ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Experiments in hiding data inside the file structure of common office documents: a stegonography application
Authors: Gary Cantrell, David D. Dampier
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Information and communication technologies (2004)

In the world of spy vs. spy, covert communication, or steganography, is not a new concept. This ancient art has been used in many ways and in many mediums and has not been ignored in this century with the bits and bytes of the computerized world. Many methods have been found for hiding covert messages and data in computer files. One only has to search the Internet for steganography, or stego for short, to find multiple freeware utilities that will allow even a novice computer user to create files with hidden communications. However, where there is a desire to hide communication, there is also a desire to detect that communication. For this reason, there are also tools available online to detect covert data in image files. How dangerous is a hiding place that everyone knows about? What if someone sending covert data used file types less commonly used for steganography such as MS Word documents? Would that communication escape notice? Can these files even carry a covert message? This paper will examine the problem of covert communication in common office files by examining some commonly used office file types to determine if they have this capability. Then, it will seek to determine if this is a problem by determining if data hidden here changes the file from a user's point of view. Finally some solutions will be proposed on how to solve this problem.
Transformations of Mutual Exclusion Algorithms from the Cache-Coherent Model to the Distributed Shared Memory Model
Authors: Hyonho Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2005)

We present two transformations that convert a class of local-spin mutual exclusion algorithms on the cache-coherent model to local-spin mutual exclusion algorithms on the distributed shared memory model without increasing their time complexity. Our first transformation uses registers and test-and-set objects, and does not increase the number of busy-waiting periods. The second transformation uses only registers, but contains two busy-waiting periods for each busy-waiting period of the input algorithm. We carefully define the class of mutual exclusion algorithms that are applicable to our transformations, and formally prove the correctness of our transformations.
A High-Performance Computational Resource Broker for Grid Computing Environments
Authors: Chao-Tung Yang, Po-Chi Shih, Kuan-Ching Li
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications - Volume 2 (2005)

Internet computing and grid technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. As Grid Computing is becoming a reality, there is a need for managing and monitoring the available resources worldwide, as well as the need for conveying these resources to the everyday user. This paper describes a resource broker with its main function as to match the available resources to the userýs needs. The use of the resource broker provides a uniform interface to access any of the available and appropriate resources using userýs credentials. The resource broker runs on top of the Globus Toolkit. Therefore, it provides security and current information about the available resources and serves as a link to the diverse systems available in the Grid.
Quality Assurance in a Student-Based Agile Software Engineering Process
Authors: Andrew Marrington, James M. Hogan, Richard Thomas
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 Australian conference on Software Engineering (2005)

Agile methodologies have proven to be a popular addition to the software engineering toolbox, promising significant advances in quality for small teams, with developers no longer weighed under by the documentation said to characterise traditional approaches. Yet, in spite of these claims, quality assurance remains a question to which agile methodologies have given only a partially satisfactory answer. This work examines quality assurance practices among student developers working within a lightweight iterative development process. Our focus is upon the linkages between their reported practices and the quality levels observed in the systems delivered. The study has identified a range of approaches to improving quality for small, inexperienced teams, with applications to both the educational and SME environments.
Approximation algorithm for bottleneck steiner tree problem in the euclidean plane
Authors: Zi-Mao Li, Da-Ming Zhu, Shao-Han Ma
Venue: Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2004)

A special case of the bottleneck Steiner tree problem in the Euclidean plane was considered in this paper. The problem has applications in the design of wireless communication networks, multifacility location, VLSI routing and network routing. For the special case which requires that there should be no edge connecting any two Steiner points in the optimal solution, a 3-restricted Steiner tree can be found indicating the existence of the performance ratio √2. In this paper, the special case of the problem is proved to be NP-hard and cannot be approximated within ratio √2. First a simple polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance ratio √3 is presented. Then based on this algorithm and the existence of the 3-restricted Steiner tree, a polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance ratio--√2 + ε is proposed, for any ε > 0.
Patterns of media use in an activity-centric collaborative environment
Authors: David R. Millen, Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Eric Wilcox, Beth Brownholtz
Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (2005)

