ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Application note: Improvement of a dual-sensor horizontal penetrometer by incorporating an EC sensor
Authors: Q. Zeng, Y. Sun, P. Schulze Lammers, D. Ma, J. Lin, H. Hueging
Venue: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (2008)

Following the development of a dual-sensor horizontal penetrometer for the simultaneous measurements of soil water content and strength, an electrical conductivity (EC) sensor with a 4-ring Wenner-array was incorporated into the cone of the horizontal penetrometer. In order to overcome the cross-modulation of signals from water content and EC sensors, two filters with specific pass-bands were connected in each circuitry. Both laboratory calibration and field test were conducted, and the experimental results showed that the improved technique could provide more informative data to interpret soil physical conditions at field-scale.
Definite Descriptions and Dijkstra's Odd Powers of Odd Integers Problem
Authors: Hugh Gibbons
Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) (2009)

The use of Frege-Russell style definite descriptions for giving meaning to functions has been long established and we investigate their use in the development of Functional Programs and from these to the development of correct imperative programs. In particular, we investigate the development of a functional program for a problem, ''Odd powers of odd integers'', discussed by Dijsktra. If the correctness of termination is not a concern then it is straightforward to develop a partially correct program. Further properties of the specification are needed to develop a totally correct program.
Error propagation analysis for underwater cooperative multi-hop communications
Authors: Cecilia Carbonelli, Shiou-Hung Chen, Urbashi Mitra
Venue: Ad Hoc Networks (2009)

The potential gains of cooperative communication and multi-hopping in underwater acoustic communication channels is examined. In particular, performance of such systems is compared to a comparable single hop system (direct transmission) with a common transmission distance. The effects of error propagation with decode and forward at each relay are explicitly treated and it is shown that strong gains can be achieved by multi-hopping (an effective SNR gain) as well as cooperation, which contributes to a diversity gain. We observe that cooperative diversity gains are retained even when considering error propagation. The analysis is done via a Markov chain analysis for both regular linear and grid networks. Our initial analysis is for single path channels; the effects of inter-symbol interference as well as multi-user interference are examined. It is found that due to the strong decay of signal power as a function of transmission distance, multi-user interference is not as significant as inter-symbol interference. In both cases, cooperative and multi-hopping gains are observed.
Computer Jobs with the Growing Information Technology Professional Services Sector [2007] Companies-Contacts-Links - IT Services Firms - Western States
Authors: Info Tech Employment
Venue:  (2007)

The solid and growing information technology professional services sector continues to increase headcount. Discover computer jobs in this robust sector of the industry with Computer Jobs with the Growing Information Technology Professional Services Sector [2007]: Career Guide - Companies-Contacts-Links -8 Regional Editions. So that jobseekers can find employers close to home, there are eight editions available , which cover eight US regions: New England States, Mid-Atlantic States, Potomac Region, Southern States, Midwest States, Western States, West Coast States, and Northwestern States. In the "Companies-Contacts-Links" section, technology jobseekers gain access to current URLs and recruiter/personnel e-mail addresses of IT service providers in their region. These providers have active government and corporate contracts to supply information technology services and staff. In the "Articles" section, 21 Advisory and Analytical articles discuss leading IT jobs, skill sets, positioning tools, job classifications and pay scales. Analytical Articles: C++ Computer . Java and JavaScript . Visual Basic . Sun Solaris, Unix, Linux, Network Tech Jobs . Oracle, SQL, FoxPro, Sybase, Database Management . Software Programmer; Software Engineer . Network Programmer, Network Systems . Telecommunications . Web Developer . IT Procurement, IT Training, Project Management . IT Security . Computer Graphics, Computer Animation. Advisory Articles: Careers in IT . Hiring Options: IT Outsourcers, IT Service Providers, In-House IT Staff. Telecommuting IT Careers, Entry-Level Tech Jobs . Resumes . Skills Employers Require of IT Professionals; Training Opportunities, Building a Successful Computer Career. These editions give sure-fire direction to good employment in all 50 U.S. States.
A sensorless closing control for an AC contactor based on a new armature displacement estimator
Authors: Chieh-Tsung Chi
Venue: WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications (2008)

This paper presents a new approach to solve the contact bounce after contacts closing problem for prolonging the lifespan and improving operation reliability. Based on combining a armature displacement estimator (ADE) with a simple hysteresis controller, such that the coil-current difference between the ac electromagnetic contactor (abbreviated ac contactor) body and the estimator is minimized, the proposed method overcomes the installation of an armature displacement measuring mechanism is indispensable restrictions imposed by previously described closing control methodologies. By using the proposed algorithm, an efficient control configuration can be obtained to reduce bounce duration. Computer simulations, of the proposed method, illustrate lots of benefits that are provided by proposed sensorless closing control configuration.
On the complexity of an accurate and precise performance evaluation of wireless networks using simulations
Authors: Elyes Ben Hamida, Guillaume Chelius, Jean-Marie Gorce
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems (2008)

