ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A Mixed Process Neural Network and its Application to Churn Prediction in Mobile Communications
Authors: Guojie Song, Dongqing Yang, Ling Wu, Tengjiao Wang, Shiwei Tang
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining - Workshops (2006)

Churn prediction is an increasingly pressing issue in today's ever-competitive commercial environments, especially in mobile communication arena. In this paper, a Mixed Process Neural Network (MPNN) based on fourier orthogonal base function has been proposed to support churn management, which can deal with both static value and time-varied continuous value simultaneously. To further improve its performance, an optimized network, c- MPNN, has been presented, which adopts fourier expansion based preprocessing and hidden layer combination techniques to optimize MPNN's structure. Most important of all, our method has been used in real applications in China Mobile. Experiments based on the real datasets also show that our proposed churn prediction method has good maneuverability and performance.
Minimizing Product Shrinkage across the Supply Chain using Radio Frequency Identification: a Case Study on a Major Australian Retailer
Authors: Nicholas Huber, Katina Michael
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Management of Mobile Business (2007)

This paper identifies the contributing factors of product shrinkage and investigates the current state of anti-theft technology as part of the loss prevention strategy for a major Australian retailer. Using a case study approach a total of eleven interviews were conducted with employees of the retailer to identify factors contributing to product shrinkage and ways to overcome these through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Known sources of product shrinkage included: warehouse discrepancies, internal and external theft, product recalls, shop return fraud, extortion, human and system error, poor stock control, poor rotation of stock, misplaced product items, lost products, product spoilage and damage. Each of the retailer's stores, in the chain of approximately 700, loses about 350000 Australian dollars to product shrinkage every six months. This paper argues that RFID would act as a partial solution toward the minimization of the retailer's product shrinkage and provide greater visibility throughout the supply chain.
The Effect of Aesthetic on the Usability of Data Visualization
Authors: Nick Cawthon, Andrew Vande Moere
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (2007)

Aesthetic seems currently under represented in most current data visualization evaluation methodologies. This paper investigates the results of an online survey of 285 participants, measuring both perceived aesthetic as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of retrieval tasks across a set of 11 different data visualization techniques. The data visualizations represent an identical hierarchical dataset, which has been normalized in terms of color, typography and layout balance. This study measured parameters such as speed of completion, accuracy rate, task abandonment and latency of erroneous response. Our findings demonstrate a correlation between latency in task abandonment and erroneous response time in relation to visualization's perceived aesthetic. These results support the need for an increased recognition for aesthetic in the typical evaluation process of data visualization techniques.
Motives and Barriers Affecting the Use of Mobile Data Services
Authors: Maria Bina, Dimitrios Karaiskos, George M. Giaglis
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Management of Mobile Business (2007)

Studying the adoption and acceptance of Mobile Data Services (MDS) has been an intriguing endeavour for quite some time. Much of the related literature is inspired by the Technology Acceptance Model and its heirs. The study presented in this paper adopts an alternative perspective and proposes the study of MDS actual usage patterns under the lens of the Triandis theory of explaining human behaviour. To this end, we adjust the concepts included in the original Triandis model to the MDS context and construct a model predicting MDS use. The model is empirically validated through a survey (N=365) and tested for its predictive capacity against four different MDS categories (m-commerce, communication, information, and entertainment services). Results suggest that the uptake of each of the four service categories is contingent upon a limited set of factors. In addition, financial barriers emerge as a universal inhibitor over and above specific service groupings.
Global asymptotic convergence of nonlinear relaxation equations realised through a recurrent perceptron
Authors: D. P. Mandic
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1999)

Conditions for global asymptotic stability (GAS) of a nonlinear relaxation equation realised by a nonlinear autoregressive moving average (NARMA) recurrent perceptron are provided. Convergence is derived through fixed point iteration (FPI) techniques, based upon a contraction mapping feature of a nonlinear activation function of a neuron. Furthermore, nesting is shown to be a spatial interpretation of an FPI, which underpins a pipelined recurrent neural network (PRNN) for nonlinear signal processing.
Large scale Linux configuration with LCFG
Authors: Paul Anderson, Alastair Scobie
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 4 (2000)

