ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Optimal QoS-Aware Web Service Composition
Authors: Marco Aiello, Elie el Khoury, Alexander Lazovik, Patrick Ratelband
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (2009)

The availability of many independent services on anopen network opens the opportunity of composing individualinstances to achieve complex functionality. Most often thereare several possible compositions to achieve the same highlevelfunctionality; the advantage of choosing one compositioninstead of another one may lie in the different quality ofthe composition, e.g., one might be cheaper, faster, or morereliable. In this paper, we focus on services described withXML documents and accessed via XML Protocols, knownas Web services, and enriched with semantic and Qualityof Service (QoS) annotations. We propose an algorithmthat, given a desired functionality, returns a composition ofservices from a repository with the optimal response time orthroughput. Services are composed taking into account anontology of operation names expressed in OWL. RuGQoS isthe related implementation.
Making Shape from Shading Work for Real-World Images
Authors: Oliver Vogel, Levi Valgaerts, Michael Breuß, Joachim Weickert
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st DAGM Symposium on Pattern Recognition (2009)

Although shape from shading (SfS) has been studied for almost four decades, the performance of most methods applied to real-world images is still unsatisfactory: This is often caused by oversimplified reflectance and projection models as well as by ignoring light attenuation and nonconstant albedo behavior. We address this problem by proposing a novel approach that combines three powerful concepts: (i) By means of a Chan-Vese segmentation step, we partition the image into regions with homogeneous reflectance properties. (ii) This homogeneity is further improved by an adaptive thresholding that singles out unreliable details which cause fluctuating albedos. Using an inpainting method based on edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion, structures are filled in such that the albedo does no longer suffer from fluctuations. (iii) Finally a sophisticated SfS method is used that features a perspective projection model, considers physical light attenuation and models specular highlights. In our experiments we demonstrate that each of these ingredients improves the reconstruction quality significantly. Their combination within a single method gives favorable perfomance also for images that are taken under real-world conditions where simpler approaches fail.
An exploratory study on promoting students' critical thinking by using weblogs
Authors: Qiyun Wang, Huaylit Woo
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on International conference for the learning sciences - Volume 3 (2008)

Critical thinking becomes an essential competency for people in the new information age. The purpose of this research is to investigate to what extent writing online reflections using weblogs can promote students' critical thinking. This research is conducted in a secondary school. After completing 3 weblogs, a focus group interview was conducted to collect their feedback on the design and implementation of the research. The results showed that the students liked the way of writing online reflections. They attempted to make the weblogs interesting, convincing and logical. Also, they liked to view others' reflections and to give comments. This paper presents the formative evaluation processes and results of the research.
Can Flash Memory Help in Model Checking?
Authors: Jiří Barnat, Luboš Brim, Stefan Edelkamp, Damian Sulewski, Pavel Šimeček
Venue: Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: 13th International Workshop, FMICS 2008, L'Aquila, Italy, September 15-16, 2008, Revised Selected Papers (2009)

As flash media become common and their capacities and speed grow, they are becoming a practical alternative for standard mechanical drives. So far, external memory model checking algorithms have been optimized for mechanical hard disks corresponding to the model of Aggarwal and Vitter [1]. Since flash memories are essentially different, the model of Aggarwal and Vitter no longer describes their typical behavior. On such a different device, algorithms can have different complexity, which may lead to the design of completely new flash-memory-efficient algorithms. We provide a model for computation of I/O complexity on the model of Aggarwal and Vitter modified for flash memories. We discuss verification algorithms optimized for this model and compare the performance of these algorithms with approaches known from I/O efficient model checking on mechanical hard disks. We also give an answer, when the usage of flash devices pays off and whether their further evolution in speed and capacity could broaden a range, where new algorithms outperform the old ones.
FPGA Implementation of a Best-Precision Fixed-Point Digital PID Controller
Authors: Yankai Xu, Kai Shuang, Shan Jiang, Xiaoliang Wu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation - Volume 03 (2009)

Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers have been broadly used in many areas. Compared with analog controllers, digital ones by Digital Signal Processor (DSP) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are more stable and easier to adjust parameter. Digital controllers are usually implemented with FPGA for its fast and stable performance. When it is implemented with FPGA, floating-point arithmetic is usually converted to fixed-point arithmetic. However the process of a floating-fixed conversion is complex, the period is long and the precision is proved to be low. Since the above problems, this paper proposes both best-precision fixed point arithmetic and the FPGA implementation details of a digital PID controller. And it illustrates the process of converting analog controllers to digital one. The simulation results show that the best-precision fixed point digital PID Controller is simple, and it outperforms by high-speed response, better precision, minor error and high dynamic range.
Dynamic quality control for transform domain Wyner-Ziv video coding
Authors: Sören Sofke, Fernando Pereira, Erika Müller
Venue: Journal on Image and Video Processing (2009)

