ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Asymmetric Affinity in Fuzzy Connectedness Segmentation for Oral Contrast-Enhances CT Colonography
Authors: Marek Franaszek, Ronald M. Summers
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (2006)

In oral contrast-enhanced CT colonography, patients are given barium- or iodine-containing solutions to drink to tag out remnants of stool and residual fluid in the colon. Frequently, residual fecal matter absorbs more tagging material and appears much brighter on CT images than surrounding opacified fluid. This may cause even advanced segmentation procedures, like fuzzy connectedness, to miss local regions of colonic lumen. This in turn leads to spurious deformations of the reconstructed colonic wall and impairs interpretation. We show that these problems may be avoided when the properly designed asymmetric affinities are used for segmenting air- and fluid-filled parts of the colon. After this improvement, the segmented volume does not contain holes of missed regions and resulting colonic surface is smooth and free from undesired distortion.
Enforcing efficient resource provisioning in peer-to-peer file sharing systems
Authors: Panayotis Antoniadis, Costas Courcoubetis
Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (2006)

In this paper we focus on content availability as the main good provided by a p2p file sharing system and consider peer availability, the amount of time peers stay connected sharing their files, as their main contribution. We wish to study the effectiveness of incentive mechanisms which enforce contribution by somehow relating it with consumption. Towards this end, we propose a mechanism who wishes to regulate the time required for peers to stay on-line sharing their files by dictating a fixed upload throughput used by uploading peers and thus a certain average time for a download to finish. We formulate and analyze a suitable economic model focusing on peer availability in order to understand the role of this important system parameter and provide the means to efficiently tune it.
Fast Multicomputation with Asynchronous Strategy
Authors: Wu-Chuan Yang, D. J. Guan, Chi Sung Laih
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (2007)

We propose a new strategy to improve the performance of multicomputations, such as computing xA + yBin an additive group or a^{x}b^{y}in a multiplicative group. This new strategy is called asynchronous strategy. In each iteration, it tries to compute partial results by pairing nearby zero and nonzero bits. The new strategy can be applied to any binary code of xand yto further reduce the computational cost. However, our experiments show that sparse signed-digit code can achieve minimum computational cost. The algorithms using the asynchronous strategy need only O(h)extra registers when they try to do computation with bits which are hpositions apart.
Web Service Discovery and Composition using USDL
Authors: Srividya Kona, Ajay Bansal, Gopal Gupta, Thomas D. Hite
Venue: Proceedings of the The 8th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and E-Services (2006)

For web-services to become practical, an infrastructure needs to be supported that allows users and applications to discover, deploy, compose and synthesize services automatically. In this paper, we present the design of an automatic service discovery and composition engine using USDL (Universal Service-Semantics Description Language) [1, 2], a language for formally describing the semantics of web-services. The implementation will be used for the WS-Challenge 2006 [3].
A Single-Chip Fail-Safe Microprocessor with Memory Data Comparison Feature
Authors: Kotaro Shimamura, Takeshi Takehara, Yosuke Shima, Kunihiko Tsunedomi
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (2006)

A single-chip fail-safe microprocessor has been developed. It contains two processor cores and realizes self-checking feature by comparing the processing results of the two processor cores. In order to overcome redundant input disagreement problem, two mechanisms have been implemented. The one is input data exchange mechanism used with bus comparison feature. The other is memory data comparison and copy mechanism. With the memory data comparison mechanism, input data comparison overhead can be reduced, which is especially useful for short period control task with many input data. The microprocessor utilizes 0.18ìm CMOS process and integrates 512KB RAM and 25M transistors random logic in a 14.75mm x 14.75mm die. With the developed microprocessor, the size of a fault-tolerant controller can be reduced, which makes it easy to embed fault-tolerant controllers into equipments controlled.
An Interactive Semantic Video Mining and Retrieval Platform--Application in Transportation Surveillance Video for Incident Detection
Authors: Xin Chen, Chengcui Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (2006)

Understanding and retrieving videos based on their semantic contents is an important research topic in multimedia data mining and has found various real-world applications. Most existing video analysis techniques focus on the low level visual features of video data. However, there is a "semantic gap" between the machine-readable features and the high level human concepts i.e. human understanding of the video content. In this paper, an interactive platform for semantic video mining and retrieval is proposed using Relevance Feedback (RF), a popular technique in the area of Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR). By tracking semantic objects in a video and then modeling spatio-temporal events based on object trajectories and object interactions, the proposed interactive learning algorithm in the platform is able to mine the spatio-temporal data extracted from the video. An iterative learning process is involved in the proposed platform, which is guided by the user's response to the retrieved results. Although the proposed video retrieval platform is intended for general use and can be tailored to many applications, we focus on its application in traffic surveillance video database retrieval to demonstrate the design details. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated by our experiments on real-life traffic surveillance videos.
Representation theory of q-rook monoid algebras
Authors: Rowena Paget
Venue: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics: An International Journal (2006)

