ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Decision making support systems: achievements, challenges and opportunities
Authors: Guisseppi A. Forgionne, Jatinder N. D. Gupta, Manuel Mora
Venue: Decision making support systems: achievements, trends and challenges for (2002)

Previous chapters have described the state of the art in decision making support systems (DMSS). This chapter synthesizes the views of leading scientists concerning the achievements of DMSS and the future challenges and opportunities. According to the experts, DMSS will be technologically more integrated, offer broader and deeper support for decision making, and provide a much wider array of applications. In the process, new information and computer technologies will be necessitated, the decision makers'jobs will change, and new organizational structures will emerge to meet the changes. The changes will not occur without displacements of old technologies and old work paradigms. In particular, there will be an evolution toward team-based decision making paradigms. Although the evolution can require significant investments, the organizational benefits from successful DMSS deployments can be significant and substantial. Researchers and practitioners are eneouraged to collaborate in their effort to further enhance the theoretical and pragmatic developments of DMSS.
A formal service specification for IIOP based on ISO/IEC 14752
Authors: Abhishek Singh, Jonathan Billington
Venue: Proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.1 Fifth International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems V (2002)

The Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) supports the interworking of Object Request Brokers (ORBs) over TCP/IP. This paper creates a service specification for IIOP by combining three interworking facilities identified in ISO/IEC 14752. This is formalised using Coloured Petri nets, which are used to generate the set of global primitive sequences of the IIOP service.
Not Just a Formality: Pay System Formalization and Sex-Related Earnings Effects
Authors: Marta M. Elvira, Mary E. Graham
Venue: Organization Science (2002)

Drawing on neoclassical economic, internal labor market, and devaluation theories, we examine how the sex composition of jobs and the sex of individual workers affect earnings, depending upon the formalization of the pay type. Using personnel data for over 8,000 employees, we confirm the existence of a negative relationship between earnings and the proportion female in a job. We also find that for less-formalized pay types (cash incentive bonuses), sex-composition and individual-sex effects are larger than for more formalized pay (merit raises and base salary). Together, these findings support devaluation explanations, suggest that incentive bonuses may widen the earnings gap between women and men, and have implications for the design of pay structures in organizations.
Generalization of inductive topologies to L-topological vector spaces
Authors: Cong-hua Yan
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2002)

In this paper, using the theory of L-topological vector spaces, we study some properties of inductive topologies determined by the family of L-fuzzy linear order-homomorphisms defined by Fang Jin-xuan (J. Fuzzy Math. 4(1) (1996) 93), and give a characterization of inductive topologies determined by a single L-fuzzy linear order-homomorphism. As an example, we point out the quotient L-topology of L-tvs is an inductive topology.
Analog circuit sizing based on formal methods using affine arithmetic
Authors: Andreas Lemke, Lars Hedrich, Erich Barke
Venue: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2002)

We present a novel approach to optimization-based variation-tolerant analog circuit sizing. Using formal methods based on affine arithmetic, we calculate guaranteed bounds on the worst-case behavior and deterministically find the global optimum of the sizing problem by means of branch-and-bound optimization. To solve the nonlinear circuit equations with parameter variations, we define a novel affine-arithmetic Newton operator that gives a significant improvement in computational efficiency over an implementation using interval arithmetic. The calculation of guaranteed worst-case bounds and the global optimization are demonstrated by a prototype implementation.
IRBL: An Implicitly Restarted Block-Lanczos Method for Large-Scale Hermitian Eigenproblems
Authors: J. Baglama, D. Calvetti, L. Reichel
Venue: SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (2002)

The irbleigs code is an implementation of an implicitly restarted block-Lanczos method for computing a few selected nearby eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors of a large, possibly sparse, Hermitian matrix A. The code requires only the evaluation of matrix-vector products with A; in particular, factorization of A is not demanded, nor is the solution of linear systems of equations with the matrix A. This, together with a fairly small storage requirement, makes the irbleigs code well suited for large-scale problems. Applications of the irbleigs code to certain generalized eigenvalue problems and to the computation of a few singular values and associated singular vectors are also discussed. Numerous computed examples illustrate the performance of the method and provide comparisons with other available codes.
Decomposable multi-parameter matroid optimization problems
Authors: David Fernández-Baca
Venue: Theoretical Computer Science (2003)

