ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Nondeterministic Discretization of Weights Improves Accuracy of Neural Networks
Authors: Marcin Wojnarski
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th European conference on Machine Learning (2007)

The paper investigates modification of backpropagation algorithm, consisting of discretization of neural network weights after each training cycle. This modification, aimed at overfitting reduction, restricts the set of possible values of weights to a discrete subset of real numbers, leading to much better generalization abilities of the network. This, in turn, leads to higher accuracy and a decrease in error rate by over 50% in extreme cases (when overfitting is high).Discretization is performed nondeterministically, so as to keep expected value of discretized weight equal to original value. In this way, global behavior of original algorithm is preserved. The presented method of discretization is general and may be applied to other machine-learning algorithms. It is also an example of how an algorithm for continuous optimization can be successfully applied to optimization over discrete spaces. The method was evaluated experimentally in WEKA environment using two real-world data sets from UCI repository.
Policy Security Protecting for Negotiating Trust
Authors: Dong Li, Linpeng Huan
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Third International IEEE Conference on Signal-Image Technologies and Internet-Based System (2007)

The dynamic and cross-organizational aspects of Grid introduce challenging management and policy issues for controlling access to the resources. Automated trust negotiation is an approach which establishes trust between strangers through the bilateral, iterative disclosure of digital credentials. Sensitive credentials are protected by access control policies which may also be communicated to the other party. In this paper, we propose a policy security protecting solution as a mechanism to help prevent unauthorized information inferences during trust negotiation. Compared to the existing safety model, our policy security protecting solution focuses on the actual information gain during trust negotiation instead of the exchanged messages. Thus, it directly reflects the essence of safety in sensitive information protection. Based on the proposed solution, We show that policy security protecting solution achieve the same protection of sensitive information as existing solutions without imposing additional complications to the interaction between negotiation participants or restricting users’ autonomy in defining their own policies.
On the Locality of Extracting a 2-Manifold in
Authors: Daniel Dumitriu, Stefan Funke, Martin Kutz, Nikola Milosavljević
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th Scandinavian workshop on Algorithm Theory (2008)

Algorithms for reconstructing a 2-manifold from a point sample in based on Voronoi-filtering like CRUST [1] or CoCone [2] still require --- after identifying a set of candidate triangles --- a so-called manifold extraction step which identifies a subset of the candidate triangles to form the final reconstruction surface. Non-locality of the latter step is caused by so-called slivers --- configurations of four almost cocircular points having an empty circumsphere with center close to the manifold surface.We prove that under a certain mild condition --- local uniformity --- which typically holds in practice but can also be enforced theoretically, one can compute a reconstruction using an algorithm whose decisions about the adjacencies of a point only depend on nearby points.While the theoretical proof requires an extremely high sampling density, our prototype implementation, described in a companion paper [3], preforms well on typical sample sets. Due to its local mode of computation, it might be particularly suited for parallel computing or external memory scenarios.
Advanced auditory menus: design and evaluation of auditory scroll bars
Authors: Pavani Yalla, Bruce N. Walker
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (2008)

Auditory menus have the potential to make devices that use visual menus accessible to a wide range of users. Visually impaired users could especially benefit from the auditory feedback received during menu navigation. However, auditory menus are a relatively new concept, and there are very few guidelines that describe how to design them. This paper details how visual menu concepts may be applied to auditory menus in order to help develop design guidelines. Specifically, this set of studies examined possible ways of designing an auditory scrollbar for an auditory menu. The following different auditory scrollbar designs were evaluated: single-tone, double-tone, alphabetical grouping, and proportional grouping. Three different evaluations were conducted to determine the best design. The first two evaluations were conducted with sighted users, and the last evaluation was conducted with visually impaired users. The results suggest that pitch polarity does not matter, and proportional grouping is the best of the auditory scrollbar designs evaluated here.
An experimental assessment of semantic apprehension of graphical linguistics
Authors: Michael Workman
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2008)

