ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
PRIMA: archiving and querying historical data with evolving schemas
Authors: Hyun J. Moon, Carlo A. Curino, Myungwon Ham, Carlo Zaniolo
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2009)

Schema evolution poses serious challenges in historical data management. Traditionally, historical data have been archived either by (i) migrating them into the current schema version that is well-understood by users but compromising archival quality, or (ii) by maintaining them under the original schema version in which the data was originally created, leading to perfect archival quality, but forcing users to formulate queries against complex histories of evolving schemas. In the PRIMA system, we achieve the best of both approaches, by (i) archiving historical data under the schema version under which they were originally created, and (ii) letting users express temporal queries using the current schema version. Thus, in PRIMA, the system rewrites the queries to the (potentially many) pertinent versions of the evolving schema. Moreover, the system o ers automatic documentation of the schema history, and allows the users to pose temporal queries over the metadata history itself. The proposed demonstration highlights the system features exploiting both a synthetic-educational running example and the real-life evolution histories (schemas and data), which include hundreds of schema versions from Wikipedia and Ensembl. The demonstration off ers a thorough walk-through of the system features and a hands-on system testing phase, where the audiences are invited to directly interact with the advanced query interface of PRIMA.
An Efficient Method for Quick Construction of Web Services
Authors: Hao Han, Yohei Kotake, Takehiro Tokuda
Venue: Proceeding of the 2009 conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XX (2009)

With the development of the Internet, Web services, such as Google Maps API and YouTube Data API, become more important and convenient for the Web knowledge distribution and integration. However, currently, most existing Web sites do not provide Web services. In this paper, we present a partial information extraction technology to construct the Web services from the general Web applications quickly and easily. Our implementation shows that our approach is applicable to different kinds of Web applications.
Geodesically Linked Active Contours: Evolution Strategy Based on Minimal Paths
Authors: Julien Mille, Laurent D. Cohen
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision (2009)

The proposed method is related to parametric and geodesic active contours as well as minimal paths, in the context of image segmentation. Our geodesically linked active contour model consists in a set of vertices connected by paths of minimal cost. This makes up a closed piecewise defined curve, over which an edge or region energy functional is formulated. The greedy algorithm is used to move vertices towards a configuration minimizing the energy functional. This evolution technique ensures lower sensitivity to erroneous local minima than usual gradient descent of the energy. Our method intends to take advantage of explicit active contours, minimal paths and greedy evolution techniques.
Model checking race-freeness
Authors: Parosh Aziz Abdulla, Frédéric Haziza, Mats Kindahl
Venue: ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (2009)

With the introduction of highly concurrent systems in standard desktop computers, ensuring correctness of industrial-size concurrent programs is becoming increasingly important. One of the most important standards in use for developing multi-threaded programs is the POSIX Threads standard, commonly known as PThreads. Of particular importance, the analysis of industrial code should, as far as possible, be automatic and not require annotations or other forms of specifications of the code. Model checking has been one of the most successful approaches to program verification during the last two decades. The size and complexity of applications which can be handled have increased rapidly through integration with symbolic techniques. These methods are designed to work on finite (but large) state spaces. This framework fails to deal with several essential aspects of behaviours for multithreaded programs: there is no bound a priori on the number of threads which may arise in a given run of the system; each thread manipulates local variables which often range over unbounded domains; and the system has a dynamic structure in the sense that threads can be created and killed throughout execution of the system. In this paper we concentrate on checking a particular class of properties for concurrent programs, namely safety properties. In particular, we focus on race-freeness, that is, the absence of race conditions (also known as data races) in shared-variable pthreaded programs. We will follow a particular methodology which we have earlier developed for model checking general classes of infinite-state systems [1, 3, 6, 8, 9] and apply a symbolic backward reachability analysis to verify the safety property. Since we construct a model as an over-approximation of the original program, proving the safety property in the model implies that the property also holds in the original system. Surprisingly, it leads to a quite efficient analysis which can be carried out fully automatically.
The integrated implementation of surgical simulations through modeling by means of imaging, comprehension, visualization, deformation, and collision detection in virtual environments
Authors: Kamran Iqbal
Venue:  (2008)

