ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Developing the `Ouch-o-Meter' to Teach Safe and Effective Use of Pressure for Palpation
Authors: Sarah Baillie, Andrew Crossan, Neil Forrest, Stephen May
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Haptics: Perception, Devices and Scenarios (2008)

Many clinical examinations involve palpation and part of the diagnostic process depends on the application of pressure. Teaching and learning such skills is difficult especially for internal examinations. A modification to a veterinary virtual reality (VR) simulator, the Haptic Cow, was planned to teach safe and effective use of pressure for bovine pregnancy diagnosis. Expert technique was captured when veterinarians performed pregnancy diagnosis in a simulated environment. The information is being used to calibrate a pressure indicator, the `Ouch-o-meter' that together with palpation profiles will provide guidance for students.
Dimension Reduction for Mixtures of Exponential Families
Authors: Shotaro Akaho
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Part I (2008)

Dimension reduction for a set of distribution parameters has been important in various applications of datamining. The exponential family PCA has been proposed for that purpose, but it cannot be directly applied to mixture models that do not belong to an exponential family. This paper proposes a method to apply the exponential family PCA to mixture models. A key idea is to embed mixtures into a space of an exponential family. The problem is that the embedding is not unique, and the dimensionality of parameter space is not constant when the numbers of mixture components are different. The proposed method finds a sub-optimal solution by linear programming formulation.
An agent-based framework to support collaborative product design
Authors: Ming Xi Tang
Venue:  (2007)

This thesis investigates the requirements of collaborative product design and proposes a new agent-based framework to support design collaboration by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the management and coordination of collaborative product design processes. Collaborative design creates added-values in the product development process by bringing the benefits of teamwork and cooperation. However, its success is undermined by difficulties arising from the differences between heterogeneous system architectures and information structures. Agent technology is a promising approach to analyzing, designing, and implementing industrial distributed systems. The hypothesis of this research is that a collaborative product design framework implemented by taking an agent-based approach can assist human designers effectively and efficiently in collaborative design processes. Based on the investigation of collaborative design processes, the requirements for a collaborative product design framework are identified. Then, a new agent-based framework is proposed and it relocates designers and supporting agents in a unified knowledge representation scheme. In order to model the constantly changing design process and design rationales, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM) and a Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed to maintain the consistency of product data and assist designers in making good decisions. The CPDM is established by extending the traditional feature-based parametric Product Data Model (PDM) to include information related to the management and coordination of collaborative product design processes. The CDPM takes a constraint-oriented approach to modelling the collaborative design process because, in product design, most of the design requirements can be represented in computational design constraints. Based on the proposed system architecture, CPDM and CDPM, a prototype system is implemented. The results of design experiments using the implemented prototype system demonstrate how the proposed framework improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the management and coordination of a collaborative product design process. This research contributes to the development of new tools supporting collaborative product design using computational agents in an integrated framework. The implemented framework with product design examples demonstrated the advantages of using agent technology to achieve better design cooperation, coordination, response, desired modularity, and improved software reusability in the process of product design collaboration.
Development of a 3D atmospheric radiative transfer model
Authors: Zhifeng Lu, Ge Li, Gang Guo, Kedi Huang
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on Automatic Control, Modelling & Simulation (2008)

The 3D atmospheric radiative transfer model is established based on MODTRAN4. Moreover, the methods of calculating the ratio of atmospheric transmission, path radiation and single scattering solar radiation are presented. This 3D model is running by using the spectral database generated by MODTRAN4. It can handle attenuation of infrared radiation through the 3D atmosphere when target is below 60km.
Clustering Using Normalized Path-Based Metric
Authors: Jundi Ding, Runing Ma, Songcan Chen, Jingyu Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks, Part II (2008)

In this paper, we propose a normalized path-based metric based on an introduced neighborhood density index which can sufficiently exploit the local density "revealed" by data. The metric axioms (positive definite property, symmetry and triangular inequality) are strictly proved in theory. Using this idea of path, we further devise a heuristic clustering algorithm which can perform the elongated structure extraction, uneven lighting background isolation, grains of tiny objects segmentation and figure-ground separation. In particular, when the pairwise distances between data are given, the proposed algorithm has a computational complexity linear in the size of data. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate its effectiveness, efficiency and competitiveness in resistance to noise.
Parallel Realisation of the Recurrent RTRN Neural Network Learning
Authors: Jarosław Bilski, Jacek Smoląg
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (2006)

In this paper we present a parallel realisation of Real-Time Recurrent Network (RTRN) learning algorithm. We introduce the cuboid architecture to parallelise computation of learning algorithms. Parallel neural network structures are explicitly presented and the performance discussion is included.
Ping Pong in Dangerous Graphs: Optimal Black Hole Search with Pure Tokens
Authors: Paola Flocchini, David Ilcinkas, Nicola Santoro
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international symposium on Distributed Computing (2008)

