ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Business Process Outsourcing on Firm Performance
Authors: Pisit Chanvarasuth
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (2008)

In recent years outsourcing in general and business process outsourcing in particular has become an important phenomenon. It is widely expected that business process outsourcing offers significant value to firms through lowered costs, increased ability to scale, enhanced flexibility and better access to knowledge and technological resources. However, there are only a few empirical studies investigating the relationships between business process outsourcing and firm performance. This paper attempts to examine the impact of business process outsourcing on the subsequent financial performance of outsourcing client firms. The results indicate that outsourcing intensity has a positive impact on firm productivity and a negative impact on profitability.
Improving relevance feedback in language modeling with score regularization
Authors: Fernando D. Diaz
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (2008)

We demonstrate that regularization can improve feedback in a language modeling framework.
An efficient genetic algorithm with uniform crossover for air traffic control
Authors: Xiao-Bing Hu, Ezequiel Di Paolo
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2009)

Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) is a major issue in the daily air traffic control (ATC) operations. This paper reports on the application of genetic algorithms (GAs) to tackle the ASS problem in multi-runway systems. Most existing GAs for ASS are confronted with feasibility and efficiency problems in the design of their evolutionary operators, particularly the crossover. The new GA reported in this paper uses the following relationship between aircraft to construct chromosomes. This makes it possible to design a highly efficient crossover operator-uniform crossover, which is hardly applicable to those GAs designed directly based on the order of aircraft in arrival queues. The main benefit from the proposed uniform crossover operator is the effectiveness and efficiency in identifying, inheriting and protecting common sub-traffic-sequences without sacrificing the capability of diversifying chromosomes, which is demonstrated in the extensive comparative simulation study. By adopting the strategy of receding horizon control, the reported GA exhibits a good potential of real-time implementation in the ASS problem.
Delay-dependent H∞ controller design for linear neutral systems with discrete and distributed delays
Authors: Baoyong Zhang, Shaosheng Zhou, Shengyuan Xu
Venue: International Journal of Systems Science (2007)

This article considers the delay-dependent H∞ control problem for linear neutral systems with both discrete and distributed delays. The problem we address is to design a state feedback controller such that the resulting closed-loop system is asymptotically stable and satisfies a prescribed H∞ performance level. First, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the solvability of the problem is obtained in terms of matrix inequalities. Then, by using the cone complementarity linearization approach, an H∞ controller is developed based on the solvability condition. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Adaptive e-mail intention finding mechanism based on e-mail words social networks
Authors: Che-Fu Yeh, Ching-Hao Mao, Hahn-Ming Lee, Tsuhan Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Large scale attack defense (2007)

Through the rapid evaluation of spam, no fully successful solution for filtering spam has been found. However, the spammers still spread spam by using the same intentions such as advertising and phishing. In this investigation, we propose a mechanism of E-mail Words Social Network (EWSN) for profiling users' intentions related to interesting and uninteresting e-mails. An EWSN is constructed from the information in an individual user's mailbox, and expands e-mail information from the World Wide Web (WWW) via the search engine. Based on the web information and association rules among the words, words and relations are expanded as a words' social network. Via the EWSN, both interested and uninterested EWSNs can be constructed to analyze user intentions. Additionally, an efficiency detection mechanism based on the EWSN is proposed to classify e-mails. Finally, the adaptation algorithm of artificial immune system is applied to EWSN, which is thus adapted to follow the user's confirmed classification results. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system is very helpful for classifying spam e-mails by analyzing senders' intentions. Some ideas for analyzing interested nature of people, and profiling their backgrounds, are also presented.
Many-core design from a thermal perspective
Authors: Wei Huang, Mircea R. Stant, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Robert J. Ribando, Kevin Skadron
Venue: Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference (2008)

Air cooling limits have been a major design challenge in recent years for integrated circuits. Multi-core exacerbates thermal challenges because power scales with the number of cores, but also creates new opportunities for temperature-aware design, because multi-core designs offer more design parameters than single-core designs. This paper investigates the relationship between core size and on-chip hot spot temperature and shows that with the same power density, smaller cores are cooler than larger cores due to a spatial low-pass filtering effect of temperature. This phenomenon suggests that designs exploiting low-pass filtering can dissipate more power within the same cooling budget than contemporary designs.
The colourful feasibility problem
Authors: Antoine Deza, Sui Huang, Tamon Stephen, Tamás Terlaky
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2008)

