ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
IWWUA 2008 Workshop PC Chairs' Message
Authors: Silvia Abrahão, Cristina Cachero, Maristella Matera
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshops on Web Information Systems Engineering (2008)

Usability and accessibility are crucial factors in Web application development. The ease or difficulty that users experience with Web applications determines their success or failure. According to recent studies, an estimated 90 sites and applications suffer from usability and/or accessibility problems. As user satisfaction has increased in importance, the need for usable and accessible Web applications has become more critical. To achieve usability for a Web product (e.g., a service, a model, a running application, a portal), the attributes of Web artefacts must be clearly defined. Otherwise, assessment of usability is left to the intuition or to the responsibility of people who are in charge of the process. In this sense, quality models (describing all the usability sub-characteristics, attributes and their relationships) should be built, and usability evaluation methods should be used during the requirements, design and implementation stages based on these models. Similarly, identifying the set of characteristics that make the Web more accessible for everybody, including those with disabilities, is necessary to systematize the way practitioners deal with accessibility issues.
Construction of an Internal Predictive Model by Event Anticipation
Authors: Philippe Capdepuy, Daniel Polani, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Venue: Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems: From Brains to Individual and Social Behavior (2007)

We introduce information-theoretic tools that can be used in an autonomous agent for constructing an internal predictive model based on event anticipation. This model relies on two different kinds of predictive relationships: time-delay relationships, where two events are related by a nearly constant time-delay between their occurrences; and contingency relationships, where proximity in time is the main property. We propose an anticipation architecture based on these tools that allows the construction of a relevant internal model of the environment through experience. Its design takes into account the problem of handling different time scales. We illustrate the effectiveness of the tools proposed with preliminary results about their ability to identify relevant relationships in different conditions. We describe how these principles can be embedded in a more complex architecture that allows action-decision making according to reward expectation, and handling of more complex relationships. We conclude by discussing issues that were not addressed yet and some axis for future investigations.
Structure and bonding in M-X-M systems (M=Li, Na and K; X=O, S): Effects of charge-transfer
Authors: P. J. Mohan, Ayan Datta, Swapan K. Pati
Venue: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (2007)

Structure and bonding for a series of oxo-bridged and sulphur bridged alkali-metal centers (M-X-M: Li, Na and K; X=O, S) are studied for various M-X-M angles. The structures for these charge-transfer systems are compared with H-X-H. These charge- transfer systems show bonding and structures that are distinctively different from the covalent H-X-H molecules. The singlet-triplet gap for all of these molecules are positive suggesting the stabilization of the spin-paired configuration instead of the paramagnetic state. The variation in the exchange-coupling constant (J) with the change in M-X-M angle suggest that the singlet- triplet gap for these systems can be reduced through stabilization of geometries with M-X-M angles differing from the ground state geometries. Strategies are proposed for reducing the singlet-triplet gaps in these systems by confining them inside fullerenes.
A Genetic Algorithm Using a Mixed Crossover Strategy
Authors: Li-Yan Zhuang, Hong-Bin Dong, Jing-Qing Jiang, Chu-Yi Song
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks (2008)

Function Optimization is a typical problem. A mixed crossover strategy genetic algorithm for function optimization is proposed in this paper. Four crossover strategies are mixed in this algorithm and the performance is improved compared with traditional genetic algorithm using single crossover strategy. The numerical experiment is carried out on nine traditional functions and the results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to four single pure crossover strategy genetic algorithms in the convergence rate for function optimization problems.
Liver Segmentation from CT Scans: A Survey
Authors: Paola Campadelli, Elena Casiraghi
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications: Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory (2007)

In this paper we describe the state of the art of the semi-automatic and automatic techniques for liver volume extraction from abdominal CT. In the recent years this research focus has gained a lot of importance in the field of medical image processing since it is the first and fundamental step of any automated technique for the automatic liver disease diagnosis, liver volume measurement, and 3D liver volume rendering from CT images.
ABZ2008 VSR-Net Workshop
Authors: Jim Woodcock, Paul Boca
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Abstract State Machines, B and Z (2008)

In 2004, the UK Computing Research Committee initiated a number of Grand Challenges aimed at stimulating long term research in key areas of computing science. One of the challenges (GC6) focuses on Dependable Systems Evolution. GC6 has two central principles: theory should be embodied in tools, and tools should be tested against real systems. The goal is to produce a Verifying Compiler (a suite of integrated tools) and a repository of verified software.
Tutorial support for developing recognition of tonality among middle school students in a small parochial school
Authors: Steven R. Terrell
Venue:  (2008)

