ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A P2P strategy for QoS discovery and SLA negotiation in Grid environment
Authors: Antonella Di Stefano, Giovanni Morana, Daniele Zito
Venue: Future Generation Computer Systems (2009)

In recent years, Grid systems and Peer to Peer networks are the most commonly-used solutions to achieve the same goal: the sharing of resources and services in heterogeneous, dynamic, distributed environments. Many studies have proposed hybrid approaches that try to conjugate the advantages of the two models. This paper proposes an architecture that integrates the P2P interaction model in Grid environments, so as to build an open cooperative model wherein Grid entities are composed in a decentralized way. In particular, this paper focuses on a QoS aware discovery algorithm for P2P Grid systems, analyzing protocol and explaining techniques used to improve its performance.
Reinforcement learning for robot soccer
Authors: Martin Riedmiller, Thomas Gabel, Roland Hafner, Sascha Lange
Venue: Autonomous Robots (2009)

Batch reinforcement learning methods provide a powerful framework for learning efficiently and effectively in autonomous robots. The paper reviews some recent work of the authors aiming at the successful application of reinforcement learning in a challenging and complex domain. It discusses several variants of the general batch learning framework, particularly tailored to the use of multilayer perceptrons to approximate value functions over continuous state spaces. The batch learning framework is successfully used to learn crucial skills in our soccer-playing robots participating in the RoboCup competitions. This is demonstrated on three different case studies.
Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages
Authors: S. Nirenburg, S. Nirenburg
Venue:  (2009)

Technologies enabling computers to process specific languages facilitate economic and political progress of societies where these languages are spoken. Development of methods and systems for language processing is therefore a worthy goal for national governments as well as for business entities and scientific and educational institutions in every country in the world. As work on systems and resources for the 'lower-density' languages becomes more widespread, an important question is how to leverage the results and experience accumulated by the field of computational linguistics for the major languages in the development of resources and systems for lower-density languages. This issue has been at the core of the NATO Advanced Studies Institute on language technologies for middle- and low-density languages held in Georgia in October 2007. This publication is a collection - of publication-oriented versions - of the lectures presented there and is a useful source of knowledge about many core facets of modern computational-linguistic work. By the same token, it can serve as a reference source for people interested in learning about strategies that are best suited for developing computational-linguistic capabilities for lesser-studied languages - either 'from scratch' or using components developed for other languages. The book should also be quite useful in teaching practical system- and resource-building topics in computational linguistics.
Constraint-Based Validation of Adaptive e-Learning Courseware
Authors: Mark Melia, Claus Pahl
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (2009)

Personalised e-learning allows the course creator to create courseware that dynamically adapts to the needs of individual learners or learner groupings. This dynamic nature of adaptive courseware makes it difficult to evaluate what the delivery time courseware will be for the learner. The course creator may attempt to validate adaptive courseware through dummy runs, but cannot eliminate the risk of pedagogical problems due to adaptive courseware's inherent variability. Courseware validation checks that adaptive courseware conforms to a set of pedagogical and non-pedagogical requirements. Validation of adaptive courseware limits the risk of pedagogical problems at delivery time. In this paper, we present our approach to adaptive courseware validation using the Courseware Authoring Validation Information Architecture (CAVIAr). We outline how CAVIAr captures adaptive courseware authoring concerns and validates courseware using a constraint-based approach. We also describe how CAVIAr can be integrated with the state of the art in adaptive e-learning and evaluate our validation approach.
Improving option price forecasts with neural networks and support vector regressions
Authors: Xun Liang, Haisheng Zhang, Jianguo Xiao, Ying Chen
Venue: Neurocomputing (2009)

Options are important financial derivatives that allow investors to control their investment risks in the securities market. Determining the theoretical price for an option, or option pricing, is regarded as one of the most important issues in financial research; a number of parametric and nonparametric option pricing approaches have been presented. While the objective of option pricing is to find the current fair price, for decision making, in contrast, the forecasting activity has to accurately predict the future option price without advance knowledge of the underlying asset price. In this paper, a simple and effective nonparametric method of forecasting option prices based on neural networks (NNs) and support vector regressions (SVRs) is presented. We first modified the improved conventional option pricing methods, allowing them to forecast the option prices. Second, we employed the NNs and SVRs to further decrease the forecasting errors of the parametric methods. Since the conventional methods mimic the trends of movement of the real option prices, using these methods in a first stage allows the NNs and SVRs to concentrate their power in nonlinear curve approximation to further reduce the forecasting errors in a second stage. Finally, extensive experimental studies with data from the Hong Kong option market demonstrated the ability of NNs and SVRs to improve forecast accuracy.
Change Management in Interorganizational Systems for the Public
Authors: Juliana Sutanto, Atreyi Kankanhalli, Junyun Tay, K. Raman, Bernard Tan
Venue: Journal of Management Information Systems (2008)

