ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A New Method of IRFPA Nonuniformity Correction
Authors: Shaosheng Dai, Tianqi Zhang, Jian Gao
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Neural Networks: Part II--Advances in Neural Networks (2007)

In order to meet the demand of real time nonuniformity correction of Infrared Focal Plane Array (IRFPA), a new algorithm based on neural network (NN) is proposed. Comparing to the traditional NN algorithm, the new algorithm uses weighted average of four adjacent pixels value to calculate the expected output value, and uses weighted average of four adjacent corrected output value to replace the finally corrected value. With the help of high performance image-processing system based on TMS320C6201 DSP, the nonuniformity of IRFPA is real time corrected. In this paper the mathematical model of the new NN algorithm is established, and the specific hardware correction process is expatiated. At last experimental results are given out. The results show that new NN algorithm is more satisfying to increase the quality of the corrected image.
Operational Risk Visualization
Authors: Concetto Bonafede, Roberto Marmo
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Visual Information Systems: Web-Based Visual Information Search and Management (2008)

Operational risk management is a new paradigm for decision making, that involves the two-way exchange of information between interested parties in order to manage risks according to strategic background. The database used to develop our graph comes from a telecommunication service company which provides custom communication equipments to client. We provide graphical representations useful to decide pro-actively if a new client is a potential source of some kind of problems that lead to growth of some risks. We study the usability of graphical formats using eye tracker.
An open-source solution for a high school science grant
Authors: Suguna Chundur, Terry Wooton, Ben Aicholtz, William Clifton
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education (2008)

This project was developed as an Information Technology solution for a grant received by a local high school from the "What Kids Can Do Foundation". A group of high school students under the guidance of their teacher is currently working on the old growth hemlock forests of Great Smoky Mountains National Park to document the impact of an exotic species of Adelgid that has been wiping out large sections of hemlock forest along the east coast. This exotic species from China has been killing entire forest for the last 20 years. The goal of the project is to identify as many species as possible that inhabit the hemlock forests and to document how the loss of hemlock trees will impact the microclimate, and other species that live in the forest. The project is on going and is estimated to last 10 years. During this time period there will be approximately 30 data loggers collecting light and temperature data every 15 min, 24/7/365. This data separated by elevation and habitat will help the researchers establish the microclimate and how that microclimate changes correlates to changes in tree health. The data loggers will collect an estimated 1.4 million pieces of data over the period of study, which will need to be analyzed. Along with the light and temperature data, the researchers will be collecting data on the different species that can be found in the hemlock forest. They will also collect voucher specimens and track the locations and sightings of each specimen over a period of ten years. This will give the researchers some insight as to how the forest uses changes as the climax vegetation changes. The lead teacher for the project approached our department for a free and easy to use solution for their information technology needs. A team of Computer Information Technology students, under the guidance of their instructor, developed a solution using open source technology, such as PHP, MySQL, XHTML, and AJAX. The group used PHP to parse the data provided by the field equipment from a Comma Separated Volume (csv) into a MySQL database, which users can retrieve via a search page. This is an on-going project with new functionality being added. The students plan on implementing AJAX on the search page so the clients can dynamically produce search results from a large collection of data without the inconvenience of waiting for the web form to POST each time search data is submitted. The project stakeholders plan to integrate GIS data with this project in the near future.
New Algorithms for k-Center and Extensions
Authors: René Brandenberg, Lucia Roth
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (2008)

The problem of interest is covering a given point set with homothetic copies of several convex containers C 1, ..., C k , while the objective is to minimize the maximum over the dilatation factors. Such k-containment problems arise in various applications, e.g. in facility location, shape fitting, data classification or clustering. So far most attention has been paid to the special case of the Euclidean k-center problem, where all containers C i are Euclidean unit balls. New developments based on so-called core-sets enable not only better theoretical bounds in the running time of approximation algorithms but also improvements in practically solvable input sizes. Here, we present some new geometric inequalities and a Mixed-Integer-Convex-Programming formulation. Both are used in a very effective branch-and-bound routine which not only improves on best known running times in the Euclidean case but also handles general and even different containers among the C i .
Estimating User's Conversational Engagement Based on Gaze Behaviors
Authors: Ryo Ishii, Yukiko I. Nakano
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (2008)

