ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Capacity building for sustainable agricultural development in the GMS: taking advantage of eLearning
Authors: Buenafe R. Abdon
Venue: Proceedings of the sixth conference on IASTED International Conference Web-Based Education - Volume 2 (2007)

In the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), where agriculture contributes over 40% of the GDP and provides employment for 75% of the population, sustainable and equitable development is intrinsically linked with improvements in the agricultural sector. While the role of education as a key mechanism for promoting improved agricultural practices and development is universally accepted, delivering agricultural knowledge in the GMS and other developing countries remains a challenge. In response to the needs and to assess the potential of eLearning as an effective delivery mechanism, a project was implemented under which 3 online courses were implemented targeting agricultural educators and professionals. Although problems were encountered, the project demonstrated that eLearning can and does work even in a region as technologically underdeveloped as the GMS. Based on the experience and student feedback the following recommendations are put forward to strengthen eLearning in this region: (1) continue to support and encourage online learning for agricultural professionals in the GMS; (2) recognize and respond to the need to adequately promote online courses; (3) develop indigenous eLearning capacity in the region, and (4) look for opportunities to subsidize or lower the costs of internet access for online learners.
Dynamic clustering in delaunay-based P2P networked virtual environments
Authors: Matteo Varvello, Ernst Biersack, Christophe Diot
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games (2007)

Classical client/server approaches for Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) require considerable server resources to support a large number of players. On the opposite peer-to-peer (p2p) architectures achieve the required scalability at much lower cost. The feasibility of a p2p approach to NVEs depends heavily on the fact that a given user is interested only in a small part of the virtual world. For this reason, the Delaunay network is an appealing solution, which organizes peers according to their position within the NVE. However, in a NVE players typically tend to aggregate around some attractive points. As the cost of maintenance of the Delaunay network increases with player density and velocity, some peers may see a considerable volume of maintenance traffic. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic clustering algorithm: each peer in the network monitors his cost of maintenance and triggers the creation of a cluster as soon as the volume of traffic generated exceeds a given threshold. Members of a cluster then expand their coordinates to increase their reciprocal distances. In this way, decreasing the concentration of players we achieve a diminution of the maintenance cost. To evaluate our clustering scheme we simulate a simple NVE and run an experiment in Second Life. The results we obtained show that our solution is effective in keeping the amount of maintenance traffic below a chosen threshold.
Dynamic Task Scheduling in Hard Real-Time Distributed systems
Authors: K. Ramamritham
Venue: IEEE Software (1984)

This algorithm for scheduling tasks with hard real-time constraints that is, tasks that must meet their deadlines-works dynamically on loosely coupled distributed systems.
Modular Approach to Recognition of Strokes in Telugu Script
Authors: A. Jayaraman, C. C. Sekhar, V. S. Chakravarthy
Venue: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition - Volume 01 (2007)

In this paper, we address some issues in developing an online handwritten character recognition(HCR) system for an Indian language script, Telugu. The number of charac- ters in this script is estimated to be around 5000. A char- acter in this script is written as a sequence of strokes. The set of strokes in Telugu consists of 253 unique strokes. As the similarity among several strokes is high, we propose a modular approach for recognition of strokes. Based on the relative position of a stroke in a character, the stroke set has been divided into three subsets, namely, baseline strokes, bottom strokes and top strokes. Classifiers for the differ- ent subsets of strokes are built using support vector ma- chines(SVMs). We study the performance of the classifiers for subsets of strokes and propose methods to improve their performance. A comparative study using hidden Markov models(HMMs) shows that the SVM based approach gives a significantly better performance.
Public Concerned About Privacy
Venue: Computer (1979)

Two out of three Americans are concerned about the threat to their personal privacy posed by computer-operated data banks in the hands of business and government. They want something done to give individuals practical rights of privacy, confidentiality, and access to records of themeselves. These are the key findings of a Louis Harris survey, as reported by Prof. Alan F. Westin of Columbia University, during the plenary session on computers and society. The survey was sponsored as a public service by Sentry Insurance. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Optimization of Robust Asynchronous Circuits by Local Input Completeness Relaxation
Authors: Cheoljoo Jeong, Steven M. Nowick
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (2007)

