K J Friston, Klaas Enno Stephan, S J Kiebel, Free-energy, value and neuronal systems, In: Computational modelling in behavioural neuroscience: Closing the gap between neurophysiology and behaviour, Psychology Press, New York, p. 206 - 302, 2009-06-04. (Book Chapter)
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Burkhard Stiller, Monitoring of SLA Compliances for Hosted Streaming Services, In: 11th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2009. 2009. (Conference Presentation)
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R M Füchslin, H Fellermann, A Eriksson, H J Ziock, Coarse graining and scaling in dissipative particle dynamics, Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 130 (21), 2009. (Journal Article)
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Peter Racz, STACO - An Accounting Configuration Architecture for Multi-Service Mobile Networks, In: 11th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2009. 2009. (Conference Presentation)
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Angelo Ranaldo, Charlotte Christiansen, Extreme coexceedances in new EU member states' stock markets, Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 33 (6), 2009. (Journal Article)
We analyze the financial integration of the new European Union (EU) member states' stock markets using the negative (positive) coexceedance variable that counts the number of large negative (large positive) returns on a given day across the countries. A similar analysis is performed for the old EU countries. We use a multinomial logit model to investigate how persistence, asset classes, and volatility are related to the coexceedance variables. We find that the effects differ (a) between negative and positive coexceedance variables (b) between old and new EU member states, and (c) before and after the EU enlargement in 2004, suggesting a closer connection of new EU stock markets to those in Western Europe. |
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Erin Krupka, Roberto A. Weber, The focusing and informational effects of norms on pro-social behavior, Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol. 30 (3), 2009. (Journal Article)
This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a “focusing” influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual’s attention is drawn to them; and the second is an “informational” influence, whereby a norm exerts a stronger impact on an individual’s behavior the more others he observes behaving consistently with that norm. We find support for both effects. Either thinking about or observing the behavior of others produces increased pro-social behavior – even when one expects or observes little pro-social behavior on the part of others – and the degree of pro-social behavior is increasing in the actual and expected pro-social behavior of others. This experiment eliminates strategic influences and thus demonstrates a direct effect of norms on behavior. |
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P Racz, Burkhard Stiller, STACO - An Accounting Configuration Architecture for Multi-Service Mobile Networks, In: 11th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2009), IEEE, New York, USA, 2009-06-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Accounting is a key task in commercial networks.
With the increasing number of IP-based services and mobility
support, accounting needs to evolve towards an integrated,
service-oriented accounting approach in a mobile environment.
Therefore, this dissertation digest paper presents the Serviceoriented
Tailored Accounting Configuration (STACO)
architecture that enables a service-oriented accounting
configuration management in a mobile, multi-domain networking
environment. Additionally, it presents the Diameter flow
accounting application as an extension to the Diameter protocol in
order to integrate IP flow accounting into any Diameter-based
infrastructure and to support an efficient transfer of IP flow
records.
Keywords–Accounting, Accounting Configuration, Mobility, IP
Flow Accounting, Diameter, IPFIX. |
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T Kuhn, How Controlled English can Improve Semantic Wikis, In: Fourth Workshop on Semantic Wikis (SemWiki2009), 2009-06-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The motivation of semantic wikis is to make acquisition, maintenance, and mining of formal knowledge simpler, faster, and more flexible. However, most existing semantic wikis have a very technical interface and are restricted to a relatively low level of expressivity. In this paper, we explain how AceWiki uses controlled English - concretely Attempto Controlled English (ACE) - to provide a natural and intuitive interface while supporting a high degree of expressivity. We introduce recent improvements of the AceWiki system and user studies that indicate that AceWiki is usable and useful. |
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Hasan, P Racz, Burkhard Stiller, Monitoring of SLA Compliances for Hosted Streaming Services, In: 11th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2009), IEEE, New York, USA, 2009-06-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Monitoring of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) determines an essential part of Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, since customers are to be reimbursed, if a providerfails to fulfil them. By automating this process, a timely detection of a violation is possible. The compliance approach must be flexible to adapt to potential changes, must be scalable with respect to the amount of data, and has to support multi-domain environments. This paper determines a Hosted Streaming Services scenario and defines relevant SLOs. Key requirements are derived, the respective architecture is designed, and the approach is implemented prototypically based on a generic auditing framework. Further-more, a new scheme is proposed that considers the degree and duration of SLO violations in calculating reimbursements. |
