ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Development and validation of a computer attitude measure for young students (CAMYS)
Authors: Timothy Teo, Jan Noyes
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2008)

An important aspect in successfully implementing instructional technology in educational settings is user acceptance, which is greatly influenced by users' attitudes towards computers. Today, computers have become an integral part of instruction at all levels of education and it is important for educators and policy makers to understand how various factors interact with the user's characteristics to influence the teaching and learning process involving the use of computers. Over the years, many scales have been developed to measure computer attitudes of secondary students and adults. Few have been develop to be used for students in the primary schools. The aim of this study is to develop and validate a computer attitude measure for young students (CAMYS). The revised 12-item CAMYS was piloted with 256 students aged 10-12 with a mean of 11.9 years (SD=0.31). Several statistical analyses were performed to assess the reliability and validity of the measure. The measure, together with suggestions for administration and scoring are included.
Annotations on musical scores by performing musicians: Collaborative models, interactive methods, and music digital library tool development
Authors: Megan A. Winget
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2008)

Although there have been a number of fairly recent studies in which researchers have explored the information-seeking and management behaviors of people interacting with musical retrieval systems, there have been very few published studies of the interaction and use behaviors of musicians interacting with their primary information object, the musical score. The ethnographic research reported here seeks to correct this deficiency in the literature. In addition to observing rehearsals and conducting 22 in-depth musician interviews, this research provides in-depth analysis of 25,000 annotations representing 250 parts from 13 complete musical works, made by musicians of all skill levels and performance modes. In addition to producing specific and practical recommendations for digital-library development, this research also provides an augmented annotation framework that will enable more specific study of human-information interaction, both with musical scores, and with more general notational-instructional information objects. &copy; 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Unification and Matching Modulo Leaf-Permutative Equational Presentations
Authors: Thierry Boy De La Tour, Mnacho Echenim, Paliath Narendran
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on Automated Reasoning (2008)

Unification modulo variable-permuting equational presentations is known to be undecidable. We address here the problem of the existence of a unification algorithm for the class of linear variable-permuting presentations, also known as leaf-permutative presentations. We show that there is none, by exhibiting a leaf-permutative presentation whose unification problem is undecidable. We also exhibit one such presentation whose word and pattern matching problems are PSPACE-complete. The proof proceeds in three stages, by transforming length-preserving string-rewriting systems into atomic, then into bit-swapping string-rewriting systems, and finally into leaf-permutative presentations.
Entities and relations in medical imaging: An analysis of computed tomography reporting
Authors: Dirk Marwede, James Matthew Fielding
Venue: Applied Ontology (2007)

Biomedical ontologies define entities and relations in order to represent knowledge in the biomedical domain. In addition, many ontologies further represent supplementary knowledge by linking terms from an external controlled vocabulary to the entities defined within the ontology itself. In this paper we concentrate on the domain of medical imaging, for which controlled vocabularies are emerging, but no ontology currently exists. We analyzed computed tomography reports in order to determine to which entities terms used in such reports refer and which relations are used with regard to the recently published Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Relation Ontology. Our analysis revealed that the majority of entities referred to in radiological reporting practice are anatomical entities and anatomical coordinates. Based on the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Relation Ontology we provide a set of additional relations for the ontological structuring of image features such as shape, morphology, size and signal, frequently found in the reports. On the basis of these results we conclude that the construction of an imaging ontology may benefit greatly from already existing reference ontologies such as the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), which represent those entities to which radiological reports most frequently refer.
Model and Modeless Friction Compensation: Application to a Defective Haptic Interface
Authors: Gianni Borghesan, Claudio Melchiorri
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Haptics: Perception, Devices and Scenarios (2008)

This paper describes a preliminary work devoted to the design of a control architecture for a defective haptic interface, i.e. an underactuated haptic interface not able to apply forces along arbitrary directions. This interface is intended to be used for grasping tasks, where unilateral constraints are usually present. The main control problems considered in this paper concern the study of friction compensation techniques by means of a force feedback loop and a feedforward controller. This has been implemented with three different methods: two are based on a model of the friction present in the actuation system, while the latter on a Momentum Observer. These schemes have been experimentally tested on a simplified setup of the haptic interface, composed by a linear motor, a force sensor, and a Kevlar wire. Two sets of experiments have been considered, i.e. free space motions and interaction with a virtual wall.
Transmission-line-matrix (TLM) modeling of self-heating in AlGaN/GaN transistor structures
Authors: S. Mimouni, A. Saidane, A. Feradji
Venue: Microelectronics Journal (2008)

