CiteULike: fheintz's library [683 articles]

Signal Processing Challenges in Distributed Stream Processing Systems

P Frossard — 2008-08-17T14:10:34-00:00

Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2006. ICASSP 2006 Proceedings. 2006 IEEE International Conference on, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. V-V.

Distributed stream processing represents a novel computing paradigm where data, sensed externally and possibly preprocessed, is pushed asynchronously to various connected computing devices with heterogeneous capabilities for processing. It enables novel applications typically characterized by the need to process high-volume data streams in a timely and responsive fashion. Some example applications include sensor networks, location-tracking services, distributed speech recognition, and network management. Recent work in large-scale distributed stream processing tackle various research challenges in both the application domain as well as in the underlying system. The main focus of this paper is to highlight some of the signal processing challenges such a novel computing framework brings. We first briefly introduce the main concepts behind distributed stream processing. Then we define the notion of relevant information from two related information-theoretic approaches. Finally, we browse existing techniques for sensing and quantizing the information given the set of classification, detection and estimation tasks, which we refer to as task-driven signal processing. We also address some of the related unexplored research challenges

Place: A Distributed Spatio-Temporal Data Stream Management System for Moving Objects

Xiaopeng Xiong — 2008-08-17T13:55:50-00:00

Mobile Data Management, 2007 International Conference on (2007), pp. 44-51.

In this paper, we introduce PLACE*, a distributed spatio-temporal data stream management system for moving objects. PLACE* supports continuous spatio-temporal queries that hop among a network of regional servers. To minimize the execution cost, a new Query-Track- Participate (QTP) query processing model is proposed inside PLACE*. In the QTP model, a query is continuously answered by a querying server, a tracking server, and a set of participating servers. In this paper, we focus on query plan generation, execution and update algorithms for continuous range queries in PLACE* using QTP. An extensive experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in PLACE*.

Event-based Middleware for Pervasive Computing- Foundations, Concepts, Design

Andreas Zeidler — 2008-08-17T12:59:56-00:00

(18 May 2007)

Mobile applications running on personal devices, like smartphones, PDAs, or laptop computers, create a fascinating market for many new mobile services. Mobile commerce, location-based services, multimedia messaging, or mobile gaming are expected to constitute a main driving-force for technological advancements, creating a new source of revenue for infrastructure providers and developers. Based on what we observe today, the logical next steps lead to integrated infrastructures and applications supporting "pervasive computing". Whatever this future will look like, the basic cornerstones will be: (i) highly nomadic users, (ii) personalized devices running smart applications, (iii) pervasive smart infrastructures, and (iv) efficient communication for end-to-end integration of all building blocks. This book introduces the amazing world of pervasive computing, leads stepby- step through the new design challenges for pervasive computing applications and identifies the key challenges for engineering middleware supporting pervasive applications. Based on the well-known publish/subscribe paradigm it demonstrates how middleware systems can be designed to explicitly make use of "context" of users and applications. It then shows how context information can be leveraged for optimizing the efficiency of communication inside a notification service. The book addresses developers of middleware, mobile application designers, as well as interested individuals who want to learn more about the challenges of next generation pervasive and mobile systems.

Distributed Event-based Systems

Ludger Fiege — 2008-07-08T12:39:26-00:00

(22 June 2006)

In today’s world, services and data are integrated in ever new constellations, requiring the easy, flexible and scalable integration of autonomous, heterogeneous components into complex systems at any time. Event-based architectures inherently decouple system components. Event-based components are not designed to work with specific other components in a traditional request/reply mode, but separate communication from computation through asynchronous communication mechanisms via a dedicated notification service. Mühl, Fiege, and Pietzuch provide the reader with an in-depth description of event-based systems. They cover the complete spectrum of topics, ranging from a treatment of local event matching and distributed event forwarding algorithms, through a more practical discussion of software engineering issues raised by the event-based style, to a presentation of state-of-the-art research topics in event-based systems, such as composite event detection and security. Their presentation gives researchers a comprehensive overview of the area and lots of hints for future research. In addition, they show the power of event-based architectures in modern system design, thus encouraging professionals to exploit this technique in next generation large-scale distributed applications like information dissemination, network monitoring, enterprise application integration, or mobile systems.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Asynchronous Middleware and Services

D Lea — 2008-08-17T08:25:33-00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE, Vol. 10, No. 1. (2006), pp. 14-17.

Asynchronous middleware is playing an increasingly important role in distributed and Web-based systems. This issue's theme articles address some research and engineering challenges that remain before this technology can fully make good on its promises.