Visual displays of information (such as dashboards) have become very sophisticated in rendering world semantics but neglect display semantics, leading to what is commonly called information overload. Underlying storage and retrieval research has been utilizing semantic and cognitive theory to drive the current implementations of ontology markup using the resource description framework (RDF) and Web ontology language (OWL) for over a decade. Yet despite these semantically rich underlying description logics, and despite the very large and mature stream of cognitive and neuroscience theory literature on visual perception and attention, memory, and linguistics, this is one aspect within the area of information visualization and human factors research where empirically tested semantic theory has not yet caught up, and begs for theory-driven research into display semantics using what might be termed ''graphical linguistics.'' We conducted an experiment to assess the cognitive effort of interpreting domain general knowledge using the same information represented in three forms, and found that graphical linguistics reduce cognitive effort for a specific type of task involving high-density time-sensitive information typically found in situation control rooms.
iTV as a Platform for Rich Multimedia Reminders for People with Dementia
Authors: Alex Carmichael, Mark Rice, Stephen Lindsay, Patrick Olivier
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th European conference on Changing Television Environments (2008)

This paper gives an overview of a reminder system, based on digital television technology, which can present rich multi-media prompting messages in order to help maintain a regular daily schedule for people with mild to moderate dementia. The ongoing development of this application has the aim of supporting busy carers by making it easy to create, adapt and maintain a schedule of reminders to help keep a regular daily routine, relieving some of the burden of care and freeing more time for better human contact and interaction.
Study on the Modern Books Logistics Management Information Platform Based on the Workflow
Authors: ChangQing Cai, Jia Mao, Wei Jun Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposiums on Information Processing (2008)

As a part of the modern logistics industry, the constructing of modern books logistics information system is the key point of enhancing our country’s current books publication economical benefit. To establish such a system, we should not only set up modern logistics management in abstractors, but also need to regulate and unify the relative Books Logistics standard systematically, promote the Third Party Logistics. The most important is to set up books logistics information platform. We established a Books Logistics information platform structural model according to the basic principle of workflows and provide the theoretic for our country to realize the Books Logistics management information platform.
ODILIA - A Mobility Concept for the Visually Impaired
Authors: Bernhard Mayerhofer, Bettina Pressl, Manfred Wieser
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (2008)

A navigation system for visually impaired people has to take into account the special requirements of these users. Within this group, there is also need for a customizable man-machine interface tailored to the individual. It has to be suitable for people depending on orientation by the sense of hearing or on tactile orientation, always avoiding disturbance of the user's remaining senses. On the other side, the hardware for data input and on-trip control should not exceed a certain size and weight. To be accepted for daily use, the overall system must not be stigmatizing the user. Stigmatizing means, that visually impaired users often do not want to be apparently distinguishable from the average pedestrian by wearing noticeable equipment. Another point is reliability and accuracy of the system which are essential features, because a blind person can be reliant on the system when entering an unknown area. The navigation system developed in ODILIA should provide accuracy, reliability of routing and guidance and the possibility to give the user an impression of the surrounding area.
Buffer Tuning Mechanism for Stripped Transport Layer Connections Using PID Controller on Multi-homed Mobile Host
Authors: Faraz Idris Khan, Eui Nam Huh
Venue: Proceeding sof the international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, Part I (2008)

Recent advancements in wireless networks have enabled a network as a whole in motion. In such cases a vehicle will be equipped with a mobile router equipped with heterogeneous interface acting as a gateway, providing connectivity to the network interior to the vehicle. A cache server application installed on a gateway has the capability to utilize all the heterogeneous interfaces in future as transport layer data stripping is possible [2]. Traditionally, high performance data transfer requires tuning of multiple TCP sockets, at sender's end, sharing single high bandwidth delay product (BDP) path. Moreover, traditional techniques like ATBT, which balance memory and fulfill network demand, are designed for wired infrastructure assuming single flow on a single socket. Hence, in this paper we propose a buffer tuning technique at sender's end designed to ensure high performance data transfer by striping data at transport layer across heterogeneous wireless paths. The proposed mechanism has the capability to become a resource management system for transport layer connections running on multi-homed mobile host supporting features for wireless link i.e. mobility, bandwidth fluctuations, link level losses. We have shown that our proposed mechanism performs better than ATBT, in efficiently utilizing memory and achieving aggregate throughput.
Combining Audio and Video by Dominance in Bimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Lixing Huang, Le Xin, Liyue Zhao, Jianhua Tao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (2007)

We propose a novel bimodal emotion recognition approach by using the boosting-based framework, in which we can automatically determine the adaptive weights for audio and visual features. In this way, we balance the dominances of audio and visual features dynamically in feature-level to obtain better performance.
Generating Dialogues for Virtual Agents Using Nested Textual Coherence Relations
Authors: Hugo Hernault, Paul Piwek, Helmut Prendinger, Mitsuru Ishizuka
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (2008)