Self-heating in AlGaN/GaN (GaN-gallium nitride) heterostructures is an important issue for a large use of these devices in high-density power telecommunication applications. The equation of heat associated with this type of problem does not admit an analytical solution. Hence, we propose a numerical solution based on the use of a transmission line matrix (TLM). The method is easy to program and gives insights on temperature distribution throughout the device. It allows a better understanding of heat behavior and management at each layer that forms the structure. Some TLM simulation results have been compared with those obtained experimentally using integrated micro-Raman/infrared (IR) thermography methods, and have been found to agree within the bounds set by the resolution of the meshes used. The TLM has also the advantage upon other numerical methods of being unconditionally stable, one step and can adapt to complex geometries such as devices with several fingers.
QA@L2F, First Steps at QA@CLEF
Authors: Ana Mendes, Luísa Coheur, Nuno J. Mamede, Ricardo Ribeiro, Fernando Batista, David Martins Matos
Venue: Advances in Multilingual and Multimodal Information Retrieval: 8th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 19-21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers (2008)

This paper presents QA@L2F, the question-answering system developed at L2F, INESC-ID. QA@L2F follows different strategies according with the question type, and relies strongly on named entity recognition and on the pre-detection of linguistic patterns. Each question type is mapped into a single strategy; however, if no answer is found, the system proceeds and tries to find an answer using one of the other strategies.
Answering Portuguese Questions
Authors: Luís Fernando Costa, Luís Miguel Cabral
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (2008)

Esfinge is a general domain Portuguese question answering system that participated in the last four editions of CLEF. This system uses the Web as a fundamental resource in its architecture, using information redundancy rather than sophisticated annotations of the document collections to retrieve answers. In this paper we describe experiments that took as starting point the version of Esfinge that participated at the evaluation contest CLEF 2007. These experiments consisted in using different types of search patterns to retrieve relevant documents for questions, as this issue (document retrieval) was responsible for most of the errors occurred at CLEF 2007.
An Algorithm for Protecting Knowledge Discovery Data
Authors: Boštjan Brumen, Izidor Golob, Tatjana Welzer, Marjan Družovec, Ivan Rozman, Hannu Jaakkola
Venue: Informatica (2003)

In the paper, we present an algorithm that can be applied to protect data before a data mining process takes place. The data mining, a part of the knowledge discovery process, is mainly about building models from data. We address the following question: can we protect the data and still allow the data modelling process to take place? We consider the case where the distributions of original data values are preserved while the values themselves change, so that the resulting model is equivalent to the one built with original data. The presented formal approach is especially useful when the knowledge discovery process is outsourced. The application of the algorithm is demonstrated through an example.
Motivate the Learners to Practice English through Playing with Chatbot CSIEC
Authors: Jiyou Jia, Weichao Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment (2008)

CSIEC (Computer Simulation in Educational Communication), is an interactive web-based human-computer dialogue system with natural language for English instruction. In this paper we present its newest developments and applications in English education. After brief introduction of the project motivation and the related works, we illustrate the system structure with a flow diagram, and describe its pedagogical functions in details, including free chatting, chatting on a given topic and the chatting scoring mechanism. We review the free Internet usage within six months, and evaluate its integration into English classroom. The summarization and assessment findings confirm that the chatting function has been enhanced and fully used by the users, and the application of the CSIEC system in English instruction can interest the learners to study English and motivate them to practice English more frequently. Finally we discuss the application driven approach of system development, and draw some conclusions for the further improvements.
A Formal Comparison of the Bell & LaPadula and RBAC Models
Authors: Lionel Habib, Mathieu Jaume, Charles Morisset
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The Fourth International Conference on Information Assurance and Security (2008)

In this paper we address the problem of comparing access control models. Indeed, many access control models can be found in the literature and in order to choose one model for a particular context, some tools helping such a choice are needed. We develop here a complete example allowing to compare (in a formal way) the Bell and LaPadula (BLP) model and the Role-Based (RBAC) model. In order to achieve this goal, we first express these models in a uniform way, then we introduce concepts (mostly based on simulations) allowing to compare access control models.
A dataflow pattern catalog for sound and music computing
Authors: Pau Arumí, David García, Xavier Amatriain
Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Pattern languages of programs (2006)

