ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
"Thinking inside of the box": retention of women in engineering
Authors: P. J. Shull
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 02 (2000)

The paper describes a current effort at Penn State Altoona to address the issue of low retention of women in science and engineering. This effort also is designed to contribute to the long-term advancement of women in these fields throughout their careers. The approach taken is to challenge women students to recognize their beliefs and self perceptions regarding their relationship with engineering and thus provide them with the opportunity for positive change. As a consequence, their actions have potential to change stereotypical attitudes towards women in the sciences. The particular method we chose to accomplish these goals is to design and teach a course to educate women in the area of computer problem diagnosis and repair. The course includes diagnosing and troubleshooting software and hardware problems, and upgrading and maintaining the systems, as well as an introduction to component functionality and integration. Demonstration of the proficiency attained by the women in computer technology distinguishes them among colleagues. This distinction results from the well-recognized prestige associated with this level of knowledge of computer technology.
SPD (Static Priority with Deadline Considerations) Packet Scheduling Algorithm for achieving better QoS
Authors: Tamer Dag
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Networking and Services (2007)

Providing quality of service (QoS) to applications with different traffic characteristics based on their needs is an important research area for today's and tomorrow's high speed networks. Various techniques have been proposed to achieve good QoS for diverse application types. Among these techniques, packet scheduling algorithms decide on how to process packets at network nodes; however they have limited support for better QoS. In order to supply the various QoS requirements for different kinds of applications, new scheduling policies need to be developed and evaluated. This paper proposes a new kind of packet scheduling algorithm, Static Priority with Deadline Considerations (SPD), which integrates an important QoS parameter (the delay) into the classical static priority packet scheduling algorithm and analyses the packet losses by considering the two different components of losses; buffer overflows and deadline violations. The proposed algorithm not only reduces the complexity of the static priority algorithm by introducing degree sorting but also solves the starving problem and provides fairness to applications with different priorities.
Using routing and tunneling to combat DoS attacks
Authors: Adam Greenhalgh, Mark Handley, Felipe Huici
Venue: Proceedings of the Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet on Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet Workshop (2005)

Thorough defense against DoS attacks is extremely difficult without incurring significant changes to the Internet architecture. We present a series of changes aimed at establishing protection boundaries to reduce the effectiveness of most flooding DoS attacks against servers. Only minimal and local changes are required to current network architectures. We show that our scheme is highly beneficial even if deployed at a single ISP, with additional benefits arising from multiple-ISP deployment. Finally, we show that the changes can be implemented with off-the-shelf components.
Does Visualization Affect Perceptions of Ethically Complex Policy Decisions: An Experimental Study
Authors: Deirdre Hahn, Rick Shangraw, Mark Keith, David Coursey
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

Visualization as a communication medium is an important factor when considering how individuals are influenced in a decision about a complex policy issue. Age, race and gender may have interacting relationships with decision making about science and perceptions of communication made through immersive visual environments. This study is an exploration of what happens when laypeople are allowed to make a decision about an ethically challenging, human experiment and how age, race, gender, and communication mediums may influence this decision making process. Preliminary results indicate visualization environments are better than print media in communicating risks; older or more educated participants are less likely to approve scientific studies involving human subjects; race nor ethnicity are significant indicators of decision outcome. Direction of future research around each of these areas is discussed.
Blind separation of disjoint orthogonal signals: demixing N sources from 2 mixtures
Authors: A. Jourjine
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2000)

We present a novel method for blind separation of any number of sources using only two mixtures. The method applies when sources are (W-)disjoint orthogonal, that is, when the supports of the (windowed) Fourier transform of any two signals in the mixture are disjoint sets. We show that, for anechoic mixtures of attenuated and delayed sources, the method allows one to estimate the mixing parameters by clustering ratios of the time-frequency representations of the mixtures. The estimates of the mixing parameters are then used to partition the time-frequency representation of one mixture to recover the original sources. The technique is valid even in the case when the number of sources is larger than the number of mixtures. The general results are verified on both speech and wireless signals.
How do the National Science Education Standards support the teaching of engineering principles and design?
Authors: M. S. Fadali
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (2000)