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Amancio Bouza, G Reif, Abraham Bernstein, Probabilistic partial user model similarity for collaborative filtering, In: 1st International Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web (IRMLeS2009) at the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009), 2009-06-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Recommender systems play an important role in supporting people getting items they like. One type of recommender systems is user-based collaborative filtering. The fundamental assumption of user-based collaborative filtering is that people who share similar preferences for common items behave similar in the future. The similarity of user preferences is computed globally on common rated items such that partial preference similarities might be missed. Consequently, valuable ratings of partially similar users are ignored. Furthermore, two users may even have similar preferences but the set of common rated items is too small to infer preference similarity. We propose first, an approach that computes user preference similarities based on learned user preference models and second, we propose a method to compute partial user preference similarities based on partial user model similarities. For users with few common rated items, we show that user similarity based on preferences significantly outperforms user similarity based on common rated items. |
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Jonas Tappolet, Abraham Bernstein, Applied temporal RDF: efficient temporal querying of RDF data with SPARQL, In: 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), 2009-06. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Many applications operate on time-sensitive data. Some of
these data are only valid for certain intervals (e.g., job-assignments, versions of software code), others describe temporal events that happened at certain points in time (e.g., a persons birthday). Until recently, the only way to incorporate time into Semantic Web models was as a data type property. Temporal RDF, however, considers time as an additional dimension in data preserving the semantics of time.
In this paper we present a syntax and storage format based on named graphs to express temporal RDF. Given the restriction to preexisting RDF-syntax, our approach can perform any temporal query using standard SPARQL syntax only. For convenience, we introduce a shorthand format called t-SPARQL for temporal queries and show how t-SPARQL
queries can be translated to standard SPARQL. Additionally, we show that, depending on the underlying data’s nature, the temporal RDF approach vastly reduces the number of triples by eliminating redundancies resulting in an increased performance for processing and querying. Last but not least, we introduce a new indexing approach method that can significantly reduce the time needed to execute time point queries (e.g., what happened on January 1st). |
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Renato Pajarola, Y Miao, J Feng, Curvature-aware adaptive re-sampling for point-sampled geometry, Computer-Aided Design, Vol. 41 (6), 2009. (Journal Article)
With the emergence of large-scale point-sampled geometry acquired by high-resolution 3D scanning devices, it has become increasingly important to develop efficient algorithms for processing such models which have abundant geometric details and complex topology in general. As a preprocessing step, surface simplification is important and necessary for the subsequent operations and geometric processing. Owing to adaptive mean-shift clustering scheme, a curvature-aware adaptive re-sampling method is proposed for point-sampled geometry simplification. The generated sampling points are non-uniformly distributed and can account for the local geometric feature in a curvature aware manner, i.e. in the simplified model the sampling points are dense in the high curvature regions, and sparse in the low curvature regions. The proposed method has been implemented and demonstrated by several examples. |
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M Waldburger, M Göhner, H Reiser, G Dreo Rodosek, Burkhard Stiller, Evaluation of an accounting model for dynamic virtual organizations, Journal of Grid Computing, Vol. 7 (2), 2009. (Journal Article)
Accounting of Grid resource and service usage determines the central support activity for Grid systems to be adopted as a means for service-oriented computing in Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO). An all-embracing study of existing Grid accounting systems has revealed that these approaches focus primarily on technical precision, while they lack a foundation of appropriate economic accounting principles and the support for multi-provider scenarios or virtualization concepts. Consequently, a new, flexible, resource-based accounting model for DVOs was developed, combining technical and economic accounting by means of Activity-based Costing. Driven by a functional evaluation, this paper pursues a full-fledged evaluation of the new, generically applicable Grid accounting model. This is done for the specific environment of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. Thus, a detailed evaluation methodology and evaluation environment is outlined, leading to actual model-based cost calculations for a defined set of considered Grid services. The results gained are analyzed and respective conclusions on model applicability, optimizations, and further extensions are drawn. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Jiwen Li, From active towards InterActive learning: using consideration information to improve labeling correctness, In: Human Computation Workshop, 2009-06. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Active learning methods have been proposed to reduce the labeling effort of human experts: based on the initially available labeled instances and information about the unlabeled data those algorithms choose only the most informative instances for labeling. They have been shown to significantly reduce the size of the required labeled dataset to generate a precise model [17]. However, active learning framework assumes "perfect" labelers, which is not true in practice (e.g., [22, 23]). In particular, an empirical study for hand-written digit recognition [5] has shown that active learning works poorly when a human labeler is used. Thus, as active learning enters the realm of practical applications, it will need to confront the practicalities and inaccuracies of human expert decision-making. Specifically, active learning approaches will have to deal with the problem that human experts are likely to make mistakes when labeling the selected instances. |
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Thomas Scharrenbach, Abraham Bernstein, On the evolution of ontologies using probabilistic description logics, In: First ESWC Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web, 2009-06. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Exceptions play an important role in conceptualizing data,
especially when new knowledge is introduced or existing knowledge changes. Furthermore, real-world data often is contradictory and uncertain.
