ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Course assessment and proposal report (CAPR): a year in review
Authors: A. S. Ruocco
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the US Military Academy began a pilot program using the Course Assessment and Proposal Report (CAPR) in Fall 1999. By the Fall of 2000, every course in the department was required to use it. The format used for all courses was the same, and course directors were given an option of a Web-based entry system or a word-processor based entry system to prepare their CAPR. This paper discusses some highlights of developing and using the CAPR. Among items discussed are the different levels of acceptance between new instructors and more senior faculty. The varying degrees of acceptance of a Web-based version of the CAPR also impacted on utility of the tool. Changes to the CAPR should enhance long-range tracking of information for accreditation. 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
Suppression of phasiness for time-scale modifications of speech signals based on a shape invariance property
Authors: J. di Martino
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 200. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2001)

Time-scale modifications of speech signals, based on frequency-domain techniques, are hampered by two important artifacts which are "phasiness" and "transient smearing". They correspond to the destruction of the shape of the original signal, i.e. the de-synchronization between the phases of the frequency components. This paper describes an algorithm that preserves the shape invariance of speech signals in the context of a phase vocoder. Phases are corrected at the onset of each voiced region. Modified signals, even for large expansion factors, are of high quality and free from transient smearing or phasiness. A demonstration is proposed in the web page: http://www.loria.fr/-jdm/PhaseVocoder/index.html.
Multistability in Spiking Neuron Models of Delayed Recurrent Inhibitory Loops
Authors: Jianfu Ma, Jianhong Wu
Venue: Neural Computation (2007)

We consider the effect of the effective timing of a delayed feedback on the excitatory neuron in a recurrent inhibitory loop, when biological realities of firing and absolute refractory period are incorporated into a phenomenological spiking linear or quadratic integrate-and-fire neuron model. We show that such models are capable of generating a large number of asymptotically stable periodic solutions with predictable patterns of oscillations. We observe that the number of fixed points of the so-called phase resetting map coincides with the number of distinct periods of all stable periodic solutions rather than the number of stable patterns. We demonstrate how configurational information corresponding to these distinct periods can be explored to calculate and predict the number of stable patterns.
Expanding and extending the security features of java
Authors: Nimisha V. Mehta, Karen R. Sollins
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 7 (1998)

The popularity of the web has had several significant impacts, two of note here: (1) increasing sophistication of web pages, including more regular use of Java and other mobile code, and (2) decreasing average level of sophistication as the user population becomes more broad-based. Coupling these with the increased security threats posed by importing more and more mobile code has caused an emphasis on the security of executing Java applets. This paper considers two significant enhancements that will provide users with both a richer and more effective security model. The two enhancements are the provision of flexible and configurable security constraints and the ability to confine use of certain storage channels, as defined by Lampson[11], to within those constraints. We are particularly concerned with applets using files as communications channels contrary to desired security constraints. We present the mechanisms, a discussion of the implementation, and a summary of some performance comparisons. It is important to note that the ideas presented here are more generally applicable than only to the particular storage channels discussed or even only to Java.
GAINS: genetic algorithms for increasing net sales of a mobile reverse demand communication system
Authors: Michael Henry Wolk
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 GECCO conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation (2007)

In this paper, I describe MRDCOM, a mobile reverse-demand communication system for the pizza industry. The web-based system will support student (buyer) sign-up and will be capable of sending buyers discount food offers through mobile phone text messaging technology. Pizza sellers will be able to easily purchase pizza sales offers that will then be sent only to a relevant sub-group of users. A component of MRDCOM, GAINS, is an offline genetic algorithm (GA) learning component designed to model the offers that are accepted. The rule set derived from the GA component will be used to raise user satisfaction by sending offers to users most likely to accept them. GAINS is expected to increase the accepted offer rate will provide economic benefits for students, pizza sellers, and the administrators of the MRDCOM system.
Quality-of-Service Provisioning using Hierarchical Scheduling in Optical Burst Switched Network
Authors: Suriani Mohd Sam, Norsheila Fisal, Sharifah Hafizah Syed Ariffin
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Networking and Services (2007)

