ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Internet channel entry: retail coverage and entry cost advantage
Authors: Zhuo (June) Cheng, Barrie R. Nault
Venue: Information Technology and Management (2007)

In this research we study how existing market coverage affects the outcome of the Internet channel entry game between an existing retailer and a new entrant. A market is not covered when some consumers with low reservation prices are priced out by existing retailers and do not purchase. In a model with multiple existing retailers and a potential new entrant, we demonstrate that when entry costs are equal, one of the existing retailers enters the Internet channel first. However, if the market is covered by existing retailers before entry, then because of the threat of Internet channel entry by the potential new entrant, retailer entry cannibalizes existing retail profits--cannibalizing at a loss. In addition, if a potential new entrant has a slight advantage in Internet channel entry costs and the market is not covered by existing retailers, then the new entrant enters the Internet channel first. If the market is covered by existing retailers, then the new entrant must have a larger Internet channel entry cost advantage to be first to enter the Internet channel.
Combined acoustic echo and noise reduction using GSVD-based optimal filtering
Authors: S. Doclo
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2000)

This paper describes two schemes for combining acoustic echo and noise reduction using a GSVD-(generalized singular value decomposition-) based optimal filtering technique. The GSVD-based filtering technique is a signal enhancement technique which has previously been proposed for noise reduction in multi-microphone speech signals. In many speech communication applications however also a far-end echo source is present. Therefore a combined echo and noise reduction scheme is needed. The first scheme combines a standard multi-channel adaptive echo canceller with the GSVD-based noise reduction technique. The second scheme incorporates the far-end echo reference directly into the GSVD-based signal enhancement technique without cancelling the echo in every microphone signal. The two different schemes are compared with regard to performance and computational complexity.
Service-learning's effect on engineering students and K-12 teacher partnership in an "Introduction to mechanical engineering" course
Authors: E. Tsang
Venue: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 03 (1998)

This paper describes the engineering student and K-12 teacher partnership and impact on student learning from the four elements of service-learning: identify community need and form partnership; design and implement solution; evaluation; and reflection. Service learning is a method in which students learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized activities that are integrated into and enhance academic learning for students while meeting a community need. Results based on evaluation of 83 students and 44 teacher partners over a two-year period indicate that the partnership in ME 125, "Introduction to Mechanical Engineering", has a positive impact on meeting the engineering education needs for a majority of students as well as meeting a community educational need for a majority of the teacher partners.
Estimating the Capacity of the Location - Based Advertising Channel
Authors: Gyozo Gidofalvi, Hans Ravnkjaer Larsen, Torben Bach Pedersen
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Management of Mobile Business (2007)

Delivering "relevant" advertisements to consumers carrying mobile devices is regarded by many as one of the most promising mobile business opportunities. The relevance of a mobile ad depends on at least two factors: (1) the proximity of the mobile consumer to the product or service being advertised, and (2) the match between the product or service and the interest of the mobile consumer. The interest of the mobile consumer can be either explicit (expressed by the mobile consumer) or implicit (inferred from user characteristics). This paper tries to empirically estimate the capacity of the mobile advertising channel, i.e., the number of relevant ads that can be delivered to mobile consumers. The estimations are based on a simulated mobile consumer population and simulated mobile ads. Both of the simulated data sets are realistic and derived based on real world data sources about population geo-demographics, businesses offering products or services, and related consumer surveys. The estimations take into consideration both the proximity and interest requirements of mobile ads, i.e., ads are only delivered to mobile consumers that are close by and are interested, where interest is either explicit or implicit. Results show that the capacity of the LBA channel is rather large, which is evidence for a strong business case, but also indicate the need for user-control of the received mobile ads.
An adaptive post-filtering technique based on the modified Yule-Walker filter
Authors: A. Mustapha
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1999)

