ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
On cheating in sealed-bid auctions
Authors: Ryan Porter, Yoav Shoham
Venue: Decision Support Systems (2005)

Motivated by the rise of online auctions and their relative lack of security, this paper analyzes two forms of cheating in sealedbid auctions. The first type of cheating we consider occurs when the seller examines the bids of a second-price auction before the auction clears and then submits a shill bid in order to increase the payment of the winning bidder. In the second type, a bidder cheats in a first-price auction by examining the competing bids before submitting his own bid. In both cases, we derive equilibrium strategies when bidders are aware of the possibility of cheating. These results provide insights into sealed-bid auctions even in the absence of cheating, including some counterintuitive results on the effects of overbidding in a first-price auction.
Hidden Convex Minimization
Authors: Duan Li, Zhi-You Wu, Heung-Wing Joseph Lee, Xin-Min Yang, Lian-Sheng Zhang
Venue: Journal of Global Optimization (2005)

A class of nonconvex minimization problems can be classified as hidden convex minimization problems. A nonconvex minimization problem is called a hidden convex minimization problem if there exists an equivalent transformation such that the equivalent transformation of it is a convex minimization problem. Sufficient conditions that are independent of transformations are derived in this paper for identifying such a class of seemingly nonconvex minimization problems that are equivalent to convex minimization problems. Thus, a global optimality can be achieved for this class of hidden convex optimization problems by using local search methods. The results presented in this paper extend the reach of convex minimization by identifying its equivalent with a nonconvex representation.
Delivering new web content reusing remote and heterogeneous sites. A DOM-based approach
Authors: Luis Álvarez Sabucedo, Luis Anido Rifón
Venue: Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web (2005)

This contribution addresses the development of new web sites reusing already existing contents from external sources. Unlike common links to other resources, which retrieves the whole resource, we propose an approach where partial retrieval is possible: the unit for data reuse is a node in a DOM tree. This solution permits the partial reuse of external and heterogeneous web contents with no need for client (browser) modifications and just minor changes for web servers.
Modal spaces: spatial multiplexing to mediate direct-touch input on large displays
Authors: Katherine Everitt, Chia Shen, Kathy Ryall, Clifton Forlines
Venue: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2005)

We present a new interaction technique for large direct-touch displays called Modal Spaces. Modal interfaces require the user to keep track of the state of the system. The Modal Spaces technique adds screen location as an additional parameter of the interaction. Each modal region on the display supports a particular set of input actions and the visual background indicates the space's use. This "workbench approach" exploits the larger form factor of display. Our spatial multiplexing of the display supports a document-centric paradigm (as opposed to application-centric), enabling input gesture reuse, while complementing and enhancing the current existing practices of modal interfaces. We present a proof-of-concept system and discuss potential applications, design issues, and future research directions.
On the use of hierarchical information in sequential mining-based XML document similarity computation
Authors: Ho-Pong Leung, Fu-Lai Chung, Stephen Chi-Fai Chan
Venue: Knowledge and Information Systems (2005)

Measuring the structural similarity among XML documents is the task of finding their semantic correspondence and is fundamental to many web-based applications. While there exist several methods to address the problem, the data mining approach seems to be a novel, interesting and promising one. It explores the idea of extracting paths from XML documents, encoding them as sequences and finding the maximal frequent sequences using the sequential pattern mining algorithms. In view of the deficiencies encountered by ignoring the hierarchical information in encoding the paths for mining, a new sequential pattern mining scheme for XML document similarity computation is proposed in this paper. It makes use of a preorder tree representation (PTR) to encode the XML tree&#x2019;s paths so that both the semantics of the elements and the hierarchical structure of the document can be taken into account when computing the structural similarity among documents. In addition, it proposes a postprocessing step to reuse the mined patterns to estimate the similarity of unmatched elements so that another metric to qualify the similarity between XML documents can be introduced. Encouraging experimental results were obtained and reported.
Extramural funding opportunities in bioinformatics from the National Library of Medicine: Research Articles
Authors: Carol A. Bean, Milton Corn
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2005)

National Library of Medicine (NLM) extramural programs in bioinformatics are described in the context of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding mechanisms and illustrated through a sampling of recently funded grants. The NIH application, evaluation, and funding process is described as used by the NLM. &copy; 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Shortest path amidst disc obstacles is computable
Authors: Ee-Chien Chang, Sung Woo Choi, DoYong Kwon, Hyungju Park, Chee K. Yap
Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-first annual symposium on Computational geometry (2005)