We study a colourful generalization of the linear programming feasibility problem, comparing the algorithms introduced by Barany and Onn with new methods. This is a challenging problem on the borderline of tractability, its complexity is an open question. We perform benchmarking on generic and ill-conditioned problems, as well as recently introduced highly structured problems. We show that some algorithms can lead to cycling or slow convergence and we provide extensive numerical experiments which show that others perform much better than predicted by complexity arguments. We conclude that the most efficient method is a proposed multi-update algorithm.
Semantic pointing for object picking in complex 3D environments
Authors: Niklas Elmqvist, Jean-Daniel Fekete
Venue: Proceedings of graphics interface 2008 (2008)

Today's large and high-resolution displays coupled with powerful graphics hardware offer the potential for highly realistic 3D virtual environments, but also cause increased target acquisition difficulty for users interacting with these environments. We present an adaptation of semantic pointing to object picking in 3D environments. Essentially, semantic picking shrinks empty space and expands potential targets on the screen by dynamically adjusting the ratio between movement in visual space and motor space for relative input devices such as the mouse. Our implementation operates in the image-space using a hierarchical representation of the standard stencil buffer to allow for real-time calculation of the closest targets for all positions on the screen. An informal user study indicates that subjects perform more accurate pointing with semantic 3D pointing than without.
CIOs' perspectives of critical success factors in ERP upgrade projects
Authors: D. L. Olson, F. Zhao
Venue: Enterprise Information Systems (2007)

Enterprise resource planning systems have required significant upgrades in the 21st century as many of the systems obtained prior to 2000 have become outdated due to vendor changes. SAP and Oracle have emerged as dominant vendors, and SAP has announced discontinuance of support in the future for its primary R/3 system. This study reports interviews with the chief information officers (CIOs) of 15 institutions that have undergone (or are undergoing) enterprise system upgrades, with focus on discussion of major critical success factors for ERP upgrade projects.
Topology Design of Network-Coding-Based Multicast Networks
Authors: Kaikai Chi, Xiaohong Jiang, Susumu Horiguchi, Minyi Guo
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2008)

It is anticipated that a large amount of multicast traffic need to be supported in the future communication networks. Network coding technique proposed recently is promising for establishing multicast connections with significantly lower bandwidth requirement than that of the traditional Steiner treebased multicast connections. How to design multicast network topologies with the consideration of efficiently supporting multicast by network coding technique becomes an important issue now. It is notable, however, that the conventional algorithms for network topology design are mainly unicast-oriented, and they cannot be adopted directly for efficient topology design of network coding-based multicast networks by simply treating each multicast as multiple unicasts. In this paper, we consider for the first time the novel topology design problem of network coding-based multicast networks. Based on the characteristics of multicast and network coding, we first formulate this problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which is NP- ard, and then propose two heuristic algorithms for it. The effectiveness of our heuristics is verified through simulation and the comparison with the exhaustive search method. We demonstrate in this paper that in the topology design of multicast networks, adopting network coding technique to support multicast transmissions can significantly reduce the overall topology cost as compared to the conventional unicast-oriented design and the Steiner tree-based design.
Evolutionary synthesis of kinematic mechanisms
Authors: Hod Lipson
Venue: Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (2008)

This paper discusses the application of genetic programming to the synthesis of compound two-dimensional kinematic mechanisms, and benchmarks the results against one of the classical kinematic challenges of 19th century mechanical design. Considerations for selecting a representation for mechanism design are presented, and a number of human-competitive inventions are shown.
Traffic Distribution Forecasting in Packet-Switching Networks
Authors: Faramak Zandi
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Networking and Services (2008)

This paper presents a traffic distribution forecasting model in packet-switching networks with mapping these networks into multi-commodity networks. Firstly, the radial basis function (RBF) networks is applied to monitor and learn the real traffic distribution at present time. Then, a quadratic model is used to calibrate these functions for precise traffic distribution forecasting. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated through the use of a numerical example.
MULTIMODEL DISCRETE CONTROL WITH ONLINE UPDATING OF THE FRACTIONAL ORDER HOLD GAINS
Authors: A. Bilbao-Guillerna, M. De la Sen, S. Alonso-Quesada
Venue: Cybernetics and Systems (2007)

