ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The Performance Study of Two Genetic Algorithm Approaches for VLSI Macro-Cell Layout Area Optimization
Authors: H. A. Rahim, Ab Al Hadi Ab Rahman, R. Badlishah Ahmad, Wan Nur Suryani Firuz Wan Ariffin, Muhammad Imran Ahmad
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Second Asia International Conference on Modelling & Simulation (AMS) (2008)

Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) design has been the subject of much research since the early 1980s where the VLSI cell placement emerges to be a crucial stage in the chip design. Its area optimization is very important in order to reduce the delay and include more functionalities to the designed chip. The VLSI cell area optimization continues to become increasingly important to the performance of VLSI design due to the accelerating of the design complexities in VLSI. Thus, this paper addresses the performance comparisons of two different types of Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques for VLSI macro-cell layout area optimization by utilizing the adopted method of cell placement that is binary tree method. Two GA approaches which are Simple Genetic Algorithm (SGA) and Steady-State Genetic Algorithm (SSGA) have been implemented and their performances in converging to their global minimums are examined and discussed. The performances of these techniques are tested on Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) benchmark circuit’s data set. The experimental results demonstrate that both algorithms achieve acceptable area requirement compared to the slicing floorplan approach [1]. However, SSGA outperforms SGA where it achieves faster convergence rate and obtains more near optimum area.
Computational foundations for personalizing instruction with digital libraries
Authors: Sebastian de la Chica, Faisal Ahmad, Tamara Sumner, James H. Martin, Kirsten Butcher
Venue: International Journal on Digital Libraries (2008)

This paper describes our progress towards automating adaptive personalized instruction based on student conceptual understandings using digital libraries. The reported approach merges conversational learning theory with advances in natural language processing to enable personalized pedagogical interactions. Multi-document summarization techniques serve as the computational basis to process digital library resources and automatically construct a rich domain model on earthquakes and plate tectonics for high school age learners. Shallow semantic analysis and graph-based techniques are used to computationally diagnose student understandings that enable conceptual personalizations integrating digital library resources. The evaluation of the implemented algorithms indicates that digital libraries may serve as knowledge platforms to support the automated construction of rich domain models and the diagnosis of student conceptual understandings. Furthermore, this approach introduces a novel and effective alternative to prior work in adaptive learning environments in terms of scalability and portability, thus tackling important challenges associated with supporting personalized instruction using digital libraries.
A method for aerosol correction from the spectral variation in the visible and near infrared: application to the MERIS sensor
Authors: D. Béal, F. Baret, C. Bacour, X-F. Gu
Venue: International Journal of Remote Sensing (2007)

The signal recorded by the sensor at the satellite level contains information relative both to the atmosphere and the surface. Atmospheric correction is therefore necessary to extract the surface reflectance required within biophysical algorithms used to estimate canopy attributes. Aerosol characteristics are difficult to evaluate because they vary rapidly with time and space. The objective of this study is to develop an autonomous aerosol correction method exploiting the information content in MERIS images. A dedicated neural network was trained to retrieve aerosol optical thickness (AOT) from the top of atmosphere signal recorded in 13 MERIS bands. The training database was made of radiative transfer model simulations, SMAC code coupled to SAIL and PROSPECT models. In this preliminary study, aerosol were characterized only by their optical thickness at 550nm, considering only the continental aerosol type. Theoretical results derived from model simulations demonstrate the pertinence of the method, with a 0.058 Root Mean Square Error associated to the estimation of the AOT, inducing a RMSE on the estimated top of canopy reflectance better than 0.005. The method was then validated using 61 actual MERIS images acquired over AERONET sites. Results show RMSE values of 0.116 associated to the AOT estimation. Comparison with MODIS achieved over 31 among the 61 scenes show a RMSE value of 0.11 similar to the 0.10 value observed for MERIS with our algorithm. Comparison between atmospheric correction achieved with our algorithm and with those based on actual AERONET measurements show RMSE values on top of canopy reflectance close to 0.005.
Formal Security Analysis in Industry, at the Example of Electronic Distribution of Aircraft Software (EDS)
Authors: David van Oheimb
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation (2006)