Wyner-Ziv is an emerging video coding paradigm based on the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems where video coding may be performed by exploiting the temporal correlation at the decoder and not anymore at the encoder as in conventional video coding. This approach should allow designing low-complexity encoders, targeting important emerging applications such as wireless surveillance and visual sensor networks, without any cost in terms of RD performance. However, the currently available WZ video codecs do not allow controlling the target quality in an efficient way which is a major limitation for some applications. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to propose an efficient quality control algorithm to maintain a uniform quality along time in low-encoding complexity WZ video coding by dynamically adapting the quantization parameters depending on the desired target quality without any a priori knowledge about the sequence characteristics. This objective will be reached in the context of the so-called Stanford WZ video codec architecture which is currently the most used in the literature.
Research on Distributed Data Mining Technology Based on Grid
Authors: Ning Zhang, Hong Bao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 First International Workshop on Database Technology and Applications (2009)

Distributed data mining (DDM) techniques have become necessary for large and multi-scenario datasets requiring resources, which are heterogeneous and distributed. In this paper, we focused on distributed data mining based in grid. We have discussed and analyzed a new framework based on grid environments to execute new distributed data mining techniques on very large and distributed heterogeneous datasets. The architecture and motivation for the design have been presented. We pointed out that distributed data mining technology can offer a better solution since they are designed to work in a distributed environment by paying careful attention to the computing and communication resources.
Existing and future standards for event-driven business process management
Authors: Rainer von Ammon, Christoph Emmersberger, Thomas Ertlmaier, Opher Etzion, Thomas Paulus, Florian Springer
Venue: Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (2009)

The development and operation of modern IT infrastructures requires generally accepted standards. Many standardization efforts are currently ongoing within the service oriented and event processing community. Recently a new discipline entitled "Event-Driven Business Process Management (ED-BPM)" has emerged which takes a synergetic approach within this larger area. Consecutively, topics being discussed in this paper relate to the role of standards in the ED-BPM context, the need for a standard per se and the benefits and shortcomings of standardization in early phases vs. late phases. Within this activities, the most interesting proposal for a reference architecture is the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (NESSI) approach called NESSI Open Serivce Framework -- Reference Architecture (NEXOF-RA) which has to be enhanced in order to support ED-BPM applications. Thereupon a proposal for describing the context and structure of occurring events on a descriptive and non-complex level of events is discussed. Related industry standards like "Notification Event Architecture for Retail (NEAR)" and the possibility to extend that approach to other domains are surveyed. Two possible extensions are exemplified, for the logistics domain (NEAL), and for the finance domain (NEAF). Use cases for the retail, logistics, and finance domains are demonstrated. In the final analysis conclusions are drawn and proposed action items for advancing the ED-BPM standardization are made. The following paper is a shortened version. The whole paper can be downloaded on the CITT-homepage http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/Existing_and_Future_Standards_for_EDB_PM.pdf
Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Judgements in Computational Linguistics
Venue: ACL Workshops (2008)

The papers in these proceedings were presented at the Coling 2008 workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics, held in Manchester on 23 August 2008. Human judgements play a key role in the development and the assessment of linguistic resources and methods in Computational Linguistics. They are commonly used in the creation of lexical resources and corpus annotation, and also in the evaluation of automatic approaches to linguistic tasks: In the developmental phase, human judgements help to define an inventory of categories as well as robust annotation criteria, and in the assessment phase they are used to evaluate the results of automatic systems against existing linguistic standards. Furthermore, systematically collected human judgements provide clues for research on linguistic issues that underlie the judgement task, providing insights complementary to introspective analysis or evidence gathered from corpora. The workshop included papers about experiments that collect human judgements for Computational Linguistic purposes. A particular focus of the workshop was concerned with human judgements on "controversial" linguistic tasks (those that are not clear from a theoretical point of view, such as many tasks having to do with semantics or pragmatics). Such experimental tasks are usually difficult to design and interpret, and they typically result in low agreement scores. They are often poorly documented in the literature; however, they are especially well-suited as a basis for a fruitful discussion. We were pleased to receive 22 submissions, of which we accepted eight papers for presentation at the workshop. We would like to thank the program committee for the excellent job they did in reviewing the submissions. As well as the paper presentations, the workshop also included a keynote talk by Martha Palmer of the University of Colorado at Boulder. These proceedings include an abstract of her talk.
The Periodic Domino Problem Is Undecidable in the Hyperbolic Plane
Authors: Maurice Margenstern
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Reachability Problems (2009)