We prove that, for the black hole search problem, the pure token model is computationally as powerful as the whiteboard model; furthermore the complexity is exactly the same. More precisely, we prove that a team of two asynchronous agents, each endowed with a single identical pebble (that can be placed only on nodes, and with no more than one pebble per node) can locate the black hole in an arbitrary network of known topology; this can be done with ¿(n logn) moves, where n is the number of nodes, even when the links are not FIFO.
Shifting and Lifting of Cellular Automata
Authors: Luigi Acerbi, Alberto Dennunzio, Enrico Formenti
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Computability in Europe: Computation and Logic in the Real World (2007)

We consider the family of all the Cellular Automata (CA) sharing the same local rule but have different memory. This family contains also all the CA with memory m &le; 0 (one-sided CA) which can act both on A ℤ and on A ℕ. We study several set theoretical and topological properties for these classes. In particular we investigate if the properties of a given CA are preserved when we consider the CA obtained by changing the memory of the original one (shifting operation). Furthermore we focus our attention to the one-sided CA acting on A ℕ starting from the one-sided CA acting on A ℤ and having the same local rule (lifting operation). As a particular consequence of these investigations, we prove that the long-standing conjecture [Surjectivity $\Rightarrow$ Density of the Periodic Orbits (DPO)] is equivalent to the conjecture [Topological Mixing $\Rightarrow$ DPO].
Software security economics and threat modeling based on attack path analysis; a stakeholder value driven approach
Authors: Barry W. Boehm
Venue:  (2007)

The thesis presents the T&barbelow;hreat M&barbelow;odeling Method Based on A&barbelow;ttack P&barbelow;ath Analysis (T-MAP) which quantifies security threats by calculating the total severity weights of relevant attacking paths for Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) based systems. Further security economic analysis enabled by T-MAP is demonstrated. Compared to existing approaches, T-MAP is sensitive to system stakeholder value priorities and organizational IT environment. It distills the technical details of thousands of relevant software vulnerabilities into management-friendly numbers at a high-level; it systematically establishes the traceability and consistency from management-level organizational value propositions to technical-level security threats and corresponding mitigation strategies. In its trial usage in a large IT organization, T-MAP demonstrated promising strength in prioritizing and estimating security investment cost-effectiveness, as well as in evaluating the security performance of COTS systems. The steps of using T-MAP to optimize the cost-effectiveness of software patching, user account control and firewall are demonstrated through case studies. A system stakeholder value sensitive Firewall rule generation method based on T-MAP is introduced. In addition, a software tool that automates T-MAP has been developed.
Rule-Based Simplification in Vector-Product Spaces
Authors: Songxin Liang, David J. Jeffrey
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th symposium on Towards Mechanized Mathematical Assistants: 6th International Conference (2007)

A vector-product space is a component-free representation of the common three-dimensional Cartesian vector space. The components of the vectors are invisible and formally inaccessible, although expressions for the components could be constructed. Expressions that have been built from the scalar and vector products can be simplified using a rule-based system. In order to develop and specify the system, an axiomatic system for a vector-product space is given. In addition, a brief description is given of an implementation in Aldor. The present work provides simplification functionality which overcomes difficulties encountered in earlier packages.
Visualization of Jet Mixing in a Fluidic Oscillator
Authors: J. W. Gregory, J. P. Sullivan, S. Raghu
Venue: Journal of Visualization (2005)

The fluidic oscillator is a device that generates an oscillating jet when supplied with fluid at pressure. The oscillator has no moving parts - the creation of the unsteady jet is based solely on fluid-dynamic interactions. Fluidic oscillators can operate at frequencies ranging up to 20 kHz, and are useful for flow control applications. The fluidic oscillator evaluated in the current study is comprised of two fluid jets that interact in an internal mixing chamber, producing the oscillating jet at the exit. Both porous pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) and dye-colored water flow are used to visualize the internal and external fluid dynamics of the oscillator. Porous PSP formulations have been shown to have frequency responses on the order of 100 kHz, which is more than adequate for visualizing the fluidic oscillations. In order to provide high-contrast PSP data in these tests, one of the internal jets of the fluidic oscillator is supplied with oxygen, and the other with nitrogen. Results indicate that two counter-rotating vortices within the mixing chamber drive the oscillations. It is also shown that the fluidic oscillator possesses excellent mixing characteristics.
HYPENS: A Matlab Tool for Timed Discrete, Continuous and Hybrid Petri Nets
Authors: Fausto Sessego, Alessandro Giua, Carla Seatzu
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets (2008)