An open question in Exact Geometric Computation is whether there re transcendental computations that can be made "geometrically exact".Perhaps the simplest such problem in computational geometry is that of computing the shortest obstacle-avoiding path between two points p, q in the plane, where the obstacles re collection of n discs.This problem can be solved in O (n 2 log n)time in the Real RAM model, but nothing was known about its computability in the standard (Turing) model of computation. We first show the Turing-computability of this problem,provided the radii of the discs are rationally related. We make the usual assumption that the numerical input data are real algebraic numbers. By appealing to effective bounds from transcendental number theory, we further show single-exponential time upper bound when the input numbers are rational.Our result ppears to be the first example of non-algebraic combinatorial problem which is shown computable. It is also rare example of transcendental number theory yielding positive computational results.
An expressive aspect language for system applications with Arachne
Authors: Rémi Douence, Thomas Fritz, Nicolas Loriant, Jean-Marc Menaud, Marc Ségura-Devillechaise, Mario Südholt
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development (2005)

C applications, in particular those using operating system level services, frequently comprise multiple crosscutting concerns: network protocols and security are typical examples of such concerns. While these concerns can partially be addressed during design and implementation of an application, they frequently become an issue at runtime, e.g., to avoid server downtime. A deployed network protocol might not be efficient enough and may thus need to be replaced. Buffer overflows might be discovered that imply critical breaches in the security model of an application. A prefetching strategy may be required to enhance performance.While aspect-oriented programming seems attractive in this context, none of the current aspect systems is expressive and efficient enough to address such concerns. This paper presents a new aspect system to provide a solution to this problem. While efficiency considerations have played an important part in the design of the aspect language, the language allows aspects to be expressed more concisely than previous approaches. In particular, it allows aspect programmers to quantify over sequences of execution points as well as over accesses through variable aliases. We show how the former can be used to modularize the replacement of network protocols and the latter to prevent buffer overflows. We also present an implementation of the language as an extension of Arachne, a dynamic weaver for C applications. Finally, we present performance evaluations supporting that Arachne is fast enough to extend high performance applications, such as the Squid web cache.
The Instability of Optimal Control Problems to Time Delay
Authors: Alexey S. Matveev
Venue: SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization (2005)

This paper considers a general optimal control problem with a small time delay $\Delta$ in both the state and control. The objective is to find a correct way to neglect the delay or, in other words, to construct a well-posed instantaneous approximation of the delayed problem. The natural way to do so is by merely ignoring the delay in the model. It is shown that this way is almost always incorrect: it gives rise to an error that does not vanish as $\Delta \to +0$, and so results in an ill-posed model. A proper approximation of the delayed problem is offered.
A brief survey of program slicing
Authors: Baowen Xu, Ju Qian, Xiaofang Zhang, Zhongqiang Wu, Lin Chen
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (2005)

Program slicing is a technique to extract program parts with respect to some special computation. Since Weiser first proposed the notion of slicing in 1979, hundreds of papers have been presented in this area. Tens of variants of slicing have been studied, as well as algorithms to compute them. Different notions of slicing have different properties and different applications. These notions vary from Weiser's syntax-preserving static slicing to amorphous slicing which is not syntax-preserving, and the algorithms can be based on dataflow equations, information-flow relations or dependence graphs.Slicing was first-developed to facilitate debugging, but it is then found helpful in many aspects of the software development life cycle, including program debugging, software testing, software measurement, program comprehension, software maintenance, program parallelization and so on.Over the last two decades, several surveys on program slicing have been presented. However, most of them only reviewed parts of researches on program slicing or have now been out of date. People who are interested in program slicing need more information about the up to date researches. Our survey fills this gap. In this paper, we briefly review most of existing slicing techniques including static slicing, dynamic slicing and the latest slicing techniques. We also discuss the contribution of each work and compare the major difference between them. Researches on slicing are classified by the research hot spots such that people can be kept informed of the overall program slicing researches.
Reusable software components
Authors: Trudy Levine
Venue: ACM SIGAda Ada Letters (2005)

This column consists of our yearly listing of sources for reusable software components. As always, no recommendation or guarantee by this column is implied.
Narrowband main beam interference mitigation algorithms for space-time adaptive processing
Authors: Harri Saarnisaari, Pertti Henttu, Henri Puska
Venue: Signal Processing (2005)

