ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Emergence of Sharing Behavior in a Multi-agent Society Using Tags
Authors: Sharmila Savarimuthu, Maryam Purvis, Martin Purvis
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02 (2008)

This paper investigates how tags can be used to achieve emergence of sharing behavior in a multi-agent society made of different groups. The context of interaction between agents in the society is the knowledge-sharing game, where agents use tags to identify those who are similar to them. This paper explains under what circumstances tags succeed to establish knowledge sharing. The results discussed in this paper were obtained using the simulation of artificial agent societies.
Mars: a MapReduce framework on graphics processors
Authors: Bingsheng He, Wenbin Fang, Qiong Luo, Naga K. Govindaraju, Tuyong Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques (2008)

We design and implement Mars, a MapReduce framework, on graphics processors (GPUs). MapReduce is a distributed programming framework originally proposed by Google for the ease of development of web search applications on a large number of commodity CPUs. Compared with CPUs, GPUs have an order of magnitude higher computation power and memory bandwidth, but are harder to program since their architectures are designed as a special-purpose co-processor and their programming interfaces are typically for graphics applications. As the first attempt to harness GPU's power for MapReduce, we developed Mars on an NVIDIA G80 GPU, which contains over one hundred processors, and evaluated it in comparison with Phoenix, the state-of-the-art MapReduce framework on multi-core CPUs. Mars hides the programming complexity of the GPU behind the simple and familiar MapReduce interface. It is up to 16 times faster than its CPU-based counterpart for six common web applications on a quad-core machine.
The interactive television user experience so far
Authors: William Cooper
Venue: Proceeding of the 1st international conference on Designing interactive user experiences for TV and video (2008)

After a decade of digital broadcasting, there is still much that may be done to improve the interactive television user experience. The United Kingdom has pioneered many developments in interactive television and so-called 'red button' services are regularly used by millions of viewers. This paper presents some of the key user experience lessons that may be learnt with respect to navigation design. The ability to provide successful user experiences has been restricted for a number of reasons. It is inherently problematic to apply interactivity to a predominantly broadcast medium. The relatively constrained hardware and primitive middleware of many set-top boxes tends to limit performance, while restricted bandwidth and limited graphics capabilities have inhibited the sophistication of presentation. As a result, the user experience has often fallen far short of user expectations. Interactive television has evolved distinct navigational principles, generally based on hierarchical menus. These rely on up, down, left and right buttons and some form of selection. This is effective within the limitations of most remote controls but it remains unclear how far it represents an optimal paradigm. There is still debate about whether to use numbers, colour-coded shortcuts or dedicated buttons. Consistent conventions have yet to emerge even at this basic level. More powerful hardware and improved graphics, connected to high-definition displays, are now raising the bar for designers, enabling new forms of user interface and interaction. Broadband network connections will allow genuinely interactive propositions and convergent communications services. The risk is that this will further fragment and complicate the overall user experience unless best practice design patterns can be consistently applied.
TactiMote: a tactile remote control for navigating in long lists
Authors: Muhammad Tahir, Gilles Bailly, Eric Lecolinet, Gérard Mouret
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (2008)

This paper presents TactiMote, a remote control with tactile feedback designed for navigating in long lists and catalogues. TactiMote integrates a joystick that allows 2D interaction with the thumb and a Braille cell that provides tactile feedback. This feedback is intended to help the selection task in novice mode and to allow for fast eyes-free navigation among favorite items in expert mode. The paper describes the design of the TactiMote prototype for TV channel selection and reports a preliminary experiment that shows the feasibility of the approach.
Financial failure prediction using efficiency as a predictor
Authors: Xiaoyan Xu, Yu Wang
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

Corporate financial failure prediction is of critical importance for decision making of managers, investors and shareholders. In current financial failure prediction models, various financial ratios are usually selected as prediction variables, which implicates that these financial ratios represent the possible cause of financial failure. It is widely recognized that a main cause of financial failure is poor management, and that business operation efficiency is a good reflection of a firm's management. In this paper, we propose a financial failure prediction model using efficiency as a predictor variable. In the proposed method, data envelopment analysis (DEA) are employed as a tool to evaluate the input/output efficiency of each corporation. To verify the efficacy of efficiency as a predictor, we use the data of corporations listed in Shanghai stock exchange (SSE), and compare the accuracy of the same prediction method with and without the variable. Experimental results of three main financial failure prediction models, i.e., multiple discriminant approach (MDA), logistic regression, and support vector machines (SVMs), all suggest that efficiency is an effective predictor variable.
Flexible Recommendations in CourseRank
Authors: Hector Garcia-Molina
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

