ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
STudio for Engineering Practice, "STEP", lessons learned about engineering practice
Authors: R. J. Coleman
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference on 1995. Proceedings., 1995 vol 1. - Volume 01 (1995)

The STudio for Engineering Practice, "STEP", is a first step in introducing freshman engineering students to "hands-on engineering practice", including design, construction and testing. The initial cohorts of students have performed design team experiments supplied by the electrical, mechanical and civil engineering departments as well as computer utilization for analysis and simulation, in order to introduce students to those disciplines. The studio culminated with a multi-disciplinary design project. This project is in many ways similar to others being introduced across the engineering academic environment and one particular emphasis is to make the project cost effective in both finances and faculty time. We imported appropriate materials from other successful curriculum experiments to reduce development cost and modified the material to fit the local situation. Of particular interest is the challenge to scale up the project from the experimental cohorts to full scale implementation. This project was sponsored by the SUCCEED Engineering Education Coalition and materials were shared and imported from other Coalition members. The external evaluation is to be provided by the Coalition Evaluation and Assessment Team to reduce cost and utilize professional evaluation talent. The paper presents an outline of the freshman studio experience, a summary of the evaluation results, a discussion of problems encountered in the two year trial and a few recommendations to improve the project.
Crossover and mutation operators for grammar-guided genetic programming
Authors: Jorge Couchet, Daniel Manrique, Juan R&#x00ed;os, Alfonso Rodr&#x00ed;guez-Pat&#x00f3;n
Venue: Soft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications (2007)

This paper proposes a new grammar-guided genetic programming (GGGP) system by introducing two original genetic operators: crossover and mutation, which most influence the evolution process. The first, the so-called grammar-based crossover operator, strikes a good balance between search space exploration and exploitation capabilities and, therefore, enhances GGGP system performance. And the second is a grammar-based mutation operator, based on the crossover, which has been designed to generate individuals that match the syntactical constraints of the context-free grammar that defines the programs to be handled. The use of these operators together in the same GGGP system assures a higher convergence speed and less likelihood of getting trapped in local optima than other related approaches. These features are shown throughout the comparison of the results achieved by the proposed system with other important crossover and mutation methods in two experiments: a laboratory problem and the real-world task of breast cancer prognosis.
Pitch quantization in low bit-rate speech coding
Authors: T. Eriksson
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1999)

This paper describes a new pitch quantization method for low bit-rate speech coding systems. The logarithm of the pitch period is quantized in a combination of two uniform quantizers, one working directly on logarithmic pitch values and the other working on the difference between current and previous logarithmic pitch. The best of the two output values is transmitted to the receiver. This scheme can exploit: both redundancy in the signal and properties of the ear to achieve an efficient quantization. Listening tests show that the proposed scheme allows the pitch parameter to be quantized using 4 bits, with no degradation in audible quality.
A Systolic Architecture and Implementation of Feedback Network for Blind Source Separation
Authors: H. Jeong, Y. Kim
Venue: Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (2007)

Blind source separation of independent sources from their convolutive mixtures is a problem in many real-world multi-sensor applications. However, the existing BSS architectures are more often than not based upon software and thus not suitable for direct implementation on hardware. The existing software of feedback network algorithm is not suitable for real-time implementations. In this paper, we present a parallel algorithm and architecture for hardware implementation of blind source separation. The algorithm is based on feedback network and is highly suited for parallel processing. The implementation is designed to operate in real time for speech signal sequences. It is systolic and easily scalable by simple adding and connecting chips or modules. In order to verify the proposed architecture, we have also designed and implemented it in a hardware prototyping with Xilinx FPGAs running at 33 MHz.
Using active learning to teach technical and non-technical skills in the same course
Authors: R. Martinazzi
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference,1997. on 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change. - Volume 01 (1997)

The use of student teams to teach collaboratively is a model applicable to what engineers will be doing in their professional life. The sense of working with others and depending on their competence is important in any team project. The authors describe an educational program which leads to the development of this team atmosphere and allows students to work through the pitfalls in a comfortable environment. The development of other skills is a spin-off that is immensely important to all professionals who deal with the public. It is also a recognized weakness in the engineering profession that must be addressed. The responses of the students who have experienced this program illustrate the obvious advantages to addressing these weaknesses. Finally, the apparent willingness of students to subjugate grades in favor of greater learning objectives is inspirational. This occurs in some measure because the course emphasizes the holistic development of the students from their first to last terms. Students learn to believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; that teams can do much more than individuals.
Nearfield broadband frequency invariant beamforming
Authors: R. A. Kennedy
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