The issues of providing QoS in WDM OBS network are attracting increasing attention in the networking community. One of the key issues is to design efficient algorithms for burst scheduling or more precisely their bandwidth reservation. An ideal scheduling algorithm should be able to process a control packet fast enough before the burst arrives, and yet be able to find a suitable void interval for the burst as long as there exists one. Otherwise, a burst may be unnecessarily discarded either because a reservation cannot be completed before the burst arrives or simply because the scheduling algorithm is not smart enough to make the reservation. In this paper, we propose an OBS network model using the per-hobbehaviors with its three methods of forwarding of the differentiated service to create the burst packets and to implement the burst hierarchical scheduling technique using Weighted Round-Robin and Priority Queueing (WRR_PQ) in order for the network model to support QoS in terms of lower blocking probability, higher resource utilization and lower burst loss rates.
SSH: secure login connections over the internet
Authors: Tatu Ylönen
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, Focusing on Applications of Cryptography - Volume 6 (1996)

SSH provides secure login, file transfer, X11, and TCP/IP connections over an untrusted network. It uses cryptographic authentication, automatic session encryption, and integrity protection for transferred data. RSA is used for key exchange and authentication, and symmetric algorithms (e.g., IDEA or three-key triple-DES) for encrypting transferred data. SSH is intended as a replacement for the existing rsh, rlogin, rcp, rdist, and telnet protocols. SSH is currently (March 1996) being used at thousands of sites in at least 50 countries. Its users include top universities, research laboratories, many major corporations, and numerous smaller companies and individuals. The SSH protocol can also be used as a generic transport layer encryption mechanism, providing both host authentication and user authentication, together with privacy and integrity protection.
Usable Mandatory Integrity Protection for Operating Systems
Authors: Ninghui Li, Ziqing Mao, Hong Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2007)

Existing mandatory access control systems for operating systems are difficult to use. We identify several principles for designing usable access control systems and introduce the Usable Mandatory Integrity Protection (UMIP) model that adds usable mandatory access control to operating systems. The UMIP model is designed to preserve system integrity in the face of network-based attacks. The usability goals for UMIP are twofold. First, configuring a UMIP system should not be more difficult than installing and configuring an operating system. Second, existing applications and common usage practices can still be used under UMIP. UMIP has several novel features to achieve these goals. For example, it introduces several concepts for expressing partial trust in programs. Furthermore, it leverages information in the existing discretionary access control mechanism to derive file labels for mandatory integrity protection. We also discuss our implementation of the UMIP model for Linux using the Linux Security Modules framework, and show that it is simple to configure, has low overhead, and effectively defends against a number of network-based attacks.
Hybrid linear/quadratic time-frequency attributes
Authors: R. Baraniuk
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2000)

We present an efficient method for robustly calculating time-frequency attributes of a signal, including instantaneous mean frequency, bandwidth, and kurtosis. Most current approaches involve a costly intermediate step of computing a (highly oversampled) 2-D bilinear time-frequency representation (TFR), which is then collapsed to the 1-D attribute. Using the principles of hybrid linear/bilinear time-frequency analysis, we propose computing attributes as nonlinear combinations of the (barely oversampled) linear Gabor transform of the signal. The method is both computationally efficient and accurate-it performs as well as the best bilinear techniques based on adaptive TFRs. To illustrate, we calculate an attribute of a seismic cross-section.
Fuzzy controller implementations with fewer than ten transistors?
Authors: A. Stoica, R. S. Zebulum, D. Keymeulen, M. I. Ferguson, Vu Duong
Venue: Proceedings of the Evolutionary Computation on 2002. CEC '02. Proceedings of the 2002 Congress - Volume 02 (2002)

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) offer good promise for automated design of analog circuits as well as for adaptation and automatic reconfiguration of programmable devices. In particular, EAs facilitate the design of analog circuits for very specific requirements, such as those related to the implementation of fuzzy operators, or even of complete fuzzy systems. The paper starts with a brief overview of the evolutionary process applied to circuit design and of a family of analog programmable devices that support on-chip evolution. As a case study, we describe the evolutionary design of a fuzzy controller, using re-configurable analog chips models and unstructured representation. We were able to achieve a circuit that approximates the control surface of a 2-input fuzzy controller, mapping thus a full fuzzy system in only seven transistors. The paper presents evidence that EA can provide very compact solutions for implementation of fuzzy systems, and that programmable analog devices are an efficient and rapid solution for rapid deployment of fuzzy systems.
Electronics lab bench in a laptop: using Electronics Workbench/sup (R/) to enhance learning in an introductory circuits course
Authors: E. R. Doering
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference,1997. on 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change. - Volume 01 (1997)

