ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
On optimal resampling of view and illumination dependent textures
Authors: Jiří Filip, Michael J. Chantler, Michal Haindl
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization (2008)

The use of illumination and view dependent textural information is one way to capture the realistic appearance of genuine materials. One example of such data is the bidirectional texture function. The main disadvantage of these data, that makes their further application very difficult, is their massive size. Perceptually-based methods can determine optimal uniform resampling of these data that allows considerable reduction of a number of view and illumination dependent samples. In this paper we propose to achieve this goal by means of a psychophysical study, comparing original data rendering with rendering of their uniformly resampled version over the hemisphere of illumination and view dependent textural measurements. The resampling was done separately for elevation and azimuthal angles as well as in illumination and view space. Our results shown promising consequences for compression and modeling algorithms using this kind of massive data.
A Relation-Algebraic Theory of Bisimulations
Authors: Michael Winter
Venue: Fundamenta Informaticae (2008)

In this paper we develop an algebraic/categorical theory of bisimulations using relational methods. We define a general notion, which is capable of handeling different version of bisimilarity in a common context. Furthermore, the approach relates bisimulations with the notion of a covering known from the theory of graphs and their applications in topology and complex analysis.
SystemCoDesigner: automatic design space exploration and rapid prototyping from behavioral models
Authors: Christian Haubelt, Thomas Schlichter, Joachim Keinert, Mike Meredith
Venue: Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference (2008)

SystemCoDesigner is an ESL tool developed at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. SystemCoDesigner offers a fast design space exploration and rapid prototyping of behavioral SystemC models. Together with Forte Design Systems, a fully automated approach was developed by integrating behavioral synthesis into the design flow. Starting from a behavioral SystemC model, hardware accelerators can be generated automatically using Forte Cynthesizer and can be added to the design space. The resulting design space is explored automatically by optimizing several objectives simultaneously using state of the art multi-objective optimization algorithms. As a result, SystemCoDesigner presents optimized hardware/software solutions to the designer who can select any of them for rapid prototyping on an FPGA basis. Thus, SystemCoDesigner bridges the gap from ESL to RTL and increases the confidence in early design decisions.
Tunable Optical Trap Induced by Focal Shift and Focal Switch in a Focusing Apodized Optical System
Authors: Xiumin Gao
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics - Volume 02 (2008)

Focal shift and focal switch induced by a three-portion apodizer, whose center annular portion has continuously changing phase shift, is theoretically investigated. Numerical simulations show that for the certain geometrical parameters of the proposed apodizer, the focal shift occurs and can be adjustable continuously by changing the phase shift of its center annular portion, and the focal switch may also be changed simultaneously. The possibility of constructing optical trap by use of the apodizer is also discussed
Pre-service and in-service teachers' experiences of learning to program in an object-oriented language
Authors: Irene Govender, Diane J. Grayson
Venue: Computers Education (2008)

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the various ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers experience learning to program in an object-oriented language. Both groups of teachers were enrolled in university courses. In most cases, the pre-service teachers were learning to program for the first time, while the in-service teachers had previously programmed using a procedural programming language. Phenomenography was used to identify categories of description of learning to program. From these categories an outcome space was created that shows the relationship between different experiences of learning to program. The outcome space can be represented as circles inscribed within one another, where the innermost circle represents a lower level of cognitive accomplishment and the outer circles subsume the inner circles. The five levels of the outcome space are: meeting the requirements, learning the syntax/learning by comparison, understanding and assimilating, problem solving and programming in the large. Implications of the findings for teaching are discussed.
haplog: A Hash-Only and Privacy-Preserved Secure Logging Mechanism
Authors: Chih-Yin Lin
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Third International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (2008)

A secure logging mechanism named haplog is proposed. In essence, haplog uses only one-way hash functions to achieve the security and functional requirements of logging. This makes haplog more concise and efficient than schemes previously proposed. In addition, haplog considers that all events logged as log entries should be private and only the system can decide what event information the verifier can obtain. Even the trusted center, who helps to initialize the log mechanism and possesses shared secret with the system, should not be able to learn event information when verifying the integrity of the log.
Software-Implemented Fault Detection Approaches
Authors: Goutam Kumar Saha
Venue: Ubiquity (2008)

A comparative study on various software-implemented fault detection approaches has been briefly described in a tabular form
On tensor approximation of Green iterations for Kohn-Sham equations
Authors: Boris N. Khoromskij
Venue: Computing and Visualization in Science (2008)