In wireless multi-hop networks, there is a growing need for the performance evaluation of protocols and distributed applications. Due to the high complexity of analytical models and the difficulty of setting up large scale testbeds, simulations are generally considered as the most convenient methodology for evaluating the performance of wireless systems. However, evaluating a protocol can be a tedious task as it depends on several factors including the physical layer modeling and the dimensioning of protocol or environment parameters. As a consequence inferring an overall performance for a protocol is a real issue. In this paper, we highlight some main factors that may affect the accuracy of the performance evaluation of protocols using simulations. First, we focus on the physical layer (PHY) modeling which represent a key point for the sake of realism and confidence. Second, we discuss the impact of some protocol parameters on the behavior of the evaluated protocols.
Principal Components of Port-Address Matrices in Port-Scan Analysis
Authors: Hiroaki Kikuchi, Naoya Fukuno, Masato Terada, Norihisa Doi
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part II on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (2008)

There are many studies aiming at using port-scan traffic data for the fast and accurate detection of rapidly spreading worms. This paper proposes two new methods for reducing the traffic data to a simplified form comprising significant components of smaller dimensionality. (1) Dimension reduction via Term Frequency --- Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) values, a technique used in information retrieval, is used to choose significant ports and addresses in terms of their "importance" for classification. (2) Dimension reduction via Principal Component Analysis (PCA), widely used as a tool in exploratory data analysis, enables estimation of how uniformly the sensors are distributed over the reduced coordinate system. PCA gives a scatter plot for the sensors, which helps to detect abnormal behavior in both the source address space and the destination port space. In addition to our proposals, we report on experiments that use the Internet Scan Data Acquisition System (ISDAS) distributed observation data from the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team (JPCERT).
Stereoscopic 3D from 2D video with super-resolution capability
Authors: Sebastian Knorr, Matthias Kunter, Thomas Sikora
Venue: Image Communication (2008)

This paper presents a new approach for the generation of super-resolution stereoscopic and multi-view video from monocular video. Such multi-view video is used, for instance, with multi-user 3D displays or auto-stereoscopic displays with head-tracking to create a depth impression of the observed scenery. Our approach is an extension of the realistic stereo-view synthesis (RSVS) approach, which is based on structure from motion techniques and image-based rendering to generate the desired stereoscopic views for each point in time. Subjective quality measurements with 25 real and 3 synthetic sequences were carried out to test the performance of RSVS against simple time-shift and depth-image-based rendering (DIBR). Our approach heavily enhances the stereoscopic depth perception and gives a more realistic impression of the observed scenery. Simulation results applying super-resolution show that the image quality can further be improved by reducing motion blur and compression artifacts.
Approximate lineage for probabilistic databases
Authors: Christopher Ré, Dan Suciu
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

In probabilistic databases, lineage is fundamental to both query processing and understanding the data. Current systems s.a. Trio or Mystiq use a complete approach in which the lineage for a tuple t is a Boolean formula which represents all derivations of t. In large databases lineage formulas can become huge: in one public database (the Gene Ontology) we often observed 10MB of lineage (provenance) data for a single tuple. In this paper we propose to use approximate lineage, which is a much smaller formula keeping track of only the most important derivations, which the system can use to process queries and provide explanations. We discuss in detail two specific kinds of approximate lineage: (1) a conservative approximation called sufficient lineage that records the most important derivations for each tuple, and (2) polynomial lineage, which is more aggressive and can provide higher compression ratios, and which is based on Fourier approximations of Boolean expressions. In this paper we define approximate lineage formally, describe algorithms to compute approximate lineage and prove formally their error bounds, and validate our approach experimentally on a real data set.
The Open Provenance Model: An Overview
Authors: Luc Moreau, Juliana Freire, Joe Futrelle, Robert E. Mcgrath, Jim Myers, Patrick Paulson
Venue: Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes: Second International Provenance and Annotation Workshop, IPAW 2008, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, June 17-18, 2008. Revised Selected Papers (2008)

Provenance is well understood in the context of art or digital libaries, where it respectively refers to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object's life cycle. Interest for provenance in the "e-science community" [12] is also growing, since provenance is perceived as a crucial component of workflow systems that can help scientists ensure reproducibility of their scientific analyses and processes [2,4].
Keynote: Trustworthy Services and the Biological Analogy
Authors: Michael Reiter
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (2008)