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is based on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared items with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed analysis of user behavior during a five month field study. We present the patterns of media use that we observed, using a variety of analytical methods including thread clustering and analysis. Major findings include four patterns of media use: communicating, exchanging mixed objects, coordinating, (e.g., of status reports), and semi-archival filing. We observed differential use of various media including highly variable use of chats and surprisingly informal uses of files. We discuss the implications for the design of mixed media collaborative tools to support the work activities of small to medium sized work teams.
Topic session on discourse
Authors: Damaris M. Ayuso
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Message understanding (1993)

Discourse processing remains one of the major outstanding issues in data extraction. The speakers in this session represented a wide range of approaches. Their presentations are briefly described below:
Projective Rectification with Reduced Geometric Distortion for Stereo Vision and Stereoscopic Video
Authors: Hsien-Huang P. Wu, Yu-Hua Yu
Venue: Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems (2005)

Projective geometry has been proved to be a useful tool for solving the rectification problem without camera calibration. However, if the matrices used for projective rectification (homographies) are not constrained properly, the rectification process can cause great geometric distortion. For visual application, e.g., tele-operation for remotely controlled robot arm, rectification with minimum geometry distortion should be pursued. In this paper, we propose an improved algorithm to minimize the distortion by combining a newly developed projective transform with a properly chosen shearing transform. Experimental data show that our proposed method works quite well for all the image pairs under test. Comparison with other available methods based on visual inspection and numerical data demonstrates the superiority of the new approach.
Impostor-Based Animation of Deformable Virtual Characters with Dynamic Shadow
Authors: S. K. Chow, K. L. Chan
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Image and Graphics (2004)

This project aims to develop a fast and realistic system for animating virtual characters. Deformations are applied to the human characters to make the model pose naturally. To speed up the animation, each character model is replaced by an impostor. We have devised a novel solution to correct the visibility problem of the impostor by using stencil buffer and bounding box. There have been very few studies to generate shadow for impostor. We propose a novel algorithm with the use of stencil buffer and bounding box for rendering impostor shadow. Our system can generate animations of numerous deformable human models which are substantially faster and of comparable quality than those rendered in geometry.
Google Power, 1 edition
Authors: Chris Sherman
Venue:  (2005)

Learn advanced techniques for maximizing the Google search engine and extract the best content from Google without having to learn complicated code. Go under the hood and learn a wide range of advanced web search techniques through practical examples. This is an ideal resource for students, librarians, journalists, researchers, businesspeople, lawyers, investigators, and anyone interested in conducting an in-depth search.
Engineering-based processes and agile methodologies for software development: a comparative case study
Authors: Éric Germain, Pierre N. Robillard
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2005)

The emergence of various software development methodologies raises the need to evaluate and compare their efficiencies. One way of performing such a comparison is to have different teams apply different process models in the implementation of multiple versions of common specifications. This study defines a new cognitive activity classification scheme which has been used to record the effort expended by six student teams producing parallel implementations of the same software requirements specifications. Three of the teams used a process based on the Unified Process for Education (UPEDU), a teaching-oriented process derived from the Rational Unified Process. The other three teams used a process built around the principles of the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. Important variations in effort at the cognitive activity level between teams shows that the classification could scarcely be used without categorization at a higher level. However, the relative importance of a category of activities aimed at defining "active" behaviour was shown to be almost constant for all teams involved, possibly showing a fundamental behaviour pattern. As secondary observations, aggregate variations by process model tend to be small and limited to a few activities, and coding-related activities dominate the effort distribution for all the teams.
Non-product property of the digital fundamental group
Authors: Sang-Eon Han
Venue: Information Sciences&mdash;Informatics and Computer Science: An International Journal (2005)

For given two digital images both equipped with each digital connectedness, we show that the digital fundamental groups of both images do not necessarily lead to the digital fundamental group of the product image. In order to prove the non-product property of the digital fundamental group of the digital product image, we need the notion of product image and some calculation of the digital 8-fundamental group of the digital 8-pseudotorus in Z4 by means of a counterexample.
From the Editor in Chief: Veni, Vidi, Sensi
Authors: Robert E. Filman
Venue: IEEE Internet Computing (2003)

What is the right way to make an electronic voting system? After the Florida debacle, Caltech and MIT formed a project to look at the problem. Their most important conclusions were the need to have a physically readable and auditable record of the vote, countable independently of the machine that presents the choices and records the votes. This echoes Rebecca Mercuri's 2000 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, in which she argued for a voter-checkable paper record of the vote that could be preserved for audit.
A Hierarchical Non-Parametric Method for Capturing Non-Rigid Deformations
Authors: Ady Ecker, Shimon Ullman
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd Canadian conference on Computer and Robot Vision (2005)

