ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A Tactic-Based Approach to Embodying Non-functional Requirements into Software Architectures
Authors: Suntae Kim, Dae-Kyoo Kim, Lunjin Lu, Soo-Yong Park
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 12th International IEEE Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (2008)

This paper presents an approach for embodying nonfunctional requirements(NFRs) into software architecture using architectural tactics. Architectural tactics are reusable architectural building blocks, providing general architectural solutions for commonly occurring issues related to quality attributes. In this approach, architectural tactics are represented as feature models, and their semantics is defined using the Role-Based Metamodeling Language (RBML) which is a UML-based pattern specification notation. Given a set of NFRs, architectural tactics are elected and composed. The composed tactic is then used to instantiate an initial architecture for the application where the NFRs are embodied. A stock trading system is used to demonstrate the approach.
Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement
Authors: Rini van Solingen
Venue: IEEE Software (2004)

Software practitioners often hear, "We cannot quantify the benefits of SPI, because it is not possible to express indirect benefits such as customer satisfaction or personnel motivation in financial numbers, as an argument against calculating the return on investment for software process improvement. An approach is presented detailing how to measure benefits, as are case-study findings from pragmatic ROI analyses for SPI and an overview of literature on the ROI of SPI.
Ant Colony Optimization: A Leading Algorithm in Future Optimization of Petroleum Engineering Processes
Authors: Fatemeh Razavi, Farhang Jalali-Farahani
Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (2006)

The objective of the research presented in this paper is to investigate the application of a metaheuristic algorithm called Ant Colony Algorithm to petroleum engineering problems. This algorithm usually used for discrete domains, but with some modifications could be applied to continuous optimization. In this Paper, two examples with continuous and discrete parameters also known solutions and varying degrees of complexities are presented as an illustration for solving a large class of process optimization problems in petroleum engineering. Results of case studies show ability of Ant Colony Algorithm to provide fast and accurate solutions.
A Surgical Simulation System Supporting COLLADA-Based File Format
Authors: Katsunori Miyahara, Yoshihiro Okada
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 Fifth International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (2008)

This paper proposes a surgical simulation system that supports a COLLADA file format, which is a XML based 3D model data format and also proposes its extended file format to represent various information useful for the surgical simulation, i.e., several parameters for a spring model of the skin or the internal organs used as a haptic device parameters and several text-based data used as annotations for helping a surgical operator. The system provides the user with intuitive operations such as cutting and sewing operations in a virtual 3D space using a force-feedback device, Phantom. A lot of surgical simulation systems supporting a force-feedback device like Phantom have been proposed so far. In this paper, the authors propose not only a surgical simulation system supporting a haptic device, Phantom, but also an extended COLLADA file format. The proposed file format can include various additional data besides 3D model data. This paper introduces the proposed COLLADA-based file format and clarifies it is useful for surgical simulators by showing actual examples using the proposed surgical simulation system.
The stop-like modification of /th/: a case study in the analysis and handling of speech variation
Authors: Kenneth N. Stevens
Venue:  (2007)

Phonetic variation is pervasive in everyday speech. Studying these variations is essential for building acoustic models and lexical representations that effectively capture the variability of speech. This thesis examines one of the commonly-occurring phonetic variations in English: the stop-like modification of the dental fricative /&eth;/. This variant exhibits a drastic change from the canonical /&eth;/; the manner of production is changed from one that is fricative to one that is stop-like. Furthermore, the place of articulation of stop-like /&eth;/ has been a point of uncertainty, leading to the confusion between stop-like /&eth;/ and /d/. This thesis aims to uncover the segmental context of stop-like /&eth;/, possible causes of the modification, whether the dental place of articulation is preserved despite modification, and if there are salient acoustic cues that distinguish between stop-like /&eth;/ and /d/.Word-initial /&eth;/ in the read speech of the TIMIT Database, the task-oriented spontaneous speech of the AEMT Corpus, and the non-task-oriented spontaneous speech of the Buckeye Corpus are examined acoustically. It is found that stop-like /&eth;/ occurs most often when it is preceded by silence or when preceded by a stop consonant. The occurrence is less frequent when /&eth;/ is preceded by a fricative or an affricate consonant. This modification rarely occurs when /&eth;/ is preceded by a vowel or liquid consonant. The findings suggest that possible factors that may contribute to the stop-like modification of /&eth;/ include physiological mechanisms of speech production, prosody, and/or other aspects of speaking style and manner.Acoustic analysis indicates that stop-like /&eth;/ is significantly different from /d/ in burst amplitude, burst spectrum shape, burst peak frequency, and second formant at following-vowel onset. Moreover, the acoustic differences indicate that the dental place of articulation is preserved for stop-like /&eth;/. Automatic classification experiments involving these acoustic measures suggest that they are robust in distinguishing stop-like /&eth;/ from /d/. Applications of these findings may lie in areas of automatic speech recognition, speech transcription, and development of acoustic measures for speech disorder diagnosis. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Ballroom etiquette: A Case Study for Norm-Governed Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Dorian Gaertner, Keith Clark, Marek Sergot
Venue: Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems II: AAMAS 2006 and ECAI 2006 International Workshops, COIN 2006 Hakodate, Japan, May 9, 2006 Riva del Garda, Italy, August 28, 2006. Revised Selected Papers (2007)