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert — 2007-05-21T18:21:11-00:00

(20 March 2007)

Do you know what makes you happy? Daniel Gilbert would bet that you think you do, but you are most likely wrong. In his witty and engaging new book, Harvard professor Gilbert reveals his take on how our minds work, and how the limitations of our imaginations may be getting in the way of our ability to know what happiness is. Sound quirky and interesting? It is! But just to be sure, we asked bestselling author (and master of the quirky and interesting) Malcolm Gladwell to read Stumbling on Happiness, and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham <hr size="1">Guest Reviewer: Malcolm Gladwell <img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0316172324.01.SWATCHXX.jpg" size="THUMB" border="0" align="left">Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, and is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies--and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have--which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world. Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness, and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive. Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important? In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating--and in some ways troubling--facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We're far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren't particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren't nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think. I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that--and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. --Malcolm Gladwell <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /> • Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? • Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it? In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. Vividly bringing to life the latest scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. With penetrating insight and sparkling prose, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.

We the Living

Ayn Rand — 2008-08-17T05:58:56-00:00

(01 January 1996)

NLP: The New Technology of Achievement

NLP Comprehensive — 2008-08-16T15:58:04-00:00

(19 February 1996)

NLP has already helped millions of people overcome fears, increase confidence, enrich relationships, and achieve greater sucess. Now the NLP Comprehensive Training Team has written a book that reveals how to use this breakthrough technology to _achieve whatever you want._ Short for neuro-linguistic programming, NLP is a revolutionary approach to human communication and development. In _NLP: The New Technology of Achievement,_ you'll be guided step-by-step through specific programs for learning the characeristics of top achievers and creating a blueprint for unlimited sucess. Plus, an all-new twenty-one-day program created especially for this book provides you with the essential skills you'll need to achieve peak performance in business and life.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)

Robert Cialdini — 2008-08-16T15:57:47-00:00

(01 January 2007)

Arguably the best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion. Whether you're a mere consumer or someone weaving the web of persuasion to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential book for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing. Recommended.

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

William Strunk — 2005-06-17T23:32:00-00:00

(15 January 2000)

Composition teachers throughout the English-speaking world have been pushing this book on their students since it was first published in 1957. Co-author White later revised it, and it remains the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters of basic principles of composition, grammar, word usage and misusage, and writing style. This is the braille version of the timeless reference book. According to the St. Louis Dispatch, this "excellent book, which should go off to college with every freshman, is recognized as the best book of its kind we have." It should be the ". . . daily companion of anyone who writes for a living and, for that matter, anyone who writes at all" (Greensboro Daily New). "No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume" (The Boston Globe). Two volumes in braille.

A Theory of Objects

Martin Abadi — 2007-12-14T14:26:05-00:00

(1996)

Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth

Steve Pavlina — 2008-08-08T18:28:19-00:00

(15 October 2008)

Despite promises of “fast and easy” results from slick marketers, real personal growth is neither fast _nor _easy. The truth is that hard work, courage, and self-discipline are required to achieve meaningful results—results that are not attained by those who cling to the fantasy of achievement without effort. _ __Personal Development for Smart People_ reveals the unvarnished truth about what it takes to consciously grow as a human being. As you read, you’ll learn the seven universal principles behind all successful growth efforts (_truth, love, power, oneness, authority, courage,_ and _intelligence_); as well as practical, insightful methods for improving your health, relationships, career, finances, and more. You’ll see how to become the **conscious creator** of your life instead of feeling hopelessly adrift, enjoy a **fulfilling career** that honors your unique self-expression, attract **empowering relationships** with loving, compatible partners, wake up early feeling **motivated, energized, **and **enthusiastic**, achieve **inspiring goals** with disciplined daily habits and much more! With its refreshingly honest yet highly motivating style, this fascinating book will help you courageously explore, creatively express, and consciously embrace your extraordinary human journey.

What You Can Change . . . and What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

Martin Seligman — 2008-07-06T21:02:38-00:00

(09 January 2007)

In the climate of self-improvement that pervades our culture, there is an overwhelming amount of information about treatments for everything from alcohol abuse to sexual dysfunction. Much of this information is exaggerated if not wholly inaccurate. As a result, people who try to change their own troubling conditions often experience the frustration of mixed success, success followed by a relapse, or outright failure. To address this confusion, Martin Seligman has meticulously analyzed the most authoritative scientific research on treatments for alcoholism, anxiety, weight loss, anger, depression, and a range of phobias and obsessions to discover what is the most effective way to address each condition. He frankly reports what does not work, and pinpoints the techniques and therapies that work best for each condition, discussing why they work and how you can use them to make long lasting change. Inside you’ll discover the four natural healing factors for recovering from alcoholism; the vital difference between overeating and being overweight; the four therapies that work for depression, the pros and cons of anger--and much more. Wise, direct, and very useful, _What You Can Change and What You Can’t_ will help anyone who seeks to change.

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin Seligman — 2008-07-06T20:55:20-00:00

(03 January 2006)

Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enchances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier.. With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, _Learned Optimism_ is both profound and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.

