ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
On estimating the conditional expected shortfall
Authors: Franco Peracchi, Andrei V. Tanase
Venue: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (2008)

Unlike the value at risk, the expected shortfall is a coherent measure of risk. In this paper, we discuss estimation of the expected shortfall of a random variable Yt with special reference to the case when auxiliary information is available in the form of a set of predictors Xt. We consider three classes of estimators of the conditional expected shortfall of Yt given Xt: a class of fully non-parametric estimators and two classes of analog estimators based, respectively, on the empirical conditional quantile function and the empirical conditional distribution function. We study their sampling properties by means of a set of Monte Carlo experiments and analyze their performance in an empirical application to financial data. Copyright &copy; 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
HPC Opportunities and Challenges in e-Science
Authors: Fabrizio Gagliardi
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Computational Science, Part I (2008)

In the last few years a new paradigm has emerged in science: extensively use of simulation techniques and software modeling, running on a distributed high performance computing electronic infrastructure. This paradigm is referred to as electronic Science or e-Science. Besides computer simulation, it uses huge amounts of distributed and shared data captured by instruments or sensors and/or stored in databases, analyzed to provide new results for science. This distributed HPC and data ecosystem enables the sharing of acquired knowledge, remote access to resources and above of all a world-wide scientific collaboration.
Making Reading Experience Rich with Augmented Book Cover and Bookmark
Authors: Nobuhiro Inagawa, Kaori Fujinami
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th Asia-Pacific conference on Computer-Human Interaction (2008)

In this paper, we describe the design and the prototype implementation of a virtual illustration system. An ordinal book is augmented to provide a reader with value added experiences while keeping the original sense of utilization intact, e.g. a texture of paper. Multimedia information is automatically presented based on the page s/he is reading. The electronic version of a book is not needed. Anyone can create and share contents like posting a book review on a blog. Two types of add-on devices for page-flipping detection have been investigated, where a book cover and a bookmark with two 3-axes accelerometers have been augmented. A preliminary usability test shows the concept mostly preferred. The accuracy of flipping detection for a book cover and a bookmark version is 88.1% and 92.5%, respectively.
Complementarity Systems in Constrained Steady-State Optimal Control
Authors: A. Jokic, M. Lazar, P. P. Bosch
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (2008)

This paper presents a solution to the problem of regulating a general nonlinear dynamical system to a time-varying economically optimal operating point. The system is characterized by a set of exogenous inputs as an abstraction of time-varying loads and disturbances. The economically optimal operating point is implicitly defined as a solution to a given constrained convex optimization problem, which is related to steady-state operation. The system outputs and the exogenous inputs represent respectively the decision variables and the parameters in the optimization problem. Complementarity systems are employed as building blocks to construct a dynamic controller that solves the considered regulation problem. The complementarity solution arises naturally via a dynamic extension of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions for the steady-state related optimization problem.
Game `Life' with Anticipation Property
Authors: Alexander Makarenko, Boris Goldengorin, Dmitry Krushinsky
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Cellular Automata for Reseach and Industry (2008)

Mechanisms of endowing cellular automata (CA) models with anticipation property are considered. As a background for investigation a widely known Conway's game of `Life' was chosen. Even within this simple model, introduction of anticipation has a crucial impact on the behavior of the system, resulting in emergence of multiple co-existing solutions. The inherent behavioral templates of classical `Life' (fixed point, cycle, chaos) are valid for its anticipatory version; however, they develop at a level of sets of configurations. Extensive computational simulations were held and the most eloquent results are presented.
KeYmaera: A Hybrid Theorem Prover for Hybrid Systems (System Description)
Authors: André Platzer, Jan-David Quesel
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on Automated Reasoning (2008)

KeYmaera is a hybrid verification tool for hybrid systems that combines deductive, real algebraic, and computer algebraic prover technologies. It is an automated and interactive theorem prover for a natural specification and verification logic for hybrid systems. KeYmaera supports differential dynamic logic, which is a real-valued first-order dynamic logic for hybrid programs, a program notation for hybrid automata. For automating the verification process, KeYmaera implements a generalized free-variable sequent calculus and automatic proof strategies that decompose the hybrid system specification symbolically. To overcome the complexity of real arithmetic, we integrate real quantifier elimination following an iterative background closure strategy. Our tool is particularly suitable for verifying parametric hybrid systems and has been used successfully for verifying collision avoidance in case studies from train control and air traffic management.
Modeling Imitational Behavior Via Social Comparison Theory
Authors: Natalie Fridman, Gal A. Kaminka
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (2007)