This paper describes the automatic installation and configuration system currently being used to manage several hundred Linux machines in the Division of Informatics at Edinburgh University. This is a development of the LCFG system which has been used successfully for several years under Solaris. The introduction provides some background on the general problem of large-scale configuration, together with a short comparison of typical solutions, and a brief description of the original LCFG system. The specific changes required to support Linux are then discussed; in particular, the issues of installation bootstrapping, and the updaterpms program. This automatically synchronises client software packages with a specification in the central database. We describe how the system is used in practice, and how it enables us to automatically maintain large numbers of machines with very diverse and evolving configurations. Some future plans are then discussed, including a major reworking of the LCFG implementation, LDAP integration, and our intention to make the technology more widely available.
The Camera-Driven Interactive Table
Authors: Christopher Schwarz, Niels da Vitoria Lobo
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (2007)

One emerging application of computing technology is that of interactive rooms and furniture. For instance, Interactive Tables allow for a workspace that is intuitive, natural, and conducive to creating multi-user collaborative work environments. Although several interactive table prototypes have been developed, we have engineered a method using a computer vision system instead of touch screen technology, which allows increased flexibility to the end user because of its ability to ignore or even make use of objects placed upon the table and its decreased likelihood of accidental input. In this work we present a method for implementing such a camera-driven interactive table with a ceiling-mounted camera and demonstrate some of its potential uses. The vision system makes use of a novel hand detection and segmentation technique designed to be tolerant of any level of background complexity on the display and any reasonable range of indoor lighting conditions, thus allowing the highest level of freedom to the end user. It searches the results of multi-scale line and curve finding systems to locate thimbleshaped finger models, marking them as candidate fingers and performing a set of geometric and texture-based tests on each to remove false positives. Finally, it groups finger detections that are similar to each other in location and appearance, while allowing the reintroduction of weak candidates that are supported by strong neighbors, into hand detections with finger and palm locations. Results demonstrate the system's ability extract enough information from images of hands in very complex backgrounds to allow for finger and palm placement recognition.
Reconfiguring Workflows of Web Services
Authors: R. Baird, M. Hepner, R. Gamble, M. T. Gamble
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International IEEE Conference on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS)-Based Software Systems (2007)

Workflow reconfiguration traditionally involves modifying workflow specifications to adapt to changing architectural conditions. Causes include the introduction of new services or the alteration of goals. Dynamic reconfiguration is currently achieved in workflow specifications employing Web services using techniques that modify endpoint bindings and control structures. Abstract specification of service endpoints delay the point at which the endpoint for a Web service is bound, and modifications to control structures can allow for a variety of complex workflows to be specified. These approaches work with limited changes. This paper defines an improved process of dynamically reconfiguring Web service workflows. Our double loop approach utilizes companion meta-data specifications and reconfiguration plans that are associated with workflow specifications. The approach maps external change requests to workflow actions to determine an appropriate reconfiguration plan without changing the workflow language. Dynamic reconfiguration concepts are reused from architecture reconfiguration research to offer a wider range of potential changes.
QDM: A Generic QoS-Aware Data Model for Real-Time Data Stream Processing
Authors: Sven Schmidt, Benjamin Schlegel, Wolfgang Lehner
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Digital Telecommunications (2007)

Data Stream processing addresses a huge variety of application, ranging from processing complex-structured business events to high-volume RFID tag info streams. Some application areas, especially in telecommunication or manufacturing, require guarantees with regard to pre-defined service constraints. In this paper, we outline the cornerstones of a QoS-aware data model comprising functional as well as non-functional properties to describe quality constraints. We will look at the model from a structural point of view as well as from the operational perspective. Since the proposed model is specific with regard to QoS constraint and generic with regard to specific operators, it may serve as a blue-print for a broad spectrum of data stream systems.
Template-driven generation of prosodic information for Chinese concatenative synthesis
Authors: Chung-Hsien Hu
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1999)

A template-driven generation of prosodic information is proposed for Chinese text-to-speech conversion. A set of monosyllable-based synthesis units is selected from a large continuous speech database. The speech database is employed to establish a word-prosody-based template tree according to the linguistic features: tone combination, word length, part-of-speech (POS) of the word, and word position in a sentence. This template tree stores the prosodic features including pitch contour, average energy, and syllable duration of a word for possible combinations of linguistic features. Two modules for sentence intonation and template selection are proposed to generate the target prosodic templates. The experimental results for the TTS conversion system showed that synthesized prosodic features quite resembled their original counterparts for most syllables in the inside test. Evaluation by subjective experiments also confirmed the satisfactory performance of these approaches.
Towards dynamic interprocedural analysis in JVMs
Authors: Feng Qian, Laurie Hendren
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Virtual Machine Research And Technology Symposium - Volume 3 (2004)