Advances in information technology based applications in medicine and biology help to improve the conventional methods of delivering health services by enhancing and complementing traditional approaches of medical education, diagnostic techniques, intra-operative assistance, and pre/post operative services etc. Individualized medical training by virtual simulations and the use of advanced visualization techniques in cell biology will impact the way medicine is practiced and biological processes are understood. Although enhancing visualization and presenting the unreality in a form of blended virtuality is exceedingly accepted in medicine and biology, it brings many challenging but intriguing and intertwined multi disciplinary problems that are required to be addressed. This dissertation addresses the challenges of facilitating the virtual environment systems particularly in the augmented reality and the virtual reality settings that deal with algorithmic problems originated from integration of different components particularly related to surgical simulations. More specifically, the works will be presented here include light microscopic image enhancement (MIBIC algorithm) and its improvement for real-time processing, testing human perception metrics in immersive environments, rasping procedure design and analysis for artificial disc replacement surgery, registration problem in augmented reality system, real-time soft-tissue deformation in virtual reality with a commodity graphical processing unit (GPU), and collision detections for deformable bodies with using hardware assisted spanner (or balls hierarchy).
The fast, efficient, and representative benchmarking of future microarchitectures
Authors: Trevor N. Mudge
Venue:  (2008)

A methodology is introduced to reduce the overall simulation time of large benchmarking suites. Previous work shows that it is possible to simulate only small sections of a benchmark's dynamic instruction stream in detail, without sacrificing accuracy in simulation results with respect to overall behavior. As benchmarking suites increase in size, many such techniques still require a great deal of simulation time to complete. The methods presented in this dissertation build on this previous work by converting representative sections of a benchmark's execution into either augmented binaries or intrinsically checkpointed assembly code. This new code can then serve as a replacement for the original benchmark. In addition, a methodology is proposed that creates new benchmark binaries that no longer need input files or system calls in order to execute properly. Since the new benchmarks only contain portions of the original benchmarks and input data is effectively hidden within them, corporations can safely release benchmarks to the public created using their own internal, proprietary test programs without the fear of losing sensitive information. Simulations of the new benchmarks are much faster, require less overhead, and still properly represent the original benchmark's execution profile. Results show that benchmarks created using these techniques are very portable and accurately predict the performance of the original benchmark. An average error rate of less than 5% is achieved when compared to the original representative sections. In addition, a speedup of roughly 60x per benchmark is achieved when the new benchmarks are executed serially and 1000x when they are executed in parallel. This translates into a reduction in simulation time from months to minutes and greatly decreases the amount of time necessary to test a new design.
Concept identification and presentation in the context of technical text summarization
Authors: Horacio Saggion, Guy Lapalme
Venue: NAACL-ANLP 2000 Workshop on Automatic Summarization (2000)

We describe a method of text summarization that produces indicative-informative abstracts for technical papers. The abstracts are generated by a process of conceptual identification, topic extraction and re-generation. We have carried out an evaluation to assess indicativeness and text acceptability relying on human judgment. The results so far indicate good performance in both tasks when compared with other summarization technologies.
Multi-Agent Based Approach for Quantum Key Distribution in WiFi Networks
Authors: Shirantha Wijesekera, Xu Huang, Dharmendra Sharma
Venue: Proceedings of the Third KES International Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications (2009)

Security in WiFi networks has become a major concern as the wireless networks are vulnerable to security threats than wired networks. The 802.11i wireless networks uses 4 way handshake protocol to distribute the key hierarchy in order to encrypt the data communication. In our previous research work [2], we have discussed the use of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), for key distribution in 802.11 wireless networks. The whole communication flow of our proposed protocol can be split into several key processes. It can be seen that these processes can be implemented efficiently using Software Agents. In this paper we shall discuss the use of Software Agents in quantum cryptography based key distribution in WiFi wireless networks.
Ethical Issues in Global Supply Chain Management
Authors: Andrew M. McCosh
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Collaborative Decision Making: Perspectives and Challenges (2008)

The paper addresses the general nature of a supply chain as a human artifact with potential for greatness and for failure like any other. The exact nature of the possible failures and successes are discussed, and the ethical issues identified. The hazards of adversarial supply chain management, especially the more vicious forms of it, are identified. Intra-chain brutality is rarely as profitable as mutual supportiveness if we think, as the world's first international lawyer said we should, prudently and well into the future. The paper concludes with one drastic example of what happens when we do not.
Query parameters for harvesting digital video and associated contextual information
Authors: Gary Marchionini, Chirag Shah, Christopher A. Lee, Robert Capra
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (2009)

