ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Using GIS in Government: An Overview of the VHA's Healthcare Atlas, FY-2000
Authors: Diane Cowper, W. Yu, Mark Kuebeler, Joseph D. Kubal, Larry M. Manheim, Bruce A. Ripley
Venue: Journal of Medical Systems (2004)

The amount of VA data available for analysis can be overwhelming to individuals who need to translate these data into usable information. The Atlas, using current GIS technology, was funded to provide data in a comprehensive guide. Patients were identified using a disease classification scheme based on Kaiser Permanente methodology and the Clinical Classifications Software (AHRQ). Utilization data were extracted from the Medical SAS Datasets. Cost data were obtained from the HERC. GIS tools were used to create the Atlas. The Atlas overviews the location of VA hospitals&semi; profiles veteran, VA enrollee and patient populations&semi; examines overall utilization&semi; depicts patterns in healthcare use by specific disease cohorts&semi; and examines geographic variations in costs. This product will enhance knowledge of VA's enrolled patient population and their healthcare needs, and provide background information that will improve the formulation of specific research questions to address those needs.
The 3-Connected Graphs with Exactly Three Non-Essential Edges
Authors: James Oxley, Haidong Wu
Venue: Graphs and Combinatorics (2004)

An edge e of a simple 3-connected graph G is essential if neither the deletion G\e nor the contraction G/e is both simple and 3-connected. Tutte&#x2019;s Wheels Theorem proves that the only simple 3-connected graphs with no non-essential edges are the wheels. In earlier work, as a corollary of a matroid result, the authors determined all simple3-connected graphs with at most two non-essential edges. This paper specifies all such graphs with exactly three non-essential edges. As a consequence, with the exception of the members of 10 classes of graphs, all 3-connected graphs have at least four non-essential edges.
Polygonal Decomposition of the 1-Ring Neighborhood of the Catmull-Clark Scheme
Venue: Proceedings of the Shape Modeling International 2004 (2004)

We propose a polygonal decomposition of the 1-ringneighborhood of a quadrilateral mesh, which is suitable forthe study of the Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme. The initialconfiguration consists of 2n planar 2n-gons and underthe Catmull-Clark subdivision they transform into 4nplanar n-gons coming in pairs of coplanar polygons andquadruples of parallel polygons. We calculate the eigenvaluesand eigenvectors of the transformations of these configurationsshowing their relation with the tangent plane andthe curvature properties of the subdivision surface. Usingdirect computations on circulant-block matrices we showhow the same eigenvalues can be analytically deduced fromthe subdivision matrix.
Radiosity on graphics hardware
Authors: Greg Coombe, Mark J. Harris, Anselmo Lastra
Venue: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2004 (2004)

Radiosity is a widely used technique for global illumination. Typically the computation is performed offline and the result is viewed interactively. We present a technique for computing radiosity, including an adaptive subdivision of the model, using graphics hardware. Since our goal is to run at interactive rates, we exploit the computational power and programmability of modern graphics hardware. Using our system on current hardware, we have been able to compute and display a radiosity solution for a 10,000 element scene in less than one second.
The three threats of action research: a discussion of methodological antidotes in the context of an information systems study
Authors: Ned Kock
Venue: Decision Support Systems (2004)

This paper provides a brief historical discussion of action research (AR), from its emergence as a distinct research approach after World War II to its relatively recent use in the field of information systems (IS). Based on a review of the research methods literature, it presents and discusses three main threats inherent in action research, called "uncontrollability", "contingency", and "subjectivity"; and three methodological antidotes to deal with these three action research threats, called "unit of analysis", "grounded theory", and "multiple iterations". Both the threats and the antidotes are discussed in the context of a real information systems action research study that investigated the impact of computer support on the success of group-based business process improvement (BPI) attempts.
An improved algorithm for selecting p items with uncertain returns according to the minmax-regret criterion
Authors: Eduardo Conde
Venue: Mathematical Programming: Series A and B (2004)

We consider the problem of selecting a subset of p investments of maximum total return out of a set of n available investments with uncertain returns, where uncertainty is represented by interval estimates for the returns, and the minmax regret objective is used. We develop an algorithm that solves this problem in O(min{p,n&#x2212;p}n) time. This improves the previously known complexity O(min{p,n&#x2212;p}2n).
Sources of Success for Boosted Wrapper Induction
Authors: David Kauchak, Joseph Smarr, Charles Elkan
Venue: The Journal of Machine Learning Research (2004)