It is recognized that change management is necessary for information technology implementation success. While there are a growing number of interorganizational systems (IOS) designed for the public, there is little study of and lack of clear guidelines on managing change related to their implementation. This research explores the phenomenon through the case study of a country-wide farecard system implemented in Singapore's public transportation system that involved several organizations and the public. Through the case analysis, we identified critical success factors (CSFs) for change management in IOS for the public and interrelated them using a causal loop diagram (CLD). These factors included refinements of existing CSFs identified from the literature as well as new CSFs from our case study. Our case analysis showed that communication through senior management and cooperation of affected organizations in the system implementation was able to overcome resistance to change in these organizations. We also found that while comprehensive publicity could initiate change in the public, a critical mass had to be built up for managing public change by coopting public opinion leaders as well. By interrelating CSFs identified in the case via a CLD, this study provides a preliminary theoretical framework for studying change management in IOS for the public and aims to guide practitioners in implementing such systems.
Bits, Bytes, and Balance Sheets: The New Economic Rules of Engagement in a Wireless World
Authors: Walter B. Wriston
Venue:  (2007)

This follow-up to the author's "Twilight of Sovereignty" explores the consequences of the changes produced by the new economy of the Internet, defining the new rules and examining some of the promising initiatives under way to create a system of measuring and valuing assets that reflects our new economic realities. Wriston shows that, in today's economy, intellectual capital is more important than physical capital--and, in fact, that the very source of wealth and how it is created has changed--and that businesses must adapt to this change or perish. And, he argues, it is not more laws that should form the basis for regulating the new economy but the personal ethics of good people. 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
Interacting with (semi-) automatically extracted context of digital objects
Authors: Rudolf Mayer, Robert Neumayer, Andreas Rauber
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Context, Information and Ontologies (2009)

The context in which digital objects are created, modified, or used is essential for the interpretation of information entities, for retrieval settings, for establishing their authenticity, as well as ensuring appropriate use. Therefore, determining this context of creation and use of digital objects is an essential task for many areas and applications, from (huge) digital library settings to end-user applications such as search. However, context is notoriously difficult and laboursome to establish and document, and when it has to be entered and maintained manually by the creator of the digital objects, it is often missing or partially incomplete or incorrect. Thus, this paper proposes an approach to (semi-) automatically determine the context of creation and usage of digital objects. Various facets of context along different dimensions are automatically detected, and are combined in pivot-table inspired views, at multiple levels of granularity, which then allow the extraction of the most appropriate connections to other digital objects. Finally, this contact can be used for a range of applications, such as search and navigation.
Local projection methods on layer-adapted meshes for higher order discretisations of convection--diffusion problems
Authors: Gunar Matthies
Venue: Applied Numerical Mathematics (2009)

We consider singularly perturbed convection-diffusion problems in the unit square where the solutions show the typical exponential layers. Layer-adapted meshes (Shishkin and Bakhvalov-Shishkin meshes) and the local projection method are used to stabilise the discretised problem. Using enriched Q"r-elements on the coarse part of the mesh and standard Q"r-elements on the remaining parts of the mesh, we show that the difference between the solution of the stabilised discrete problem and a special interpolant of the solution of the continuous problem convergences @e-uniformly with order O(N^-^(^r^+^1^/^2^)) on Bakhvalov-Shishkin meshes and with order O(N^-^(^r^+^1^/^2^)+N^-^(^r^+^1^)ln^r^+^3^/^2N) on Shishkin meshes. Furthermore, an @e-uniform convergence in the @e-weighted H^1-norm with order O((N^-^1lnN)^-^r) on Shishkin meshes and with order O(N^-^r) on Bakhvalov-Shishkin meshes will be proved. Numerical results which support the theory will be presented.
Learning Autodesk Inventor 2008: The 2D to 3D Transition Handbook, 1st edition
Authors: Ralph Grabowski
Venue:  (2007)

Welcome to 3D modeling as it should be! As an AutoCAD user, you are about to enter a brand-new CAD experience, one where you no longer worry about text sizes, linetype scales, paper space, and plot styles. Instead, you sketch with Inventor, then extrude, assemble-and your 3D model is done! As technical editor Bill Fane puts it, "Inventor lets us get back to 'napkin CAD'." Learning Autodesk Inventor 2008: The 2D to 3D Transition Handbook examines and clearly explains the similarities and differences between AutoCAD and Inventor. The goal is to help the hesitant AutoCAD user jump into Inventor while reassuring users that their valuable collection of AutoCAD drawings can be reused - and even combined - in Inventor and freeing them to go beyond the drawing-with-lines-and-arcs orientation of AutoCAD.
The effectiveness of computer supported collaborative learning on helping tasks in a mathematics course
Authors: Harold O'Neil
Venue:  (2008)