Observing events and situations in time

Tim Fernando — 2008-07-25T09:31:07-00:00

Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 5. (30 October 2007), pp. 527-550.

Abstract Events and situations are represented by strings of temporally ordered observations, on the basis of which the events and situations are recognized. Allen’s basic interval relations are derived from superposing strings that mark interval boundaries, and Kamp’s event structures are constructed as projective limits of strings. Observations are generalized to temporal propositions, leading to event-types that classify event-instances. Working with sets of strings built from temporal propositions, we obtain natural notions of bounded entailment from set inclusions. These inclusions are decidable if the sets are accepted by finite automata.

Formal semantics in the age of pragmatics

Juan Barba — 2008-07-25T09:34:12-00:00

Linguistics and Philosophy

Abstract This paper aims to argue for two related statements: first, that formal semantics should not be conceived of as interpreting natural language expressions in a single model (a very large one representing the world as a whole, or something like that) but as interpreting them in many different models (formal counterparts, say, of little fragments of reality); second, that accepting such a conception of formal semantics yields a better comprehension of the relation between semantics and pragmatics and of the role to be played by formal semantics in the general enterprise of understanding meaning. For this purpose, three kinds of arguments are given: firstly, empirical arguments showing that the many models approach is the most straightforward and natural way of giving a formal counterpart to natural language sentences. Secondly, logical arguments proving the logical impossibility of a single universal model. And thirdly, theoretical arguments to the effect that such a conception of formal semantics fits in a natural and fruitful way with pragmatic theories and facts. In passing, this conception will be shown to cast some new light on the old problems raised by liar and sorites paradoxes.

A knowledge-based system for tactical situation assessment

Ken Funk — 2008-07-24T05:24:55-00:00

Annals of Operations Research, Vol. 12, No. 1. (30 December 1988), pp. 285-296.

To perform tactical situation assessment effectively, a system must be capable of performing tactical information integration, interpretation, and threat evaluation. This paper describes a prototype system for naval surface warfare which incorporates a human operator for integration, an artificial intelligence-based subsystem for interpretation, and an operations research-based system for evaluation. The system provides the operator with an interactive environment for displaying and managing tactical information and tools for interpreting and evaluating it.

Inside Steve's Brain

Leander Kahney — 2008-07-17T05:51:07-00:00

(17 April 2008)

**Steve Jobs has turned his personality traits into a business philosophy. Here’s how he does it.** It’s hard to believe that one man revolutionized computers in the 1970s and ’80s (with the Apple II and the Mac), animated movies in the 1990s (with Pixar), and digital music in the 2000s (with the iPod and iTunes). No wonder some people worship him like a god. On the other hand, stories of his epic tantrums and general bad behavior are legendary. _Inside Steve’s Brain_ cuts through the cult of personality that surrounds Jobs to unearth the secrets to his unbelievable results. It reveals the real Steve Jobs—not his heart or his famous temper, but his mind. So what’s really inside Steve’s brain? According to Leander Kahney, who has covered Jobs since the early 1990s, it’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions. Jobs is an elitist who thinks most people are bozos—but he makes gadgets so easy to use, a bozo can master them. He’s a mercurial obsessive with a filthy temper—but he forges deep partnerships with creative geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, and John Lasseter. He’s a Buddhist and anti-materialist—but he produces mass-market products in Asian factories, and he promotes them with absolute mastery of the crassest medium, advertising. In short, Jobs has embraced the traits that some consider flaws—narcissism, perfectionism, the desire for total control—to lead Apple and Pixar to triumph against steep odds. And in the process, he has become a self-made billionaire. In _Inside Steve’s Brain_, Kahney distills the principles that guide Jobs as he launches killer products, attracts fanatically loyal customers, and manages some of the world’s most powerful brands. The result is this unique book about Steve Jobs that is part biography and part leadership guide, and impossible to put down. It gives you a peek inside Steve’s brain, and might even teach you something about how to build your own culture of innovation.

Spatio-Temporal Coincidence and the Grounding Problem

Karen Bennett — 2008-07-08T06:33:49-00:00

Philosophical Studies (April 2004), pp. 339-371.

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the `grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive.

Identity, indiscernibility, and belief

Robert Swartz — 2008-07-08T06:34:56-00:00

Philosophical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 6. (1 December 1972), pp. 410-413.

A survey on algorithms for mining frequent itemsets over data streams

James Cheng — 2008-07-08T04:33:10-00:00

Knowledge and Information Systems, Vol. 16, No. 1. (1 July 2008), pp. 1-27.

