ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Tag around: a 3D gesture game for image annotation
Authors: Duarte Gonçalves, Rui Jesus, Filipe Grangeiro, Teresa Romão, Nuno Correia
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (2008)

Manual annotation is difficult to perform in large image databases and the automatic methods deliver results that are far from what is desired by the users. New and fun ways to provide image annotation are required. This paper describes Tag Around, a computer game for image tagging. The application is based on a 3D game interface, a game engine that uses a system for automatic image classification and gestural input to play the game. We present the game, how it is used to improve image annotation, the design principles of the interface and the usability tests that were carried out in order to validate the application.
Performance of double binary turbo coded UWB systems with antenna diversity
Authors: Eun Cheol Kim, Jin Young Kim
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (2009)

In this paper, the performance of double binary turbo coded ultra wide band (UWB) system with antenna diversity is analyzed and simulated in an indoor wireless channel. We consider pulse position modulation-time hopping (PPM-TH) UWB system. In double binary turbo code, there are two inputs, A and B. The encoder is fed by blocks of k bits or N couples (N = k bits / 2). The most significant bit (MSB) of the first byte after the burst preamble is assigned to A, the next bit to B and so on for the remainder of the burst content. A modified Saleh and Valenzuela (SV) model is adopted as a UWB indoor channel model. Perfect synchronization between a transmitter and a receiver is assumed. Therefore, coherent equal gain combining (EGC) scheme to collect the energy available in the multipath components is investigated. It is shown that the performance is improved by increasing the number of antennas at the receiver. The results of this paper can be applied to the applications of UWB.
ACPI: Design Principles and Concerns
Authors: Loïc Duflot, Olivier Levillain, Benjamin Morin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trusted Computing (2009)

ACPI (Advanced Configuration Power Interface) allows operating systems to efficiently configure the hardware platform they are running on and deal with power management tasks. These tasks used to be achieved by the BIOS because it was the only platform component to know which specific chipset or device registers dealt with power management. In this paper, we illustrate how this shift in the global power management model introduces additional threats, especially for trusted platforms, by showing how rootkits can use ACPI to conceal some of their functions. We also study the relationship between trusted computing blocks and ACPI.
Resource selection in grid: a taxonomy and a new system based on decision theory, case-based reasoning, and fine-grain policies
Authors: Lilian Noronha Nassif, José Marcos Nogueira, Flá vio Vinícius de Andrade
Venue: Concurrency and Computation: Practice Experience (2009)

Resource selection on current brokers still presents challenges for achieving the best solution in the decision-making process, especially when considering many factors. We approach this problem considering user preference for specific resource selection objectives such as expected performance for an application execution, resource access restriction, execution application cost, and resource reliability. For each objective, we employ different techniques and combine them in a decision theory model. By considering performance in the selection process, we use the case-based reasoning technique based on similar past job executions to predict a new job time execution. With the resource access restriction as a selection factor, we develop a fine-grain policy-based model for distributed resource access verification. Unlike a global access policy, which applies to all resources in a virtual organization, a fine-grain policy establishes rules for specific resources and users. In this case, a previous access restriction verification prevents a resource selection, which may deny access to a requisition, resulting in an unsuccessful submission. The decision model uses the multi-attribute utility theory, which relates the important objectives above and allows different proportions of user preferences for each objective. The complete solution is distributed and implemented using a multi-agent system, acting as a resource broker. All models of this paper are analyzed in a real environment, presenting appropriate functional behaviors. Results show that our prediction model is accurate and efficient in the prediction process and our distributed model runs faster than centralized approaches and considers access restriction heterogeneities. Copyright &copy; 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Practical issues for academics using the Turnitin plagiarism detection software
Authors: Karl O. Jones
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies and Workshop for PhD Students in Computing (2008)

The Turnitin plagiarism detection system allows individual student assignments to be uploaded and matched for similarity with content on the web, all other assignments uploaded by institutions using the system and certain journals. An online report is produced for each submission identifying the sources of those similarities and the percentage match. There is a significant benefit in using Turnitin to identify possible cases of plagiarism. This paper highlights some issues that might be raised in employing Turnitin and suggests some approaches that academics might utilise to allow efficient use of Turnitin.
Shutters: a permeable surface for environmental control and communication
Authors: Marcelo Coelho, Pattie Maes
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (2009)