HYPENS is an open source tool to simulate timed discrete, continuous and hybrid Petri nets. It has been developed in Matlab to allow designer and user to take advantage of several functions and structures already defined in Matlab, such as optimization routines, stochastic functions, matrices and arrays, etc. The tool can also be easily interfaced with other Matlab programs and be used for analysis and optimization via simulation. The large set of plot functions available in Matlab allow one to represent the results of the simulation in a clear and intuitive way.
Design and Evaluation of a Support Service for Mobile, Wireless Publish/Subscribe Applications
Authors: Mauro Caporuscio Antonio Carzaniga Alexander L. Wolf
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2003)

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a support service for mobile, wireless clients of a distributed publish/subscribe system. A distributed publish/subscribe system is a networked communication infrastructure where messages are published by senders and then delivered to the receivers whose subscriptions match the messages. Communication therefore does not involve the use of explicit addresses, but rather emerges from the dynamic arrangement of publishers and subscribers. Such a communication mechanism is an ideal platform for a variety of internet applications, including multiparty messaging, personal information management, information sharing, online news distribution, service discovery, and electronic auctions. Our goal is to support such applications on mobile, wireless host devices in such a way that the applications can, if they chose, be oblivious to the mobility and intermittent connectivity of their hosts as they move from one publish/subscribe access point to another. In this paper, we describe a generic, value-added service that can be used in conjunction with publish/subscribe systems to achieve these goals. We detail the implementation of the service and present the results of our evaluation of the service in both wireline and emulated wireless environments.
A Theory of Action, Knowledge and Time in the Event Calculus
Authors: Theodore Patkos, Dimitris Plexousakis
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th Hellenic conference on Artificial Intelligence: Theories, Models and Applications (2008)

To regulate and coordinate the behavior of agents within real-world environments, the participating entities must be able to reason not only about the state of the environment itself, but also about their own knowledge concerning that state, based on information acquired through sensing actions. Considering the dynamic nature of most realistic domains, the study of knowledge evolution over time is a critical aspect. This paper develops a formal account of action, knowledge and time within the context of the Event Calculus and proposes a unified theory that is applicable to diverse scenarios of commonsense reasoning.
Approximating Maximum Subgraphs without Short Cycles
Authors: Guy Kortsarz, Michael Langberg, Zeev Nutov
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international workshop, APPROX 2008, and 12th international workshop, RANDOM 2008 on Approximation, Randomization and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Techniques (2008)

We study approximation algorithms, integrality gaps, and hardness of approximation, of two problems related to cycles of "small" length k in a given graph. The instance for these problems is a graph G = (V,E) and an integer k. The k -Cycle Transversal problem is to find a minimum edge subset of E that intersects every k-cycle. The k -Cycle-Free Subgraph problem is to find a maximum edge subset of E without k-cycles.The 3-Cycle Transversal problem (covering all triangles) was studied by Krivelevich [Discrete Mathematics, 1995], where an LP-based 2-approximation algorithm was presented. The integrality gap of the underlying LP was posed as an open problem in the work of Krivelevich. We resolve this problem by showing a sequence of graphs with integrality gap approaching 2. In addition, we show that if 3-Cycle Transversal admits a (2 ¿ ¿)-approximation algorithm, then so does the Vertex-Cover problem, and thus improving the ratio 2 is unlikely. We also show that k -Cycle Transversal admits a (k ¿ 1)-approximation algorithm, which extends the result of Krivelevich from k = 3 to any k. Based on this, for odd k we give an algorithm for k -Cycle-Free Subgraph with ratio $\frac{k-1}{2k-3}=\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{4k-6}$; this improves over the trivial ratio of 1/2.Our main result however is for the k -Cycle-Free Subgraph problem with even values of k. For any k = 2r, we give an $\Omega\left(n^{-\frac{1}{r}+\frac{1}{r(2r-1)}-\varepsilon}\right)$-approximation scheme with running time ¿ ¿ ¿(1/¿) poly(n). This improves over the ratio ¿(n ¿ 1/r ) that can be deduced from extremal graph theory. In particular, for k = 4 the improvement is from ¿(n ¿ 1/2) to ¿(1/n ¿ 1/3 ¿ ¿ ).Similar results are shown for the problem of covering cycles of length ≤ k or finding a maximum subgraph without cycles of length ≤ k.
Comparing Analytical Decision Support Models Through Boolean Rule Extraction: A Case Study of Ovarian Tumour Malignancy
Authors: M. S. Aung, P. J. Lisboa, T. A. Etchells, A. C. Testa, B. Calster, S. Huffel, L. Valentin, D. Timmerman
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Neural Networks: Part II--Advances in Neural Networks (2007)