Abstract The increasing prominence of data streams arising in a wide range of advanced applications such as fraud detection and trend learning has led to the study of online mining of frequent itemsets (FIs). Unlike mining static databases, mining data streams poses many new challenges. In addition to the one-scan nature, the unbounded memory requirement and the high data arrival rate of data streams, the combinatorial explosion of itemsets exacerbates the mining task. The high complexity of the FI mining problem hinders the application of the stream mining techniques. We recognize that a critical review of existing techniques is needed in order to design and develop efficient mining algorithms and data structures that are able to match the processing rate of the mining with the high arrival rate of data streams. Within a unifying set of notations and terminologies, we describe in this paper the efforts and main techniques for mining data streams and present a comprehensive survey of a number of the state-of-the-art algorithms on mining frequent itemsets over data streams. We classify the stream-mining techniques into two categories based on the window model that they adopt in order to provide insights into how and why the techniques are useful. Then, we further analyze the algorithms according to whether they are exact or approximate and, for approximate approaches, whether they are false-positive or false-negative. We also discuss various interesting issues, including the merits and limitations in existing research and substantive areas for future research.

Discovering correlated spatio-temporal changes in evolving graphs

Jeffrey Chan — 2008-07-08T04:33:13-00:00

Knowledge and Information Systems, Vol. 16, No. 1. (1 July 2008), pp. 53-96.

Abstract Graphs provide powerful abstractions of relational data, and are widely used in fields such as network management, web page analysis and sociology. While many graph representations of data describe dynamic and time evolving relationships, most graph mining work treats graphs as static entities. Our focus in this paper is to discover regions of a graph that are evolving in a similar manner. To discover regions of correlated spatio-temporal change in graphs, we propose an algorithm called cSTAG. Whereas most clustering techniques are designed to find clusters that optimise a single distance measure, cSTAG addresses the problem of finding clusters that optimise both temporal and spatial distance measures simultaneously. We show the effectiveness of cSTAG using a quantitative analysis of accuracy on synthetic data sets, as well as demonstrating its utility on two large, real-life data sets, where one is the routing topology of the Internet, and the other is the dynamic graph of files accessed together on the 1998 World Cup official website.

Robust data association for online application

V Lepetit — 2008-07-07T09:05:56-00:00

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE Computer Society Conference on, Vol. 1 (2003), pp. I-281-I-288 vol.1.

We present a method for performing data association that handles complex motion models while increasing the robustness of tracking and being suitable for real-time applications. Instead of using motion model in standard recursive fashion, we robustly fit it over multiple frames simultaneously. This allows us to naturally handle arbitrarily complex motion models, to automate the initialization and to deal with occlusion and false alarms. This is effective even if the motion model is not entirely accurate and if there are frequent false-negatives and false-positives. Our algorithm is easy to implement and we show its performances on two real examples of complex motion tracking.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

William Barrett — 2007-08-24T13:59:35-00:00

(20 July 1962)

Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist Philosophy, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett discusses the views of 19th and 20th century existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre and interprets the impact of their thinking on literature, art, and philosophy.

The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

Christof Koch — 2006-04-28T05:29:27-00:00

Consciousness is one of science’s last great unsolved mysteries. How can the salty taste and crunchy texture of potato chips, the unmistakable smell of dogs after they have been in the rain, or the exhilarating feeling of hanging on tiny fingerholds many feet above the last secure foothold on a cliff, emerge from networks of neurons and their associated synaptic and molecular processes? In The Quest for Consciousness, Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch explores the biological basis of the subjective mind in animals and people. He outlines a framework that he and Francis Crick (of the "double helix") have constructed to come to grips with the ancient mind-body problem. At the heart of their framework is a sustained, empirical approach to discovering and characterizing the neuronal correlates of consciousness – the NCC – the subtle, flickering patterns of brain activity that underlie each and every conscious experience.

Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

Stewart Friedman — 2008-06-19T15:17:58-00:00

(10 June 2008)

