ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A transformation-based approach to building multi-platform user interfaces using a task model and the user interface markup language
Authors: Mir Farooq Ali
Venue:  (2005)

The widespread emergence of computing devices that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers has created a challenge for user interface (UI) developers who face the problem of a lack of a unified development process for building these UIs. This dissertation research focuses on creating a simplified development process for building UIs for multiple platforms. As part of this, the necessary building blocks (and their relationships) that can be used in a process to develop multi-platform UIs (MPUIs) are identified and specified. A task model, which is an abstract representation of the tasks that users perform with a system, is used as a high-level platform-independent specification for representing UIs for multiple platforms. The task model is supplemented with additional navigation attributes and containment operators for each target platform to facilitate the UI development process. This contribution is based on the insight that an uncontaminated task model, in conjunction with additional operators, allows different styles of UIs to be derived for different platforms. This development process is evaluated by functional comparison with a few other multi-platform development processes, based on a set of criteria. In particular, a detailed comparison of this approach is performed with the approach used in the TERESA development environment. The process is also evaluated by demonstrating how the new features of this approach allow different styles of UIs to be built not only for a single platform, but also for different platforms. The two underlying notations that are used in this work include the Concurrent Task Tree (CTT) modeling notation for the task model and an intermediate language for UIs, the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). This research associates a new vocabulary with the UIML language to facilitate a multi-step transformation-based MPUI development process.
Is there any need for combined continuous discrete simulation languages?
Authors: Dik L. Kettenis
Venue: ACM SIGSIM Simulation Digest (1982)

With the help of an example it is shown that there is a need for simulation languages for combined continuous and discrete models. Giving an overview of some necessary language constructs, the new COSMOS simulation language is presented. COSMOS is a process oriented simulation language, and as such it has inherited some of the language constructs of SIMULA. The power of the language is illustrated by two examples, describing models where the number of active copies of the processes varies during the simulation period.
Expectation maximization algorithms for conditional likelihoods
Authors: Jarkko Salojärvi, Kai Puolamäki, Samuel Kaski
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Machine learning (2005)

We introduce an expectation maximization-type (EM) algorithm for maximum likelihood optimization of conditional densities. It is applicable to hidden variable models where the distributions are from the exponential family. The algorithm can alternatively be viewed as automatic step size selection for gradient ascent, where the amount of computation is traded off to guarantees that each step increases the likelihood. The tradeoff makes the algorithm computationally more feasible than the earlier conditional EM. The method gives a theoretical basis for extended Baum Welch algorithms used in discriminative hidden Markov models in speech recognition, and compares favourably with the current best method in the experiments.
Exploiting Fine-Grained Explicit Router Feedback towards High-Performance Transport Protocols
Authors: Kiyohide Nakauchi, Katsushi Kobayashi
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications on Internet (2006)

The positive use of router feedback that explicitly indicates internal network conditions is a promising way to address the performance issues of congestion control in high-speed networks. In this paper, we propose SIRENS, a scalable, robust, and flexible fine-grained explicit router feedback framework where each receiver can find out the overall path status by assembling all the cumulative router feedback that indicate the status in the single hop. Such perhop information is needed by end-hosts to design novel congestion control mechanisms or to significantly enhance the performance of traditional forms of congestion control in specific situations. As one typical application of SIRENS, we examine the optimization of TCP Limited Slow-Start. Through the implementation and evaluation, we have made sure that a sender can shift from a slow start phase to a congestion avoidance phase without any packet drop, and can achieve more effective bandwidth utilization. We also examine multi-rate multicast congestion control as another application and evaluate the performance through simulations.
Membership management for dynamic peer groups
Authors: Jeong Hyun Yi
Venue:  (2005)