This paper presents a method for nearfield frequency invariant broadband array beamforming. This means that we can design an array with associated signal processing to achieve a desired frequency invariant beam pattern (as a function of direction) at any nominal finite distance over an arbitrarily wide range of frequencies. The challenge here is to compensate accurately for the nearfield distortions (both magnitude and phase) which are more acute at the lower frequencies of the operating bandwidth than the higher frequencies. The methodology uses spherical harmonics to transform the nearfield broadband frequency invariant beampattern specification to an equivalent farfield frequency varying beampattern specification. A simulation example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in producing a nearfield beam pattern which is frequency invariant over an octave bandwidth.
Acoustic source location in noisy and reverberant environment using CSP analysis
Authors: M. Omologo
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1996)

A linear four microphone array can be employed for acoustic event location in a real environment using an accurate time delay estimation. This paper refers to the use of a specific technique, based on crosspower spectrum phase (CSP) analysis, that yielded accurate location performance. The behavior of this technique is investigated under different noise and reverberation conditions. Real experiments as well as simulations were conducted to analyze a wide variety of situations. Results show system robustness at quite critical environmental conditions.
Energy-efficiency and storage flexibility in the blue file system
Authors: Edmund B. Nightingale, Jason Flinn
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 6 (2004)

A fundamental vision driving pervasive computing research is access to personal and shared data anywhere at anytime. In many ways, this vision is close to being realized. Wireless networks such as 802.11 offer connectivity to small, mobile devices. Portable storage, such as mobile disks and USB keychains, let users carry several gigabytes of data in their pockets. Yet, at least three substantial barriers to pervasive data access remain. First, power-hungry network and storage devices tax the limited battery capacity of mobile computers. Second, the danger of viewing stale data or making inconsistent updates grows as objects are replicated across more computers and portable storage devices. Third, mobile data access performance can suffer due to variable storage access times caused by dynamic power management, mobility, and use of heterogeneous storage devices. To overcome these barriers, we have built a new distributed file system called BlueFS. Compared to the Coda file system, BlueFS reduces file system energy usage by up to 55% and provides up to 3 times faster access to data replicated on portable storage.
DSP core verification using automatic test case generation
Authors: T. Glokler
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 06 (2000)

The verification methodology for a TMS320C25 compatible embedded DSP core is described. The DSP core has been implemented in synthesizable VHDL and has been cosimulated with the original DSP to verify correct behavior. Automatic test case generation together with hand-crafted code has been used as a means of providing stimuli to achieve increased RTL-simulation coverage. The cosimulation environment for this verification and the process of automatic test case generation is described in detail. Experimental results in terms of simulation coverage are discussed. Finally, a classification of all identified design flaws in the implementation is given and error-prone parts of the HDL design are identified.
Process Compliance and Enterprise System Implementation
Authors: Nicholas Berente, Danail Ivanov, Betty Vandenbosch
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

Enterprise systems promise to integrate the processes of an entire enterprise. To attain this promise, users must do more than accept the technology; they must adhere to the process scripts prescribed by the enterprise system. In this paper we introduce and motivate "process compliance" as an important issue associated with enterprise system implementation. Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the process compliance of one firm's sales force, we identify and measure four key drivers of process compliance: ease-of-use, perceived value, urgency, and gatekeeper flexibility. We find that traditional technology acceptance factors are important determinants of process compliance, and connect with process-specific factors to improve individuals' willingness to work within the bounds of prescribed processes.
Collaborative broadcasting and compression in cluster-based wireless sensor networks
Authors: Anh Tuan Hoang, Mehul Motani
Venue: ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN) (2007)