A framework for solving certain multi-dimensional parametric matroid optimization problems in randomized linear time by prune-and-search is presented. The common feature of these problems, which include the multi-parameter minimum spanning tree problem on planar and dense graphs, is that their fixed-parameter versions are solvable by tournament-like algorithms whose structure is represented by a balanced decomposition tree.
Some New Properties of the Chebyshev Polynomials and Their Use in Analysis and Design of Dynamic Systems
Authors: Yu. G. Bulychev, E. Yu. Bulycheva
Venue: Automation and Remote Control (2003)

The possibility of essential simplification of the procedure of approximate analysis and design of various systems obeying the operator equations in appropriate functional spaces was demonstrated by taking into account the new properties of the Chebyshev polynomials of the first and second kinds.
Choosing Hardware-and-Software Facilities for Designing the Microprocessor Switching Module of the Multistage ATM Switch Using by the Real-Time Criterion
Authors: A. N. Nazarov
Venue: Automation and Remote Control (2003)

Design a microprocessor-based high-speed real-time switching module of the multistage ATM switch was considered. The main parameters such as the constraint on real time and the system response time were specified and formalized. The problem of conditional optimization was formulated, studied, and solved with the aim of designing the real-time mode in the class of relative software priorities. The proposed algorithm enables one to choose particular hardware-and-software facilities for designing the switching module. By allowing for cost, the algorithm chooses a certain type of microprocessor, determines a particular number of switched input and output communication lines, takes into account the characteristics of the elements, and chooses the strategies of software design.
A Tactical Planning Model for Mixed-Model Electronics Assembly Operations
Authors: Anantaram Balakrishnan, Francois Vanderbeck
Venue: Operations Research (1999)

This paper develops an optimization model and methodology to support tactical planning in a high mix, low volume electronics assembly environment. The model assigns product families to parallel surface mount assembly lines to minimize setup cost on the placement machines while ensuring that the facilities are not overloaded. To capture the impact of product assignment decisions on setup cost, we consider a partial setup policy of mounting some components permanently on each placement machine and loading other components as needed for each product. We formulate the tactical planning problem as an integer program, and show that even the special case of minimizing the setup cost on a single placement machine, for a given assignment of products, is NP-hard. Our solution method for the general problem, based on column generation, provides both heuristic solutions and lower bounds. Two subproblems that we solve-a product selection subproblem and a setup optimization subproblem-might be independently useful for short-term production planning. Computational experience shows that the approach is effective, providing solutions that are within 1.5% of optimality on average and reducing setup costs considerably compared to a complete setup policy.
Schedule Optimization at Sncf: From Conception to Day of Departure
Authors: Nejib Ben-Khedher, Josephine Kintanar, Cecile Queille, William Stripling
Venue: Interfaces (1998)

Because of the upcoming deregulation and the advent of high-speed rail networks, European passenger railroads are battling for customers among themselves and with other means of transportation. To maintain a competitive advantage, they rely on the scheduling process as a key factor in winning market share. Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF), in partnership with SABRE Technology Solutions, has developed RailPlus, a strategic schedule planning system, and RailCap, a tactical capacity-adjustment system, to meet the new challenges of the rail business. The heart of these systems is a set of advanced operations research models that enable analysts to take a global approach to decision making. The two systems combined provide 110 million francs in incremental revenue per year and substantially reduce operating costs. In addition, the two systems have become the foundation for the reorganization of SNCF/TGV.
Reengineering of database intensive application
Authors: Rakesh Agarwal, Ajit Sarangi, Swati Das
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (2003)

Reengineering databases has been a challenge since ages and it requires process mapping to understand better and significantly improve the business processes and performance. In this paper we describe a generic architecture for reengineering legacy databases, which is an outcome of working on a real software project. The goal of this research is to formalize a process that is applicable to different database reengineering scenarios and requirements. We elaborate the steps that were actually done for implementing the project.
Blackwell sufficiency and fuzzy experiments
Authors: W. Näther, A. Wünsche
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2002)

Blackwell sufficiency is an accepted instrument for the comparison of random experiments. In this paper it is shown that Blackwell sufficiency, only in special cases, is well suited for the comparison of fuzzy experiments. This is discussed for two types of fuzzy experiments: random experiments with vague outcomes where we ask for links between fuzziness and Blackwell sufficiency, and experiments which are evaluated by belief and plausibility where we find some connections between specificity and Blackwell sufficiency.
Achieving Target State-Action Frequencies in Multichain Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Dmitry Krass, O. J. Vrieze
Venue: Mathematics of Operations Research (2002)