We present a novel approach for measuring deformations between image patches. Our algorithm is a variant of dynamic programming that is not inherently one-dimensional, and its scores are on a relative scale. The method is based on the combination of similarities between many overlapping sub-patches. The algorithm is designed to be robust to small deformations of parts at various positions and scales.
Dynamic cache reconfiguration strategies for a cluster-based streaming proxy
Authors: Yang Guo, Zihui Ge, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Prashant Shenoy, Don Towsley
Venue: Web content caching and distribution: proceedings of the 8th international workshop (2004)

The high bandwidth and the relatively long-lived characteristics of digital video are key limiting factors in the wide-spread usage of streaming content over the Internet. The problem is further complicated by the fact that video popularity changes over time. In this paper, we study caching issues for a cluster-based streaming proxy in the face of changing video popularity. We show that the cache placement problem for a given video popularity is NP-complete, and propose the dynamic first fit (DFF) algorithm that give the results close to the optimal cache placement. We then propose minimum weight perfect matching(MWPM) and swapping-based techniques that can dynamically reconfigure the cache placement to adapt to changing video popularity with minimum copying overhead. Our simulation results show that MWPM reconfiguration can reduce the copying overhead by a factor of more than two, and that swapping-based reconfiguration can further reduce the copying overhead compared to MWPM, and allow for the tradeoffs between the reconfiguration copying overhead and the proxy bandwidth utilization.
Feature Planning for Robust Execution of General Robot Tasks using Visual Servoing
Authors: Mads Paulin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd Canadian conference on Computer and Robot Vision (2005)

In this paper we present a new method for automatic feature planning for visual tracking systems employed in visual servoing control of robot manipulators. Such planning of optimal feature sets is of utmost importance in order to ensure accurate and robust execution of general robot tasks using visual servoing. First we introduce a novel platform for simulation and preparation of visual servoing systems. Subsequently we demonstrate how this platform, together with combinatorial optimization techniques and fitness measures which consider several aspects related to the robustness of the tracking system, can be used to plan reliable and information rich feature sets. Finally, we present experiments which compare the performance of a visual servoing system employing the proposed feature planning technique to that of a servoing system based on features selected using traditional methods. These experiments demonstrate that our technique not only improves the robustness of the visual tracking system but also significantly increases the accuracy of the visual servoing control loop.
The Case of the Missing Supercomputer Performance: Achieving Optimal Performance on the 8,192 Processors of ASCI Q
Authors: Fabrizio Petrini, Darren J. Kerbyson, Scott Pakin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (2003)

In this paper we describe how we improved the effective performance of ASCI Q, the world's second-fastest supercomputer, to meet our expectations. Using an arsenal of performance-analysis techniques including analytical models, custom microbenchmarks, full applications, and simulators, we succeeded in observing a serious-but previously undetected-performance problem. We identified the source of the problem, eliminated the problem, and "closed the loop" by demonstrating up to a factor of 2 improvement in application performance. We present our methodology and provide insight into performance analysis that is immediately applicable to other large-scale supercomputers.
Efficient Information-based Visual Robotic Mapping in Unstructured Environments
Authors: Vivek A. Sujan, Steven Dubowsky
Venue: International Journal of Robotics Research (2005)