Surfaces capable of modulating permeability have long been used in architecture for environmental control, but have remained largely unexplored as information displays. The advent of new shape changing materials and construction techniques promises to change this. In this paper, we describe Shutters: a curtain composed of actuated louvers that can be individually addressed for precise control of ventilation, daylight incidence and information display. We discuss related work, the underlying design principles behind Shutters, engineering details and application scenarios in architecture and fashion. We conclude with a comparative visual study for the use of permeability in kinetic and shadow displays and provide directions for future work.
Using DEA window analysis to measure efficiencies of Taiwan's integrated telecommunication firms
Authors: Hsu-Hao Yang, Cheng-Yu Chang
Venue: Telecommunications Policy (2009)

Taiwan's telecommunication firms are faced with an important challenge arising from a situation in which the growth rate of telephone subscribers has gradually decreased owing to limited market size and the policy of continuous deregulation propagated by the government. To deal with the challenge, several acquisitions among telecommunication firms have taken place and have caused the three currently leading firms to capture a market share of more than 80%. Considering how acquisitions and related strategies might affect the firms, this paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) under constant and variable returns-to-scale to measure firms' efficiencies over the period 2001-2005. Because there are only three firms, DEA window analysis is employed to increase the number of decision-making units so that discriminating power can be increased. According to the results, the first finding shows that the acquisitions are justified by exhibiting higher scale efficiency (but lower pure technical efficiency) in the short run. The second finding indicates that adjusting the strategies such as enlarging market share to improving financial portfolios helps firms to achieve better scale size. The third finding justifies government efforts to privatize state-owned enterprises and liberalize the market to strengthen competitiveness.
Computers and entertainment
Authors: Suzanne Landa
Venue: Proceedings of the May 19-22, 1980, national computer conference (1980)

In response to a paper I wrote last year on computer technology and the movie industry, Dick Thompson, a special effects professional, commented, "There is much more involvement in computer technology in "show business" than anyone suspects. You are just beginning to turn over the rock---or is it a can of worms?" Dick's question remains to be answered because the relationship between the entertainment industry and the computer industry is yet in its infancy. I think entertainment is truly the last (earthly) frontier for automation and over the next decade we will see exciting results of this union. Indications of the importance of computers in entertainment are already surfacing: The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers devoted an entire day to computer applications at its 1979 Conference; several computer-based systems have been nominated for Technical Achievement Academy Awards in 1980. The entertainment industry is thus beginning to achknowledge the significant role of the computer. Appropriately, the computer industry also recognizes its current and potential contributions to entertainment through six technical paper and panel sessions at the 1980 NCC. The sessions will provide an overview of computer usage in movies and television, the performing arts, amusements, and home entertainment/services.
The design and use of a sparse direct solver for skew symmetric matrices
Authors: Iain S. Duff
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2009)

We consider the LDL^T factorization of sparse skew symmetric matrices. We see that the pivoting strategies are similar, but simpler, to those used in the factorization of sparse symmetric indefinite matrices, and we briefly describe the algorithms used in a forthcoming direct code based on multifrontal techniques for the factorization of real skew symmetric matrices. We show how this factorization can be very efficient for preconditioning matrices that have a large skew component.
Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy, 1 edition
Authors: Preston de Guise
Venue:  (2008)

This volume provides organizations with a comprehensive understanding of the principles and features involved in effective enterprise backups. Rather than focusing on any individual backup product, this book recommends corporate procedures and policies that need to be established for comprehensive data protection. It provides relevant information to any organization, regardless of what operating systems or applications are deployed, what backup system is in place, or what planning has been done for business continuity. It explains how backup must be included in every phase of system planning, development, operation, and maintenance. It also provides techniques for analyzing and improving current backup system performance.
Disruptive technologies and neurally-inspired architectures
Authors: Pinaki Mazumder
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI (2009)

Conventional shrinking methods to improve VLSI chip performance by continual scaling of device and interconnect geometries may allow CMOS juggernaut to reach about 22 nm nodes. During the post-shrinking era, a slew of mesoscopic and nanoscale technologies such as quantum tunneling devices, plasmon based transistors, ionic transport based crossbar structures, nanomagnetic logic, grapheme FET's, self-assembled array of quantum dots, and molecular devices are likely to emerge as commercially viable technologies in order to sustain the demands for exponential economic growth throughout the first quarter of the 21st Century. Quantum tunneling in nanometric devices augurs a revolutionary shift of paradigm for circuit and CAD tools design that must account for quantum effects as well as local interactions between self-assembled circuit elements. These circuit elements may consist of a 2-dimensional array of self-organized quantum dots that can be instrumented to perform cellular automata class of algorithms or a 3-dimensional array of self-organized nanowires to perform a random Boolean network (RBN) class of algorithms. The talk will also briefly introduce neuromorphic nanoarchitectures consisting of 2-D array of amorphous-Silicon based memristor devices and also THz digital systems deploying surface plasmon polariton (SPP).
Fully non-homogeneous hidden Markov model double net: A generative model for haplotype reconstruction and block discovery
Authors: Alessandro Perina, Marco Cristani, Luciano Xumerle, Vittorio Murino, Pier Franco Pignatti, Giovanni Malerba
Venue: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (2009)

