Optimal layouts of midimew networks

Midimew networks are mesh-connected networks derived from a subset of degree-4 circulant graphs. They have minimum diameter and average distance among all degree-4 circulant graphs, and are better than some of the most common topologies for parallel computers in terms of various cost measures. Among the many midimew networks, the rectangular ones appear to be most suitable for practical implementation. Unfortunately, with the normal way of laying out these networks on a 2D plane, long cross wires that grow with the size of the network exist. In this paper, we propose ways to lay out rectangular midimew networks in a 2D grid so that the length of the longest wire is at most a small constant. We prove that these constants are optimal under the assumption that rows and columns are moved as a whole during the layout process     

GUIDE: Games with UML for interactive design exploration

In this paper we present our design tool GUIDE, which allows the user to explore a design in UML interactively by playing a game. The game incorporates both the design model and a specification of what it means for the design to be correct. The central idea of this approach is that the designer can increment the game during a play and gradually add more detail to it. Specification and design are refined by repeated plays of the game. The designer stops playing when design and specification are detailed enough for his purpose and match each other. The interactive game approach helps to cope with incompleteness and informal definition of UML models, which make strictly formal verification techniques difficult. The designer may resolve these problems when they arise during a play or let the GUIDE tool determine how the play should proceed. We discuss the potential impact of GUIDE and tools like it on software development.     

Image-based interactive exploration of real-world environments

Interactive scene walkthroughs have long been an important computer graphics application area. More recently, researchers have developed techniques for constructing photorealistic 3D architectural models from real-world images. We present an image-based rendering system that brings us a step closer to a compelling sense of being there. Whereas many previous systems have used still photography and 3D scene modeling, we avoid explicit 3D reconstruction because it tends to be brittle. Our system is not the first to propose interactive video-based tours. We believe, however, that our system is the first to deliver fully interactive, photorealistic image-based tours on a personal computer at or above broadcast video resolutions and frame rates. Moreover, to our knowledge, no other tour provides the same rich set of interactions or visually complex environments.     

Age differences in information finding tasks: Performance and visual exploration strategy with different web page layouts

Recent research suggests that older Internet users seem to find it more difficult to locate navigation links than to find information content in web pages. One possibility is that older Internet users’ visual exploration of web pages is more linear in nature, even when this type of processing is not appropriate for the task. In the current study, the eye movements of young and older Internet users were recorded using an ecological version of the web pages or a discursive version designed to induce a linear exploration. The older adults found more targets when performing content-oriented compared to navigation-oriented searches, thus replicating previous results. Moreover, they performed less well than young people only when required to locate navigation links and tended to outperform the younger participants in content-oriented searches. Although the type of search task and type of web page resulted in different visual strategies, little or no support was found for the hypothesis that older participants explore web pages in a more linear way in cases where this strategy was not appropriate. The main conclusion is that differences in visual exploration do not seem to mediate the specific difficulty older adults experience in navigation-oriented searches in web pages.     

TREE: An interactive system for editing tree structures

Many existing systems provide extensive facilities for entry and manipulation of text. Typical of these are QED (Bell Telephone), TECO (MIT), TVEDIT (Stanford), and E (Yale). Text entry, insertion, deletion, search, and display are all performed interactively with a small number of key strokes. Unfortunately, similarly powerful and general interactive tools for editing of more general data structures have not been available.The system TREE provides these interactive editing facilities for tree structures. TREE enables insertion, deletion, copying, search, and display of any branch of a given tree structure. Any tree, whether a syntax tree or a decision tree, or a LISP program could be entered rapidly and changed quickly in TREE. The program itself is coded in PDP 10 fortran IV and will run with any of a number of inexpensive graphics terminals.     

Localization of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks using bat optimization algorithm with enhanced exploration and exploitation characteristics

The Journal of Supercomputing - Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) contain sensor nodes in enormous amount to accumulate the information about the nearby surroundings, and this information is...     

Self-monitoring during exploration of an interactive device

We report four experiments in which we manipulated the conditions under which subjects explored an unfamiliar interactive device without the benefit of assistance or instruction. Our aim was to increase the amount of knowledge subjects acquired about the device and to influence how efficient they were at later applying the operational procedures they discovered. The interventions were to interrupt subjects' exploration at regular intervals and ask them to verbally report on what they had learned so far (Experiment I) or to state their future intention (Experiment II). Both manipulations yielded significant benefits, when compared to subjects who explored the same device without such interruptions. In Experiment III there were four conditions in which interrupted subjects reported on topics of different levels of relevance to the task. This experiment showed that it is the relevance of the verbalised content as opposed to an “incubation” period which affects performance in a beneficial manner. Finally we investigated whether it was necessary to employ external prompts to obtain these effects (Experiment IV). It was found that subjects were in fact able to effectively interrupt their work in order to review their progress.     