In this paper, we consider the periodic tiling problem which was proved undecidable in the Euclidean plane by Yu. Gurevich and I. Koriakov, see [3]. Here, we prove that the same problem for the hyperbolic plane is also undecidable.
The musical heritage of futurism: A digital reconstruction of the intonarumori family
Authors: Amalia De Götzen, Stefania Serafin
Venue: Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) (2009)

This article presents a digital simulation of the intonarumori, musical instruments invented by the Italian Futurist composer and painter Luigi Russolo. By building the physical models of different members of the intonarumori family and a physical interface, a preservation of an important contribution to the musical heritage of the beginning of the 20th century is achieved.
Summarizing spoken and written conversations
Authors: Gabriel Murray, Giuseppe Carenini
Venue: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2008)

In this paper we describe research on summarizing conversations in the meetings and emails domains. We introduce a conversation summarization system that works in multiple domains utilizing general conversational features, and compare our results with domain-dependent systems for meeting and email data. We find that by treating meetings and emails as conversations with general conversational features in common, we can achieve competitive results with state-of-the-art systems that rely on more domain-specific features.
Nutritional Diet Decision Using Multi-objective Difference Evolutionary Algorithm
Authors: Zhenkui Pei, Zhen Liu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Natural Computing - Volume 01 (2009)

The nutrition diet decision problems on Multi-objective optimization are solved by using Compromise Difference Evolutionary (DE) algorithm. This method is equipped with a domination selection operator to enhance its performance by favoring non–dominated individuals in the populations. DE is a population based search algorithm, which is an improved version of Genetic Algorithm (GA). Simulations carried out involved solving nutrition decision using a method that relationships of dominant to determine the fitness, and finding Pareto optimum set for the nutrition decision problem. Compromise Difference Evolutionary found to be stable and more accurate in optimization compared to simple GA.
Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an Extreme Testing Environment, 1st edition
Authors: John Watkins
Venue:  (2009)

In an IT world in which there are differently sized projects, with different applications, differently skilled practitioners, and on-site, off-site, and off-shored development teams, it is impossible for there to be a one-size-fits-all agile development and testing approach. This book provides practical guidance for professionals, practitioners, and researchers faced with creating and rolling out their own agile testing processes. In addition to descriptions of the prominent agile methods, the book provides twenty real-world case studies of practitioners using agile methods and draws upon their experiences to propose your own agile method; whether yours is a small, medium, large, off-site, or even off-shore project, this book provides personalized guidance on the agile best practices from which to choose to create your own effective and efficient agile method.
Intangible Assets in a Polish Telecommunication Sector --- Rough Sets Approach
Authors: Agnieszka Maciocha, Jerzy Kisielnicki
Venue: Transactions on Rough Sets X (2009)

In this article, we present the results of a follow up study concentrated on the intangible assets and their role in the value creation process. As a result of the earlier investigation [47] we obtained two different groups of telecommunication companies. In the first group, we observed stable and continuous growth of the corporate value while in the second group this growth was insignificant and continually fluctuating. In order to obtain factors causing this discrepancy we decide to pursue further analysis. The present study used the data acquired through employee questionnaires sent to the analyzed companies. Using this data we constructed an Information System according to Pawlak and Slowinski [62], [50]. Next, we applied Rough Sets in order to differentiate these intangible assets (IA) which caused the aforementioned difference. Specifically, we focused on theoretical concepts of data reduction, quality of classification, accuracy of approximation, and core of the set. Consequently, we obtained a set of intangible assets which had the biggest impact on the value of analysed companies.
The Rebound Attack: Cryptanalysis of Reduced Whirlpool and Grøstl
Authors: Florian Mendel, Christian Rechberger, Martin Schläffer, Søren S. Thomsen
Venue: Fast Software Encryption: 16th International Workshop, FSE 2009 Leuven, Belgium, February 22-25, 2009 Revised Selected Papers (2009)