Biological systems survive through a combination of redundancy, diversity and modularity. It has been argued that these principles can also be applied to construct information services that survive a variety of hostile attacks, including even the compromise of computers that help implement the service. Despite nearly 30 years of research to advance these principles and to apply them to the construction of trustworthy services, each remains an active and fruitful topic of research. In this talk we will describe recent progress in achieving redundancy, diversity and modularity, and in using these to implement trustworthy services. This progress, we will argue, is paving the way to next-generation services that are significantly more resilient than todays. We will also discuss challenges that remain in achieving this goal.
Online Querying of Concept Hierarchies in P2P Systems
Authors: Katerina Doka, Athanasia Asiki, Dimitrios Tsoumakos, Nectarios Koziris
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

In this paper we describe HIS, a system that enables efficient storage and querying of data organized into concept hierarchies and dispersed over a network. Our scheme utilizes an adaptive algorithm that automatically adjusts the level of indexing according to the granularity of the incoming queries, without assuming any prior knowledge of the query workload. Efficient roll-up and drill-down operations increase the exact-match query ratio by shifting to the most favorable hierarchy level. Combined with soft-state indices created after query misses, our system achieves maximization of performance by minimizing query flooding. Extensive experimental evaluations show that, on top of the advantages that a distributed storage offers, our method answers the large majority of incoming queries without flooding the network and at the same time it manages to preserve the hierarchical nature of data. It shows remarkable performance especially for skewed workloads, which are frequently documented in the majority of Internet-scale applications. These characteristics are maintained even after sudden shifts in the workload.
Defect spatial pattern recognition using a hybrid SOM-SVM approach in semiconductor manufacturing
Authors: Te-Sheng Li, Cheng-Lung Huang
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

As manufacturing geometries continue to shrink and circuit performance increases, fast fault detection and semiconductor yield improvement is of increasing concern. Circuits must be controlled to reduce parametric yield loss, and the resulting circuits tested to guarantee that they meet specifications. In this paper, a hybrid approach that integrates the Self-Organizing Map and Support Vector Machine for wafer bin map classification is proposed. The log odds ratio test is employed as a spatial clustering measurement preprocessor to distinguish between the systematic and random wafer bin map distribution. After the smoothing step is performed on the wafer bin map, features such as co-occurrence matrix and moment invariants are extracted. The wafer bin maps are then clustered with the Self-Organizing Map using the aforementioned features. The Support Vector Machine is then applied to classify the wafer bin maps to identify the manufacturing defects. The proposed method can transform a large number of wafer bin maps into a small group of specific failure patterns and thus shorten the time and scope for troubleshooting to yield improvement. Real data on over 3000 wafers were applied to the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our approach can obtain over 90% classification accuracy and outperform back-propagation neural network.
Is fair resource sharing responsible for spreading long delays?
Authors: Predrag R. Jelenković, Xiaozhu Kang
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (2008)

We show that mixing the statistically long jobs (subexponential) and short ones (exponentially bounded) using processor sharing service discipline causes long (subexponential) delays for all types of jobs in the system. Since processor sharing represents a baseline fair scheduling discipline used in designing Web servers, as well as the basic model of TCP bandwidth sharing, our finding suggests that even though fairness possesses many desirable attributes, it causes unnecessarily long delays for statistically short jobs. Hence, fairness comes with a price. We further quantify the preceding result when the long jobs follow the widely observed power law distribution x-α, α > 0, where we discover the criticality of the lognormal distribution for the delay characteristics of the lighter jobs. Specifically, we find that when the shorter jobs are heavier than lognormal, the sojourn time V and the service time distribution B of the shorter jobs are tail equivalent P[V > x] ~ P[B > (1 - ρ)x]. However, if P[B > x] is lighter than lognormal, the preceding tail equivalence does not hold. Furthermore, when the shorter jobs B have much lighter tails e-λx&#946, λ > 0, β > 0, we show that the distribution of the delay V for these jobs satisfy, as x → ∞, -log P[V > x] ~ c(x log x) β / β+1, where c is explicitly computable. Note that β = 1 and β = 2 represent the exponential and Gaussian cases with the corresponding delay distributions approximately of the form e-√x log x and e-(x log x)2/3, respectively. Our results are different from the existing ones in the literature that focused on the delays which are of the same form (tail equivalent) as the jobs size distribution.
On correct and complete strong merging of partial behaviour models
Authors: Dario Fischbein, Sebastian Uchitel
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (2008)

