ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Design and Performance-Study of Crash-Tolerant Protocols for Broadcasting and Reaching Consensus in MANETs
Authors: Einar W. Vollset, Paul D. Ezhilchelvan
Venue: Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (2005)

The mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) technology offers an ideal medium for hosting self-organized collaborative applications in terrains with no infrastructure support for untethered communication. Collaboration involves users with potentially different initial opinions deciding identically, i.e., reaching consensus. Efficient consensus solutions require efficient broadcast support. This paper presents four crash-tolerant broadcast protocols which are designed (i) to provide the maximum broadcast coverage that can ever be guaranteed, and (ii) to suit a wide range of MANET types: from a connected MANET (no partitions) to intermittently disconnected one (partitions occurring rarely and healing swiftly) to an intermittently connected one (partitions taking longer to heal and re-appearing swiftly). The resulting design challenges are addressed systematically, presenting two foundational results that would guide the protocol design. The protocols¿ performance is then studied through simulations for a range of node speeds and network densities. The best-performing one is used to host a consensus protocol as its ¿application¿. The overhead and the latency for reaching consensus are measured; surprisingly, they are hardly affected as the number of nodes with distinct initial opinions increases beyond one.
Pair designing as practice for enforcing and diffusing design knowledge: Research Articles
Authors: Emilio Bellini, Gerardo Canfora, Félix García, Mario Piattini, Corrado Aaron Visaggio
Venue: Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice (2005)

Evolving software's design requires that the members of the team acquire a deep and complete knowledge of the domain, the architectural components, and their integration. Such information is scarcely addressed within the design documentation and it is not trivial to derive it. A strategy for enforcing the consciousness of such hidden aspects of software's design is needed. One of the expected benefits of pair programming is fostering (tacit) knowledge building between the components of the pair and fastening its diffusion within the project's team. We have applied the paradigm of pair programming to the design phase and we have named it &lsquo;pair designing&rsquo;. We have realized an experiment and a replica in order to understand if pair designing can be used as an effective means for diffusing and enforcing the design knowledge while evolving the system's design. The results suggest that pair designing could be a suitable means to disseminate and enforce design knowledge. Copyright &copy; 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Service Oriented Architecture Framework for Collaborative Services
Authors: Ivar Jorstad, Schahram Dustdar, Do Van Thanh
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprise (2005)

The demand for flexible, efficient and user-friendly collaborative services is becoming more and more urgent as the competition in the current marketoriented arena is getting more intense and fiercer. Enterprises have to be more dynamic in terms of collaboration with partners and even competitors. The Service Oriented Architecture is a promising distributed computing paradigm offering solutions that are extendible, flexible and compatible with legacy systems. This paper proposes and investigates the use of SOA in the construction of collaborative services. The paper starts with a short introduction of the Service Oriented Architecture and then gives a description of collaborative services. A generic model of a collaborative service is analysed to identify the basic collaborative functions. A Service Oriented Architecture Framework for collaborative service is presented.
A Method for Specifying Contract Mediated Interactions
Authors: Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Santosh Shrivastava, John Warne
Venue: Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference (2005)

To form and automatically manage partnerships within a virtual organisation, it is necessary to have an electronic representation of the contract governing business relationships that can be used to mediate the rights and obligations that each interacting entity promises to honour. The paper describes a general method of representing business interactions using a widely used modelling language Promela and discusses how to represent permissions, obligations, prohibitions, actors (agents), time constraints, and message type checking; that is, all the basic parameters that compose most typical business contracts. Two levels of contract representations are described: implementation neutral, and implementation specific, that is a refinement of the former to include technical details such as acknowledgements and synchronization messages that form an important part of any implementation.
Finding blocks and other patterns in a random coloring of &Zopf;
Authors: Heinrich Matzinger, Silke W. W. Rolles
Venue: Random Structures Algorithms (2006)

Let &xi; = (&xi;k)k&isin;&Zopf; be i.i.d. with P(&xi;k = 0) = P(&xi;k = 1) = 1&#x002F;2, and let S: = (Sk)k&isin;&Nopf;0 be a symmetric random walk with holding on &Zopf;, independent of &xi;. We consider the scenery &xi; observed along the random walk path S, namely, the process (&chi;k := &xi;Sk)k&isin;&Nopf;0. With high probability, we reconstruct the color and the length of blockn, a block in &xi; of length &ge; n close to the origin, given only the observations (&chi;k)k&isin;[0,2&middot;33n]. We find stopping times that stop the random walker with high probability at particular places of the scenery, namely on blockn and in the interval [-3n,3n]. Moreover, we reconstruct with high probability a piece of &xi; of length of the order 3n0.2 around blockn, given only 3&lfloor;n0.3&rfloor; observations collected by the random walker starting on the boundary of blockn. &copy; 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2006
BIG D attracts record breaking crowd of technical writers & illustrators
Authors: Diana Patterson
Venue: ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation (1978)