This article describes a set of patterns the authors have seen emerging during years of experience developing assorted applications in the sound and music domain and receiving influences from theoretical models, existing systems, and colleagues. Those patterns aim at offering a generative pattern language that falls within a generic data flow architecture. Regardless the audio domain origins of the patterns, we foresee that they have applicability in other domains. Contributions of this paper are: General Dataflow Patterns, that address problems about how to organize high-level aspects of the dataflow architecture, by having different types of modules connections; Flow Implementation Patterns, that address how to physically transfer tokens from one module to another, according to the types of flow defined by the "general dataflow patterns". Tokens life-cycle, ownership and memory management are recurrent issues in those patterns; and finally, Network Usability Patterns, that address how humans can interact with dataflow networks.
Investigation of Examples of E-education Environment for Scientific Collaboration and Distance Graduate Studies. Part 2
Authors: Jonas Mockus
Venue: Informatica (2008)

The aim is to investigate two emerging information technologies in graduate studies and scientific cooperation. Internet is the first technology. The open source is the second. They help each other in many ways. The joint influence of both is regarded in this paper. Results of complexity theory show the limitations of exact analysis. That explains popularity of heuristic algorithms. It is well known that efficiency of heuristics depends on the parameters. Therefore automatic procedures for tuning the heuristics help to compare results of different heuristics and enhance their efficiency. The theory and some applications of Bayesian Approach were discussed in (Mockus, 2006a). In this paper examples of Bayesian Approach to automated tuning of heuristics are investigated. This is the Bayesian Heuristic Approach, in short. The examples of traditional methods of optimization, including applications of linear and dynamic programming, will be investigated in the next paper. These three papers represents three parts of the same work. However each part can be read independently. All the algorithms are implemented as platform independent Java applets or servlets. Readers can easily verify and apply the results for studies and for real life optimization problems. The theoretical result is application of unified Bayesian Heuristic Approach for different discrete optimization models. The practical result is adaptation of these models for graduate distance studies and scientific collaboration by a common java global optimization framework. The software is regularly updated and corrected responding to new programming tools and users reports. However the general structure of web sites remains. The information is on the web site: http://pilis.if.ktu.lt/~mockus and four mirror sites.
Novel Algorithms for the Network Lifetime Problem in Wireless Settings
Authors: Michael Elkin, Yuval Lando, Zeev Nutov, Michael Segal, Hanan Shpungin
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Ad-hoc, Mobile and Wireless Networks (2008)

A wireless ad-hoc network is a collection of transceivers positioned in the plane. Each transceiver is equipped with a limited, non-replenishable battery charge. The battery charge is then reduced after each transmission, depending on the transmission distance. One of the major problems in wireless network design is to route network traffic efficiently so as to maximize the network lifetime, i.e., the number of successful transmissions. This problem is known to be NP-Hard for a variety of network operations. In this paper we are interested in two fundamental types of transmissions, broadcast and data gathering.We provide polynomial time approximation algorithms, with guaranteed performance bounds, for the maximum lifetime problem under two communication models, omnidirectional and unidirectional antennas. We also consider an extended variant of the maximum lifetime problem, which simultaneously satisfies additional constraints, such as bounded hop-diameter and degree of the routing tree, and minimizing the total energy used in a single transmission.
Culture, gender and information technology use: A comparison of Chinese and US children
Authors: Linda A. Jackson, Yong Zhao, Wei Qiu, Anthony Kolenic,  III, Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Rena Harold, Alexander von Eye
Venue: Computers in Human Behavior (2008)

This research addressed four basic questions about culture, gender and information technology (IT) use. First, are there differences between Chinese and US children in their computer and Internet use? Second, are there differences between Chinese and US children in their use of other technologies, namely, videogames and cell phones? Third, does gender moderate the influence of culture on the use of computers, the Internet and other technologies? Fourth, are there differences among subcultural groups within cultures in their IT use? Using samples of 600 Chinese and 600 US children whose average age was 12 years old, findings indicated cultural and gender differences in technology use as well as interactions between the two. US children used computers and the Internet more than did Chinese children, with Chinese females being the least intense users. Males played videogames more than did females, with US males playing more than did Chinese males. US females lead all other groups in cell phone use, whereas Chinese females were least likely to use them. Racial and ethnic group differences indicate that diversity within cultural groups among subcultures must be considered in understanding children's IT use. Implications of cultural, gender and subcultural group differences in technology use for equity in access to technology and educational interventions for children in the use of technology are discussed.
ASM and evolutionary algorithm for economic optimization of project risk management
Authors: Emil M. Popa, Ioana Gabriela Marcut
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on Evolutionary Computing (2008)