This paper presents an adaptive time-domain post-filtering technique based on the modified Yule-Walker filter. Conventionally, post-filtering is derived from an original LPC spectrum. In general, this time-domain technique produces unpredictable spectral tilt that is hard to control by the modified LPC synthesis, inverse and high pass filtering and causes unnecessary attenuation or amplification of some frequency components that introduces muffling in speech quality. This effect increases when voice coders are tandemed together. Another approach of designing a post-filter was developed by McAulay and Quatieri (1991) which can only be used in sinusoidal based speech coders. We have also developed another new time-domain post-filtering technique. This technique eliminates the problem of spectral tilt in the speech spectrum and can be applied to various speech coders. The new post-filter has a flat frequency response at the formant peaks of the speech spectrum. Instead of looking at the modified LPC synthesis, inverse, and high pass filtering in the conventional time-domain technique, we gather information about the poles of the LPC spectrum in the new technique. This post-filtering technique has been used in a 4 kb/s harmonic excitation linear predictive coder (HE-LPC) and a subjective listening tests have indicated that this technique outperforms the conventional one in both one and two tandem connections.
Teaching history of programming languages to undergraduate students
Authors: M. A. Perez-Quinones
Venue: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1998)

More emphasis should be placed on the history of computing in university curricula. The area of programming languages is no exception and has lots of history to study. This paper discusses the approach followed to study the history of programming languages in the Computer Engineering Program at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. The proceedings for History of Programming Languages (HOPL) Conferences are used as reference for a term paper. This paper describes the parts of the term paper, some of the comments given by students, future changes to the methodology and some observations in general about teaching history of programming languages.
Look, no timetable [education]
Authors: P. Spasov
Venue: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 02 (2000)

Sir Sandford Fleming College offers 3-year programs where the final semester is completely timetable free and problem based. This paper describes the launch and first year of Fleming's Applied Projects program where computer and engineering technology students do full-term project work that is useful to an enterprise. The enterprise sponsor is one who provides the setting for a real-world problem to form the basis of the project. The program is also a cost saver. Unlike cooperative work placements or internships, an applied project makes extensive use of faculty mentors and advisors. Their role is to facilitate, guide and evaluate the learning that is required for student's area of study. The program itself is yearlong with three phases, which are establishing, planning and executing, the latter being a full time semester with no formal timetable.
Developing Realistic Approaches for Migration of Legacy Assets to SOA Environments
Authors: Dennis Smith, Grace Lewis
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International IEEE Conference on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS)-Based Software Systems (2007)

This tutorial outlines the basic principles of SOA based systems and discusses their potentials and challenges. The basic operations of service discovery, service composition and service invocation are outlined. The OASIS SOA-based systems development reference model is also presented. The tutorial also identifies common misconceptions that users have experienced in migrating to SOAs. SOA systems are analyzed from three perspectives: the application developer, the infrastructure developer, and the service provider. The needs and concerns of each of these participants, as well as the types of cross organizational communication patterns required for success are outlined.
Dynamic Reconstruction from Noise Contaminated Data with Sparse Bayesian Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Derrick T. Mirikitani, Incheon Park, Mohammed Daoudi
Venue: Proceedings of the First Asia International Conference on Modelling & Simulation (2007)

Dynamic reconstruction is fundamental to building models of nonlinear processes with unknown governing equations. Dynamic reconstruction attempts to reconstruct the underlying dynamics of the system under consideration from a series of scalar measurements over time. Reconstruction of system dynamics from measurements can be interpreted as an ill posed inverse problem of which Tikhnov regularization has been found to provide stable estimate solutions. In this paper, a Bayesian regularized recurrent neural network is used to perform dynamic reconstruction of a noisy chaotic processes. The Bayesian regularized recurrent network is able to reconstruct attractors from noise contaminated data that are qualitatively similar to and have similar correlation dimension as attractors reconstructed from noise free data.
Routing in Intermittently Connected Networks: Age Rumors in Connected Components
Authors: Philippe Jacquet, Bernard Mans
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (2007)

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) protocols are efficient in routing data dynamically between mobile nodes that belong to the same connected component and thus assume that the network is always fully connected. However, even if the network is continuously partitioned, a "communication path" may be available through time and mobility using intermediate mobile nodes (temporally within reach of each other). We consider the problem of routing with the sole assumption that the speed of the node mobility is less than the speed of transmitting a packet to a neighbor. We introduce new routing algorithms that vary depending on the buffering capability of the nodes while always minimizing the impact on the capacity (i.e., only one copy of a packet can be sent while a copy may be kept). The novelty is based on link aging rumors across connected components (as opposed to neighbor's aging). We show that various pattern of mobility and network clustering can be described by a single parameter such as the information speed propagation. We establish several analytical properties independent of mobility models using an analogy with the sound propagation in liquid where molecules creates temporary connected component in which sound travels fast.
A Service-Oriented Approach for Specifying Component-Based Systems
Authors: Gerald Kotonya, John Hutchinson
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth International IEEE Conference on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS)-Based Software Systems (2007)