We show that, over an arbitrary field, q-rook monoid algebras are iterated inflations of Iwahori-Hecke algebras, and, in particular, are cellular. Furthermore we give an algebra decomposition which shows a q-rook monoid algebra is Morita equivalent to a direct sum of Iwahori-Hecke algebras. We state some of the consequences for the representation theory of q-rook monoid algebras.
An algebraic grid optimization algorithm using condition numbers
Authors: Costanza Conti, Rossana Morandi, Rosa Maria Spitaleri
Venue: Applied Numerical Mathematics (2006)

In this paper we present an algorithm able to provide geometrically optimal algebraic grids by using condition numbers as quality measures. In fact, the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) to model complex problems needs an efficient algorithm to generate a good quality grid since better geometrical grid quality is gained, faster accuracy of the numerical solution can be kept. Moving from classical approaches, we derive new measures based on the condition numbers of appropriate cell matrices to control grid uniformity and orthogonality. We assume condition numbers in appropriate norms as building blocks of objective functions to be minimized for grid optimization. This optimization procedure improves the mixed algebraic grid generation method first discussed in [C. Conti, R. Morandi, D. Scaramelli, Using discrete uniformity property in a mixed algebraic method, Appl. Numer. Math. 49 (4) (2004) 355-366. [3]]. The whole algorithm is able to cheaply generate optimal algebraic grids providing optimal location of the control points defining a small set of free parameters in the tensor product of the mixed algebraic method.
In the News
Authors: Jan Krikke, Benjamin Alfonsi
Venue: IEEE Intelligent Systems (2006)

In the first news story, "Intelligent Surveillance Empowers Security Analysts," governments and corporations worldwide are spending billions of dollars researching, developing, and deploying intelligent video surveillance systems, data mining software, biometrics systems, and Internet geolocation technology. Growing use of these technologies has increased public scrutiny of, and resistance to, them.In the second news story, "These Computers Know How You Feel," with the debate still going as to whether AI is actual intelligence or just clever programming, the question remains: Can a computer have an EQ (emotional quotient)? The first line researchers have taken in investigating computers' capacity for feeling involves affective, or emotional, computing, which refers to computers sensing, reasoning about, and responding to human emotion.
Self-Supervised Learning of Face Appearances in TV Casts and Movies
Authors: Ralph Ewerth, Markus Muhling, Bernd Freisleben
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006)

Retrieving information about the occurrences of persons in a video is an important task in many video indexing and retrieval applications. The problem is to answer the question "In which shots and scenes does person X appear?". In this paper, we present an automatic video annotation system with respect to a person's appearance based on state-of-the-art algorithms for face detection, tracking and recognition. In contrast to many related approaches, knowledge about the persons in a given video is not assumed in advance. Adaboost is employed after an initial clustering of faces to select the best features describing a person's face. These features are then used to train new classifiers based only on the faces extracted from the video under consideration. Several possibilities to train Adaboost and Support Vector Machine (ensemble) classifiers directly on a video are compared. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of correcting in-plane face rotation and of the employed self-supervised learning method.
The Mercury system: exploiting truly fast hardware for data search
Authors: Roger D. Chamberlain, Ron K. Cytron, Mark A. Franklin, Ronald S. Indeck
Venue: Proceedings of the international workshop on Storage network architecture and parallel I/Os (2003)

In many data mining applications, the size of the database is not only extremely large, it is also growing rapidly. Even for relatively simple searches, the time required to move the data off magnetic media, cross the system bus into main memory, copy into processor cache, and then execute code to perform a search is prohibitive. We are building a system in which a significant portion of the data mining task (i.e., the portion that examines the bulk of the raw data) is implemented in fast hardware, close to the magnetic media on which it is stored. Furthermore, this hardware can be replicated allowing mining tasks to be performed in parallel, thus providing further speedup for the overall mining application. In this paper, we describe a general framework under which this can be accomplished and provide initial performance results for a set of applications.
Comparison of two VR platforms for rehabilitation: video capture versus HMD
Authors: Debbie Rand, Rachel Kizony, Uri Feintuch, Noomi Katz, Naomi Josman, Albert Rizzo, Patrice L. Weiss
Venue: Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (2005)