CourseRank is a course planning tool we have developed for Stanford students, and is already in use by most undergraduates. For CourseRank, we have developed a "flexible recommendations" engine for defining recommendation strategies as high level workflows. By selecting a workflow and providing parameters (e.g., a filter condition for biology classes), students can receive personalized recommendations that better suit their needs. In this talk I will give an overview of CourseRank and its recommendation engine. 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
A Two Level Approach for Managing Resource and Data Intensive Tasks in Grids
Authors: Imran Ahmad, Shikharesh Majumdar
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

In recent years, Grid computing has emerged as an attractive platform to tackle various large-scale problems, especially in the field of science and engineering. Scheduling Grid resources involves a number of challenging issues, mainly due to the distributed and dynamic nature of the Grids. This paper focuses on the resource allocation for a particular type of resource intensive tasks called Processable Bulk Data Transfer (PBDT) tasks in a Grid environment. The defining trait of a PBDT task is a large raw data-file at a source node that needs to be processed in some way before it can be used at a set of sink nodes. Our scheduling approach uses a Bi-level decision-making architecture. This paper analyzes the performance of the proposed architecture at various workload conditions. This architecture can be extended for other types of tasks using the concepts presented.
Metagenomics reveals our incomplete knowledge of global diversity
Authors: Miguel Pignatelli, Gabriel Aparicio, Ignacio Blanquer, Vicente Hernández, Andrés Moya, Javier Tamames
Venue: Bioinformatics (2008)

Contact: Javier.tamames@uv.es
Column aerosol characterization in a semi-arid region around Marrakech during the WATERMED 2003 campaign
Authors: J. L. Gomez-Amo, V. Estelles, R. Pedros, M. P. Utrillas, J. A. Sobrino, J. A. Martinez-Lozano
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

In the framework of the WATERMED (WATer use efficiency in natural vegetation and agricultural areas by Remote sensing in the MEDiterranean basin) project, an experimental field campaign was carried out in a semi-arid region near Marrakech, Morocco, during March 2003. This work focused on the columnar aerosol characterization from spectroradiometric and photometric measurements of direct solar irradiance and sky radiance at ground level. The results show a high dependence of the aerosol optical properties on the air masses present in the area. Two periods with different aerosol loads were observed in the campaign. In the first, Atlantic-origin aerosols showed a marine particle accumulation mode combined with a dominant mode corresponding to coarse particles of local origin. In the second period the synoptic situation changed towards a Saharan+Atlantic origin, the Atlantic influence persisting at altitude while at lower levels the presence of air masses proceeding from the Saharan desert was observed. This dry air carried a large quantity of mineral particles that increased the area's turbidity, leading to a substantial increase in the volume of the whole distribution, a displacement of the accumulation mode radius towards higher values and an increasingly evident spread of the coarse particle mode, although the radius remained the same as that in the first period of the campaign.
Integrating semantically heterogeneous aggregate views of distributed databases
Authors: Sally Mcclean, Bryan Scotney, Philip Morrow, Kieran Greer
Venue: Distributed and Parallel Databases (2008)

In statistical databases and data warehousing applications it is commonly the case that aggregate views are maintained as an underlying mechanism for summarising information. Where the databases or applications are distributed, or arise from independent data collections or system developments, there may be incompatibility, heterogeneity, and data inconsistency. These challenges need to be overcome if federations of aggregated databases are to be successfully incorporated into systems for database management, querying, retrieval, and knowledge discovery.In this paper we address the issue of integrating aggregate views that have semantically heterogeneous classification schemes. In previous work we have developed a methodology that is efficient but that cannot easily handle data inconsistencies. Our previous approach is therefore not particularly well-suited to very large databases or federations of large numbers of databases. We now address these scalability issues by introducing a methodology for heterogeneous aggregate view integration that constructs a dynamic shared ontology to which each of the aggregate views can be explicitly related. A maximum likelihood technique, implemented using the EM (Expectation-Maximisation) algorithm, is used to inherently handle data inconsistencies in the computation of integrated aggregates that are described in terms of the dynamic shared ontology.
siDRM
Authors: Wuming Gong, Yongliang Ren, Haiyan Zhou, Yejun Wang, Shuli Kang, Tongbin Li
Venue: Bioinformatics (2008)