This paper describes recent advances on the Text2Dialogue system we are currently developing. Our system enables automatic transformation of monological text into a dialogue. The dialogue is then "acted out" by virtual agents, using synthetic speech and gestures. In this paper, we focus on the monologue-to-dialogue transformation, and describe how it uses textual coherence relations to map text segments to query---answer pairs between an expert and a layman agent. By creating mapping rules for a few well-selected relations, we can produce coherent dialogues with proper assignment of turns for the speakers in a majority of cases.
How Did Computing Go Global? The Need for an Answer and a Research Agenda
Authors: James W. Cortada
Venue: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2004)

The answers to how computing went global have ramifications for historians and society far beyond mere documentation. By understanding the complexities of how IT computing technology spread around the globe, we may gain insight into future technologies and be able to help shape their deployment to a larger extent, which may ultimately better benefit humankind, while learning more about how technologies have spread in the past.
Animated Graphical User Interface Generator Framework for Input-Output Place-Transition Petri Net Models
Authors: João Lourenco, Luís Gomes
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets (2008)

The paper presents a development framework allowing the automatic generation of animated graphical user interface associated with specific embedded system controllers, and allowing the association of the characteristics of its behavioral model with specific characteristics of the graphical user interface through a set of dedicated rules. The behavioral model of the system is specified by means of an IOPT (Input-Output Place-Transition) Petri net model, which is represented using a PNML (Petri Net Markup Language) notation. Two main tools are described: the "Animator", and the "Synoptic". The first one is the development environment and allows the definition of the graphical characteristics of the synoptic, and their association with dynamic and static characteristics of the Petri net model (the "Animator"); this tool also supports hierarchical structuring of the synoptic and definition of platform dependent code to link the physical world to the Petri net model signals and events. The second one is responsible for the execution part including embedded control and on-line animation of the graphical user interface (the "Synoptic"). Current main usage of the tool is to support teaching of Petri nets and their application to automation and embedded systems design; yet, application as a SCADA (Supervisory, Control, and Data Acquisition) system is envisaged. The application of the tools to a Petri net model of a parking lot controller is briefly presented.
Stable Output Feedback in Reservoir Computing Using Ridge Regression
Authors: Francis Wyffels, Benjamin Schrauwen, Dirk Stroobandt
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Part I (2008)

An important property of Reservoir Computing, and signal processing techniques in general, is generalization and noise robustness. In trajectory generation tasks, we don't want that a small deviation leads to an instability. For forecasting and system identification we want to avoid over-fitting. In prior work on Reservoir Computing, the addition of noise to the dynamic reservoir trajectory is generally used. In this work, we show that high-performing reservoirs can be trained using only the commonly used ridge regression. We experimentally validate these claims on two very different tasks: long-term, robust trajectory generation and system identification of a heating tank with variable dead-time.
Unsupervised relation learning for event-focused question-answering and domain modelling
Authors: Kathleen R. Mckeown
Venue:  (2008)

In this thesis, we investigate the problem of identifying, within a text, relations that capture information important for event-focused document collections. The presented solutions work with events of various granularity and we show how to use these relations to improve the performance of a number of natural language processing applications. For a set of related event-focused documents, we introduce a notion of a shallow semantic network based on the relations between the important elements discovered in these documents. This shallow semantic network captures the most important relations among the objects, people, and other elements that are involved in the events described in the input document collection. We present experimental evidence that such a relation-based representation of event-focused documents is superior to techniques that rely on term frequencies for the task of information selection. For a set of document collections describing similar events within the same domain, we design and implement a completely automatic, data-driven procedure for inducing domain templates. These domain templates capture facts that are important for most domain instances. We then devise a procedure for identifying commonalities across different subdomains. We experiment with a special case of a domain, a biography domain, and identify commonalities across activities used for descriptions of people belonging to different occupations. We also propose a methodology for creating domain hierarchies. We apply our methods for identifying relations to the question-answering task. We design and implement a two-pronged approach for answering open-ended event-related questions. The first approach relies on automatically created domain templates and is used when the event mentioned can be identified as one of a particular class of events (e.g., earthquakes, presidential elections). The second, complementary approach is based on a shallow semantic network, which we extract from the documents relevant to the question. We also suggest a formal model for efficient information packaging that is based on mapping the information selection task onto the set cover complexity problem. Using this mapping, we outline and implement information selection algorithms that are provably optimal polynomial-time approximations for information selection tasks that have a limit on the output size.
Random Forest for Gene Expression Based Cancer Classification: Overlooked Issues
Authors: Oleg Okun, Helen Priisalu
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd Iberian conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Part II (2007)

