Description: This presentation discusses user and interference models, wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) capacity with perfect and imperfect power control, and spreading factors with numerical results.

Description: Abstract: This paper presents a method for measuring the semantic similarity of texts, using corpus-based and knowledge-based measures of similarity. Previous work on this problem has focused mainly on either large documents (e.g. text classification, information retrieval) or individual words (e.g. synonymy tests). Given that a large fraction of the information available today, on the Web and elsewhere, consists of short text snippets (e.g. abstracts of scientific documents, image captions, product descriptions), in this paper the authors focus on measuring the semantic similarity of short texts. Through experiments performed on a paraphrase data set, the authors show that the semantic similarity method out-performs methods based on simple lexical matching, resulting in up to 13% error rate reduction with respect to the traditional vector-based similarity metric.

Description: This paper discusses automatic generating of back-of-the-book indexes. Abstract: The automatic generation of back-of-the-book indexes seems to be out of sight of the Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing communities, although the increasingly large number of books available in electronic format, as well as recent advances in key-phrase extraction, should motivate an increased interest in this topic. In this paper, the authors describe the background relevant to the process of creating back-of-the-book indexes, namely (1) a short overview of the origin and structure of back-of-the-book indexes, and (2) the correspondence that can be established between techniques for automatic index construction and keyphrase extraction. Since the development of any automatic system requires in the first place an evaluation testbed, the authors describe their work in building a gold standard collection of books and indexes, and the authors present several metrics that can be used for the evaluation of automatically generated indexes against the gold standard. Finally, the authors investigate the properties of the gold standard index, such as index size, length of index entries, and upper bounds on coverage as indicated by the presence of index entries in the document.

Description: This paper discusses intra-class competitive assignments in CS2. Abstract: The widespread goals of student retention, introducing larger programming projects, and fostering collaboration among students in computer science courses has led to the inclusion of group projects in many curricula, with task division and collaboration as motivation for students to complete assignments. This paper presents a study in a first-year programming assignment with similar goals, but with methods adopting the contrarian view - having students directly compete with one another in a tournament of their respective software agents. This paper presents the results of a year-long experiment in an intra-class competitive assignment in the second C++ programming course at the University of North Texas in Denton. Metrics of student performance on the assignment, correlation with course grade, student surveys of the project, and retention statistics are presented. Results demonstrating overwhelmingly positive response and high levels of effort among students are submitted, along with remarks on application to student recruiting, retention, and curriculum design.

Description: This article discusses a non-preemptive scheduling algorithm for soft real-time systems. Real-time systems are often designed using preemptive scheduling and worst-case execution time estimates to guarantee the execution of high priority tasks. There is, however, an interest in exploring non-preemptive scheduling models for real-time systems, particularly for soft real-time multimedia applications. In this paper, the authors propose a new algorithm that uses multiple scheduling strategies for efficient non-preemptive scheduling of tasks. The goal is to improve the success ratio of the well-known Earliest Deadline First (EDF) approach when the load on the system is very high and to improve the overall performance in both underloaded and overloaded conditions. The authors' approach, known as group EDF (gEDF) is based on dynamic grouping of tasks with deadlines that are very close to each other, and using Shortest Job First (SJF) technique to schedule tasks within the group. The authors present results comparing gEDF with other real-time algorithms including EDF, Best-effort, and Guarantee, by using randomly generated tasks with varying execution times, release times, deadlines and tolerance to missing deadlines, under varying workloads. The authors believe that grouping tasks dynamically with similar deadlines and utilizing a secondary criteria, such as minimizing the total ...