ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Applying constructivist approach to educational business games: case REALGAME
Authors: Timo Lainema, Pekka Makkonen
Venue: Simulation and Gaming (2003)

Business organizations and their employees face ever-increasing complexity and accelerating changes. This brings along the need for training models that can transmit knowledge and skills needed in this kind of environment. Business process understanding is especially required. This article evaluates business games in the light of constructivism, a view of learning emphasizing the need to anchor training to everyday activities and concrete contexts, and introduces a new computer-based business game. The purpose of this construction is to give the business game participants a realistic view of business processes and thus enhance participant business process perception. The primary aim of the construction is to present business processes to game participants by providing a natural representation of the real world and a case-based learning environment that fosters reflective practice. Although this article does not explicitly describe a geographically distributed game case, it introduces a game construction based on Internet transmission protocol that can also be used in a distributed manner. But as such, the article argues for the use of techniques that support continuously processed and Internet-based gaming simulations.
An Assessment of Tritium Supply Alternatives in Support of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile
Authors: Detlof Von Winterfeldt, Eric Schweitzer
Venue: Interfaces (1998)

Nuclear weapons require the periodic replacement of tritium, a radioactive gas that decays at approximately 5.5 percent per year. Currently no tritium-supply facility exists in the US, and due to the decay, the tritium inventory will fall below the required reserve level in 2011. To decide how to fill this projected gap, the US Department of Energy assessed 10 tritium-supply alternatives, including several types of new reactors, an accelerator, and the use of commercial reactors. The DOE compared the alternatives with respect to three objectives: production assurance, cost, and environmental impacts. We combined a dynamic production-simulation model and probabilistic assessments of schedule, production capacity, and availability risks to predict the production behavior of each alternative over 40 years. We also assessed the cost and environmental risks. The secretary of energy decided to pursue both the commercial-reactor and accelerator alternatives, based, in part, on the results of this analysis.
Card, English, and Burr (1978): 25 years later
Authors: I. Scott MacKenzie, R. William Soukoreff
Venue: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2003)

We revisit the Fitts? law model published 25 years ago by Card, English, and Burr. Their research was important because it was the first comparative evaluation of the mouse, and also the first use of Fitts? law in HCI. For the mouse, they reported MT = 1.03 + 0.096 ID, with throughput reported as the slope reciprocal: TP = 1 / 0.96 = 10.3 bps. We re-analyse their data in view of ISO9241-9, the new standard for evaluating pointing devices. The reanalysis yields a throughput of 2.65 bps, or 4.32 bps including a nominal adjustment for the time for the hand to adjust its grip on the mouse. These values are closer to recently published ISO-conforming values for the mouse.
New Two-Stage and Sequential Procedures for Selecting the Best Simulated System
Authors: Stephen E. Chick, Koichiro Inoue
Venue: Operations Research (2001)

Standard "indifference-zone" procedures that allocate computer resources to infer the best of a finite set of simulated systems are designed with a statistically conservative, least favorable configuration assumption consider the probability of correct selection (but not the opportunity cost) and assume that the cost of simulating each system is the same. Recent Bayesian work considers opportunity cost and shows that an average case analysis may be less conservative but assumes a known output variance, an assumption that typically is violated in simulation. This paper presents new two-stage and sequential selection procedures that integrate attractive features of both lines of research. They are derived assuming that the simulation output is normally distributed with unknown mean and variance that may differ for each system. We permit the reduction of either opportunity cost loss or the probability of incorrect selection and allow for different replication costs for each system. The generality of our formulation comes at the expense of difficulty in obtaining exact closed-form solutions. We therefore derive a bound for the expected loss associated potentially incorrect selections, then asymptotically minimize that bound. Theoretical and empirical results indicate that our approach compares favorably with indifference-zone procedures.
Fuzzy Modeling for Function Points Analysis
Authors: Osias De Souza Lima Júnior, Pedro Porfírio Muniz Farias, Arnaldo Dias Belchior
Venue: Software Quality Control (2003)

Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a largely used technique to estimate the size of development project, enhancement project or applications already installed. During the point counting process that represents the dimension of a project or an application, each function is classified according to its relative functional complexity. Several studies resulted in FPA extensions, and most of them are mainly aimed at achieving greater precision in the point assessment of systems of greater algorithmic complexity. This work proposes the use of concepts and properties from fuzzy set theory to extend FPA into FFPA (Fuzzy Function Point Analysis). Fuzzy theory seeks to build a formal quantitative structure capable of emulating the imprecision of human knowledge. With the function points generated by FFPA, the functionality of the project is better represented than it was through FPA. Thus, derived values such as costs and terms of development can be more precisely determined.
Analysis of navigation behaviour in web sites integrating multiple information systems
Authors: Bettina Berendt, Myra Spiliopoulou
Venue: The VLDB Journal &mdash; The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (2000)

