it would be interesting to hear about your experiences as to what makes a good one and how to go about creating it.Having accepted this daunting commission, and being mindful of Horace's remark that good advice should be short, I am now busily engaged in finding a pearl that is not too trivial, nor too complicated, and is sufficiently elegant to serve as a decent example, both to illustrate the talk and to provide some technical content.