ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Modelling spatial-temporal change of Poyang Lake using multitemporal Landsat imagery
Authors: Fengming Hui, Bing Xu, Huabing Huang, Qian Yu, Peng Gong
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2008)

Poyang Lake is a seasonal lake, exchanging water with the lower branch of the Yangtze River. During the spring and summer flooding season it inundates a large area while in the winter it shrinks considerably, creating a large tract of marshland for wild migratory birds. A better knowledge of the water coverage duration and the beginning and ending dates for the vast range of marshlands surrounding the lake is important for the measurement, modelling and management of marshland ecosystems. In addition, the abundance of a special type of snail (Oncomelania hupensis), the intermediate host of parasite schistosome (Schistosoma japonicum) in this region, is also heavily dependent on the water coverage information. However, there is no accurate digital elevation model (DEM) for the lake bottom and the inundated marshland, nor is there sufficient water level information over this area. In this study, we assess the feasibility of the use of multitemporal Landsat images for mapping the spatial-temporal change of Poyang Lake water body and the temporal process of water inundation of marshlands. Eight cloud-free Landsat Thematic Mapper images taken during a period of one year were used in this study. We used the normalized difference water index (NDWI) and the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) methods to map water bodies. We then examined the annual spatial-temporal change of the Poyang Lake water body. Finally we attempted to obtain the duration of water inundation of marshlands based on the temporal sequence of water extent determined from the Landsat images. The results showed that although the images can be used to capture the snapshots of water coverage in this area, they are insufficient to provide accurate estimation of the spatial-temporal process of water inundation over the marshlands through linear interpolation.
Learning to use a text editor: some learner characteristics that predict success
Authors: Louis M. Gomez, Dennis E. Egan, Cheryl Bowers
Venue: Human-computer interaction (1986)

Why do some people have much more difficulty than others in learning a computer-based skill? To answer this question, we observed first-time users of computers as they learned to use a computer text editor. In two experiments, older people had more trouble than younger people and those who scored low on a standard test of spatial memory had greater diffkulty than high scorers. These correlations were stable over several hours of practice and did not vary as a function of the type of terminal used or specific editing problems attempted. Correlations involving age and spatial memory could not be explained by other characteristics such as amount of education, reasoning ability, or associative memory ability. Results like these that relate learning diffkulty to specific characteristics of people ultimately may suggest ways to change computer interface design or training to accommodate a wider range of users.
The Influence of Instruction Mode on Reaching Movements during Manual Assembly
Authors: Sonja Stork, Christian Stößel, Anna Schubö
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society on HCI and Usability for Education and Work (2008)

The mode and design of instruction presentation have a high impact on human task performance. Especially in a working context, instruction modes have to be developed according to the properties of human information processing like attentional selection and action planning. Accordingly, tasks have to be divided in subtasks in order to find the best way to support each subprocess. The present study presents an experimental setup and first results in order to investigate the impact of different instruction modes on the first goal-directed movement during an assembly task. Results are discussed with respect to implications for instruction presentation and the development of a system for adaptive worker assistance.
Automated creation of a forms-based database query interface
Authors: Magesh Jayapandian, H. V. Jagadish
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Forms-based query interfaces are widely used to access databases today. The design of a forms-based interface is often a key step in the deployment of a database. Each form in such an interface is capable of expressing only a very limited range of queries. Ideally, the set of forms as a whole must be able to express all possible queries that any user may have. Creating an interface that approaches this ideal is surprisingly hard. In this paper, we seek to maximize the ability of a forms-based interface to support queries a user may ask, while bounding both the number of forms and the complexity of any one form. Given a database schema and content we present an automated technique to generate a good set of forms that meet the above desiderata. While a careful analysis of real or expected query workloads are useful in designing the interface, these query sets are often unavailable or hard to obtain prior to the database even being deployed. Hence generating a good set of forms just using the database itself is a challenging yet important problem. Our experimental analysis shows that our techniques can create a reasonable set of forms, one that can express 60--90% of user queries, without any input from the database administrator. Human experts, without support from software such as ours, are often unable to support as high a fraction of user queries.
Fast Bit Gather, Bit Scatter and Bit Permutation Instructions for Commodity Microprocessors
Authors: Yedidya Hilewitz, Ruby B. Lee
Venue: Journal of Signal Processing Systems (2008)