Modeling crowd behaviors is an important challenge for intelligent virtual agents. We propose a general cognitive model of simulating crowd behaviors, based on Festinger's Social Comparison Theory (SCT), a prominent social psychology theory. We present the use of the SCT model (using the Soar cognitive architecture) in the generation of imitational behavior in loosely-coupled groups and show that SCT generates behavior more in-tune with human crowd behavior.
Automated information extraction from web pages using presentation and domain regularities
Authors: Srinivas Vadrevu
Venue:  (2008)

The vast amount of data on the World Wide Web poses many challenges in devising effective methodologies to search, access and integrate the information. Recently many information extraction systems have been proposed to (semi) automatically extract structured information from the Web. However, the applicability of these systems is limited only to a specific portion of the Web that is generated from underlying databases with a common presentation template. Some information extraction systems also require human assistance thereby limiting their scalability. Hence, the biggest challenge of automated information extraction from all kinds of Web documents still remains open. Even though the Web is composed of several heterogeneous sources, their data and metadata presentation adheres to certain regularities. This dissertation employs such presentation and metadata regularities to automatically extract structured information from Web data. A novel semantic partitioning information extraction algorithm is described that utilizes the presentation and domain metadata regularities to organize the content in a Web page into hierarchical group structures by using grammar induction techniques. This algorithm transforms Web pages into semantically represented XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents where the tag names denote the metadata labels and the elements denote the data value labels. The semi-structured XML documents that are extracted from Web pages facilitate efficient indexing of the content in Web pages by their metadata and can be used to provide structured query support over Web pages. It is shown how the semantic partitioning algorithm can be utilized to build a semantic search engine that can automatically reformulate the given keyword query into XQuery language that can be processed over the XML documents. The resulting search engine achieves high precision by retrieving the relevant fragments of the structured parts of the Web page as results instead of pointer URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) where the results can be found. This dissertation also discusses how the proposed semantic partitioning algorithm can be utilized to mine taxonomies and their instances from various collections of Web pages. The technical details of the algorithms are described and empirical evaluation performed on diverse collections of Web pages is presented to demonstrate their efficacy and scalability.
Modeling Moods in BBC Programs Based on Emotional Context
Authors: Michael Kai Petersen, Andrius Butkus
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th European conference on Changing Television Environments (2008)

The increasing amounts of streaming and downloadable me- dia becoming available in converged digital broadcast and next genera- tion mobile broadband networks will require intelligent interfaces capable of personalizing the selection of content according to user preferences and moods. We propose an approach to automatically generate atmosphere-like metadata from BBC synopsis descriptions, by applying LSA latent semantic analysis to define the degree of similarity between textual program descriptions and emotional tags in a semantic space.
Automated cell analysis in 2D and 3D: A comparative study
Authors: Michael G. Meyer, Mark Fauver, J. Richard Rahn, Thomas Neumann, Florence W. Patten, Eric J. Seibel, Alan C. Nelson
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2009)

Optical projection tomographic microscopy is a technique that allows 3D analysis of individual cells. Theoretically, 3D morphometry would more accurately capture cellular features than 2D morphometry. To evaluate this thesis, classifiers based on 3D reconstructions of cell nuclei were compared with 2D images from the same nuclei. Human adenocarcinoma and normal lung epithelium cells were used. Testing demonstrated a three-fold reduction in the false negative rate for adenocarcinoma detection in 3D versus 2D at the same high specificity. We conclude that 3D imaging will potentially expand the horizon for automated cell analysis with broad applications in the biological sciences.
Socializing in mobile gaming
Authors: Sheila A. Paul, Marianne Jensen, Chui Yin Wong, Chee Weng Khong
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (2008)

Currently the most prevalent format for mobile gaming is the single-player variety, where users interact with the game's artificial intelligence within a number of genres such as sports, action, racing, and puzzle games, etc. The users install the game and play it for entertainment and to pass the time until repetitiveness and boredom prompts them to stop playing that game and switch to another one. We would like to suggest the incorporation of socializing elements into mobile game concepts, in order to enrich the user experience and allow users to share this experience with other members of their readily available social networks. Empirical studies with Malaysian and Thai youths were conducted to gain insights on behavior in playing videogames in general and playing mobile games to be specific. These studies identified socializing as one of the key drivers in playing these games. The results were shared and resulted in a jointly collaborated interface design project to explore the theme of 'socializing in mobile games'. Interface design students created new game concepts incorporating elements of socializing. Two of these mobile design projects were shown as examples to illustrate the mobile game concepts and also to identify the common themes in the context of socializing within mobile games.
A Dataflow-Oriented Atomicity and Provenance System for Pipelined Scientific Workflows
Authors: Liqiang Wang, Shiyong Lu, Xubo Fei, Jeffrey Ram
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computational Science, Part III: ICCS 2007 (2007)

