ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Supporting a course in new literacies and skills for linguists with a Virtual Learning Environment. Results from a staff/student collaborative action-research project at Coventry University
Authors: Marina Orsini-Jones
Venue: ReCALL (2004)

This paper reports on the results of an action research project at Coventry University that consisted of the evaluation of a curriculum innovation supported by the use of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) WebCT, i.e. a new module (course): Academic and Professional Skills for Language Learning. The project was carried out collaboratively by staff &ndash; all the linguists teaching level 1 modules in EFL, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish &ndash; and students over a period of ten months in 2002&ndash;2003. The module aims at engaging students actively with the new literacies and skills required by the &lsquo;knowledge society&rsquo;. The provisional hypothesis was that skills-based teaching and learning activities that are aligned with the needs of language learners would raise confidence in academic and professional skills and increase motivation and proficiency in language learning. The use of the Virtual Learning Environment Web Communication Tools (WebCT), available within the online learning portal both on and off campus for students at Coventry University, would be instrumental in testing the hypothesis, as it provided an interactive reflective forum for both staff and students involved. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The paper will show how the use of the Virtual Learning Environment facilitated the creation of exercises that developed both ICT skills and language-specific ones. On a less positive note, the results confirmed the outcomes of other research in the field, i.e. that students find it challenging to become reflective, autonomous learners and that we cannot assume that the use of technology automatically leads to autonomy. Many students also found it challenging to see the relevance to their studies of skills and literacies that went beyond the four basic language skills. The paper will conclude by illustrating both the positive and the negative outcomes of the project and outlining the staff/student-agreed way forward in the light of the issues encountered.
Discovering and representing the contextual and narrative structure of e-books to support reading and comprehension (abstract only)
Authors: Yixing Sun
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

A person reading a book needs to build an understanding based on the available textual materials. As a result of a survey of users' reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that most of these interfaces provide poor support for the actual processes of reading and comprehension. In particular, there is generally minimal support for understanding the overall structure (or contextual structure) and the narrative structure of a book. We propose adapting topic tracking and detection techniques to discover the narrative threads within a book, and hence its narrative structure. The contextual and narrative structures will be presented to the user through purpose-designed visualisations, which will be integrated and linked within a newly developed e-Book browser. We have chosen to use the Bible as our test corpus, as it has a rich narrative structure, and relatively complex contextual structure. Evaluation of the interface, and its components, will be done through field studies involving actual readers of the Bible, to assess the effectiveness of the user interface in enhancing a user's experience.
GDF "Dolce Vita"
Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 video review on Electronic theater program on Electronic theater program - Volume 144 (2003)

A man floating on a bubble armchair, a woman flying down the stairs in a coat of feathers, another man bathing. Copyright held by creator.
Collaborative Resource Allocation in Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Simone Giannecchini, Marco Caccamo, Chi-Sheng Shih
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (2004)

Traditional real-time resource allocation algorithms assume that the available resources in a system such as total CPU and network bandwidth do not change over time. However, in wireless sensor networks, the amount of available resources on the devices and the communication channel may not be constant for all times: for instance, a node can be turned off in some time intervals to increase its battery lifetime. Since sensor networks have limited network capacity and computational capabilities, it is crucial to optimally assign the available resources among all the active tasks.In this paper, we propose a fast a fast online resource allocation algorithm (CoRAl) to dynamically reconfigure a sensor network whenever a new hot spot occurs (e.g., a new intruder is detected) or a node's activity changes (i.e., sleep vs. active mode). Our experimental results show that CoRAl provides always near-optimal resource allocation while keeping its online overhead low.
Elaboration tolerance through object-orientation
Authors: Joakim Gustafsson, Jonas Kvarnström
Venue: Artificial Intelligence (2004)

Although many formalisms for reasoning about action and change have been proposed in the literature, any concrete examples provided in such articles have primarily consisted of tiny domains that highlight some particular aspect or problem. However, since some of the classical problems are now completely or partially solved and since powerful tools are becoming available, it is now necessary to start modeling more complex domains. This article presents a methodology for handling such domains in a systematic manner using an object-oriented framework and provides several examples of the elaboration tolerance exhibited by the resulting models.
Forming test collections with no system pooling
Authors: Mark Sanderson, Hideo Joho
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