The principal challenge in requirements engineering for component-based software systems is to develop models that allow us to make the best use of the available component technology by balancing aspects of requirements, business concerns, and architectural considerations with capabilities embodied in software components. Unfortunately, the critzcal steps of requirements elicitation and modelling are often ignored in requirements methods for component-based systems. Requirements elicitation not only allows the developer to establish the actors and stakeholders associated with the system, it also provides a means for identzfiing and structuring their needs. Requirement modelling in component-based development is an important vehicle for contextualizing, scoping and mapping user requirements to possible blackbox component solutions. This paper proposes an approach to requirements definition that uses the notion of viewpoints and services. Viewpoints provide us with a framework for eliciting and structuring user requirements; services provide us with a mechanism for mapping the requirements to components and component architectures. Together, they provide traceable progression from initial system formulation through to system design and composition.
Multimedia driver support in the FreeBSD operating system
Authors: James S. Lowe, Luigi Rizzo
Venue: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (1998)

In this paper we will discuss the motivation, design, implementation issues, and applications for the audio and the video acquisition drivers which are available in FreeBSD [1]. Both systems have been designed from scratch, with special attention paid to the effective transfer and synchronization of data between the hardware and advanced applications. The main focus in the design of the audio driver was for supporting multimedia applications, which often require full duplex operation and have strict synchronization requirements. This suggested the definition of a new software interface, simpler to use than the previously existing OSS (Voxware) driver. The driver is backward compatible with the OSS API due to the large base of applications that use this API. The video acquisition driver focuses on providing flexible access to the acquisition device and the ability to suit the needs of different applications, from simple TV viewers to video conferencing programs. The driver provides memory mapped access to the capture buffer, flexible support for synchronization with the application, and supports the various capture formats and scaling capabilities that are available from the video acquisition hardware.
A Log Correlation Model to Support the Evidence Search Process in a Forensic Investigation
Authors: Jorge Herrerias, Roberto Gomez
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering (2007)

Computer forensics searches for evidence to reassemble the actions that led the system from a secure state to the moment an intrusion was detected. The main source of data for a forensic investigation is the information provided by log files. Log files are generated by applications to keep a register of the actions occurred on the system. However, the massive amount of recorded events complicates the forensic investigation. A model composed by a set of agents in order to collect, filter, normalize, and to correlate events coming from diverse log files is proposed in this paper. The purpose of the model is to assist the analyst in the evidence search process of a forensic investigation.
Approximate Viterbi decoding for 2D-hidden Markov models
Authors: B. Merialdo
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (2000)

While one-dimensional hidden Markov models have been very successfully applied to numerous problems, their extension to two dimensions has been shown to be exponentially complex, and this has very much restricted their usage for problems such as image analysis. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm which is able to approximate the search for the best state path (Viterbi decoding) in a 2D HMM. This algorithm makes certain assumptions which lead to tractable computations, at a price of loss in full optimality. We detail our algorithm, its implementation, and present some experiments on handwritten character recognition. Because the Viterbi algorithm serves as a basis for many applications, and 1D HMMs have shown great flexibility in their usage, our approach has the potential to make 2D HMMs as useful for 2D data as 1D HMMs are for 1D data such as speech.
Realization of paraunitary filter banks over fields of characteristic two
Authors: F. Fekri
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (2000)

Paraunitary filter banks are multi-rate filter realizations of orthogonal wavelet transforms. They are an important subclass of perfect reconstruction filter banks that provide a new framework for error control coding and decoding. This paper undertakes the problem of classifying all paraunitary matrices with entries from a polynomial ring, where the coefficients of the polynomials are taken from finite fields. It constructs Householder transformations that are used as elementary operations for the realization of all unitary matrices. Then, it introduces elementary paraunitary building blocks and a factorization technique that are specialized to obtain a complete realization for all paraunitary filter banks over fields of characteristic two (this is proved for the 2-band case, and a conjecture is applied for the proof of the M-band case, where M/spl ges/3). Using these elementary building blocks, we can construct all paraunitary filter banks over fields of characteristic two.
Password rescue: a new approach to phishing prevention
Authors: Dinei Florêncio, Cormac Herley
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (2006)

