ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Enhancing group projects in software engineering
Authors: Jennifer A. Polack-Wahl
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2001)

Many professors in computer science feel that group projects are not worth the hassle and complications[1]. Several reasons have been cited: different student schedules make it difficult to get together, centralizing information is tedious and usually hard to secure, and it is hard to monitor group participation. The problem with not creating group projects means students are missing a vital component of their educations. This paper describes how a Software Engineering Course used Blackboard CourseInfo to increase collaboration, learning, and interactivity while working on a group project to create software. In addition, a brief study and comparison between Software Engineering courses that used CourseInfo and those that did not is included. The course, which is described in this paper, used CourseInfo as a resource but did not replace the classroom experience.
A reusable graphical user interface for manipulating object-oriented databases using Java and XML
Authors: Suzanne W. Dietrich, Dan Suceava, Chakrapani Cherukuri, Susan D. Urban
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2001)

This paper describes the design and functionality of a graphical user interface (GUI) written in Java Swing that is used to support instructional activities associated with teaching object-oriented database (OODB) concepts. The GUI supports the manipulation of objects in an OODB, assuming the implementation of a specified interface for interacting with an OODB. By using the interface, students can focus on object-oriented design and programming concepts associated with OODB concepts rather than the development of a user interface. Since the GUI uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for defining the database schema and data import/export, the use of the GUI provides the added benefit of demonstrating the manner in which XML interacts with database technology.
Adaptive optimization in the Jalape&ntilde;o JVM
Authors: Matthew Arnold, Stephen Fink, David Grove, Michael Hind, Peter F. Sweeney
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (2000)

Future high-performance virtual machines will improve performance through sophisticated online feedback-directed optimizations. this paper presents the architecture of the Jalape ntilde;o Adaptive Optimization System, a system to support leading-edge virtual machine technology and enable ongoing research on online feedback-directed optimizations. We describe the extensible system architecture, based on a federation of threads with asynchronous communication. We present an implementation of the general architecture that supports adaptive multi-level optimization based purely on statistical sampling. We empirically demonstrate that this profiling technique has low overhead and can improve startup and steady-state performance, even without the presence of online feedback-directed optimizations. The paper also describes and evaluates an online feedback-directed inlining optimization based on statistical edge sampling. The system is written completely in Java, applying the described techniques not only to application code and standard libraries, but also to the virtual machine itself.
On declaring arbitrarily coded alphabets
Authors: Christopher J. Shaw
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1964)

The inability of existing programming languages to handle character strings from more than one or two alphabets is mentioned and a scheme for declaring additional alphabets is proposed. The scheme provides for: many-to-one encodings, right or left justification, collating sequences different from numeric sequence, variations in character size (number of bits) from alphabet to alphabet, and arbitrary source-language character representation.
Non-preemptive dispatching and locking policies
Authors: Alan Burns
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international workshop on Real-time Ada workshop (2001)

In this short paper two new pragmas are introduced and defined. Together they allow non-preemptive scheduling to be specified for Ada Programs. The syntax, rules and dynamic semantics for the scheme are described. Use is made of an additional execution resource --- the execution-token.
Periodic, random-fault-tolerant correction networks
Authors: Marek Piotrów
Venue: Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures (2001)

We study the problem of sorting sequences of N-keys that can be obtained from sorted ones by changing values of s, 0 < s &lne; N, keys at unknown positions. Such s-disturbed sequences can appear as outputs of a sorting network that contains faulty comparators. We present a simple comparator network of depth 4 that sorts 1-disturbed sequences in logarithmic time, where the network is used repeatedly, i.e. if its output is not sorted, the network is run again taking the output as input. Then we analyze the passive-fault model of comparator networks introduced by Yao and Yao, where a faulty comparator outputs directly its input without making a comparison. In this context, we give a construction of N-input, f-fault-tolerant comparator networks of depth 6 that sort 1-disturbed sequences in time &Ogr;(logN + f). Finally, we prove that choosing f = &Ogr;(logN) one can make such networks random-fault-tolerant. In the last two results the constructions and their analysis are simpler as the previous non-periodic ones, and still their runtimes are asymptotically optimal.
President's letter to the ACM membership
Authors: A. G. Oettinger
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1967)

Computer programming deals with an enormous variety of activities and is carried on by people with a great variety of backgrounds. It seems clear that part but not all of this activity is evolving toward a distinct professional field, but that the scope of this emerging profession, and some of its economic, social, and educational characteristics are as yet by no means well defined. In this paper, these issues are examined and some opinions about them are expressed.
New enhancements to cut, fade, and dissolve detection processes in video segmentation
Authors: Ba Tu Truong, Chitra Dorai, Svetha Venkatesh
Venue: Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia (2000)