In this paper, we examine an important recent rule-based information extraction (IE) technique named Boosted Wrapper Induction (BWI) by conducting experiments on a wider variety of tasks than previously studied, including tasks using several collections of natural text documents. We investigate systematically how each algorithmic component of BWI, in particular boosting, contributes to its success. We show that the benefit of boosting arises from the ability to reweight examples to learn specific rules (resulting in high precision) combined with the ability to continue learning rules after all positive examples have been covered (resulting in high recall). As a quantitative indicator of the regularity of an extraction task, we propose a new measure that we call the SWI ratio. We show that this measure is a good predictor of IE success and a useful tool for analyzing IE tasks. Based on these results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of BWI. Specifically, we explain limitations in the information made available, and in the representations used. We also investigate the consequences of the fact that confidence values returned during extraction are not true probabilities. Next, we investigate the benefits of including grammatical and semantic information for natural text documents, as well as parse tree and attribute-value information for XML and HTML documents. We show experimentally that incorporating even limited grammatical information can increase the regularity of natural text extraction tasks, resulting in improved performance. We conclude with proposals for enriching the representational power of BWI and other IE methods to exploit these and other types of regularities.
INSIDE: INstruction Selection/Identification & Design Exploration for Extensible Processors
Authors: Newton Cheung, Sri Parameswaran, Jörg Henkel
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

This paper presents the INSIDE system that rapidly searchesthe design space for extensible processors, given area and performance constraints of an embedded application, while minimizing the design turn-around-time. Our system consists ofa) a methodology to determine which code segments are mostsuited for implementation as a set of extensible instructions,b) a heuristic algorithm to select pre-configured extensibleprocessors as well as extensible instructions (library), and c)an estimation tool which rapidly estimates the performance ofan application on a generated extensible processor. By selecting the right combination of a processor core plus extensible instructions, we achieve a performance increase on average of 2.03x (up to 7x) compared to the base processor core at aminimum hardware overhead of 25% on average.
Ontology-Driven Web Services Composition Platform
Authors: I. Budak Arpinar, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Ruoyan Zhang, Angela Maduko
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology (2004)

Discovering and assembling individual Web Services into more complex yet new and more useful Web Processes is an important challenge. In this paper, we present techniques for (semi) automatically composing Web Services into Web Processes by using their ontological descriptions and relationships to other services. In Interface-Matching Automatic composition technique, the possible compositions are obtained by checking semantic similarities between interfaces of individual services. Then these compositions are ranked and an optimum composition is selected. In Human-Assisted composition the user selects a service from a ranked list at certain stages. We also address automatic compositions in a Peer-to-Peer network.
Using Data-Flow Analysis for Resilience and Result Checking in Peer-To-Peer Computations
Authors: Samir Jafar, Sebastien Varrette, Jean-Louis Roch
Venue: Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications, 15th International Workshop (2004)

To achieve correct execution of peer-to-peer applications on non-reliable resources, we present a portable and distributed algorithm that provides fault tolerance and result checking. Two kinds of faults are considered: node failure or disconnection and result forgery. This algorithm is based on the knowledge of the macro data-flow dependencies between the application tasks. It provides correct execution with respect to a probabilistic certificate. We have implemented it on top of Athapascan programming interface and experimental results are presented.
Static and dynamic analysis of call chains in java
Authors: Atanas Rountev, Scott Kagan, Michael Gibas
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis (2004)

This work presents a parameterized framework for static and dynamic analysis of call chains in Java components. Such analyses have a wide range of uses in tools for software understanding and testing. We also describe a test coverage tool built with these analyses and the use of the tool on a real-world test suite. Our experiments evaluate the exact precision of several instances of the framework and provide a novel approach for estimating the limits of class analysis technology for computing precise call chains.
Computing in Fault Tolerance Broadcast Networks
Authors: Ilan Newman
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Annual Conference on Computational Complexity (2004)

We consider a fault tolerance broadcast network of nprocessors each holding one bit of information. The goal isto compute a given Boolean function on the n bits. In eachstep, a processor may broadcast one bit of information.Each listening processor receives the bit that was broadcastedwith error probability bounded by a fixed constant \varepsilon.The errors in different steps, as well as for different receivingprocessors in the same step, are mutually independent.The protocols that are considered in this model are obliviousprotocols: At each step, the processors that broadcastare fixed in advanced and independent of the input and theoutcome of previous steps. The primal complexity measurein this model is the total number of broadcasts that is performedby the protocol.We present here the first linear complexity protocolsfor several classes of Boolean functions, including the ORfunction, functions that have 0(1)-minterm (maxterm) size,functions that have linear size AC_0 formulae and someother functions. This answer an open question of Yao [22],considering this fault tolerance model of El Gamal [2] andGallager [8].
A Proof of Simmons&rsquo; Conjecture
Authors: Tor Helleseth, Johannes Mykkeltveit
Venue: Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2004)

An open problem posed by Simmons is whether two given permutations of the vertices of the deBruijn graph have the same cycle structure, or not. We present a solution to this problem and find the complete cycle structure.
A formal study of information retrieval heuristics
Authors: Hui Fang, Tao Tao, ChengXiang Zhai
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