The relative performances of different classifiers applied to the same data are typically analyzed using the Receiver Operator Characteristic framework (ROC). This paper proposes a further analysis by explaining the operation of classifiers using low-order Boolean rules to fit the predicted response surfaces using the Orthogonal Search Based Rule Extraction algorithm (OSRE). Four classifiers of malignant or benign ovarian tumours are considered. The models analyzed are two Logistic Regression models and two Multi-Layer Perceptrons with Automatic Relevance Determination (MLP-ARD) each applied to a specific alternative covariate subset. While all models have comparable classification rates by Area Under ROC (AUC) the classification varies for individual cases and so do the resulting explanatory rules. Two sets of clinically plausible rules are obtained which account for over one half of the malignancy cases, with near-perfect specificity. These rules are simple, explicit and can be prospectively validated in future studies.
Semantic Process Retrieval with iSPARQL
Authors: Christoph Kiefer, Abraham Bernstein, Hong Joo Lee, Mark Klein, Markus Stocker
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th European conference on The Semantic Web: Research and Applications (2007)

The vision of semantic business processes is to enable the integration and inter-operability of business processes across organizational boundaries. Since different organizations model their processes differently, the discovery and retrieval of similar semantic business processes is necessary in order to foster inter-organizational collaborations. This paper presents our approach of using iSPARQL --- our imprecise query engine based on iSPARQL --- to query the OWL MIT Process Handbook --- a large collection of over 5000 semantic business processes. We particularly show how easy it is to use iSPARQL to perform the presented process retrieval task. Furthermore, since choosing the best performing similarity strategy is a non-trivial, data-, and context-dependent task, we evaluate the performance of three simple and two human-engineered similarity strategies. In addition, we conduct machine learning experiments to learn similarity measures showing that complementary information contained in the different notions of similarity strategies provide a very high retrieval accuracy. Our preliminary results indicate that iSPARQL is indeed useful for extending the reach of queries and that it, therefore, is an enabler for inter- and intra-organizational collaborations.
Exploring the Perceptual Relevance of Inherent Variability of Drum Sounds
Authors: Matthias Rath, Marcel Wältermann
Venue: Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Sense of Sounds: 4th International Symposium, CMMR 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27-31, 2007. Revised Papers (2008)

It is common "beat programming" practice to construct rhythmic sequences in a one-sample-per-instrument manner. Sounds of separate strokes on a drum, however, generally are not really perceptually identical, even when played with identical intention on the side of the player. Moreover, such unavoidable individual variations go beyond the effects of amplitude scaling or simple linear (e.g., low- or high-pass) filtering. One first simple approach to examine effects of this fact is to construct rhythmical patterns using several samples of each instrument. Experiences in a first pilot study with such "drum-machine-like" patterns suggest that individual note---to---note differences have a relevant influence on the overall character of the musical results.
Strategies for CORBA Middleware-Based Load Balancing
Authors: Ossama Othman, Carlos O'Ryan, Douglas C. Schmidt
Venue: IEEE Distributed Systems Online (2001)

The growth of online Internet services during the past decade has increased the demand for scalable and dependable distributed computing systems. E-commerce and online stock trading systems are examples. These systems concurrently serve many clients that transmit a large, often "bursty," number of requests and have stringent quality of service requirements. To protect hardware investments and avoid overcomitting resources, such systems scale incrementally by connecting servers through high-speed networks.
Haptic manipulation of microspheres using optical tweezers under the guidance of artificial force fields
Authors: Ibrahim Bukusoglu Cagatay Basdogan, Alper Kiraz Adnan Kurt
Venue: Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (2008)

Using optical tweezers (OT) and a haptic device, microspheres having diameters ranging from 3 to 4 μm (floating in a fluid solution) are manipulated in order to form patterns of coupled optical microresonators by assembling the spheres via chemical binding. For this purpose, biotin-coated microspheres trapped by a laser beam are steered and chemically attached to an immobilized streptavidin-coated sphere (i.e., the anchor sphere) one by one using an xyz piezo scanner controlled by a haptic device. The positions of all spheres in the scene are detected using a CCD camera and a collision-free path for each manipulated sphere is generated using the potential field approach. The forces acting on the manipulated particle due to the viscosity of the fluid and the artificial potential field are scaled and displayed to the user through the haptic device for better guidance and control during steering. In addition, a virtual fixture is implemented such that the desired angle of approach and strength are achieved during the binding phase. Our experimental studies in virtual and real environments with eight human subjects show that haptic feedback significantly improves the user performance by reducing the task completion time, the number of undesired collisions during steering, and the positional errors during binding. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a haptic device is coupled with OTs to guide the user during an optical manipulation task involving steering and assembly of microspheres to construct a coupled microresonator.