A multiestimation scheme for adaptive discrete-time control is presented. The different models of the scheme to be estimated are obtained from a set of different discretizations of a continuous-time unknown transfer function under a fractional order hold of correcting gain (β-FROH) which leads to distinct associate discrete-time models for the given continuous-time plant. The objective is to design a scheme being able to find the most appropriate value for the gain β to enhance the identification and tracking performances. The scheme chooses online the value of β with the best reference tracking performance by implementing eventually switches through time among a prefixed set of values characterizing the discrete models of the plant in a parallel multiestimation scheme. The switching rule is subjected to a minimum residence time in order to guarantee the closed loop stability. Simulations for two different practical cases, a controlled DC motor and a resonant circuit, are presented.
Massively parallel molecular dynamics simulations of lysozyme unfolding
Authors: R. Zhou, M. Eleftheriou, C.-C. Hon, R. S. Germain, A. K. Royyuru, B. J. Berne
Venue: IBM Journal of Research and Development (2008)

We have performed molecular dynamics simulations for a total duration of more than 10 µs (with most molecular trajectories being 1 µs in duration) to study, the effect of a single mutation on hen lysozyme protein stability and denaturing, using an IBM Blue Gene/L™ supercomputer. One goal of this study was to assess the use of certain force fields to reproduce experimental results of protein unfolding using thermal denaturing techniques. A second and more important goal was to gain microscopic insights into the mechanism of protein misfolding using both thermal and chemical denaturing techniques. We found that the thermal denaturing results were robust and reproducible with various force fields. The chemical denaturing results explained why the single amino-acid mutation on residue Trp62 causes the disruption of long-range interactions in the tertiary structure. Simulation results revealed that the Trp62 residue was the key to a cooperative long-range interaction within the wild-type protein. Specifically, Trp62 acts as a bridge between two neighboring basic residues through a π-type H-bond or π-cation interaction to form an Arg-Trp-Arg "sandwich-like" structure. Our findings support the general conclusions of the experiment and provide an interesting molecular depiction of the disruption of the long-range interactions.
Boosting text segmentation via progressive classification
Authors: Eugenio Cesario, Francesco Folino, Antonio Locane, Giuseppe Manco, Riccardo Ortale
Venue: Knowledge and Information Systems (2008)

A novel approach for reconciling tuples stored as free text into an existing attribute schema is proposed. The basic idea is to subject the available text to progressive classification, i.e., a multi-stage classification scheme where, at each intermediate stage, a classifier is learnt that analyzes the textual fragments not reconciled at the end of the previous steps. Classification is accomplished by an ad hoc exploitation of traditional association mining algorithms, and is supported by a data transformation scheme which takes advantage of domain-specific dictionaries/ontologies. A key feature is the capability of progressively enriching the available ontology with the results of the previous stages of classification, thus significantly improving the overall classification accuracy. An extensive experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of our approach.
A product management challenge: Creating software product value through requirements selection
Authors: Sebastian Barney, Aybüke Aurum, Claes Wohlin
Venue: Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal (2008)

It is important for a software company to maximize value creation for a given investment. The purpose of requirements engineering activities is to add business value that is accounted for in terms of return on investment of a software product. This paper provides insight into the release planning processes used in the software industry to create software product value, by presenting three case studies. It examines how IT professionals perceive value creation through requirements engineering and how the release planning process is conducted to create software product value. It also presents to what degree the major stakeholders' perspectives are represented in the decision-making process. Our findings show that the client and market base of the software product represents the most influential group in the decision to implement specific requirements. This is reflected both in terms of deciding the processes followed and the decision-making criteria applied when selecting requirements for the product. Furthermore, the management of software product value is dependant on the context in which the product exists. Factors, such as the maturity of the product, the marketplace in which it exists, and the development tools and methods available, influence the criteria that decide whether a requirement is included in a specific project or release.
Probabilistic global motion estimation based on Laplacian two-bit plane matching for fast digital image stabilization
Authors: Nam-Joon Kim, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Jae-Beom Lee
Venue: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (2008)

Digital image stabilization (DIS) is a technique to prevent images captured by a handheld camera from temporal fluctuation. This paper proposes a new DIS algorithm that reduces the computation time while preserving the accuracy of the algorithm. To reduce the computation time, an image is transformed by a Laplacian operation and then converted into two one-bit spaces, called L+ and L- spaces. The computation time is reduced because only two-bits-per-pixel are used while the accuracy is maintained because the Laplacian operation preserves the edge information which can be efficiently used for the estimation of camera motion. Either two or four subimages in the corners of an image frame are selected according to the type of the image and five local motion vectors with their probabilities to be a global motion vector are derived for each subimage. The global motion vector is derived from these local motion vectors based on their probabilities. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a similar or better accuracy than a conventional DIS algorithm using a local motion estimation based on a full-search scheme and MSE criterion while the complexity of the proposed algorithm is much less than the conventional algorithm.
Research on Location Service Integration Strategy
Authors: Yongyi Zhao, Jin Li
Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications - Workshops (2008)