Dynamic Peer Groups (DPGs) are becoming increasingly popular and ubiquitous. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are examples of dynamic peer groups. DPGs are characterized by two important features, (1) lack of trusted authority and (2) dynamic membership. These features prompt a number of challenges for routing, content placement and retrieval. They also make it difficult to develop security mechanisms. In this thesis, we focus on secure and efficient distributed group membership management techniques for DPGs. In short, secure membership management (1) ascertains membership eligibility, and (2) is a pre-requisite for the functioning of secure group communication, routing and traditional access control mechanisms. The contribution of this work is four-fold: (1) peer group membership control framework, (2) five distributed membership management techniques; three for long-lived groups and two for short-lived groups, (3) design and implementation of the Bouncer membership control toolkit and its trial integration with Gnutella protocol, and (4) performance comparison of five protocols. We first design the architecture of group membership management, outlining important design elements, system models, and design challenges. We then propose five novel membership management techniques. Their key features are: dynamic membership support, distributed secret share acquisition, robustness against DoS attacks, and verifiable identifier configuration. The three protocols for long-lived groups: TS-DSA, TS-Sch, and ID-GAC, are based on various flavors of threshold signatures. TS-DSA and TS-Sch are certificate-based approaches. In contrast, ID-GAC is an identity-based approach where members are able to prove their membership only with their public identity (e.g., an email address). We also propose two secure and efficient protocols well-suited for short-lived groups. The UniAC protocol, based on univariate polynomials, is much simpler than protocols for long-lived groups. The BiAC protocol, based on bivariate polynomials, is non-interactive, and communication-, computation- and energy-efficient. To validate our proposed techniques, we integrated them with a real P2P system. As a first step, we design and implement the Bouncer toolkit. Bouncer provides a set of APIs to multiple group membership management protocols. Next, we integrated the toolkit with Gnutella (a well-known P2P file sharing protocol). Finally, we measured the performance of the Bouncer toolkit in terms of battery power consumption as well as communication and computational costs.
Building reusable information security courseware
Authors: Andy Ju An Wang, Ken Yetsko
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd annual conference on Information security curriculum development (2005)

Well-designed courseware improves teaching effectiveness and encourages active learning. This paper reports our experience in developing a multimedia and interactive courseware for an information security course in our distance education program as well as course supplementary materials for our on-site information security courses. The courseware emphasizes interactivity and reusability, following common cognitive principles and pedagogical methods.
Information Extraction: Distilling Structured Data from Unstructured Text
Authors: Andrew McCallum
Venue: Queue (2005)

In 2001 the U.S. Department of Labor was tasked with building a Web site that would help people find continuing education opportunities at community colleges, universities, and organizations across the country. The department wanted its Web site to support fielded Boolean searches over locations, dates, times, prerequisites, instructors, topic areas, and course descriptions. Ultimately it was also interested in mining its new database for patterns and educational trends. This was a major data-integration project, aiming to automatically gather detailed, structured information from tens of thousands of individual institutions every three months.
Learning with non-metric proximity matrices
Authors: Gang Wu, Edward Y. Chang, Zhihua Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (2005)

Many emerging applications formulate non-metric proximity matrices (non-positive semidefinite), and hence cannot fit into the framework of kernel machines. A popular approach to this problem is to transform the spectrum of the similarity matrix so as to generate a positive semidefinite kernel matrix. In this paper, we explore four representative transformation methods: denoise, flip, diffusion, and shift. Theoretically, we discuss a generalization problem where the test data are not available during transformation, and thus propose an efficient algorithm to address the problem of updating the cross-similarity matrix between test and training data. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of these methods on several real-world (dis)similarity matrices with semantic meanings.
Intelligent and Efficient Strategy for Unstructured Environment Sensing Using Mobile Robot Agents
Authors: Vivek A. Sujan, Marco A. Meggiolaro
Venue: Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems (2005)

In field environments it is not usually possible to provide robots in advance with valid geometric models of its task and environment. The robot or robot teams need to create these models by scanning the environment with its sensors. Here, an information-based iterative algorithm to plan the robot's visual exploration strategy is proposed to enable it to most efficiently build 3D models of its environment and task. The method assumes mobile robot (or vehicle) with vision sensors mounted at a manipulator end-effector (eye-in-hand system). This algorithm efficiently repositions the systems' sensing agents using an information theoretic approach and fuses sensory information using physical models to yield a geometrically consistent environment map. This is achieved by utilizing a metric derived from Shannon's information theory to determine optimal sensing poses for the agent(s) mapping a highly unstructured environment. This map is then distributed among the agents using an information-based relevant data reduction scheme. This method is particularly well suited to unstructured environments, where sensor uncertainty is significant. Issues addressed include model-based multiple sensor data fusion, and uncertainty and vehicle suspension motion compensation. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this algorithm.
Theme preservation and the evolution of representation
Authors: Keki M. Burjorjee, Jordan B. Pollack
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 workshops on Genetic and evolutionary computation (2005)