The analysis of web usage has mostly focused on sites composed of conventional static pages. However, huge amounts of information available in the web come from databases or other data collections and are presented to the users in the form of dynamically generated pages. The query interfaces of such sites allow the specification of many search criteria. Their generated results support navigation to pages of results combining cross-linked data from many sources. For the analysis of visitor navigation behaviour in such web sites, we propose the web usage miner (WUM), which discovers navigation patterns subject to advanced statistical and structural constraints. Since our objective is the discovery of interesting navigation patterns, we do not focus on accesses to individual pages. Instead, we construct conceptual hierarchies that reflect the query capabilities used in the production of those pages. Our experiments with a real web site that integrates data from multiple databases, the German SchulWeb, demonstrate the appropriateness of WUM in discovering navigation patterns and show how those discoveries can help in assessing and improving the quality of the site.
Behavioural subtyping and property preservation for active objects
Authors: Nabil Hameurlain
Venue: Proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.1 Fifth International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems V (2002)

Behavioural typing and subtyping has proved to be a very useful concept for the support of incremental reuse in the area of object-oriented (O-O) languages. With the emergence of formalisms integrating the O-O approach and concurrency, yielding systems of active objects, the question arises about how behavioural subtyping may be supported by such formalisms. We present a formal framework for the definition of behavioural subtyping for active objects. This framework is based upon the preorder relations which are considered in the study of concurrent systems, allowing to define various subtyping relations. We investigate the property preservation to the degree of change of these subtyping relations, safety and liveness properties are preserved up to different extents.
Explaining Complex Organizational Dynamics
Authors: Kevin J. Dooley, Andrew H. Van De Ven
Venue: Organization Science (1999)

Studies of organizational processes can yield observations in the form of event time series that can be analyzed to determine whether they reflect periodic, chaotic, white noise, or pink noise dynamic patterns. These different patterns each imply different underlying generative mechanisms and hence, different process theories. In this paper we present a model that describes how these four dynamical patterns are different from one another. Specifically, a causal system can be characterized by its dimensionality, and by the nature of interaction between causal factors. Low dimensional causal systems yield periodic and chaotic dynamics, while high dimensional causal systems yield white and pink noise dynamics. Periodic and white noise dynamics stem from systems where causal factors act independently, or in a linear fashion, while chaotic and pink noise systems stem from systems where causal factors act interdependently, in a nonlinear fashion. Thus, given a diagnosis of an observed event time series, we can hypothesize a particular story, or causal process theory, that might explain in organization-specific terms why such dynamics came about. In doing so, we also propose that the observation of chaotic organizational dynamics may often signify the presence of control and/or cooperation, rather than a lack of it, as implied by the vernacular use of the term. We conclude by challenging organizational researchers to define new models that capture such observed behavior.
Practice Abstract
Authors: Vitor F. C. Goncalves, Antonio Palma-Dos-Reis, Joao Duque, Donald L. Keefer
Venue: Interfaces (1999)

Practice Abstracts carries short reports of specific current or recent OR/MS projects. Often these reports are based on existing documents, such as internal reports or company newsletters. We hope that these abstracts will be accessible, interesting, and valuable to practitioners in other organizations. Contributions should be sent for evaluation to the editor of Practice Abstracts, Donald L. Keefer, Department of Management, Arizona State University, Box 874006, Tempe Arizona 85287-4006 [Don.Keefer@ASU.EDU].
Packet Routing in Telecommunication Networks with Path and Flow Restrictions
Authors: Larry J. Leblanc, Jerome Chifflet, Philippe Mahey
Venue: INFORMS Journal on Computing (1999)

We address packet-switched telecommunication networks, including ATM, SMDS, and X.25 services. We analyze important extensions of routing models by imposing restrictions on paths and flows. We then study how these modifications affect the computational requirements for solution. The restricted cases we examine are: 1) hop limits-the flow between each pair of nodes can take a maximum of h hops; 2) node and link capacity constraints-instead of traditional queuing delays, queuing is treated indirectly using penalty terms for "effective" capacity constraints; and 3) high- and low-priority flows-because of higher grade-of-service requirements for high-priority flows, additional capacity constraints are imposed on them. We discuss the importance of these restrictions and report results of computational testing using the flow-deviation algorithm. We also discuss the importance of limiting the number of routes used between node pairs and then analyze numerically how many distinct routes are typically used by the final solution from the flow-deviation algorithm when no route limits exist between node pairs.
Protocol creation as a pedagogical tool in a computer networks course
Authors: Curt M. White
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2002)