We present improved algorithms for cut, fade, and dissolve detection which are fundamental steps in digital video analysis. In particular, we propose a new adaptive threshold determination method that is shown to reduce artifacts created by noise and motion in scene cut detection. We also describe new two-step algorithms for fade and dissolve detection, and introduce a method for eliminating false positives from a list of detected candidate transitions. In our detailed study of these gradual shot transitions, our objective has been to accurately classify the type of transitions (fade-in, fade-out, and dissolve) and to precisely locate the boundary of the transitions. This distinguishes our work from other early work in scene change detection which tends to focus primarily on identifying the existence of a transition rather than its precise temporal extent. We evaluate our improved algorithms against two other commonly used shot detection techniques on a comprehensive data set, and demonstrate the improved performance due to our enhancements.
Parallel controlled conspiracy number search
Authors: Ulf Lorenz
Venue: Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures (2001)

Tree search algorithms play an important role in many applications in the field of artificial intelligence. When playing board games like chess etc., computers use game tree search algorithms to evaluate a position. In this paper, we present a procedure that we call Parallel Controlled Conspiracy Number Search (Parallel CCNS). Shortly, we describe the principles of the sequential CCNS algorithm, which bases its approximation-results on irregular subtrees of the entire game tree. We have parallelized CCNS and implemented it in our chess program P. ConNerS, which now is the first in the world, that could win a high-ranked Grandmaster chess-tournament. We add experiments that show a speedup of about 50 on 159 processors running on an SCI-workstation-cluster.
A unified framework for semantics and feature based relevance feedback in image retrieval systems
Authors: Ye Lu, Chunhui Hu, Xingquan Zhu, HongJiang Zhang, Qiang Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia (2000)

The relevance feedback approach to image retrieval is a powerful technique and has been an active research direction for the past few years. Various ad hoc parameter estimation techniques have been proposed for relevance feedback. In addition, methods that perform optimization on multi-level image content model have been formulated. However, these methods only perform relevance feedback on the low-level image features and fail to address the images' semantic content. In this paper, we propose a relevance feedback technique, iFind, to take advantage of the semantic contents of the images in addition to the low-level features. By forming a semantic network on top of the keyword association on the images, we are able to accurately deduce and utilize the images' semantic contents for retrieval purposes. The accuracy and effectiveness of our method is demonstrated with experimental results on real-world image collections.
Evaluating a content based image retrieval system
Authors: Sharon McDonald, Ting-Sheng Lai, John Tait
Venue: Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2001)

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) presents special challenges in terms of how image data is indexed, accessed, and how end systems are evaluated. This paper discusses the design of a CBIR system that uses global colour as the primary indexing key, and a user centered evaluation of the systems visual search tools. The results indicate that users are able to make use of a range of visual search tools, and that different tools are used at different points in the search process. The results also show that the provision of a structured navigation and browsing tool can support image retrieval, particularly in situations in which the user does not have a target image in mind. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the design of visual search tools, and their implications for the use of user-centered evaluation for CBIR systems.
An interface for melody input
Authors: Lutz Prechelt, Rainer Typke
Venue: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) (2001)

We present a software system, called Tunserver, which recognizes a musical tune whistled by the user, finds it in a database, and returns its name, composer, and other information. Such a service is useful for track retrieval at radio stations, music stores, etc., and is also a step toward the long-term goal of communicating with a computer much like one would with a human being. Tuneserver is implemented as a public Java-based WWW service with a database of approximately 10,000 motifs. Tune recognition is based on a highly error-resistant encoding, proposed by Parsons, that uses only the direction of the melody, ignoring the size of intervals as well as rhythm. We present the design and implementation of the tune recognition core, outline the design of the Web service, and describe the results obtained in an empirical evaluation of the new interface, including the derivation of suitable system parameters, resulting performance figures, and an error analysis.
An axiomatic basis for computer programming
Authors: C. A. R. Hoare
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1969)

In this paper an attempt is made to explore the logical foundations of computer programming by use of techniques which were first applied in the study of geometry and have later been extended to other branches of mathematics. This involves the elucidation of sets of axioms and rules of inference which can be used in proofs of the properties of computer programs. Examples are given of such axioms and rules, and a formal proof of a simple theorem is displayed. Finally, it is argued that important advantage, both theoretical and practical, may follow from a pursuance of these topics.
Rule-based video classification system for basketball video indexing
Authors: Wensheng Zhou, Asha Vellaikal, C. C. Jay Kuo
Venue: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM workshops on Multimedia (2000)