Now more than ever, your success as a leader isn't just about being a great business person. You've got to be a great person, performing well in all domains of your life -- your work, your home, your community, and your private self. That's a tall order. The good news is that, contrary to conventional wisdom about "balance," you don't have to assume that these domains compete in a zero-sum game. Total Leadership is a game-changing blueprint for how to perform well as a leader not by trading off one domain for another, but by finding mutual value among all four. Stew Friedman shows you how to achieve these "four-way wins" as a leader who can: -Â· Be real: Act with authenticity by clarifying what's important -Â· Be whole: Act with integrity by respecting the whole person -Â· Be innovative: Act with creativity by experimenting to find new solutions With engaging examples and clear instruction, Friedman provides more than thirty hands-on tools for using these proven principles to produce stronger business results, find clearer purpose in what you do, feel more connected to the people who matter most, and generate sustainable change. Most leadership development books focus only on your professional skills, while books about personal growth concentrate on your needs beyond work. Total Leadership is different. It's a unique and long-awaited resource that shows how to win in all domains of life. In a world of work-life trade-offs, Stew Friedman offers what most think impossible: a field-tested program that gives you not only what you want in business, but also what you want in life. Brilliant. --Timothy Ferriss, New York Times bestselling author, The 4-Hour Workweek Destined to be a classic, this is a remarkable book. I have studied leadership and led organizations for over twenty years. No other book has reshaped my thinking about leadership development as much as Total Leadership. -- David A. Thomas, professor, Harvard Business School, and author, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Professionals in Corporate America Stew Friedman absolutely gets it. He is both a visionary and a much-needed advocate for a new kind of total leadership in the twenty-first century. What an empowering book! -- Janet Hanson, Founder, 85 Broads Total Leadership will help you build a life, not just a sum. Stew Friedman has written the owners manual for all types of leaders, young and old, who aspire to both professional success and personal fulfillment. -- Tom Tierney, Chairman and Cofounder, The Bridgespan Group The best leaders are those who stay connected to their communities, to the people they love, to themselves. In Stew Friedman s Total Leadership, you'll learn simple, powerful new ways to make these connections happen and enjoy the rich rewards that inevitably follow. -- Keith Ferrazzi, CEO, Ferrazzi Greenlight, and author, Never Eat Alone As the pace of business continues to race forward at lightening speed, Stew Friedman offers us an innovative and sustainable model for successful leadership. Total Leadership provides a unique proposition for individuals who strive to be their very best both personally and professionally. -- Dave Lissy, CEO, Bright Horizons Family Solutions Total Leadership is so aligned with my thinking as an HR executive and medical director of a global business. With practical tools and compelling stories, Friedman demonstrates how to achieve four-way wins a distinctive, important new concept for today s leaders. --Dr. Robert W. Carr, Vice President and Corporate Medical Director, GlaxoSmithKline

Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today

2008-06-07T14:10:27-00:00

(06 May 2008)

&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RAs founder, editor, and publisher of the intellectual forum www.edge.org, John Brockman is well-positioned to initiate and cultivate an ongoing dialogue with today's leading cutting-edge thinkers. The website is a virtual salon for every type of intellectual and scientific pursuit, from evolutionary biology and quantum physics, to crowd psychology and miniaturized computing. Through this vibrant and varied online community, Brockman has shifted sharply away from the stereotype of the introverted, out-of-touch scientist and introduced the reality of a fully aware and involved scientific society.&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R&&LI&&RScience at the Edge&&L/I&&R reflects this brave new world, and Brockman has assembled some of the today's most revolutionary scholars from all scientific disciplines to discuss their unique contributions to the development of modern thought. Far from being a catalog of the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome scientific class, this is a thrilling and intellectually stimulating discussion that serves as an introduction to some of the best minds of the 21st century. This revised and updated version features additional conversations, as well as a new introduction written especially for this edition.&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RThe book contains Brockman's discussions, many with bestselling authors, on the following topics:&&L/P&&R * Population theory, with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond * Human nature, with Steven Pinker, author of &&LI&&RThe Stuff Of Thought&&L/I&&R * Technology and the human mind, with Ray Kurzweil, author of the controversial book &&LI&&RThe Age of Spiritual Machines&&L/I&&R * Ways for humans to make themselves more intelligent, with Marvin Minsky, author of &&LI&&RThe Emotion Machine&&L/I&&R * Evolution of mankind's violence, with Richard Wrangham, co-author of &&LI&&RDemonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence&&L/I&&R * Possibilities of robot life, with Rodney Brooks, author of &&LI&&RFlesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us&&L/I&&R * Cognitive science and brain development, with Marc Hauser, author of &&LI&&RThe Evolution of Communication&&L/I&&R * String theory and dimensions of space, with Lisa Randall, Harvard physics professor &&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in"&&RA selection of the Scientific American Book Club.&&L/P&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R

The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe)

Umberto Eco — 2008-06-07T14:10:47-00:00

(15 April 1997)

The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto- language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a_ tour de force_ of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke--the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific

Cali Ressler — 2008-05-21T15:31:22-00:00

(29 May 2008)

Do you hate cramming all of your errands into the weekend? Do you resent having to beg permission to watch your kid’s weekday soccer game? Are you tired of seeing people who aren’t very good at their jobs get promoted because they arrive early and stay late? There’s got to be a better way—and there is! Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson show that _everyone_ benefits when we change the focus from hours to outcomes. It’s just that our traditional definition of work—Monday through Friday, nine to five—doesn’t make sense in the always-on global economy. So, Ressler and Thompson created the Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, _you_ control when, where, and how long you work. As long as you meet your objectives, the way you spend your time is entirely up to you. Suddenly, work isn’t a place you _go_, it’s a thing you _do_. In a ROWE, there are no mandatory meetings or fixed schedules. You stop doing any activity that wastes time, and no one criticizes you for “leaving early” or “coming in late.” If you do your best work at midnight or on Sundays, go for it! ROWE sounds like a fantasy, but Ressler and Thompson have already made it a reality at Best Buy, a Fortune 100 company. They have proven that ROWE not only makes employees happier but also delivers _better results_. And now the authors are helping companies implement ROWE nationwide. Infused with passion and common sense, _Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ will change the way you think about your job, your company, and your quality of life. Read it and join the revolution!