This paper presents a new, inexpensive, mechanism for constructing a complete call graph for Java programs at runtime, and provides an example of using the mechanism for implementing a dynamic reachability-based interprocedural analysis (IPA), namely dynamic XTA. Reachability-based IPAs, such as points-to analysis and escape analysis, require a context-insensitive call graph of the analyzed program. Computing a call graph at runtime presents several challenges. First, the overhead must be low. Second, when implementing the mechanism for languages such as Java, both polymorphism and lazy class loading must be dealt with correctly and efficiently. We propose a new, low-cost, mechanism for constructing runtime call graphs in a JIT environment. The mechanism uses a profiling code stub to capture the first execution of a call edge, and adds at most one more instruction to repeated call edge invocations. Polymorphism and lazy class loading are handled transparently. The call graph is constructed incrementally, and it supports optimistic analysis and speculative optimizations with invalidations. We also developed a dynamic, reachability-based type analysis, dynamic XTA, as an application of runtime call graphs. It also serves as an example of handling lazy class loading in dynamic IPAs. The dynamic call graph construction algorithm and dynamic version of XTA have been implemented in Jikes RVM. We present empirical measurements of the overhead of call graph profiling and compare the characteristics of call graphs built using our profiling code stubs with conservative ones constructed by using dynamic class hierarchy analysis (CHA).
A Variational Approach to Problems in Calibration of Multiple Cameras
Authors: Gozde Unal, Anthony Yezzi, Stefano Soatto, Greg Slabaugh
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2007)

This paper addresses the problem of calibrating camera parameters using variational methods. One problem addressed is the severe lens distortion in low-cost cameras. For many computer vision algorithms aiming at reconstructing reliable representations of 3D scenes, the camera distortion effects will lead to inaccurate 3D reconstructions and geometrical measurements if not accounted for. A second problem is the color calibration problem caused by variations in camera responses that result in different color measurements and affects the algorithms that depend on these measurements. We also address the extrinsic camera calibration that estimates relative poses and orientations of multiple cameras in the system and the intrinsic camera calibration that estimates focal lengths and the skew parameters of the cameras. To address these calibration problems, we present multiview stereo techniques based on variational methods that utilize partial and ordinary differential equations. Our approach can also be considered as a coordinated refinement of camera calibration parameters. To reduce computational complexity of such algorithms, we utilize prior knowledge on the calibration object, making a piecewise smooth surface assumption, and evolve the pose, orientation, and scale parameters of such a 3D model object without requiring a 2D feature extraction from camera views. We derive the evolution equations for the distortion coefficients, the color calibration parameters, the extrinsic and intrinsic parameters of the cameras, and present experimental results.
Smart cards in interaction: towards trustworthy digital signatures
Authors: Roger Kilian-Kehr, Joachim Posegga
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference - Volume 5 (2002)

We present approaches to raise the security level in the process of electronic signature creation by shifting as many tasks as possible involved in digitally signing data into a tamper-resistant and trustworthy smart card. We describe the fundamental technical principles our approach is based on, illustrate resulting design options, and compare the security of our approach with traditional electronic signature scenarios.
Usability field-test of a spoken data-entry system
Authors: M. Federico
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1999)

This paper reports on the field-test of a speech based data-entry system developed as a follow-up of an EC funded project. The application domain is the data-entry of personnel absence records from a huge historical paper file (about 100,000 records). The application was required by the personnel office of a public administration. The tested system resulted both sufficiently simple to make a detailed analysis feasible, and sufficiently representative of the potentials of spoken data-entry.
Some similarity measures of intuitionistic fuzzy sets and their applications to multiple attribute decision making
Authors: Zeshui Xu
Venue: Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making (2007)

Atanassov (1986) defined the notion of intuitionistic fuzzy set, which is a generalization of the notion of Zadeh' fuzzy set. In this paper, we first develop some similarity measures of intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Then, we define the notions of positive ideal intuitionistic fuzzy set and negative ideal intuitionistic fuzzy set. Finally, we apply the similarity measures to multiple attribute decision making under intuitionistic fuzzy environment.
You must be joking: a historic open reviewing at global internet '07
Authors: Michalis Faloutsos, Anirban Banerjee, Reza Rejaie
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2007)

