ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Teaching introductory programming, problem solving and information technology with robots at West Point
Authors: J. Schumacher
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

As part of an ongoing initiative to continually revise and improve its introductory computer science courses, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the United States Military Academy has added the use of LEGO Mindstorm robots as part of the active-learning environment used to teach Information Technology (IT) and programming basics. It is critical for the Army and the Nation that its future leaders understand and are capable of taking advantage of IT. All cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point are required to take a course on IT and problem solving using computer programming. This course is an important first, and sometimes only, opportunity to expose undergraduate students to technology and concepts that will be a part of their daily lives and future careers. The LEGO Mindstorm robots are used in the introductory computer science course to teach fundamental, computer programming concepts and introduce the concepts of autonomous vehicles, embedded computer systems and computer simulation. The positive short-term impact on the students taking the course has been substantial and while the long-term impact has yet to be measured, it also has the potential to be substantial. Members of the faculty at West Point developed a computer simulation of the robot environment as well as a Java programming language translator for the LEGO programmable brick, called the RCX. These two tools are combined into a unique programming and teaching environment that we named Jago. Jago enables the robots and robot simulator to be used to teach fundamental programming concepts visually, which some students can more easily grasp and all are clearly excited to use. Based on these results we have incorporated Jago into the core IT course taught at West Point.
Blind detection of independent dynamic components
Authors: L. K. Hansen
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2001. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2001)

In certain applications of independent component analysis (ICA) it is of interest to test hypotheses concerning the number of components or simply to test whether a given number of components is significant relative to a "white noise" null hypothesis. We estimate probabilities of such competing hypotheses for ICA based on dynamic decorrelation. The probabilities are evaluated in the so-called Bayesian information criterion approximation, however, they are able to detect the content of dynamic components as efficiently as an unbiased test set estimator.
A new optimization procedure for extracting the point-based lip contour using active shape model
Authors: K. L. Sum
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2001. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 03 (2001)

This paper presents a new optimization procedure for extracting the point-based lip contour using the active shape model (ASM). A 14-point ASM lip model is used to describe the lip contour. With the aid of fuzzy clustering analysis, a probability map of the color lip image is obtained and a region-based cost function is established. The new optimization procedure operates on the spatial domain (actual contour points) and all the points are pulled towards their desirable locations in each iteration. Hence, the lip contour evolution becomes better controlled and consequently fast convergence is achieved. The new procedure can also achieve real-time performance on lip contour extraction and tracking from lip image sequence.
Flexible Controller Design and Its Application for Concurrent Execution of Buffer Centric Dataflows
Authors: Junhee Mun, Shung Han Cho, Sangjin Hong
Venue: Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (2007)

This paper presents a flexible controller structure for concurrent processing of memory centric coarse grain data flows. We propose a design flow based on block level pipelining where concurrency among processing blocks is fully maintained. The controller is dynamically reconfigurable to support dynamic data-flow structure changes by localizing control signals. The proposed control design method isolates controllers and processing logics such that system integration is simplified while controllers are locally configured from orthogonal global information. The controller also supports interfacing with external processors for asynchronous processing. The controller for heterogeneous processing blocks is synthesized and verified using Verilog and SystemC on FPGA. We present an example demonstrating the effectiveness of the controllers where dynamic reconfiguration of the execution is feasible.
Online Algorithms for Handling Skew in Parallel Joins
Authors: Arun Swami, Honesty C. Young
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 International Conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 03 (1993)

When the work involved in a join is partitioned among multiple processors in the parallel join, the skew in the operand relations can result in significant imbalance in the work assigned to the different processors. This imbalance can cause significant degradation in the response time for the join operation.
Implementation of Supply Chains Coordination Using Semantic Web Service Composition
Authors: Yongjun Liu, Guihua Nie
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (2007)