Scientific workflows have gained great momentum in recent years due to their critical roles in e-Science and cyberinfrastructure applications. However, some tasks of a scientific workflow might fail during execution. A domain scientist might require a region of a scientific workflow to be "atomic". Data provenance, which determines the source data that are used to produce a data item, is also essential to scientific workflows. In this paper, we propose: (i) an architecture for scientific workflow management systems that supports both provenance and atomicity; (ii) a dataflow-oriented atomicity model that supports the notions of commit and abort; and (iii) a dataflow-oriented provenance model that, in addition to supporting existing provenance graphs and queries, also supports queries related to atomicity and failure.
Fast prototyping and indirect adaptive GPC temperature control of a class of passive HVAC
Authors: Rousseau Tawegoum
Venue: Proceedings of the WSEAS International Conference on Applied Computing Conference (2008)

This study focuses firstly on the numerical investigation of an air conditioning unit prototype developed to guarantee a microclimate with controlled temperature and relative humidity set points for crop growth chambers. Numerical techniques based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) were implemented to analyze the flow characteristics of the mixed air produced by the device. Simulations disclose a non-linear relationship between the air flow rate and the aperture opening, and also show that the mixing zone was not perfect but could be improved by the addition of baffles. The promising results obtained from CFD were used to improve the automation of the device for potential application in closed greenhouses. Secondly, the indirect adaptive generalized predictive control strategy (IAGPC) with a decentralized architecture was used to control the temperature of the air conditioning unit. As the process involves time-varying, the use of a recursive estimation approach with a fixed forget factor was adopted to estimate in real time the system parameters, and to adapt simultaneously the GPC controller parameters. In order to achieve a local and global efficient performance, the proposed decentralized IAGPC architecture was applied to two principal subsystems, which compose the global unit. A significant real time experimental improvement in the system performance is observed on temperature control for a wide range of operating points.
Rationality and traffic attraction: incentives for honest path announcements in bgp
Authors: Sharon Goldberg, Shai Halevi, Aaron D. Jaggard, Vijay Ramachandran, Rebecca N. Wright
Venue: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2008)

We study situations in which autonomous systems (ASes) may have incentives to send BGP announcements differing from the AS-level paths that packets traverse in the data plane. Prior work on this issue assumed that ASes seek only to obtain the best possible outgoing path for their traffic. In reality, other factors can influence a rational AS's behavior. Here we consider a more natural model, in which an AS is also interested in attracting incoming traffic (e.g., because other ASes pay it to carry their traffic). We ask what combinations of BGP enhancements and restrictions on routing policies can ensure that ASes have no incentive to lie about their data-plane paths. We find that protocols like S-BGP alone are insufficient, but that S-BGP does suffice if coupled with additional (quite unrealistic) restrictions on routing policies. Our game-theoretic analysis illustrates the high cost of ensuring that the ASes honestly announce data-plane paths in their BGP path announcements.
Multi-user MIMO testbed
Authors: Peter Luethi, Markus Wenk, Thomas Koch, Wolfgang Fichtner, Michael Lerjen, Norbert Felber
Venue: Proceedings of the third ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation and characterization (2008)

This paper provides an overview of a real-time multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication testbed designed for demonstration and assessment of real-world wireless communication aspects. The testbed is built on a modular hardware platform consisting of three different boards and incorporates a MIMO-OFDM-based physical (PHY) layer, an embedded media access controller (MAC), and an Ethernet interface. Due to the modular design of the testbed, it can be used for both, real-time and offline processing experiments with real-world aspects.
On Weyl-Heisenberg orbits of equiangular lines
Authors: Mahdad Khatirinejad
Venue: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics: An International Journal (2008)

An element $\mathbf {z}\in \mathbb {CP}^{d-1}$ is called fiducial if {gz:g¿G} is a set of lines with only one angle between each pair, where G ¿¿ d ×¿ d is the one-dimensional finite Weyl-Heisenberg group modulo its centre. We give a new characterization of fiducial vectors. Using this characterization, we show that the existence of almost flat fiducial vectors implies the existence of certain cyclic difference sets. We also prove that the construction of fiducial vectors in prime dimensions 7 and 19 due to Appleby (J. Math. Phys. 46(5):052107, 2005) does not generalize to other prime dimensions (except for possibly a set with density zero). Finally, we use our new characterization to construct fiducial vectors in dimension 7 and 19 whose coordinates are real.
The 3DVDM Approach: A Case Study with Clickstream Data
Authors: Michael H. Böhlen, Linas Bukauskas, Arturas Mazeika, Peer Mylov
Venue: Visual Data Mining: Theory, Techniques and Tools for Visual Analytics (2008)