Achieving energy efficiency to prolong the network lifetime is an important design criterion for wireless sensor networks. In this article, we propose a novel approach that exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless medium for energy conservation in spatially correlated wireless sensor networks. Since wireless transmission is inherently broadcast, when one sensor node transmits, other nodes in its coverage area can receive the transmitted data. When data collected by different sensors are correlated, each sensor can utilize the data it overhears from other sensors to compress its own data and conserve energy in its own transmissions. We apply this idea to a class of cluster-based wireless sensor networks in which each sensing node transmits collected data directly to its cluster head using time division multiple access (TDMA). We formulate the problem in which sensors in each cluster collaborate their transmitting, receiving, and compressing activities to optimize their lifetimes. We show that this lifetime optimization problem can be solved by a sequence of linear programming problems. We also propose a heuristic scheme which has low complexity and achieves near optimal performance. Important characteristics of wireless sensor networks such as node startup cost and packet loss due to transmission errors are also considered. Numerical results show that by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, our control schemes achieve significant improvement in the sensors' lifetimes.
Self-Stabilizing Algorithms of Constructing Spanning Tree and Weakly Connected Minimal Dominating Set
Authors: Pradip K. Srimani, Zhenyu Xu
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (2007)

In this paper, we present a self-stabilizing algorithm that computes the breadth first spanning tree in arbitrary graph, with O(n3) time complexity using the unfair central daemon. We then propose a self-stabilizing algorithm to compute the weakly connected minimal dominating set in a graph using the same model and provide its correctness and complexity analysis; as far as we know, this is the first self-stabilizing algorithm to compute such sets.
The bodily aspect in computer-supported creativity
Authors: Andre Knörig
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity cognition (2007)

In opposition to being the fundamental condition for our existence, the human body has long been marginalized in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. It is now gaining consideration through the idea of embodiment. I want to support the embodied argument by pointing out the role of the body in creativity. A general framework and a criticism of interaction with today's Personal Computers delivers guidelines and starting points for a more conscious design of systems that seek to support creativity.
A Comprehensive Approach to Service Adaptation
Authors: Soo Ho Chang, Hyun Jung La, Soo Dong Kim
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (2007)

In service-oriented computing (SOC), services are designed not just for a dedicated client, but for a family of potential clients who typically discover and compose services dynamically. For services to be generic and hence serviceable to different users in a given domain, the service variability among different clients must be analyzed and modeled into service components. Furthermore, effective methods for dynamically adapting services for different invocations and contexts must be provided. Nonetheless, the research on service variability management and service adaptation is still in early stage. In this paper, we survey representative software adaptation methods, and propose four types of service variability. Then we present practical adaptation methods for resolving the four types of service variability. The proposed adaption methods presented in this paper can be implemented in a typical Web service environment with WSDL, UDDI and BPEL.
Transparent Symmetric Active/Active Replication for Service-Level High Availability
Authors: C. Engelmann, S. L. Scott, C. Leangsuksun, X. He
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (2007)

As service-oriented architectures become more important in parallel and distributed computing systems, individual service instance reliability as well as appropriate service redundancy becomes an essential necessity in order to increase overall system availability. This paper focuses on providing redundancy strategies using service-level replication techniques. Based on previous research using symmetric active/active replication, this paper proposes a transparent symmetric active/active replication approach that allows for more reuse of code between individual service-level replication implementations by using a virtual communication layer. Serviceand client-side interceptors are utilized in order to provide total transparency. Clients and servers are unaware of the replication infrastructure as it provides all necessary mechanisms internally.
Performance of Two-Disk Failure-Tolerant Disk Arrays
Authors: Alexander Thomasian, Gang Fu, Chunqi Han
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2007)