Objective: In the last decade, haplotype reconstruction in unrelated individuals and haplotype block discovery have riveted the attention of computer scientists due to the involved strong computational aspects. Such tasks are usually addressed separately, but recently, statistical techniques have permitted them to be solved jointly. Following this trend we propose a generative model that permits researchers to solve the two problems jointly. Method: The model inference is based on variational learning, which permits one to estimate quickly the model parameters while remaining robust even to local minima. The model parameters are then used to segment genotypes into blocks by thresholding a quantitative measure of boundary presence. Results: Experiments on real data are presented, and state-of-the-art systems for haplotype reconstruction and strategies for block estimation are considered as comparison. Conclusions: The proposed method can be used for a fast and reliable estimation of haplotype frequencies and the relative block structure. Moreover, the method can be easily used as part of a more complex system. The threshold used for block discovery can be related to the quality-of-fit reached in the model learning, resulting in an unsupervised strategy for block estimation.
Living interfaces: the thrifty faucet
Authors: Jonas Togler, Fabian Hemmert, Reto Wettach
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (2009)

In this paper, we present a novel type of persuasive home appliance: A thrifty water faucet. Through a servo motor construction, it is enabled to move and behave in life-like manners and to step into dialogue with the user. For example about water consumption or hygiene. We sought to research the reactions of users to such an appliance, alongside possible implications for the design of future human-machine interfaces. This project is part of a larger series of experiments in the Living Interfaces project, exploring ways in which reduced and abstract life-like movements can be beneficial for Human-Machine Interaction.
Security from the bottom-up: compliance regulations and the trend toward design-oriented web applications
Authors: Matthew M. North, Max M. North, Sarah M. North
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2009)

This paper explores the push toward more "bottom-up" design strategies for the creation of web applications, a push which has produced a strengthening of code auditing, training, and education. Part of that push arises from compliance issues, particularly government regulations such as Sarbanes- Oxley and PCI DSS, regulations which require long-term, cost-efficient strategies to maintain. In web application design, this means businesses must place greater emphasis on these bottom-up strategies.
Pruning and regularization in reservoir computing
Authors: X. Dutoit, B. Schrauwen, J. Van Campenhout, D. Stroobandt, H. Van Brussel, M. Nuttin
Venue: Neurocomputing (2009)

Reservoir computing is a new paradigm for using recurrent neural network with a much simpler training method. The key idea is to use a large but fixed recurrent part as a reservoir of dynamic features and to train only the output layer to extract the desired information. We propose to study how pruning some connections from the reservoir to the output layer can help on the one hand to increase the generalization ability, in much the same way as regularization techniques do, and on the other hand to improve the implementability of reservoirs in hardware.
Operational domain theory and topology of sequential programming languages
Authors: Martı´n Escardó, Weng Kin Ho
Venue: Information and Computation (2009)

A number of authors have exported domain-theoretic techniques from denotational semantics to the operational study of contextual equivalence and order. We further develop this, and, moreover, we additionally export topological techniques. In particular, we work with an operational notion of compact set and show that total programs with values on certain types are uniformly continuous on compact sets of total elements. We apply this and other conclusions to prove the correctness of non-trivial programs that manipulate infinite data. What is interesting is that the development applies to sequential programming languages, in addition to languages with parallel features.
Toward a programming theory for rational agents
Authors: K. V. Hindriks, J. -J. Meyer
Venue: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (2009)

An important problem in agent verification is a lack of proper understanding of the relation between agent programs on the one hand and agent logics on the other. Understanding this relation would help to establish that an agent programming language is both conceptually well-founded and well-behaved, as well as yield a way to reason about agent programs by means of agent logics. As a step toward bridging this gap, we study several issues that need to be resolved in order to establish a precise mathematical relation between a modal agent logic and an agent programming language specified by means of an operational semantics. In this paper, we present an agent programming theory that provides both an agent programming language as well as a corresponding agent verification logic to verify agent programs. The theory is developed in stages to show, first, how a modal semantics can be grounded in a state-based semantics, and, second, how denotational semantics can be used to define the mathematical relation connecting the logic and agent programming language. Additionally, it is shown how to integrate declarative goals and add precompiled plans to the programming theory. In particular, we discuss the use of the concept of higher-order goals in our theory. Other issues such as a complete axiomatization and the complexity of decision procedures for the verification logic are not the focus of this paper and remain for future investigation.
The complexity of satisfiability problems: Refining Schaefer's theorem
Authors: Eric Allender, Michael Bauland, Neil Immerman, Henning Schnoor, Heribert Vollmer
Venue: Journal of Computer and System Sciences (2009)