In face-to-face conversations, speakers are continuously checking whether the listener is engaged in the conversation. When the listener is not fully engaged in the conversation, the speaker changes the conversational contents or strategies. With the goal of building a conversational agent that can control conversations with the user in such an adaptive way, this study analyzes the user's gaze behaviors and proposes a method for predicting whether the user is engaged in the conversation based on gaze transition 3-Gram patterns. First, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to collect the user's gaze behaviors as well as the user's subjective reports and an observer's judgment concerning the user's interest in the conversation. Next, we proposed an engagement estimation algorithm that estimates the user's degree of engagement from gaze transition patterns. This method takes account of individual differences in gaze patterns. The algorithm is implemented as a real-time engagement-judgment mechanism, and the results of our evaluation experiment showed that our method can predict the user's conversational engagement quite well.
6th International Special Session on Current Trends in Numerical Simulation for Parallel Engineering Environments New Directions and Work-in-Progress ParSim 2007
Authors: Carsten Trinitis, Martin Schulz
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th European PVM/MPI User's Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface (2007)

In today's world, the use of parallel programming and architectures is essential for simulating practical problems in engineering and related disciplines. Remarkable progress in CPU architecture (multi- and manycore, SMT, transactional memory, virtualization support, etc.), system scalability, and interconnect technology continues to provide new opportunities, as well as new challenges for both system architects and software developers. These trends are paralleled by progress in parallel algorithms, simulation techniques, and software integration from multiple disciplines.
On the Average Distribution of Power Residues and Primitive Elements in Inversive and Nonlinear Recurring Sequences
Authors: Ayça Çeşmelioğlu, Arne Winterhof
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Sequences and Their Applications (2008)

We estimate character sums with inversive and nonlinear recurring sequences `on average' over all initial values and obtain much stronger bounds than known for `individual' sequences. As a consequence, we present results 'on average' about the distribution of power residues and primitive elements in such sequences.On the one hand our bounds can be regarded as results on the pseudorandomness of inversive and nonlinear recurring sequences. On the other hand they shall provide a further step to efficient deterministic algorithms for finding non-powers and primitive elements in a finite field.
Colored trails: a multiagent system testbed for decision-making research
Authors: Sevan G. Ficici, Avi Pfeffer, Ya'akov Gal, Barbara Grosz, Stuart Shieber
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: demo papers (2008)

With increasing frequency, computer agents participate in collaborative and competitive multiagent domains in which humans reason strategically to make decisions. The deployment of computer agents in such domains requires that the agents understand something about human behavior so that they can interact successfully with people; the computer agents must be sensitive to how people reason in strategic settings as well as to the social utilities people employ to inform their reasoning. To date, these design requirements for computer agents have received relatively little attention. To further research in this area, we are developing the Colored Trails (CT) testbed [5], a configurable and extensible open-source system for use by the research community at large to investigate multiagent decision making.
(m,n)-Equidistant Sets in $\mathbb{R}^{k},\mathbb{S}^{k}$, and &#x2119;k
Authors: Strashimir G. Popvassilev
Venue: Discrete Computational Geometry (2008)

We call a metric space X (m,n)-equidistant if, when A&#x2286;X has exactly m points, there are exactly n points in X each of which is equidistant from (the points of)&#x00a0;A. We prove that, for k&#x2265;2, the Euclidean space &#x211d; k contains an (m,1)-equidistant set if and only if k&#x2265;m. Although the sphere $\mathbb{S}^{2}$is (3,2)-equidistant, $\mathbb{S}^{3}$and &#x211d;4 contain no (4,2)-equidistant sets. We discuss related results about projective spaces, and state a conjecture about $\mathbb{S}^{2}$analogous to the Double Midset Conjecture.
Visualization of free search process
Authors: Erdoan Veliev, Kalin Penev
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on Evolutionary Computing (2008)

The article presents visualization of an adaptive method for optimization called Free Search and gives a description of methodology used. Implemented tasks are illustrated with relevant graphics. Benefits of having 3D graphical interface are in opportunity to observe and track the changes and behavior of this algorithm during the search process. Technologies and tools used for visualization are explained and discussed.
Searching for Gapped Palindromes
Authors: Roman Kolpakov, Gregory Kucherov
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th annual symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (2008)

We study the problem of finding, in a given word, all maximal gapped palindromes verifying two types of constraints, that we call long-armed and length-constrained palindromes. For both classes, we propose algorithms that run in time O(n + S), where S is the number of output palindromes. Both algorithms can be extended to compute biological gapped palindromes within the same time bound.
Research Article: Morphological variation in the oral disc of the scleractinian coral Favia speciosa (Dana) at Indonesia
Authors: Tamir Caras, Ami Bachar, Zohar Pasternak
Venue: Computational Biology and Chemistry (2008)