In this paper we address a basic problem that arises naturally in average-reward Markov decision processes with constraints and/or nonstandard payoff criteria: Given a feasible state-action frequency vector ("the target"), construct a policy whose state-action frequencies match those of the target vector.While it is well known that the solution to this problem cannot, in general, be found in the space of stationary randomized policies, we construct a solution that has "ultimately stationary" structure: It consists of two stationary policies where the first one is used initially, and then the switch to the second one is made at a certain random switching time. The computational effort required to construct this solution is minimal.We also show that our problem can always be solved by a stationary policy if the original MDP is "extended" by adding certain states and actions. The solution in the original MDP is obtained by mapping the solution in the extended MDP back to the original process.
Data assimilation for assessing radioactive contamination of feed and foodstuffs
Authors: K. Richter, F. Gering, H. Müller
Venue: Development and application of computer techniques to environmental studies (2002)

After a large-scale emission of radioactivity into the atmosphere in the case of a nuclear accident appropriate measures have to be taken in order to minimize the health risk of the population. Estimations of the contamination of feed and foodstuffs are of particular importance for this. The decision support system RODOS, which is installed in many European countries for assessing the consequences of nuclear emergencies, contains a food chain model to predict the activity concentration in feed and foodstuffs. The uncertainty of the food chain model parameters, for example root uptake factors and the time of harvest, as well as the uncertainty of the input parameters, namely the deposited activity on ground and plants contribute to the uncertainty of the model output. Results of a sensitivity analysis to identify the most important model parameters are presented. Since in a real emergency, measurements of activity concentrations in feed and foodstuffs are available, they can be used to improve the results of the food chain model. This data assimilation is done with a Kalman filter, using the results of the sensitivity analysis. The Kalman filter updates the predicted activity concentration every time new measurements are available taking into account both the uncertainty of the food chain model output and the uncertainty of the measurements. Measurements carried out at a particular site and point in time may influence the predicted activity concentration at other sites and other points in time. Since the food chain model works on a large-scale grid a sub-optimal Kalman filter, the Ensemble Kalman Filter, is applied in order to reduce the data amount and the computational time. Examples of the temporal course and the spatial distribution of activity concentrations are shown.
From here to obscurity?: media substitution theory and traditional media in an on-line world
Authors: Barbara K. Kaye, Thomas J. Johnson
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2003)

An online survey targeted to politically interested Internet users assesses whether traditional media use is decreasing, increasing or remaining the same since users first started using the Web, bulletin boards/electronic mailing lists and chat rooms. Associations are made between media use gratifications, political attitudes and demographics and traditional media use, and further analysis determines whether these factors predict changes in the amount of time online users spend with traditional media. This study's findings are compared with a similar study conducted in 1996. News magazines and radio news took the hardest hit from the Internet in 2000 but in 1996 television news suffered the most. Generally, in both years the Internet had not altered media use patterns. In 1996 and 2000 more users claimed that the time they spent seeking political information from traditional media sources had stayed the same than had changed. However, the trend indicates that those Internet users whose media patterns have changed are abandoning traditional media at a much greater rate than they are increasing their use.
Two-scale limits in some non-linear problems of engineering mechanics
Authors: J. Vala
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2003)

The paper deals with the homogenization of variational formulations of non-linear systems of PDEs with periodically oscillating coefficients, occurring in engineering mechanics, whose microstructure can include holes of complicated shapes and parts of different dimensions. The first section discusses some approaches to the mathematical formulation of physical and engineering problems where the advanced analysis of microstructural properties is needed to obtain numerical results of non-negligible validity; in most cases some kind of homogenization cannot be avoided. One of the most effective approaches, involving certain compensated compactness phenomenon, is based on the idea of the two-scale convergence, whose definition and basic properties (with respect to Radon measures) are presented in the second section. The last section is devoted to the microstructural and macrostructural formulation of a model elliptic problem; it is demonstrated how the notion of the two-scale homogenization explains and simplifies the complicated form of the macroscopic limit equation, thanks to the addition of a new microscopic hidden variable.
Slip-dependent friction in dynamic elasticity
Authors: Ioan R. Ionescu, Quoc-Lan Nguyen, Sylvie Wolf
Venue: Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods Applications (2003)

The dynamic evolution with frictional contact of an elastic body is considered. In modeling the contact the Tresca model and a slip-dependent friction law are used. The existence of a solution is proved in the two-dimensional case. The uniqueness is proved for the one-dimensional shearing problem. The convergence, for a vanishing viscosity, of the unique solution of the viscoelastic problem to a solution of the elastic problem is obtained.
Aspect-oriented interaction in multi-organisational web-based systems
Authors: Rafael Corchuelo, José A. Pérez, Antonio Ruiz-Cortés
Venue: Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (2003)