As process, temperature and voltage variations become significant in deep submicron design, timing closure becomes a critical challenge using synchronous CAD flows. One attractive alternative is to use robust asynchronous circuits which gracefully accommodate timing discrepancies. However, these asynchronous circuits typically suffer from high area and latency overhead. In this paper, an optimization algorithm is presented which reduces the area and delay of these circuits by relaxing their overly-restrictive style. The algorithm was implemented and experiments performed on a subset of MCNC circuits. On average, 49.2% of the gates could be implemented in a relaxed manner, 34.9% area improvement was achieved, and 16.1% delay improvement was achieved using a simple heuristic for targeting the critical path in the circuit. This is the first proposed approach that systematically optimizes asynchronous circuits based on the notion of local relaxation while still preserving the circuit's overall timing-robustness.
Does domain knowledge matter: Mapping users' expertise to their information interactions
Authors: Boryung Ju
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2007)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role that domain knowledge plays in users' interactions with information systems. Two groups of users with two different areas of expertise were recruited for 34 experimental sessions to answer two research questions: (a) Does one group's domain knowledge (Geography majors) affect their performance on an information system more than another group's domain knowledge (Computer Science majors)? (b) Are there any differences and/or similarities in the performance of the two groups in terms of the information problem-solving processes? Task completion time, task completeness, and mouse movements were collected while users performed six tasks during the experimental sessions. Data were analyzed through repeated measures. An ANOVA was used for task completion time and task completeness. GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules) was also used for mouse movements to identify some of the similarities and differences between the two groups' information problem-solving processes. The GOMS analysis found the two groups' processing activities to be remarkably similar. The ANOVA results indicate that expertise type was not a major factor influencing user performance, but task and task combined with the type of expertise played a significant role in the users' interactions with the interface. External operators, goal decompositions, and methods related to the problem solving process through GOMS are also presented. &copy; 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Psuedo-Millimeter-Wave Up-Conversion Mixer with On-Chip Balun for Vehicular Radar Systems
Authors: Ivan C. H. Ivan Chee Hong Lai, M. Fujishima
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (2007)

A low-power, fully integrated 20-26 GHz broadband up-conversion mixer implemented with on-chip Marchand baluns is demonstrated on 90nm CMOS technology in this paper. The baluns employ capacitive coupling between two metal layers and include slotted shields to reduce substrate losses. At 22.1 GHz, the integrated mixer achieves a conversion gain of 2 dB with a maximum power dissipation of only 11.1mW from a 1.2V dc power supply at LO power of 5 dBm.
Checks and balances: monitoring data quality problems in network traffic databases
Authors: Flip Korn, S. Muthukrishnan, Yunyue Zhu
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 29 (2003)

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use real-time data feeds of aggregated traffic in their network to support technical as well as business decisions. A fundamental difficulty with building decision support tools based on aggregated traffic data feeds is one of data quality. Data quality problems stem from network-specific issues (irregular polling caused by UDP packet drops and delays, topological mislabelings, etc.) and make it difficult to distinguish between artifacts and actual phenomena, rendering data analysis based on such data feeds ineffective. In principle, traditional integrity constraints and triggers may be used to enforce data quality. In practice, data cleaning is done outside the database and is ad-hoc. Unfortunately, these approaches are too rigid and limited for the subtle data quality problems arising from network data where existing problems morph with network dynamics, new problems emerge over time, and poor quality data in a local region may itself indicate an important phenomenon in the underlying network. We need a new approach - both in principle and in practice - to face data quality problems in network traffic databases. We propose a continuous data quality monitoring approach based on probabilistic, approximate constraints (PACs). These are simple, user-specified rule templates with open parameters for tolerance and likelihood. We use statistical techniques to instantiate suitable parameter values from the data, and show how to apply them for monitoring data quality.In principle, our PAC-based approach can be applied to data quality problems in any data feed. We present PAC-Man, which is the system that manages PACs for the entire aggregate network traffic database in a large ISP, and show that it is very effective in monitoring data quality problems.
Innovating Database Technology for Advanced Applications
Authors: Ge Yu, Guoren Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Derong Shen, Daling Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing Workshops (2007)

This paper discusses the new trends of innovative database technology for advanced applications, under the background of the research and development activities of the database group of Northeastern University, China. The brief history of around 30 years is retrospected. The ongoing research issues on the key database techniques for emerging advanced applications are presented. Finally, the experiences and lessons are examined, and the future work is discussed.
Improved GAP-RBF network for classification problems
Authors: Runxuan Zhang, Guang-Bin Huang, N. Sundararajan, P. Saratchandran
Venue: Neurocomputing (2007)