Electrical Systems, part of the Foundation Coalition Sophomore Engineering Curriculum at Rose-Hulman, serves as the introductory circuits course for students participating in the curriculum. The quarter-long three-credit course is designed to provide breadth in DC, transient, and AC circuits for all engineering majors. Rose-Hulman is in the second year of requiring entering students to purchase their own laptop computer, so this year each student in Electrical Systems has a 486-based laptop that can be used to support classroom activities as well as homework assignments. Electronics Workbench (EWB) provides an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface by which students can build a circuit, insert measuring devices such as voltmeters and ammeters, and click the "power switch" icon to simulate the circuit and see the results displayed immediately on the instrument panels. In effect, the student's laptop simulates an electronics lab bench. At the start of the quarter I spent zero class time lecturing about how to use EWB, yet students were able to productively use the simulator by the second week. In class the students experience circuit behavior as new concepts are introduced. Homework is structured around the design process: students "design" an analysis procedure, and verify their "design" with an EWB simulation. Survey results show that the students believe that the in-class simulations help them to better understand the concepts, and rate the tool highly in terms of its ability to help the learning process.
HTTPS Hacking Protection
Authors: Thawatchai Chomsiri
Venue: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops - Volume 01 (2007)

In general, E-Commerce sites utilize SSL to ward off the authorized detection and decoding of confidential data over a network. In most cases, the communication between Web Browser and E-Commerce Web Server is uses HTTPS protocol. However, the communication often induces some drawbacks, simply denoted by hole. This, in addition, furnishes an opportunity for a hacker to manipulate the data, i.e. decoding the data, using SSL-MITM (SSL Man in the Middle) technique. According to the trials in an experiment with Auditor Security Collection, the results illustrate a hacker and a victim who are on the same local area network; the hacker could be able to decode confidential data (password or credit card number) with the possibility of more than 50 %. This paper presents 3 different methodologies to prevent the decoding using SSL-MITM on the confidential data which normally traverses over e-commerce websites. In addition, the evaluation of 3 schemes is conducted to show the degrees of efficiency of the techniques. Furthermore, this information can be preliminarily utilized as a factor to increase the security of e-commerce website.
DSP-based signal processing for OFDM transmission
Authors: M. Schobinger
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 200. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2001)

A demonstrator for orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) transmission based on a programmable DSP (TMS320C6201) is described. It turns out that the realized rather moderate sampling rates up to 10 Msamples/s still represent quite a challenge for state-of-the-art DSPs in terms of the required computational power but also the synchronization of the internal processing with the I/O interface to a real-time environment. It is illustrated that SW development under stringent resource constraints requires analysis and partitioning of the algorithms in a manner very similar to the mapping strategies necessary in an ASIC design for either cost-sensitive or extremely challenging applications. Therefore, the demonstrator development provides a sound basis for a subsequent design of such a kind of ASICs.
A usage profile and evaluation of a wide-area distributed file system
Authors: Mirjana Spasojevic, M. Satyanarayanan
Venue: Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1994 Technical Conference on USENIX Winter 1994 Technical Conference (1994)

The evolution of the Andrew File System (AFS) into a wide-area distributed file system has encouraged collaboration and information dissemination on a much broader scale than ever before. In this paper, we examine AFS as a provider of wide-area file services to over 80 organizations around the world. We discuss usage characteristics of AFS derived from empirical measurements of the system, and from user responses to a questionnaire. Our observations indicate that AFS provides robust and efficient data access in its current configuration, thus confirming its viability as a design point for wide-area distributed file systems.
Real-Time Divisible Load Scheduling for Cluster Computing
Authors: Xuan Lin, Ying Lu, Jitender Deogun, Steve Goddard
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE Real Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (2007)

Cluster computing has emerged as a new paradigm for solving large-scale problems. To enhance QoS and provide performance guarantees in cluster computing environments, various real-time scheduling algorithms and workload models have been investigated. Computational loads that can be arbitrarily divided into independent pieces represent many real-world applications. Divisible load theory (DLT) provides insight into distribution strategies for such computations. However, the problem of providing performance guarantees to divisible load applications has not yet been systematically studied. This paper investigates such algorithms for a cluster environment. Design parameters that affect the performance of these algorithms and scenarios when the choice of these parameters have significant effects are studied. A novel algorithmic approach integrating DLT and EDF (earliest deadline first) scheduling is proposed. For comparison, we also propose a heuristic algorithm. Intensive experimental results show that the application of DLT to real-time cluster-based scheduling leads to significantly better scheduling approaches.
Reducing the Write Traffic for a Hybrid Cache Protocol
Authors: Fredrik Dahlgren, Per Stenstrom
Venue: Proceedings of the 1994 International Conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 01 (1994)