When developing products or solutions in industry and assessing their quality, formal methods provide the most rigorous tools for checking for safety and security flaws. In this talk we share our first-hand general experience in this area, and furthermore provide some details of a project specifying and modeling Electronic Distribution Software (EDS). We comment on the motivation, practice, and impact of applying formal methods in industry, including the role of evaluation and certification according to the Common Criteria. Second, we give an overview of which modeling and verification techniques we have found useful so far, for which reasons. Third, we present some ongoing work on specifying and modeling EDS. The aim of EDS is to alleviate the burden of distributing initial and update versions of software in modern airplanes. By now this is done physically using disks, which is becoming unbearable with the amount of software steadily increasing. EDS is currently under standardization in the ARINC 666 committee, which includes the main players Boeing and Airbus, as well as their maintenance partners. Obviously, electronic shipment via cable-based and wireless connections faces severe security threats, such that one should better check with maximal scrutiny whether the mechanisms actually fulfill the security goals required, in particular integrity and authenticity. 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
A trade-off between energy and delay in data dissemination for wireless sensor networks using transmission range slicing
Authors: Habib M. Ammari, Sajal K. Das
Venue: Computer Communications (2008)

Data dissemination is an essential function in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN consists of a large number of unattended sensors with limited storage, battery power, computation, and communication capabilities, where battery power (or energy) is the most crucial resource for sensor nodes. Because delay time is also a critical metric for certain applications, data dissemination between source sensors (or simply sources) and a sink (or central gathering point) should be done in an energy-efficient and timely manner. In this paper, we present an approach that characterizes a trade-off between energy and source-to-sink delay (or simply delay). Specifically, we decompose the transmission range of sensors into concentric circular bands (CCBs) based on a minimum transmission distance between any pair of sensors. Our decomposition strategy provides a classification of these CCBs that helps a sensor express its degree of interest (DoI) in minimizing two conflicting metrics, namely energy consumption and delay. We also propose a data dissemination protocol that exploits the above-mentioned decomposition to meet the specific requirements of a sensing application in terms of energy and delay. We prove that the use of sensors nodes, which lie on or closely to the shortest path between a source and a sink, as proxy forwarders in data dissemination from sources to a sink, helps simultaneously minimize energy consumption and delay. Also, we compute theoretical lower and upper bounds on these two metrics. Our simulation results are found to be consistent with our theoretical results, and show that the first CCB minimizes energy consumption; the last CCB minimizes delay; and the middle CCBs trade-off energy consumption with delay in data dissemination in WSNs.
Summary for leadership and management in software architecture (lMSA 2008)
Authors: Brian Berenbach, Len Bass
Venue: Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering (2008)

Software architecture, in education and practice, is primarily concerned with technical issues associated with the quality of software architecture and design. However, as project size increases, leadership, management skills, and the organizational context of the architect become more important, to the point where the non-technical duties of the project architect can "make or break" a project. This workshop is focused on understanding these non-technical duties.
A Testbed for Localizing Wireless LAN Devices Using Received Signal Strength
Authors: Alireza Nafarieh, Jacek Ilow
Venue: Proceedings of the Communication Networks and Services Research Conference (2008)

This paper elaborates on the development of a wireless network testbed to measure the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) in different environments, as the first step for the application of fingerprinting-type localization algorithms of wireless LAN devices. Specifically, in the localization algorithm to the closest previously mapped sets of locations, the RSSI data collected first at known positions are then used to localize the mobile devices at random points. The localization algorithm tested is the minimum-distance algorithm in the RSSI feature space corresponding to the actual geographical points. This paper shows how the environment for RSSI measurement is built and what network configurations yield the most reliable measurements. In the first phase of building a testbed, configurations of off-the-shelf-equipment and the corresponding applications are explained. The second phase is to measure the RSSI in different propagation and physical environments. In this phase, different environments that have already been built in the first phase are examined. Firstly, RSSI is measured from access points’ perspective. Secondly, RSSI measurements are taken from laptops’ perspective. The third phase is to apply a localization algorithm using the collected data to verify the accuracy of the localization method and examine the characteristics of the collected data.
Sketching in adversarial environments
Authors: Ilya Mironov, Moni Naor, Gil Segev
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (2008)