Current information and communication technologies provide the infrastructure to send bits anywhere, but do not presume to handle information at the semantic level. This paper investigates the use of video content analysis and feature extraction and clustering techniques for further video semantic classifications and a supervised rule based video classification system is proposed. This system can be applied to the applications such as on-line video indexing, filtering and video summaries, etc. As an experiment, basketball video structure will be examined and categorized into different classes according to distinct visual and motional characteristics features by rule-based classifier. The semantics classes, the visual/motional feature descriptors and their statistical relationship are then studied in detail and experiment results based on basketball video will be provided and analyzed.
A parallel vector quantization processor featuring an efficient search algorithm for real-time motion picture compression
Authors: Toshiyuki Nozawa, Makoto Imai, Masanori Fujibayashi, Tadahiro Ohmi
Venue: Proceedings of the 2001 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (2001)

A parallel vector quantization (VQ) processor has been developed aiming at real-time compression of motion pictures using 0.35um CMOS technology. The chip employs a new simple search algorithm for VQ encoding. As a result, the die area of the chip is decreased to 33% of that of conventional fully parallel design. This chip can handle 2048 template vectors by a single chip and is applicable to real-time compression of 30 frames/see full-color VGA (640x480 pixels) images. The chip operates at 33 MHz with power dissipation of 790mW under 2.5V power supply.
Applications of generalized pair hidden Markov models to alignment and gene finding problems
Authors: Lior Pachter, Marina Alexandersson, Simon Cawley
Venue: Proceedings of the fifth annual international conference on Computational biology (2001)

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been successfully applied to a variety of problems in molecular biology, ranging from alignment problems to gene finding and annotation. Alignment problems can be solved with pair HMMs, while gene finding programs rely on generalized HMMs in order to model exon lengths. In this paper we introduce the generalized pair HMM (GPHMM), which is an extension of both pair and generalized HMMs. We show how GPHMMs, in conjunction with approximate alignments, can be used for cross-species gene finding, and describe applications to DNA-cDNA and DNA-protein alignment. GPHMMs provide a unifying and probabilistically sound theory for modeling these problems.
Lifetime-Sensitive Modulo Scheduling in a Production Environment
Authors: Josep Llosa, Eduard Ayguadé, Antonio Gonzalez, Mateo Valero, Jason Eckhardt
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2001)

This paper presents a novel software pipelining approach, which is called Swing Modulo Scheduling (SMS). It generates schedules that are near optimal in terms of initiation interval, register requirements, and stage count. Swing Modulo Scheduling is a heuristic approach that has a low computational cost. This paper first describes the technique and evaluates it for the Perfect Club benchmark suite on a generic VLIW architecture. SMS is compared with other heuristic methods, showing that it outperforms them in terms of the quality of the obtained schedules and compilation time. To further explore the effectiveness of SMS, the experience of incorporating it into a production quality compiler for the Equator MAP1000 processor is described; implementation issues are discussed, as well as modifications and improvements to the original algorithm. Finally, experimental results from using a set of industrial multimedia applications are presented.
A family of test matrices
Authors: A. C. R. Newbery
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1964)

A family of test matrices with the following properties is described here: (a) an explicit inverse is given; (b) the characteristic polynomial is easily obtained; (c) a large measure of control over the eigenvalues is possible; (d) in special cases the eigenvalues and eigenvectors can be given explicitly, and the P-condition number can be arbitrarily assigned.
Yield modeling and BEOL fundamentals
Authors: José Pineda de Gyvez
Venue: Proceedings of the 2001 international workshop on System-level interconnect prediction (2001)

The advent of deep submicron technologies with larger die sizes lends itself to an increase in fabrication cost. An appropriate yield forecast renders significant benefits in both time-to-market and manufacturing cost prediction. Yield forecasting is essential for the development of new products as it effectively shows if a design is feasible of meeting its cost objectives or not. In mature manufacturing processes, spot defects are the main detractors in the successful outcome of an IC. Their manifestation is as local disturbances of silicon layer structures. Spot defects are in essence random phenomena occurring on the wafer with certain stochastic size, spatial distribution, and frequency of occurrence per unit area. To verify the robustness of an IC it is necessary to extract its &ldquo;critical areas&rdquo;. The so-called critical areas are the places in the layout where defects can induce and IC faulty behavior such as a short or a break circuit. A figure of merit that measures the layouts robustness is obtained as the ratio of the total critical area to the layout area. This figure of merit is known as defect sensitivity. Knowledge of the designs defect sensitivity and the stochastic behavior of defects in the manufacturing line is used to ultimately predict yield.This tutorial reviews the basics on spot defect modeling, critical area modeling and its application in interconnect yield analysis.
Verifying properties of parallel programs: an axiomatic approach
Authors: Susan Owicki, David Gries
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1976)

