ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Algorithmic aspects of connectivity, allocation and design problems
Authors: Vijay V. Vazirani
Venue:  (2008)

Most combinatorial optimization problems are NP-hard, which implies that under well-believed complexity assumptions, there exist no polynomial time algorithms to solve them. To cope with the NP-hardness, approximation algorithms which return solutions close to the optimal, have become a rich field of study. One successful method for designing approximation algorithms has been to model the optimization problem as an integer program and then using its polynomial time solvable linear programming relaxation for the design and analysis of such algorithms. Such a technique is called the LP-based technique. In this thesis, we study the algorithmic aspects of three classes of combinatorial optimization problems using LP-based techniques as our main tool. Connectivity problems. We study the Steiner tree problem and devise new linear programming relaxations for the problem. We show an equivalence of our relaxation with the well studied bidirected cut relaxation for the Steiner tree problem. Furthermore, for a class of graphs called quasi-bipartite graphs, we improve the best known upper bound on the integrality gap from 3/2 to 4/3. Algorithmically, we obtain fast and simple approximation algorithms for the Steiner tree problem on quasi-bipartite graphs. Allocation problems. We study the budgeted allocation problem of allocating a set of indivisible items to a set of agents who bid on it but possess a hard budget constraint more than which they are unwilling to pay. This problem is a special case of submodular welfare maximization. We use a natural LP relaxation for the problem and improve the best known approximation factor for the problem from &sime; 0:632 to 3=4. We also improve the inapproximability factor of the problem to 15/16 and use our techniques to show inapproximability results for many other allocation problems. We also study online allocation problems where the set of items are unknown and appear one at a time. Under some necessary assumptions we provide online algorithms for many problems which attain the (almost) optimal competitive ratio. Both these works have applications in the area of budgeted auctions, the most famous of which are the sponsored search auctions hosted by search engines on the Internet. Design problems. We formally define and study design problems which ask how the weights of an input instance can be designed, so that the minimum (or maximum) of a certain function of the input can be maximized (respectively, minimized). We show if the function can be approximated to any factor &alpha;, then the optimum design can be approximated to the same factor.We also show that (max-min) design problems are dual to packing problems. We use the framework developed by our study of design problems to obtain results about fractionally packing Steiner trees in a &ldquo;black-box" fashion. Finally, we study integral packing of spanning trees and provide an alternate proof of a theorem of Nash-Williams and Tutte about packing spanning trees.
Digital Media Tools, 3rd edition
Authors: Nigel Chapman, Jenny Chapman
Venue:  (2008)

Digital Media Tools is a clearly focussed introduction to the major software tools used for creating digital graphics, multimedia and Web pages. There are substantial chapters on each of the industry-leading applications such as Photoshop or Flash, plus an introductory chapter on the common interface elements. Readers will acquire a basic fluency with these important tools, learn what they do best and what their limitations are. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout, and files are provided on the supporting web site for students to work through all the major examples themselves. The approach is highly practical and founded in the authors extensive experience with these tools, but also supported by a thorough understanding and explanation of the technical and theoretical issues underpinning their use. Digital Media Tools is designed to be the perfect practical companion text to the authors latest course Web Design: A Complete Introduction. This edition brings this very successful book up to date and provides information on the latest versions of Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, along with new coverage of Bridge. This 3rd edition introduces a wide range of new teaching and learning features both in the book itself and on the new supporting Web site www.digitalmediatools.org
Categorisation of Norms
Authors: Emile de Maat, Radboud Winkels
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2007: The Twentieth Annual Conference (2007)

In a lot of existing legal knowledge based applications, the underlying legal model does not retain isomorphism with the original legal text. Parts of the text have not been modelled, and other parts have been simplified to single if-then-else clauses. This makes these models difficult to validate, maintain and re-use. In this article we propose to make an intermediate model, in which the original structure of the legal text is still represented. A first step is the detection and classification of norms in sentences in legal texts. We present a classification of norms or provisions based on the analyses of a large body of Dutch law. The classification covers all text constructs found thus far and we claim the use of typical sentence structures enables automation of a large part of this task.
Focus to emphasize tone structures for prosodic analysis in spoken language generation
Authors: Lalita Narupiyakul
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop (2006)