Scenario recognition from video using a hierarchy of dynamic belief networks

D Ayers — 2008-05-21T06:52:12-00:00

Pattern Recognition, 2000. Proceedings. 15th International Conference on, Vol. 1 (2000), pp. 835-838 vol.1.

Interpreting video is a challenging problem in computer vision with promising applications, such as video surveillance and indexing. The focus of the paper is determining if a scenario occurs in a video taken from a moving airplane. Our paradigm for scenario recognition uses dynamic belief networks (DBNs) in a hierarchical fashion. DBNs provide a method for propagating statistical information over time. Larger scenarios are made up of smaller scenarios and actions. DBNs are ideal for situations where prior knowledge is available about the scenarios of interest. This prior knowledge is encoded in the structure of the network. The statistical parameters of the network can either be specified by the user or learned from input sequences

Scenario Recognition in Airborne Video Imagery

Fran&ccedil:ois Brémond — 2008-05-21T06:52:01-00:00

We describe here a system for image sequence understanding. More precisely, we address the issue of scenario recognition for scene interpretation systems. We start by presenting main issues in describing human activities and by presenting work related to these problems. Then, based on a model, we represent a scenario describing human activities as a combination of sub-scenarios and properties on the mobile objects involved in the scenario. Depending on the type of combination (temporal or non...

Focusing on scenario recognition in information extraction

Milena Yankova — 2008-05-21T06:51:46-00:00

(2003), pp. 41-48.

Scenario recognition for temporal reasoning in medical domains

M Dojat — 2008-05-21T06:51:20-00:00

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (September 1998), pp. 139-155.

The recognition of high level clinical scenes is fundamental in patient monitoring. In this paper, we propose a technique for recognizing a session, i.e. the clinical process evolution, by comparison against a predetermined set of scenarios, i.e. the possible behaviors for this process. We use temporal constraint networks to represent both scenario and session. Specific operations on networks are then applied to perform the recognition task. An index of temporal proximity is introduced to quantify the degree of matching between two temporal networks in order to select the best scenario fitting a session. We explore the application of our technique, implemented in the Deja Vu system, to the recognition of typical medical scenarios with both precise and imprecise temporal information.

Temporal Bayesian Networks for Scenario Recognition

Ahmed Ziani — 2008-05-21T06:51:05-00:00

Image Analysis (2007), pp. 689-698.

This work presents an automatic scenario recognition system for video sequence interpretation. The recognition algorithm is based on a Bayesian Networks approach. The model of scenario contains two main layers. The first one enables to highlight atemporal events from the observed visual features. The second layer is focused on the temporal reasoning stage. The temporal layer integrates an event based approach in the framework of the Bayesian Networks. The temporal Bayesian network tracks lifespan of relevant events highlighted from the first layer. Then it estimates qualitative and quantitative relations between temporal events helpful for the recognition task. The global recognition algorithm is illustrated over real indoor images sequences for an abandoned baggage scenario.

Driving situation recognition with uncertainty management and rule-based systems

JM Nigro — 2008-05-21T06:49:32-00:00

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (June 2002), pp. 217-228.

The recognition of a temporal sequence is a complex problem, especially in the framework of driving situations. However, this recognition is essential for the development of driving assistance systems. This paper presents a rule-based system that manages the real-time measurements got from sensors of an experimental vehicle, in order to determine the current possible maneuvers worked out by the driver. The particularity of the proposed system is that it manages the inaccuracy of the data and the uncertainty of the recognition, using fuzzy subsets and beliefs on hypotheses.

Support of Situation Recognition by Intention Driven Adaptive Sensing

Makoto Hiroki — 2008-05-21T06:49:27-00:00

INTRODUCTION The appropriate situation recognition is quite important to achieve higher level of safety in large scale process systems, such as nuclear power plant. Although many research efforts have been conducted to develop a diagnosis system to help operators by effectively and quickly identifying a root cause of failure[1] , few of them are applied to the practical operational situations and accepted by operators preferably. This is partly because that most of the diagnosis system have...

IDRES: A rule-based system for driving situation recognition with uncertainty management

Jean Nigro — 2008-05-21T06:49:38-00:00

Information Fusion, Vol. 4, No. 4. (December 2003), pp. 309-317.