Random forest is a collection (ensemble) of decision trees. It is a popular ensemble technique in pattern recognition. In this article, we apply random forest for cancer classification based on gene expression and address two issues that have been so far overlooked in other works. First, we demonstrate on two different real-world datasets that the performance of random forest is strongly influenced by dataset complexity. When estimated before running random forest, this complexity can serve as a useful performance indicator and it can explain a difference in performance on different datasets. Second, we show that one should rely with caution on feature importance used to rank genes: two forests, generated with the different number of features per node split, may have very similar classification errors on the same dataset, but the respective lists of genes ranked according to feature importance can be weakly correlated.
Application of Survival Models for the Population Studies
Authors: Leonardas Vilkauskas, Abdonas Tamošiūnas, Regina Rėklaitienė, Algirdas Juozulynas
Venue: Informatica (2003)

The paper deals with the analysis of the two survival models of the accelerated failure-time using two-parametrical log-logistic and Weibull distributions, and survival models using conditional generalized Weibull, log-logistic, and Smith and Bain distributions. The observed survival (number of deaths during the 30-year follow-up period among the study cohort) and the survival predicted by regression models (predicted number of deaths for the same period of time) were compared. Data on deaths occurring in random sample of men were obtained from the death register of the city of Kaunas. The best agreement between the predicted and observed survival was obtained with one of the modified Smith and Bain models.
Capability Maturity Framework for eGovernment: A Multi-dimensional Model and Assessing Tool
Authors: Marcelo Iribarren, Gastón Concha, Gonzalo Valdes, Mauricio Solar, María T. Villarroel, Patricio Gutiérrez, Álvaro Vásquez
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic Government (2008)

This article describes an IT-based, eGov-centered and capability-driven model for assessing e-government capabilities and maturity of public agencies. It is the result of an initiative of the Chilean government to reinforce its e-government strategy. The proposed model, called eGov-MM (e-Government Maturity Model), has three dimensions (a cube) supporting business processes: information criteria, IT resources, and leverage domains. Changing the traditional and exclusive focus on IT, four Leverage Domains are defined: e-Strategy, IT Governance, Process Management, and People and Organization Capabilities. The Leverage Domains generate a hierarchical structure with a second level named Key Domain Areas. These areas should be measurable and controllable, so they are related to a third hierarchical level, called Critical Variables, allowing the model's elements to be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively. The capability and maturity of these variables associated with the intersection with the other two axes of the cube establish five levels of capability. The proposed model is strongly supported by the international experience and best practices for IT management and has already been field tested.
On the Hardness of Losing Weight
Authors: Andrei Krokhin, Dániel Marx
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th international colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, Part I (2008)

We study the complexity of local search for the Boolean constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), in the following form: given a CSP instance, that is, a collection of constraints, and a solution to it, the question is whether there is a better (lighter, i.e., having strictly less Hamming weight) solution within a given distance from the initial solution. We classify the complexity, both classical and parameterized, of such problems by a Schaefer-style dichotomy result, that is, with a restricted set of allowed types of constraints. Our results show that there is a considerable amount of such problems that are NP-hard, but fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the distance.
Enhancing an Integer Challenge-Response Protocol
Authors: Robson Oliveira Albuquerque, Luis Javier García Villalba, Rafael Timóteo Sousa,  Jr.
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, Part II (2008)

In a decentralized network, such as a peer-to-peer or a spontaneous network, a significant trust factor for a peer is to gain a sufficient level of certainty on the other peers' real identity. In this paper we evaluate a proposed peer identification protocol that was designed for such environments and operates based on iterated challenge-response exchanges among peers. For this purpose, we introduce a new attack against this protocol and use the birthday paradox to model the number of operations until the proposed attack is successful. The modeling process, which results in the estimation of the upper bound effort for this successful attack, gives way to the definition of enhancements for the identification protocol. As a result, we define a new identification protocol based on multiple integer challenge-responses that, though not being a cryptographic protocol, represents for an attacker a challenge harder than breaking a symmetric cryptographic key by brute force attack. Our proposed attack shows how to break the GCP protocol without any previous knowledge on target secret information.