ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A case study of information flows in multi-agency emergency response exercises
Authors: Nitesh Bharosa, JinKyu Lee, Marijn Janssen, H. Raghav Rao
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government (2009)

Successful disaster management requires efficient information sharing and coordination of multi-agency emergency response operations. This paper compares two types of multi-agency emergency response exercises where multiple relief agencies are required to collaborate, using a set of information communication technologies, in response to large-scale disaster scenarios. The analysis shows that many decision-makers and information managers suffer from a lack of information availability awareness and that the information flows are heavily regulated by the institutional structure and organizations involved in multi-agency emergency response, which may not achieve the full potential of the available ICTs' technical capabilities. As a result, information systems should be conceptualized in a way that the system includes the underlying political and organizational structure, institutional rules/operational procedures, norms, and most importantly, the human actors. The paper also discusses several points that seem to have important implications to successful emergency response.
HDSampler: revealing data behind web form interfaces
Authors: Anirban Maiti, Arjun Dasgupta, Nan Zhang, Gautam Das
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2009)

A large number of online databases are hidden behind the web. Users to these systems can form queries through web forms to retrieve a small sample of the database. Sampling such hidden databases is widely desired for understanding the nature and quality of data stored in them. We have developed HDSampler, which to the best of our knowledge is the first practical system for sampling structured hidden web databases. It enables efficient sampling of the databases and accurate answering of aggregate queries, to provide analysts with valuable information for data analytics, as well as help power a multitude of third-party applications such as web-mashups and meta-search engines. For the purpose of this demo, we present an instance of HDSampler on Google Base - a content-rich hidden web database maintained by Google. By using HDSampler, the demo reveals a snapshot of the marginal distribution of various attributes of Google Base in a matter of minutes.
N-way morphing for 2D animation
Authors: William Baxter, Pascal Barla, Ken Anjyo
Venue: Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (2009)

We present a novel approach to the creation of varied animations from a small set of simple 2D input shapes. Instead of providing a new 2D shape for each keyframe of an animation sequence, we interpolate between a few example shapes in a reduced pose-space. Similar approaches have been presented in the past, but were restricted in the types of input or range of deformations allowed. In order to address these limitations, we reformulate the problem as an N-way morphing process on 2D input bitmap or vector graphics. Our formulation includes an N-way mapping technique, an efficient, rigidity preserving nonlinear blending function, improved extrapolation and a novel scattered data interpolation technique to manage the reduced pose-space. The resulting animations are correlated to paths in the reduced pose-space, allowing users to intuitively and interactively control temporal behaviours with simple gestures. We demonstrate our techniques in several example animations. Copyright &copy; 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. We present a novel approach to the creation of varied animations by interpolating a small set of input images in a reduced pose-space. The technique includes an N-way mapping technique, an efficient, rigidity preserving nonlinear blending function, improved extrapolation and a novel scattered data interpolation technique to manage the reduced pose-space. Together these allow users to intuitively and interactively control temporal behaviours with simple gestures.
Efficient Knowledge Acquisition for Extracting Temporal Relations
Authors: Son Bao Pham, Achim Hoffmann
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

Machine learning approaches in natural language processing often require a large annotated corpus. We present a complementary approach that utilizes expert knowledge to overcome the scarceness of annotated data. In our framework KAFTIE, the expert could easily create a large number of rules in a systematic manner without the need of a knowledge engineer. Using KAFTIE, a knowledge base was built based on a small data set that outperforms machine learning algorithms trained on a much bigger data set for the task of recognizing temporal relations. Furthermore, our knowledge acquisition approach could be used in synergy with machine learning algorithms to both increase the performance of the machine learning algorithms and to reduce the expert's knowledge acquisition effort.
Triangles in regular graphs with density below one half
Authors: Allan siu lun Lo
Venue: Combinatorics, Probability and Computing (2009)

Let k3reg(n, d) be the minimum number of triangles in d-regular graphs with n vertices. We find the exact value of k3reg(n, d) for d between <inline-graphic mime-subtype="gif" xlink="S0963548309009857_inline1"><alt-text>$2n /5 + 12 \sqrt{n}/5$</alt-text></inline-graphic> and n/2. In addition, we identify the structure of the extremal graphs.
A parallel Aitken-additive Schwarz waveform relaxation suitable for the grid
Authors: Hatem Ltaief, Marc Garbey
Venue: Parallel Computing (2009)