Empirical studies of information retrieval methods show that good retrieval performance is closely related to the use of various retrieval heuristics, such as TF-IDF weighting. One basic research question is thus what exactly are these "necessary" heuristics that seem to cause good retrieval performance. In this paper, we present a formal study of retrieval heuristics. We formally define a set of basic desirable constraints that any reasonable retrieval function should satisfy, and check these constraints on a variety of representative retrieval functions. We find that none of these retrieval functions satisfies all the constraints unconditionally. Empirical results show that when a constraint is not satisfied, it often indicates non-optimality of the method, and when a constraint is satisfied only for a certain range of parameter values, its performance tends to be poor when the parameter is out of the range. In general, we find that the empirical performance of a retrieval formula is tightly related to how well it satisfies these constraints. Thus the proposed constraints provide a good explanation of many empirical observations and make it possible to evaluate any existing or new retrieval formula analytically.
Web-Service Semantic Enabled Implementation of Machine vs.Machine Business Negotiation
Authors: Laurentiu Vasiliu, Michal Zaremba, Matthew Moran, Christoph Bussler, Jim Browne
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (2004)

The ultimate target of business to business (B2B) integration and deployment is completebusiness process automation within and between enterprises with no human intervention.From a business point of view, negotiation is the main mechanism that modern enterprises use to achieve targets that maximise their profits. This paper proposes an automated B2B negotiation solution: the implementation of semantic-enabled machine versus machine business negotiation as a web service. We argue that the shift from human vs. human to machine vs. machine business negotiation is facilitated by using semantic web technology implemented with web services. The negotiation process in this work is designed for multiple machines (a minimum of 3 computers), using a negotiation algorithm that emulates the behaviour of human business negotiations. Possible development directions are brought forward in the paper's conclusion.
Automated Functional Test Case Synthesis from THALES industrial Requirements
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (2004)

Test case generation and specification validationare essential concerns for the software industry in itscontinuous search for productivity improvement andquality mastering. This paper presents the approachdeveloped in the MUTATION project for functionaltest case synthesis in the THALES industrial context.A two-step approach is proposed, which automatesmost of the process in a continuous way.The first step consists in expressing therequirements in the Requirements DescriptionLanguage (RDL) textual formalism and completing,disambiguating and validating them throughsimulation. Test objectives are then automaticallyderived from the RDL formalisation.The second step synthesises functional test casesthrough combining the test objectives produced at step1 and symbolic path computation on a UML detaileddesign model of the application, using the academictool AGATHA (French acronym for toolset dedicatedto automatic test generation for automata basedspecification). Test cases are produced throughselecting symbolic behaviour paths that match the testobjectives, applying a constraint solver to generatenumeric tests.This approach is based on three innovations thatare the core of this work: 1) definition of anappropriate language and a related methodology todefine the test requirements; 2) symbolic execution ona UML action language; 3) combination of testobjectives and symbolic execution to synthesizefunctional test cases.
Scalable Spatio-temporal Continuous Query Processing for Location-aware Services
Authors: Xiaopeng Xiong, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Walid G. Aref, Susanne E. Hambrusch, Sunil Prabhakar
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2004)

Real-time spatio-temporal query processing needs toeffectively handle a large number of moving objectsand continuous spatio-temporal queries. In this paper,we use shared execution as a mechanism to supportscalability in location-aware servers. Our main ideais to maintain a query table that stores informationabout continuous spatio-temporal queries. Then, answering spatio-temporal queries is abstracted as a spatial join among the moving objects and queries. Threequery join policies are proposed aiming to minimize thecost of the join operation under the shared executionparadigm, namely the Clock-triggered Join Policy, theIncremental Join Policy, and the Hot Join Policy. Weintroduce the concept of a No-Action Region that isused in conjunction with the hot join policy. We propose algorithms that calculate the No-Action region for objects and queries. Experimental performance demonstrates that the No-Action region is more efficient thanother approaches when used along with the hot join policy. Experiments also demonstrate that the hot join policy outperforms the clock-triggered join policy andthe incremental join policy in terms of both I/O andCPU costs.
Global Path Planning in Gaussian Probabilistic Maps
Authors: Álvaro Sánchez Miralles, Miguel Ángel Sanz Bobi
Venue: Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems (2004)

This paper is focused on path planning in environments modelled using continuous probabilistic maps, in particular, maps where obstacles are modelled using the sum of Gaussian distributions. Potential field and roadmap based methods are suitable for these type of maps, but they have some disadvantages. In order to attenuate the disadvantages of the previous methods, a new method has been proposed which is a mixture of them. It performs path planning based on a potential field taking into account a roadmap as a source of potential. Moreover, some experiments have been done in order to compare the performance of them.
The Complexity of the Covering Radius Problem on Lattices and Codes
Authors: Venkatesan Guruswami, Daniele Micciancio, Oded Regev
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Annual Conference on Computational Complexity (2004)