We analyze the concept of focus in speech and the relationship between focus and speech acts for prosodic generation. We determine how the speaker's utterances are influenced by speaker's intention. The relationship between speech acts and focus information is used to define which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose the Focus to Emphasize Tones (FET) structure to analyze the focus components. We also design the FET grammar to analyze the intonation patterns and produce tone marks as a result of our analysis. We present a proof-of-the-concept working example to validate our proposal. More comprehensive evaluations are part of our current work.
Knowledge networks for pervasive services
Authors: Nicola Bicocchi, Gabriella Castelli, Marco Mamei, Alberto Rosi, Franco Zambonelli, Matthias Baumgarten, Maurice Mulvenna
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Pervasive services (2009)

Technologies to pervasively acquire information about the physical and social worlds -- as needed by services to achieve context-awareness -- are becoming increasingly available. This calls for specific approaches to automatically organize and aggregate such data before delivering it to services. Contextual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology within which they autonomously link and combine with each other into sorts of "knowledge networks". This can produce compact and easy-to-be-managed higher-level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment, and eventually can make services able to easily acquire "situation-awareness". In this paper, after having framed the key concepts and motivations underlying "situation-awareness" and our "knowledge networks" approach, we present the design and implementation of a "knowledge networks" prototype, intended as a tool to support self-organization and self-aggregation of contextual data item and to facilitate their exploitation by pervasive services. A representative case study in the area of adaptive pervasive advertisement is introduced to clarify the concepts expressed, to exemplify the actual functioning of the toolkit and of some specific algorithms integrated within it.
A sophisticated library search strategy using folksonomies and similarity matching
Authors: Maria Soledad Pera, William Lund, Yiu-Kai Ng
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2009)

Libraries, private and public, offer valuable resources to library patrons. As of today, the only way to locate information archived exclusively in libraries is through their catalogs. Library patrons, however, often find it difficult to formulate a proper query, which requires using specific keywords assigned to different fields of desired library catalog records, to obtain relevant results. These improperly formulated queries often yield irrelevant results or no results at all. This negative experience in dealing with existing library systems turns library patrons away from directly querying library catalogs; instead, they rely on Web search engines to perform their searches first, and upon obtaining the initial information (e.g., titles, subject headings, or authors) on the desired library materials, they query library catalogs. This searching strategy is an evidence of failure of today's library systems. In solving this problem, we propose an enhanced library system, which allows partial, similarity matching of (a) tags defined by ordinary users at a folksonomy site that describe the content of books and (b) unrestricted keywords specified by an ordinary library patron in a query to search for relevant library catalog records. The proposed library system allows patrons posting a query Q using commonly used words and ranks the retrieved results according to their degrees of resemblance with Q while maintaining the query processing time comparable with that achieved by current library search engines. &copy; 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Supplementary loss concealment technique for image transmission through data hiding
Authors: Kyung-Su Kim, Hae-Yeoun Lee, Heung-Kyu Lee
Venue: Multimedia Tools and Applications (2009)

This paper addresses a loss concealment technique of image transmission in error prone environments. Imperfect transmission of imagery results in the loss of lines or blocks. Previous concealment techniques utilize the spatial, spectral, or temporal redundancy of the imagery. We propose a supplementary loss concealment technique that uses a data-hiding method. We divide an image into 8¿×¿8 pixels blocks and generate block description information of each block. The block description information is inserted into other blocks in the same image through LSB-based data hiding. Missing lines or blocks during transmission are restored by extracting this block description information. The technique to resist against lossy compression is also considered. We have performed a simulation to show the outstanding performance of the proposed technique in comparison with other loss concealment methods.
Contrast and Assimilation Effects on Consumers' Trust in Internet Companies
Authors: Katherine Stewart, Ross Malaga
Venue: International Journal of Electronic Commerce (2009)

The Internet presents an ever-shifting landscape for consumers to navigate. Links that exist one day may be gone the next, only to be replaced by new sets of connections among organizations. This study addresses the question of how an organization's positioning in a particular set of links on the Web might bias consumers' later judgment of its trustworthiness. The study suggests that the particular set of links a consumer faces in navigating toward an organization constitutes a context for the encounter with that organization and may have a significant impact on the way the consumer judges the company after interacting with its Web site. The paper develops and tests hypotheses that argue for the priming effect of context. Results of an experimental study provide evidence that unfamiliar companies may benefit from an overall assimilation effect when a link to their sites is surrounded by links to more familiar organizations, and familiar organizations may benefit from a contrast effect when inexperienced consumers see their company link surrounded by links to unfamiliar companies. The paper extends prior models on the determinants of consumers' on-line trust by examining concepts from priming theory. The conclusions suggest that practitioners should be aware of the context in which links to their sites are placed.
Algorithms for very large scale set covering problems
Authors: Cesar Rego
Venue:  (2007)