This paper contains an optimization of project risk management efforts, based on an evolutionary algorithm. It uses the mathematical model of the project risk management made by Ben-David, Rabinowitz and Raz in [2]. An abstract state machine, inspired by [5], is build to design the economic optimization. The risk abatement actions selection is a complex problem, so we consider the evolutionary algorithm the most adequate to solve it, especially in the case of big projects. A numerical example illustrates the efficiency of the algorithm.
On the Impact of Evolving Requirements-Architecture Dependencies: An Exploratory Study
Authors: Safoora Shakil Khan, Phil Greenwood, Alessandro Garcia, Awais Rashid
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (2008)

Architecture design plays a significant role in the evolution of software systems, as it provides the prime realization of the driving requirements and their inter-dependencies. With the increasing volatility of software requirements nowadays, it is necessary to understand the correlation between evolving classical requirements dependencies and their impact on the architectural decomposition. In the context of this analysis, two questions arise: (i) what are the conventional categories of requirements dependencies that are more architecturally significant in terms of change impact? and (ii) to what extent those evolving dependencies tend to generate ripple effects through architectural modules and interfaces. In order to address these two questions, this paper first presents an analysis model that categorizes requirements dependencies. Second, we have performed an exploratory study, based on the change history analysis of a real-life Web-based information system, in order to gather the most architecturally-significant requirements dependencies from our model. We have systematically analyzed ten system releases, based on some qualitative and quantitative indicators, with respect to how the requirements- architecture dependencies and compositions evolved.
Some aspects regarding the adaptive control of a flying wing: micro air vehicle with flexible wing tips
Authors: Boscoianu Mircea, Pahonie Radu, Coman Adrian
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on Mathematical Methods and Computational Techniques in Electrical Engineering (2008)

The problem of automatic development of controllers for high maneuverable flexible flying wing micro air vehicles for the situations in which the exact characteristics are not known, has a strong motivation for research because of the low cost bioinspiration emerging technologies, the integration of micro sensors, neural networks and adaptive control. The aim to obtain an enhanced agility and functionality demands that MAV should perform over an extended flight envelope, an increased range of operating conditions with dramatic variations and highly nonlinear aerodynamic phenomena.
Selecting Representative Speakers for a Speech Database on the Basis of Heterogeneous Similarity Criteria
Authors: Sacha Krstulović, Frédéric Bimbot, Olivier Boëffard, Delphine Charlet, Dominique Fohr, Odile Mella
Venue: Speaker Classification II: Selected Projects (2007)

In the context of the Neologos French speech database creation project, a general methodology was defined for the selection of representative speaker recordings. The selection aims at providing a good coverage in terms of speaker variability while limiting the number of recorded speakers. This is intended to make the resulting database both more adapted to the development of recently proposed multi-model methods and less expensive to collect.The presented methodology proposes a selection process based on the optimization of a quality criterion defined in a variety of speaker similarity modeling frameworks. The selection can be achieved with respect to a unique similarity criterion, using classical clustering methods such as Hierarchical or K-Medians clustering, or it can combine several speaker similarity criteria, thanks to a newly developed clustering method called Focal Speakers Selection.In this framework, four different speaker similarity criteria are tested, and three different speaker clustering algorithms are compared. Results pertaining to the collection of the Neologos database are also discussed.
From Gene Regulation to Stochastic Fusion
Authors: Gabriel Ciobanu
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Unconventional Computing (2008)

Usual process algebras are working with one-to-one interactions, and so it is difficult to use them in order to describe complex biological systems like gene regulation where many-to-many interactions are involved. We overcome this limitation and present a stochastic fusion calculus suitable to describe the dynamic behaviour involving many-to-many interactions. We extend the semantics of the fusion calculus from labelled transition system to stochastic labelled transition system where the evolution of a system is driven by probability distributions, then we analyse the stochastic distribution of the synchronization between interacting processes. Finally we define and study a stochastic hyperequivalence, and present an axiomatic system for it.
About the Termination Detection in the Asynchronous Message Passing Model
Authors: Jérémie Chalopin, Emmanuel Godard, Yves Métivier, Gerard Tel
Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (2007)

Starting with the works by Angluin [1] and Itai and Rodeh [11], many papers have discussed the question what functions can be computed by distributed algorithms in networks where knowledge about the network topology is limited.