ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Business process reengineering and workflow automation: a technology transfer experience
Authors: Lerina Aversano, Gerardo Canfora, Andrea De Lucia, Pierpaolo Gallucci
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software (2002)

In the last few years many public and private organizations have been changing the way of thinking their business processes to improve the quality of delivered services while achieving better efficiency and efficacy. This paper presents results and lessons learned from an on-going technology-transfer research project aimed at introducing service and technology innovation within a peripheral public administration while transferring enabling workflow methodologies and technologies to local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). We discuss a process reverse engineering approach and its application in the technology transfer project. We also discuss an approach for evaluation and assessment of workflow technology and present a prototype implementation for a selected process of the subject organization.
On the Frame-Stewart algorithm for the multi-peg Tower of Hanoi problem
Authors: Sandi Klavžar, Uroš Milutinović, Ciril Petr
Venue: Discrete Applied Mathematics (2002)

It is proved that seven different approaches to the multi-peg Tower of Hanoi problem are all equivalent. Among them the classical approaches of Stewart and Frame from 1941 can be found.
Organizational Environments in Flux: The Impact of Regulatory Punctuations on Organizational Domains, CEO Succession, and Performance
Authors: Heather A. Haveman, Michael V. Russo, Alan D. Meyer
Venue: Organization Science (2001)

A central debate in organizational theory concerns how organizations evolve. There are two diametrically opposing viewpoints. Adaptation theories predict that change occurs as fluid organizations adjust to meet shifting environmental demands, while selection theories predict that change occurs through the differential selection and replacement of inert organizations as environmental demands vary over time. Our paper bridges these polar opposites by using a punctuated equilibrium framework to examine organizations' responses to discontinuous industry-level change. This framework recognizes that the histories of many industries are occasionally punctuated by dramatic exogenous shocks, such as radical technological innovation, social and political turmoil, major changes in government regulation, and economic crashes. Our central thesis is that such environmental punctuations dramatically reduce pressures and rewards for organizational inertia and thereby alter both organizations' propensities for change and their survival chances following change.We focus on one form of punctuation, major regulatory change, and study firms in two industries: general hospitals and savings and loan associations. For organizations in both industries, we examine three important outcomes: shifts in organizational domain, CEO succession, and changes in financial performance. Our analyses show that punctuational regulatory change prompts shifts in organizational domains and executive leadership. Additionally, post-punctuation domain change and post-punctuation CEO succession both affect subsequent performance. We discuss our results in light of current thinking about the content and process effects of core organizational change, which has been developed in the context of stable environments. Finally, we argue for the development of more temporally sensitive theories of organizational action.
Optimization and control of VDD and VTH for low-power, high-speed CMOS design
Authors: Tadahiro Kuroda
Venue: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2002)

It is essential to control VDD and VTH for low-power, high-speed CMOS design. In this paper, it is shown that these two parameters can be controlled by designers as objectives of design optimization to find better trade-offs between power and speed. Quantitative analysis of trade-offs between power and speed is presented. Some of the popular circuit techniques and design examples to control VDD and VTH are introduced. A simple theory to compute optimum multiple VDD's and VTH's is described. Scaling scenarios of variable and/or multiple VDD's and VTH's is discussed to show future technology directions.
Avatar proxies: configurable informants of collaborative activities
Authors: Umer Farooq, Con Rodi, John M. Carroll, Philip Isenhour
Venue: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2003)

In the physical world, every user exists at one and only one place, but in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE), other paradigms are achievable such as a user existing at more than one place at a time. In a collaborative environment, a user is typically engaged with one primary activity at a time. As the number of collaborative activities increases, users are unable to maintain focal attention on all activities, and must offload some cognitive effort to a peripheral attention sphere. This delegation of attention-the movement of primary activities as focal attention to secondary activities as non-focal attention-requires that users remember certain parameters of context switching, such as what the secondary activities are, and more importantly, when to switch their focal attention to these activities. Keeping track of these context-switching parameters is itself a cognitive load that often degenerates focal attention on primary activities.Our goal is to augment users' cognition by delegating the work of remembering context-switching parameters to other entities in a collaborative environment. We call these entities avatar proxies because our implementation is in a CVE in which users are iconified as avatars, but the techniques and results are general to a broader range of collaborative environments. Avatar proxies notify users when they are required to switch their focal attention to secondary activities.
Interval selection: applications, algorithms, and lower bounds
Authors: Thomas Erlebach, Frits C. R. Spieksma
Venue: Journal of Algorithms (2003)