The objective of this paper is to describe a grid-efficient parallel implementation of the Aitken-Schwarz waveform relaxation method for the heat equation problem. This new parallel domain decomposition algorithm, introduced by Garbey [M. Garbey, A direct solver for the heat equation with domain decomposition in space and time, in: Springer Ulrich Langer et al. (Ed.), Domain Decomposition in Science and Engineering XVII, vol. 60, 2007, pp. 501-508], generalizes the Aitken-like acceleration method of the additive Schwarz algorithm for elliptic problems. Although the standard Schwarz waveform relaxation algorithm has a linear rate of convergence and low numerical efficiency, it can be easily optimized with respect to cache memory access and it scales well on a parallel system as the number of subdomains increases. The Aitken-like acceleration method transforms the Schwarz algorithm into a direct solver for the parabolic problem when one knows a priori the eigenvectors of the trace transfer operator. A standard example is the linear three dimensional heat equation problem discretized with a seven point scheme on a regular Cartesian grid. The core idea of the method is to postprocess the sequence of interfaces generated by the additive Schwarz wave relaxation solver. The parallel implementation of the domain decomposition algorithm presented here is capable of achieving robustness and scalability in heterogeneous distributed computing environments and it is also naturally fault tolerant. All these features make such a numerical solver ideal for computational grid environments. This paper presents experimental results with a few loosely coupled parallel systems, remotely connected through the internet, located in Europe, Russia and the USA.
E = MC3: managing uncertain enterprise data in a cluster-computing environment
Authors: Fei Xu, Kevin Beyer, Vuk Ercegovac, Peter J. Haas, Eugene J. Shekita
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2009)

Modern enterprises must manage uncertain data for purposes of risk assessment and decisionmaking under uncertainty. The Monte Carlo approach embodied in the MCDB system of Jampani et al. is well suited for such a task. MCDB can support industrial strength business-intelligence queries over uncertain warehouse data. Moreover, MCDB's extensible approach to specifying uncertainty can also capture complex stochastic prediction models, allowing sophisticated ``what-if'' analyses within the DBMS. The MCDB computations can be highly CPU intensive, but offer the potential for massive parallelization. To realize this potential, we provide a new system, called MC3 (Monte Carlo Computation on a Cluster), that extends the MCDB approach to the map-reduce processing framework. MC3 can exploit the robustness and scalability of map-reduce, and can handle data stored in non-relational formats. We show how MCDB query plans over ``tuple bundles'' can be translated to sequences of map-reduce operations over nested data, and describe different parallelization schemes. We also provide and analyze several novel distributed algorithms for adding pseudorandom number seeds to tuple bundles. These algorithms ensure statistical correctness of the Monte-Carlo computations while minimizing the seed length. Our experiments show that MC3 can scale well for a variety of workloads.
Session-state Reveal Is Stronger Than Ephemeral Key Reveal: Attacking the NAXOS Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol
Authors: Cas J. Cremers
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (2009)

In the paper "Stronger Security of Authenticated Key Exchange" [1, 2], a new security model for authenticated key exchange protocols (eCK) is proposed. The new model is suggested to be at least as strong as previous models for key exchange protocols. The model includes a new notion of an Ephemeral Key Reveal adversary query, which is claimed in e.g. [2,3, 4] to be at least as strong as the Session-state Reveal query. We show that Session-state Reveal is stronger than Ephemeral Key Reveal, implying that the eCK security model is incomparable to the CK model [5, 6]. In particular we show that the proposed NAXOS protocol from [1, 2] does not meet its security requirements if the Session-state Reveal query is allowed in the eCK model. We discuss the implications of our result for some related protocols proven correct in the eCK model, and discuss the interaction between Session-state Reveal and protocol transformations.
Building content dictionaries for geometric algebra in OMDoc format
Authors: Kuo-pao Yang, Wendy Zhang, Fred Petry
Venue: Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference (2009)