This was the Silver Jubilee of the International Technical Communication Conference (ITTC 25), and the largest crowd ever gathered in Dallas, Texas in May for the occasion. Since most registrants only signed up at the last minute, the conference overflowed into not one, but two hotels, with the odd person at still others. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Accessing Government Statistical Information
Authors: Gary Marchionini, Stephanie W. Haas, Junliang Zhang, Jonathan Elsas
Venue: Computer (2005)

The GovStat project aims to make the vast resources of government statistical data more broadly accessible to both agencies and the general population. Some first steps are creating layers of online help to address different browsing needs and developing prototype interfaces for exploring data.
Audio-Video Person Authentication Based on 3D Facial Feature Warping
Authors: Girija Chetty, Michael Wagner
Venue: Proceedings of the Digital Image Computing on Techniques and Applications (2005)

In this paper we propose a novel feature warping technique based on thin-plate-spline (TPS) analysis for 3D audio-video person authentication systems. The TPS warp features model information related to non-rigid variations on speaking faces, such as expression lines, gestures, and wrinkles, enhancing the performance of the system against impostor and spoof attacks. Experiments with multimodal fusion of acoustic and TPS shape features for two different speaking face data corpus, VidTIMIT and AVOZES, allowed equal error rates (EERs) of less than 0.5 % for imposter attacks, less than 1 % for type-1 replay attacks (still photo and pre-recorded audio) and less than 2% for more complex type-2 replay attacks (pre-recorded video or fake CG animated video).
Beating In-Order Stalls with "Flea-Flicker" Two-Pass Pipelining
Authors: Ronald D. Barnes, John W. Sias, Erik M. Nystrom, Sanjay J. Patel, Jose (Nacho) Navarro, Wen-mei W. Hwu
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2006)

While compilers have generally proven adept at planning useful static instruction-level parallelism for in-order microarchitectures, the efficient accommodation of unanticipable latencies, like those of load instructions, remains a vexing problem. Traditional out-of-order execution hides some of these latencies, but repeats scheduling work already done by the compiler and adds additional pipeline overhead. Other techniques, such as prefetching and multithreading, can hide some anticipable, long-latency misses, but not the shorter, more diffuse stalls due to difficult-to-anticipate, first or second-level misses. Our work proposes a microarchitectural technique, two-pass pipelining, whereby the program executes on two in-order back-end pipelines coupled by a queue. The "advance” pipeline often defers instructions dispatching with unready operands rather than stalling. The "backup” pipeline allows concurrent resolution of instructions deferred by the first pipeline allowing overlapping of useful "advanced” execution with miss resolution. An accompanying compiler technique and instruction marking further enhance the handling of miss latencies. Applying our technique to an Itanium 2-like design achieves a speedup of 1.38\times in mcf, the most memory-intensive SPECint2000 benchmark, and an average of 1.12\times across other selected benchmarks, yielding between 32 percent and 67 percent of an idealized out-of-order design's speedup at a much lower design cost and complexity.
Runtime Validation of Behavioural Contracts for Component Software
Authors: Yan Jin, Jun Han
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Quality Software (2005)

In component software, the independence of components is achieved by separating their interfaces from implementations. The interface definition of a component serves as the contract with its neighbouring components regarding the use of its services. In general, such a contract should cover issues beyond interface signatures, such as service functionality, usage and quality. The Interface Definition Languages (IDLs) used by commercial middleware such as CORBA, however, lack mechanisms for capturing such semantic characteristics. In this paper, we introduce a framework and associated techniques that augment commercial IDLs with behavioural contract specifications and validate at runtime component interactions against such contracts. The behavioural contract of a component describes occurrence or sequencing constraints on its interactions with the environment. The validation of such constraints is achieved by intercepting runtime interactions between components and validating them against the finite state automata that semantically represent the constraints. The validation provides a useful tool for testing whether the component services are used properly and whether the component fulfils its behavioural obligations in a distributed system.
Spherical mirror: a new approach to hemispherical dome projection
Authors: Paul Bourke
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia (2005)