Advanced bit manipulation operations are not efficiently supported by commodity word-oriented microprocessors. Programming tricks are typically devised to shorten the long sequence of instructions needed to emulate these complicated bit operations. As these bit manipulation operations are relevant to applications that are becoming increasingly important, we propose direct support for them in microprocessors. In particular, we propose fast bit gather (or parallel extract), bit scatter (or parallel deposit) and bit permutation instructions (including group, butterfly and inverse butterfly). We show that all these instructions can be implemented efficiently using both the fast butterfly and inverse butterfly network datapaths. Specifically, we show that parallel deposit can be mapped onto a butterfly circuit and parallel extract can be mapped onto an inverse butterfly circuit. We define static, dynamic and loop invariant versions of the instructions, with static versions utilizing a much simpler functional unit. We show how a hardware decoder can be implemented for the dynamic and loop-invariant versions to generate, dynamically, the control signals for the butterfly and inverse butterfly datapaths. The simplest functional unit we propose is smaller and faster than an ALU. We also show that these instructions yield significant speedups over a basic RISC architecture for a variety of different application kernels taken from applications domains including bioinformatics, steganography, coding, compression and random number generation.
Designing an Interactive Messaging and Reminder Display for Elderly
Authors: Erwin R. Veldhoven, Martijn H. Vastenburg, David V. Keyson
Venue: Proceedings of the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (2008)

Despite the wealth of information and communication technology in society today, there appears to be a lack of acceptable information services for the growing elderly population in need of care. Acceptability is not only related to human factors such as button size and legibility, but rather relates to perceived value and harmony in relation to existing living patterns. This paper describes the design of an asynchronous interactive communication system based upon a bulletin board metaphor. A panel of end-users was involved in various stages of the design process. To improve ease of use, functionality exposed to elderly users is limited, while caregivers are given extended control. A pilot field study with a working prototype showed a high degree of user acceptance. The user centered approach resulted in a design concept that was acceptable for the elderly participants.
Locating the critical failure surface in a slope stability analysis by genetic algorithm
Authors: Aniruddha Sengupta, Anup Upadhyay
Venue: Applied Soft Computing (2009)

The slope stability analysis is routinely performed by engineers to evaluate the stability of embankment dams, road embankments, river training works, excavations and retaining walls. Locating the critical failure surface of a soil slope is rendered erroneous and cumbersome due to the existence of local minima points. In case of large soil slopes, engineers face with a search space too large to employ the trial and error method in a computationally efficient fashion. A genetic algorithm is proposed to locate the critical surface under general conditions with general constraints. Convergence to any prescribed degree of precision was achieved with the algorithm. The algorithm has been demonstrated to be computationally superior to other optimization routines, like, Monte-Carlo method and grid-points approach.
Privacy preserving serial data publishing by role composition
Authors: Yingyi Bu, Ada Wai Chee Fu, Raymond Chi Wing Wong, Lei Chen, Jiuyong Li
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Previous works about privacy preserving serial data publishing on dynamic databases have relied on unrealistic assumptions of the nature of dynamic databases. In many applications, some sensitive values changes freely while others never change. For example, in medical applications, the disease attribute changes with time when patients recover from one disease and develop another disease. However, patients do not recover from some diseases such as HIV. We call such diseases permanent sensitive values. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing solutions handle these realistic issues. We propose a novel anonymization approach called HD-composition to solve the above problems. Extensive experiments with real data confirm our theoretical results.
Efficient online monitoring of web-service SLAs
Authors: Franco Raimondi, James Skene, Wolfgang Emmerich
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (2008)

If an organization depends on the service quality provided by another organization it often enters into a bilateral service level agreement (SLA), which mitigates outsourcing risks by associating penalty payments with poor service quality. Once these agreements are entered into, it becomes necessary to monitor their conditions, which will commonly relate to timeliness, reliability and request throughput, at run-time. We show how these conditions can be translated into timed automata. Acceptance of a timed word by a timed automaton can be decided in quadratic time and because the timed automata can operate while messages are exchanged at run-time there is effectively only a linear run-time overhead. We present an implementation to derive on-line monitors for web services automatically from SLAs using an Eclipse plugin. We evaluate the efficiency and scalability of this approach using a large-scale case study in a service-oriented computational grid.
Substantiation of a criterion of metrological reliability of measuring instruments
Authors: I. A. Sakhnyuk
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (2008)

The choice of a criterion of metrological reliability of measuring instruments is founded. Redundant measurement methods are used that make it possible to determine the current values of the parameters of the conversion function being used at any moment of operation of a measuring instrument. Based on the results of intermediate measurements of correcting physical values, an equation of quantities that describe the conversion function parameters is obtained.
Phasor representation for narrowband active noise control systems
Authors: Fu-Kun Chen, Ding-Horng Chen, Yue-Dar Jou
Venue: EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing (2008)