Modal Transition Systems (MTS) have been shown to be useful to reason about system behaviour in the context of partial information and to support incremental elaboration of behaviour models. A particularly useful notion in the context of software and requirements engineering is that of merge. MTS merging can be used as the conjunction of multiple partial operational descriptions which may have been provided as MTS or even synthesised from other description languages such as goal models and scenarios. One of the current limitations of MTS merging is that a complete and correct algorithm for merging has not been developed. Hence, an engineer attempting to merge partial descriptions may be prevented to do so by overconstrained algorithms or algorithms that introduce behaviour that does not follow from the partial descriptions being merged. This paper resolves these problems for strong semantics by providing a complete characterization of MTS consistency and a correct and complete algorithm for MTS merging.
Computer supported collaborative learning and vocational training: adapting the technology to the learners&#x2019; needs
Authors: Margit Pohl, Markus Rester, Kerstin St&#x00f6;ckelmayr, Jutta Jerlich, Peter Judmaier, Franz Reichl, Eva Oberm&#x00fc;ller
Venue: Universal Access in the Information Society (2008)

The aim of the ECODESIGN project was the development of a course in sustainable product design. The target group are employees in the areas of product design, marketing or similar areas. Some learners from this target group have a low computer literacy and are, therefore, reluctant to use advanced forms of electronic communication. Collaborative learning has to be designed according to the learners&#x2019; needs, taking into account that many participants of the ECODESIGN course have to get used to electronic communication. Despite this problem, a community of practice seems to result from the ECODESIGN course. Active tutoring was especially important to motivate learners and to constitute the community of practice.
Hash-base subgraph query processing method for graph-structured XML documents
Authors: Hongzhi Wang, Jianzhong Li, Jizhou Luo, Hong Gao
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

When XML documents are modeled as graphs, many research issues arise. In particular, there are many new challenges in query processing on graph-structured XML documents because traditional query processing techniques for tree-structured XML documents cannot be directly applied. This paper studies the problem of structural queries on graph-structured XML documents. A hash-based structural join algorithm, HGJoin, is first proposed to handle reachability queries on graph-structured XML documents. Then, it is extended to the algorithms to process structural queries in form of bipartite graphs. Finally, based on these algorithms, a strategy to process subgraph queries in form of general DAGs is proposed. Analysis and experiments show that all the algorithms have high performance. It is notable that all the algorithms above can be slightly modified to process structural queries in form of general graphs.
Main-memory scan sharing for multi-core CPUs
Authors: Lin Qiao, Vijayshankar Raman, Frederick Reiss, Peter J. Haas, Guy M. Lohman
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Computer architectures are increasingly based on multi-core CPUs and large memories. Memory bandwidth, which has riot kept pace with the increasing number of cores, has become the primary processing bottleneck, replacing disk I/O as the limiting factor. To address this challenge, we provide novel algorithms for increasing the throughput of Business Intelligence (BI) queries, as well as for ensuring fairness and avoiding starvation among a concurrent set of such queries. To maximize throughput, we propose a novel FullSharing scheme that allows all concurrent queries, when performing base-table I/O, to share the cache belonging to a given core. We then generalize this approach to a BatchSharing scheme that avoids thrashing on "agg-tables" ---hash tables that are used for aggregation processing---caused by execution of too many queries on a core. This scheme partitions queries into batches such that the working-set of agg-table entries for each batch can fit into a cache; an efficient sampling technique is used to estimate selectivities and working-set sizes for purposes of query partitioning. Finally, we use lottery-scheduling techniques to ensure fairness and impose a hard upper bound on staging time to avoid starvation. On our 8-core testbed, we were able to completely remove the memory I/O bottleneck, increasing throughput by a factor of 2 to 2.5, while also maintaining fairness and avoiding starvation.
Application-specific Processor Architecture: Then and Now
Authors: Peter Cappello
Venue: Journal of Signal Processing Systems (2008)

We first relate the architecture of systolic arrays to the technological and economic design forces acting on architects of special-purpose systems some 20 years ago. We then observe that those same design forces now are bearing down on the architects of contemporary general-purpose processors, who consequently are producing general-purpose processors whose architectural features are increasingly similar to those of systolic arrays. We then describe some economic and technological forces that are changing the landscape of architectural research. At base, they are the increasing complexity of technology and applications, the fragmenting of the general-purpose processor market, and the judicious use hardware configurability. We describe a 2D architectural taxonomy, identifying what, we believe, to be a "sweet spot" for architectural research.