Planetariums and smaller personal domes can provide an immersive environment for science education, virtual reality, and entertainment [Shaw 1998]. Digital projection into domes, called "full dome projection" in the industry, can be a technically challenging and expensive exercise, particularly so for installations with modest budgets. An alternative full dome digital projection system is presented based upon a single projector and a spherical mirror to scatter the light onto the dome surface. The approach offers many advantages over the fisheye lens alternatives, results in a similar quality result, but at a fraction of the cost.
Multipurpose Prototypes for Assessing User Interfaces in Pervasive Computing Systems
Authors: Bonnie E. John, Dario D. Salvucci
Venue: IEEE Pervasive Computing (2005)

Prototypes' different purposes give them different requirements. Purposes for UI prototypes in pervasive computing systems development include communicating design ideas to diverse team members, supporting formative user tests, and providing summative evaluations of skilled user performance. CogTool is a system for rapidly building HTML storyboards as prototypes to fulfill all three purposes. It automatically produces quantitative predictions of skilled user performance time through demonstration, making human performance modeling more accessible to system designers.This article is part of a special issue on rapid prototyping.
Low-Cost Static Performance Prediction of Parallel Stochastic Task Compositions
Authors: Hasyim Gautama Arjan J. C. van Gemund
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2006)

Current analytic solutions to the execution time distribution of a parallel composition of tasks having stochastic execution times are computationally complex, except for a limited number of distributions. In this paper, we present an analytical solution based on approximating execution time distributions in terms of the first four statistical moments. This low-cost approach allows the parallel execution time distribution to be approximated at ultra-low solution complexity for a wide range of execution time distributions. The accuracy of our method is experimentally evaluated for synthetic distributions as well as for task execution time distributions found in real parallel programs and kernels (NAS-EP, SSSP, APSP, Splash2-Barnes, PSRS, and WATOR). Our experiments show that the prediction error of the mean value of the parallel execution time for N{\hbox{-}}{\rm{ary}} parallel composition is in the order of percents, provided the task execution time distributions are sufficiently independent and unimodal.
Semantic-Chunks a middleware for ubiquitous cooperative work
Authors: Luís Veiga, Paulo Ferreira
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Reflective and adaptive middleware systems (2005)

To be productive, cooperative work has to be supported efficiently so that users do achieve their goals. This requires solving the well known fundamental problem of replicas consistency.Update-based solutions are easy to use transparently with commercial applications, but consider every modification in a document as a new document update, thus fostering conflicts and hindering concurrency. Operational-based solutions promise increased concurrency, by interleaving compatible modifications from different users. They require central reconciliation algorithms, and cannot be applied to commercial applications without further instrumentation.We propose the notion of a semantic chunk, i.e., a semantically annotated document region with application relevance, that is promoted to a full-right entity w.r.t. consistency information and enforcement. This unit, being smaller than a file and semantically richer, allows greater concurrency and better update merging with less aborts than current solutions.
Application Deployment over Heterogeneous Grids using Distributed Ant
Authors: Wojtek Goscinski, David Abramson
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (2005)

The construction of large scale e-Science grid experiments presents a challenge to e-Scientists because of the inherent difficulty of deploying applications over large scale heterogeneous grids. In spite of this, user-oriented application deployment has remained unsupported in grid middleware. This lack of support for application deployment is strongly detrimental to the usability, evolution, uptake and continual development of the grid. This paper presents our motivation, design and implementation of the Distributed Ant user-oriented application deployment system, including recent extensions to support application deployment over heterogeneous grids. We also present a significant Distributed Ant deployment case study, demonstrating how a user-oriented application deployment system enables e-Science experiments.
Internet Wiretapping Decision Headed for the Courts
Authors: Greg Goth
Venue: IEEE Internet Computing (2006)

The FCC faces a legal challenge over its decision to compel broadband and voice-over-IP service providers to comply with wiretapping requests under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
Text Detection in Images Based on Unsupervised Classification of Edge-based Features
Authors: Chunmei Liu, Chunheng Wang, Ruwei Dai
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (2005)

In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for detecting texts in images and video frames. It is performed by three steps: edge detection, text candidate detection and text refinement detection. Firstly, it applies edge detection to get four edge maps in horizontal, vertical, up-right, and up-left direction. Secondly, the feature is extracted from four edge maps to represent the texture property of text. Then k-means algorithm is applied to detect the initial text candidates. Finally, the text areas are identified by the empirical rules analysis and refined through project profile analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach could efficiently be used as an automatic text detection system, which is robust for font-size, font-color, background complexity and language.
An EAWA Filter for Denoising of Filtering of Fluorescein Angiogram Sequences
Authors: Xiaoxin Guo, Zhiwen Xu, Yinan Lu, Yunjie Pang
Venue: Proceedings of the The Fifth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (2005)