This paper presents the performance evaluation of the recently developed Growing and Pruning Radial Basis Function (GAP-RBF) algorithm for classification problems. Earlier GAP-RBF was evaluated only for function approximation problems. Improvements to GAP-RBF for enhancing its performance in both accuracy and speed are also described and the resulting algorithm is referred to as Fast GAP-RBF (FGAP-RBF). Performance comparison of FGAP-RBF algorithm with GAP-RBF and the Minimal Resource Allocation Network (MRAN) algorithm based on four benchmark classification problems, viz. Phoneme, Segment, Satimage and DNA are presented. The results indicate that FGAP-RBF produces higher classification accuracy with reduced computational complexity.
A formal framework and extensions for function approximation in learning classifier systems
Authors: Jan Drugowitsch, Alwyn M. Barry
Venue: Machine Learning (2008)

Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) consist of the three components: function approximation, reinforcement learning, and classifier replacement. In this paper we formalize the function approximation part, by providing a clear problem definition, a formalization of the LCS function approximation architecture, and a definition of the function approximation aim. Additionally, we provide definitions of optimality and what conditions need to be fulfilled for a classifier to be optimal. As a demonstration of the usefulness of the framework, we derive commonly used algorithmic approaches that aim at reaching optimality from first principles, and introduce a new Kalman filter-based method that outperforms all currently implemented methods, in addition to providing further insight into the probabilistic basis of the localized model that a classifier provides. A global function approximation in LCS is achieved by combining the classifier's localized model, for which we provide a simplified approach when compared to current LCS, based on the Maximum Likelihood of a combination of all classifiers. The formalizations in this paper act as the foundation of a currently actively developed formal framework that includes all three LCS components, promising a better formal understanding of current LCS and the development of better LCS algorithms.
Stochastic Network Fluid Modeling with Probabilistic Wavelet System
Authors: Zhi Liu, Yun Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing - Volume 03 (2007)

A probabilistic wavelet system (PWS) is proposed to model the unknown network fluid dynamical system with stochastic and incomplete traffic data. When compared with the traditional wavelet system, the PWS uses a novel three-domain wavelet function to make a balance among probability, time and frequency domain, which may achieve a robust modeling performance with poor data information. The definition, transformation and implementation of the PWS are presented for the data-based modeling of network system. Simulation studies show that the performance of the proposed PWS is superior to the traditional one in the stochastic and incomplete data-based modeling system.
Wideband speech recovery using psychoacoustic criteria
Authors: Visar Berisha, Andreas Spanias
Venue: EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing (2007)

Many modern speech bandwidth extension techniques predict the high-frequency band based on features extracted from the lower band. While this method works for certain types of speech, problems arise when the correlation between the low and the high bands is not sufficient for adequate prediction. These situations require that additional high-band information is sent to the decoder. This overhead information, however, can be cleverly quantized using human auditory system models. In this paper, we propose a novel speech compression method that relies on bandwidth extension. The novelty of the technique lies in an elaborate perceptual model that determines a quantization scheme for wideband recovery and synthesis. Furthermore, a source/filter bandwidth extension algorithm based on spectral spline fitting is proposed. Results reveal that the proposed system improves the quality of narrowband speech while performing at a lower bitrate. When compared to other wideband speech coding schemes, the proposed algorithms provide comparable speech quality at a lower bitrate.
The Geometric Brilliance of Chartres
Authors: A. Reilly
Venue: IEEE Software (1986)

Chartres embodies the medieval fascination with light, color, numerology, and geometry. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Emotional interaction as a way of communication
Authors: Helena Sustar, Panayiotis Zaphiris
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces (2007)

The article presents the design and evaluation phase --- an example of an emotional interaction for elderly users as a means for interpersonal communication, management with the residence (smart house) and communication with the external environment. The proposed solution suggests using non-verbal communication (care for a garden) with the assistance of sound, colours, materials and shapes for creating an intuitive, fluid and permanent communication. The paper also reports on the evaluation phase of this kind of interaction by investigating whether it is suitable for different age group users. The evaluation phase was focused more on the 60+ year old elderly users. We evaluated this way of interaction in different situations: in communicating with relatives, taking medicine, recording reminders, controlling their home and using different services. Evaluation results showed that our users felt that this interaction is too simple and that older people in their fourth life period (around the eighties) do not appreciate this way of thinking.
Subsystems of Processes with Deadlock Avoidance
Authors: D. B. Lomet
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (1980)