We present a case study which describes a ballroom as a social institution with autonomous dancer agents constrained by sets of norms and conventions that coordinate the behaviour of the participants. We provide a representation for the interaction protocols as finite state machines and a new way of formalising the associated norms in a logic programming language. Furthermore, we report on recent and ongoing work on an architecture for normative systems of this kind which allows agents to dynamically download interaction protocols and operational norms to guide their behaviour. Finally, we outline an alternative approach for representing the institutional state in a virtual, distributed fashion in the agents' private belief stores.
A Novel Timing Acquisition Algorithm for Differential Transmitted Reference UWB Receivers
Authors: Lin Yang, Huisheng Zhang, Fengqi Yu
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 ISECS International Colloquium on Computing, Communication, Control, and Management - Volume 02 (2008)

The timing acquisition constitutes a major challenge in Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio (UWB-IR). The challenge is not only in detecting pulses with very short duration, but also in considering RMS delay spread caused by multipath channel. This paper presents a novel data-aided synchronization acquisition algorithm. With judiciously designed algorithm and training sequence, the proposed algorithm overcomes the impact of RMS delay spread. This algorithm is based on differential transmitted reference receivers. It can be applied for low complexity and low-data-rate (LDR) applications, such as sensors networks. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed acquisition algorithm has better performance in probability of detection than conventional acquisition algorithms. In addition it has low complexity.
Fast track article: Enabling opportunistic storage for mobile DTNs
Authors: Mikko Juhani Pitkänen, Jörg Ott
Venue: Pervasive and Mobile Computing (2008)

Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) can enable ad-hoc communication within (sparse) mobile user communities and multi-hop Internet access where IP-based end-to-end communication would fail. DTN message forwarding in ad-hoc networks may lead to message replication and messages remaining stored on several nodes for some time. We leverage these characteristics and provide application support in intermediate nodes: we enable them to understand the resources contained in forwarded and locally stored DTN messages to perform application-specific processing. Based upon this, we create an opportunistic distributed storage for cooperative content caching and retrieval using the nodes' buffers.
Real-Time Access Guarantees for NAND Flash Using Partial Block Cleaning
Authors: Siddharth Choudhuri, Tony Givargis
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 10.2 international workshop on Software Technologies for Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems (2008)

Increasing use of NAND flash in newer application domains has been possible due to lowering cost per GB, consumer demands for storage and advantages of NAND flash over traditional disks. However, NAND flash has its idiosyncrasies resulting in asymmetric read/write times due to garbage collection and wear leveling requirements. Such asymmetric (non-deterministic) read/write times poses a challenge for the adoption of NAND flash in real-time systems.We present the implementation details of a flash translation layer called GFTL that guarantees strict upper bounds on read/write times that are comparable to a theoretical ideal case. Such guarantees are made possible by dividing the source of non-determinism into deterministic intervals using our proposed approach called partial block cleaning. Using partial block cleaning, the process of garbage collection is divided into several smaller, deterministic steps. Partial block cleaning comes with an overhead of additional space requirements. We provide a proof on the limit of the additional space requirements.
Secure Control: Towards Survivable Cyber-Physical Systems
Authors: Alvaro A. Cardenas, Saurabh Amin, Shankar Sastry
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 The 28th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (2008)

In this position paper we investigate the security of cyber-physical systems. We (1) identify and define the problem of secure control, (2) investigate the defenses that information security and control theory can provide, and (3) propose a set of challenges that need to be addressed to improve the survivability of cyber-physical systems.
Optimal Cost, Collaborative, and Distributed Response to Zero-Day Worms - A Control Theoretic Approach
Authors: Senthilkumar G. Cheetancheri, John-Mark Agosta, Karl N. Levitt, Felix Wu, Jeff Rowe
Venue: Proceedings of the 11th international symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (2008)