Fierce competition due to globalization, demand diversity and technological breakthroughs stimulates enterprises to coordinate in a supply chain in order to gain mutual benefits. In such a distributive, autonomous and dynamic business environment, Semantic Web services which combines Web services architecture and Semantic Web is more adapted to facilitate supply chain coordination than existing information technologies. In this paper, we propose OWL-S as ontology for describing heterogeneous Web services in supply chains and analyze the interaction process, including automated discovery, composition and invocation of Semantic Web services, by means of OWL-S. Specifically, we present a framework to facilitate automated composition of Semantic Web services based on mediator and bidirectional chaining composition algorithm which is more adaptive, accurate and effective.
The multispace: an evolutionary platform for infrastructural services
Authors: Steven D. Gribble, Matt Welsh, Eric A. Brewer, David Culler
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (1999)

This paper presents the architecture for a Base, a clustered environment for building and executing highly available, scalable, but flexible and adaptable infrastructure services. Our architecture has three organizing principles: addressing all of the difficult service fault-tolerance, availability, and consistency problems in a carefully controlled environment, building that environment out of a collection of execution environments that are receptive to mobile code, and using dynamically generated code to introduce run-time-generated levels of indirection separating clients from services. We present a prototype Java implementation of a Base called the MultiSpace, and talk about two applications written on this prototype: the Ninja Jukebox (a cluster based music warehouse), and Keiretsu (an instant messaging service that supports heterogeneous clients). We show that the MultiSpace implementation successfully reduces the complexity of implementing services, and that the platform is conducive to rapid service evolution.
Implementing Speculative Parallelism in Possible Computational Worlds
Authors: Debra S. Jusak, James Hearne, Hilda Halliday
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 International Conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 02 (1993)

Most constructs for speculative parallelism have been devised in an ad hoc way, with quite particular applications in mind. What diverse instances of speculative computation have in common is the notion of executing code conditional on a future condition or event.
Seeing People in Different Light-Joint Shape, Motion, and Reflectance Capture
Authors: Christian Theobalt, Naveed Ahmed, Hendrik Lensch, Marcus Magnor, Hans-Peter Seidel
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2007)

By means of passive optical motion capture, real people can be authentically animated and photo-realistically textured. To import real-world characters into virtual environments, however, surface reflectance properties must also be known. We describe a video-based modeling approach that captures human shape and motion as well as reflectance characteristics from a handful of synchronized video recordings. The presented method is able to recover spatially varying surface reflectance properties of clothes from multiview video footage. The resulting model description enables us to realistically reproduce the appearance of animated virtual actors under different lighting conditions, as well as to interchange surface attributes among different people, e.g., for virtual dressing. Our contribution can be used to create 3D renditions of real-world people under arbitrary novel lighting conditions on standard graphics hardware.
Evaluating financial time series models for irregularly spaced data: A spectral density approach
Authors: Pierre Duchesne, Maria Pacurar
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2008)

Engle and Russell's autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models have been proven successful in modelling financial data that arrive at irregular intervals. In practice, evaluating these models represents a crucial step. The spectral density is widely used in engineering and applied mathematics. Here, we advocate its use when testing for the so-called ACD effects, and for evaluating the adequacy of ACD models. Two classes of test statistics for duration clustering and one class of test statistics for the adequacy of ACD models are proposed. We adapt Hong's [Consistent testing for serial correlation of unknown form. Econometrica 1996;64:837-64; One-sided testing for conditional heteroskedasticity in time series models. Journal of Time Series Analysis 1997;18:253-77] approach in the context of evaluating ACD models. In particular, we justify rigorously the asymptotic distributions, which are all standard normal, of the test statistics in the ACD framework. When testing for ACD effects, the second class of test statistics exploits the one-sided nature of the alternative hypothesis and we discuss in which circumstances these test statistics should be more powerful. Using a particular kernel function, the classes based on integrated measures provide generalized versions of the classical Box-Pierce/Ljung-Box test statistics, which are popular procedures among practitioners. However, we obtain more powerful test procedures in many situations, using nonuniform kernels. Important aspects of the paper are a simulation study illustrating the merits of the proposed procedures in the ACD context, and applications with financial data.
Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams
Authors: Jeff Sutherland, Anton Viktorov, Jack Blount, Nikolai Puntikov
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