In recent years, clinical studies have begun to demonstrate the effectiveness of VR as an intervention tool for a variety of neurological conditions. There remain, however, a number of important issues that must be addressed in order to determine how widely VR-based intervention should be applied, and the user and platform characteristics that may be important when using VR in clinical settings. One of the unresolved issues that must be addressed is the suitability of particular VR platforms in relation to the therapeutic goals one wishes to achieve. Studying and identifying the characteristics of each platform may assist the therapist in choosing a suitable VR platform for the patient's needs. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of a study of healthy participants (N -- 89) using 2 different VR platforms in combination with 1 of the 2 virtual environments that was designed to compare the sense of presence, incidence of side effects, perceived exertion, and performance. The data demonstrate significant differences in some of the key characteristics of both VR platforms and environments as they affect participants' sense of presence, performance, side effects, and exertion. We conclude that when seeking a suitable VR therapeutic application, the user's characteristics together with attributes of the VR platform must be taken into consideration since both appear to have an impact on key outcome measures.
Timing-Aware ATPG for High Quality At-speed Testing of Small Delay Defects
Authors: Xijiang Lin, Kun-Han Tsai, Chen Wang, Mark Kassab, Janusz Rajski, Takeo Kobayashi, Randy Klingenberg, Yasuo Sato, Shuji Hamada, Takashi Aikyo
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th Asian Test Symposium (2006)

In this paper, a new ATPG methodology is proposed to improve the quality of test sets generated for detecting delay defects. This is achieved by integrating timing information, e.g. from Standard Delay Format (SDF) files, into the ATPG tool. The timing information is used to guide the test generator to detect faults through the longest paths in order to improve the ability to detect small delay detects. To avoid propagating faults through similar paths repeatedly, a weighted random method is proposed to improve the path coverage during test generation. During fault simulation, a new fault-dropping criterion, named Dropping based on Slack Margin (DSM), is proposed to facilitate the trade-off between the test set quality and the test pattern count. The quality of the generated test set is measured by two metrics: delay test coverage and SDQL. The experimental results show that significant test quality improvement is achieved when applying timing-aware ATPG with DSM to industrial designs.
Japanese Learning System for Native Chinese Speakers focusing on Differences between Chinese and Japanese
Authors: Sa Lu, Naoko Yamashita, Hiroyuki Tominaga, Toshihiro Hayashi, Toshinori Yamasaki
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2006)

In this paper, we describe development of a Japanese learning system for native Chinese speakers focusing on the differences between Chinese and Japanese. First, we analyze the differences between both languages and propose how to give questions for Chinese speakers. Then, we describe a Japanese language learning system "JaLeSy-CJ" to support native Chinese speakers with learning sound, writing, and meaning of Kanji.
Successes and failures in co-present situations
Authors: Ilona Heldal, Anthony Steed, Maria Spante, Ralph Schroeder, Sophia Bengtsson, Marja Partanen
Venue: Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (2005)

Virtual environments systems based on immersive projection technologies (IPTs) offer users the possibility of collaborating intuitively in a 3D environment. While considerable work has been done to examine interaction in desktop-based collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), there are currently no studies for collaborative interaction using IPTs.The aim of this paper is to examine how immersive technologies support interaction and to compare this to the experience with desktop systems. A study of collaboration is presented where two partners worked together using networked IPT environments. The data collected included observations, analysis of video and audio recordings, questionnaires and debriefing interviews from both IPT sites. This paper focuses on the successes and failures in collaboration through detailed examination of particular incidents during the interaction. We compare these successes and failures with the findings of a study by Hindmarsh, Fraser, Heath, & Benford (Computer Supported Collaborative Work, CSCW'98, 1998, pp. 217-226) that examined object-focused interaction on a desktop-based CVE system.Our findings identify situations where interaction is better supported with the IPT system than the desktop system, and situations where interaction is not as well supported. We also present examples of how social interaction is critical to seamless collaboration.
Modelling and estimation of mutual coupling between array elements
Authors: A. Manikas, N. Fistas
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing,1994. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1994)

The adverse effect of mutual coupling between the elements of an array, on the performance of super-resolution techniques is demonstrated. An analytical modelling of the mutual coupling is presented, and its effects are modelled in the form of a complex square matrix, the mutual coupling matrix (MCM). The MCM depends on the array geometry and the array electrical characteristics, but not on the direction of the incoming signals. Based on the modelling of the mutual coupling effects, a new technique is proposed for estimating the mutual coupling matrix of an array of general geometry. The proposed method employs one pilot source, and uses an extra element at some distance away from the original array.
CollabU: a design for reflective, collaborative university teaching and learning
Authors: Alain Breuleux, Ron Owston, Thérèse Laferrière, Nolan Estes, Paul Resta, William Hunter, Carolyn Awalt
Venue: Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning (1999)