Many educators and students find the concepts in a computer networking class challenging. To assist with course pedagogy, many instructors assign hands-on projects which force the students to incorporate their newly learned concepts into a real-world environment. One possible type of project that requires "hands-on" ability is to ask the students to create a new protocol for a hypothetical or actual application. In this paper we will examine how one can create the BidNet protocol to support distributed program execution. The students will examine existing protocols looking for strengths and weaknesses, create a set of request and response primitives, design the frame / packet layouts, and decide at what layer the protocol should operate. As a final optional task, the student can evaluate the effectiveness of the protocol by performing an analytical calculation, use a canned protocol verification program, create a simulation study, or create a series of programs which incorporate the protocol.
Using IIDs to estimate sound source direction
Authors: Leslie S. Smith
Venue: Proceedings of the seventh international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior on From animals to animats (2002)

Poster. Sounds recorded using a binaural head are analysed to find the azimuthal direction of a sound source. Two techniques for interaural intensity difference (IID) estimation are compared. In both, signals were filtered into a number of wideband logarithmically spaced frequency bands. In method 1, an estimate of the IID in each frequency band was made every 20ms, and in method 2, estimates were made only when a cluster of onsets had been found. Onsets were detected using a biologically plausible spike-based technique. IID vectors were converted to directions using estimates of the impulse response of the binaural head. The onset-based technique provides better results, particularly in reverberant environments.
Support vector machines and Kernel methods: the new generation of learning machines
Authors: Nello Cristianini, Bernhard Schölkopf
Venue: AI Magazine (2002)

Kernel methods, a new generation of learning algorithms, utilize techniques from optimization, statistics, and functional analysis to achieve maximal generality, flexibility, and performance. These algorithms are different from earlier techniques used in machine learning in many respects: For example, they are explicitly based on a theoretical model of learning rather than on loose analogies with natural learning systems or other heuristics. They come with theoretical guarantees about their performance and have a modular design that makes it possible to separately implement and analyze their components. They are not affected by the problem of local minima because their training amounts to convex optimization. In the last decade, a sizable community of theoreticians and practitioners has formed around these methods, and a number of practical applications have been realized. Although the research is not concluded, already now kernel methods are considered the state of the art in several machine learning tasks. Their ease of use, theoretical appeal, and remarkable performance have made them the system of choice for many learning problems. Successful applications range from text categorization to handwriting recognition to classification of gene-expression data.
Numerical method for Oseen's linearized equations in three-dimensional exterior domains
Authors: Kotoba Nishida
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2003)

In this paper, we consider Oseen's linearized equations, which appear in fluid mechanics, in three-dimensional exterior domains, and propose a new numerical method based on fundamental solution method coupled with collocation method to solve this problem. We show the effectiveness of our method by numerical experiments.
Direct decompositions of non-algebraic complete lattices
Authors: Friedrich Wehrung
Venue: Discrete Mathematics (2003)

For a given complete lattice L, we investigate whether L can be decomposed as a direct product of directly indecomposable lattices. We prove that this is the case if every element of L is a join of join-irreducible elements and dually, thus extending to nonalgebraic lattices a result of L. Libkin. We illustrate this by various examples and counterexamples.
Nonblockability of Switches with the Cayley Graph Structure for Serial Transfer of Data Blocks. Generalized Hypercubes and Multidimensional Grids
Authors: V. S. Podlazov
Venue: Automation and Remote Control (2003)

A general method of conflictless arbitrary permutation of &ldquo;large&rdquo; data elements that can be divided into a multitude of &ldquo;smaller&rdquo; data blocks was considered for switches structured as the Cayley graphs. The method was specified for arbitrary permutations in the generalized hypercubes and multidimensional grids, and their characteristics were considered.
A quantitative analysis of robotic languages
Authors: Arnold Vento, Cindy Beltrán, Emi Taniuchi
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2002)

The RCX is a programmable brick that can be used to control LEGO Mindstorms Robots. The default programming environment for the RCX programmable brick is a graphic user interface that is very limited. A considerable number of alternative programming environments and firmware are available to enhance the performance of a robot's given set of instructions. The objective of the research projects is to analyze the execution of specific tasks implemented by various programming languages. These languages include: Not Quite C (NQC), ROBOLAB, Spirit.ocx with Visual Basic, and LeJOS (Lego Java Operating System).Each author preformed a series of individual experiments testing different facets and limitations of the RCX programmable brick. Arnold Vento analyzed the differences of speed and accuracy of a light sensing navigation algorithm in NQC and LeJOS. Cindy Beltrán examined the length of byte code and performance time of tasks both in ROBOLAB and NQC. Emi Taniuchi researched the performance of accuracy and responsiveness of touch and light sensing algorithms with Spirit.ocx using Visual Basic and ROBOLAB. Differences in the size of RCX code generated (in bytes) were also measured. This paper describes the results of the experiments performed by each researcher.
Practice Abstracts
Authors: Donald L. Keefer, DeLyle Bloomquist, David Graziosi, Lei Lei, Andrzej Ruszczynski, Shuguang Liu, Hua Zhong
Venue: Interfaces (2002)

