ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The guide to IT contracting
Authors: Samuel Blankson
Venue:  (2007)

The Guide to I.T. Contracting' is a complete guide to contracting for all I.T. contractors and anyone planning on entering this exciting and lucrative market. The book covers how to form a Limited Company, using an umbrella company, job hunting, interviewing, improving the chances of contract renewal, rate negotiation and rate setting, training and certification, tax minimisation, tax efficient investing, contracting abroad, contractor's etiquette, selecting a bank, selecting an accountant, buying insurance cover, buying a home as a contractor and much more. 'The Guide to I.T. Contracting' is specifically written for ambitious I.T. contractors, offers many insider 'secrets' and is full of useful and practical information. 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 mobile agent based framework for web services
Authors: Mohammed Ketel
Venue: Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference (2009)

Web Services are emerging as a major technology to enable dynamic service discovery, composition, and invocation. On the other hand, software agents provide a distinctive capability in mediating user goals to determine service invocations. Web services and agent technologies have different problems that limit their functionality when applied separately. It is widely recognized that integrating these two technologies in a joint environment can overcome their problems while strengthening their advantages. There exists a communication gap between them. The major reason is that agents are not compatible with widely accepted standards of Web services. In response to the mentioned problems, this paper presents a mobile agent framework for Web services integration.
Techniques and Tools for the Design and Implementation of Enterprise Information Systems
Authors: Angappa Gunasekaran
Venue:  (2007)

Inter-organizational information systems play a major role in improving communication and integration between partnering firms to achieve an integrated global supply chain. Current research in enterprise resource planning and electronic commerce is crucial to maintaining efficient supply chain management and organizational competitiveness. Techniques and Tools for the Design & Implementation of Enterprise Information Systems enables libraries to provide an invaluable resource to academicians and practitioners in fields such as operations management, Web engineering, information technology, and management information systems, providing insight into the effective design and implementation of enterprise information systems to improve communication and integration between partnering firms to achieve an integrated global supply chain. 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
Exact boundary conditions for time-harmonic wave propagation in locally perturbed periodic media
Authors: Sonia Fliss, Patrick Joly
Venue: Applied Numerical Mathematics (2009)

We consider the solution of the Helmholtz equation with absorption -@Du(x)-n(x)^2(@w^2+i@e)u(x)=f(x), x=(x,y), in a 2D periodic medium @W=R^2. We assume that f(x) is supported in a bounded domain @W^i and that n(x) is periodic in the two directions in @W^e=@W@?@W^i. We show how to obtain exact boundary conditions on the boundary of @W^i, @S"S that will enable us to find the solution on @W^i. Then the solution can be extended in @W in a straightforward manner from the values on @S"S. The particular case of medium with symmetries is exposed. The exact boundary conditions are found by solving a family of waveguide problems.
Taking account of privacy when designing cloud computing services
Authors: Siani Pearson
Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing (2009)

Privacy is an important issue for cloud computing, both in terms of legal compliance and user trust, and needs to be considered at every phase of design. In this paper the privacy challenges that software engineers face when targeting the cloud as their production environment to offer services are assessed, and key design principles to address these are suggested.
Workflow for Oracle E-Business Suite
Authors: Roel Hogendoorn
Venue:  (2007)

This book explains in the purpose of Oracle Workflow in the Oracle e-Business Suite. It is explained via step-by-step examples, with lots of screenshots. Workflow is not difficult, if you have good examples. And this book is packed with clear examples that you can easily copy for your purpose. The book can be used in a classroom, for giving a course. All chapters have exercises for up to ten students.
Iris Extraction Based on Intensity Gradient and Texture Difference
Authors: Guodong Guo, Michael J. Jones
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (2008)

Biometrics has become more and more important in security applications. In comparison with many other biometric features, iris recognition has very high recognition accuracy. Successful iris recognition depends largely on correct iris localization, however, the performance of current techniques for iris localization still leaves room for improvement. To improve the iris localization performance, we propose a novel method that optimally utilizes both the intensity gradient and texture difference. Experimental results demonstrate that our new approach gives much better results than previous approaches. In order to make the iris boundary more accurate, we present a new issue called model selection and propose a method to choose between ellipse/circle and circle/circle models. Furthermore, we propose a dome model to compute mask images and remove eyelid occlusions in the unwrapped images rather than in the original eye images with a least commitment strategy.
Professional and end-user-driven service creation in the SPICE platform
Authors: Olaf Droegehorn, Immanuel Konig, Goulven Le-Jeune, Julien Cupillard, Mariano Belaunde, Erno Kovacs
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (2008)