A phishing attack exploits both the enormous scale of the web and the fact that users are often enormously confused about what they can trust. Scale allows the phisher to get many responses to his attack, even though the probability of any given user responding is low (it costs the phisher no more to send a million emails than to send one). The enormous confusion about trust allows the phisher make a copy of a bank web-site look as trustworthy to the victim as the original. Previous approaches to this problem have tried to solve the problem by preventing useful information leaking to the phisher; for example by alerting the user to suspicious or low reputation sites. Generally this is done at the client (typically in a browser plugin or add-on). We propose a scheme that in several respects is a radical departure from previous approaches. First, we make no attempt to prevent information leakage. Rather, we try to detect and then rescue users from the consequences of bad trust decisions. Second, we harness scale against the attacker instead of trying to solve the problem at each client. Thus our scheme increases in efficacy with the scale of deployment: it offers very little protection if a small fraction of users participate, but makes phishing almost impossible as the deployment increases. Finally, we make clear that small trials of our system would prove little. The scale requirements of Password Rescue make it suitable for large deployment or not at all. HotSec seems like the best forum for such ideas.
Markov chains, game theory, and infinite programming: three paradigms for optimization of complex systems
Authors: Robert L. Smith
Venue:  (2006)

A Complex System can be defined as a natural, artificial, social, or economic entity whose model involves an inordinate, or even infinite number of variables. This thesis is an attempt to employ techniques from Markov Chains, Game Theory, and Functional Analysis to develop theory and algorithms for optimizing mathematical abstractions of Euclidean, discrete, and infinite dimensional complex systems. The first chapter focuses on Markov Chain techniques. (i) We develop a novel rigorous connection between the famous Small World phenomenon and effective Markov candidate generators for continuous optimization; (ii) We propose Adaptive Search with Amorphous Probabilities (ASAP), a unified algorithmic framework that allows for very general acceptance probabilities, adaptive tuning of parameters and guarantees convergence in probability to the optimum function value for continuous as well as stochastic optimization problems; (iii) We develop the notion of Fastest Mixing Boltzmann Chains to analytically formulate the "to cool or not to cool" problem for the first time. The second chapter relies on Game Theory to solve deterministic and stochastic discrete black-box optimization problems. We propose a bounded rational version of Sampled Fictitious Play (SFP). Unlike earlier work, the players in this version (i) Use samples of size one for their best response computations, (ii) Are forced to make "mistakes", (iii) Have finite memory, and (iv) Are guaranteed to find optimal solutions. In the third chapter, we study two infinite dimensional complex systems: (i) Countably infinite linear programs, and (ii) Infinite horizon production planning under convex costs. We develop duality theory for countably infinite linear programs, and a characterization of their extreme points through positive variables. We develop the Shadow Simplex method that requires finite computation in each iteration and achieves value convergence. Unlike previous research in the convex production planning domain, we allow backlogging. Properties of convex network flow problems are then used to compute closed form formulas for a minimum forecast horizon.
Localization and Coverage for High Density Sensor Networks
Authors: Jacques M. Bahi, Abdallah Makhoul, Ahmed Mostefaoui
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (2007)

The only power source of nodes in sensor networks is usually provided by batteries which have a determined lifetime. In order to increase the total network lifetime, neighbors nodes can alternate between active (receive, transmit...) and sleep mode. The objective is to find sets of active nodes that ensure as much as possible the zone coverage. In this paper, we will introduce a new method for nodes scheduling in sensor networks. We exploit a mobile beacon localization approach to construct sets of active nodes. The mobile beacon follows the Hilbert space filling curve, that has several properties. It divides the area into unit squares by the mean of linear ordering. In our approach, we chose the Hilbert curve order, in a way that, every unit square will be covered by one and only one sensor node and all the reminder nodes inside this unit square will go to sleep until the first node dies. It is an energy saved approach because nodes communicate only with the mobile beacon. The experimental studies we conducted, confirmed the effectiveness of our approach.