Collaborative environments present a happy hunting ground for worms due to inherent trust present amongst the peers. We present a novel control-theoretic approach to respond to zero-day worms in a signature independent fashion in a collaborative environment. A federation of collaborating peers share information about anomalies to estimate the presence of a worm and each one of them independently chooses the most cost-optimal response from a given set of responses. This technique is designed to work when the presence of a worm is uncertain. It is unique in that the response is dynamic and self-regulating based on the current environment conditions. Distributed Sequential Hypothesis Testing is used to estimate the extent of worm infection in the environment. Response is formulated as a Dynamic Programming problem with imperfect state information. We present a solution and evaluate it in the presence of an Internet worm attack for various costs of infections and response.A major contribution of this paper is analytically formalizing the problem of optimal and cost-effective response to worms. The second contribution is an adaptive response design that minimizes the variety of worms that can be successful. This drives the attacker towards kinds of worms that can be detected by other means; which in itself is a success. Counter-intutive results such as leaving oneself open to infections being the cheapest option in certain scenarios become apparent with our response model.
The Wikipedia XML Corpus
Authors: Ludovic Denoyer, Patrick Gallinari
Venue: Comparative Evaluation of XML Information Retrieval Systems: 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, December 17-20, 2006, Revised and Selected Papers (2007)

This article presents the general Wikipedia XML Collection developped for Structured Information Retrieval and Structured Machine Learning. This collection has been built from the Wikipedia Enclyclopedia. We detail particularly here which parts of this collection have been used during INEX 2006 for the Ad-hoc track and for the XML Mining track. Note that other tracks of INEX - multimedia track for example - have also been based on this collection.
Pattern Based SOA Deployment
Authors: William Arnold, Tamar Eilam, Michael Kalantar, Alexander V. Konstantinou, Alexander A. Totok
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Service-Oriented Computing (2007)

A key function of a Service Oriented Architecture is the separation between business logic and the platform of its implementation and deployment. Much of the focus in SOA research has been on service design, implementation, composition, and placement. In this paper we address the challenge of configuring the hosting infrastructure for SOA service deployment. The functional and non-functional requirements of services impose constraints on the configuration of their containers at different levels. Presently, such requirements are captured in informal documents, making service deployment a slow, expensive, and error-prone process. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to formally capturing service deployment best-practices as model-based patterns. Deployment patterns capture the structure of a solution, without bindings to specific resource instances. They can be defined at different levels of abstraction supporting reuse, and role-based iterative refinement and composition. We show how we extended an existing model driven deployment platform to support pattern based deployment. We formally define pattern semantics, validation, and refinement. We also present an algorithm for automatically instantiating such patterns on multiple distributed service environments. Our approach has been verified in a large prototype that has been used to capture a variety of functional and non-functional deployment constraints, and demonstrate their end-to-end maintenance and realization.
An Algorithm for Discovering Ontology Mappings in P2P Systems
Authors: Giuseppe Pirrò, Massimo Ruffolo, Domenico Talia
Venue: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, Part II (2008)

Ontology Mapping is mandatory for enabling semantic interoperability among different agents and services making use of different ontologies. The ontology mapping problem becomes more critical in P2P systems since: (i) the number of different ontologies can dramatically increase; (ii) ontology mapping must be performed on the fly and only on parts of ontologies contextual to a specific interaction in which the peers are involved; (iii) complex mapping strategies (e.g., structural mapping) cannot be exploited since peers are not aware of one another's ontologies. Hence, specific techniques have to be designed. This paper presents and evaluate the SEmantiC COordinator (SECCO) ontology mapping algorithm that addresses the abovementioned issues by adopting a mapping strategy based on the evaluation of three different similarity measures: syntactic, lexical and contextual.
Implementation of Central Pattern Generator in an FPGA-Based Embedded System
Authors: Cesar Torres-Huitzil, Bernard Girau
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Part II (2008)

This paper proposes an embedded system on a chip to generate locomotion patterns of periodic rhythmic movements inspired by biological neural networks called Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) found in animal nervous system. The proposed system contains a custom digital module, attached to an embedded processor, that mimics the functionality and organization of the fundamental Amari-Hopfield CPG. In order to reduce the CPG hardware integration complexity as well as to provide flexibility, an embedded linux operating system running on a processor is used to deal with the CPG interfacing in a high level transparent way for application development. The system is implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device providing a compact, flexible and expandable solution for generating periodic rhythmic patterns in robot control applications. Results show that the obtained waveforms from the FPGA implementation agree with software simulations and preserve the easiness of CPG parameter setting for adaptive behavior.
An Algorithm for BCH Codes Extended with Finite State Automata
Authors: Andrei Kelarev
Venue: Fundamenta Informaticae (2008)