Separation of concerns has been presented as a promising tool to tackle the design of complex systems in which cross-cutting properties that do not fit into the scope of a class must be satisfied. Unfortunately, current proposals assume that objects interact by means of object-oriented method calls, which implies that they embed interactions with others into their functional code. This makes them dependent on this interaction model, and makes it difficult to reuse them in a context in which another interaction model is more suited, e.g., tuple spaces, multiparty meetings, ports, and so forth. In this paper, we show that functionality can be described separately from the interaction model used, which helps enhance reusability of functional code and coordination patterns. Our proposal is innovative in that it is the first that achieves a clear separation between functionality and interaction in an aspect-oriented manner. In order to show that it is feasible, we adapted the multiparty interaction model to the context of multiorganisational web-based systems and developed a class framework to build business objects whose performance rates comparably to handmade implementations; the development time, however, decreases significantly.
An activation based behaviour control architecture for walking machines
Authors: Jan Albiez, Tobias Luksch, Karsten Berns, Rüdiger Dillmann
Venue: Proceedings of the seventh international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior on From animals to animats (2002)

This paper introduces a behaviour network architecture for controlling walking machines. The behavior coordination problem is solved by distributing the activation of the behaviours according to the sensoric information as well as the specified task of the robot. This approach heavily emphasises the loop-back of the behaviour activities and the satisfaction of their goals. The results of initial experiments with this architecture on the four-legged walking machine BISAM are also presented.
Formal logics of discovery and hypothesis formation by machine
Authors: Petr Hájek, Martin Holena
Venue: Theoretical Computer Science (2003)

The following are the aims of the paper: (1) To call the attention of the community of Discovery Science (DS) to certain existing formal systems for DS developed in Prague in the 1960s through the 1980s suitable for DS and unfortunately largely unknown. (2) To illustrate the use of the calculi in question by the example of the GUHA method of hypothesis generation by computer, subjecting this method to a critical evaluation in the context of contemporary data mining. (3) To stress the importance of fuzzy logic for DS and to present the state of mathematical foundations of fuzzy logic. (4) Finally, to present a running research program of developing calculi of symbolic fuzzy logic for DS and for a fuzzy GUHA method.
Emotions, speech and the ASR framework
Authors: Louis ten Bosch
Venue: Speech Communication (2003)

Automatic recognition and understanding of speech are crucial steps towards natural human-machine interaction. Apart from the recognition of the word sequence, the recognition of properties such as prosody, emotion tags or stress tags may be of particular importance in this communication process. This paper discusses the possibilities to recognize emotion from the speech signal, primarily from the viewpoint of automatic speech recognition (ASR). The general focus is on the extraction of acoustic features from the speech signal that can be used for the detection of the emotional state or stress state of the speaker.After the introduction, a short overview of the ASR framework is presented. Next, we discuss the relation between recognition of emotion and ASR, and the different approaches found in the literature that deal with the correspondence between emotions and acoustic features. The conclusion is that automatic emotional tagging of the speech signal is difficult to perform with high accuracy, but prosodic information is nevertheless potentially useful to improve the dialogue handling in ASR tasks on a limited domain.
Checking temporal duration properties of timed automata
Authors: Yong Li, Dang Van Hung
Venue: Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2002)

In this paper, the problem of checking a timed automaton for a Duration Calculus formula of the form Temporal Duration Property is addressed. It is shown that Temporal Duration Properties are in the class of discretisable real-time properties of Timed Automata. and an algorithm is given to solve the problem based on linear programming techniques and the depth-first search method in the integral region graph of the automaton. The complexity of the algorithm is in the same class as that of the solution of the reachability problem of timed automata.
Are designers ready for ubiquitous computing?: a formative study
Authors: Sara Ljungblad, Tobias Skog, Lalya Gaye
Venue: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2003)

Ubiquitous computing is increasingly becoming reality, even for people outside of research. A group that will have to face the challenges of this new technology is product and industrial designers. To get a designer's view of ubiquitous computing, we demonstrated the Smart-Its ubiquitous computing prototyping platform to 16 product designers and collected their impressions during a workshop. Our results show that the way designers approach technology differs from that of researchers, which indicates the need for more comprehensive workshops.