In the present paper we discuss efficient rank-structured tensor approximation methods for 3D integral transforms representing the Green iterations for the Kohn-Sham equation. We analyse the local convergence of the Newton iteration to solve the Green&#x2019;s function integral formulation of the Kohn-Sham model in electronic structure calculations. We prove the low-separation rank approximations for the arising discrete convolving kernels given by the Coulomb and Yukawa potentials 1/|x|, and e &#x2212;&#x03bb;|x|/|x|, respectively, with $$x \in {\mathbb{R}}^{d}$$. Complexity analysis of the nonlinear iteration with truncation to the fixed Kronecker tensor-product format is presented. Our method has linear scaling in the univariate problem size. Numerical illustrations demostrate uniform exponential convergence of tensor approximations in the orthogonal Tucker and canonical formats.
Processing and recognition of characters in container codes
Authors: Juan Rosell, Gabriela Andreu, Alberto Pérez
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International Conference on Signal, Speech and Image Processing (2006)

This paper describes the process of location and recognition of container code characters. The system has to deal with outdoor images. Top hat transformation, segmentation algorithms and filters have been applied in order to locate the container's registration number. Our aim is to obtain a list of characters which contains all, or as much as possible, characters of the container's registration number in order to recognize them. This work is part of a higher order project whose aim is the automation of the entrance gate of a port.
Main Memory Commit Protocols for Multiple Backups
Authors: Heine Kolltveit, Svein-Olaf Hvasshovd
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Networking (2008)

Atomic commitment protocols are needed to preserve ACID properties of distributed transactional systems. The performance of such protocols is essential to avoid adding too much overhead to transaction processing. Also, many applications require levels of availability, which cannot be met by using only one backup source (disk or process). Combining these two requirements, this paper presents protocols for use with main memory primary-backup systems, where there are multiple backup processes for each primary. These protocols are evaluated by simulation and verified by statistical analysis. The results show that the best choice of protocol is not static, but varies with the transactional load of the system.
Particle simulation of Coulomb collisions: Comparing the methods of Takizuka & Abe and Nanbu
Authors: Chiaming Wang, Tungyou Lin, Russel Caflisch, Bruce I. Cohen, Andris M. Dimits
Venue: Journal of Computational Physics (2008)

The interactions of charged particles in a plasma are governed by long-range Coulomb collision. We compare two widely used Monte Carlo models for Coulomb collisions. One was developed by Takizuka and Abe in 1977, the other was developed by Nanbu in 1997. We perform deterministic and statistical error analysis with respect to particle number and time step. The two models produce similar stochastic errors, but Nanbu's model gives smaller time step errors. Error comparisons between these two methods are presented.
Extending GridSim with an architecture for failure detection
Authors: Agustin Caminero, Anthony Sulistio, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrion, Rajkumar Buyya
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems - Volume 01 (2007)

Grid technologies are emerging as the next generation of distributed computing, allowing the aggregation of resources that are geographically distributed across different locations. However, these resources are independent and managed separately by various organizations with different policies. This will have a major impact to users who submit their jobs to the Grid, as they have to deal with issues such as policy heterogeneity, security and fault tolerance. Moreover, the changes of Grid conditions, such as resources that may become unavailable for a period of time due to maintenance and/or suffer failures, would significantly affect the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of users. Therefore, it is essential for users to take into account the effects of resource failures during jobs execution.In this paper, we present our work on introducing resource failures and failure detection into the GridSim simulation toolkit. As we need to conduct repeatable and controlled experiments, it is easier to use simulation as a means of studying complex scenarios. We also give a detailed description of the overall design and a use case scenario demonstrating the conditions of resources varied over time.
Meeting george bush versus meeting cinderella: The neural response when telling apart what is real from what is fictional in the context of our reality
Authors: Anna Abraham, D. Yves von Cramon, Ricarda I. Schubotz
Venue: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008)

A considerable part of our lives is spent engaging in the entertaining worlds of fiction that are accessible through media such as books and television. Little is known, however, about how we are able to readily understand that fictional events are distinct from those occurring within our real world. The present functional imaging study explored the brain correlates underlying such abilities by having participants make judgments about the possibility of different scenarios involving either real or fictional characters being true, given the reality of our world. The processing of real and fictional scenarios activated a common set of regions including medial-temporal lobe structures. When the scenarios involved real people, brain regions associated with episodic memory retrieval and self-referential thinking, the anterior prefrontal cortex and the precuneus/posterior cingulate, were more active. In contrast, areas along the left lateral inferior frontal gyrus, associated with semantic memory retrieval, were implicated for scenarios with fictional characters. This implies that there is a fine distinction in the manner in which conceptual information concerning real persons in contrast to fictional characters is represented. In general terms, the findings suggest that fiction relative to reality tends to be represented in more factual terms, whereas our representations of reality relative to fiction are colored by personal subjectivity. What modulates our understanding of the relative difference between reality and fiction seems to be whether such character-type information is coded in self-relevant terms or not.
Composing interactive systems by planning
Authors: Yoann Gabillon, Gaëlle Calvary, Humbert Fiorino
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th French-speaking conference on Mobility and ubiquity computing (2008)