Services are becoming the foundation of the Telecommunication and Internet world. The ability to fast and cost-efficient create, provision and manage services will become a driving force in the overall competition. A major step forward for a rich service environment is to give end-users the ability to create their own services. The SPICE platform provides an environment for future converged services. Using the SPICE tool chain for service creation professional developers can build services combining Internet and Telecommunication service enablers. End-user driven service creation explore the creativity and needs of the real users. We explain how professional services can be created in such a way that they stimulate the uptake of end-user services. Finally, we explain the design aspect of privacy preserving service enablers which will allow network operator to take a central role in the overall service economy while preserving essential requirements like privacy.
Delay-dependent stability analysis and controller synthesis for Markovian jump systems with state and input delays
Authors: Bing Chen, Hongyi Li, Peng Shi, Chong Lin, Qi Zhou
Venue: Information Sciences: an International Journal (2009)

This paper focuses on the problem of delay-dependent robust stochastic stability analysis and controller synthesis for Markovian jump systems with state and input delays. It is assumed that the delays are constant and unknown, but their upper bounds are known. By constructing a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and introducing some appropriate slack matrices, new delay-dependent stochastic stability and stabilization conditions are proposed by means of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). An important feature of the results proposed here is that all the robust stability and stabilization conditions are dependent on the upper bound of the delays. Memoryless state feedback controllers are designed such that the closed-loop system is robustly stochastically stable. Some numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Resource co-allocation for large-scale distributed environments
Authors: Claris Castillo, George N. Rouskas, Khaled Harfoush
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th ACM international symposium on High performance distributed computing (2009)

Advances in the development of large scale distributed computing systems such as Grids and Computing Clouds have intensified the need for developing scheduling algorithms capable of allocating multiple resources simultaneously. In principle, the required resources may be allocated by sequentially scheduling each resource individually. However, such a solution can be computationally expensive, hence inappropriate for time-sensitive applications, and may lead to deadlocks. In this work we present an efficient online algorithm for co-allocating resources that also provides support for advance reservations. The algorithm utilizes data structures specifically designed to organize the temporal availability of resources, and implements co-allocation through efficient range searches that identify all available resources simultaneously. We use simulations driven by real workloads to show that the co-allocation algorithm scales to systems with large numbers of users and resources, and we perform an in-depth comparative analysis against existing batch scheduling mechanisms. Our findings indicate that the online scheduling algorithms may achieve higher utilization while providing smaller delays and better QoS guarantees without adding much complexity.
A step counter service for Java-enabled devices using a built-in accelerometer
Authors: Martin Mladenov, Michael Mock
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Context-Aware Middleware and Services: affiliated with the 4th International Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware (COMSWARE 2009) (2009)

The presence of 3D acceleration sensors in mobile devices has already raised a new range of context-aware applications, in particular in the sports and wellness sector. In this paper, we present an accelerometer-based step counter middleware for J2ME-enabled smartphones to simplify the development of activity aware applications, creating an abstraction layer between the client and the signal processing algorithms and raw sensor access. The service provides information about the step count, stop detection and changes in the phone's orientation, independently of the phone's location on the human body. The software package runs natively on Symbian S60 phones, providing an interface to J2ME applications and has been validated experimentally on a Nokia's N95 smartphone.
Aggregation Dynamics in Overlay Networks and Their Implications for Self-Organized Distributed Applications
Authors: Fabrice Saffre, Richard Tateson, José Halloy, Mark Shackleton, Jean Louis Deneubourg
Venue: The Computer Journal (2009)

In this paper, we investigate the global self-aggregation dynamics arising from local decision-based rewiring of an overlay network, used as an abstraction for an autonomic service-oriented architecture. We measure the ability of a selected set of local rules to foster self-organization of what is originally a random graph into a structured network. Scalability issues with respect to the key parameters of system size and diversity are extensively discussed. Conflicting goals are introduced, in the form of a population of nodes actively seeking to acquire neighbours of a type different from their own, resulting in decreased local homogeneity. We show that a ‘secondary’ self-organization process ensues, whereby nodes spontaneously cluster according to their implicit objective. Finally, we introduce dynamic goals by making the preferred neighbour type a function of the local characteristics of a simulated workload. We demonstrate that in this context, an overlay rewiring process based purely on local decisions and interactions can result in efficient load-balancing without central planning. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the design of future distributed applications, the likely influence of other factors and of extreme parameter values on the ability of the system to self-organize and the potential improvements to our framework.
Robust Division in Clustering of Streaming Time Series
Authors: Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, João Gama
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2008)

