ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Maximum utilization of vehicle capacity: A case of MRO items
Authors: Ashutosh Sarkar, Pratap K. J. Mohapatra
Venue: Computers and Industrial Engineering (2008)

With the pressure to remain competitive, organizations are increasingly depending on third parties for support for logistical services like transportation, particularly for MRO items that involve a large number of items, each with small individual weights and a large number of suppliers. In order to cut costs, it is important to maximize vehicle utilization. In this paper we have addressed a case of an integrated steel plant that engages a third-party transporter for transportation of its MRO supplies. The problem here is to find a subset of suppliers so as to maximize the utilization of vehicle capacity which is used for carrying items with known weight. The mathematical formulation of the problem is similar to the traditional subset sum problem. We propose an exchange algorithm for finding a solution of the problem. The proposed exchange algorithm has a lower time complexity. Further, its quality of solutions is found to be superior to many currently available algorithms, when tested on a number of test problems given in the literature. The algorithm is also applied to maximize the utilization of the truck capacity for the aforementioned case of an integrated steel plant. When used for the data available from the case, the algorithm resulted in a very high level of utilization of the vehicle and thus huge savings in terms of costs.
Three measures for secure palmprint identification
Authors: Adams Kong, David Zhang, Mohamed Kamel
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2008)

Most previous research in the area of personal authentication using the palmprint as a biometric trait has concentrated on enhancing accuracy yet resistance to attacks is also a centrally important feature of any biometric security system. In this paper, we address three relevant security issues: template re-issuances, also called cancellable biometrics, replay attacks, and database attacks. We propose to use a random orientation filter bank (ROFB) as a feature extractor to generate noise-like feature codes, called Competitive Codes for templates re-issuances. Secret messages are hidden in templates to prevent replay and database attacks. This technique can be regarded as template watermarking. A series of analyses is provided to evaluate the security levels of the measures.
An advanced hybrid peer-to-peer botnet
Authors: Ping Wang, Sherri Sparks, Cliff C. Zou
Venue: Proceedings of the first conference on First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets (2007)

A "botnet" consists of a network of compromised computers controlled by an attacker ("botmaster"). Recently botnets have become the root cause of many Internet attacks. To be well prepared for future attacks, it is not enough to study how to detect and defend against the botnets that have appeared in the past. More importantly, we should study advanced botnet designs that could be developed by botmasters in the near future. In this paper, we present the design of an advanced hybrid peer-to-peer botnet. Compared with current botnets, the proposed botnet is harder to be shut down, monitored, and hijacked. It provides robust network connectivity, individualized encryption and control traffic dispersion, limited botnet exposure by each bot, and easy monitoring and recovery by its botmaster. Possible defenses against this advanced botnet are suggested.
PickPocket: A computer billiards shark
Authors: Michael Smith
Venue: Artificial Intelligence (2007)

Billiards is a game of both strategy and physical skill. To succeed, a player must be able to select strong shots, and then execute them accurately and consistently on the table. Several robotic billiards players have recently been developed. These systems address the task of executing shots on a physical table, but so far have incorporated little strategic reasoning. They require artificial intelligence to select the 'best' shot taking into account the accuracy of the robot, the noise inherent in the domain, the continuous nature of the search space, the difficulty of the shot, and the goal of maximizing the chances of winning. This article describes the program PickPocket, the winner of the simulated 8-ball tournaments at the 10th and 11th Computer Olympiad competitions. PickPocket is based on the traditional search framework, familiar from games such as chess, adapted to the continuous stochastic domain of billiards. Experimental results are presented exploring the properties of two search algorithms, Monte-Carlo search and Probabilistic search.
Some Notes on Speeding Up Certain Loops by Software, Firmware, and Hardware Means
Authors: D. Pager
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (1972)

Some ways of speeding up certain loops by software, firmware, and hardware means are discussed in this note. The importance of the inner loop calculation is emphasized and a simple, though as yet unused, programming technique is presented whereby the inner loop time may be reduced by approximately 20 percent. The general problem of a program with many loops is then considered and a method is indicated for obtaining the maximum speedup by means of the technique described earlier. Turning to firmware, it is shown how, by altering the normal algorithm used for the inner loop calculation, a very substantial speedup can be achieved with the use of microprogramming (above and beyond the savings in instruction decoding time). Finally, a means is considered whereby a computer can alter its own hardware, so as to achieve a speedup of several orders for loops in which the resolution of decision tables accounts for a significant portion of the iteration time.
Frequency estimators for MIMO-OFDM systems
Authors: David C.-H. Chiang, Yu T. Su
Venue: Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal (2007)