Given a set of jobs, each consisting of a number of weighted intervals on the real line, and a positive integer m, we study the problem of selecting a maximum weight subset of the intervals such that at most one interval is selected from each job and, for any point p on the real line, at most m intervals containing p are selected. We give a parameterized algorithm GREEDYα that belongs to the class of "myopic" algorithms, which are deterministic algorithms that process the given intervals in order of non-decreasing right endpoint and can either reject or select each interval (rejections are irrevocable). We show that there are values of the parameter α so that GREEDYα produces a 2-approximation in the case of unit weights, an 8-approximation in the case of arbitrary weights, and a (3 + 2√2)- approximation in the case where the weights of all intervals corresponding to the same job are equal. We also show that no deterministic myopic algorithm can achieve ratio better than 2 in the case of unit weights, better than ≈ 7.103 in the case of arbitrary weights, and better than 3 + 2√2 in the case where the weights of all intervals corresponding to the same job are equal. Furthermore, we give additional results for the case where all intervals have the same length as well as a lower bound of e/e-1≈ 1.582 on the approximation ratio of randomized myopic algorithms in the case of unit weights.
Eliminating definitions and Skolem functions in first-order logic
Authors: Jeremy Avigad
Venue: ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL) (2003)

From proofs in any classical first-order theory that proves the existence of at least two elements, one can eliminate definitions in polynomial time. From proofs in any classical first-order theory strong enough to code finite functions, including sequential theories, one can also eliminate Skolem functions in polynomial time.
Upper bounds for the prime divisors of Wendt's determinant
Authors: Anastasios Simalarides
Venue: Mathematics of Computation (2002)

Let c ≥ 2 be an even integer, (3, c) = 1. The resultant Wc of the polynomials tc - 1 and (1 + t)c - 1 is known as Wendt's determinant of order c. We prove that among the prime divisors q of Wc only those which divide 2c - 1 or Lc/2 can be larger than θc/4, where θ = 2.2487338 and Ln is the nth Lucas number, except when c = 20 and q = 61. Using this estimate we derive criteria for the nonsolvability of Fermat's congruence.
CALPUFF, HPAC, and VLSTRACK evaluation with the over-land alongwind dispersion (OLAD) field data
Authors: J. C. Chang, K. Chayantrakom, S. R. Hanna
Venue: Development and application of computer techniques to environmental studies (2002)

The CALPUFF (California Puff), HPAC (Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability), and VLSTRACK (Chemical/Biological Agent Vapor, Liquid and Solid Tracking) transport and dispersion models were evaluated with the Over-Land Alongwind Dispersion (OLAD) field data. OLAD involved nearly instantaneous line releases of sulfuric hexafluoride (SF6) from truck or aircraft on a mesoscale field site at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Meteorological data were measured at 16 surface sites, at one radiosonde site, and at one pibal site. SF6 concentrations were mainly measured by the whole-air samplers along three sampling lines. In general, all three models underpredicted the maximum dosages across a sampling line. CALPUFF, HPAC, and VLSTRACK predictions indicated a factor of 1.8, 2.0, and 3.3 mean underprediction, respectively; and a factor of two to seven random scatter for all three models, with HPAC having the smallest scatter. The fraction of predictions within a factor of two of observations was about 30% for CALPUFF, 25% for VLSTRACK, and about 50% for HPAC. The underprediction might be due to the model formulations for the vertical dispersion coefficient and the cloud advective speed.
Location learning in Chinese versus English menu selection
Authors: Kin Pou Lie
Venue: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2003)

The orthography of Chinese is remarkably different from that of English. Does it have implications for human-computer interaction? This paper presents an empirical study in which location learning of Chinese menu items and location learning of English menu items were compared. Participants using a Chinese menu learned the locations of menu items to a less extent, compared with participants using an equivalent English menu.
Scalability and FETI based algorithm for large discretized variational inequalities
Authors: Zdeněk Dostál, David Horák
Venue: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (2003)

The point of this paper is to review recent theoretical and experimental results related to scalability of the FETI based domain decomposition algorithm that was proposed recently by Dostál, Friedlander, Santos and Gomes for numerical solution of discretized variational inequalities. After briefly describing the basic algorithm with a "natural coarse grid" and its implementation, we review theoretical results that indicate a kind of optimality of the algorithm, namely that the number of iterations that are necessary to complete some parts of the algorithm is bounded independently of the discretization parameter. Then, we give some results of numerical experiments with parallel solution of a model problem discretized by up to more than eight million of nodal variables to give an evidence of both numerical and parallel scalability of the algorithm presented.
High-level synthesis of distributed logic-memory architectures
Authors: Chao Huang, Srivaths Ravi, Anand Raghunathan, Niraj K. Jha
Venue: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design (2002)