Melody and harmony are foundational elements of music. Middle school students often struggle to develop the ability to identify examples of differing tonality. Research suggests that review and practice will help master the understanding and skills necessary to overcome this. Current research also suggests that computer tutorials are at least as effective, and in some cases more effective than traditional activities in developing concepts among middle school students and in music education. This study examined the use of a tutorial to provide review and practice in developing the ability to recognize and identify examples of tonalities. This study used seventh and eighth grade students in a small parochial school to compare the effectiveness of the tutorial with traditional methodology. The research followed an experimental design. Subjects were randomly divided into two groups. A pre-test was administered. Following the pre-test, normal instruction took place with both groups together. The treatment group used the tutorial during the six week instructional unit while the control group used traditional style worksheets. Following completion of the unit, a post-test was administered. The difference between pre-test and post-test scores was analyzed. Statistical analysis was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the tutorial in each of the areas. Results demonstrated effectiveness for CAI support of some aural concepts. Results failed to support the other research hypotheses. Six conclusions came from the study. First, the use of CAI is more effective for some aural concepts. Secondly, given the time of year, the tutorial that was used, and the size of the subject population, the use of a tutorial was not more effective than traditional methods. The third conclusion was that the design of the tutorial used in this study may not have been optimal. Fourth, this study did not occur at the optimal time of year. Fifth, the size of the subject population may have been too small to provide an accurate representation of the effectiveness of CAI. Finally, the use of the tutorial resulted in student learning and such usage appeared to be at least as effective as the use of traditional paper and pencil.
Affisix: Tool for Prefix Recognition
Authors: Jaroslava Hlaváčoá, Michal Hrušecký
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (2008)

In the paper, we present a software tool Affisix for automatic recognition of prefixes. On the basis of an extensive list of words in a language, it determines the segments --- candidates for prefixes. There are two methods implemented for the recognition --- the entropy method and the squares method. We briefly describe the methods, propose their improvements and present the results of experiments with Czech.
A Formal Analysis of Coercion-Resistance of the Internet Voting Protocol Based on DKR Formal Model
Authors: Bo Meng
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposiums on Information Processing (2008)

The practical Internet voting protocols should have: privacy, completeness, soundness, unreusability, fairness, eligibility, invariableness, universal verifiability, receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance. Formal method is an important tool to assess coercion-resistance of internet voting protocols. But the coercion-resistance of many Internet voting protocols is analyzed without formal method. The applied pi calculus can be used to model and verify the security protocols, such as internet voting protocol. In this paper, firstly, we research the coercion-resistance . Then we model a typical internet voting protocol with applied pi calculus. Thirdly we analyze the typical internet voting protocol with DKR coercion-resistance formal model. According to the result of analysis we point out that the typical protocol is coercion-resistance.
Hybrid algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems
Authors: Arife Burcu Colak
Venue:  (2008)

Many real-world operational level optimization problems contain several challenges: the problem sizes are often very large and frequently the problems are time-sensitive in nature. Hence the effectiveness of a solution depends on both its quality and the speed at which it can be generated. The problems are often NP-hard and therefore it is unlikely that one will find fast algorithms that will be guaranteed to solve them to optimality. In this dissertation, different methods are proposed to hybridize exact methods with heuristics for solving combinatorial optimization problems with the aim of combining the strengths of both approaches to find better quality solutions within a reasonable amount of computational time. The first approach used in this dissertation is the divide-and-merge algorithm, which divides the given instance into smaller instances, optimizes these instances and then merges their solutions to obtain a complete solution to the original problem. The second approach is the reduce-and-optimize algorithm, which is based on solving the problem over a small subset of the solution space with the goal that this reduced space contains the optimal solution. The interval-indexed formulation, and Integer Programming and Linear Programming-based heuristics are introduced for solving single machine scheduling problems. The reduce-and-optimize approach can be used to improve a set of solutions obtained by other heuristics. To illustrate this, the interval-indexed formulation based heuristic is used to improve a population of a genetic algorithm as the third approach. The interval-indexed based heuristic is applied at each iteration of the genetic algorithm and the population is updated based on the solutions obtained. Ways to improve the intervals of the interval-indexed formulation are also studied as the fourth approach. A linear programming based approach is suggested and computational experiments give promising results. To test the approaches introduced, single machine total weighted tardiness problem instances are used. But the algorithms that are introduced in the dissertation can be generalized and applied to many other scheduling and combinatorial optimization problems, with small modifications in the algorithms. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Efficiency of selfish investments in network security
Authors: Libin Jiang, Venkat Anantharam, Jean Walrand
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Economics of networked systems (2008)