Hypothesis generation in climate research with interactive visual data exploration

One of the most prominent topics in climate research is the investigation, detection, and allocation of climate change. In this paper, we aim at identifying regions in the atmosphere (e.g., certain height layers) which can act as sensitive and robust indicators for climate change. We demonstrate how interactive visual data exploration of large amounts of multi-variate and time-dependent climate data enables the steered generation of promising hypotheses for subsequent statistical evaluation. The use of new visualization and interaction technology--in the context of a coordinated multiple views framework--allows not only to identify these promising hypotheses, but also to efficiently narrow down parameters that are required in the process of computational data analysis. Two datasets, namely an ECHAM5 climate model run and the ERA-40 reanalysis incorporating observational data, are investigated. Higher-order information such as linear trends or signal-to-noise ratio is derived and interactively explored in order to detect and explore those regions which react most sensitively to climate change. As one conclusion from this study, we identify an excellent potential for usefully generalizing our approach to other, similar application cases, as well.     

Deep interactive encoding with capsule networks for image classification

With new architectures providing astonishing performance on many vision tasks, the interest in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has grown exponentially in the recent past. Such architectures, however, are not problem-free. For instance, one of the many issues is that they require a huge amount of labeled data and are not able to encode pose and deformation information. Capsule Networks (CapsNets) have been recently proposed as a solution to the issues related to CNNs. CapsNet achieved interesting results in images recognition by addressing pose and deformation encoding challenges. Despite their success, CapsNets are still an under-investigated architecture with respect to the more classical CNNs. Following the ideas of CapsNet, we propose to introduce Residual Capsule Network (ResNetCaps) and Dense Capsule Network (DenseNetCaps) to tackle the image recognition problem. With these two architectures, we expand the encoding phase of CapsNet by adding residual convolutional and densely connected convolutional blocks. In addition to this, we investigate the application of feature interaction methods between capsules to promote their cooperation while dealing with complex data. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than existing solutions.

     

Parallel sets: interactive exploration and visual analysis of categorical data

Categorical data dimensions appear in many real-world data sets, but few visualization methods exist that properly deal with them. Parallel Sets are a new method for the visualization and interactive exploration of categorical data that shows data frequencies instead of the individual data points. The method is based on the axis layout of parallel coordinates, with boxes representing the categories and parallelograms between the axes showing the relations between categories. In addition to the visual representation, we designed a rich set of interactions. Parallel Sets allow the user to interactively remap the data to new categorizations and, thus, to consider more data dimensions during exploration and analysis than usually possible. At the same time, a metalevel, semantic representation of the data is built. Common procedures, like building the cross product of two or more dimensions, can be performed automatically, thus complementing the interactive visualization. We demonstrate Parallel Sets by analyzing a large CRM data set, as well as investigating housing data from two US states.     

Vispedia: interactive visual exploration of wikipedia data via search-based integration

Wikipedia is an example of the collaborative, semi-structured data sets emerging on the Web. These data sets have large, non-uniform schema that require costly data integration into structured tables before visualization can begin. We present Vispedia, a Web-based visualization system that reduces the cost of this data integration. Users can browse Wikipedia, select an interesting data table, then use a search interface to discover, integrate, and visualize additional columns of data drawn from multiple Wikipedia articles. This interaction is supported by a fast path search algorithm over DBpedia, a semantic graph extracted from Wikipedia's hyperlink structure. Vispedia can also export the augmented data tables produced for use in traditional visualization systems. We believe that these techniques begin to address the "long tail" of visualization by allowing a wider audience to visualize a broader class of data. We evaluated this system in a first-use formative lab study. Study participants were able to quickly create effective visualizations for a diverse set of domains, performing data integration as needed.      

Designing interactive infographics to stimulate environmental awareness: an exploration with a University community

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action addressed not only to governments but also to businesses and civil society. In this...     