Researchers (Lou, 2004; Lou, Abrami, d'Apollonia, 2001; Susman, 1998) have conducted meta-analyses to compare collaborative and individual learning when working with computers. Their consistent findings show that students working in groups outperform students working with computers individually. However, Webb, Ing, Kersting and Nemer (2006) indicate that learning benefits are promoted in the group only when students are able to seek and give elaborated help effectively. This study examined the effectiveness of computer supported collaborative learning on mathematic problem solving in a blended distance learning course. In this study, the instruction consisted of lectures and face-to-face collaboration, and online homework. The purpose of the study was to determine whether helping strategies instruction used in a designed collaborative learning structure would increase academic achievement in the blended distance learning course compared to the individual help group. This study utilized 2x2 ANOVA with a repeated measures design. The first factor was group (collaborative help group versus individual help group), and the second factor was occasion (pre-test-post-test). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups&mdash;the collaborative help group (n=42) and the individual help group (n=21). It was hypothesized that the collaborative help group would perform better in content understanding, domain-specific problem solving strategies, domain-independent problem solving strategies (elaboration, adaptive help-seeking strategies and maladaptive help-seeking strategies), and self-regulation (test anxiety, effort, academic efficacy, and control strategies) than would the individual help group. In addition, it was hypothesized that the participants in the collaborative help group would have better teamwork skills (cognitive teamwork scale and interpersonal teamwork scale). The results showed that the collaborative help group significantly outperformed the individual help group on content understanding. And the collaborative help group requested more helps and asked more questions than did the individual help group. However, the participants in the collaborative help group did not perform any better than those in the individual help group on teamwork skills, problem strategies, and self regulation strategies posttests. This study provided evidence for integrating a problem solving model with collaborative learning components. Educators can use helping strategies training as an instructional strategy to enhance their current collaborative learning design.
Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds
Authors: P.-A. Absil, R. Mahony, R. Sepulchre
Venue:  (2007)

Many problems in the sciences and engineering can be rephrased as optimization problems on matrix search spaces endowed with a so-called manifold structure. This book shows how to exploit the special structure of such problems to develop efficient numerical algorithms. It places careful emphasis on both the numerical formulation of the algorithm and its differential geometric abstraction--illustrating how good algorithms draw equally from the insights of differential geometry, optimization, and numerical analysis. Two more theoretical chapters provide readers with the background in differential geometry necessary to algorithmic development. In the other chapters, several well-known optimization methods such as steepest descent and conjugate gradients are generalized to abstract manifolds. The book provides a generic development of each of these methods, building upon the material of the geometric chapters. It then guides readers through the calculations that turn these geometrically formulated methods into concrete numerical algorithms. The state-of-the-art algorithms given as examples are competitive with the best existing algorithms for a selection of eigenspace problems in numerical linear algebra. Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds offers techniques with broad applications in linear algebra, signal processing, data mining, computer vision, and statistical analysis. It can serve as a graduate-level textbook and will be of interest to applied mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.
Characterizing pattern preserving clustering
Authors: Hui Xiong, Michael Steinbach, Arifin Ruslim, Vipin Kumar
Venue: Knowledge and Information Systems (2009)

This paper describes a new approach for clustering&#x2014;pattern preserving clustering&#x2014;which produces more easily interpretable and usable clusters. This approach is motivated by the following observation: while there are usually strong patterns in the data&#x2014;patterns that may be key for the analysis and description of the data&#x2014;these patterns are often split among different clusters by current clustering approaches. This is, perhaps, not surprising, since clustering algorithms have no built-in knowledge of these patterns and may often have goals that are in conflict with preserving patterns, e.g., minimize the distance of points to their nearest cluster centroids. In this paper, our focus is to characterize (1) the benefits of pattern preserving clustering and (2) the most effective way of performing pattern preserving clustering. To that end, we propose and evaluate two clustering algorithms, HIerarchical Clustering with pAttern Preservation (HICAP) and bisecting K-means Clustering with pAttern Preservation (K-CAP). Experimental results on document data show that HICAP can produce overlapping clusters that preserve useful patterns, but has relatively worse clustering performance than bisecting K-means with respect to the clustering evaluation criterion of entropy. By contrast, in terms of entropy, K-CAP can perform substantially better than the bisecting K-means algorithm when data sets contain clusters of widely different sizes&#x2014;a common situation in the real-world. Most importantly, we also illustrate how patterns, if preserved, can aid cluster interpretation.
Geometric Mesh Denoising via Multivariate Kernel Diffusion
Authors: Khaled Tarmissi, A. Hamza
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Vision/Computer Graphics CollaborationTechniques (2009)