The recently developed National Science Education Standards (NSES) have the overall goal of making scientific literacy, in all of our citizens, a reality in the 21st century. The NSES science standards address content in science and technology as well as science as inquiry, science in personal and social perspectives, and the history and nature of science in grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12. We have examined the extent to which the NSES support the teaching of engineering principles and design within the traditional science content areas. We have identified sections within the standards that adequately address the need for exposing students to engineering and technology. We have also identified sections where engineering and technology are not included but where we believe that they have a major role. The paper is a summary of our findings and recommendations.
Stability and Computation of Topological Invariants of Solids in ${\Bbb R}^n$
Authors: Frederic Chazal, Andre Lieutier
Venue: Discrete Computational Geometry (2007)

In this work one proves that under quite general assumptions one can deduce the topology of a bounded open set in ${\Bbb R}^n$ from an approximation of it. For this, one introduces the weak feature size (wfs) that extends for nonsmooth objects the notion of local feature size. Our results apply to open sets with positive wfs. This class includes subanalytic open sets which cover many cases encountered in practical applications. The proofs are based upon the study of distance functions to closed sets and their critical points. The notion of critical point is the same as the one used in riemannian geometry [22], [9], [20] and nonsmooth analysis [10]. As an application, one gives a way to compute the homology groups of open sets from noisy samples of points on their boundary.
An intuitionistic fuzzy system for time series analysis in plant monitoring and diagnosis
Authors: Oscar Castillo, Arnulfo Alanis, Mario Garcia, Hector Arias
Venue: Applied Soft Computing (2007)

We describe in this paper a proposed new approach for fuzzy inference in intuitionistic fuzzy systems. The new approach combines the outputs of two traditional fuzzy systems to obtain the final conclusion of the intuitionistic fuzzy system. The new method provides an efficient way of calculating the output of an intuitionistic fuzzy system, and as consequence can be applied to real-world problems in many areas of application. We illustrate the new approach with a simple example to motivate the ideas behind this work. We also illustrate the new approach for fuzzy inference with a more complicated example of monitoring a non-linear dynamic plant.
A fast ray tracing algorithm for propagation prediction in broadband wireless systems
Authors: H. Zare, A. Mohammadi
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th International Conference on Communication Systems - Volume 01 (2002)

This paper discuses a fast ray tracing algorithm for propagation prediction in outdoor wireless channels. The algorithm uses a GTD/UTD (geometrical theory of diffraction/uniform theory of diffraction) in combination with a ray tracing technique to model and to simulate the broadband wireless channels. The algorithm uses a modified shooting and bouncing technique to accelerate the ray tracing method. The algorithm is examined for channel modeling and propagation prediction in various wireless channels including LMDS system. The simulation data is compared with measurement results in the same scenario. An excellent agreement shows the validity and accuracy of the new algorithm.
Task Decomposition and Delegation Algorithms for Coordinating Unstructured Multi Agent Systems
Authors: Antonio Luis Lopes, Luis Miguel Botelho
Venue: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (2007)

This paper describes the initial PhD research work for developing an innovative process for agent coordination in unstructured distributed environments. In this proposal, an agent that receives a request will use an AI-based planning algorithm to decompose the received request into several subtasks; it will handle those for which it has know-how and available resources; and it will use decentralized networks computing methods to delegate the rest of the request to other agents that can possibly handle it. These, in turn, will recursively apply the same process until the initial request is completely solved or until some specified termination condition holds. The work contributions to the state-of-the-art are: the creation of an AI-based planning algorithm capable of partial task decomposition with only partial knowledge of available planning operators; and the creation of a coordination infrastructure that enables agents to delegate subtasks to other agents in totally unstructured decentralized environments.
An adaptive block-matching algorithm for motion estimation
Authors: V. G. Moshnyaga
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1999)

A new adaptive algorithm for the block matching motion estimation is presented. The algorithm works in the full-search fashion but unlike the FSBMA it adjusts the number of computations dynamically to picture variation. Due to incorporated mechanism of data-driven thresholding, the proposed approach performs as four times as less operations compared to the FSBMA while maintaining the same quality of results. Its hardware implementation is simple and compact. A supportive hardware design as well as simulation results on benchmarks are outlined.
Advances in Mathematical Sketching: Moving Toward the Paradigm's Full Potential
Authors: Joseph J. LaViola Jr.
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2007)

MathPad2 is a Tablet PC-based application that lets users create and explore mathematical sketches, graph functions, evaluate expressions, and solve equations through an easy-to-use interface. The author describes the work done with MathPad2 thus far and presents recent advances toward realizing mathematical sketching's full potential to aid in mathematical problem solving and visualization.
A block priority based instruction caching scheme for multimedia processors
Authors: Jiyang Kang
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 200. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2001)