With the increasing cost of global communication on-chip, high-performance designs for data-intensive applications require architectures that distribute hardware resources (computing logic, memories, interconnect, etc.) throughout a chip, while restricting computations and communications to geographic proximities. In this paper, we present a methodology for high-level synthesis (HLS) of distributed logic-memory architectures, i.e., architectures that have logic and memory distributed across several partitions in a chip. Conventional HLS tools are capable of extracting parallelism from a behavior for architectures that assume a monolithic controller/datapath communicating with a memory or memory hierarchy. This work provides techniques to extend the synthesis frontier to more general architectures that can extract both coarse- and fine-grained parallelism from data accesses and computations in a synergistic manner. Our methodology selects many possible ways of organizing data and computations, carefully examines the trade-offs (i.e., communication overheads, synchronization costs, area overheads) in choosing one solution over another, and utilizes conventional HLS techniques for intermediate steps.We have evaluated the proposed framework on several benchmarks by generating register-transfer level (RTL) implementations using an existing commercial HLS tool with and without our enhancements, and by subjecting the resulting RTL circuits to logic synthesis and layout. The results show that circuits designed as distributed logic-memory architectures using our framework achieve significant (upto, 5.31X average of 3.45X) performance improvements over well-optimized conventional designs with small area overheads (upto 19.3%, 15.1% on average).
The randomized complexity of maintaining the minimum
Authors: Gerth Stølting Brodal, Shiva Chaudhuri, Jaikumar Radhakrishnan
Venue: Nordic Journal of Computing (1996)

The complexity of maintaining a set under the operations Insert, Delete and FindMin is considered. In the comparison model it is shown that any randomized algorithm with expected amortized cost t comparisons per Insert and Delete has expected cost at least n/(e22t)-1 comparisons for FindMin. If FindMin is replaced by a weaker operation. FindAny, then it is shown that a randomized algorithm with constant expected cost per operation exists; in contrast, it is shown that no deterministic algorithm can have constant cost per operation. Finally, a deterministic algorithm with constant amortized cost per operation for an offline version of the problem is given.
Social regulation in virtual spaces
Authors: Jack Muramatsu
Venue: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2003)

The described dissertation focuses on social regulation of user behavior within virtual social spaces. A multi-year field study of two fantasy-based game MUDs (multi-user dungeons) was conducted to gain a detailed understanding of the work involved in regulating behavior in these virtual environments. This field study examines the work and techniques employed by game administrators (immortals) to maintain social regulation over their respective game MUDs. One key feature of social regulation in such virtual spaces is the use and possible use of specialized software routines to regulate specific behaviors. Ongoing analysis of the field study data is expected to provide an understanding of how aspects of the virtual world affect the manner in which social regulation is performed.
Design and performance evaluation of scheduling algorithms for unslotted CSMA/CA with backoff MAC protocol in multiple-access WDM ring networks
Authors: Kyeong Soo Kim, Leonid G. Kazovsky
Venue: Information Sciences&mdash;Informatics and Computer Science: An International Journal (2003)

The unslotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) with backoff is a fully distributed, asynchronous Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for multiple-access Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) ring networks with simplicity and robustness comparable to those of Ethernet [IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 18 (10) (2000) 2004; Proceedings of GLOBECOM'00, vol. 2, 2000, p. 1303]. In this paper, we present the results of performance evaluation of four scheduling algorithms - Random Select (RS), Destination Priority Queueing (DPQ), Longest Queue First (LQF), and Shortest Packet First (SPF) - designed for the unslotted CSMA/CA with backoff MAC protocol to address the issues of fairness and bandwidth efficiency. Through extensive network-level simulations for a multiple-access WDM ring with 10 nodes and 10 wavelengths on a 100 km ring, we have verified that under uniform traffic condition, the LQF with optical buffer size of 13 and 78 octets shows the best performance in terms of fairness, guaranteeing full fairness (fairness index ≈ 1) for arrival rates up to 9.5 Gbps/node, while for throughput and packet delay, the DPQ with the maximum optical buffer size of 1538 octets gives the best results. We have also identified that the optical buffer size greatly affects the performance of nonrandom scheduling algorithms.
Derandomizing Variance Estimators
Authors: Shane G. Henderson, Peter W. Glynn
Venue: Operations Research (1999)