Online learning algorithms which address fast data streams should process examples at the rate they arrive, using a single scan of data and fixed memory, maintaining a decision model at any time and being able to adapt the model to the most recent data. These features yield the necessity of using approximate models. One problem that usually arises with approximate models is the definition of a minimum number of observations necessary to assure convergence, which implies a high risk since the system may have to decide based only on a small subset of the entire data. One approach is to apply techniques based on the Hoeffding bound to enforce decisions with a confidence level. In divisive clustering of time series, the goal is to find clusters of similar time series over time. In online approaches there are two decisions to make: when to split and how to assign variables to new clusters. We can define a confidence level to both the decision of splitting and the assignment of data variables to new clusters. Previous works have already addressed confident decisions on the moment of split. Our proposal is to include a confidence level to the assignment process. When a split point is reported, creating two new clusters, we can directly assign points which are confidently closer to one cluster than the other, having a different strategy for those variables which do not satisfy the confidence level. In this paper we propose to assign the unsure variables to a third cluster. Experimental evaluation is presented in the context of a recently proposed hierarchical algorithm, assessing the advantages of the proposal, revealing also advantages on memory usage reduction and processing speed. Although this proposal is evaluated under the scope of an existent method, it can be generalized to any divisive procedure.
Compositional dependence of work function and Fermi level position of the HfNx/SiO2 system
Authors: J. A. Rothschild, M. Eizenberg
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2009)

In situ Kelvin Probe (KP) measurements performed on HfN"x showed an increase of the vacuum work function as a function of N content from a value of 3.9eV (silicon conduction band edge) for pure Hf to a value of 5eV (silicon valence band edge) for x~2. In contrast, capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements showed that the effective work function increased only until x
A Hybrid Fuzzy Knowledge-Based Expert System and Genetic Algorithm for efficient selection and assignment of Material Handling Equipment
Authors: S. Hamid L. Mirhosseyni, Phil Webb
Venue: Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal (2009)

Material Handling (MH) is one of the key issues for every production site and has a great impact on manufacturing costs. The core concern in the design of a MH system is selecting the most suitable equipment for every MH operation and optimising them totally in order to attain an optimum solution. This paper presents a hybrid method for the selection and assignment of the most appropriate Material Handling Equipment (MHE). In the first phase, the system selects the most appropriate MHE types for every MH operation in a given application using a Fuzzy Knowledge-Based Expert System consisting of two sets of rules: Crisp Rules and Fuzzy Rules. In the second phase, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) searches throughout the feasible solution space, constituting of all possible combinations of the feasible equipment specified in the previous phase, in order to discover optimum solutions. The validity of the methodology developed in this paper is proved through the use of a real problem. Finally a comparison of the method with the other available publicised methods reveals the effectiveness of this hybrid approach.
1-D chaincode pattern matching for compression of Bi-level printed farsi and arabic textual images
Authors: Hadi Grailu, Mojtaba Lotfizad, Hadi Sadoghi-Yazdi
Venue: Image and Vision Computing (2009)

In some scripts, especially the Farsi/Arabic script, letters normally attach together and produce many different patterns, some of which are fully or partially similar. Detecting such patterns and exploiting them to reduce the library size, has a rather great effect on the compression ratio. In this paper, a lossy/lossless compression method is proposed for bi-level printed text images in archiving applications. For this, we propose a new 1-D pattern matching technique in the chain coding domain that uses the proposed technique of detecting the repetitive sub-signals in order to detect the fully or partially similar patterns. Experimental results show that the compression performance of the proposed method is considerably better than those of the existing bi-level printed text image compression methods as high as 1.8-4.2 times in the lossy case and 1.6-3.8 times in the lossless case at 300dpi.
Buckling of rectangular laminated composite thin plates subject to non-uniform in-plane loading: a differential quadrature approach
Authors: M. Mohieddin Ghomshei, H. Oulad Dameshghie
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Mathematical methods, computational techniques and intelligent systems (2008)