This paper describes why and how to build Content Dictionaries for Geometric Algebra implemented in OMDoc format, an XML-based markup language. Geometric Algebra is a powerful and general language available for the development of mathematical physics. Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) enables one to write XML-based language to display mathematical formulae on web browsers and OpenMath makes the text semantics available by creating a series of Content Dictionaries, but no markup languages have been previously created for Geometric Algebra to interpret semantics of documentations. Open Mathematical Documentation (OMDoc) extends OpenMath by providing more features such as axiom, theorem, and proof structures. The working Content Dictionary implemented in OMDoc format for Geometric Algebra has been established. It is able to be transformed and then displayed in the Firefox web browser for instance. This research will lead to the study and design of many more various scientific fields interested in accessibilities and capabilities through the internet.
Named entity recognition for Ukrainian: a resource-light approach
Authors: Sophia Katrenko, Pieter Adriaans
Venue: Proceedings of the Workshop on Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction and Enabling Technologies (2007)

Named entity recognition (NER) is a subtask of information extraction (IE) which can be used further on for different purposes. In this paper, we discuss named entity recognition for Ukrainian language, which is a Slavonic language with a rich morphology. The approach we follow uses a restricted number of features. We show that it is feasible to boost performance by considering several heuristics and patterns acquired from the Web data.
CelOWS: A Service Oriented Architecture to Define, Query and Reuse Biological Models
Authors: Ely Edison Matos, Fernanda Campos, Regina Braga, Rodrigo Weber, Daniele Palazzi
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Science: Part I (2009)

The amount of information generated by biological research has lead to an intensive use of models. Mathematical and computational modeling needs accurate description to share, reuse and simulate models as formulated by original authors. In this paper, we introduce the Cell Component Ontology - CelO, expressed in OWL-DL. This ontology captures both the structure of a cell model and the properties of functional components. We use this ontology in a Web project --- CelOWS - to describe, query and compose CellML models. It aims to improve reuse and composition of existent components and allow semantic validation of new models.
Benefits of Combinatorial Auctions with Transformability Relationships
Authors: Andrea Giovannucci, Jesús Cerquides, Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy (2006)

In this paper we explore whether an auctioneer/buyer may benefit from introducing his transformability relationships (some goods can be transformed into others at a transformation cost) into multi-unit combinatorial reverse auctions. Thus, we quantitatively assess the potential savings the auctioneer/buyer may obtain with respect to combinatorial reverse auctions that do not consider tranformability relationships. Furthermore, we empirically identify the market conditions under which it is worth for the auctioneer/buyer to exploit transformability relationships.
Middleware-based services for virtual cooperative mobile platforms
Authors: Karsten Schwan
Venue:  (2008)

Mobile computing devices like handhelds are becoming ubiquitous and so is computing embedded in cyber-physical systems like cameras, smart sensors, vehicles, and many others. Further, the computation and communication resources present in these settings are becoming increasingly powerful. The resulting, rich execution platforms are enabling increasingly complex applications and system uses. These trends enable richer execution platforms for running ever more complex distributed applications. This thesis explores these opportunities (i) for cooperative mobile platforms, where the combined resources of multiple computing devices and the sensors attached to them can be shared to better address certain application needs, and (ii) for distributed platforms where opportunities for cooperation are further strengthened by virtualization. The latter offers efficient abstractions for device sharing and application migration that enable applications to operate across dynamically changing and heterogeneous systems without their explicit involvement. An important property of cooperative distributed platforms is that they jointly and cooperatively provide and maintain the collective resources needed by applications. Another property is that these platforms make decisions about the resources allocated to certain tasks in a decentralized fashion. In contrast to volunteer computing systems, however, cooperation implies the commitment of resources as well as the commitment to jointly managing them. The resulting technical challenges for the mobile environments on which this thesis is focused include coping with dynamic network topology, the runtime addition and removal of devices, and resource management issues that go beyond resource usage and scheduling to also include topics like energy consumption and battery drain. Platform and resource virtualization can provide important benefits to cooperative mobile platforms, the key one being the ability to hide from operating systems and applications the complexities implied by collective resource usage. To realize this opportunity, this thesis extends current techniques for device access and sharing in virtualized systems, particularly to improve their flexibility in terms of their ability to make the implementation choices needed for efficient service provision and realization in the mobile and embedded systems targeted by this work. Specifically, we use middleware-based approaches to flexibly extend device and service implementations across cooperative and virtualized mobile platforms. First, for cooperating platforms, application-specific overlay networks are constructed and managed in response to dynamics at the application level and in the underlying infrastructure. When virtualizing these platforms, these same middleware techniques are shown capable of providing uniform services to applications despite platform heterogeneity and dynamics. The approach is shown useful for sharing and remotely accessing devices and services, and for device emulation in mobile settings.
Enabling information retrieval on historical document collections: the role of matching procedures and special lexica
Authors: Annette Gotscharek, Andreas Neumann, Ulrich Reffle, Christoph Ringlstetter, Klaus U. Schulz
Venue: Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (2009)