In this paper, a novel filter model called extended adaptive weighted averaging (EAWA) filter model is proposed, by which some particular filters can be designed via selecting an appropriate pixel of interest (POI) and defining a weight distribution function for the filter according to some speci- fied requirements. Based on the novel model, a fluoresceinangiogram- oriented filter, high-intensity preserving (HIP) filter is introduced to solve the problems of high-intensity preservation when filtering noise. The results of the experiments show that the HIP filter has the features of frameaveraging, which can achieve noise suppression efficiently, and the features of high-intensity preservation, which can keep the intensities of bright pixels from degrading via distributing the weights adaptively according to the intensity of each pixel.
A Possibility Test on a Discrimination System for Identification of Cultivated Products by Trace ElementsAnalysis
Authors: Nobuyoshi Sato, Minoru Uehara, Jin Tamaoka
Venue: Proceedings of the The Fifth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (2005)

In Japan, places where agricultural products are cultivated or fishery products produced have recently begun to make their locality into a brand. To take advantage of this brand creation, some other producing districts camouflage their agricultural or fishery products to be sold as the branded district's goods with its attendant higher brand values; thus fraudulently raising their own prices. Therefore, we proposed a system that identifies the various places of cultivation of green groceries by analyzing very small quantities of trace elements in the cultivated products and then storing this information in a database. In this paper, we describe the outline and design of a system that discriminates the place of cultivation. We show that discrimination is possible by correlation analysis on the results of our trace elements analysis. Also, we will describe about computation time of correlation coefficient with simulated data. And, we prove that the proposing system is suitable for practical use if the number of samples is largely increased, when granularity of the producing districts became smaller.
An Analysis of Feature-based and State-based Representations for Module-Based Learning in Mobile Robots
Authors: Esther L. Colombini, Carlos H. C. Ribeiro
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (2005)

The information available to robots in real tasks is widely distributed both in time and space, requiring the agent to search for relevant information. In this work, we implement a solution that uses qualitative and quantitative knowledge to turn robot tasks able to be treated by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. The steps of this procedure include: 1) to decompose the overall task into smaller ones, using abstraction and macrooperators, thus achieving a discrete action space; 2) to use observation functions of the environment  here called features - to achieve both time and state space discretisation; 3) to use quantitative knowledge to design controllers that are able to solve the subtasks; 4) to learn the coordination of these behaviours using RL, more specifically Q-learning. The approach was verified on an increasingly complex set of robot tasks using a Khepera robot simulator. Two approaches for space discretisation were used, one based on features and the other on states. The learned policies over these two models were compared to a predefined hand-crafted one. It was found that the learned policy over the state-based discretisation leads quickly to good results, although it can not be applied to complex tasks, where the state space representation becomes computationally unfeasible.
Partition-based filters for image restoration
Authors: Russell C. Hardie
Venue:  (2005)

Wiener filters are commonly used for image restoration. They are mean square based optimization filters, and are effective when the signal and noise are jointly Gaussian and stationary. The previously proposed partition-based weighted sum (PWS) filters combine vector quantization (VQ) and linear finite impulse response (FIR) Wiener filtering concepts. By partitioning the observation space and applying a tuned Wiener filter to each partition, the PWS filter is spatially adaptive and has been shown to perform well in noise reduction applications. In this dissertation, subspace PWS (SPWS) filters are proposed, and their efficacy in image deconvolution and noise reduction applications is evaluated. In the SPWS filter, the observation vectors are projected into a subspace using principal component analysis (PCA), or other methods, prior to partitioning. This subspace projection can dramatically reduce the computational burden associated with partitioning, especially for large window sizes. In some cases, performance is also enhanced due to improved partitioning. The Soft-PWS filters use information from all of the partition filters to process each observation vector. Soft-PWS filters have been shown to be capable of outperforming PWS filters in noise reduction applications. To date, however, the optimization of the Soft-PWS filters has received only limited attention. Prior work has focused on a stochastic-gradient based method that requires a large number of iterations, making it computationally prohibitive in many applications. Furthermore, its convergence is highly sensitive to the step size and no reliable method of determining a suitable step size has been presented. In this dissertation, a novel radial basis function interpretation of the Soft-PWS filters is described, and an efficient optimization procedure that we believe makes the Soft-PWS filters far more practical to implement is presented. To demonstrate the efficacy of the Soft-PWS filters with the new optimization procedure, we apply the filters to the problem of noise reduction. Simulation results show that, for the data used here, the Soft-PWS filter outperforms the standard PWS filter and Wiener filter under the mean squared error criterion.