Agile project management with Scrum derives from best business practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix and StarSoft Development Laboratories achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. During 2005, a distributed team of 56 Scrum developers working from Provo, Utah; Waterloo, Canada; and St. Petersburg, Russia, delivered 671,688 lines of production Java code. At 15.3 function points per developer/month, this is the most productive Java project ever documented. SirsiDynix best practices are similar to those observed on distributed Scrum teams at IDX Systems, radically different than those promoted by PMBOK, and counterintuitive to practices advocated by the Scrum Alliance. This paper analyzes and recommends best practices for globally distributed Agile teams.
Risk Mining in Hospital Information Systems
Authors: Shusaku Tsumoto, Kimiko Matsuoka, Shigeki Yokoyama
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining - Workshops (2006)

To err is human. How can we avoid near misses and achieve medical safety? From this perspective, we analyzed the nurses' incident data by data mining with the "concept of quality control" that near misses are produced by the system rather than individuals. Nurses' incident data were collected during the 18 months at the emergency room. Significant rules (If-then rules) indicated that the medication errors are likely to occur when mental concentration is disrupted by interruption of work, etc. Based on the results of the analysis, the nurses' medication check system was improved. During the last 6 months, the check system was put into effect. The frequency of the medication errors decreased to about one-twenties or less. It was considered that the data mining analysis contributes the decision support on the improvement of incidents.
Enhancements to the linux kernel for blocking buffer overflow based attack
Authors: Massimo Bernaschi, Emanuele Gabrielli, Luigi V. Mancini
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 4 (2000)

We present the design and implementation of a cost-effective mechanism which controls the invocation of critical, from the security viewpoint, system calls. The integration into existing UNIX operating systems is carried out by instrumenting the code of the system calls so that the system call itself once invoked checks to see whether the invoking process and the argument values passed comply with the rules held in an access control database. A working prototype able to detect and block buffer overflow attacks is available as a small set of "patches" to the Linux operating system kernel source.
Discryption: Internal Hard-Disk Encryption for Secure Storage
Authors: Laszlo Hars
Venue: Computer (2007)

Internal encryption to protect the confidentiality of stored data in disk drives has many advantages.
Playing on a line: location-based games for linear trips
Authors: Peter Kiefer, Sebastian Matyas, Christoph Schlieder
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (2007)

Most location-based games are designed for players who move freely around a geographic game board such as a city centre or acampus. By contrast, we discuss design issues for location-based games played when traveling from A to B on a predefined route, e.g. when following a biking trail along a river. We present the results of a simulation study that compares different alternatives of adopting a two-dimensional location-based game to a linear feature. As our running example for a linear location-based game, we use a geographic version of the board game Alak, the most popular linear game from the family of Go games.
A flow-sensitive analysis of privacy properties
Authors: Hanne Riis Nielson, Fleming Nielson
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (2007)

In this paper we consider service oriented architectures where many components interact with one another using a wireless network. We are interested in questions like:Can I be sure that I do not get unsolicited information from some service? -- unless I give my permission?Can I be sure that information I send to some service never is leaked to another service? -- unless I give my permission? We shall develop a static program analysis for the \pi- calculus and show how it can be used to give privacy guarantees like the ones requested above. The analysis records the explicit information flow of the system and keeps track of, not only the potential configurations of the system, but also the order in which they may be encountered.
The commentator information system: a usability evaluation of a real-time sport information service
Authors: Marie-Anne Midy, Carlos Jensen, Yunrim Park
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (2007)

Many of the most vivid recollections we have of major sporting events and accomplishments as TV viewers and sports fans are things like scores, statistics, or the TV images of specific events. What make many of these live in our memories, or grab our attention in the first place is often the commentator or sports-caster, their words of wisdom, or lack thereof, the excitement and emotion in their voices, echoing our own. The commentator is a vital part to the sportscast experience, part of what can make watching sports remotely more enjoyable than at the stadium. In order to provide accurate and timely data to TV viewers, radio, or online listeners, commentators sometimes rely on a system called the Commentator Information System (CIS). In this paper we present an in-depth usability study of a CIS, how commentators do their job, how the process may be improved, and how to make sportscasts and simulations more enjoyable in the future.
Using Graphics Processor Units (GPUs) for Automatic Video Structuring
Authors: Peter Kehoe, Alan F. Smeaton
Venue: Proceedings of the Eight International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (2007)