In field environments it is often not possible to provide robot teams with detailed a priori environment and task models. In such unstructured environments, robots will need to create a dimensionally accurate three-dimensional geometric model of its surroundings by performing appropriate sensor actions. However, uncertainties in robot locations and sensing limitations/occlusions make this difficult. A new algorithm, based on iterative sensor planning and sensor redundancy, is proposed to build a geometrically consistent dimensional map of the environment for mobile robots that have articulated sensors. The aim is to acquire new information that leads to more detailed and complete knowledge of the environment. The robot(s) is controlled to maximize geometric knowledge gained of its environment using an evaluation function based on Shannon's information theory. Using the measured and Markovian predictions of the unknown environment, an information theory based metric is maximized to determine a robotic agent's next best view (NBV) of the environment. Data collected at this NBV pose are fused using a Kalman filter statistical uncertainty model to the measured environment map. The process continues until the environment mapping process is complete. The work is unique in the application of information theory to enhance the performance of environment sensing robot agents. It may be used by multiple distributed and decentralized sensing agents for efficient and accurate cooperative environment modeling. The algorithm makes no assumptions of the environment structure. Hence, it is robust to robot failure since the environment model being built is not dependent on any single agent frame, but is set in an absolute reference frame. It accounts for sensing uncertainty, robot motion uncertainty, environment model uncertainty and other critical parameters. It allows for regions of higher interest receiving greater attention by the agents. This algorithm is particularly well suited to unstructured environments, where sensor uncertainty and occlusions are significant. Simulations and experiments show the effectiveness of this algorithm.
Mountain Clustering on Non-Uniform Grids Using P-Trees
Authors: John T. Rickard, Ronald R. Yager, Wendy Miller
Venue: Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making (2005)

A new clustering technique is described, which is an improvement on the mountain method (MM) of clustering originally proposed by Yager and Filev. This new technique employs a data driven, hierarchical partitioning of the data set to be clustered, using a "p-tree" algorithm for spatially decomposing the data set. The centroids of data subsets in the terminal nodes of the "p-tree" become the set of candidate cluster centers upon which the iterative cluster center selection process of MM is applied. As the data dimension and/or the number of uniform grid lines used in Yager and Filev's original technique increases, our approach requires exponentially fewer cluster centers to be evaluated by the MM selection algorithm. Extensive sample data sets are used to illustrate the performance of this new technique.
Interactive Shape from Shading
Authors: Gang Zeng, Yasuyuki Matsushita, Long Quan, Heung-Yeung Shum
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05) - Volume 1 - Volume 01 (2005)

Shape from shading (SfS) has always been difficult for real applications due to its intrinsic ill-posedness. In this paper, we propose an interactive SfS method whichefficiently uses human knowledge in order to resolve ambiguity. We propose a global solution of continuous surfaces with a few constraints of surface normals that are interactively imposed to regularize the problem. A surface is divided into local patches, and each local solution is estimated with a fast marching SfS. It is shown that the boundaries of local solutions constitute a weighted Voronoi diagram, which allows for the formation of a global solution from the local ones. Finally, we optimize this global estimation by minimizing an energy functional based on shading and smoothness priors. Reconstruction results from both synthetic and real images demonstrate the usability of the new approach for various modeling applications.
PRESS: A Clustered Server Based on User-Level Communication
Authors: Enrique V. Carrera, Ricardo Bianchini
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2005)

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a cluster-based network server called PRESS. The server relies on locality-conscious request distribution and a standard for user-level communication to achieve high performance and portability. We evaluate PRESS by first isolating the performance benefits of three key features of user-level communication: low processor overhead, remote memory accesses, and zero-copy transfers. Next, we compare PRESS to servers that involve less intercluster communication, but are not as easily portable. Our results for an 8-node server cluster and five WWW traces demonstrate that user-level communication can improve performance by as much as 52 percent compared to a kernel-level protocol. Low processor overhead, remote memory writes, and zero-copy all make nontrivial contributions toward this overall gain. Our results also show that portability in PRESS causes no throughput degradation when we exploit user-level communication extensively.
CNN-based architecture for real-time object-oriented video coding applications: Research Articles
Authors: Giuseppe Grassi, Luigi A. Grieco
Venue: International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications (2005)

This paper presents a new CNN-based architecture for real-time video coding applications. The proposed approach, by exploiting object-oriented CNN algorithms and MPEG encoding capabilities, enables low bit-rate encoder&#x002F;decoder to be designed. Simulation results using Claire video sequence show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Copyright &copy; 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Preferential walk: towards efficient and scalable search in unstructured peer-to-peer networks
Authors: Hai Zhuge, Xue Chen, Xiaoping Sun
Venue: Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web (2005)

To improve search efficiency and reduce unnecessary traffic in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, this paper proposes a trust-based probabilistic search algorithm, called preferential walk (P-Walk). Every peer ranks its neighbors according to searching experience. The highly ranked neighbors have higher probabilities to be queried. Simulation results show that P-Walk is not only efficient, but also robust against malicious behaviors. Furthermore, we measure peers' rank distribution and draw implications.