We formalize a realistic model for computations over massive data sets. The model, referred to as the {\em adversarial sketch model}, unifies the well-studied sketch and data stream models together with a cryptographic flavor that considers the execution of protocols in "hostile environments", and provides a framework for studying the complexity of many tasks involving massive data sets. The adversarial sketch model consists of several participating parties: honest parties, whose goal is to compute a pre-determined function of their inputs, and an adversarial party. Computation in this model proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, the adversarial party chooses the inputs of the honest parties. These inputs are sets of elements taken from a large universe, and provided to the honest parties in an on-line manner in the form of a sequence of insert and delete operations. Once an operation from the sequence has been processed it is discarded and cannot be retrieved unless explicitly stored. During this phase the honest parties are not allowed to communicate. Moreover, they do not share any secret information and any public information they share is known to the adversary in advance. In the second phase, the honest parties engage in a protocol in order to compute a pre-determined function of their inputs. In this paper we settle the complexity (up to logarithmic factors) of two fundamental problems in this model: testing whether two massive data sets are equal, and approximating the size of their symmetric difference. We construct explicit and efficient protocols with sublinear sketches of essentially optimal size, poly-logarithmic update time during the first phase, and poly-logarithmic communication and computation during the second phase. Our main technical contribution is an explicit and deterministic encoding scheme that enjoys two seemingly conflicting properties: incrementality and high distance, which may be of independent interest.
Optimal evolutionary tree comparison by sparse dynamic programming
Authors: M. Farach
Venue: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1994)

In computational biology one is often interested in finding the concensus between different evolutionary trees for the same set of species. A popular formalizations is the Maximum Agreement Subtree Problem (MAST) defined as follows: given a set A and two rooted trees /spl Tscr//sub 0/ and /spl Tscr//sub 1/ leaf-labeled by the elements of A, find a maximum cardinality subset B of A such that the restrictions of /spl Tscr//sub 0/ and /spl Tscr//sub 1/ to B are topologically isomorphic. Polynomial time solutions exist, but they rely on a dynamic program with /spl Theta/(n/sup 2/) nodes-and /spl Theta/(n/sup 2/) running time. We sparsify this dynamic program and show that MAST is equivalent to Unary Weighted Bipartite Matching (UWBM) modulo an O(nc/sup /spl radic/(log n/) additive overhead. Applying the best bound for UWBM, we get an O(n/sup 1.5/ log n) algorithm for MAST. From our sparsification follows an O(nc/sup /spl radic/(log n/)) time algorithm for the special case of bounded degrees. Also here the best previous bound was /spl Theta/(n/sup 2/).
25 Years ago I couldn't even spell Canadian, now I are one: momentos of collaborating on, with, and about technology
Authors: Kellogg S. Booth
Venue: Proceedings of graphics interface 2008 (2008)

I've been in Canada doing research and teaching for just about half of my life. It's been fun. I will share some of the lessons I've learned and things I have discovered, but mostly I want to convey a sense of my delight in having had the good fortune over the years to always have worked within a collaborative setting, both in terms of the actual research that often involved systems to support communication between people and in terms of how the research itself was undertaken by a team of people.
Prioritized aggregation operators
Authors: Ronald R. Yager
Venue: International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (2008)

We consider criteria aggregation problems where there exists a prioritization relationship over the criteria. We suggest that prioritization between criteria can be modeled by making the weights associated with a criteria dependent upon the satisfaction of the higher priority criteria. We consider a number of aggregation operators in which there exists a prioritization relationship between the arguments. We first introduce a prioritized scoring operator and a closely related prioritized averaging operator. We next introduce a prioritized ''anding'' and then a prioritized ''oring'' operator.
A new normalized method on line-based homography estimation
Authors: Hui Zeng, Xiaoming Deng, Zhanyi Hu
Venue: Pattern Recognition Letters (2008)

It is a conventional belief that line-based approaches perform better than point-based ones for homography estimation, as the line-fitting is generally more noise resistant than point detection. In this note, we show that blithely using line-based estimation is a risky business. More specifically, we show that when the image line(s) is (are) passing through or close to the origin, the line-based homography estimation could become wildly unstable whereas the point-based estimation performs normally. To tackle this problem, a new normalized method specially designed for line-based homography estimation is proposed and validated by extensive experiments.
Design and Applications of a Pen-Like Haptic Interface with Texture and Vibrotactile Display
Authors: Ki-Uk Kyung, Jun-Young Lee, Junseok Park
Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technologies (2007)

This paper presents a pen-like haptic interface with a built-in compact tactile display module and a vibrating module. We describe evaluations verifying its performance and indicating that it can satisfactorily represent tactile patterns and provide vibrotactile feedback. Its applicability to combined force and tactile feedback display in a pen held haptic device is also investigated. Finally, we evaluate its capacity to support touch screen operations by providing tactile sensations when a user rubs against an image displayed on a monitor.
A New Approach to Development and Execution of Interactive Applications on the Grid
Authors: Piotr Nowakowski, Daniel Harezlak, Marian Bubak
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (2008)