Clickstreams are among the most popular data sources because Web servers automatically record each action and the Web log entries promise to add up to a comprehensive description of behaviors of users. Clickstreams, however, are large and raise a number of unique challenges with respect to visual data mining. At the technical level the huge amount of data requires scalable solutions and limits the presentation to summary and model data. Equally challenging is the interpretation of the data at the conceptual level. Many analysis tools are able to produce different types of statistical charts. However, the step from statistical charts to comprehensive information about customer behavior is still largely unresolved. We propose a density surface based analysis of 3D data that uses state-of-the-art interaction techniques to explore the data at various granularities.
Consciousness and Computers
Authors: Neville Holmes
Venue: Computer (2007)

The conscious mind is not mysterious, just misunderstood.
The Coevolution of Robot Behavior and Central Action Selection
Authors: Fernando Montes-Gonzalez
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international work-conference on Nature Inspired Problem-Solving Methods in Knowledge Engineering: Interplay Between Natural and Artificial Computation, Part II (2007)

The evolution of an effective central model of action selection and behavioral modules have already been revised in previous papers. The central model has been set to resolve a foraging task, where specific modules for exploring the environment and for handling the collection and delivery of cylinders have been developed. Evolution has been used to adjust the selection parameters of the model and the neural weights of the exploring behaviors. However, in this paper the focus is on the use of genetic algorithms for coevolving both the selection parameters and the exploring behaviors. The main goal of this study is to reduce the number of decisions made by the human designer.
Reconstruction of Markov Random Fields from Samples: Some Observations and Algorithms
Authors: Guy Bresler, Elchanan Mossel, Allan Sly
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international workshop, APPROX 2008, and 12th international workshop, RANDOM 2008 on Approximation, Randomization and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Techniques (2008)

Markov random fields are used to model high dimensional distributions in a number of applied areas. Much recent interest has been devoted to the reconstruction of the dependency structure from independent samples from the Markov random fields. We analyze a simple algorithm for reconstructing the underlying graph defining a Markov random field on n nodes and maximum degree d given observations. We show that under mild non-degeneracy conditions it reconstructs the generating graph with high probability using ¿(d logn) samples which is optimal up to a multiplicative constant. Our results seem to be the first results for general models that guarantee that the generating model is reconstructed. Furthermore, we provide an explicit O(d n d + 2 logn) running time bound. In cases where the measure on the graph has correlation decay, the running time is O(n 2 logn) for all fixed d. In the full-length version we also discuss the effect of observing noisy samples. There we show that as long as the noise level is low, our algorithm is effective. On the other hand, we construct an example where large noise implies non-identifiability even for generic noise and interactions. Finally, we briefly show that in some cases, models with hidden nodes can also be recovered.
Data Streaming with Affinity Propagation
Authors: Xiangliang Zhang, Cyril Furtlehner, Michèle Sebag
Venue: Proceedings of the European conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - Part II (2008)

This paper proposed StrAP (Streaming AP), extending Affinity Propagation (AP) to data steaming. AP, a new clustering algorithm, extracts the data items, or exemplars, that best represent the dataset using a message passing method. Several steps are made to build StrAP. The first one (Weighted AP) extends AP to weighted items with no loss of generality. The second one (Hierarchical WAP) is concerned with reducing the quadratic AP complexity, by applying AP on data subsets and further applying Weighted AP on the exemplars extracted from all subsets. Finally StrAP extends Hierarchical WAP to deal with changes in the data distribution. Experiments on artificial datasets, on the Intrusion Detection benchmark (KDD99) and on a real-world problem, clustering the stream of jobs submitted to the EGEE grid system, provide a comparative validation of the approach.
Hierarchical Decision Making Framework for Evaluation and Improvement of Composite Systems (Example for Building)
Authors: Mark Sh. Levin, Moshe A. Danieli
Venue: Informatica (2005)

The article describes a hierarchical decision making framework for the evaluation and improvement/redesign of composite systems. The framework is based on Hierarchical Morphological Multicriteria Design (HMMD) and corresponding morphological clique problem which realize &ldquo;partitioning/synthesis macroheuristic&rdquo;. The system evaluation process consists in hierarchical integration of expert judgment (as ordinal estimates): a method of integration tables or the above-mentioned morphological approach. As a result, ordinal multi-state classification is realized. The system improvement/redesign process is examined as the selection and planning of redesign operations while taking into account operations attributes (e.g., required resources, effectiveness) and binary relations (equivalence, complementarity, precedence) on the operation sets. For modeling the system improvement process several combinatorial optimization models are used (knapsack problem, multiple choice problem, etc.) including HMMD. The suggested approach is illustrated by realistic numerical example for two-floor building. This applied problem is examined from the viewpoint of earthquake engineering.