In this work, we propose the rebound attack, a new tool for the cryptanalysis of hash functions. The idea of the rebound attack is to use the available degrees of freedom in a collision attack to efficiently bypass the low probability parts of a differential trail. The rebound attack consists of an inbound phase with a match-in-the-middle part to exploit the available degrees of freedom, and a subsequent probabilistic outbound phase. Especially on AES based hash functions, the rebound attack leads to new attacks for a surprisingly high number of rounds.We use the rebound attack to construct collisions for 4.5 rounds of the 512-bit hash function Whirlpool with a complexity of 2120 compression function evaluations and negligible memory requirements. The attack can be extended to a near-collision on 7.5 rounds of the compression function of Whirlpool and 8.5 rounds of the similar hash function Maelstrom. Additionally, we apply the rebound attack to the SHA-3 submission Grøstl, which leads to an attack on 6 rounds of the Grøstl-256 compression function with a complexity of 2120 and memory requirements of about 264.
Indirect-HMM-based hypothesis alignment for combining outputs from machine translation systems
Authors: Xiaodong He, Mei Yang, Jianfeng Gao, Patrick Nguyen, Robert Moore
Venue: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2008)

This paper presents a new hypothesis alignment method for combining outputs of multiple machine translation (MT) systems. An indirect hidden Markov model (IHMM) is proposed to address the synonym matching and word ordering issues in hypothesis alignment. Unlike traditional HMMs whose parameters are trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the parameters of the IHMM are estimated indirectly from a variety of sources including word semantic similarity, word surface similarity, and a distance-based distortion penalty. The IHMM-based method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art TER-based alignment model in our experiments on NIST benchmark datasets. Our combined SMT system using the proposed method achieved the best Chinese-to-English translation result in the constrained training track of the 2008 NIST Open MT Evaluation.
Cultural Representation for Multi-culture Interaction Design
Authors: Javed Anjum Sheikh, Bob Fields, Elke Duncker
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Internationalization, Design and Global Development: Held as Part of HCI International 2009 (2009)

This research works towards the integration of cultural factors in global information systems like the Web or digital libraries to enhance global access to information and services. In this context, we study cultural differences in categorization and classification by means of card sorting experiments in combination with observations and interviews. An initial analysis of data collected in Pakistan and UK reveals a number of differences between Pakistani and British participants as to how they classify every-day objects. The differences found suggest a number of design solutions for cultural inclusion.
Scalable Hardware Architecture for Montgomery Inversion Computation in Dual-Field
Authors: Dai Zi-bin, Qin Fan, Yang Xiao-hui
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 WASE International Conference on Information Engineering - Volume 02 (2009)

Computing the inverse of a number in finite fields GF(p) or GF(2n) is equally important for cryptographic applications. A novel scalable and unified architecture for a Montgomery inversion hardware that operates in both GF(p) and GF(2n) is proposed. The scalable design is the novel modification performed on the fixed hardware to make it occupy a small area and operate with better or similar speed, and it takes less number of clock cycle as the fixed datapath is large and can also achieve high clock frequency. Finally this work has been verified by modeling it in Verilog-HDL, implementing it under 0.18μm CMOS technology. The reault indicates that our work has advanced performance than other works.
Social-Stratification Probabilistic Routing Algorithm in Delay-Tolerant Network
Authors: Fuad Alnajjar, Tarek Saadawi
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (2009)

Routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) is complicated due to the fact that the network graph is episodically connected. In MANET, topology is changing rapidly because of weather, terrain and jamming. A key challenge is to create a mechanism that can provide good delivery performance and low end-to-end delay in an intermittent network graph where nodes may move freely. Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture is designed to provide communication in intermittently connected networks, by moving messages towards destination via "store, carry and forward" technique that supports multi-routing algorithms to acquire best path towards destination. In this paper, we propose the use of probabilistic routing in DTN architecture using the concept of social-stratification network. We use the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator as a simulation tool to compare the proposed Social- stratification Probabilistic Routing Algorithm (SPRA) with the common DTN-based protocols. Our results show that SPRA outperforms the other protocols.
SmartActions: Context-Aware Mobile Phone Shortcuts
Authors: Akos Vetek, John A. Flanagan, Ashley Colley, Tuomas Keränen
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part I (2009)

Mobile phones are often regarded as difficult to use due to their size restrictions. To improve on this, in this paper we described our approach using unsupervised learning to automate common tasks on a mobile phone, thereby requiring less key presses, by means of context-dependent quick-access shortcuts presented in the homescreen of the phone. We also briefly reviewed some of our user study findings, and raised the issue of possible privacy concerns with our implementation.