Video is increasingly important to digital libraries and archives as both primary content and as context for the primary objects in collections. Services like YouTube not only offer large numbers of videos but also usage data such as comments and ratings that may help curators today make selections and aid future generations to interpret those selections. A query-based harvesting strategy is presented and results from daily harvests for six topics defined by 145 queries over a 20-month period are discussed with respect to, query specification parameters, topic, and contribution patterns. The limitations of the strategy and these data are considered and suggestions are offered for curators who wish to use query-based harvesting.
Concept Lattice Orbifolds --- First Steps
Authors: Daniel Borchmann, Bernhard Ganter
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis (2009)

Concept lattices with symmetries may be simplified by "folding" them along the orbits of their automorphism group. The resulting diagram is often more intuitive than the full lattice diagram, but well defined annotations are required to make the folded diagram as informative as the original one. The folding procedure can be extended to formal contexts.A typical situation where such lattice foldings are useful is when hierarchies of structures are considered "up to isomorphisms".
Improved GeOI substrates for pMOSFET off-state leakage control
Authors: K. Romanjek, E. Augendre, W. Van Den Daele, B. Grandchamp, L. Sanchez, C. Le Royer, J. -M. Hartmann, B. Ghyselen, E. Guiot, K. Bourdelle, S. Cristoloveanu, F. Boulanger, L. Clavelier
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2009)

The origin of parasitic leakage that occurs in some GeOI pMOSFETs has been investigated and located at the Ge-buried oxide (BOX) interface. Silicon passivation of that interface was found to be effective in reducing this current. An optimum thickness of the buried silicon capping is required to reduce the parasitic leakage current while preserving Ge-like back channel transport properties.
Regret-based online ranking for a growing digital library
Authors: Erick Delage
Venue: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009)

The most common environment in which ranking is used takes a very specific form. Users sequentially generate queries in a digital library. For each query, ranking is applied to order a set of relevant items from which the user selects his favorite. This is the case when ranking search results for pages on the World Wide Web or for merchandize on an e-commerce site. In this work, we present a new online ranking algorithm, called NoRegret KLRank. Our algorithm is designed to use "clickthrough" information as it is provided by the users to improve future ranking decisions. More importantly, we show that its long term average performance will converge to the best rate achievable by any competing fixed ranking policy selected with the benefit of hindsight. We show how to ensure that this property continues to hold as new items are added to the set thus requiring a richer class of ranking policies. Finally, our empirical results show that, while in some context NoRegret KLRank might be considered conservative, a greedy variant of this algorithm actually outperforms many popular ranking algorithms.
Leaf classification using navigation-based skeletons
Authors: Georgios Sakellariou, Murray Shanahan
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

In this paper, we present a leaf classification method based on skeletons produced by a navigation-inspired technique. The classification system comprises three separate stages. First, a skeletonisation algorithm is used to gather low level structural and morphological information about the shape. Subsequently, the data is converted into a series of attributed graphs. Graphs of the same type are then compared using an approximate graph matcher, which identifies a degree of similarity between them. Each degree of similarity corresponds to a dimension in a conceptual space, as defined by Gärdenfors. We test the performance of our technique on a set of leaves belonging to three different species.
Approximating tensor product Bézier surfaces with tangent plane continuity
Authors: Lizheng Lu
Venue: Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2009)

We present a simple method for degree reduction of tensor product Bezier surfaces with tangent plane continuity in L"2-norm. Continuity constraints at the four corners of surfaces are considered, so that the boundary curves preserve endpoints continuity of any order @a. We obtain matrix representations for the control points of the degree reduced surfaces by the least-squares method. A simple optimization scheme that minimizes the perturbations of some related control points is proposed, and the surface patches after adjustment are C^~ continuous in the interior and G^1 continuous at the common boundaries. We show that this scheme is applicable to surface patches defined on chessboard-like domains.
Perceived quality and motivations on intention-to-use of a general web portal
Authors: Tung Bui
Venue:  (2008)