Practice Abstracts carries short reports of specific current or recent OR/MS projects. Often these reports are based on existing documents, such as internal reports or company newsletters. We hope that these abstracts will be accessible, interesting, and valuable to practitioners in other organizations. Contributions should be sent for evaluation to the editor of "Practice Abstracts," Donald L. Keefer, Department of Supply Chain Management, Arizona State University, Box 874706, Tempe, Arizona 85287-4706 [don.keefer@asu.edu].
Test Set Size Minimization and Fault Detection Effectiveness: A Case Study in a Space Application
Authors: W. Eric Wong, Joseph R. Horgan, Aditya P. Mathur, Alberto Pasquini
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Computer Software and Applications Conference (1997)

An important question in software testing is whether it is reasonable to apply coverage based criteria as a filter to reduce the size of a test set. An empirical study was conducted using a test set minimization technique to explore the effect of reducing the size of a test set, while keeping block coverage constant, on the fault detection strength of the resulting minimized test set. Two types of test sets were examined. For those with respect to a fixed size, no test case screening was conducted during the generation, whereas for those with respect to a fixed coverage, each subsequent test case had to improve the overall coverage in order to be included. The study reveals that no matter how a test set is generated (with or without any test case screening) block minimized test sets have a size/effectiveness advantage, in terms of a significant reduction in test set size but with almost the same fault detection effectiveness, over the original non-minimized test sets.
A Directory Service for a Federation of CIM Databases with Migrating Objects
Authors: Ajit K. Patankar, Arie Segev, J. George Shanthikumar
Venue: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering (1996)

We propose a novel directory scheme for a large federation of databases where object migration is in response to manufacturing events. In our directory scheme, objects report their location to a directory server instead of the traditional method of the directory servers polling sites in the network. The directory is distributed among multiple servers to avoid bottleneck during query processing. A distributed Linear Hashing algorithm is proposed for efficiently determining an appropriate server for an object. Finally, a stochastic dynamic programming model is proposed for minimizing the number of database transactions.
Design and Analysis of an Efficient Evolutionary Image Segmentation Algorithm
Authors: Shinn-Ying Ho, Kual-Zheng Lee
Venue: Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (2003)

Evolutionary image segmentation algorithms have a number of advantages such as continuous contour, non-oversegmentation, and non-thresholds. However, most of the evolutionary image segmentation algorithms suffer from long computation time because the number of encoding parameters is large. In this paper, design and analysis of an efficient evolutionary image segmentation algorithm EISA are proposed. EISA uses a K-means algorithm to split an image into many homogeneous regions, and then uses an intelligent genetic algorithm IGA associated with an effective chromosome encoding method to merge the regions automatically such that the objective of the desired segmentation can be effectively achieved, where IGA is superior to conventional genetic algorithms in solving large parameter optimization problems. High performance of EISA is illustrated in terms of both the evaluation performance and computation time, compared with some current segmentation methods. It is empirically shown that EISA is robust and efficient using nature images with various characteristics.
Comments on ISO 14102: the standard for CASE-tool evaluation
Authors: Björn Lundell, Brian Lings
Venue: Computer Standards Interfaces (2002)

In this paper, we comment on the ISO standard for evaluation and selection of CASE-tools (ISO 14102), focusing on the important task of establishing a relevant set of requirements for any specific use of the standard. We review the literature related to CASE-tool evaluation and illuminate our findings by comparing CASE-tool requirements developed for a company with the suggested set of characteristics in the standard. We identify two weaknesses in the standard. Firstly, we note a lack of method support for evaluation framework development. Secondly, we note a number of weaknesses in the way decision frameworks are treated. The paper concludes with recommendations for improvement, as submitted to ITS/AG7.
A symbolic-simulation approach to the timing verification of interacting FSMs
Authors: A. J. Daga, W. P. Birmingham
Venue: Proceedings of the 1995 International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors (1995)

A timing verifier that scales to verify complex sequential circuits, modeled in terms of interacting FSMs, while rejecting false sequential and combinational paths has, so far, not been developed. We present an algorithm for this purpose. The inherently modular nature of interactions among FSMs, allow a highly efficient symbolic simulation verification methodology. Experimental results illustrate this methodology's ability to scale, while providing accurate timing verification results.