This paper presents an approach to development of interactive Grid applications used in the Application Development Platform (Appea), currently under development. The presented environment enables smooth and reliable development of such applications, integrating various types of Web and Grid services as well as data sources spread over a distributed infrastructure. However, the users to which Appea caters require that such applications be capable of interactivity and require human actors to interact with them. The addition of interactivity requirements has not thus far been sufficiently addressed in the Grid domain and indeed many popular Grid middleware platforms do not take sufficient notice of this problem. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe how such aspects of user interactivity are supported by the Appea platform and how they correspond to the needs of end users of Grid applications. The paper presents the motivation behind the proposed solution, a conceptual design of Appea as well as its basic architecture. In addition, a use case is presented, showing how the solution can be applied to a real-life workflow.
Building rules on top of ontologies for the semantic web with inductive logic programming
Authors: Francesca a. Lisi
Venue: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (2008)

Building rules on top of ontologies is the ultimate goal of the logical layer of the Semantic Web. To this aim, an ad-hoc markup language for this layer is currently under discussion. It is intended to follow the tradition of hybrid knowledge representation and reasoning systems, such as <inline-graphic mime-subtype="gif" xlink="S1471068407003195_inline1"><alt-text>$\mathcal{AL}$</alt-text></inline-graphic>-log that integrates the description logic <inline-graphic mime-subtype="gif" xlink="S1471068407003195_inline2"><alt-text>$\mathcal{ALC}$</alt-text></inline-graphic> and the function-free Horn clausal language Datalog. In this paper, we consider the problem of automating the acquisition of these rules for the Semantic Web. We propose a general framework for rule induction that adopts the methodological apparatus of Inductive Logic Programming and relies on the expressive and deductive power of <inline-graphic mime-subtype="gif" xlink="S1471068407003195_inline1"><alt-text>$\mathcal{AL}$</alt-text></inline-graphic>-log. The framework is valid whatever the scope of induction (description versus prediction) is. Yet, for illustrative purposes, we also discuss an instantiation of the framework which aims at description and turns out to be useful in Ontology Refinement.
Nonexpressibility of fairness and signaling
Authors: D. McAllester, P. Panangaden, V. Shanbhogue
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1988)

Expressiveness results for indeterminate data flow primitives are established. Choice primitives with three differing fairness assumptions are considered, and it is shown that they are strictly inequivalent in expressive power. It is also shown that the ability to announce choices enhances the expressive power of two of the primitives. These results are proved using a very crude semantics and will thus apply in any reasonable theory of process equivalence.
RFID security and privacy: long-term research or short-term tinkering?
Authors: Gene Tsudik, Mike Burmester, Ari Juels, Alfred Kobsa, David Molnar, Roberto Di Pietro, Melanie Rieback
Venue: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Wireless network security (2008)

RFID technology has raised a number of both real and imagined security and privacy fears and concerns. Since roughly 2001, a number of researchers have stepped up to the plate and proposed techniques for strengthening RFID security and privacy, while others have focused on attacking (and demonstrating weaknesses in) currently deployed RFID systems. Despite a few PhD theses devoted to this topic, it remains to be seen whether there are any new long-term fundamental issues involved in RFID security & privacy. Therefore, this panel's goal is to present and debate the panelists' diverse perspectives on the future (or lack thereof) of RFID security and privacy research. One line of thought is that this topic is a mere fad. After all, RFID tags are computational amoebas, akin to dumb sensors that sense nothing. RFID tags do not network and do not collect anything; hence, the only interaction worth considering is between a tag and a reader. Is there anything challenging remaining beyond the set of cryptographically contortionist protocols and techniques already proposed in the literature? An opposing point of view is that RFID technology has opened up a new and exciting avenue for research which is here to stay. Although some basic protocols have been designed, there are several important outstanding issues, including (but not limited to) the following. One purely technical issue that remains unaddressed is how to handle revocation of rogue readers. Inherent lack of on-board clocks makes revocation checking very difficult. There is also the problem of secure pairing of personal RFID tags (e.g., in passports and transponders) with other ubiquitous devices, e.g., cell-phones, laptops or PDAs. Another is the design of inexpensive and robust privacy "shields" for protecting RFID tags -- carried by a potentially unwitting user -- from leaking information. Yet another important unexplored issue is user perception and, more generality, usability aspects of RFID tags. This is surprising since, unlike sensors/WSNs or MANETs, RFID tags are expected to be close and relevant to the average user/consumer. This international panel is composed of academic and industrial experts in cryptography, security/privacy and usability, each with a track record of research results in the respective aspects of RFID technology. The panelists' statements and the summary of the panel discussion will be available (after the conference) at: http://sconce.ics.uci.edu/wisec08-rfid-panel.