User Interfaces (UIs) are mostly produced along a mental forward engineering process consisting in step by step transforming abstract descriptions into more concrete ones. Transformations make trade-offs between the context of use (<user, platform, environment>) and the usability properties that have been elicited as key. In ubiquitous computing, neither the context of use nor the user's objectives can be set at design time: they may opportunistically emerge with the arrival/departure of interaction resources and/or user's needs. As a result, there is a need for dynamically composing interactive systems. We explore multiagents planning for tackling the combinatory issue when sharing interaction resources among interactive systems and UI elements. The gateway between HCI and planning is performed using Model Driven Engineering (MDE). Experience shows that MDE is powerful for chaining domains together as well as for better understanding and improving domains languages.
Knowledge-Guided Semantic Indexing of Breast Cancer Histopathology Images
Authors: Adina Eunice Tutac, Daniel Racoceanu, Thomas Putti, Wei Xiong, Wee-Kheng Leow, Vladimir Cretu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics - Volume 02 (2008)

Narrowing the semantic gap represents one of the mostoutstanding challenges in medical image analysis andindexing. This paper introduces a medical knowledge – guidedparadigm for semantic indexing of histopathology images,applied to breast cancer grading (BCG). Our method improvespathologists’ current manual procedures consistency by employing a semantic indexing technique, according to a rule-based decision system related to Nottingham BCG system. The challenge is to move from the medical concepts/ rulesrelated to the BCG, to the computer vision (CV) concepts andsymbolic rules, to design a future generic framework-following Web Ontology Language standards - for an semi- automatic generation of CV rules. The effectiveness of this approach was experimentally validated over six breast cancer cases consisting of 7000 frames with domain knowledge from experts of Singapore National University Hospital, Pathology Department. Our method provides pathologists a robust and consistent tool for BCG and opens interesting perspectives for the semantic retrieval and visual positioning.
Multi-modular algorithm for computing the splitting field of a polynomial
Authors: Guénaël Renault, Kazuhiro Yokoyama
Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-first international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (2008)

Let f be a univariate monic integral polynomial of degree n and let (α1, ..., αn) be an n-tuple of its roots in an algebraic closure Q of Q. Obtaining an algebraic representation of the splitting field Q(α1, ..., αn) of f is a question of first importance in effective Galois theory. For instance, it allows us to manipulate symbolically the roots of f. In this paper, we propose a new method based on multi-modular strategy. Actually, we provide algorithms for this task which return a triangular set encoding the splitting ideal of f. We examine the ability/practicality of the method by experiments on a real computer and study its complexity.
Deciding properties of nonregular programs
Authors: D. Harel, D. Raz
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1990)

The problem of deciding the validity of formulas in extensions of propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is considered. The extensions are obtained by adding programs defined by nonregular languages. In the past, a number of very simple languages were shown to render this problem highly undecidable, whereas other very similar-looking languages were shown to retain decidability. Understanding this rather strange phenomenon and generalizing the isolated extensions have remained elusive. The authors provide decision procedures for two wide classes of extensions, thus shedding light on the general problem. The proofs are novel, in that they explicitly consider the machines that accept the languages, in this case special classes of PDAs and stack automata. It is shown that the emptiness problem for stack automata on infinite trees is decidable, a result of independent interest, and the result is combined with the construction of certain tree models for the corresponding formulas.
On a question of bourgain about geometric incidences
Authors: JÓzsef Solymosi, Csaba d. TÓth
Venue: Combinatorics, Probability and Computing (2008)

Given a set of s points and a set of n2 lines in three-dimensional Euclidean space such that each line is incident to n points but no n lines are coplanar, we show that s = Ω(n11/4). This is the first non-trivial answer to a question recently posed by Jean Bourgain.
Combining Boundaries and Ratings from Multiple Observers for Predicting Lung Nodule Characteristics
Authors: Ekarin Varutbangkul, Vesna Mitrovic, Daniela Raicu, Jacob Furst
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Biocomputation, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Technologies (2008)