Forming test collection relevance judgments from the pooled output of multiple retrieval systems has become the standard process for creating resources such as the TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR test collections. This paper presents a series of experiments examining three different ways of building test collections where no system pooling is used. First, a collection formation technique combining manual feedback and multiple systems is adapted to work with a single retrieval system. Second, an existing method based on pooling the output of multiple manual searches is re-examined: testing a wider range of searchers and retrieval systems than has been examined before. Third, a new approach is explored where the ranked output of a single automatic search on a single retrieval system is assessed for relevance: no pooling whatsoever. Using established techniques for evaluating the quality of relevance judgments, in all three cases, test collections are formed that are as good as TREC.
Functional dimensioning and tolerancing software for concurrent engineering applications
Authors: M. N. Islam
Venue: Computers in Industry (2004)

This paper describes the development of a prototype software package for solving functional dimensioning and tolerancing (FD&T) problems in a Concurrent Engineering environment. It provides a systematic way of converting functional requirements of a product into dimensional specifications by means of the following steps: firstly, the relationships necessary for solving FD&T problems are represented in a matrix form, known as functional requirements/dimensions (FR/D) matrix. Secondly, the values of dimensions and tolerances are then determined by satisfying all these relationships represented in a FR/D matrix by applying a comprehensive strategy which includes: tolerance allocation strategies for different types of FD&T problems and for determining an optimum solution order for coupled functional equations. The prototype software is evaluated by its potential users, and the results indicate that it can be an effective computer-based tool for solving FD&T problems in a CE environment.
Integrative quality assurance of micro-parts using Microfeatures
Authors: J. Fleischer, D. Spath, J. Elsner
Venue: Microsystem Technologies (2004)

The article introduces the &#x201c;Microfeature Catalogue&#x201d; as an information database that is structured by Microfeatures and can be used for preventive and non-preventive quality assurance. The Microfeature conception is adapted and evaluated in the specific fabrication environment of micro mechanical components. The production of micro parts demands a further development of the new fabrication technologies on the one hand and an appropriate development of the concomitant processes such as the quality assurance process on the other hand. A coherent information cycle between design, fabrication and quality assurance is put into practice.
Etching profile of silicon carbide in a NF3/CH4 inductively coupled plasma
Authors: Byungwhan Kim, Suk Yong Lee, Byung-Teak Lee
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2004)

Using a Ni mask as the protective layer, silicon carbide (SiC) has been etched in a NF3/CH4 inductively coupled plasma. SiC profiles were investigated as a function of process parameters. Experimental ranges are 700-850 W source power, 50-150 W bias power, 6-16 mTorr pressure, and 20-100% NF3 percentage. Etch mechanisms were estimated by combining dc bias, etch rate, and expected fluorine radical behavior. The profile angle behavior with the bias power was mainly attributed to enhanced mask erosion by ion bombardment. The profile angle was strongly correlated to the dc bias in the source power range 700-800 W, and in the pressure range 7.5-10.5 mTorr. For the variations in the NF3 percentage, the dc bias effect was insignificant.
A Study of Multiple-Valued Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) Using Binary MTJ Devices
Venue: Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (2004)

This paper presents four-valued magnetoresistiveRAM (MRAM) storage cells using one access transistorand two binary magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ)devices with the MTJ devices either in series or in parallel.We present a comparative study of the two cellsin terms of their area and power benefits over the binaryMRAM, all using the same conventional MRAMprocess.
A study of methods for normalizing user ratings in collaborative filtering
Authors: Rong Jin, Luo Si
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2004)

The goal of collaborative filtering is to make recommendations for a test user by utilizing the rating information of users who share interests similar to the test user. Because ratings are determined not only by user interests but also the rating habits of users, it is important to normalize ratings of different users to the same scale. In this paper, we compare two different normalization strategies for user ratings, namely the Gaussian normalization method and the decoupling normalization method. Particularly, we incorporated these two rating normalization methods into two collaborative filtering algorithms, and evaluated their effectiveness on the EachMovie dataset. The experiment results have shown that the decoupling method for rating normalization is more effective than the Gaussian normalization method in improving the performance of collaborative filtering algorithms.
Predicting user preferences: from semantic to pragmatic metrics of Web navigation behavior
Authors: Ion Juvina, Herre van Oostendorp
Venue: Proceedings of the conference on Dutch directions in HCI (2004)

This paper aims at demonstrating a particular method to extract relevant information from navigation data. Participants had to perform web tasks while their navigation behavior was recorded. Then, they had to rate a list of presents based on the question: "how much would you like to receive this present for your birthday?" The semantic similarities (calculated with Latent Semantic Analysis) between users' navigation paths and presents' descriptions were used as implicit estimates of users' preferences. Results show that users' explicit preferences can be accurately estimated based on users' navigation behavior. Consequently, we propose this method to be used in building user models for adaptive web applications.
The Interactive Simulation Environments of OAIR
Authors: Qiqian Zhang, Miaoliang Zhu, Benye Gui, Shaojun Xu
Venue: Proceedings of the Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference (2004)