In his thesis Toussaint calls for a "general project to develop theories on adaptation processes that account for the adaptation of representations". The theory developed in this paper is a contribution to this project. We first define the simple concept of a genotypic theme and define what it means for mutation operators to be theme preserving and theme altering. We use the idea of theme preservation to develop the concept of subrepresentation. Then we develop a theory that illuminates the behavior of a mutation-only fitness proportional evolutionary algorithm in which mutation preserves genotypic themes with high probability. Our theory shows that such evolutionary algorithms implicitly implement what we call subrepresentation evolving multithreaded evolution, i.e. such EAs conduct second-order search over a predetermined set of representations and exploit promising representations for first order evolutionary search. We illuminate subrepresentaiton evolving multithreaded evolution by comparing and contrasting it with the behavior of island model EAs. Our theory is immediately useful in understanding the significance of the low probability with which theme altering type 2 mutations are applied to genotypes of the evolutionary systems in Toussaint's thesis.
Stylized and Abstract Painterly Rendering System Using a Multiscale Segmented Sphere Hierarchy
Authors: Ming-Te Chi Tong-Yee Lee
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2006)

This paper presents a novel system framework for interactive, three-dimensional, stylized, abstract painterly rendering. In this framework, the input models are first represented using 3D point sets and then this point-based representation is used to build a multiresolution bounding sphere hierarchy. From the leaf to root nodes, spheres of various sizes are rendered into multiple-size strokes on the canvas. The proposed sphere hierarchy is developed using multiscale region segmentation. This segmentation task assembles spheres with similar attribute regularities into a meaningful region hierarchy. These attributes include colors, positions, and curvatures. This hierarchy is very useful in the following respects: 1) it ensures the screen-space stroke density, 2) controls different input model abstractions, 3) maintains region structures such as the edges/boundaries at different scales, and 4) renders models interactively. By choosing suitable abstractions, brush stroke, and lighting parameters, we can interactively generate various painterly styles. We also propose a novel scheme that reduces the popping effect in animation sequences. Many different stylized images can be generated using the proposed framework.
Tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP calls on the internet
Authors: Xinyuan Wang, Shiping Chen, Sushil Jajodia
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (2005)

Peer-to-peer VoIP calls are becoming increasingly popular due to their advantages in cost and convenience. When these calls are encrypted from end to end and anonymized by low latency anonymizing network, they are considered by many people to be both secure and anonymous.In this paper, we present a watermark technique that could be used for effectively identifying and correlating encrypted, peer-to-peer VoIP calls even if they are anonymized by low latency anonymizing networks. This result is in contrast to many people's perception. The key idea is to embed a unique watermark into the encrypted VoIP flow by slightly adjusting the timing of selected packets. Our analysis shows that it only takes several milliseconds time adjustment to make normal VoIP flows highly unique and the embedded watermark could be preserved across the low latency anonymizing network if appropriate redundancy is applied. Our analytical results are backed up by the real-time experiments performed on leading peer-to-peer VoIP client and on a commercially deployed anonymizing network. Our results demonstrate that (1) tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP calls on the Internet is feasible and (2) low latency anonymizing networks are susceptible to timing attacks.
Why simulating evolutionary processes is just as interesting as applying them
Authors: Katharina A. Lehmann
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 workshops on Genetic and evolutionary computation (2005)

Evolutionary algorithms are very efficient tools to find a near-optimum solution in many cases. Until now they have been mostly used to find results but in this article we argue that evolutionary algorithms can also be used to simulate the evolution of complex systems. We model complex systems as networks in which agents are connected by edges if they interact with each other. It is known that many networks of this kind exhibit stable properties despite the dynamic processes they are subject to. We show here how evolutionary processes on complex systems can be modeled with a new kind of evolutionary algorithm which we have presented in [8]. We will show that some evolutionary processes within this framework yield networks with stable properties in reasonable time. An understanding of what kind of evolutionary processes will produce what kind of network properties in what time is vital to transfer evolutionary processes to technical ad-hoc networks in order to improve their flexibility and stability in quickly changing environments.
Studies of disk arrays tolerating two disk failures and a proposal for a heterogeneous disk array
Authors: Alexander Thomasian
Venue:  (2004)