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are known to be sensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO). This paper is concerned with the CFO estimation for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems employing OFDM waveforms. We present two approaches to derive maximum likelihood (ML) pilot-assisted frequency estimators that use either two or multiple identical training symbols. It is shown that the resulting ML frequency estimators are similar to maximum ratio combining versions of Moose estimator and Yu---Su solution, respectively. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed frequency estimators are robust against spatial Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) variation and they yield performance superior to that of the corresponding single-antenna system.
Ergodicity condition for a system with queuing and servicing of objects with a complicated structure
Authors: E. V. Koba, I. N. Kovalenko
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2007)

A single-channel queuing system with a Poisson incoming flow of objects is considered. Each object consists of several spaced requests. A simple ergodicity condition is established.
Optimizing Blind Equalization Intelligent Algorithm for Wireless Communication Systems
Authors: Lijun Sun, Chao Zhao
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Natural Computation - Volume 03 (2007)

In digital wireless communications, Blind channel equalization technique plays an important role in combating the intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by nonideal channels or multipath propagation. Convergence behaviors and design cost are two major performance evaluative features. In this paper we present a low complexity blind equalization algorithm suitable for wireless communication channels, by exploiting the signed polarity and improving the iteration version of the super-exponential algorithm for the coefficients adaptation. The proposed algorithm both reduce the computation complexity and ensure a fast speed of convergence with an acceptable steady state compared with conventional one. Computer simulation results are presented to confirm our approach.
Special Feature Chip-Level Simulation of Microprocessors
Authors: J. R. Armstrong
Venue: Computer (1980)

Chip-level simulation techniques represent a bridge between the old world of gate, flip-flop, and bit and the new world of the microprocessor.
Program Testing Techniques for Nuclear Reactor Protection Systems
Authors: W. Geiger
Venue: Computer (1979)

The high-reliability software required for nuclear reactor protection systems cannot be validated by a single method. This approach combines several different but complementary techniques.
Freeness of partial words
Authors: Florin Manea, Robert Merca
Venue: Theoretical Computer Science (2007)

The paper approaches the classical combinatorial problem of freeness of words, in the more general case of partial words. First, we propose an algorithm that tests efficiently whether a partial word is k-free or not, for a given k. Then, we show that there exist arbitrarily many k-free infinite partial words, over a binary alphabet, containing an infinite number of holes, for k>=3. Moreover, we present an efficient algorithm for the construction of a cube-free partial word with a given number of holes, over a binary alphabet. In the final section of the paper, we show that there exists an infinite word, over a four-symbol alphabet, in which we can substitute randomly one symbol with a hole, and still obtain a cube-free word; we show that such a word does not exist for alphabets with fewer symbols. Further, we prove that in this word we can replace arbitrarily many symbols with holes, such that each two consecutive holes are separated by at least two symbols, and obtain a cube-free partial word. This result seems interesting because any partial word containing two holes with less than two symbols between them is not cube-free. Finally, we modify the previously presented algorithm to construct, over a four-symbol alphabet, a cube-free partial word with exactly n holes, having minimal length, among all the possible cube-free partial words with at least n holes.
Performance Modeling of Shared-Resource Array Processors
Authors: L. M. Ni
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (1981)

This paper presents a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of shared-resource array processors for multiple vector processing. Such a parallel processor contains multiple control units sharing a resource pool of processing elements and operating with multiple single-instruction multiple-data streams (MSIMD). In the steady state, the Markov model corresponds to a two-dimensional Markov chain, which can be expressed by a set of equilibrium equations. An iterative method is developed to solve the Markov chain after projecting the equilibrium equations onto a one-dimensional state space. The convergence rate of the iterative method can be greatly enhanced by choosing starting values corresponding to the approximated analytical results obtained earlier by the authors.
What is the meaning of these constant interruptions?
Authors: Graham Hutton, Joel Wright
Venue: Journal of Functional Programming (2007)

Asynchronous exceptions, or interrupts, are important for writing robust, modular programs, but are traditionally viewed as being difficult from a semantic perspective. In this article, we present a simple, formally justified, semantics for interrupts. Our approach is to show how a high-level semantics for interrupts can be justified with respect to a low-level implementation, by means of a compiler and its correctness theorem. In this manner we obtain two different perspectives on the problem, formally shown to be equivalent, which gives greater confidence in the correctness of our semantics.
Just-in-time contextual advertising
Authors: Aris Anagnostopoulos, Andrei Z. Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vanja Josifovski, Lance Riedel
Venue: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management (2007)