Because of the complexity of the outdoor terrain and the variety of the robot missions, the Outdoor Autonomous Intelligent Robot (OAIR) has to carry out missions in unstructured and impossibly predicted environment, which brings forward the higher challenge for the simulation environment. So the interactive simulation idea is introduced in this article. By means of classification, the outdoor simulation environments are divided into several sub-environments. The environmental entities modeled by a Scene Modeling Language (SML) can be edited interactively in accordance with requisition. And on the basis of the path- planning, the mission- planning method is introduced to simulate the complicated environment. The method not only simulates path-planning algorithms, but also verifies the validity and robustness of Intelligent Agents through editing or modifying the robot's geometric and kinetic parameters to accomplish the interactive simulation between the running environment and the mission-planning. At last, a visual Monitoring Tool is designed to evaluate the performance and the coordination of the Intelligent Agents.
Spatio-Temporal Photon Density Estimation Using Bilateral Filtering
Authors: Markus Weber, Marco Milch, Karol Myszkowski, Kirill Dmitriev, Przemyslaw Rokita, Hans-Peter Seidel
Venue: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International (2004)

Photon tracing and density estimation are well establishedtechniques in global illumination computation andrendering of high-quality animation sequences. Using traditionaldensity estimation techniques it is difficult to removestochastic noise inherent for photon-based methodswhile avoiding overblurring lighting details. In this paperwe investigate the use of bilateral filtering for lighting reconstructionbased on the local density of photon hit points.Bilateral filtering is applied in spatio-temporal domain andprovides control over the level-of-details in reconstructedlighting. All changes of lighting below this level are treatedas stochastic noise and are suppressed. Bilateral filteringproves to be efficient in preserving sharp features in lightingwhich is in particular important for high-quality causticreconstruction. Also, flickering between subsequent animationframes is substantially reduced due to extending bilateralfiltering into temporal domain.
Real Scale Experiments on Communityware
Authors: Toru Ishida, Hideyuki Nakanishi, Saeko Nomura
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Informatics Research for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure (2004)

Communityware is for more diverse and amorphousgroups of people. Compared to current groupwarestudies, communityware focuses on an earlier stage ofcollaboration: group formation from a wide variety ofpeople. We have been working on real scaleexperiments on communityware for more than 8 years.This paper summarizes our experiences on real scaleexperiments on communityware: the Mobile AssistantProject, Digital City Kyoto, and the InterculturalCollaboration Experiment.
Understanding CASE Generated Legacy Applications: A Case Study
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension (2004)

Reverse engineering for program understanding isalways the first step in a reengineering project. WhenCASE tools are used to develop legacy applications, thereare hidden assets that are not usually available. Theseassets may be very useful for program understandingbecause they contain design and architecturalinformation usually only found, if at all, in theapplications' documentation or are implicit in the code.Reverse engineering this type of applications requirestaking advantage of these assets.In this paper, we describe a case study in which wereverse engineer a large legacy application which wasconstructed using SNAP, a CASE tool for the AS400. Byexploiting vital information generated by SNAP, we wereable to obtain representations of the application'spersistent data and of dependency information ofprograms that make up the application. This experienceled to the definition of guidelines that can be used totackle the problem of reengineering applications thatwere developed with case tools.
A branch-and-bound algorithm for the early/tardy machine scheduling problem with a common due-date and sequence-dependent setup time
Authors: Ghaith Rabadi, Mansooreh Mollaghasemi, Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2004)

The single-machine early/tardy (E/T) scheduling problem is addressed in this research. The objective of this problem is to minimize the total amount of earliness and tardiness. Earliness and tardiness, are weighted equally and the due date is common and large (unrestricted) for all jobs. Machine setup time is included and is considered sequence-dependent. When sequence-dependent setup times are included, the complexity of the problem increases significantly and the problem becomes NP-hard. In the literature, only mixed integer programming formulation is available to optimally solve the problem at hand. In this paper, a branch-and-bound algorithm (B&B) is developed to obtain optimal solutions for the problem. As it will be shown, the B&B solved problems three times larger than what has been reported in the literature.
A Threshold Logic Synthesis Tool for RTD Circuits
Authors: Maria J. Avedillo, Jose M. Quintana
Venue: Proceedings of the Digital System Design, EUROMICRO Systems (2004)