A computational technique known as differential quadrature method (DQM) is implemented for the fist time to analyze the nonlinear problem of the buckling of thin rectangular plates under non-uniform distributed in-plane loadings. The approach includes two steps: (1) solve a problem of in-plane elasticity to obtain the in-plane force resultants and (2) solve the buckling problem under the force distribution obtained in step (1). Solution procedures are performed numerically by discretizing the governing differential equations and B.C.'s using differential quadrature method. Applying the developed DQ model, the buckling loads are obtained for some examples, and the numerical results compared well with those available in the literature.
3D Facial Animation- Recreating human heads with virtual skin, bones, and muscles
Authors: Kolja Khler
Venue:  (2007)

The creation of computer-animated human faces is a long-standing and challenging problem since the early 1970s. There are numerous approaches to facial animation, but to this day no general-purpose system exists that solves the problem in a manner satisfying the needs of all practical applications. An obvious approach to achieve generality is the simulation of the inner workings of a real face. The ultimate goal is to have the full range of conformation and expressiveness in the face emerge "naturally" through precise modeling of the anatomical structure and accurate simulation of tissue properties. This has so far only been realized in parts, and no current implementation catches all the intricacies of the human face. This text describes an approach for building and animating virtual head models with anatomical structure, animated in a physics-based manner by use of muscle contractions that in turn cause skin deformations. 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
System Identification and Discrete Nonlinear Control of Miniature Helicopters Using Backstepping
Authors: Ioannis A. Raptis, Kimon P. Valavanis, Wilfrido A. Moreno
Venue: Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems (2009)

This paper deals with the dual problem of system identification and control of small scale unmanned helicopters. Although most controller designs are in continuous time, this paper considers the discrete time dynamics of the helicopter. A simple Recursive Least Square algorithm is used for parameter identification in the time domain, the objective being the derivation of system dynamics that are both minimal in complexity and accurate for control design in discrete time. The helicopter's nonlinear rigid body equations of motion are considered. The necessity to encapsulate the nonlinear terms of the rigid body's motion is very important since it provides a wider dynamical description of the flight envelope. A controller is designed based on a discrete time backstepping technique, for the tracking of predefined position and yaw trajectories. The developed controller provides design freedom in the convergence rate for each state variable of the cascade structure. This is of particular interest since control of the convergence rate in each level of the cascade structure provides better flight results. Both the identification part and control performance are evaluated using a commercial available flight simulator X-Plane ©.
Comparison of interpolation methods for depth to groundwater and its temporal and spatial variations in the Minqin oasis of northwest China
Authors: Yue Sun, Shaozhong Kang, Fusheng Li, Lu Zhang
Venue: Environmental Modelling Software (2009)

Severe water shortages and dramatic declines in groundwater levels have resulted in environmental deterioration in the Minqin oasis, an arid region of northwest China. Understanding temporal and spatial variations in the depth to groundwater in the region is important for developing management strategies. Depth to groundwater records for 48 observation wells in the Minqin oasis were available for 22 years from 1981 to 2003, allowing us to compare three different interpolation methods based on three selected years (1981, 1990, 2002) as starting points. The three methods were inverse distance weighting (IDW), radial basis function (RBF), and kriging (including ordinary kriging (OK), simple kriging (SK), and universal kriging (UK)). Cross-validation was applied to evaluate the accuracy of the various methods, and two indices - the correlation coefficient (R^2) and the root mean squared error (RMSE) - were used to compare the interpolation methods. Another two indices - deviation of estimation errors (@s) and 95% prediction interval (95PPI) - were used to assess prediction errors. Comparison of interpolated values with observed values indicates that simple kriging is the optimal method for interpolating depth to groundwater in this region: it had the lowest standard deviation of estimation errors and smallest 95% prediction interval (95PPI). By using the simple kriging method and an autoregressive model for depth to groundwater based on the data from 1981 to 2003, this work revealed systematic temporal and spatial variations in the depth to groundwater in the Minqin oasis. The water table has declined rapidly over the past 22 years, with the average depth to groundwater increasing from 4.95m in 1981 to 14.07m in 2002. We attribute the decline in the water table to excessive extraction and to decreases in irrigation channel leakage.