A graph-oriented approach to deadlock avoidance, which treates both shared and exclusive locking, has been described [6]. The method is particularly suited for database systems. With enhancements introduced here, the problem of indefimite delay, i.e., the possibility that a process will not run to completion (will be delayed indefinitely) can be eliminated. The approach taken is to partition the resource system into subsystems, each of which can be scheduled independently. Indefinite delay is avoided by the construction of subsystems that guarantee the completion of a process or the granting of a resource request. Further, we show how the subsystem approach can be applied systematically so as to approximate FIFO scheduling of resource requests, while avoiding deadlock and indefmite delay. Other scheduling disciplines can also be realized. A lock manager program utilizing the FIFO method has been implemented.
Processing Optimization for Injection Plastic Molding on Mold Design Grid
Authors: Cui Zhendong, Wang Xicheng, Li Zhijie
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing Workshops (2007)

According to the facts that optimization problems are always complex and requiring a long computing time Cthe grid is a good choice for solving this kind of problems. Based on the globus toolkits 4 CA four-layer architecture Mold Design Grid(MDG) platform is presented to meet the resources sharing and coordinated use equipments in solving the complex problem in the optimization design of injection mold. In this paper, a sequential approximation programming is presented to do processing optimization on the MDG. The optimization model is constructed by Kriging surrogate function. As an example, the processing optimization of cellular phone cover is investigated, in which mold temperature, melt temperature and injection time are regarded as design variables. The optimization results show that the proposed optimization method can effectively improve the injection conditions, and the framework for optimization is well suitable for grid computing. The results by using different number grid nodes also show that the grid is high speed-up and efficiency.
Point rendering of non-manifold surfaces with features
Authors: Dirk J. Harbinson, Ron J. Balsys, Kevin G. Suffern
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australia and Southeast Asia (2007)

We are concerned with producing high quality images of implicit surfaces, in particular those with non-manifold features. In this work we present a point based technique that improves the rendering of non-manifold implicit surfaces by using point and gradient information to prune plotting nodes resulting from using octree spatial subdivision based on the natural interval extension of the surface's function. The use of intervals guarantees that no parts of the surfaces are missed in the view volume and the combination of point and gradient sampling preserves this feature while greatly enhacing the quality of point based rendering of implicit surfaces. We also sucessfully render non-manifold features of implicit surfaces such as rays and thin sections. We illustrate the technique with a number of example surfaces.
Probabilistic Logic Operator based on Zero-order N/T-Norms Complete Clusters
Authors: Haiyang Xu, Wenshan Cui, Ping Wang
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing - Volume 01 (2007)

To deal with the problems of probability theory, we adopt the ideas of generalized correlativity introduced by He huacan. According to the rules of universal logic, we propose a new method to construct probabilistic logic by zero-order N/T-norms complete clusters. We mainly discuss how to construct probabilistic logic in universal logic frame, and try to discuss the algebra property of probabilistic logic operator. The result of our method is consistent with the universal logic.
An Overview of Analytic Solid Modeling
Authors: Malcolm Casale, Edward Stanton
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (1985)

Exotic applications are possible with this geometric modeling system because of the generality of its mathematical framework. The method has been extended to include the modeling of nongeometric data.
Humanists as information users in the digital age: The case of Jewish studies scholars in Israel
Authors: Shifra Baruchson-Arbib, Jenny Bronstein
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2007)

User studies provide libraries with invaluable insight into their users' information needs and behaviors, allowing them to develop services that correspond to these needs. This insight has become even more important for libraries since the advent of the Internet. The Internet has brought about a development of information technologies and electronic information sources that have had a great impact on both the ways users search for information and the ways libraries manage information. Although humanists represent an important group of users for academic libraries, research studies into their information-seeking behavior since the advent of the Internet have been quite scarce (Ellis & Oldman, 2005) in the past decade. This study presents updated research on a group of humanists, Jewish studies scholars living in Israel, as information users in the digital age based on two categories: (a) the use of formal and informal information channels, and (b) the use of information technologies and their impact on humanistic research. &copy; 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Automatic Software Test Drivers
Authors: D. J. Panzl
Venue: Computer (1978)

Typical testing activities may involve many hundreds of tests. An automatic software test driver assists the tester by managing all of the test data, and automatically running the tests. Savings during regression testing can be significant.