Teams in cooperating grammar systems

Abstract

We consider grammar systems in which several components are active at the same moment (a team of components is working). The power of such mechanisms is investigated and it is found that in many cases the team feature increases the generative capacity of grammar systems. In the so-called t-mode of derivation (a team works as much as it can) it is found that the team size does not induce an infinite hierarchy of languages. However, the family obtained in this case is a full abstract family of languages properly including ETOL.     

Extensions of LDA by PCA mixture model and class-wise features

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a data discrimination technique that seeks transformation to maximize the ratio of the between-class scatter and the within-class scatter. While it has been successfully applied to several applications, it has two limitations, both concerning the underfitting problem. First, it fails to discriminate data with complex distributions since all data in each class are assumed to be distributed in the Gaussian manner. Second, it can lose class-wise information, since it produces only one transformation over the entire range of classes. We propose three extensions of LDA to overcome the above problems. The first extension overcomes the first problem by modelling the within-class scatter using a PCA mixture model that can represent more complex distribution. The second extension overcomes the second problem by taking different transformation for each class in order to provide class-wise features. The third extension combines these two modifications by representing each class in terms of the PCA mixture model and taking different transformation for each mixture component. It is shown that all our proposed extensions of LDA outperform LDA concerning classification errors for synthetic data classification, hand-written digit recognition, and alphabet recognition.     

Discovery of Intrinsic Primitives on Triangle Meshes

The discovery of meaningful parts of a shape is required for many geometry processing applications, such as parameterization, shape correspondence, and animation. It is natural to consider primitives such as spheres, cylinders and cones as the building blocks of shapes, and thus to discover parts by fitting such primitives to a given surface. This approach, however, will break down if primitive parts have undergone almost‐isometric deformations, as is the case, for example, for articulated human models. We suggest that parts can be discovered instead by finding intrinsic primitives, which we define as parts that posses an approximate intrinsic symmetry. We employ the recently‐developed method of computing discrete approximate Killing vector fields (AKVFs) to discover intrinsic primitives by investigating the relationship between the AKVFs of a composite object and the AKVFs of its parts. We show how to leverage this relationship with a standard clustering method to extract k intrinsic primitives and remaining asymmetric parts of a shape for a given k. We demonstrate the value of this approach for identifying the prominent symmetry generators of the parts of a given shape. Additionally, we show how our method can be modified slightly to segment an entire surface without marking asymmetric connecting regions and compare this approach to state‐of‐the‐art methods using the Princeton Segmentation Benchmark.     

A Hierarchical Grid Based Framework for Fast Collision Detection

We present a novel hierarchical grid based method for fast collision detection (CD) for deformable models on GPU architecture. A two‐level grid is employed to accommodate the non‐uniform distribution of practical scene geometry. A bottom‐to‐top method is implemented to assign the triangles into the hierarchical grid without any iteration while a deferred scheme is introduced to efficiently update the data structure. To address the issue of load balancing, which greatly influences the performance in SIMD parallelism, a propagation scheme which utilizes a parallel scan and a segmented scan is presented, distributing workloads evenly across all concurrent threads. The proposed method supports both discrete collision detection (DCD) and continuous collision detection (CCD) with self‐collision. Some typical benchmarks are tested to verify the effectiveness of our method. The results highlight our speedups over prior algorithms on different commodity GPUs.     

Logic-based automated multi-issue bilateral negotiation in peer-to-peer e-marketplaces

We present a novel logic-based framework to automate multi-issue bilateral negotiation in e-commerce settings. The approach exploits logic as communication language among agents, and optimization techniques in order to find Pareto-efficient agreements. We introduce , a propositional logic extended with concrete domains, which allows one to model relations among issues (both numerical and non-numerical ones) via logical entailment, differently from well-known approaches that describe issues as uncorrelated. Through it is possible to represent buyer’s request, seller’s supply and their respective preferences as formulas endowed with a formal semantics, e.g., “if I spend more than 30000 € for a sedan then I want more than a two-years warranty and a GPS system included”. We mix logic and utility theory in order to express preferences in a qualitative and quantitative way. We illustrate the theoretical framework, the logical language, the one-shot negotiation protocol we adopt, and show we are able to compute Pareto-efficient outcomes, using a mediator to solve an optimization problem. We prove the computational adequacy of our method by studying the complexity of the problem of finding Pareto-efficient solutions in our setting.     