We did it! A few CCR issues back, this column argued in favor of an all open review. At the time, most people thought that it was a joke. Quite frankly, we meant it as a joke. It is a crazy world we live in. No, seriously, it was not so much of a joke, as a wild attempt to think outside the box. Or else, desperate times call for desperate measures. Something like that. Apparently, we were so desperate that we actually tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. But then again, we may be biased. "To say it was easy would be a lie." R. Rejaie and M. Faloutsos, early 21st century.
Unified Modeling and Analysis based on Petri nets and Pi calculus
Authors: Fei Xu, Li Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (2007)

Awareness of the need for process orientation in IT support field has been increasing these decades, which made the modeling and analyzing of business process become more and more significant. Among various formal methods, Petri nets were applied in workflow management, mainly because its visible feature based on the rigors graph theory. As another potential candidate, Pi calculus, a branch of process algebra, proved to be more capable in modeling mobility and interaction. But there were no formal methods to integrate these two formal methods, even this work may be of great significance. In this paper, based on the analysis of both Petri nets and Pi calculus, we will introduce a mapping model between those two formal methods, which integrates the workflow model of Petri nets and the interaction model of Pi calculus to describe collaboration business processes.
What is a free name in a process algebra?
Authors: Flemming Nielson, Hanne Riis Nielson, Henrik Pilegaard
Venue: Information Processing Letters (2007)

There are two popular approaches to specifying the semantics of process algebras: labelled transition semantics and reaction semantics. While the notion of free name is rather unproblematic for labelled transition semantics this is not so for reaction semantics in the presence of a structural congruence for unfolding recursive declarations. We show that the standard definition of free name is not preserved under the structural congruence. We then develop a fixed point approach to the set of free names and show that it is invariant under the structural congruence.
Teaching DSP concepts using MATLAB and the TMS320C31 DSK
Authors: C. H. G. Wright
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 06 (1999)

A graphically-oriented MATLAB program written by the authors facilitates teaching real-world digital signal processing concepts such as quantization of digital filter coefficients that occur in fixed-point processors, for example the widely used TMS320C5x. While many universities have or plan to buy the inexpensive floating-point TMS320C31 DSKs for pedagogical reasons, this MATLAB program simulates certain fixed-point effects on these floating-point devices and eliminates the need to purchase expensive specialized software programs or extra hardware. The program described in this paper provides an interactive graphical user interface which communicates directly with the DSK, and demonstrates in real-time how coefficient quantization adversely affects filter performance, without the need for tedious programming of the TMS320C31.
Analysis of segmented human body scans
Authors: Pengcheng Xi, Won-Sook Lee, Chang Shu
Venue: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2007 (2007)

Analysis on a dataset of 3D scanned surfaces have presented problems because of incompleteness on the surfaces and because of variances in shape, size and pose. In this paper, a high-resolution generic model is aligned to data in the Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry Resources (CAESAR) database in order to obtain a consistent parameterization. A Radial Basis Function (RBF) network is built for rough deformation by using landmark information from the generic model, anatomical landmarks provided by CAESAR dataset and virtual landmarks created automatically for geometric deformation. Fine mapping then successfully applies a weighted sum of errors on both surface data and the smoothness of deformation. Compared with previous methods, our approach makes robust alignment in a higher efficiency. This consistent parameterization also makes it possible for Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on the whole body as well as human body segments. Our analysis on segmented bodies displays a richer variation than that of the whole body. This analysis indicates that a wider application of human body reconstruction with segments is possible in computer animation.
An open source software culture in the undergraduate computer science curriculum
Authors: John David N. Dionisio, Caskey L. Dickson, Stephanie E. August, Philip M. Dorin, Ray Toal
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (2007)

Open source software has made inroads into mainstream computing where it was once the territory of software altruists, and the open source culture of technological collegiality and accountability may benefit education as well as industry. This paper describes the Recourse project, which seeks to transform the computer science undergraduate curriculum through teaching methods based on open source principles, values, ethics, and tools. Recourse differs from similar projects by bringing the open source culture into the curriculum comprehensively, systematically, and institutionally. The current state of the project is described, and initial results from a pilot exercise are presented.(1)