Current formalisms for conceptualizing data like Description Logics rely upon first-order logic. As a consequence, they are poor in addressing exceptional, inconsistent and uncertain data, in particular when evolving the knowledge base over time.
This paper investigates the use of Probabilistic Description Logics as a formalism for the evolution of ontologies that conceptualize real-world data. Different scenarios are presented for the automatic handling of inconsistencies
during ontology evolution. |
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K Reinecke, Abraham Bernstein, Tell me where you've lived, and I'll tell you what you like: adapting interfaces to cultural preferences, In: User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP), 2009-06. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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Markus Leippold, Daniel Egloff, American Options with Stochastic Stopping Time Constraints, Applied Mathematical Finance, Vol. 16 (3), 2009. (Journal Article)
This paper concerns the pricing of American options with stochastic stopping time constraints expressed in terms of the states of a Markov process. Following the ideas of Menaldi et al., we transform the constrained into an unconstrained optimal stopping problem. The transformation replaces the original payoff by the value of a generalized barrier option. We also provide a Monte Carlo method to numerically calculate the option value for multidimensional Markov processes. We adapt the Longstaff-Schwartz algorithm to solve the stochastic Cauchy-Dirichlet problem related to the valuation problem of the barrier option along a set of simulated trajectories of the underlying Markov process. |
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Monique Jeanblanc, Marc Yor, Marc Chesney, Mathematical Methods for Financial Markets, Springer, Heidelberg, 2009-06. (Book/Research Monograph)
Stochastic processes of common use in mathematical finance are presented throughout this book, which consists of eleven chapters, interlacing on the one hand financial concepts and instruments, such as arbitrage opportunities, admissible strategies, contingent claims, option pricing, default risk, ruin, and on the other hand, Brownian motion, diffusion processes, Lévy processes, together with the basic properties of these processes. The first half of the book is devoted to continuous path processes whereas the second half deals with discontinuous processes.
Only basic knowledge of probability theory is assumed; the book is organized so that the mathematical facts pertaining to a given financial question are gathered close to the study of that question. |
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Rolf H Weber, Seraina Grünewald, UCITS and the Madoff scandal: liability of depositary banks?, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, Vol. 24 (6), 2009. (Journal Article)
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Margit Osterloh, Bruno Frey, Are more and better indicators the solution? Comment to William Starbuck, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 25 (2), 2009. (Journal Article)
We discuss Starbuck’s proposal to improve decision processes in scholarly evaluation. While we agree that more variety is needed in evaluation committees, we suggest to enlist scholars from other research fields rather than people from outside academia. We disagree with the proposal that reliable indicators of research effectiveness will improve research. We argue that evaluating research with
even better and more reliable indicators would lead to worse results than what is observed today. Attention would be deviated from the content of research, and intrinsic motivation, which is essential for good research, would be crowded out. We propose that evaluations that are based on indicators need to be pushed back. After a careful selection process, researchers need to be given the opportunity to pursue the research they consider to be fruitful. |
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