Lower Bounds for Kernelizations and Other Preprocessing Procedures

We first present a method to rule out the existence of parameter non-increasing polynomial kernelizations of parameterized problems under the hypothesis P≠NP. This method is applicable, for example, to the problem Sat parameterized by the number of variables of the input formula. Then we obtain further improvements of corresponding results in (Bodlaender et al. in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5125, pp. 563–574, Springer, Berlin, 2008; Fortnow and Santhanam in Proceedings of the 40th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC’08), ACM, New York, pp. 133–142, 2008) by refining the central lemma of their proof method, a lemma due to Fortnow and Santhanam. In particular, assuming that the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse to its third level, we show that every parameterized problem with a “linear OR” and with NP-hard underlying classical problem does not have polynomial self-reductions that assign to every instance x with parameter k an instance y with |y|=k ^O(1)⋅|x|^1−ε (here ε is any given real number greater than zero). We give various applications of these results. On the structural side we prove several results clarifying the relationship between the different notions of preprocessing procedures, namely the various notions of kernelizations, self-reductions and compressions.     

Efficient approaches for ℓ2-ℓ0 regularization and applications to feature selection in SVM

For solving a class of ?₂- ?₀- regularized problems we convexify the nonconvex ?₂- ?₀ term with the help of its biconjugate function. The resulting convex program is explicitly given which possesses a very simple structure and can be handled by convex optimization tools and standard softwares. Furthermore, to exploit simultaneously the advantage of convex and nonconvex approximation approaches, we propose a two phases algorithm in which the convex relaxation is used for the first phase and in the second phase an efficient DCA (Difference of Convex functions Algorithm) based algorithm is performed from the solution given by Phase 1. Applications in the context of feature selection in support vector machine learning are presented with experiments on several synthetic and real-world datasets. Comparative numerical results with standard algorithms show the efficiency the potential of the proposed approaches.     

CALL FOR PAPERS NLPRS''''2 0 0 1 Workshop Automatic Paraphrasing:Theories and Applications

Tokyo,JAPAN,November30 ,2 0 0 1http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/～ yamamoto/pub/NLPRS2 0 0 1 WS.htmlToday,we encounter a lot of electronic texts and documentseverywhere.New NL P technologies that help us use thesetexts and documents easily are needed.For example,summarization of a text is necessary to reduce the text lengthto fit to sm all screen of m obile terminals:simplification of atext is beneficial to help children,elders,and non- nativesunderstand the text m ore easily.The core technolog…     

Incorporating ϵ-dominance in AMOSA: Application to multiobjective 0/1 knapsack problem and clustering gene expression data

Recently, a new model of multiobjective simulated annealing, AMOSA, was developed which was found to provide improved performance for several multi objective optimization problems especially for problems with many objectives. In this article, we aim to further improve the performance of AMOSA by incorporating the concept of ?-dominance which is a more generalized form of conventional dominance. This strategy is referred to as ?-AMOSA. The result of ?-AMOSA is compared with those of AMOSA, NSGA-II and ?-MOEA and AMOSA for several test problems with number of objectives varying from two to fifteen and the number of variables varying from one to thirty. The performance of ?-AMOSA is also compared with other strategies for multiobjective 0/1 knapsack problem. A real life application of ?-AMOSA for clustering genes from gene expression data is also demonstrated. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of ?-AMOSA.     

Do men and women differ in privacy? Gendered privacy and (in)equality in the Internet

This paper investigates how personal privacy behavior and confidence differ by gender, focusing on the dimensions of online privacy data protection and release. A hierarchical regression analysis of cross-sectional survey of a national sample (n = 419) revealed that men and women differed on the level of privacy protection; however, gender had no direct effect on the extent to which data release was exercised. Additionally, gender had a positive association with confidence in privacy protection, but not in the dimension of release. Our study suggests that the gender may affect subjective well-being of online privacy and potentially exacerbate the disparity rooted in socialization of gender. Implications of the findings are discussed in light of Internet access, skill and effort required for building and maintaining privacy, and the important role played by gender in indicating the need for gender-sensitive policy awareness.     

Paralinguistics in speech and language—State-of-the-art and the challenge

Paralinguistic analysis is increasingly turning into a mainstream topic in speech and language processing. This article aims to provide a broad overview of the constantly growing field by defining the field, introducing typical applications, presenting exemplary resources, and sharing a unified view of the chain of processing. It then presents the first broader Paralinguistic Challenge organised at INTERSPEECH 2010 by the authors including a historical overview of the Challenge tasks of recognising age, gender, and affect, a summary of methods used by the participants, and their results. In addition, we present the new benchmark obtained by fusion of participants’ predictions and conclude by discussing ten recent and emerging trends in the analysis of paralinguistics in speech and language.     

Vibrotactile and vibroacoustic communications: pairs in interaction and play—an interactive structure and bodies in an urban environment

We designed a vibrotactile vest and The Humming Wall, a vibroacoustic interactive furniture set in an urban environment to interact with each other. We developed the vibrotactile patterns in the vest as a form of vibrotactile language to convey information to the wearer. In addition, we designed a set of interactive movements on The Humming Wall that would trigger patterns on the vest and elicit sensations and encourage body movements onto the wearer’s body. We invited people to interact in pairs at The Humming Wall, with one at the wall and one wearing the vest (they later swapped roles). Actions by the one at the wall, such as swiping or knocking on the wall were repeated on the vest wearer’s body. In addition, participants could ‘feel’ (vibroacoustically) and hear their own heartbeats and breath rates at the wall. We conducted a field trial with 39 participants over a 5-week period. Participants wearing the vest (and their pair) completed a set of tasks. We logged use and responses, recorded all activities on video and conducted post-experiment interviews and questionnaires. The results depicted the participants’ experience, communication and connection while wearing the vibrotactile vest and interacting with the wall. The findings show convincing, strong and positive responses to novel interactions between the responsive vibroacoustic environment and the vibrotactile vest. This work constitutes the first field trial with people ‘working’ in pairs with a vibrotactile wearable responding to and driving vibroacoustic displays with an interactive vibroacoustic environment.     