Coherence misses limit the performance of write-invalidate cache protocols in large-scale shared-memory multi-processors. By contrast, hybrid protocols mix updates with invalidations and can reduce the coherence miss rate. The gains of the fewer coherence misses, however, can sometimes be outweighed by contention due to the extra traffic making techniques to cut the write traffic important. We study in this paper how write traffic for hybrid protocols can be reduced by incorporating a write cache in each node. Detailed architectural simulations reveal that write caches are effective in exploiting locality in write accesses under relaxed memory consistency models. Hybrid protocols augmented with write caches with only a few entries are shown to outperform a write-invalidate protocol for all five benchmark applications under study.
Efficient Hierarchical Approximation of High-Dimensional Option Pricing Problems
Authors: Christoph Reisinger, Gabriel Wittum
Venue: SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (2007)

A major challenge in computational finance is the pricing of options that depend on a large number of risk factors. Prominent examples are basket or index options where dozens or even hundreds of stocks constitute the underlying asset and determine the dimensionality of the corresponding degenerate parabolic equation. The objective of this article is to show how an efficient discretization can be achieved by hierarchical approximation as well as asymptotic expansions of the underlying continuous problem. The relation to a number of state-of-the-art methods is highlighted.
Games and Traffic Safety - an Experimental Study in a Game-Based Simulation Environment
Authors: Per Backlund, Henrik Engstrom, Mikael Johannesson, Mikael Lebram
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (2007)

In this paper we report results from an experimental study of games and traffic safety performed in an advanced gaming environment. During car simulator-sessions we collected data over different traffic safety variables, such as speed, headway distance and lane change behavior, from 70 subjects. The data was analyzed in order to investigate possible individual learning effects and differences between groupings of subjects. The experiment shows clear positive individual learning effects for all traffic safety variables analyzed. Hence we conclude that game based simulations can be used to enhance learning in driving education.
Toward a Distributed Control Plane Architecture for Next Generation Routers
Authors: K.-K. Nguyen, H. Mahkoum, B. Jaumard, C. Assi, M. Lanoue
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Universal Multiservice Networks (2007)

As networks become more and more pervasive and broadband access technologies evolve to provide affordable broadband solutions for both homes and offices, one needs to rethink the architecture design for next generation routers in order to be able to deliver multiple services over high-speed interfaces and perform fast switching capabilities (e.g., multi-petabit). The size and complexity of next generation networks requires a protocol transition from its classical centralized approach to a fully distributed and scalable paradigm. In this paper, we propose a new control plane architecture that is resilient and scalable where we distribute the OSPF/IS-IS, MPLS and BGP protocols using IETF-approved inter-protocol interfaces. In such architecture, forwarding tables will be updated by OSPF, IS-IS, RTM, BGP and MPLS routing protocols distributed onto multiple processors, in the interface cards themselves. We therefore revisit each of these protocols and redraw their implementation within an efficient, scalable, distributed, resilient, and fault tolerant scheme. As a proof of concept, we present the Hyperchip router (PBR1280) that has been built on these grounds and discuss the performance of the proposed distributed architecture. Although some features (e.g., resiliency) still need further development, it is shown that the proposed distributed routing protocol scheme already offers a new generation of routers with significant higher switching capacity.
Confidence measures for dialogue management in the CU Communicator system
Authors: R. San-Segundo
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02 (2000)

This paper provides improved confidence assessment for detection of word-level speech recognition errors and out-of-domain user requests using language model features. We consider a combined measure of confidence that utilizes the language model back-off sequence, language model score, and phonetic length of recognized words as indicators of speech recognition confidence. The paper investigates the ability of each feature to detect speech recognition errors and out-of-domain utterances as well as two methods for combining the features contextually: a multi-layer perceptron and a statistical decision tree. We illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm by considering utterances from the ATIS airline information task as either in-domain and out-of-domain for the DARPA Communicator task. Using this hand-labeled data, it is shown that 27.9% of incorrectly recognized words and 36.4% of out-of-domain phrases are detected at a 2.5% false alarm rate.
The complexity of latching transitions in large scale cortical networks
Authors: Emilio Kropff, Alessandro Treves
Venue: Natural Computing: an international journal (2007)

We study latching dynamics, i.e. the ability of a network to hop spontaneously from one discrete attractor state to another, which has been proposed as a model of an infinitely recursive process in large scale cortical networks, perhaps associated with higher cortical functions, such as language. We show that latching dynamics can span the range from deterministic to random under the control of a threshold parameter U. In particular, the interesting intermediate case is characterized by an asymmetric and complex set of transitions. We also indicate how finite latching sequences can become infinite, depending on the properties of the transition probability matrix and of its eigenvalues.