This article develops a combinatorial algorithm for a class of codes extending BCH codes and constructed with finite state automata. Our algorithm computes the largest number of errors that the extended codes can correct, and finds a generator for each optimal code in this class of extensions. The question of finding codes with largest possible information rates remains open.
Moderating effects of Job Relevance and Experience on mobile wireless technology acceptance: Adoption of a smartphone by individuals
Authors: Sang Hyun Kim
Venue: Information and Management (2008)

My study extended TAM to include individuals' intention to use mobile wireless technology (MWT). It added two new constructs, Perceived Cost Savings and Company's Willingness to Fund, and two causal relationships, Job Relevance and Experience, as moderating effects. The 286 sets of data collected in an online survey were tested against the model using SEM. Results supported my new model: the new constructs and variables accounted for 62.7% of the variance found in an individual's behavioral intention to use MWT. The path coefficients between the constructs ranged from 0.26 to 0.85 also supporting the model.
Computing Maximum Flows in Undirected Planar Networks with Both Edge and Vertex Capacities
Authors: Xianchao Zhang, Weifa Liang, Guoliang Chen
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th annual international conference on Computing and Combinatorics (2008)

We study the maximum flow problem in an undirected planar network with both edge and vertex capacities (EVC-network). A previous study reduces the minimum cut problem in an undirected planar EVC-network to the minimum edge-cut problem in another planar network with edge capacity only (EC-network), thus the minimum-cut or the maximum flow value can be computed in O(nlogn) time. Based on this reduction, in this paper we devise an O(nlogn) time algorithm for computing the maximum flow in an undirected general planar EVC-network and an O(n) time algorithm for computing the maximum flow in an undirected (s,t)-planar EVC-network. As a result, the maximum flow problem in undirected planar EVC-networks is as easy as the problem in undirected planar EC-networks in terms of computational complexity.
Virtual laboratories software research
Authors: Vladislav Slavov, Tasho Tashev, Valeri Maldenov
Venue: Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Application of Electrical Engineering (2008)

In this paper some the problem of choosing the right software for virtual laboratory design is described. Despite of the variety of programming languages, text-based and graphical, we try to answer some important questions when virtual laboratory design is initiated. We do not try to establish rules but just to research that problem.
Acoustic Emotion Recognition for Affective Computer Gaming
Authors: Christian Jones, Jamie Sutherland
Venue: Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction: From Theory to Applications (2008)

Computer games are becoming visually realistic, and coupled with more violent storylines and characters there is concern among parents and parts of the media that violent games could encourage aggressive behaviour in those who play them. There have been links made between a number of murders and the violent games played by the murderers. To stimulate other emotions in game players we have developed an emotionally responsive computer game. Based on a traditionally aggressive role-playing environment, we have removed the violent elements and replaced with a goal to navigate obstacles using both positive and negative emotions. Affective cues in the speech of the player are analysed automatically using an emotion recognition system and these affect the physical and behavioural attributes of the gaming character. The character is better able to overcome obstacles based on the emotional state of the player.
An Efficient OpenMP Runtime System for Hierarchical Architectures
Authors: Samuel Thibault, François Broquedis, Brice Goglin, Raymond Namyst, Pierre-André Wacrenier
Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on OpenMP: A Practical Programming Model for the Multi-Core Era (2007)

Exploiting the full computational power of always deeper hierarchical multiprocessor machines requires a very careful distribution of threads and data among the underlying non-uniform architecture. The emergence of multi-core chips and NUMA machines makes it important to minimize the number of remote memory accesses, to favor cache affinities, and to guarantee fast completion of synchronization steps. By using the BubbleSched platform as a threading backend for the GOMP OpenMP compiler, we are able to easily transpose affinities of thread teams into scheduling hints using abstractions called bubbles. We then propose a scheduling strategy suited to nested OpenMP parallelism. The resulting preliminary performance evaluations show an important improvement of the speedup on a typical NAS OpenMP benchmark application.
Efficient Wayfinding in Hierarchically Regionalized Spatial Environments
Authors: Thomas Reineking, Christian Kohlhagen, Christoph Zetzsche
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Spatial Cognition VI: Learning, Reasoning, and Talking about Space (2008)

Humans utilize region-based hierarchical representations in the context of navigation. We propose a computational model for representing region hierarchies and define criteria for automatically generating them. We devise a cognitively plausible online wayfinding algorithm exploiting the hierarchical decomposition given by regions. The algorithm allows an agent to derive plans with decreasing detail level along paths, enabling the agent to obtain the next action in logarithmic time and complete solutions in almost linear time. The resulting paths are reasonable approximations of optimal shortest paths.