The rapid pace of development of Graphic Processor Units (GPUs) in recent years in terms of performance and programmability has attracted the attention of those seeking to leverage alternative architectures for better performance than that which commodity CPUs can provide. In this paper, the potential of the GPU in automatically structuring video is examined, specifically in shot boundary detection and representative keyframe selection techniques. We first introduce the programming model of the GPU and outline the implementation of techniques for shot boundary detection and representative keyframe selection on both the CPU and GPU, using histogram comparisons. We compare the approaches and present performance results for both the CPU and GPU. Overall these results demonstrate the significant potential for the GPU in this domain.
Empirical Evaluation of Incomplete Hypercube Systems
Authors: Nian-Feng Tzeng
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 International Conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 01 (1993)

The incomplete hypercube provides far better incremental flexibility than the complete hyper cube, whose size is restricted to exactly a power of 2. In this paper, the performance of incomplete hypercube sys tems is evaluated empirically. The simulation results reveal that mean latency for delivering messages is roughly the same in an incomplete hypercube as in a com patible complete hypercube, unless the message genera tion rate is extremely high (. 0.9). It is also found that mean latency for messages traversing links with heavy traffic can be appreciably larger than the mean latency of overall messages. When the link communication capabil ity is doubled, mean message latency becomes virtually uniform no matter whether or not the message traverses a link with heavy traffic, confirming that the incomplete hypercube can be made congestion-free easily to guaran tee high performance under any traffic load.
High quality word graphs using forward-backward pruning
Authors: A. Sixtus
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (1999)

This paper presents an efficient method for constructing high quality word graphs for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. The word graphs are constructed in a two-pass strategy. In the first pass, a huge word graph is produced using the time-synchronous lexical tree search method. Then, in the second pass, this huge word graph is pruned by applying a modified forward-backward algorithm. To analyze the characteristic properties of this word graph pruning method, we present a detailed comparison with the conventional time-synchronous forward pruning. The recognition experiments, carried out on the North American Business (NAB) 20000-word task, demonstrate that, in comparison to the forward pruning, the new method leads to a significant reduction in the size of the word graph without an increase in the graph word error rate.
Control in Outsourcing Relationships: Governance in Action
Authors: Erik Beulen, Pieter Ribbers
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

The outsourcing market has been growing for decades. Also the impact of IT services on the performance of business processes is still growing. Therefore the need for governance structure in outsourcing relationships is undisputed. Service recipients and service providers have sometimes difficulties to control their outsourcing relationship. This research includes an overview of IT governance frameworks and items. Our research is based on two global IT outsourcing relationships. The governance strategies in these two case studies are analyzed and compared in this paper.
Towards a deep-packet-filter toolkit for securing legacy resources
Authors: James Deverick, Phil Kearns
Venue: Proceedings of the 19th conference on Large Installation System Administration Conference - Volume 19 (2005)

Users of a network system often require access to legacy resources. Providing this access is a difficult task for system administrators because the access protocols for those resources are typically insecure. A common approach is to develop a custom wrapper or proxy that securely processes user requests before forwarding them to the legacy server. The problem with this approach is that administrators must develop a custom solution for every resource. We believe that there are common requirements for managing these resources that can be addressed from a more centralized model. The userspace queuing extensions of the Netfilter firewall modules provide a generic environment in which protocol-aware deep packet filters can be constructed to enhance the security of resource access protocols. We employ this environment to strengthen two commonly used legacy protocols, and compare their requirements. We show that it is possible to secure legacy resources with minimal degradation in performance. We also discuss considerations for development of a deep packet filter toolkit to aid system administrators in securely managing legacy network resources.