One may consider a discrete-event simulation as a Markov chain evolving on a suitably rich state space. One way that regenerative cycles may be constructed for general state-space Markov chains is to generate auxiliary coin-flip random variables at each transition, with a regeneration occurring if the coin-flip results in a success. The regenerative cycles are therefore randomized with respect to the sequence of states visited by the Markov chain. The point estimator for a steady-state performance measure does not depend on the cycle structure of the chain, but the variance estimator (that defines the width of a confidence interval for the performance measure) does. This implies that the variance estimator is randomized with respect to the visited states. We show how to "derandomize" the variance estimator through the use of conditioning. A new variance estimator is obtained that is consistent and has lower variance than the standard estimator.
What regulation for virtual organizations?
Authors: Claudia Cevenini
Venue: Managing virtual web organizations in the 21st century: issues and challenges (2002)

Virtual organizations are a complex subject which requires an interdisciplinary approach. In the absence of specific legislation, consolidated doctrine and case law, jurists can resort to three main cornerstones: agreements between members and with third parties, analogical application of laws in force, and informal rules and trade usage.The preliminary step is to define the object of analysis as clearly as possible by building a model definition of virtual organizations for the legal research. On the basis of the model's features, the most relevant legal issues can be outlined.At present, owing to the very nature of VOs, no definitive solutions are possible. However, some basic indications can be provided to enable potential and effective partners of a VO to understand from the start the possible legal implications of their activities.
Implementing the architecture, assembly language, and operating systems components of curriculum 2001
Authors: Frank Ford, Michael Gousie, Amruth Kumar, Abdul Sattar, Linda Wilkens
Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2003)

This panel is concerned with present and future directions for the basic system components of the undergraduate Computer Science major curriculum. These components comprise the content of areas 5 and 6 of the Computing Curricula 2001 CS Body of Knowledge[1]; specifically, Area 5: Architecture and Organization (AR) and Area 6: Operating Systems (OS). The panel begins with an overview of the current coverage at the panelists' institutions, and then goes on to discuss possible changes which could make the implementation both more relevant to the needs of today's students and more in tune with the relevant sections of the curricula guidelines cited above.
An approach to computational microtexture perceptual detection with management of uncertainty
Authors: E. Montseny, P. Sobrevilla
Venue: Technologies for constructing intelligent systems: Tasks (2002)

The aim of this work is determining a minimum set of perceptual features allowing microtexture description, in the textured aerial images domain, and adequate computational methods for the evaluation of those features. Moreover, fuzzy techniques are introduced in the features evaluation process to be faithful to the principle of least commitment, and to make easier the management of uncertainty inherent to perceptual features of microtextures.Choosing aerial images for the fulfillment of the work is based on the broad range of microtextures contained in this kind of images, their uncertainty, variability and inherent complexity.Obtaining a "minimum" set of perceptual features has been possible considering how experts usually describe microtextures of aerial images, what features are important in visual texture perception, and how they are used. On the other hand, texture measures that correlate well with human perception have been picked to evaluate previously selected features.To illustrate the effectiveness of incorporating fuzzy techniques within our approach, the resulting computational method is applied to detect some textures of aerial images.
Explicit computation of the relaxed density coming from a three-dimensional optimal design problem
Authors: José Carlos Bellido
Venue: Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods Applications (2003)

We analyze the relaxation of a typical three-dimensional optimal design problem in conductivity, consisting of minimizing the square of the L2-norm of the underlying electric potential under a volume constraint, via a variational reformulation of the problem. Our main achievement is the explicit characterization of the "constrained quasiconvexification" of the cost density.
Gearbox widget for fine adjustments by hand motion
Authors: Noritaka Osawa, Xiangshi Ren
Venue: Proceedings of the workshop on Virtual environments 2003 (2003)

Direct manipulation by hand is easy to understand and to use for approximate positioning. However, direct manipulation by hand is not suitable for making fine adjustments to virtual objects in an immersive environment because it is difficult to hold an unsupported hand in midair and then to release an object at a fixed point. Therefore we propose a virtual 3D gearbox widget. This gearbox widget enables the user to adjust a value precisely. A combination technique of this widget and hand manipulation can move virtual objects and place them in a target position quickly and precisely. For a comparison, we tested the usability of four techniques. Experiments showed that using the proposed gearbox in combination with direct manipulation was the best of the four techniques in terms of both performance data and subjective preference.
Reducing Delay in Preemptive Repeat Priority Queues
Authors: Steve Drekic, David A. Stanford
Venue: Operations Research (2001)

The classical model of the preemptive repeat priority queue assumes that there is a single distribution from which service times for a given class are selected, regardless of the number of preemptions. This paper presents three alternatives for improving service progressively to preempted customers: (1) changing the service distribution, (2) preventing further preemptions, and (3) promoting customers to the next higher priority class. The Laplace-Stieltjes transform of the flow time distribution is found for each class in a model that can employ these three alternatives in arbitrary combinations.