Contextual Advertising is a type of Web advertising, which, given the URL of a Web page, aims to embed into the page (typically via JavaScript) the most relevant textual ads available. For static pages that are displayed repeatedly, the matching of ads can be based on prior analysis of their entire content; however, ads need to be matched also to new or dynamically created pages that cannot be processed ahead of time. Analyzing the entire body of such pages on-the-fly entails prohibitive communication and latency costs. To solve the three-horned dilemma of either low-relevance or high-latency or high-load, we propose to use text summarization techniques paired with external knowledge (exogenous to the page) to craft short page summaries in real time. Empirical evaluation proves that matching ads on the basis of such summaries does not sacrifice relevance, and is competitive with matching based on the entire page content. Specifically, we found that analyzing a carefully selected 5% fraction of the page text sacrifices only 1%-3% in ad relevance. Furthermore, our summaries are fully compatible with the standard JavaScript mechanisms used for ad placement: they can be produced at ad-display time by simple additions to the usual script, and they only add 500-600 bytes to the usual request.
Scheduling Divisible Loads on Bus Networks with Start-Up Costs by Utilizing Multiple Data Transfer Streams: PORI
Authors: Jie Hu, Raymond Klefstad
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Parallel Processing (2007)

The problem of scheduling divisible loads on a distributed bus network with start-up costs is considered. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to obtain one-round installment load distribution solutions by utilizing multiple data transfer streams. We demonstrate how our proposed algorithm works by means of multiple illustrative examples. We compare the makespan generated by our proposed algorithm with the others in difference cases. We conclude that our proposed algorithm can generate better makespans than others. The analysis provides deeper understanding of scheduling divisible loads in the more realistic model, which will allow us to design more efficient algorithms.
An Empirical Investigation on Text-Based Communication in Distributed Requirements Workshops
Authors: Fabio Calefato, Daniela Damian, Filippo Lanubile
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (2007)

Among the software development activities, requirements engineering is one of the most communication-intensive and then, its effectiveness is greatly constrained by the geographical distance between stakeholders. For this reason, the need to identify the appropriate task/technology fits to support teams of geographically dispersed stakeholders plays a key role for coping with the lack of physical proximity when developing requirements. In this paper we report on an empirical study that assessed the use of synchronous text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops, as compared to face-to-face (F2F), and the effects of computer-mediated communication (CMC), with respects to the different tasks of distributed requirements elicitation and negotiation. First results show that, in terms of satisfaction with performance, CMC elicitation is a better task/technology fit than CMC negotiation. Furthermore, the general preference for F2F over CMC is due to the strong preference for the F2F negotiation fit over the CMC counterpart.
BlogScope: a system for online analysis of high volume text streams
Authors: Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas
Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases (2007)

We present BlogScope (www.blogscope.net), a system for online analysis of temporally ordered streaming text, currently applied to the analysis of the Blogosphere. The system currently tracks over ten million blogs and handles hundreds of thousands of updates daily. BlogScope is an information discovery and text analysis system that offers a set of unique features. Such features include, spatio-temporal analysis of blogs, flexible navigation of the Blogosphere through information bursts, keyword correlations and burst synopsis, as well as enhanced ranking functions for improved query answer relevance. We describe the system, its design and the features of the current version of BlogScope.
A New Level Set Method for Image Segmentation Integrated with FCM
Authors: Zhenping Xie, Shitong Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery - Volume 04 (2007)

It is well known that fuzzy clustering and level set are two fundamental methods for image segmentation. The former focuses on the statistical properties of image features, while the latter aims to acquire the good geometrical continuity of segmentation boundaries. Obviously, two kinds of methods may complement each other. Inspired by this idea, a new level set model integrated with fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering FCMLS is presented in this paper, where three new strategies are proposed. FCMLS has some remarkable characteristics and better performance in some sense. Furthermore, it can be proved that the new strategies are also available for integrating many popular fuzzy clustering algorithms into various level set models. The results on theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrate the above conclusions on new model.
Optimal selection of the service rate for a finite input source fuzzy queuing system
Authors: María José Pardo, David de la Fuente
Venue: Fuzzy Sets and Systems (2008)

