513620
Synchronizing a database to improve freshness
In this paper we study how to refresh a local copy of an autonomous data source to maintain the copy up-to-date. As the size of the data grows, it becomes more difficult to maintain the copy \ fresh, “making it crucial to synchronize the copy effectively. We define two freshness metrics, change models of the underlying data, and synchronization policies. We analytically study how effective the various policies are. We also experimentally verify our analysis, based on data collected from 270 web sites for more than 4 months, and we show that our new policy improves the \ freshness” very significantly compared to current policies in use.
2425278
Shuffling a Stacked Deck: The Case for Partially Randomized Ranking of Search Engine Results
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with quality, a more elusive concept that is difficult to measure directly. Unfortunately, the correlation between popularity and quality is very weak for newly-created pages that have yet to receive many visits and/or in-links. Worse, since discovery of new content is largely done by querying search engines, and because users usually focus their attention on the top few results, newly-created but high-quality pages are effectively "shut out," and it can take a very long time before they become popular.We propose a simple and elegant solution to this problem: the introduction of a controlled amount of randomness into search result ranking methods. Doing so offers new pages a chance to prove their worth, although clearly using too much randomness will degrade result quality and annul any benefits achieved. Hence there is a tradeoff between exploration to estimate the quality of new pages and exploitation of pages already known to be of high quality. We study this tradeoff both analytically and via simulation, in the context of an economic objective function based on aggregate result quality amortized over time. We show that a modest amount of randomness leads to improved search results.
171503
Parallel crawlers
In this paper we study how we can design an effective parallel crawler. As the size of the Web grows, it becomes imperative to parallelize a crawling process, in order to finish downloading pages in a reasonable amount of time. We first propose multiple architectures for a parallel crawler and identify fundamental issues related to parallel crawling. Based on this understanding, we then propose metrics to evaluate a parallel crawler, and compare the proposed architectures using 40 million pages collected from the Web. Our results clarify the relative merits of each architecture and provide a good guideline on when to adopt which architecture.
516682
Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
In this paper we study in what order a crawler should visit the URLs it has seen, in order to obtain more "important" pages first. Obtaining important pages rapidly can be very useful when a crawler cannot visit the entire Web in a reasonable amount of time. We define several importance metrics, ordering schemes, and performance evaluation measures for this problem. We also experimentally evaluate the ordering schemes on the Stanford University Web. Our results show that a crawler with a good ordering scheme can obtain important pages significantly faster than one without.
1739520
Exploiting Geographical Location Information of Web Pages
Many information resources on the web are relevant primarily to limited geographical communities. For instance, web sites containing information on restaurants, theaters, and apartment rentals are relevant primarily to web users in geographical proximity to these locations. In contrast, other information resources are relevant to a broader geographical community. For instance, an on-line newspaper may be relevant to users across the United States. Unfortunately, the geographical scope of web resources is largely ignored by web search engines. We make the case for identifying and exploiting the geographical location information of web sites so that web search engines can rank resources in a geographically sensitive fashion, in addition to using more traditional information-retrieval strategies. In this paper, we first consider how to compute the geographical location of web pages. Subsequently, we consider how to exploit such information in one specific "proof-of-concept" application we implemented in JAVA, and discuss other examples as well.
1713822
A fast regular expression indexing engine
In this paper; we describe the design, architecture, and lessons learned from the implementation of a fast regular-expression indexing engine FREE. FREE uses a prebuilt index to identify the text data units which may contain a matching string and only examines these further. In this way, FREE shows orders of magnitude performance improvement in certain cases over standard regular expression matching systems, such as lex, awk and grep.
43684392
Wavelet Analysis Based Blind Watermarking for 3-D Surface Meshes
As most previous wavelet analysis based 3-D mesh watermarking methods embed the watermark information into wavelet coefficients arranged in a certain order, they have not been used as blind schemes since the connectivity information must be exactly known in the watermark extraction process. In this paper, we propose a blind watermarking method based on wavelet analysis for 3-D mesh model. Two new techniques are introduced. One is to exploit the statistical features of scale coefficients on an approximation (low resolution) level for watermark embedding. Another is to extract the hidden watermark, not from the same resolution level as used in embedding process, but directly from the spatial domain. As the proposed watermark detection does not require the wavelet analysis, any pre-processing such as registration and re-sampling, is not needed. These techniques allow to detect the watermark without referring to the original meshes. In addition, the proposed are applicable directly to irregular meshes by using irregular wavelet analysis. Through simulations, we prove that our method is fairly robust against various attacks including topological ones.