Schaefer proved in 1978 that the Boolean constraint satisfaction problem for a given constraint language is either in P or is NP-complete, and identified all tractable cases. Schaefer's dichotomy theorem actually shows that there are at most two constraint satisfaction problems, up to polynomial-time isomorphism (and these isomorphism types are distinct if and only if P
A New Heuristic Metatask Scheduling Algorithm Based on Choosing QoS Policy Mechanism
Authors: Yong Hou, Xur Wo, Hong Zhao, Wei Zhao
Venue: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (2009)

More and more applications of grid have been achieved. How to support Quality of Service (QoS) to meet different users' demand has raised an outstanding challenge. Currently, several QoS policies of resource have been widely used in Grid. Thus, how to use them freely and efficiently is a serious problem. In this study, we illustrated three QoS policies of resources: best effort, real time, and competing, and explain their mechanisms. Following this, we proposed a new QoS policy, namely Free QoS policy, to help the user who is not very familiar with QoS polices. The first step is that we can get the matrix of QoS parameters of each resource from the Policy Pool in which all the information about QoS policies of resources in “virtual organizations” could be obtained. Second, we will calculate every resource's P adjugment value by a comparison algorithm. Finally, the QoS policy matching the maximum value of P adjugment value is the user's decision. After choosing a suitable resource with a clear QoS policy, the next question is how to achieve an optimum quality under the given policy, which is the problem of scheduling. Min_Min algorithm has been widely used as a higher efficiency and simple algorithm. However, it has a serious problem: load unbalance. In order to solve the problem, we propose a novel task scheduling algorithm, called the Heuristic task scheduling algorithm based on Min-Min and Max-Min (H-MM) in the best effort of the QoS policy, which is merged with the high efficiency of the traditional Min-Min scheduling algorithm and the load balance of the traditional Max-Min scheduling algorithm. Through plenty of experiments, we know that the performance of Max-Min is better than that of Min-Min in the condition that the values of ETC are not uniform, and the performance of Min-Min is a priority to Max-Min when there are many tasks in which the value of ETC are uniform. In this paper, we take the relative standard deviation value of ETC matrix's Min_Time as the criterion to judge whether the set of tasks is uniform or not. Finally, the scheduler selects the Max-Min or Min-Min to assign tasks. The experiments have shown that the H-MM algorithm overweighs traditional algorithms a lot in the makespan and the scalability of the scheduling algorithm.
Opportunistic DTN routing with window-aware adaptive replication
Authors: Gabriel Sandulescu, Simin Nadjm-Tehrani
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th Asian Conference on Internet Engineering (2008)

This paper presents ORWAR, a resource-efficient protocol for opportunistic routing in delay-tolerant networks. Our approach exploits the context of mobile nodes (speed, direction of movement and radio range) to estimate the size of a contact window. This knowledge is exploited to make better forwarding decisions and to minimize the probability of partially transmitted messages. As well as optimizing the use of bandwidth during overloads it helps to reduce energy consumption since partially transmitted messages are useless and waste transmission power. Another feature of the algorithm is the use of a differentiation mechanism based on message utility. This allows allocating more resources for high utility messages. More precisely, messages are replicated in the order of highest utility first, and removed from the buffers in the reverse order. To illustrate the benefit of such a scheme the global accumulated utility is used as a system-wide performance metric. Simulations illustrate the benefit of our model and show that ORWAR provides lower overhead and higher delivery rate, as well as higher accumulated utility compared to a number of well-known algorithms (including Maxprop and SprayAndWait).
The compound Poisson process perturbed by a diffusion with a threshold dividend strategy
Authors: Kam C. Yuen, Yuhua Lu, Rong Wu
Venue: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (2009)

In this paper, we consider the compound Poisson process perturbed by a diffusion in the presence of the so-called threshold dividend strategy. Within this framework, we prove the twice continuous differentiability of the expected discounted value of all dividends until ruin. We also derive integro-differential equations for the expected discounted value of all dividends until ruin and obtain explicit expressions for the solution to the equations. Along the same line, we establish explicit expressions for the Laplace transform of the time of ruin and the Laplace transform of the aggregate dividends until ruin. In the case of exponential claims, some examples are provided. Copyright &copy; 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.