We investigate space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms that can mitigate narrowband main beam interference. It will be shown, through simulations for direct sequence code phase estimation, that only a form of three possible Capon beamformer implementations can do the required mitigation. Alternatively, a novel time coherent combining beamformer can be used. Both algorithms have to function in a single sample per symbol or chip mode in order to avoid mutual correlation that decreases the performance.
Error detection and visualization in digital elevation models
Authors: Steven Bowe
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2005)

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a collection of elevation data that is stored point by point in a file. This data is important for many applications, such as developing topographical maps or for use in a geographical information system (GIS). When creating a DEM, errors frequently occur; and this project uses a few different methods to detect and create a visual representation of these errors.
Self adaptivity in Grid computing: Research Articles
Authors: Sathish S. Vadhiyar, Jack J. Dongarra
Venue: Concurrency and Computation: Practice Experience (2005)

Optimizing a given software system to exploit the features of the underlying system has been an area of research for many years. Recently, a number of self-adapting software systems have been designed and developed for various computing environments. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a software system that dynamically adjusts the parallelism of applications executing on computational Grids in accordance with the changing load characteristics of the underlying resources. The migration framework implemented by our software system is aimed at performance-oriented Grid systems and implements tightly coupled policies for both suspension and migration of executing applications. The suspension and migration policies consider both the load changes on systems as well as the remaining execution times of the applications thereby taking into account both system load and application characteristics. The main goal of our migration framework is to improve the response times for individual applications. We also present some results that demonstrate the usefulness of our migration framework. Published in 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the U.S.A.
A Secure and Transparent Firewall Web Proxy
Authors: Roger Crandell, James Clifford, Alexander Kent
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration (2003)

The LANL transparent web proxy lets authorized external users originating from the Internet to securely access internal intranet web content and applications normally blocked by a firewall. Unauthenticated access is still, of course, denied. The proxy is transparent in that no changes to browsers, user interaction, or intranet web servers are necessary. The proxy, a few thousand lines of C running on Linux, has been operating within Los Alamos National Laboratory's firewall since 1999.
Roomquake: embedding dynamic phenomena within the physical space of an elementary school classroom
Authors: Tom Moher, Syeda Hussain, Tim Halter, Debi Kilb
Venue: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2005)

Authentic practice in science requires access to phenomena. In this paper, we introduce RoomQuake, an application designed to foster the growth of a community of learning around scientific practice in seismology. Rather than treating seismic activity as remote events, RoomQuake seeks to enhance salience by situating those phenomena directly in the classroom. Using fixed-position PDAs as simulated seismographs, students determine the magnitude and distance of a series of "randomly" timed events by reading characteristic waveforms and using calibrated tape measures to sweep out arcs from multiple stations until they literally collide, physically enacting mathematical trilateration. We describe our experience in a six-week unit in a fifth-grade classroom.
Dealing with the spatio-temporal interactions among transient power, supply noise and timing
Authors: David Hathaway
Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on System level interconnect prediction (2005)

An ideal power supply network would provide a steady unvarying power to all components of a system. But because physical power supply networks are not perfect, they also communicate unintended information (in the form of power supply noise) between different components of a system. This power supply noise modulates various aspects of the behavior of the system components, and in particular their delay. Accounting for these delay variations is difficult because of the exponentially large number of behaviors that the system can exhibit, and the large number of resulting patterns of delay variation across the system. Some existing approaches to this problem attempt to find a "worst case" switching behavior, assuming that the condition of maximum power supply droop will most severely constraint the system performance. But timing setup and hold tests deal with racing paths, so the condition which most severely limits performance will not necessarily be one of maximum supply collapse, but instead one which creates the largest difference in delay variations along the critical paths involved in some critical timing test. Recent work has attempted to use superposition to worst timing condition by separately characterizing the power distribution network response to a current demand impulse at each node of the network and then posing an optimization problem to determine the spatial and temporal weightings of these impulses which cause the worst slack for some test. These weightings may not be physically realizable, however, due to the behavioral characteristics of the system, and can therefore give a pessimistic result. We will examine how one might reduce this pessimism by limiting a superposition-based analysis to realizable conditions. We will also examine how such an analysis framework can be used to design the system to control global patterns of activity and thus reduce the timing impacts of transient power supply noise.
Image Decomposition into a Bounded Variation Component and an Oscillating Component
Authors: Jean-François Aujol, Gilles Aubert, Laure Blanc-Féraud, Antonin Chambolle
Venue: Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision (2005)