Along with the GPS navigation applications development, location service concept has changed and its services has changed from single location information services to integration application services that integrate many network application services, so that it can provide individual, personalized service for users. At one time, Internet needs a simple, available method to organize a lot of network application services. XML-based Web Service technology can solve it, but the application programs need to code and compile while the workflow has modified. This paper presents a location service integration strategy, it uses extended XML technology, and domain concept and dynamic invoking mechanism to realize system that has strongly usable, extensible, and maintainable.
An approach for proving lower bounds: solution of Gilbert-Pollak's conjecture on Steiner ratio
Authors: D.-Z. Du
Venue: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1990)

A family of finitely many continuous functions on a polytope X, namely (g/sub i/(x))/sub i in I/, is considered, and the problem of minimizing the function f(x)=max/sub i in I/g/sub i/(x) on X is treated. It is shown that if every g/sub i/(x) is a concave function, then the minimum value of f(x) is achieved at finitely many special points in X. As an application, a long-standing problem about Steiner minimum trees and minimum spanning trees is solved. In particular, if P is a set of n points on the Euclidean plane and L/sub s/(P) and L/sub m/(P) denote the lengths of a Steiner minimum tree and a minimum spanning tree on P, respectively, it is proved that, for any P, L/sub S/(P)>or= square root 3L/sub m/(P)/2, as conjectured by E.N. Gilbert and H.O. Pollak (1968).
A context-aware Tour Guide: User implications
Authors: S. R. Gulliver, G. Ghinea, M. Patel, T. Serif
Venue: Mobile Information Systems (2007)

Although examples of tourist guides abound, the role of context aware feedback in such systems is an issue that has been insufficiently explored. Given the potential importance of such feedback, this paper investigates, from a usability perspective, two tour guide systems developed for Brunel University: one with context-aware user feedback and the other without. An empirical study was undertaken in which each of the applications was assessed through the prism of three usability measurements: efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Incorporating the participant feedback gathered as a result, the paper compares the use of the two applications in order to determine the impact of real-time feedback with respect to user location. Efficiency, understood as the time taken by a participant to successfully complete a task, was found to be significantly affected by the use of context-aware functionality. Effectiveness, understood as the amount of information a participant assimilated from the application, was shown not to be impacted by the provision of context-aware feedback, even though average experiment duration was found to be significantly shorter in this case. Lastly, participants' subjective satisfaction when using context-aware functionality was shown to be significantly higher than when using the non-context aware application.
Fix-Mahonian Calculus, II: Further statistics
Authors: Dominique Foata, Guo-Niu Han
Venue: Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (2008)

Using classical transformations on the symmetric group and two transformations constructed in Fix-Mahonian Calculus I, we show that several multivariable statistics are equidistributed either with the triplet (fix,@?des,@?maj), or the pair (fix,@?maj), where ''fix,'' ''des'' and ''maj'' denote the number of fixed points, the number of descents and the major index, respectively.
Autonomous decision on intrusion detection with trained BDI agents
Authors: Agustín Orfila, Javier Carbó, Arturo Ribagorda
Venue: Computer Communications (2008)

In the context of computer security, the first step to respond to an intrusive incident is the detection of such activity in the monitored system. In recent years, research in intrusion detection has evolved to become a multi-discipline task that involves areas such as data mining, decision analysis, agent-based systems or cost-benefit analysis among others. We propose a multiagent IDS that considers decision analysis techniques in order to configure itself optimally according to the conditions faced. This IDS also provides a quantitative measure of the value of the response decision it can autonomously take. Results regarding the well-known 1999 KDD dataset are shown.
Real-time Observation of Intracellular Calcium Changes in GSNO-induced Mouse Thymocyte Early Apoptosis
Authors: Xiaochen Liu, Danying Lin, Wanyun Ma
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics - Volume 02 (2008)

Using fast fluorescence micro-imaging technique,we have studied the real-time changes of intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) in S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO)-induced mouse thymocyte early apoptosis. It was observed that [Ca2+]i increases rapidly until reaches a platform. The variety range and velocity are related to the GSNO concentration and the way how to treat with the thymocytes. These results show a great difference from the dexamethasone (DEX)-inducedthymocytes early apoptosis, caused by the different apoptosis mechanisms. This article supplies a new method for investigating the mechanism in GSNO induced mouse thymocyte apoptosis.