RAID5 disk arrays use the rebuild process to reconstruct the contents of a failed disk on a spare disk, but this process is unsuccessful if latent sector failures are encountered or a second disk failure occurs. The high cost of data loss has led to two-disk failure-tolerant (2DFT) arrays: RAID6, EVENODD, row-diagonal parity (RDP), and RM2. RAID6 uses Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, whereas the latter three use parity encoding. This paper is concerned with the performance from the viewpoint of disk accesses, which, with an appropriate choice of symbol sizes, is the same for RAID6, EVENODD, and RDP, rather than the computational cost (number of XOR operations). We compare the performance of 2DFTs with each other, as well as RAID0 and RAID5 in normal and degraded operating modes. We derive cost functions for processing discrete disk accesses. The mean response time can be obtained analytically with Poisson arrivals and first-come, first-served (FCFS) scheduling. A simulation is used for validation, calibrating the approximate fork-join response analysis, and shortest-access-time-first (SATF) scheduling. The response time for read requests in RAID6 and RM2 is higher than RAID5 and RAID0 and increases with the fraction of write requests. When there is a single disk failure, RM2 outperforms RAID6 since it has a smaller parity group size than RAID6, but RAID6 outperforms RM2 with two disk failures because of its costlier recovery process. Disk loads in RM2 and RAID6 in degraded mode are unbalanced, and a solution based on pseudorandom permutations is proposed for this purpose.
Accelerating convergence of cutting plane algorithms for disjoint bilinear programming
Authors: Xiaosong Ding, Faiz Al-Khayyal
Venue: Journal of Global Optimization (2007)

This paper presents two linear cutting plane algorithms that refine existing methods for solving disjoint bilinear programs. The main idea is to avoid constructing (expensive) disjunctive facial cuts and to accelerate convergence through a tighter bounding scheme. These linear programming based cutting plane methods search the extreme points and cut off each one found until an exhaustive process concludes that the global minimizer is in hand. In this paper, a lower bounding step is proposed that serves to effectively fathom the remaining feasible region as not containing a global solution, thereby accelerating convergence. This is accomplished by minimizing the convex envelope of the bilinear objective over the feasible region remaining after introduction of cuts. Computational experiments demonstrate that augmenting existing methods by this simple linear programming step is surprisingly effective at identifying global solutions early by recognizing that the remaining region cannot contain an optimal solution. Numerical results for test problems from both the literature and an application area are reported.
Image edges from area morphology
Authors: S. T. Acton
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (2000)

This paper introduces an edge detection process based on area morphology. Area open-close and area close-open operators are used to generate scaled image representations for feature extraction. The edges are defined by the boundaries of the scaled objects in the area-filtered images. From the area open-close and close-open operators, thin closed contours suitable for image segmentation are produced. The edge maps allow exact specification of the minimum area for the extracted regions and are Euclidean invariant and causal through scale space. Results are given that demonstrate the effectiveness of the area operator-based edge detection. In contrast to traditional edge detectors, edge detection via area morphology provides well-localized boundaries and does not require thresholding.
An enhanced full rate speech coder for digital cellular applications
Authors: W. LeBlanc, C. Liu, V. Viswanathan
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1996)

In the digital cellular environment, acoustic background noise and channel bit errors (both bursty and random) may severely degrade the performance of speech coders such as the current European GSM full rate standard. This paper presents a CELP-based, enhanced full rate coder, which allocates 11.9 kb/s for speech and 10.9 kb/s for error protection for an aggregate channel rate of 22.8 kb/s. This coder provides toll quality speech which is significantly better than 16 kb/s ITU standard G.728 in clean conditions; also, it maintains robust performance over adverse conditions. The noteworthy features of our coder include: 10 msec frame size, leading to lower coder delay; improved error control coding; improved detection and masking of bad frames; low-complexity predictive tree-searched multi-stage vector quantization of the line spectrum pairs (designed using a noisy channel vector quantization algorithm); and low-complexity tree-searched multi-stage vector quantization of the fixed excitation.
Developing and evaluating writing assignments for technical courses
Authors: C. Carvill
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 02 (2000)

This panel presentation focuses on designing and evaluating writing assignments for technical courses. Because of influential changes in engineering education, many engineering educators are attempting to incorporate writing assignments into their technical courses. While these writing tasks cover a wide variety of genres and products, they can prove frustrating to the professor because of the time it takes to evaluate writing, the quality of student writing, and the lack of integration between writing and technical content. The session places particular emphasis on writing good assignments, using peer review to develop sound revision practices, and employing efficient and effective evaluation strategies. The session analyzes the common pitfalls experienced when writing enters the technical classroom. As a strategy for avoiding these problems, the session explains the use of peer review as a way to help students develop sound revisions practices. Finally, it offers guidelines for making evaluations that are effective for both student and professor. Samples of successful assignments are used to demonstrate the application of the principles discussed.