Modeling time criticality of information

In this paper, we continue the research on formal treatment of attributes of information, based on the computational approach. In this scenario, the usefulness of advisory information is measured by the decrease in complexity of a problem we need to solve. We propose to model the time criticality via usefulness of a piece of information which is received during the computation. As a modeling tool, we use deterministic finite automata.     

Introducing QoS awareness in distributed programming: QTcl

A number of distributed applications require communication services with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Building global‐scale distributed systems with predictable properties is one of the great challenges for computer systems engineering in the new century. Work undertaken within the Internet Engineering Task Force has led to the definition of novel architectural models for the Internet with QoS support. According to these models, the network has to be appropriately configured in order to provide applications with the required performance guarantees. In next‐generation networks, enabling applications to interact with the underlying QoS services is of primary importance. Hence, several special‐purpose application programming interfaces (APIs) have been defined to let applications negotiate QoS parameters across QoS‐capable networks. However, so far, none of these APIs are available in different operating environments. We believe that such features should be embedded in programming environments for distributed applications. In this work we present how we included QoS control features in Tcl, a programming language that has been widely adopted for the development of distributed multimedia applications. Our work has led to the implementation of QTcl, an extended Tcl interpreter that provides programmers with a new set of primitives, in full compliance with the standard SCRAPI programming interface for the RSVP protocol. QTcl in highly portable, in that it enables standard QoS negotiation to be performed in a seamless fashion on the most common operating systems. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Safe design of high-performance embedded systems in an MDE framework

In this paper, we use the UML MARTE profile to model high-performance embedded systems (HPES) in the GASPARD2 framework. We address the design correctness issue on the UML model by using the formal validation tools associated with synchronous languages, i.e., the SIGALI model checker, etc. This modeling and validation approach benefits from the advantages of UML as a standard, and from the number of validation tools built around synchronous languages. In our context, model transformations act as a bridge between UML and the chosen validation technologies. They are implemented according to a model-driven engineering approach. The modeling and validation are illustrated using the multimedia functionality of a new-generation cellular phone.     

Query Processing Techniques for Multimedia Presentations

A multimedia presentation is a synchronized, and possibly interactive, delivery of multimedia data to users. We expect that, in the future, multimedia presentations will be stored into and queried from multimedia databases. In an earlier work, we have designed a graphical query language, called GVISUAL, that allows users to query multimedia presentations based on content information. In this paper, we discuss GVISUAL query processing techniques for multimedia presentations. More specifically, we discuss the translation of GVISUAL queries into an operator-based language, called O-Algebra, with three new operators, and efficient implementations of the new O-Algebra operators using a coding system called nodecodes.     

Purest ever example-based machine translation: Detailed presentation and assessment

We have designed, implemented and assessed an EBMT system that can be dubbed the “purest ever built”: it strictly does not make any use of variables, templates or patterns, does not have any explicit transfer component, and does not require any preprocessing or training of the aligned examples. It uses only a specific operation, proportional analogy, that implicitly neutralizes divergences between languages and captures lexical and syntactic variations along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes without explicitly decomposing sentences into fragments. Exactly the same genuine implementation of such a core engine was evaluated on different tasks and language pairs. To begin with, we compared our system on two tasks of a previous MT evaluation campaign to rank it among other current state-of-the-art systems. Then, we illustrated the “universality” of our system by participating in a recent MT evaluation campaign, with exactly the same core engine, for a wide variety of language pairs. Finally, we studied the influence of extra data like dictionaries and paraphrases on the system performance.