We present a 3D mesh denoising method based on kernel density estimation. The proposed approach is able to reduce the oversmoothing effect and effectively remove undesirable noise while preserving prominent geometric features of a 3D mesh such as curved surface regions, sharp edges, and fine details. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to existing mesh denoising techniques.
Products of Mealy-type fuzzy finite state machines
Authors: Jun Liu, Zhi-wen Mo, Dong Qiu, Yang Wang
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2009)

We introduce seven ways of constructing products for Mealy-type fuzzy finite state machines as well as the concept of covering. The properties of transition functions and output functions are discussed. Furthermore, we investigate the covering properties and mutual relationship with regard to these products. We also prove that the covering relationship holds in the product of factor machines.
Approximating Extended Answer Sets
Authors: Davy Van Nieuwenborgh Stijn Heymans, Dirk Vermeir
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

We present an approximation theory for the extended answer set semantics, using the concept of an approximation constraint. Intuitively, an approximation constraint, while satisfied by a “perfect” solution, may be left unsatisfied in an approximate extended answer set. Approximations improve as the number of unsatisfied constraints decreases. We show how the framework can also capture the classical answer set semantics, thus providing an approximative version of the latter.
Watermark location via back-lighting and recto removal
Authors: Roger D. Boyle, Hazem Hiary
Venue: International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (2009)

We consider the problem of locating a watermark in pages of archaic documents that have been both scanned and back-lit: the problem is of interest to codicologists in identifying and tracking paper materials. Commonly, documents of interest are worn or damaged, and all information is victim to very unfavourable signal-to-noise ratios&#x2014;this is especially true of &#x2018;hidden&#x2019; data such as watermarks and chain lines. We present an approach to recto removal, followed by highlighting of such &#x2018;hidden&#x2019; data. The result is still of very low signal quality, and we also present a statistical approach to locate watermarks from a known lexicon of fragments. Results are presented from a comprehensively scanned nineteenth century copy of the Qur&#x2019;&#x0101;n. The approach has lent itself to immediate exploitation in improving known watermarks, and distinguishing between twin copies.
Characterization of TiOxNy nanoparticles embedded in HfOxNy as charge trapping nodes for nonvolatile memory device applications
Authors: Chien-Wei Liu, Chin-Lung Cheng, Kuei-Shu Chang-Liao, Jin-Tsong Jeng, Bau-Tong Dai, Chen-Pang Tsai
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2009)

Silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon devices with nanoparticles (NPs) as charge trapping nodes (CTNs) are important to provide enhanced performance for nonvolatile memory devices. To study these topics, the TiO"xN"y metal oxide NPs embedded in the HfO"xN"y high-k dielectric as CTNs of the nonvolatile memory devices were investigated via the thermal synthesis using Ti thin-film oxidized in the mixed O"2/N"2 ambient. Well-isolated TiO"xN"y NPs with a diameter of 5-20nm, a surface density of ~3x10^1^1cm^-^2, and a charge trap density of around 2.33x10^1^2cm^-^2 were demonstrated. The writing characteristic measurements illustrate that the memory effect is mainly due to the hole trapping.
Online and onboard evolution of robotic behavior using finite state machines
Authors: Lukas König, Sanaz Mostaghim, Hartmut Schmeck
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

In this paper, a control system representation based on finite state machines is utilized to build an evolutionary robotic framework where evolution is performed in a swarm of simple robots in an online and onboard manner. Experiments in simulation show that the framework is capable of robustly evolving basic benchmark behaviors like collision avoidance.
Evolution of Intracellular Ca2 + Waves from about 10,000 RyR Clusters: Towards Solving a Computationally Daunting Task
Authors: Pan Li, Wenjie Wei, Xing Cai, Christian Soeller, Mark B. Cannell, Arun V. Holden
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (2009)

Detailed knowledge of spatial-temporal behaviours of intracellular calcium dynamics is very important in understanding excitation-contraction coupling of cardiac myocytes under both normal and pathological conditions, such as initiation and propagation of spontaneous calcium waves. A full cell simulation integrating about 10,000 Ca2 + release units (CRUs) in a typical cardiac myocyte is considered a multi-scale, computationally demanding problem. In this paper, we imported an experimentally obtained spatial distribution of Ryanodine Receptor (RyR) clusters into a spatially extended, stochastic model of intracellular Ca2 + dynamics, to investigate the role of the structural bifurcation of Z-disks on the initiation and propagation of intracellular Ca2 + waves from spatially symmetric Ca2 + sparks. Besides, we also proposed a simple parallelization strategy to increase computational speed for this chanllenging problem in cardiac modelling.