We construct an algorithm to split an image into a sum u + v of a bounded variation component and a component containing the textures and the noise. This decomposition is inspired from a recent work of Y. Meyer. We find this decomposition by minimizing a convex functional which depends on the two variables u and v, alternately in each variable. Each minimization is based on a projection algorithm to minimize the total variation. We carry out the mathematical study of our method. We present some numerical results. In particular, we show how the u component can be used in nontextured SAR image restoration.
Room allocation: a polynomial subcase of the quadratic assignment problem
Authors: Valentina Ciriani, Nadia Pisanti, Anna Bernasconi
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2004)

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is among the hardest combinatorial optimization problems. Very few instances of this problem can be solved in polynomial time. In this paper we address the problem of allocating rooms among people in a suitable shape of corridor with some constraints of undesired neighborhood. We give a linear time algorithm for this problem that we formulate as a QAP.
Model-based testing
Authors: Alexander Pretschner
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering (2005)

Model-based testing has become increasingly popular in recent years. Major reasons include (1) the need for quality assurance for increasingly complex systems, (2) the emerging model-centric development paradigm (e.g., UML and MDA) with its seemingly direct connection to testing, and (3) the advent of test-centered development methodologies.Model-based testing relies on execution traces of behavior models. They are used as test cases for an implementation: input and expected output. This complements the ideas of model-driven testing. The latter uses static models to derive test drivers to automate test execution. This assumes the existence of test cases, and is, like the particular intricacies of OO testing, not in the focus of this tutorial.We cover major methodological and technological issues: the business case of model-based testing within model-based development, the need for abstraction and inverse concretization, test selection, and test case generation. We (1) discuss different scenarios of model-based testing, (2) present common abstractions when building models, and their consequences for testing, (3) explain how to use functional, structural, and stochastic test selection criteria, and (4) describe today's test generation technology.We provide both practical guidance and a discussion of the state-of-the-art. Potentials of model-based testing in practical applications and future research are highlighted.
A memory of George Forsythe
Authors: Cleve Moler
Venue: ACM SIGNUM Newsletter (1972)

Early last March, I was in California and so dropped by to visit George Forsythe. I recall our conversation because it included a few of the many things George was interested in. We talked about the NATS project work in subroutine testing and distribution. He described a textbook he was writing. He went over plans for his upcoming sabbatical leave, recalling Ed Feigenbaum's remark that the only trouble with being on the Stanford faculty was that you couldn't go to Stanford for your sabbatical. He said that he had decided to accept another term as chairman of Stanford's Computer Science Department. He mentioned a study he had just made for the chancellor of another university, assessing their program in computer science. We discussed the progress which two of the grad students were making on their theses. And we even talked a little numerical analysis -- he told me about a coordinate-independent theory of splines.
Characteristics and responsibilities involved in a Phishing attack
Authors: Alta van der Merwe, Marianne Loock, Marek Dabrowski
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information and communication technologies (2005)

'Phishing' is a fraudulent activity defined as the creation of a replica of an existing Web page to fool a user into submitting personal, financial, or password data. There are security service guidelines for both software security and web site security development environments. Developers use these guidelines when planning new systems (or during re-engineering of existing systems) to ensure a secure environment. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: firstly to consider the characteristics of a phishing attack and to identify a list of issues relevant to it; and secondly, to compare the nature of a phishing attack with the security services guidelines provided and to pinpoint the weakness(es) of phishing attacks if these guidelines are adhered to.
Analysis of Atkinson&#x2019;s variable transformation for numerical integration over smooth surfaces in &#x211d;3
Authors: Avram Sidi
Venue: Numerische Mathematik (2005)

Recently, a variable transformation for integrals over smooth surfaces in &#x211d;3 was introduced in a paper by Atkinson. This interesting transformation, which includes a &#x2018;&#x2018;grading&#x2019;&#x2019; parameter that can be fixed by the user, makes it possible to compute these integrals numerically via the product trapezoidal rule in an efficient manner. Some analysis of the approximations thus produced was provided by Atkinson, who also stated some conjectures concerning the unusually fast convergence of his quadrature formulas observed for certain values of the grading parameter. In a recent report by Atkinson and Sommariva, this analysis is continued for the case in which the integral is over the surface of a sphere and the integrand is smooth over this surface, and optimal results are given for special values of the grading parameter. In the present work, we give a complete analysis of Atkinson&#x2019;s method over arbitrary smooth surfaces that are homeomorphic to the surface of the unit sphere. We obtain optimal results that explain the actual rates of convergence, and we achieve this for all values of the grading parameter.