The phasor representation is introduced to identify the characteristic of the active noise control (ANC) systems. The conventional representation, transfer function, cannot explain the fact that the performance will be degraded at some frequency for the narrowband ANC systems. This paper uses the relationship of signal phasors to illustrate geometrically the operation and the behavior of two-tap adaptive filters. In addition, the best signal basis is therefore suggested to achieve a better performance from the viewpoint of phasor synthesis. Simulation results show that the well-selected signal basis not only achieves a better convergence performance but also speeds up the convergence for narrowband ANC systems.
DISH: Distributed Self-Healing
Authors: Di Ma, Gene Tsudik
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (2008)

Unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) operating in hostile environments face the risk of compromise. Unable to off-load collected data to a sink or some other trusted external entity, sensors must protect themselves by attempting to mitigate potential compromise and safeguarding their data. In this paper, we focus on techniques that allow unattended sensors to recover from intrusions by soliciting help from peer sensors. We define a realistic adversarial model and show how certain simple defense methods can result in sensors re-gaining secrecy and authenticity of collected data, despite adversary's efforts to the contrary. We present an extensive analysis and a set of simulation results that support our observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed techniques.
Rewriting procedures for batched bindings
Authors: Ravindra Guravannavar, S. Sudarshan
Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008)

Queries, or calls to stored procedures/user-defined functions are often invoked multiple times, either from within a loop in an application program, or from the where/select clause of an outer query. When the invoked query/procedure/function involves database access, a naive implementation can result in very poor performance, due to random I/O. Query decorrelation addresses this problem in the special case of nested sub-queries, but is not applicable otherwise. This problem is traditionally addressed by manually rewriting the application to make it set-oriented, by creating a batch of parameters, and by rewriting the query/procedure to work on the batch instead of one parameter at a time. Such manual rewriting is time-consuming and error prone. In this paper, we propose techniques that can be used to do the following, (a) Automatically rewrite programs to replace multiple calls to a query by a batched call to a correspondingly rewritten query, (b) Rewrite a stored procedure/function to accept a batch of bindings, instead of a single binding. Thereby, for example, a query which would have been invoked many times from different invocations of a stored procedure would be automatically replaced by one (or a few) invocations of a batched version of the query. Our techniques can be applied to code written in any language, such as procedural versions of SQL, or Java. We have implemented the proposed rewriting techniques for a subset of Java, where database operations are performed using an API over JDBC. We demonstrate the benefits due to our rewrites with three cases from real-world applications, which faced significant performance problems due to repeated invocations of queries/procedures.
An integrative recognition method for speech and gestures
Authors: Madoka Miki, Chiyomi Miyajima, Takanori Nishino, Norihide Kitaoka, Kazuya Takeda
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (2008)

We propose an integrative recognition method of speech accompanied with gestures such as pointing. Simultaneously generated speech and pointing complementarily help the recognition of both, and thus the integration of these multiple modalities may improve recognition performance. As an example of such multimodal speech, we selected the explanation of a geometry problem. While the problem was being solved, speech and fingertip movements were recorded with a close-talking microphone and a 3D position sensor. To find the correspondence between utterance and gestures, we propose probability distribution of the time gap between the starting times of an utterance and gestures. We also propose an integrative recognition method using this distribution. We obtained approximately 3-point improvement for both speech and fingertip movement recognition performance with this method.
Dimensionality reduction for heterogeneous dataset in rushes editing
Authors: Yang Liu, Yan Liu, Keith C. C. Chan
Venue: Pattern Recognition (2009)

Rushes editing enables the computer to edit the film like a professional film cutter based on the raw footage. The most important issue in rushes editing is the generation of the effective, efficient, and robust descriptors for footage content analysis. Dimensionality reduction technology provides the means to generate such descriptors by seeking a low-dimensional equivalence of the high-dimensional video data using intelligent algorithms. However, existing dimensionality reduction techniques are not directly applicable to the editing of rushes because of the heterogeneity of rushes data. To deal with this heterogeneity, this paper proposes a novel non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm called multi-layer isometric feature mapping (ML-Isomap). First, a clustering algorithm is utilized to partition the high-dimensional data points into a set of data blocks in the high-dimensional feature space. Second, intra-cluster graphs are constructed based on the individual character of each data block to build the basic layer for the ML-Isomap. Third, the inter-cluster graph is constructed by analyzing the interrelation among these isolated data blocks to build the hyper-layers for the ML-Isomap. Finally, all the data points are mapped into the unique low-dimensional feature space by maintaining to the greatest extent the corresponding relations of the multiple layers in the high-dimensional feature space. Comparative experiments on synthetic data as well as real rushes editing tasks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce the dimensions of various datasets efficiently while preserving both the global structure and the local details of the heterogeneous dataset.
Rainfall estimation from convective storms using the hydro-estimator and NEXRAD
Authors: Nazario D. Ramirez-Beltran, Robert J. Kuligowski, Eric W. Harmsen, Joan M. Castro, Sandra Cruz-Pol, Melvin J. Cardona
Venue: WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on SYSTEMS (2008)