Due to the large number of spelling variants found in historical texts, standard methods of Information Retrieval (IR) fail to produce satisfactory results on historical document collections. In order to improve recall for search engines, modern words used in queries have to be associated with corresponding historical variants found in the documents. In the literature, the use of (1) special matching procedures and (2) lexica for historical language have been suggested as two ways to solve this problem. In the first part of the paper we show how the construction of matching procedures and lexica may benefit from each other, leading the way to a combination of both approaches. A tool is presented where matching rules and a historical lexicon are built in an interleaved way based on corpus analysis. A crucial question considered in the second part of the paper is if matching procedures alone suffice to lift IR on historical texts to a satisfactory level. Since historical language changes over centuries it is not simple to obtain an answer. We present experiments where the performance of matching procedures in text collections from four centuries is studied. After classifying missed vocabulary, we measure precision and recall of the matching procedure for each period. Our results indicate that for earlier periods historical lexica represent an important corrective to matching procedures in IR applications.
Meta Ethics for the Metaverse: The Ethics of Virtual Worlds
Authors: Edward H. Spence
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy (2008)

After a brief introduction that sets out the overall argument of the paper in summary, the second part of the paper will offer a meta-ethical framework based on the moral theory of Alan Gewirth, necessary for determining what, if any, ought to be the ethics that guide the conduct of people participating in virtual worlds in their roles as designers, administrators and players or avatars. As virtual worlds and the World Wide Web generally, are global in scope, reach and use, Gewirth's theory, which offers a supreme principle of morality, the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) that establishes universal rights for all persons always and everywhere, is particularly suitable for this task. The paper will show that persons both in the real world and in virtual worlds have rights to freedom and wellbeing. Strictly with regard to agency those rights are merely prima facie but with regard to personhood framed around the notion of self-respect those rights are absolute. The third and final part of the paper will examine in more practical detail and application why and how designers, administrators and avatars of virtual worlds are rationally committed on the basis of their own intrinsic purposive agency to ethical norms of conduct that require the universal respect of the rights of freedom and well-being of all agents, including their own. Using Alan Gewirth's argument for the Principle of Generic Consistency (Reason and Morality, 1978) and my expanded argument for the PGC in my Ethics Within Reason: A Neo-Gewirthian Approach (2006), the paper will specifically seek to demonstrate that insofar as avatars can be viewed as virtual representations or modes of presentations of real people (at least with regard to some virtual worlds in which the virtual agency of the avatar can be considered an extension of the agency of the person instantiating the avatar in the real world) and thus can and must be perceived as virtual purposive agents, then they have moral rights and obligations similar to those of their real counterparts. Finally, the paper will show how the rules of virtual worlds as instantiated by the designers' code and the administrators' end-user license agreement (EULA), must always be consistent with and comply with the requirements of universal morality as established on the basis of the PGC. When the two come into conflict, the PGC, as the supreme principle of morality, is always overriding.
A Meme Media Framework for Introducing a Multimodal User Interface to Existing Web Applications
Authors: Kimihito Ito
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XVII (2006)

Web applications, which are computer programs ported to the Web, allow us to use various remote services and tools through our Web browsers. There are an enormous number of Web applications on the Web, and they are becoming the basic infrastructure of everyday life. At the same time, multimodal character agents, which interact with human users by both verbal and nonverbal behavior, have recently seen remarkable development. It would be of great benefit if we could easily modify existing Web applications by adding multimodal user interface to them. This paper proposes a framework where IntelligentPad and Multimodal Presentation Markup Language work in collaboration to introduce multimodal character agentsto the front-end of existing Web applications. Example applications include attaching a multimodal user-interface to a news site on the Web. The framework does not require users to write any program code or script.