This paper describes a collaborative university seminar, CollabU, involving five North-American universities in its first implementation in the Winter of 1999. In this report we emphasize the design process, the role of reflective practice, and the implications of the seminar for understanding emerging transformations in university learning, teaching, and scholarship.
Reconstructing Occluded Surfaces Using Synthetic Apertures: Stereo, Focus and Robust Measures
Authors: Vaibhav Vaish, Marc Levoy, Richard Szeliski, C. L. Zitnick, Sing Bing Kang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Volume 2 (2006)

Most algorithms for 3D reconstruction from images use cost functions based on SSD, which assume that the surfaces being reconstructed are visible to all cameras. This makes it difficult to reconstruct objects which are partially occluded. Recently, researchers working with large camera arrays have shown it is possible to "see through" occlusions using a technique called synthetic aperture focusing. This suggests that we can design alternative cost functions that are robust to occlusions using synthetic apertures. Our paper explores this design space. We compare classical shape from stereo with shape from synthetic aperture focus. We also describe two variants of multi-view stereo based on color medians and entropy that increase robustness to occlusions. We present an experimental comparison of these cost functions on complex light fields, measuring their accuracy against the amount of occlusion.
Imagery as data: structures for visual model building
Authors: Brian K Smith, Erik Blankinship
Venue: Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning (1999)

Scientific visualization tools render quantitative data into visual representations that can be analyzed and manipulated by students. But certain problems require more qualitative, observational data that cannot be easily represented with current visualization software. This paper describes an approach to using photographs and video as a primary data source for observational inquiry. We describe a framework for students to collaborate around photographs and video, collaboration that leads to inquiry and the development of explanatory models. We also describe two of our learning environments to illustrate how students can begin to develop predictive theories from image data.
Congruence and tension among activity systems in a tripartite partnership for systemic reform
Authors: Daniel D. Suthers, Joyce Yukawa, Violet H. Harada
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (2006)

Systemic reform often involves partnerships between multiple communities of practice (CoP). In order to understand the strengths and challenges of a partnership, it is necessary to examine the objectives and practices of the constituent communities and the forces that shape these practices. This paper presents an activity theory analysis of relationships between three CoPs in a systemic reform effort, Hawai'i Networked Learning Communities. Essential tensions between the activity systems of the CoPs are analyzed to understand key issues encountered in the implementation, particularly with respect to the role of technology in mediating systemic reform.
A cell library for low power high performance CMOS voltage-mode quaternary logic
Authors: Ricardo C. G. da Silva, Henri Boudinov, Luigi Carro
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th annual symposium on Integrated circuits and systems design (2006)

A new method to implement high performance and low power quaternary circuits using multi-threshold transistors and 3 power supply lines is presented in this work. Some specific basic gates like inverter, NMIN and NMAX circuits are presented together with a look-up table that can be used to perform any logic function. These basic circuits are used to implement arithmetic circuits. A quaternary full adder is demonstrated and compared to equivalent binary circuit showing higher speed, low consumption with a low area overhead. The circuits were simulated with the Spice tool using TSMC 0.18μm technology.
Wave packet propagation by the Faber polynomial approximation in electrodynamics of passive media
Authors: Andrei G. Borisov, Sergei V. Shabanov
Venue: Journal of Computational Physics (2006)

Maxwell's equations for propagation of electromagnetic waves in dispersive and absorptive (passive) media are represented in the form of the Schrödinger equation i∂Ψ/∂t = HΨ, where H is a linear differential operator (Hamiltonian) acting on a multidimensional vector Ψ composed of the electromagnetic fields and auxiliary matter fields describing the medium response. In this representation, the initial value problem is solved by applying the fundamental solution exp(-itH) to the initial field configuration. The Faber polynomial approximation of the fundamental solution is used to develop a numerical algorithm for propagation of broad band wave packets in passive media. The action of the Hamiltonian on the wave function Ψ is approximated by the Fourier grid pseudospectral method. The algorithm is global in time, meaning that the entire propagation can be carried out in just a few time steps. A typical time step ΔtF is much larger than that in finite differencing schemes, ΔtF ≫ ||H||-1. The accuracy and stability of the algorithm is analyzed. The Faber propagation method is compared with the Lanczos-Arnoldi propagation method with an example of scattering of broad band laser pulses on a periodic grating made of a dielectric whose dispersive properties are described by the Rocard-Powels-Debye model. The Faber algorithm is shown to be more efficient. The Courant limit for time stepping, Δtc ∼ ||H||-1 is exceeded at least in 3000 times in the Faber propagation scheme.