We initiate the study of the computational complexity ofthe covering radius problem for point lattices, and approximationversions of the problem for both lattices and linearcodes. We also investigate the computational complexity ofthe shortest linearly independent vectors problem, and itsrelation to the covering radius problem for lattices.For the covering radius on n-dimensional lattices, weshow that the problem can be approximated within any constantfactor \gamma(n) > 1 in random exponential time 2^O(n), itis in AM for \gamma(n) = 2, in coAM for \gamma(n) = \sqrt {n\log n} and in NP ¿ coNP for \gamma (n) = \sqrt n.For the covering radius on n-dimensional linear codes,we show that the problem can be solved in deterministicpolynomial time for approximation factor \gamma (n) = log n,but cannot be solved in polynomial time for some \gamma (n) = \Omega (\log \log n) unless NP can be simulated in deterministic n^{0(\log \log \log n)}time. Moreover, we prove that the problem is NP-hard for every constant approximation factor, it is\prod 2-hard for some constant approximation factor, and it isin AM for approximation factor 2. So, it is unlikely to be\prod 2-hard for approximation factors larger than 2. This is anatural hardness of approximation result in the polynomialhierarchy.For the shortest independent vectors problem, we givea coAM protocol achieving approximation factor \gamma (n) = \sqrt {n/\log n} , solving an open problem of Blömer and Seifert (STOC'99), and prove that the problem is also in coNP for \gamma (n) = \sqrt n. Both results are obtained by giving a gap-preservingnon-deterministic polynomial time reduction to the closest vector problem.
EGOMinor: A Genomics and Proteomics Data Computation and Interpretation System for Biomedical Applications
Authors: Weimin Feng, Gaurav Tuteja, May D. Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (2004)

EGOMiner, stands for Enhanced Gene Ontology mining system, is a CORBA based tool developed for genomic and proteomic data analysis. One key function of EGOMiner is to provide biological data interpretation based on Gene Ontology with quantitative and statistical analysis and visualization by direct acyclic graph. Cross comparison of multiple experimental studies is supported. The other function is quality analysis of microarray chip images. The input is raw chip data and output is visualization of the data quality of the chip image. This is system significantly improves the GoMiner system that was designed and developed by the authors.
Augmented Reeb Graphs for Content-Based Retrieval of 3D Mesh Models
Venue: Proceedings of the Shape Modeling International 2004 (2004)

This article presents an improved method of 3D mesh modelsindexing for content-based retrieval in database withshape similarity and appearance queries. The approachis based on the Multiresolutional Reeb Graph matchingpresented in [1]. The original method only takes into accounttopological information what is often not sufficientfor effective matchings. Therefore we proposed to augmentthis graph with geometrical attributes. We also provide anew topological coherence condition to improve the graphmatching. Moreover 2D appearance attributes and 3D featuresare extracted and merged to improve the estimationof the similarity between models. Besides, all these newattributes are user-dependent as they can be weighted byvariable terms. We obtain a flexible multiresolutional andmulticriteria representation called Augmented Reeb Graph(ARG). Good preliminary results have been obtained ina shape-based matching framework compared to existingmethods based only on statistical measures. In addition,our study lead us to an innovative part matching schemebased on the same approach as our Augmented Reeb Graphmatching.
More lawyers than programmers?
Authors: Michael A. Cusumano
Venue: Communications of the ACM (2004)

Microsoft must alter its strategy to avoid an increasingly litigious future.
Digital signature: use and modification to achieve success in next generational e-business processes
Authors: Alok Gupta, Y. Alex Tung, James R. Marsden
Venue: Information and Management (2004)

A US law, the electronic signatures (E-Sign) in Global and National Commerce Act (signed by then President Clinton on 30 June 2000 with an effective date of 1 October 2000), grants electronic signatures legal validity equivalent to traditional handwritten counterparts. The intention of this law is to cut costs while providing more stringent security. In the emerging e-commerce arena, electronic signatures hold great potential for facilitating secure electronic transactions. But signatures are used in many critical business processes that occur prior to or independent of final transactions. Contract development and numerous other processes entail a series of draft modifications and sign-offs. Can electronic signatures provide cost savings and security in these activities? In this paper, we (i) detail fundamentals and the current status of electronic signatures; (ii) describe the integration of electronic signatures with electronic verification and authentication technologies; (iii) explore e-commerce applications, especially document management processes, that could benefit from adopting electronic signatures; and (iv) propose modifications to the electronic signature process to enable innovative document management processes. We propose modifications using partial document ownership, soft signatures, and hard signatures.