Validation of the Hydro-Estimator (HE) and the Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD) during heavy storms over Puerto Rico (PR) is reported. The HE is a high resolution rainfall retrieval algorithm based on satellite and numerical weather prediction model data. The accuracy of the HE and the NEXRAD rainfall estimates can be measured by decomposing the rainfall process into sequences of discrete (rain / no rain) and continuous (rainfall rate) random variables. Validation results are based on five heavy storms that seriously impacted human life and the economy of PR during the period 2003 to 2005. The average discrete validation results indicate acceptable hit rate values for both the HE and NEXRAD (0.76 vs. 0.87) and reasonable discrete bias ratios (1.04 vs. 0.73) but a very low of probability of detection of rain for both the HE and NEXRAD (0.36 vs. 0.52). The HE shows an overestimation on average whereas the NEXRAD exhibits underestimation in the continuous validation results (continuous bias ratio of 1.14 vs 0.70 for NEXRAD), which contributes to moderate overall errors for the HE and NEXRAD in terms of root mean squared error (2.14 mm vs. 1.66 mm) and mean absolute error (0.96 mm vs. 0.77 mm). The HE algorithm was designed to operate over US continental areas and satisfactory results have been reported. However, over tropical regions it was determined that warm clouds can generate substantial rainfall amounts that are not detected by the HE algorithm. It is known that precipitation processes in clouds with warm tops are very sensitive to the microphysical structure of their tops. Specifically, precipitation processes are more efficient when water droplets or/and ice particles grow to larger sizes. It has been shown that the uses of the reflected portion of the near-infrared during the daytime indicates the presence large cloud-top particles and suggest rain in warm-top clouds. It has been used the effective radius of clouds particles to detect raining clouds. However, the available algorithms to estimate the effective radius are designed to operate over ice clouds. We are in the process of developing an algorithm to extract the microphysical structure for rainy warm top clouds, and the first step of this algorithm is to estimate the emittance of near infrared window, which is described in this paper.
A tabu search heuristic for the hybrid flowshop scheduling with finite intermediate buffers
Authors: Xianpeng Wang, Lixin Tang
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2009)

This paper investigates the hybrid flowshop scheduling with finite intermediate buffers, whose objective is to minimize the sum of weighted completion time of all jobs. Since this problem is very complex and has been proven strongly NP-hard, a tabu search heuristic is proposed. In this heuristic there are two main features. One is that a scatter search mechanism is incorporated to improve the diversity of the search procedure. And the other is that a permutation of N jobs representing their processing order in the first stage instead of a complex complete schedule is used to denote a solution. Computational experiments on randomly generated instances with different structures show that the proposed tabu search heuristic can provide good solutions compared to both the lower bounds and the algorithm proposed for this problem in a lately published literature.
Studying the Influence of Network-Aware Grid Scheduling on the Performance Received by Users
Authors: Luis Tomás, Agustín Caminero, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrión
Venue: Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: (2008)

Grid computing is the key enabling technology to aggregate geographically distributed resources in the context of a particular application. As Grids are extremely distributed systems, requirements on the communication network should also be taken into account when performing usual tasks such as scheduling, migrating or monitoring of jobs. Note that users, services, and data need to communicate with each other over networks, thus the network should be used in an efficient and fault-tolerant way. There are Grid schedulers that consider the network when performing their tasks, but the way they have been implemented does not allow easy extensions. Thus, they are not suitable to be modified and try different scheduling approaches. The authors have extended the GridWay metascheduler to perform scheduling considering the network status. This is the first step in order to proceed with more complicated and efficient scheduling and reservation processes. In this work, the extension has been evaluated by means of a testbed, in which users simultaneously submit different jobs with different frequencies to GridWay. Results presented here show that the response time perceived by Grid users is reduced when data on network performance are considered in the job scheduling process.