Photographic analysis was used to examine morphological differences in the oral disc of n=1196 living polyps of Favia speciosa Dana (1846) sampled from four sites in the Wakatobi Marine National Park, Indonesia. Although oral disc size attributes differed significantly between the study sites, the geographic difference accounted for only a small fraction of the morphological variation and did not show a clear pattern of correspondence to sedimentation rates. A much higher fraction of the morphological variation was attributed to depth and so to incident light: oral discs grew significantly larger with increasing depth. These results suggest that for F. speciosa corals at Wakatobi, oral disc size may be optimised for heterotrophic nutrition under low light conditions, and photosynthesis in conditions where light is not limiting. Furthermore, the driving force for this phenotypic plasticity is more likely to be depth than sedimentation rate.
Integration of RFID and computer vision for remote object perception for individuals who are blind
Authors: Troy L. McDaniel, Kanav Kahol, Daniel Villanueva, Sethuraman Panchanathan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Ambi-Sys workshop on Haptic user interfaces in ambient media systems (2008)

Over the last few years, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has gained popularity for use in assistive technology for individuals who are blind. Recently, RFID-based wearable assistive devices have been developed for individuals who are blind to assist with navigation or remote object perception. However, RFID-based assistive technology suffers from two major drawbacks: (1) information overload in environments with many tagged objects, and (2) usability issues in untagged environments. In this paper, we propose a framework for integrating RFID and computer vision in assistive devices for remote object perception to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Computer vision enables content selection to help prevent information overload and provide users with only relevant information found through RFID. Moreover, computer vision can be used to learn a mapping between visual data and object features as acquired through tags, which will enable computer vision to replace RFID in untagged environments.
Parameter mapping and data transformation for engineering application integration
Authors: Chengen Wang, Lida Xu
Venue: Information Systems Frontiers (2008)

Enterprise applications may be classified into management applications used by managerial staffs for making decisions on business operations, and engineering applications used by engineers for solving multidisciplinary design problems. In the literature, enterprise application integration is extensively addressed in the context of management applications, but insufficiently discussed in the engineering disciplines. Practitioners in manufacturing industries have for a long time feel the increasing need of integrating engineering applications, in order to accelerate product development paces and improve design qualities. Integrating engineering applications used in the multiple engineering disciplines has to cope with a number of challenges. This paper focuses on one of the critical issues: parameter mapping and data transformation, which is of pivotal importance to integrating engineering applications. Design parameter mapping provides a consistent approach to data extraction, storage, display and manipulation among different data sources. Data transformation describes the operational logic of parsing input/output files, extracting and transforming data, and maintaining consistency among multiple data sources.
The Disappearing Computer: User-Centered Interaction Design for Smart Artefacts
Authors: Norbert Streitz
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on User Modeling (2007)

The increasing trend of embedding computation in everyday objects creating smart artefacts (Streitz et al., 2005 b) and the associated concept of the disappearing computer (Streitz, 2001, Streitz et al, 2007) raises new challenges for designing interactive systems. The unobtrusive character of this development is illustrated in this statement by Streitz and Nixon (2005): "It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and our lives".
The influence of metal grains orientation on the springback intensity in the case of parts made from tailor welded blanks
Authors: Aurelian Albut, Gheorghe Brabie
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on Automatic Control, Modelling & Simulation (2008)

The final shape of the draw bended parts is seriously affected by the springback phenomenon. The present work deals with numerical simulation and experimental tests related to draw bending and springback of U - shaped parts manufactured from tailor welded blanks. The current paper is trying to prove out the important role that the metal grain orientation of the joined steel sheets has on the springback intensity. The experimental tests and the simulation by finite element method (ABAQUS) have been carried out using two different materials grain orientaion directions and maintaining constant all other parameters.
Toward the integration of a single carbon nanofibre as via interconnect
Authors: J. C. Coiffic, H. Le Poche, D. Mariolle, N. Chevalier, S. Olivier, M. Fayolle, S. Maitrejean
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2008)

The use of carbon nanotube/nanofibres as via interconnects is widely studied. As the vias dimensions decrease below 50nm, the number of carbon nanotubes could be close to the unity in each via hole. In the present study we show the integration processes to obtain interconnects made of one single vertically free standing carbon nanofibre. Two different catalyst integrations are detailed and tested.
Interaction techniques for automating collecting and organizing personal web content
Authors: Michael F. Cohen, David H. Salesin
Venue:  (2008)