6528301
Energy Efficient Broadcast in Wireless Ad hoc Networks with Hitch-hiking
In this paper, we have proposed a novel concept called Hitch-hiking in order to reduce the energy consumption of broadcast application for wireless networks. Hitch-hiking takes advantage of the physical layer design that facilitates the combining of partial signals to obtain the complete information. The concept of combining partial signals using maximal ratio combiner [13] has been used to improve the reliability of the communication channel but has never been exploited to reduce energy consumption. We propose a centralized heuristic algorithm called Wireless Multicast with Hitch-hiking (WMH) to construct an energy efficient tree using Hitch-hiking and also present a distributed version of the heuristic. We also evaluate the proposed heuristics through simulation. Simulation results show that Hitch-hiking can reduce the transmission cost of broadcast by as much as 50%. Further, we propose and evaluate a protocol called PSBT that reduces energy consumption of broadcast by eliminating redundancy in receive operation. Finally, we propose an algorithm that takes advantage of both Hitch-hiking and PSBT in conserving energy.
45001657
A New Subsumption Method in the Connection Graph Proof Procedure
Compared to most of the other resolution-based proof procedures, the connection graph proof procedure (CGPP) is superior due to its effective search space reduction rules. A test for subsumption in CGPP is sufficiently efficient in comparison with the standard test. But the subsumption with no restriction may cause logical inconsistency. The restriction on subsumption to maintain the consistency has been an open problem since it was first noticed in 1981. We define a newθ-subsumption which maintains the logical consistency and provides the graph transformation method which makes C subsume D with the new definition if C subsumes D with the original definition ofθ-sumsumption. 
 
In the subsumption test in CGPP, it is essential to find a set of pairwise strongly compatible matching substitutions between literals in two clauses. This paper presents an algorithm which finds a set of pairwise strongly compatible matching substitutions efficiently, based on both the reduction of possible matching substitutions and bit operations. The worst-case time complexity of this algorithm is analyzed in terms of the estimated maximal number of string comparisons and it is shown that our complexity is lower than the other algorithms based on the s-link test. 
 
Based on the new definition of subsumption and the improved algorithm for the pairwise strongly compatible test, an unrestricted subsumption algorithm and a restricted subsumption algorithm are suggested.
30331490
Robust Watermarking on Polygonal Meshes Using Distribution of Vertex Norms
Most watermarking techniques for 3-D mesh models have mainly focused on robustness against various attacks, such as adding noise, smoothing, simplification, re-meshing, clipping, and so on. These attacks perceptually damage the stego model itself. Unlike watermarking of other multimedia data, serious attacks for 3-D meshes includes similarity transform and vertex re-ordering. They can fatally destroy the watermark without any perceptual degradation of the stego model. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking technique for 3-D polygonal mesh model, which modifies the distribution of vertex norms according to watermark bit to be embedded. In particular, the proposed employs blind watermark detection technique, which extracts the watermark without referring to cover meshes. The simulation results show that the proposed is remarkably robust against similarity transform and vertex re-ordering.
30800683
An optimal signal design for band-limited asynchronous DS-CDMA Communications
An optimal signal design for band-limited, asynchronous, direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) communications with aperiodic random spreading sequences and a conventional matched filter receiver is considered in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. With bandwidth defined in the strict sense, two optimization problems are solved under finite bandwidth and zero interchip interference constraints. First, a chip waveform optimization is performed given the system bandwidth, the data symbol transmission rate, and the processing gain. A technique to characterize a band-limited chip waveform with a finite number of parameters is developed, and it is used to derive optimum chip waveforms which minimize the effect of multiple-access interference (MAI) for any energy and delay profile of users. Next, a joint optimization of the processing gain and the chip waveform is performed, given the system bandwidth and the data symbol transmission rate. A sufficient condition for a system to have lower average probability of bit error for any energy profile is found, and it is used to derive some design strategies. It is shown that the flat spectrum pulse with the processing gain leading to zero excess bandwidth results in the minimum average probability of bit error. Design examples and numerical results are also provided.