Global diffusion of interactive networks: The impact of culture

The Internet and other interactive networks are diffusing across the globe at rates that vary from country to country. Typically, economic and market structure variables are used to explain these differences. The addition of culture to these variables will provide a more robust understanding of the differences in Internet and interactive network diffusion. Existing analyses that identify culture as a predictor of diffusion do not adequately specify the dimensions of culture and their impacts.This paper presents a set of propositions to be used in analyses of the impact of culture on the diffusion of interactive networks. The propositions were developed using cultural constructs presented by Hofstede (1991), Herbig (1994) and Hall and Hall (1987). Diffusion of innovations theory and critical mass theory provide the theoretical base. The development of the propositions resulted from a close examination of the theories for relationships mediated by culture. The resulting propositions use cultural variables in relationships established by the theories. It is hoped that the propositions will serve as a starting point for future research in the area of cultural influences on the diffusion of interactive networks.     

Optimal scheduling with deadline constraints in tree networks

The problem of scheduling time-critical messages over a tree network is considered. Messages arrive at any of the nodes and have to reach the root node before their deadlines expire, else they are considered lost. The network is assumed to be operating in discrete time and the messages need one time unit for transmission from one node to the next along its path. The arrival and deadline processes are arbitrary. The policy which transmits messages with smallest extinction (arrival+deadline) time at every link is shown to minimize the number of lost messages over all time intervals and for every sample path     

树形网络的平均介数

主要讨论树形网络的平均节点介数,刻画了树形网络中具有最大和最小平均节点介数的网络。     

CPO semantics of timed interactive actor networks

We give a denotational framework for composing interactive components into closed or open systems and show how to adapt classical domain-theoretic approaches to open systems and to timed systems. For timed systems, prior approaches are based on temporal logics, automata theory, or metric spaces. In this paper, we base the semantics on a CPO with a prefix order, as has been done previously for untimed systems. We show that existence and uniqueness of behaviors are ensured by continuity with respect to this prefix order. Existence and uniqueness of behaviors, however, do not imply that a composition of components yields a useful behavior. The unique behavior could be empty or smaller than expected. We define liveness and show that appropriately defined causality conditions ensure liveness and freedom from Zeno conditions. In our formulation, causality does not require a metric and can embrace a wide variety of models of time.     

Value and relation display: interactive visual exploration of large data sets with hundreds of dimensions

Few existing visualization systems can handle large data sets with hundreds of dimensions, since high-dimensional data sets cause clutter on the display and large response time in interactive exploration. In this paper, we present a significantly improved multidimensional visualization approach named Value and Relation (VaR) display that allows users to effectively and efficiently explore large data sets with several hundred dimensions. In the VaR display, data values and dimension relationships are explicitly visualized in the same display by using dimension glyphs to explicitly represent values in dimensions and glyph layout to explicitly convey dimension relationships. In particular, pixel-oriented techniques and density-based scatterplots are used to create dimension glyphs to convey values. Multidimensional scaling, Jigsaw map hierarchy visualization techniques, and an animation metaphor named Rainfall are used to convey relationships among dimensions. A rich set of interaction tools has been provided to allow users to interactively detect patterns of interest in the VaR display. A prototype of the VaR display has been fully implemented. The case studies presented in this paper show how the prototype supports interactive exploration of data sets of several hundred dimensions. A user study evaluating the prototype is also reported in this paper     

GridBench: A tool for the interactive performance exploration of Grid infrastructures

As Grids rapidly expand in size and complexity, the task of benchmarking and testing, interactive or unattended, quickly becomes unmanageable. In this article we describe the difficulties of testing/benchmarking resources in large Grid infrastructures and we present the software architecture implementation of GridBench, an extensible tool for testing, benchmarking and ranking of Grid resources. We give an overview of GridBench services and tools, which support the easy definition, invocation and management of tests and benchmarking experiments. We also show how the tool can be used in the analysis of benchmarking results and how the measurements can be used to complement the information provided by Grid Information Services and used as a basis for resource selection and user-driven resource ranking. In order to illustrate the usage of the tool, we describe scenarios for using the GridBench framework to perform test/benchmark experiments and analyze the results.     

PLATON: Peer-to-Peer load adjusting tree overlay networks

Peer-to-Peer systems supporting multi attribute and range queries use a number of techniques to partition the multi dimensional data space among participating peers. Load-balancing of data accross peer partitions is necessary in order to avoid the presence of network hotspots which may cause performance degradation or failures within the distributed environment. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, PLATON, that preserves load balancing accross peer partitions when the multi-dimensional data space is dynamic, without requiring up-to-date global load information, e.g. information about the most loaded or least loaded peers in the network. A theoretical analysis on the upper bounds (ie. worst case) of the proposed algorithm is presented; its performance is evaluated in large-scale simulated networks and validated within in the PlanetLab emulation platform.