Internet security does not only depend on the security-related investments of individual users, but also on how these users affect each other. In a non-cooperative environment, each user chooses a level of investment to minimize its own security risk plus the cost of investment. Not surprisingly, this selfish behavior often results in undesirable security degradation of the overall system. In this paper, we first characterize the price of anarchy (POA) of network security under two models: an "Effective-investment" model, and a "Bad-traffic" model. We give insight on how the POA depends on the network topology, individual users' cost functions, and their mutual influence. We also introduce the concept of "weighted POA" to bound the region of all feasible payoffs. In a repeated game, on the other hand, users have more incentive to cooperate for their long term interests. We consider the socially best outcome that can be supported by the repeated game, and give a ratio between this outcome and the social optimum. Although the paper focuses on Internet security, many results are generally applicable to games with positive externalities.
A Simple LP Relaxation for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem
Authors: Thành Nguyen
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international workshop, APPROX 2008, and 12th international workshop, RANDOM 2008 on Approximation, Randomization and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Techniques (2008)

A long-standing conjecture in Combinatorial Optimization is that the integrality gap of the Held-Karp LP relaxation for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP) is a constant. In this paper, we give a simpler LP relaxation for the ASTP. The integrality gaps of this relaxation and of the Held-Karp relaxation are within a constant factor of each other. Our LP is simpler in the sense that its extreme solutions have at most 2n ¿ 2 non-zero variables, improving the bound 3n ¿ 2 proved by Vempala and Yannakakis for the extreme solutions of the Held-Karp LP relaxation. Moreover, more than half of these non-zero variables can be rounded to integers while the total cost only increases by a constant factor.We also show that given a partially rounded solution, in an extreme solution of the corresponding LP relaxation, at least one positive variable is greater or equal to 1/2.
Towards Provisioning the Cloud: On the Usage of Multi-Granularity Flows and Services to Realize a Unified Provisioning Infrastructure for SaaS Applications
Authors: Ralph Mietzner, Frank Leymann
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Congress on Services - Part I (2008)

The automatic provisioning of applications is an importent task for the success of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. Different provisioning engines from different vendors and open source projects with different interfaces have been emerging lately. Additionally, infrastructure providers that provide infrastructure on demand now provide computing resources that can be integrated in a SaaS provider’s computing environment. In order to allow SaaS application providers to specify generic installation and maintenance flows independent from the underlying provisioning engines we propose an architecture for ageneric provisioning infrastructure based on Web services and workflow technology.
A Replicated Survey of IT Software Project Failures
Authors: Khaled El Emam, A. Günes Koru
Venue: IEEE Software (2008)

Despite various industry reports about the failure rates of software projects, there's still uncertainty about the actual figures. Researchers performed a global Web survey of IT departments in 2005 and 2007. The results suggest that the software crisis is perhaps exaggerated and that most software projects deliver. However, the overall project failure rate, including cancelled and completed but poorly performing projects, remains arguably high for an applied discipline.
A Peak-Trough Detection Algorithm Based on Momentum
Authors: K. Harmer, G. Howells, W. Sheng, M. Fairhurst, F. Deravi
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Congress on Image and Signal Processing, Vol. 4 - Volume 04 (2008)

This paper presents a simple, yet novel, approach to peak-trough detection using a rudimentary model of Newtonian mechanics. Based on the line-searching technique also employed in artificial neural network technology to determine global minima, the momentum is used to find both peaks and troughs of a signal. This algorithm provides a fast alternative to the traditional techniques, which uses contextual information in order to determine prominent peaks and troughs without requiring smoothing or thresholding.
Appearance-Based Map Learning for Mobile Robot by Using Generalized Regression Neural Network
Authors: Ke Wang, Wei Wang, Yan Zhuang
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Neural Networks: Advances in Neural Networks (2007)