This paper deals with the recognition of particular temporal sequences of a dynamic system, particularly in the driving situation context. The aim is to propose a method to recognise the manoeuvre performed by the driver from the data of sensors installed in a vehicle. The developed system named Intelligent Driving Recognition with Expert System is built on a two-level rule-based system that takes into account the measurements from the sensors and the sequence of the states that describes the manoeuvres. Because the inputs can be unreliable or/and inaccurate, a confidence notion is defined and modelled by a mass of evidence proposed in Dempster-Shafer's theory. The final system recognises the current manoeuvre and evaluates the confidence of this recognition.

Motion based event recognition using HMM

Gu Xu — 2008-05-21T06:47:51-00:00

Pattern Recognition, 2002. Proceedings. 16th International Conference on, Vol. 2 (2002), pp. 831-834 vol.2.

Motion is an important cue for video understanding and is widely used in many semantic video analyses. We present a new motion representation scheme in which motion in a video is represented by the responses of frames to a set of motion filters. Each of these filters is designed to be most responsive to a type of dominant motion. Then we employ hidden Markov models (HMMs) to characterize the motion patterns based on these features and thus classify basketball video into 16 events. The evaluation by human satisfaction rate to classification result is 75%, demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed approach to recognizing semantic events in video.

Multi-agent event recognition

S Hongeng — 2008-05-21T06:46:32-00:00

Computer Vision, 2001. ICCV 2001. Proceedings. Eighth IEEE International Conference on, Vol. 2 (2001), pp. 84-91 vol.2.

This paper presents a new approach to recognizing multiagent events observed by a static camera. To track objects robustly, knowledge about the ground plane and the events is used. An event is considered as composed of action threads, each thread being executed by a single actor. A single thread of action is recognized from the characteristics of the trajectory and moving blob of the actor using Bayesian methods. A multi-agent event is represented by a number of action threads related by temporal constraints. Multi-agent events are recognized by propagating the constraints and likelihoods of event threads in a temporal logic network

Intelligent Alarm Processor based on Chronicle Recognition for Transmission and Distribution System

J Taisne — 2008-05-21T06:43:46-00:00

Power Systems Conference and Exposition, 2006. PSCE '06. 2006 IEEE PES (2006), pp. 1606-1611.

This paper presents an intelligent alarm processor based on an innovative method which provides a fast and deterministic analysis of events. The principle combines recognition of temporal sequence of alarms and model-based reasoning. The "chronicle" formalism is used to represent the possible situations which may occur in the power system. This method has been implemented in the alarm system of AREVA T&D and has been ordered for several EMS/DMS worldwide

Event detection from time series data

Valery Guralnik — 2007-03-09T15:15:32-00:00

(1999), pp. 33-42.

The dd &p Robot Control Architecture

Frank Schönherr — 2008-05-21T06:39:29-00:00

Advances in Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents (2002), pp. 249-269.

The paper presents current results of our work on dd&p, a two layer control architecture for autonomous robots. dd&p comprises a deliberative and a behavior-based part as two peer modules with no hierarchy among these two layers, as sketched in [HJZM98]. Interaction between these control layers is regulated by the structure of the information flow, extending the “classical” sense-model-plan-act principle. The paper stresses two architectural highlights of our approach: The implementation of the “Plan-as-Advice” principle to execute plan operators by the behavior-based part, and the grounding of the symbolic planner description via chronicle recognition.

Extracting Situation Facts from Activation Value Histories in Behavior-Based Robots

Frank Schönherr — 2008-05-21T06:07:08-00:00

(2001), pp. 305-319.

The consensus glossary of temporal database concepts — February 1998 version

Christian Jensen — 2008-05-18T09:21:50-00:00

Temporal Databases: Research and Practice (1998), pp. 367-405.

This document1 contains definitions of a wide range of concepts specific to and widely used within temporal databases. In addition to providing definitions, the document also includes explanations of concepts as well as discussions of the adopted names.

Scalable Data and Sensor Fusion via Multiple Agent Hybrid Systems

Wolf Kohn — 2008-05-18T09:05:15-00:00

Hybrid Systems V (1999), pp. 637-637.

We address the problem of synchronizing estimates of plant state. The approach proposed in the study is unique because it does not attempt to transform the data to a common representation. Rather we establish a framework which we call the Multiple Agent Hybrid Estimation Architecture in which we allow heterogeneous data to flow between individual agents in the network to improve their individual estimates of the current plant state.

A hybrid systems approach to integration of medical models

W Kohn — 2008-05-18T08:57:30-00:00

Decision and Control, 1994., Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE Conference on, Vol. 4 (1994), pp. 4247-4252 vol.4.