An instruction caching scheme that utilizes the block priority information is proposed mainly targeted for embedded multimedia processors. The block priority information is obtained by profiling application programs. The goal of this caching scheme is to keep more important code blocks longer using the block priority information, which programmers provide by analyzing the profiling results of multimedia applications. In addition to a new caching scheme, the methods for determining the priority of each code block are also developed and their performances are evaluated using real multimedia applications. The experimental results show that the cache miss ratio can be reduced up to nearly a half of that of the normal LRU replacement scheme although the improvement depends on the cache size.
Detection of quotations and inserted clauses and its application to dependency structure analysis in spontaneous Japanese
Authors: Ryoji Hamabe, Kiyotaka Uchimoto, Tatsuya Kawahara, Hitoshi Isahara
Venue: Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Main conference poster sessions (2006)

Japanese dependency structure is usually represented by relationships between phrasal units called bunsetsus. One of the biggest problems with dependency structure analysis in spontaneous speech is that clause boundaries are ambiguous. This paper describes a method for detecting the boundaries of quotations and inserted clauses and that for improving the dependency accuracy by applying the detected boundaries to dependency structure analysis. The quotations and inserted clauses are determined by using an SVM-based text chunking method that considers information on morphemes, pauses, fillers, etc. The information on automatically analyzed dependency structure is also used to detect the beginning of the clauses. Our evaluation experiment using Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) showed that the automatically estimated boundaries of quotations and inserted clauses helped to improve the accuracy of dependency structure analysis.
Building Trust in Online Rating Systems Through Signal Modeling
Authors: Yafei Yang, Yan Lindsay Sun, Jin Ren, Qing Yang
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (2007)

Online feedback-based rating systems are gaining popularity. Dealing with unfair ratings in such systems has been recognized as an important but difficult problem. This problem is challenging especially when the number of regular ratings is relatively small and the unfair ratings contribute to a significant portion of the overall ratings. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect the unfair ratings that cannot be effectively prevented by existing state-of-the-art techniques. Our algorithm is particularly effective to detect malicious raters that collaboratively manipulate ratings of one or several products. The main idea of our algorithm is to use an autoregressive signal modeling technique combined with trust-enhanced rating aggregation. We are able to detect and filter out unfair ratings very accurately. Extensive experiments through simulations and real-world data have been performed to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show significant improvements on detecting collaborative unfair raters over existing techniques.
Dryad: distributed data-parallel programs from sequential building blocks
Authors: Michael Isard, Mihai Budiu, Yuan Yu, Andrew Birrell, Dennis Fetterly
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2007 (2007)

Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad application combines computational "vertices" with communication "channels" to form a dataflow graph. Dryad runs the application by executing the vertices of this graph on a set of available computers, communicating as appropriate through flies, TCP pipes, and shared-memory FIFOs. The vertices provided by the application developer are quite simple and are usually written as sequential programs with no thread creation or locking. Concurrency arises from Dryad scheduling vertices to run simultaneously on multiple computers, or on multiple CPU cores within a computer. The application can discover the size and placement of data at run time, and modify the graph as the computation progresses to make efficient use of the available resources. Dryad is designed to scale from powerful multi-core single computers, through small clusters of computers, to data centers with thousands of computers. The Dryad execution engine handles all the difficult problems of creating a large distributed, concurrent application: scheduling the use of computers and their CPUs, recovering from communication or computer failures, and transporting data between vertices.
A Reduced Complexity Estimation Algorithm for Ultrasound Images De-Blurring
Authors: Alessandro Palladini, Nicola Testoni, Luca De Marchi, Nicolo Speciale
Venue: Proceedings of the Twentieth IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (2007)

In this paper we present a deconvolution technique for ultrasound images based on a Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation procedure. In our approach the ultrasonic radio-frequency (RF) signal is considered as a sequence affected by intersymbol interference (ISI) and AWGN noise. In order to reduce the computational cost, the estimation is performed with a reduced-state Viterbi algorithm. The channel effect is estimated in two different ways: either measuring the transducer response with an experimental setting or with blind homomorphic techniques. We verify an image quality enhancement with respect to different metrics. Extensive tests are made to estimate the quantization alphabet that gives the best performances.
Stronger password authentication using browser extensions
Authors: Blake Ross, Collin Jackson, Nick Miyake, Dan Boneh, John C. Mitchell
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 14 (2005)

