This paper describes a simple technique for evaluating the length of a parametric curve. The technique approximates sections of the curve to the arc of a circle using only sample points on the curve: no computation of derivatives or other properties is required. This method is almost as quick to implement and compute as chord-length summation but is much more accurate : it also provides recursi...

Accurate branch prediction is critical to performance; mispredicted branches mean that ten’s of cycles may be wasted in superscalar architectures. Architectures combining very effective branch prediction mechanisms coupled with modified branch target buffers (BTB’s) have been proposed for wide-issue processors. These mechanisms require considerable processor resources. Concurrently, the larger ...

A video-based gesture recognition system can serve as a natural and accurate 3D user input device. We describe a two-camera system, that recognizes three gesture classes: two static and one dynamic. For one of these gestures (pointing), the system estimates five parameters of 3D pose: position and pointing direction. The recognition is robust, independent of the user and fast (60 Hz), and the e...

Mapping evolutionary trajectories of discrete traits onto phylogenies receives considerable attention in evolutionary biology. Given the trait observations at the tips of a phylogenetic tree, researchers are often interested where on the tree the trait changes its state and whether some changes are preferential in certain parts of the tree. In a model-based phylogenetic framework, such question...

The goal of intrasurgical registration is to establish a common reference frame between presurgical and intrasurgical three-dimensional data sets that correspond to the same anatomy. This paper presents two novel techniques that have application to this problem, high-speed pose tracking and intrasurgical data selection. In the first part of this paper, we describe an approach for tracking the p...

Business processes are prone to continuous and unexpected changes. Process workers may start executing a process differently in order to adjust to changes in workload, season, guidelines or regulations for example. Early detection of business process changes based on their event logs – also known as business process drift detection – enables analysts to identify and act upon changes that may ot...

We describe a fast algorithm to propagate, for any user-specified accuracy, a time-harmonic electromagnetic field between two parallel planes separated by a linear, isotropic and homogeneous medium. The analytical formulation of this problem (ca 1897) requires the evaluation of the so-called Rayleigh-Sommerfeld integral. If the distance between the planes is small, this integral can be accurate...

Recent studies have demonstrated that specificity is an important characterization of texts potentially beneficial for a range of applications such as multi-document news summarization and analysis of science journalism. The feasibility of automatically predicting sentence specificity from a rich set of features has also been confirmed in prior work. In this paper we present a practical system ...

Many research groups are estimating trees containing anywhere from a few thousands to hundreds of thousands of species, toward the eventual goal of the estimation of a Tree of Life, containing perhaps as many as several million leaves. These phylogenetic estimations present enormous computational challenges, and current computational methods are likely to fail to run even on data sets in the lo...

The problem of hand shape classification is challenging since a hand is characterized by a large number of degrees of freedom. Numerous shape descriptors have been proposed and applied over the years to estimate and classify hand poses in reasonable time. In this paper we discuss our parallel framework for real-time hand shape classification applicable in real-time applications. We show how the...