The growth of the World Wide Web has led to a dramatic increase in accessible information. Today, people use the Web for a large variety of activities including travel planning, comparison shopping, entertainment, and research. However, the tools available for collecting, organizing, and sharing Web content have not kept pace with the rapid growth in information. Today people continue to use bookmarks, email, and printers for managing Web content. In this thesis, I present a set of semi-automatic interaction techniques for retrieving content from the Web using the structure of webpages, presentation principles based on layout templates for user-guided organization of content from any number of Web sources, and a new template-based search paradigm for the Web that transforms keyword search into a goal-oriented rich visual experience. To demonstrate the efficacy of these ideas I combined them into a working system and evaluated them through a three-month longitudinal user study. Finally, the ideas that I present in this thesis when popularized by an online Web community would allow average Web users to build a kind of machine-readable "Semantic Web" piece by piece as they go about accomplishing their personal tasks.
Using Knowledge Discovery Techniques to Support Tutoring in an Ill-Defined Domain
Authors: Roger Nkambou, Engelbert Mephu Nguifo, Philippe Fournier-Viger
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2008)

Domain experts should provide relevant knowledge to a tutoring system so that it can guide a learner during problem-solving learning activities. However, for ill-defined domains this knowledge is hard to define explicitly. As an alternative, this paper presents a framework to learn relevant knowledge related to procedural tasks from users' solutions in an ill-defined procedural domain. The proposed framework is based on a combination of sequential pattern mining and association rules discovery. The resulting knowledge base allows the tutoring system to guide learners in problem-solving situations. Preliminary experiments have been conducted in CanadarmTutor.
A Framework for Multi-view Gender Classification
Authors: Jing Li, Bao-Liang Lu
Venue: Neural Information Processing: 14th International Conference, ICONIP 2007, Kitakyushu, Japan, November 13-16, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Part I (2007)

This paper proposes a novel framework for dealing with multi-view gender classification problems and shows its feasibility on the CAS-PEAL database of face images. The framework consists of three stages. First, wavelet transform is used to intensify multi-scale edges and remove effects of illumination and noises. Second, instead of traditional Euclidean distance, image Euclidean distance which considers the spatial relationships between pixels is used to measure the distance between images. Last, a two layer support vector machine is proposed, which divides face images into different poses in the first layer, and then recognizes the gender with different support vector machines in the second layer. Compared with traditional support vector machines and min-max modular network with support vector machines, our method achieves higher classification accuracy and spends less training and test time.
Imitation Learning Using Graphical Models
Authors: Deepak Verma, Rajesh P. Rao
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th European conference on Machine Learning (2007)

Imitation-based learning is a general mechanism for rapid acquisition of new behaviors in autonomous agents and robots. In this paper, we propose a new approach to learning by imitation based on parameter learning in probabilistic graphical models. Graphical models are used not only to model an agent's own dynamics but also the dynamics of an observed teacher. Parameter tying between the agent-teacher models ensures consistency and facilitates learning. Given only observations of the teacher's states, we use the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to learn both dynamics and policies within graphical models. We present results demonstrating that EM-based imitation learning outperforms pure exploration-based learning on a benchmark problem (the FlagWorld domain). We additionally show that the graphical model representation can be leveraged to incorporate domain knowledge (e.g., state space factoring) to achieve significant speed-up in learning.
Using and Detecting Links in Wikipedia
Authors: Khairun Nisa Fachry, Jaap Kamps, Marijn Koolen, Junte Zhang
Venue: Focused Access to XML Documents: 6th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2007 Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, December 17-19, 2007. Selected Papers (2008)

In this paper, we document our efforts at INEX 2007 where we participated in the Ad Hoc Track, the Link the Wiki Track, and the Interactive Track that continued from INEX 2006. Our main aims at INEX 2007 were the following. For the Ad Hoc Track, we investigated the effectiveness of incorporating link evidence into the model, and of a CAS filtering method exploiting the structural hints in the INEX topics. For the Link the Wiki Track, we investigated the relative effectiveness of link detection based on retrieving similar documents with the Vector Space Model, and then filter with the names of Wikipedia articles to establish a link. For the Interactive Track, we took part in the interactive experiment comparing an element retrieval system with a passage retrieval system. The main results are the following. For the Ad Hoc Track, we see that link priors improve most of our runs for the Relevant in Context and Best in Context Tasks, and that CAS pool filtering is effective for the Relevant in Context and Best in Context Tasks. For the Link the Wiki Track, the results show that detecting links with name matching works relatively well, though links were generally under-generated, which hurt the performance. For the Interactive Track, our test-persons showed a weak preference for the element retrieval system over the passage retrieval system.