Summary: Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) have become an indispensable tool for the investigation of gene functions. Most existing siRNA design tools were trained on datasets assembled from confined origins, incompatible with the diverse siRNA laboratory practice to which these tools will ultimately be applied. We have performed an updated analysis using the disjunctive rule merging (DRM) approach on a large and diverse dataset compiled from siRecords, and implemented the resulting rule sets in siDRM, a new online siRNA design tool. siDRM also implements a few high-sensitivity rule sets and fast rule sets, links to siRecords, and uses several filters to check unwanted detrimental effects, including innate immune responses, cell toxic effects and off-target activities in selecting siRNAs. A performance comparison using an independent dataset indicated that siDRM outperforms 19 existing siRNA design tools in identifying effective siRNAs. Availability:siDRM can be accessed at http://siRecords.umn.edu/siDRM/. Contact: toli@biocompute.umn.edu Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Requirements engineering: from craft to discipline
Authors: Axel van Lamsweerde
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (2008)

Getting the right software requirements under the right environment assumptions is a critical precondition for developing the right software. This task is intrinsically difficult. We need to produce a complete, adequate, consistent, and well-structured set of measurable requirements and assumptions from incomplete, imprecise, and sparse material originating from multiple, often conflicting sources. The system we need to consider comprises software and environment components including people and devices. A rich system model may significantly help us in this task. Such model must integrate the intentional, structural, functional, and behavioral facets of the system being conceived. Rigorous techniques are needed for model construction, analysis, exploitation, and evolution. Such techniques should support early and incremental reasoning about partial models for a variety of purposes including satisfaction arguments, property checks, animations, the evaluation of alternative options, the analysis of risks, threats, and conflicts, and traceability management. The tension between technical precision and practical applicability calls for a suitable mix of heuristic, deductive, and inductive forms of reasoning on a suitable mix of declarative and operational specifications. Formal techniques should be deployed only when and where needed, and kept hidden wherever possible. The paper provides a retrospective account of our research efforts and practical experience along this route. Problem-oriented abstractions, analyzable models, and constructive techniques were permanent concerns.
Holistically Stream-based Processing Xtwig Queries
Authors: Guoren Wang, Bo Ning, Ge Yu
Venue: World Wide Web (2008)

Unlike a twig query, an Xtwig query contains some selection predicates with reverse axes which are either ancestor or parent. To evaluate such queries in the stream-based context, some rewriting rules have been proposed to transform the paths with reverse axes into equivalent reverse-axis-free ones. However, the transformation method is expensive due to multiple scanning input streams and the generation of unnecessary intermediate results. To solve these problems, a holistic stream-based algorithm XtwigStack is proposed for Xtwig queries. Experiments show that XtwigStack is much more efficient than the transformation method.
Ant colony optimization for the two-dimensional loading vehicle routing problem
Authors: Guenther Fuellerer, Karl F. Doerner, Richard F. Hartl, Manuel Iori
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2009)

In this paper a combination of the two most important problems in distribution logistics is considered, known as the two-dimensional loading vehicle routing problem. This problem combines the loading of the freight into the vehicles, and the successive routing of the vehicles along the road network, with the aim of satisfying the demands of the customers. The problem is solved by different heuristics for the loading part, and by an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for the overall optimization. The excellent behavior of the algorithm is proven through extensive computational results. The contribution of the paper is threefold: first, on small-size instances the proposed algorithm reaches a high number of proven optimal solutions, while on large-size instances it clearly outperforms previous heuristics from the literature. Second, due to its flexibility in handling different loading constraints, including items rotation and rear loading, it allows us to draw qualitative conclusions of practical interest in transportation, such as evaluating the potential savings by permitting more flexible loading configurations. Third, in ACO a combination of different heuristic information usually did not turn out to be successful in the past. Our approach provides an example where an ACO algorithm successfully combines two completely different heuristic measures (with respect to loading and routing) within one pheromone matrix.
Self-supervised relation extraction from the Web
Authors: Benjamin Rozenfeld, Ronen Feldman
Venue: Knowledge and Information Systems (2008)