The purpose of this research was to study the quality and motivation attributes of information products from the end-users perspective, and to measure the impact of these attributes on intention-to-use. An information product is defined as a highly interdependent package of information that can be transmitted or distributed in digital form (e.g., a web portal, an application software). In the context of Web portal use, the information product generally includes three types of services: personal services (e.g., email), information services (e.g., online news) and search services. The literature suggests that the quality of an information product can be assessed from a number of attributes, such as accuracy and applicability of the information content, the timeliness and speed of the physical medium, and the reliability and responsiveness of the product provider. The literature also underscores the importance of motivational factors such as social escapism and privacy concerns on the intention to use. Drawing from this theoretical background, an initial set of 21 quality and motivation attributes has been identified, and an experimental study using 142 subjects as Web portal users has been conducted. Statistical analyses helped us consolidate quality factors into four groups of quality attributes factors as they were perceived by the subjects: Content relevancy, Communication interactiveness, Information currency, and Instant gratification. As far as impact analyses are concerned, social escapism motivation, information motivation, interactive control motivation, and socialization were found to highly correlate to all of the three types of services and the combined use. When quality factors and motivations were considered at the same time to explain intention-to-use of the Web portal, social escapism, as a motivation factor, was identified as the main determinant. The findings of this research shed new lights on the understanding of Web portal use and suggests that there are some quality attributes that are particularly perceived to be relevant to Web portal intention to use. Lessons learned from this study should also help IT professionals to design, develop and deploy more effective general web portals.
On the stability of switching in multi-models control systems
Authors: Lupu Ciprian, Udrea Andreea, Popescu Dumitru, Flutur Cristian
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Automation & information (2009)

Switching between control algorithms in multiple-models or multi-controllers structures represents one of the main problems of a successful solution for the real-time control of the nonlinear or multiregime processes. The switching issue is a theoretical and practical study subject for a lot of recently researches. The paper proposes some supplementary conditions that assure a correct real-time functioning in terms of stability for multiple-models structures. The applicability of the method is proved using an RST control algorithm. In the end, its software implementation is also shown.
L0-Norm and Total Variation for Wavelet Inpainting
Authors: Andy C. Yau, Xue-Cheng Tai, Michael K. Ng
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision (2009)

In this paper, we suggest an algorithm to recover an image whose wavelet coefficients are partially lost. We propose a wavelet inpainting model by using L 0-norm and the total variation (TV) minimization. Traditionally, L 0-norm is replaced by L 1-norm or L 2-norm due to numerical difficulties. We use an alternating minimization technique to overcome these difficulties. In order to improve the numerical efficiency, we also apply a graph cut algorithm to solve the subproblem related to TV minimization. Numerical results will be given to demonstrate our advantages of the proposed algorithm.
Multi-View Face Alignment Using 3D Shape Model for View Estimation
Authors: Yanchao Su, Haizhou Ai, Shihong Lao
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Biometrics (2009)

For multi-view face alignment (MVFA), the non-linear variation of shape and texture, and the self-occlusion of facial feature points caused by view change are the two major difficulties. The state-of-the-art MVFA methods are essentially view-based approaches in which views are divided into several categories such as frontal, half profile, full profile etc. and each of them has its own model in MVFA. Therefore the view estimation problem becomes a critical step in MVFA. In this paper, a MVFA method using 3D face shape model for view estimation is presented in which the 3D shape model is used to estimate the pose of the face thereby selecting its model and indicating its self-occluded points. Experiments on different datasets are reported to show the improvement over previous works.
Forecasting peak air pollution levels using NARX models
Authors: Enrico Pisoni, Marcello Farina, Claudio Carnevale, Luigi Piroddi
Venue: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (2009)

Air pollution has a negative impact on human health. For this reason, it is important to correctly forecast over-threshold events to give timely warnings to the population. Nonlinear models of the nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous variable (NARX) class have been extensively used to forecast air pollution time series, mainly using artificial neural networks (NNs) to model the nonlinearities. This work discusses the possible advantages of using polynomial NARX instead, in combination with suitable model structure selection methods. Furthermore, a suitably weighted mean square error (MSE) (one-step-ahead prediction) cost function is used in the identification/learning process to enhance the model performance in peak estimation, which is the final purpose of this application. The proposed approach is applied to ground-level ozone concentration time series. An extended simulation analysis is provided to compare the two classes of models on a selected case study (Milan metropolitan area) and to investigate the effect of different weighting functions in the identification performance index. Results show that polynomial NARX are able to correctly reconstruct ozone concentrations, with performances similar to NN-based NARX models, but providing additional information, as, e.g., the best set of regressors to describe the studied phenomena. The simulation analysis also demonstrates the potential benefits of using the weighted cost function, especially in increasing the reliability in peak estimation.