We use the data collected by the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) for modeling the radiologists' nodule interpretations based on image content of the nodule by using decision trees. Up to 4 radiologists delineated nodule boundaries and provided ratings for nine nodule characteristics (lobulation, margin, sphericity, etc). Therefore, there can be up to 4 instances per nodule in our data set. However, to learn a good predictive model, the data set should have only one instance per nodule. In this study, we investigate several approaches to combine delineated boundaries and ratings from multiple observers. From our experimental results, we learned that the thresholded p-map analysis approach with the probability threshold Pr>=0.75 provides the best predictive accuracies for the nodule characteristics. In the long run, we expect that the predictive model will improve radiologists' efficiency and reduce inter-reader variability.
Distributed control diffusion: towards a flexible programming paradigm for modular robots
Authors: Ulrik P. Schultz
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Robot communication and coordination (2007)

A self-reconfigurable robot is a robotic device that can change its own shape. Self-reconfigurable robots are commonly built from multiple identical modules that can manipulate each other to change the shape of the robot. The robot can also perform tasks such as locomotion without changing shape. Programming a modular, self-reconfigurable robot is however a complicated task: the robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system, where control and communication paths often are tightly coupled to the current physical configuration of the robot. To facilitate the task of programming modular, self-reconfigurable robots, we present the concept of distributed control diffusion: distributed queries are used to identify modules that play a specific role in the robot, and behaviors that implement specific control strategies are diffused throughout the robot based on these role assignments. This approach allows the programmer to dynamically distribute behaviors throughout a robot and moreover provides a partial abstraction over the concrete physical shape of the robot. We have implemented a prototype of a distributed control diffusion system for the ATRON modular, self-reconfigurable robot. The prototype relies on a simple virtual machine with a dedicated instruction set, allowing mobile programs to migrate between the modules that constitute a robot. Through a number of simulated experiments, we should how a single rule-based controller program implemented using distributed control diffusion can perform simple obstacle avoidance in a wide range of different car-like robots constructed using ATRON modules.
Fuzzy information fusion of classification models for high-throughput image screening of cancer cells in time-lapse microscopy
Authors: Tuan D. Pham, Dat T. Tran, Xiaobo Zhou
Venue: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems (2007)

Bioimaging at molecular and cellular levels requires specific image analysis methods to help life scientists develop methodologies and hypotheses in biology and biomedicine. In particular, this is true when dealing with microscopic images of cells and vessels. To facilitate the automation of cell screening, we have developed methods based on vector quantization and Markov model for classification of cellular phases using time-lapse fluorescence microscopic image sequences. Because of ambiguity inherently existing in the labeling of cell-phase feature vectors, we proposed to use relaxation labeling technique to reduce uncertainty among cell-phase models having overlapping properties. To further improve the classification rate we applied a fuzzy fusion strategy for combining individual results obtained from multiple classifiers. Our proposed image-classification methods can be useful for the task of high-content cell-cycle screening which is essential for biomedical research in the study of structures and functions of cells and molecules.
Application Level Proxies on Bridges
Authors: Tobias Eggendorfer
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Networking (2008)

Filtering data transmitted over the Internet into a company's network for viruses, Trojans, worms and spam is an important part of a security concept to protect the local network from being taken over by attackers. Those filters are either implemented on the client, on a local network server or on a proxy system, depending on how the respective data is transmitted over the network. Where mail and file server are often locally installed, web servers are usually remote and require a proxy for filtering. A proxy however takes over communication for the client and thus might change important communication parameters such as the remote machine's identification when using SSL. We have developed several application level content filters running on bridges, i.e. ISO/OSI level 2 devices filtering ISO/OSI level 7 content. This papers gives an overview of our research and discusses advantages of application level filtering on bridges.
Coding Overcomplete Representations of Audio Using the MCLT
Authors: Byung-Jun Yoon, Henrique S. Malvar
Venue: Proceedings of the Data Compression Conference (2008)

We propose a system for audio coding using the modulated complex lapped transform (MCLT). In general, it is difficult to encode signals using overcomplete representations without avoiding a penalty in rate-distortion performance. We show that the penalty can be significantly reduced for MCLT-based representations, without the need for iterative methods of sparsity reduction. We achieve that via a magnitude-phase polar quantization and the use of magnitude and phase prediction. Compared to systems based on quantization of orthogonal representations such as the modulated lapped transform (MLT), the new system allows for reduced warbling artifacts and more precise computation of frequency-domain auditory masking functions.