The Set Covering Problem (SCP) is a classical combinatorial problem used to model a wide range of applications such as airline and railway crew scheduling, political districting, and truck routing, just to cite a few. The problem is NP-Hard and therefore heuristic algorithms have been developed to solve large scale instances. This research presents a new one-pass constructive heuristic based on surrogate constraint normalization to rapidly generate a feasible solution after a single sweep through the data of the SCP. The proposed heuristic has been demonstrated to perform better than the most effective one-pass constructive heuristics for the solution of the SCP which is chiefly represented by the widely-used Chv&aacute;tal method. An extensive implementation of Lagrangian and Surrogate relaxation is also presented and subjected to computational testing. It is shown that surrogate relaxation, as well as Lagrangian relaxation, provides valuable information to generate core problems. A new heuristic based upon combining mathematical relaxation and Tabu search is developed in this research as a form of the Relaxation Adaptive Memory Programming (RAMP) approach (Rego, 2005). It is observed that this RAMP algorithm is fast and provides high quality results for the available benchmark problems. A Scatter Search stand alone algorithm for the SCP was developed as a mean to create a Primal-Dual RAMP approach (Rego, 2005). Furthermore, this research includes a new deterministic algorithm based upon a Primal-Dual RAMP approach; which uses Surrogate relaxation and Tabu search on the dual side, and Scatter Search and Tabu search on the primal side. This algorithm was able to obtain all the best known solutions for all the benchmark problems, and improved one of the best known solutions for one of the largest problems. The computational times were smaller than the state of the art algorithms reported in the literature; they confirm the efficiency of the Primal-Dual RAMP framework, and suggest the development of more advanced RAMP approaches.
On the Impact of Clustering on Measurement Reduction
Authors: Damien Saucez, Benoit Donnet, Olivier Bonaventure
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th International IFIP-TC 6 Networking Conference (2009)

Measuring a path performance according to one or several metrics, such as delay or bandwidth, is becoming more and more popular for applications. However, constantly probing the network is not suitable. To make measurements more scalable, the notion of clustering has emerged. In this paper, we demonstrate that clustering can limit the measurement overhead in such a context without loosing too much accuracy. We first explain that measurement reduction can be observed when vantage points collaborate and use clustering to estimate path performance. We then show, with real traces, how effective is the overhead reduction and what is the impact in term of measurement accuracy.
Line partitions of internal points to a conic in PG(2,q)
Authors: Massimo Giulietti
Venue: Combinatorica (2009)

All sets of lines providing a partition of the set of internal points to a conic C in PG(2,q), q odd, are determined. There exist only three such linesets up to projectivities, namely the set of all non-tangent lines to C through an external point to C, the set of all non-tangent lines to C through a point in C, and, for square q, the set of all non-tangent lines to C belonging to a Baer subplane PG(2,&#x221a;q) with &#x221a;q+1 common points with C. This classification theorem is the analogous of a classical result by Segre and Korchm&#x00e1;ros [9] characterizing the pencil of lines through an internal point to C as the unique set of lines, up to projectivities, which provides a partition of the set of all non-internal points to C. However, the proof is not analogous, since it does not rely on the famous Lemma of Tangents of Segre which was the main ingredient in [9]. The main tools in the present paper are certain partitions in conics of the set of all internal points to C, together with some recent combinatorial characterizations of blocking sets of non-secant lines, see [2], and of blocking sets of external lines, see [1].
Alpha satellite DNA analysis using spectrograms
Authors: Petre G. Pop
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Mathematics and computers in biology and chemistry (2009)

Detection of tandem repeats can be used for phylogenic studies and disease diagnosis. The numerical representation of genomic signals is very important, as many of the methods for detecting repeated sequences are part of the DSP field. Here we investigate the application of spectral analysis and spectrograms using a novel numerical representation to identify and study alpha satellite higher order repeats.
Plus-minus algorithm - A method for derivation of the Bäcklund transformations
Authors: T. Wietecha, K. Sokalski
Venue: Journal of Symbolic Computation (2009)

A new way of deriving Backlund transformations for nonlinear partial differential evolution equations is presented and applied to the following equations: Korteweg-de Vries, Gardner, Burgers, generalized KdV and the fifth order equations of the KdV hierarchies. The presented method is based on the assumption of the existence of particular forms of the Backlund transformations. This assumption is supported by the strong or semi-strong necessary condition concepts [Sokalski, K., Wietecha, T., Lisowski, Z., 2001. Acta Phys. Polon. B32, 17; Sokalski, K., Wietecha, T., Lisowski, Z., 2002. Int. J. Theor. Phys. Group Theory Nonlinear Opt., NOVA, 9, 331; Sokalski, K., Wietecha, T., Lisowski, Z., 2001. Acta Phys. Polon. B32, 2771; Sokalski, K., Wietecha, T., Sokalska, D. 2005. J. Nonlinear Math. Phys. 12, 31]. Its general form has been put within the framework of an algorithm and implemented in MAPLE.
How much logical structure is helpful in content-based argumentation software for legal case solving?
Authors: Stijn Colen, Fokie Cnossen, Bart Verheij
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (2009)