Finite input source queuing models have a wide range of applications in many practical situations and are frequently found in machine maintenance and repair operations. Owing to uncontrollable factors, finite input source queuing problems parameters may contain uncertainty. That is why to begin with, in this paper it is proposed the analysis, development and design of a fuzzy queuing model with finite input source in which the arrival pattern as well as the service pattern follow an exponential distribution under uncertain parameter. In order to design the system, the established optimization criterion consists in determining the optimal number of servers so as to minimize the expected total cost function per unit time. To choose among uncertain alternatives, three techniques to make decisions under uncertainty are proposed. This type of systems has a finite waiting line. As a result, the system of differential equations that governs the model's behaviour consists of a finite number of equations. In the second place, this feature of the finite input source queuing systems enables us to bring forward in this paper two new contributions: (i) in the first one the following doubt has been raised and solved: if the convergence of the probabilities p@?"i(t) obtained from the fuzzy differential equations that govern the behaviour of the finite source system is worked out; does the result match the steady-state fuzzy probabilities obtained by applying Zadeh's Extension Principle to the classic queuing model?; and (ii) it has been performed a fuzzy simulation experiment on the differential equations using Bontempi's Qua. Si. III algorithm. This enables us to know the time evolution of the probabilities p@?"i(t) and its convergence on the one hand. On the other we can compare the results of the simulation to those analytically obtained by applying Zadeh's Extension Principle. This way the validity of the proposed procedure for the simulation is verified by means of the theoretical results. The extension of queuing decision models to fuzzy environments enables the decision maker to obtain more informing results and wider knowledge on the behaviour of the system, since the results obtained in the fuzzy queuing model are fuzzy subsets containing the whole initial information, that is why the finite input source queuing models with uncertain data can be of more use and can have a broader range of applications.
Automatic call section segmentation for contact-center calls
Authors: Youngja Park
Venue: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management (2007)

This paper presents a SVM (Support Vector Machine) classification system which divides contact-center call transcripts into "Greeting", "Question", "Refine", "Research", "Resolution", "Closing" and "Out-of-topic" sections. This call section segmentation is useful to improve search and retrieval functions and to provide more detailed statistics on calls. We use an off-the-shelf automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to generate call transcripts from recorded calls between customers and service representatives. We first classify an individual utterance into a call section by applying the SVM classifier and then merge adjacent utterances classified into a same call section. We experiment with the proposed system on 100 automatically transcribed calls. The 10-fold cross validation shows 87.2% classification accuracy. We also compare the proposed algorithm with two other approaches - the most frequent section only method and a maximum entropy-based segmentation. The evaluation shows that our system's accuracy is 12% higher than the first baseline system and 6% higher than the second baseline system respectively.
How negative emotion enhances the visual specificity of a memory
Authors: Elizabeth A. Kensinger, Rachel J. Garoff-Eaton, Daniel L. Schacter
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2007)

Some studies have suggested that emotion primarily increases memory for “gist,” and does not enhance memory for detail. There are, however, some instances in which negative objects (e.g., snake, grenade) are remembered with more visual detail than neutral objects (e.g., barometer, blender). In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we examined the encoding processes that lead a person to remember the exact visual details of negative and neutral objects, and to remember which of two decisions were made about the objects (a size decision or an animacy decision). The enhancement in memory for a negative item's visual details appeared to result from enhanced visual processing: The right fusiform gyrus, a region known to be critical for processing exemplar-specific details, showed a greater extent and magnitude of activity during the successful encoding of negative objects. Activity in the right amygdala also corresponded with memory for visual detail, although it did not relate to memory for the task performed with the item. These data provide strong evidence that engagement of some amygdalar regions can correspond with enhanced memory for certain types of details, but does not ensure successful encoding of all contextual details.
An Evolutionary Multi-centers Based Dynamical Clustering Algorithm
Authors: Hongyun Ye, Zhiwei Ni
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Natural Computation - Volume 05 (2007)

Clustering method is one of the important data mining techniques which is used to group objects into a pre-specified number of clusters. However to many datasets it is usually hard for users to estimate correctly its number of clusters. To solve the problem of existing clustering algorithms, a multi- center based evolutionary clustering method is proposed in this paper. To dynamically determine the number of clusters well and robustly on irregularly structured datasets, multiple centers are assigned to each cluster and each individual is evaluated with two modified fitness functions, i.e. heuristic intra-cluster variation fitness function and connectivity fitness function. The corresponding evolutionary operators are designed. Experimental results on the UCI datasets and artificial datasets show that our proposed method can obtain good clustering results and outperforms other comparative methods.