Web extraction systems attempt to use the immense amount of unlabeled text in the Web in order to create large lists of entities and relations. Unlike traditional Information Extraction methods, the Web extraction systems do not label every mention of the target entity or relation, instead focusing on extracting as many different instances as possible while keeping the precision of the resulting list reasonably high. SRES is a self-supervised Web relation extraction system that learns powerful extraction patterns from unlabeled text, using short descriptions of the target relations and their attributes. SRES automatically generates the training data needed for its pattern-learning component. The performance of SRES is further enhanced by classifying its output instances using the properties of the instances and the patterns. The features we use for classification and the trained classification model are independent from the target relation, which we demonstrate in a series of experiments. We also compare the performance of SRES to the performance of the state-of-the-art KnowItAll system, and to the performance of its pattern learning component, which learns simpler pattern language than SRES.
Experience in using a process language to define scientific workflow and generate dataset provenance
Authors: Leon J. Osterweil, Lori A. Clarke, Aaron M. Ellison, Rodion Podorozhny, Alexander Wise, Emery Boose, Julian Hadley
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (2008)

This paper describes our experiences in exploring the applicability of software engineering approaches to scientific data management problems. Specifically, this paper describes how process definition languages can be used to expedite production of scientific datasets as well as to generate documentation of their provenance. Our approach uses a process definition language that incorporates powerful semantics to encode scientific processes in the form of a Process Definition Graph (PDG). The paper describes how execution of the PDG-defined process can generate Dataset Derivation Graphs (DDGs), metadata that document how the scientific process developed each of its product datasets. The paper uses an example to show that scientific processes may be complex and to illustrate why some of the more powerful semantic features of the process definition language are useful in supporting clarity and conciseness in representing such processes. This work is similar in goals to work generally referred to as Scientific Workflow. The paper demonstrates the contribution that software engineering can make to this domain.
Efficient Algorithms to Explore Conformation Spaces of Flexible Protein Loops
Authors: Peggy Yao, Ankur Dhanik, Nathan Marz, Ryan Propper, Charles Kou, Guanfeng Liu, Henry van den Bedem, Jean-Claude Latombe, Inbal Halperin-Landsberg, Russ B. Altman
Venue: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) (2008)

Several applications in biology - e.g., incorporation of protein flexibility in ligand docking algorithms, interpretation of fuzzy X-ray crystallographic data, and homology modeling - require computing the internal parameters of a flexible fragment (usually, a loop) of a protein in order to connect its termini to the rest of the protein without causing any steric clash. One must often sample many such conformations in order to explore and adequately represent the conformational range of the studied loop. While sampling must be fast, it is made difficult by the fact that two conflicting constraints - kinematic closure and clash avoidance - must be satisfied concurrently. This paper describes two efficient and complementary sampling algorithms to explore the space of closed clash-free conformations of a flexible protein loop. The "seed sampling" algorithm samples broadly from this space, while the "deformation sampling" algorithm uses seed conformations as starting points to explore the conformation space around them at a finer grain. Computational results are presented for various loops ranging from 5 to 25 residues. More specific results also show that the combination of the sampling algorithms with a functional site prediction software (FEATURE) makes it possible to compute and recognize calcium-binding loop conformations. The sampling algorithms are implemented in a toolkit (LoopTK), which is available at https://simtk.org/home/looptk.
Reconciling statechart semantics
Authors: Rik Eshuis
Venue: Science of Computer Programming (2009)

Statecharts are a visual technique for modelling reactive behaviour. Over the years, a plethora of statechart semantics have been proposed. The three most widely used are the fixpoint, Statemate, and UML semantics. These three semantics differ considerably from each other. In general, they interpret the same statechart differently, which impedes the communication of statechart designs among both designers and tools. In this paper, we identify a set of constraints on statecharts that ensure that the fixpoint, Statemate and UML semantics coincide, if observations are restricted to linear, stuttering-closed, separable properties. Moreover, we show that for a subset of these constraints, a slight variation of the Statemate semantics coincides for linear stuttering-closed properties with the UML semantics.