We describe a browser extension, PwdHash, that transparently produces a different password for each site, improving web password security and defending against password phishing and other attacks. Since the browser extension applies a cryptographic hash function to a combination of the plaintext password entered by the user, data associated with the web site, and (optionally) a private salt stored on the client machine, theft of the password received at one site will not yield a password that is useful at another site. While the scheme requires no changes on the server side, implementing this password method securely and transparently in a web browser extension turns out to be quite difficult. We describe the challenges we faced in implementing PwdHash and some techniques that may be useful to anyone facing similar security issues in a browser environment.
Extracting Web Data Using Instance-Based Learning
Authors: Yanhong Zhai, Bing Liu
Venue: World Wide Web (2007)

This paper studies structured data extraction from Web pages. Existing approaches to data extraction include wrapper induction and automated methods. In this paper, we propose an instance-based learning method, which performs extraction by comparing each new instance to be extracted with labeled instances. The key advantage of our method is that it does not require an initial set of labeled pages to learn extraction rules as in wrapper induction. Instead, the algorithm is able to start extraction from a single labeled instance. Only when a new instance cannot be extracted does it need labeling. This avoids unnecessary page labeling, which solves a major problem with inductive learning (or wrapper induction), i.e., the set of labeled instances may not be representative of all other instances. The instance-based approach is very natural because structured data on the Web usually follow some fixed templates. Pages of the same template usually can be extracted based on a single page instance of the template. A novel technique is proposed to match a new instance with a manually labeled instance and in the process to extract the required data items from the new instance. The technique is also very efficient. Experimental results based on 1,200 pages from 24 diverse Web sites demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art existing systems significantly.
Query Learning of Regular Tree Languages: How to Avoid Dead States
Authors: Frank Drewes, Johanna H&#x00f6;gberg
Venue: Theory of Computing Systems (2007)

We generalize an inference algorithm by Angluin, that learns a regular string language from a "minimally adequate teacher", to regular tree languages. The (deterministic bottom-up) finite tree automaton constructed by the learning algorithm is the minimal partial one recognizing the unknown language. This improves a similar algorithm proposed by Sakakibara by avoiding dead states both in the resulting automaton and the learning phase, which also leads to a considerable improvement with respect to efficiency.
Scrash: a system for generating secure crash information
Authors: Pete Broadwell, Matt Harren, Naveen Sastry
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 12 (2003)

This paper presents Scrash, a system that safeguards user privacy by removing sensitive data from crash reports that are sent to developers after program failures. Remote crash reporting, while of great help to the developer, risks the user's privacy because crash reports may contain sensitive user information such as passwords and credit card numbers. Scrash modifies the source code of C programs to ensure that sensitive data does not appear in a crash report. Scrash adds only a small amount of run-time overhead and requires minimal involvement on the part of the developer.
A construction for 2-chromatic Steiner quadruple systems
Authors: L. Ji
Venue: European Journal of Combinatorics (2007)

In 1971, Doyen and Vandensavel gave a special doubling construction that gives a direct construction of 2-chromatic SQS(v) for all v=4 or 8(mod12). In this paper, we introduce the concept of a 2-chromatic candelabra quadruple system, and use it to provide a construction for 2-chromatic SQS. It is proved that a 2-chromatic SQS(v) exists if v=10 or 26(mod48), or if v=2 or 34(mod96) with the possible exception v=98.
Using Fuzzy Logic in Automated Vehicle Control
Authors: Jose E. Naranjo, Miguel A. Sotelo, Carlos Gonzalez, Ricardo Garcia, Teresa de Pedro
Venue: IEEE Intelligent Systems (2007)

The automatic-driving field has received much attention in recent years, as exemplified by the Darpa's Grand Challenge. Two Spanish research groups have furthered such work by automating two mass-produced vehicles. As input, their system uses a centimetric global positioning system, wireless LAN support, and artificial vision. To control the vehicle, they use fuzzy logic techniques that contend with both complex mathematical models and inaccurate linearization. Fuzzy logic also lets them incorporate human procedural knowledge into their control algorithms. Here, the researchers describe the algorithms for steering and speed control, which together make up the trajectory control. They also describe algorithms for overtaking, adaptive cruise control with stop-and-go functionality, and vision-based vehicle detection, and discuss results from experiments in real-world conditions.