Functional devices and circuits based on Resonant Tunnelling Diodes (RTDs) are receiving much attention since they allow high speed and/or low power operation. RTDs exhibit a negative differential resistance in their current-voltage characteristic which can be exploited to significantly increase the functionality implemented by a single gate in comparison to other technologies. In particular, they have proven to efficiently implement threshold gates which are a generalization of conventional boolean gates. Suitable logic synthesis tools are required to handle these complex building blocks in order to translate the advantages of this emergent technology to the circuit and system levels. This paper describes an efficient approach to the automatic design of networks of threshold gates from functional specifications. Results for widely used logic functions and standard benchmark circuits are reported.
Testing of java web services for robustness
Authors: Chen Fu, Barbara G. Ryder, Ana Milanova, David Wonnacott
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (2004)

This paper presents a new compile-time analysis that enables a testing methodology for white-box coverage testing of error recovery code (i.e., exception handlers) in Java web services using compiler-directed fault injection. The analysis allows compiler-generated instrumentation to guide the fault injection and to record the recovery code exercised. (An injected fault is experienced as a Java exception.) The analysis (i) identifies the exception-flow 'def-uses' to be tested in this manner, (ii) determines the kind of fault to be requested at a program point, and (iii) finds appropriate locations for code instrumentation. The analysis incorporates refinements that establish sufficient context sensitivity to ensure relatively precise def-use links and to eliminate some spurious def-uses due to demonstrably infeasible control flow. A runtime test harness calculates test coverage of these links using an exception def-catch metric. Experiments with the methodology demonstrate the utility of the increased precision in obtaining good test coverage on a set of moderately-sized Java web services benchmarks.
A Shrinking-Based Dimension Reduction Approach for Multi-Dimensional Data Analysis
Authors: Yong Shi, Aidong Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (2004)

In this paper, we present continuous research on dataanalysis based on our previous work on the shrinking approach.Shrinking[A shrinking-based approach for multi-dimensional data analysis] is a novel data preprocessing technique which optimizes the inner structure of data inspiredby the Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation[The laws of physics] in the realworld. It can be applied in many data mining fields. Followingour previous work on the shrinking method for multi-dimensionaldata analysis in full data space, we propose ashrinking-based dimension reduction approach which tendsto solve the dimension reduction problem from a new perspective.In this approach data are moved along the directionof the density gradient, thus making the inner structureof data more prominent. It is conducted on a sequence ofgrids with different cell sizes. Dimension reduction processis performed based on the difference of the data distributionprojected on each dimension before and after the data-shrinkingprocess. Those dimensions with dramatic variationof data distribution through the data-shrinking processare selected as good dimension candidates for furtherdata analysis. This approach can assist to improve the performanceof existing data analysis approaches. We demonstratehow this shrinking-based dimension reduction approachaffects the clustering results of well known algorithms.
Distribution Patterns of Effort Estimations
Authors: Drazen Milicic, Claes Wohlin
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th EUROMICRO Conference (2004)

Effort estimations within software development projects and the ability to work within these estimations are perhaps the single most important, and at the same time inadequately mastered, discipline for overall project success. This study examines some characteristics of accuracies in software development efforts and identifies patterns that can be used to increase the understanding of the effort estimation discipline as well as to improve the accuracy of effort estimations. The study complements current research by taking a more simplistic approach than usually found within mainstream research concerning effort estimations. It shows that there are useful patterns to be found as well as interesting causalities, usable to increase the understanding and effort estimation capability.
Convergence of the Smarandache general continued fraction
Authors: Bouazza El Wahbi
Venue: Smarandache Notions Journal (2004)

We give a positive answer to the Smarandsche General Continued Fraction convergence (see [2]).
A Statistical Approach to Estimate the Dynamic Non-Linearity Parameters of Pipeline ADCs
Authors: Mohammad Taherzadeh-Sani, Reza Lotfi, Omid Shoaei
Venue: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2003)

A fully-analytical approach to estimate the statistics ofdynamic non-linearity parameters of pipeline analog-to-digitalconverters (ADCs) in the presence of circuit non-idealitiesincluding capacitance mismatches and non-idealopamps is presented. These parameters include the spurious-freedynamic range (SFDR) and the signal to noise-and-distortionratio (SNDR). The simple closed-form formulasfor SFDR and SNDR presented here are useful for designautomation of highly-linear pipeline ADCs in order toextract the required values for the circuit-level specificationsof the sub-blocks of converters. Behavioral simulations arepresented to show the accuracy of the proposed equations.