An axiomatic method for proving a number of properties of parallel programs is presented. Hoare has given a set of axioms for partial correctness, but they are not strong enough in most cases. This paper defines a more powerful deductive system which is in some sense complete for partial correctness. A crucial axiom provides for the use of auxiliary variables, which are added to a parallel program as an aid to proving it correct. The information in a partial correctness proof can be used to prove such properties as mutual exclusion, freedom from deadlock, and program termination. Techniques for verifying these properties are presented and illustrated by application to the dining philosophers problem.
A 1.9-GHz Direct Conversion Transmitter IC with Low Power On-Chip Frequency Doubler
Authors: Shoji Otaka, Ryuichi Fujimoto, Hiroshi Tanimoto
Venue: Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (2000)

A direct conversion transmitter IC including a proposed frequency doubler, a quadrature modulator, and a 3-bit variable attenuator was fabricated using BiCMOS technology with f_T of 12 GHz. This architecture employing frequency doubler is intended for realizing wireless terminals that are low in cost and small in size. The architecture is effective for reducing serious interference between PA and VCO by making the VCO frequency different from that of PA. The proposed frequency doubler comprises a current-driven 90&deg; phase-shifter and an ECL-EXOR circuit for both low power operation and wide input power range of local oscillator (LO). The proposed frequency doubler keeps high output power even when rectangular wave from LO is applied owing to use of the current-driven 90&deg; phase-shifter instead of a voltage-driven 90&deg; phase-shifter. An LO leakage of less than &minus;25 dBc, an image rejection ratio in excess of 45 dBc, and a maximum attenuation of 21 dB were measured. The transmitter IC successfully operates at LO power above &minus;15 dBm and consumes 68 mA from 2.7 V power supply voltage. An active die size is 1.5 mm&times;3 mm.
A critique of Z39.50 based on implementation experience
Authors: Martin L. Schoffstall, Wengyik Yeong
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (1990)

The Z39.50 Information Retrieval Protocol is a proposed ANSI standard for the retrieval of bibliographic information that originates from the library community in the United States. Unlike previous interlibrary loan protocols designed by the library community, Z39.50 is intended to be the basis of an end-user service.This paper provides a brief introduction to Z39.50, then discusses the shortcomings of the protocol that were discovered as a result of implementation experience.
Static index pruning for information retrieval systems
Authors: David Carmel, Doron Cohen, Ronald Fagin, Eitan Farchi, Michael Herscovici, Yoelle S. Maarek, Aya Soffer
Venue: Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2001)

We introduce static index pruning methods that significantly reduce the index size in information retrieval systems.We investigate uniform and term-based methods that each remove selected entries from the index and yet have only a minor effect on retrieval results. In uniform pruning, there is a fixed cutoff threshold, and all index entries whose contribution to relevance scores is bounded above by a given threshold are removed from the index. In term-based pruning, the cutoff threshold is determined for each term, and thus may vary from term to term. We give experimental evidence that for each level of compression, term-based pruning outperforms uniform pruning, under various measures of precision. We present theoretical and experimental evidence that under our term-based pruning scheme, it is possible to prune the index greatly and still get retrieval results that are almost as good as those based on the full index.
Parallel shared-memory simulator performance for large ATM networks
Authors: Brian Unger, Zhonge Xiao, John Cleary, Jya-Jang Tsai, Carey Williamson
Venue: ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) (2000)

A performance comparison between an optimistic and a conservative parallel simulation kernel is presented. Performance of the parallel kernels is also compared to a central-event-list sequential kernel. A spectrum of ATM network and traffic scenarios representative of those used by ATM networking researchers are used for the comparison. Experiments are conducted with a cell-level ATM network simulator and an 18-processor SGI PowerChallenge shared-memory multiprocessor. The results show the performance advantages of parallel simulation ove r sequential simulation for ATM networks. Speedups of 4-5 relative to a fast sequential kernel are achieved on 16 processors for several large irregular ATM benchmark scenarios and the optimistic kernel achieves 2 to 5 times speedup on all 7 benchmarks. However, the relative performance of the two parallel simulation kernels is dependent on the size of the ATM network, the number of traffic sources, and the traffic source types used in the simulation. For some benchmarks the best single point performance is provided by the conservative kernel even on a single processor. Unfortunately, the conservative kernel performance is susceptible to small changes in the modeling code and is outperformed by the optimistic kernel on 5 of the 7 benchmarks. The optimistic parallel simulation kernel thus provides most robust performance, but its speedup is limited by the overheads of its implementation, which make it approximately half the speed of the sequential kernel on one processor.