The authors discuss a fundamental problem in the provision of quality care at acceptable, society-wide costs: The integration of what is now a dichotomy in medical models. The dichotomy is one between phenomenological models of high-level decisions and evolution models of low-level dynamics. The dominant modeling concepts are based traditionally on (a) “homeostasis” and, (b) “physical dynamics”-such as those encountered in pharmacology, quantitative pathophysiology, and immunology. The authors introduce a novel idea of the hybrid system state which is used to provide a basis for integration of medical models

Hybrid knowledge bases

JJ Lu — 2008-05-18T08:56:17-00:00

Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, Vol. 8, No. 5. (1996), pp. 773-785.

Deductive databases that interact with, and are accessed by, reasoning agents in the real world (such as logic controllers in automated manufacturing, weapons guidance systems, aircraft landing systems, land-vehicle maneuvering systems, and air-traffic control systems) must have the ability to deal with multiple modes of reasoning. Specifically, the types of reasoning we are concerned with include, among others, reasoning about time, reasoning about quantitative relationships that may be expressed in the form of differential equations or optimization problems, and reasoning about numeric modes of uncertainty about the domain which the database seeks to describe. Such databases may need to handle diverse forms of data structures, and frequently they may require use of the assumption-based nonmonotonic representation of knowledge. A hybrid knowledge base is a theoretical framework capturing all the above modes of reasoning. The theory tightly unifies the constraint logic programming scheme of Jaffar and Lassez (1987), the generalized annotated logic programming theory of Kifer and Subrahmanian (1989), and the stable model semantics of Gelfond and Lifschitz (1988). New techniques are introduced which extend both the work on annotated logic programming and the stable model semantics

A mathematical framework for asynchronous, distributed, decision-making systems with semi-autonomous entities: algorithm synthesis, simulation, and evaluation

TS Lee — 2008-05-18T08:50:00-00:00

Autonomous Decentralized Systems, 1999. Integration of Heterogeneous Systems. Proceedings. The Fourth International Symposium on (1999), pp. 206-212.

For many military and civilian large-scale, real-world systems of interest, data are first acquired asynchronously, i.e. at irregular intervals of time, at geographically-dispersed sites, processed utilizing decision-making algorithms, and the processed data then disseminated to other appropriate sites. The term real-world refers to systems under computer control that relate to everyday life and are beneficial to the society in the large. The traditional approach to such problems consists of designing a central entity which collects all data, executes a decision making algorithm sequentially to yield the decisions, and propagates the decisions to the respective sites. Centralized decision making algorithms are slow and highly vulnerable to natural and artificial catastrophes. This paper proposes MFAD, a Mathematical Framework for Asynchronous, Distributed Systems, that permits the description of centralized decision-making algorithms and facilities the synthesis of distributed decision-making algorithms. MFAD is based on the Kohn-Nerode distributed hybrid control paradigm. It has been a belief that since the centralized control gathers every necessary data from all entities in the system and utilizes them to compute the decisions, the decisions may be “globally” optimal. In truth, however, as the frequency of the sensor data increases and the environment gets larger, dynamic, and more complex, the decisions are called into question

Hierarchical model-based diagnosis based on structural abstraction

Luca Chittaro — 2008-05-18T08:33:50-00:00

Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 155, No. 1-2. (May 2004), pp. 147-182.

Abstraction has been advocated as one of the main remedies for the computational complexity of model-based diagnosis. However, after the seminal work published in the early nineties, little research has been devoted to this topic. In this paper, we consider one of the types of abstraction commonly used in diagnosis, i.e., structural abstraction, investigating it both from a theoretical and practical point of view. First, we provide a new formalization for structural abstraction that generalizes and extends previous ones. Then, we present two new different techniques for model-based diagnosis that automatically derive easier-to-diagnose versions of a (hierarchical) diagnosis problem on the basis of the available observations. The two proposed techniques are formulated as extensions of the well-known Mozetic's algorithm [I. Mozetic, Hierarchical diagnosis, in: W.H.L. Console, J. de Kleer (Eds.), Readings in Model-Based Diagnosis, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1992, pp. 354-372], and experimentally contrasted with it to evaluate the obtained efficiency gains.

Formalizing the Abstraction Process in Model-Based Diagnosis

Lorenza Saitta — 2008-05-18T08:33:40-00:00

Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (2007), pp. 314-328.

Several theories have been proposed to capture the essence of abstraction. Among these, the model offers a framework where a set of generic abstraction operators allows abstraction to be automated. In this paper we show how to describe component-based abstraction for the Model-Based Diagnosis task within the framework, and we discuss the benefits of such a formalization. The clear and explicit partition of the system model into different levels required by (going from the perception level up to the theory level) opens the way to explore richer and better founded kinds of abstraction to apply to the MBD task. Another noticeable advantage is that, by suitably personalizing the generic abstraction operators of , the whole abstraction process, from the definition of abstract (macro)components to the computation of their behaviors starting from those of the ground components, can be performed automatically in such a way that important relationships between ground and abstract diagnoses are guaranteed.