Current argumentation support software often employs graphical representations of logical relationships. Little is known about the extent to which logical structuring helps to increase a user's task performance. In this research, various levels of graphical representation of the logical structure of legal subject matter are experimentally compared in terms of performance. It is shown that logical structuring significantly increases task performance, but we have found no evidence that the extensive representation of logical structure as employed by several contemporary software applications is more effective or usable than a simplified graphical representation that was previously implemented in an application called ArguGuide.
A selective downlink scheduling algorithm to enhance quality of VOD services for WAVE networks
Authors: Shumao Ou, Kun Yang, Hsiao-Hwa Chen, Alex Galis
Venue: EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2009)

Providing quality-of-service- (QoS-) guaranteed video on demand (VOD) services over wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVEs) is a challenge as WAVE adopts enhanced distributive channel access (EDCA), a contention-based channel access mechanism, for air interface access control. This paper proposes a selective downlink scheduling (SDS) algorithm to enhance the quality of VOD for WAVE networks. According to the importance of video decoding, video packets are categorized into high and low priorities. The categorized packets are put into different queues in roadside units (RSUs) to contend for transmission opportunities. Aiming to improve video playback quality and reduce video playback delay, the proposed SDS algorithm schedules video packets based on their importance, playback deadline, and their real-time parameters of receiving onboard units (OBUs), such as velocity and remaining dwelling time. The effectiveness of SDS algorithm is verified by simulations.
Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems
Authors: Eric Jul, Ian Rogers
Venue: Object-Oriented Technology. ECOOP 2008 Workshop Reader: ECOOP 2008 Workshops Paphos, Cyprus, July 7-11, 2008 Final Reports (2008)

ICOOOLPS'2008 was the third edition of the ICOOOLPS workshop at ECOOP. ICOOOLPS intends to bring researchers and practitioners both from academia and industry together, with a spirit of openness, to try and identify and begin to address the numerous and very varied issues of optimization. After two very successful editions, this third put a stronger emphasis on exchanges and discussions amongst the participants, progressing on the bases set previous years in Nantes and Berlin. The workshop attendance was relatively successful: There was about 20 attendees which was good considering the remote location and that the general attendance of ECOOP was much lower than expected. Some of the discussions (e.g., much of the afternoon sessions) were so successful that they would required even more time than we were able to dedicate to them. That is one area we plan to further improve yet again for the next edition.
Basic Statistics Using SAS Enterprise Guide: A Primer
Authors: Geoff Der, Brian S. Everitt
Venue:  (2007)

Now it's easy to perform many of the most common statistical techniques when you use the SAS Enterprise Guide point-and-click interface to access the power of SAS. Emphasizing the practical aspects of the analysis, this example-rich guide shows you how to conduct a wide range of statistical analyses without any SAS programming required. One or more real data sets, a brief introduction of the technique, and a clear explanation of the SAS Enterprise Guide output are provided for each analysis. Exercises at the end of each chapter help you consolidate what has been learned. Topics include: Analysis of variance Dealing with categorical data Logistic regression Regression Significance tests Survival analysis And more! This text is ideal for those who want to use SAS to analyze their data, but do not have the time to undertake the considerable amount of learning involved in the programming approach.
Modeling and Analysis of Enterprise and Information Systems: From Requirements to Realization, 1st edition
Authors: Qing Li, Yu-Liu Chen
Venue:  (2009)

Modeling and Analysis of Enterprise and Information Systems From Requirements to Realization discusses the basic principles of enterprise architecture and enterprise modeling. After an introduction to the field the General Enterprise Modeling Architecture is presented. The new architecture includes a set of models and methods. It describes different aspects of the system and covers its life cycle. Its models are structuralized models with multi-layers and multi-views. They are descriptions and cognitions of the system at the top level and provide tools and methodology to understand, design, develop and implement the system. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the field of industrial engineering, management engineering and information engineering. Enterprise Models discussed in this book provide a rich source in enterprise diagnosis, business process reengineering and information system implementation. Dr. Qing Li and Prof. Yu-Liu Chen both teach at the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University.