Regression analysis between features of high-dimension is receiving attention in environmental learning of mobile robot. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely General regression neural network (GRNN), for approximating the functional relationship between high-dimensional map features and robot's states. We firstly adopt PCA to preprocess images taken from omnidirenctional vision. The method extracts map features optimally and reduces the correlated features while keeping the minimum reconstruction error. Then, the robot states and corresponding features of the training panoramic snapshots are used to train the given neural network. This enables robot to memorize the environmental features as well as to predict available scene given its location information. Experimental results are shown finally.
Captioning Multiple Speakers Using Speech Recognition to Assist Disabled People
Authors: Mike Wald
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (2008)

Meetings and seminars involving many people speaking can be some of the hardest situations for deaf people to be able to follow what is being said and also for people with physical, visual or cognitive disabilities to take notes or remember key points. People may also be absent during important interactions or they may arrive late or leave early. Real time captioning using phonetic keyboards can provide an accurate live as well as archived transcription of what has been said but is often not available because of the cost and shortage of highly skilled and trained stenographers. This paper describes the development of applications that use speech recognition to provide automatic real time text transcriptions in situations when there can be many people speaking.
Parameterization of 3D Surface Patches by Straightest Distances
Authors: Sungyeol Lee, Haeyoung Lee
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computational Science, Part II (2007)

In this paper, we introduce a new piecewise linear parameterization of 3D surface patches which provides a basis for texture mapping, morphing, remeshing, and geometry imaging. To lower distortion when flatting a 3D surface patch, we propose a new method to locally calculate straightest distances with cutting planes. Our new and simple technique demonstrates competitive results to the current leading parameterizations and will help many applications that require one-to-one mapping.
Frugal Sensor Assignment
Authors: Matthew P. Johnson, Hosam Rowaihy, Diego Pizzocaro, Amotz Bar-Noy, Stuart Chalmers, Thomas Porta, Alun Preece
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE international conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (2008)

When a sensor network is deployed in the field it is typically required to support multiple simultaneous missions, which may start and finish at different times. Schemes that match sensor resources to mission demands thus become necessary. In this paper, we consider new sensor-assignment problems motivated by frugality, i.e., the conservation of resources, for both static and dynamic settings. In general, the problems we study are NP-hard even to approximate, and so we focus on heuristic algorithms that perform well in practice. In the static setting, we propose a greedy centralized solution and a more sophisticated solution that uses the Generalized Assignment Problem model and can be implemented in a distributed fashion. In the dynamic setting, we give heuristic algorithms in which available sensors propose to nearby missions as they arrive. We find that the overall performance can be significantly improved if available sensors sometimes refuse to offer utility to missions they could help based on the value of the mission, the sensor's remaining energy, and (if known) the remaining target lifetime of the network. Finally, we evaluate our solutions through simulations.
Observability Concepts in Abstract Data Type Specification, 30 Years Later
Authors: Donald Sannella, Andrzej Tarlecki
Venue: Concurrency, Graphs and Models: Essays Dedicated to Ugo Montanari on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (2008)

We recall the contribution of Montanari's paper [GGM76] and sketch a framework for observable behaviour specification that blends some of these early ideas, seen from a more modern perspective, with our own approach.
Measuring Complexity of Multi-agent Simulations --- An Attempt Using Metrics
Authors: Franziska Klügl
Venue: Languages, Methodologies and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems: First International Workshop, LADS 2007, Durham, UK, September 4-6, 2007. Revised Selected Papers (2008)

The variety of existing agent-based simulations is overwhelming. However --- especially when comparing agent-based simulation to other simulation paradigms, a reference frame is missing that allows characterizing shortly and discriminating between simulation models. In this contribution, I address this problem by introducing metrics for measuring properties of agent-based simulations for finally being able to characterize the complexities involved in developing such a model.
Reinforcement learning for DEC-MDPs with changing action sets and partially ordered dependencies
Authors: Thomas Gabel, Martin Riedmiller
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3 (2008)

Decentralized Markov decision processes are frequently used to model cooperative multi-agent systems. In this paper, we identify a subclass of general DEC-MDPs that features regularities in the way agents interact with one another. This class is of high relevance for many real-world applications and features provably reduced complexity (NP-complete) compared to the general problem (NEXP-complete). Since optimally solving larger-sized NP-hard problems is intractable, we keep the learning as much decentralized as possible and use multi-agent reinforcement learning to improve the agents' behavior online. Further, we suggest a restricted message passing scheme that notifies other agents about forthcoming effects on their state transitions and that allows the agents to acquire approximate joint policies of high quality.