On Division in Extreme and Mean Ratio and its Connection to a Particular Re-Expression of the Golden Quadratic Equation x 2 − x − 1 = 0

The golden quadratic x² − x − 1 = 0, when re-expressed as (x)(1) = 1/(x − 1), x = 1.618, can be interpreted as the algebraic expression of division in extreme and mean ratio (DEMR) of a line of length x = 1.618 into a longer section of length 1 and a smaller of length (x − 1). It can, however, also be interpreted as the formulation of the area of a golden rectangle of sides x = 1.618 and 1, and as the system of equations constituted by y =  x, and y = 1/(x − 1). Based on the well-known connection existing between the first two of these interpretations, the authors address the problem of finding out the thread connecting the golden rectangle with the system of equations referred to above. The results obtained indicate first that this system, like the golden rectangle, also carries in its geometry the essential traits of DEMR; and, second, that it implicitly subsumes the simpler rectangular geometry of its alternative interpretation. The process of developing these connections brought forward a heretofore apparently unreported golden trapezoid of sides Φ, 1, ϕ and .     

Nested Beliefs, Goals, Duties, and Agents Reasoning About their Own or Each Other’s Body in the TIMUR Model: A Formalism for the Narrative of Tamerlane and the Three Painters

This article develops two threads. The first thread argues that the narrative dimension of social interaction is important to societies of embodied agents: not only to animated avatars in virtual environments (for which, behaviour specification languages are useful, simplifying the distinct task of feeding a narrative into the system), but also, arguably, in societies of robots, because categories of patterns of action can arguably be usefully captured by modifications of levels of abstraction originally developed by structuralism for folktale studies. This first thread does not depend, for its validity, on the second thread. The other thread of this paper is to analyze a story of interaction among characters with different social positioning, such that reasoning on the body of one of them is central. We develop the analysis by resorting to episodic formulae, a method of representation developed by the present author and often applied during the last several years.     

Full Or-Parallemism and Restricted And-Parallelism in BTM

BTM is a new And/Or parallel execution model for logic programs which exploits both full Or-parallelism and restricted And-parallelism.The advantages of high parallelism and low run time cost make BTJ,an experimental execution system of BTM implemented on a nonshared-memory multiprocessor system,achieve significant speedup for both And-paralled and Or-parallel logic programs.     

‘Systemic rationalization’ in Austria: Social and political mediation in technology use and work organization

The paper analyses restructuring processes occuring with the introduction of information technologies into firms in Austria and assesses how far the evidence lends support to the thesis of a fundamental change in rationalization patterns as postulated by continental industrial sociologists claiming the emergence of a novel type of systemic rationalization. Based on a research perspective putting emphasis on several levels of social mediation of technological change the broad conclusion is the following: there are clear indications of a novel systemic approach to rationalization but the associated forms of work organization show substantial variation. The analysis of the influence of national-level institutions, industry- and firm-specific conditions, and their role in micro-political processes of system and work design, points towards an underutilization of work humanization potentials and suggests an increase in skill supply as one of the possible intervention strategies.     

Optimal discrete-time H∞/γ0 filtering and control under unknown covariances

New stochastic γ₀ and mixed H_∞/γ₀ filtering and control problems for discrete-time systems under completely unknown covariances are introduced and solved. The performance measure γ₀ is the worst-case steady-state averaged variance of the error signal in response to the stationary Gaussian white zero-mean disturbance with unknown covariance and identity variance. The performance measure H_∞/γ₀ is the worst-case power norm of the error signal in response to two input disturbances in different channels, one of which is the deterministic signal with a bounded energy and the other is the stationary Gaussian white zero-mean signal with a bounded variance provided the weighting sum of disturbance powers equals one. In this framework, it is possible to consider at the same time both deterministic and stochastic disturbances highlighting their mutual effects. Our main results provide the complete characterisations of the above performance measures in terms of linear matrix inequalities and therefore both the γ₀ and H_∞/γ₀ optimal filters and controllers can be computed by convex programming. H_∞/γ₀ optimal solution is shown to be actually a trade-off between optimal solutions to the H_∞ and γ₀ problems for the corresponding channels.     

Detecting and Locating Failures in Communication Networks

The connectivity of a strongly connected network may be destroyed after link damage.Since many networks are connected by directed links,the reachability may be restore by altering the direction of one or more of the links and thus reconfiguring the network.The location of the failed link ust first be determined.In this paper,we examine new methods to determine the location of failed links and nodes in networks.A routing test approach is proposed and the conditions under which communication networks may be tested are discussed Finally,an adaptive algorithm and a heuristic algorithm that can locate a single failed link or a single failed node are presented.     

Octree Representation and Its Applications in CAD

In this paper,a survey of octree representation and its applications in CAD is presented.The octree representation may be categorized as pure octree representation and polytree(or extended octree),and the latter is actually a boundary representation decomposed by octree.Linear octree which is a variant of regular octree representation has the advantage of saving memory space.The mapping between Cartesian coordinates and node addresses in linear octree is discussed.Then,algorithms for converting a boundary representation of 3D object into an octree are investiged and major approaches for transforming an octree encoded object are presented.After that,some of the applications of octree representation in CAD are listed,in particular,the applications in solid modeling,in accelerating ray tracing and in generating meshes for FEM.