There has been an explosion in the amount of generated data in the past decade. Online access to these data is made possible by large disk arrays, especially in the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) paradigm. According to the RAID level a disk array can tolerate one or more disk failures, so that the storage subsystem can continue operating with disk failure(s). RAID5 is a single disk failure tolerant array which dedicates the capacity of one disk to parity information. The content on the failed disk can be reconstructed on demand and written onto a spare disk. However, RAID5 does not provide enough protection for data since the data loss may occur when there is a media failure (unreadable sectors) or a second disk failure during the rebuild process. Due to the high cost of downtime in many applications, two disk failure tolerant arrays, such as RAID6 and EVENODD, have become popular. These schemes use 2/N of the capacity of the array for redundant information in order to tolerate two disk failures. RM2 is another scheme that can tolerate two disk failures, with slightly higher redundancy ratio. However, the performance of these two disk failure tolerant RAID schemes is impaired, since there are two check disks to be updated for each write request. Therefore, their performance, especially when there are disk failure(s), is of interest. In the first part of the dissertation, the operations for the RAID5, RAID6, EVENODD and RM2 schemes are described. A cost model is developed for these RAID schemes by analyzing the operations in various operating modes. This cost model offers a measure of the volume of data being transmitted, and provides a device-independent comparison of the efficiency of these RAID schemes. Based on this cost model, the maximum throughput of a RAID scheme can be obtained given detailed disk characteristic and RAID configuration. Utilizing M/G/1 queuing model and other favorable modeling assumptions, a queuing analysis to obtain the mean read response time is described. The second part of this dissertation describes a new disk array architecture, namely Heterogeneous Disk Array (HDA). The HDA is motivated by a few observations of the trends in storage technology. The HDA architecture allows a disk array to have two forms of heterogeneity: (1) device heterogeneity, i.e., disks of different types can be incorporated in a single HDA; and (2) RAID level heterogeneity, i.e., various RAID schemes can coexist in the same array. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Lazy Verification in Fault-Tolerant Distributed Storage Systems
Authors: Michael Abd-El-Malek, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter, Jay J. Wylie, Garth R. Goodson
Venue: Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (2005)

Verification of write operations is a crucial component of Byzantine fault-tolerant consistency protocols for storage. Lazy verification shifts this work out of the critical path of client operations. This shift enables the system to amortize verification effort over multiple operations, to perform verification during otherwise idle time, and to have only a subset of storage-nodes perform verification. This paper introduces lazy verification and describes implementation techniques for exploiting its potential. Measurements of lazy verification in a Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed storage system show that the cost of verification can be hidden from both the client read and write operation in workloads with idle periods. Furthermore, in workloads without idle periods, lazy verification amortizes the cost of verification over many versions and so provides a factor of four higher write bandwidth when compared to performing verification during each write operation.
Exploiting Hierarchical CP-Nets to Increase the Reliability of Web Services Workflow
Authors: Yanping Yang, Qingping Tan, Yong Xiao, Jinshan Yu, Feng Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications on Internet (2006)

Individual Web services can be composed together to form value-added composite Web services represented as business process workflow. However, the value of such composite Web services is directly influenced by the reliability of the composite services. Composing Web services is not an easy task and is error-prone, so there is a growing interest for the verification techniques which enable designers to find and repair design errors even before actual running of the service, or allow designers to detect erroneous properties such as deadlocks or livelocks and formally verify whether the service process design does have certain desired properties (such as consistency with the conversation protocols of partner service). In this paper, we present to analyze and verify Web services composition by using some kind of Colored Petri Nets (CP-nets) called hierarchical CP-nets, which combine the strengths of Petri nets with the expressive power of high-level programming and have sound mathematical semantics. Services composition proposals can be transformed by transformation rules into CP-nets, which can be simulated to analyze the performance and verified to investigate behavioral properties by exploiting existing CP-nets specialized tools.
On the trap generation rate in ultrathin SiON under constant voltage stress
Authors: R. Degraeve, B. Kaczer, Ph. Roussel, G. Groeseneken
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2005)

Trap generation in ultrathin oxide is measured by counting the creation of individual paths through single traps. A power law increase is found with exponent ∼0.4 defined as the trap generation rate. The voltage acceleration corresponds to that of time-dependent dielectric breakdown. We demonstrate how the trap generation rate can also be extracted from current-time traces during a constant voltage stress as the slope of the Weibull distribution of the time needed to reach the first current step higher than a chosen magnitude. For ultrathin SiON the trap generation is approximately constant between 1.8 and 2.6 V.
Multi-Valued Continuous Mappings of Figure Spaces
Authors: V. Ya. Burdyuk
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2005)

New definitions of a j-continuous multi-valued mapping of arbitrary figure spaces (j = 1, 2,...,8) are proposed and the following questions are investigated: (1) the hierarchy of the mentioned definitions, (2) all the pairs of equivalent definitions for the case where spaces of opened figures such as topological spaces are mapped, (3) a superposition of j-continuous mappings for each j.