16416021
Analyzing the Terrorist Social Networks with Visualization Tools
Analysis of terrorist social networks is essential for discovering knowledge about the structure of terrorist organizations. Such knowledge is important for developing effective combating strategies against terrorism. Visualization of a network with the support of social network analysis techniques greatly facilitates the inspection of the network global structure. However, its usefulness becomes limited when the size and complexity of the network increase. In this work, we develop two interactive visualization techniques for complex terrorist social networks: fisheye views and fractal views. Both techniques facilitate the exploration of complex networks by allowing a user to select one or more focus points and dynamically adjusting the graphical layout and abstraction level to enhance the view of regions of interest. Combining the two techniques can effectively help an investigator to recognize patterns previously unreadable in the normal display due to the network complexity. Case studies are presented to illustrate how such visualization tools are capable to extract the hidden relationships among terrorists in the network through user interactions. Experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the visualization techniques.
16166999
Automatic Construction of Cross-Lingual Networks of Concepts from the Hong Kong SAR Police Department
The tragic event of September 11 has prompted the rapid growth of attention of national security and criminal analysis. In the national security world, very large volumes of data and information are generated and gathered. Much of this data and information written in different languages and stored in different locations may be seemingly unconnected. Therefore, cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a major challenge to generate an overview of this disparate data and information so that it can be analysed, searched. The traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches normally require a document to share some keywords with the query. In reality, the users may use some keywords that are different from what used in the documents. There are then two different term spaces, one for the users, and another for the documents. The problem can be viewed as the creation of a thesaurus. The creation of such relationships would allow the system to match queries with relevant documents, even though they contain different terms. Apart from this, terrorists and criminals may communicate through letters, e-mails and faxes in languages other than English. The translation ambiguity significantly exacerbates the retrieval problem. To facilitate cross-lingual information retrieval, a corpusbased approach uses the term co-occurrence statistics in parallel or comparable corpora to construct a statistical translation model to cross the language boundary. However, collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task due to the unique linguistics and grammar structures of oriental languages. In this paper, the text-based approach to align English/Chinese Hong Kong Police press release documents from the Web is first presented. This article then reports an algorithmic approach to generate a robust knowledge base based on statistical correlation analysis of the semantics (knowledge) embedded in the bilingual press release corpus. The research output consisted of a thesaurus-like, semantic network knowledge base, which can aid in semantics-based cross-lingual information management and retrieval.
2566456
Interval constraint networks for tolerance analysis and synthesis
This paper proposes interval constraint networks and interval propagation techniques for automatic tolerance design. To develop an intelligent automatic tolerance design mechanism, the following interrelated problems are addressed: (1) representing the relationships between the tolerances of the entities, attributes, and the functional requirements of a design component by a constraint network, (2) developing tolerance propagation techniques in the network that will satisfy the constraints between the entities, attributes and functional requirement. For the purpose of tolerance design, we propose new definitions for consistency of constraints and consistency of a constraint network. New forward and backward propagation techniques achieve worst-case tolerance analysis and synthesis, respectively. A tank design problem illustrates the use of the procedures for tolerance analysis and synthesis. The discussion and examples compare the new constraint network and propagation techniques with previous works.
15657957
Automatic Summarization of Chinese and English
As a result of the rapid growth in Internet access, significantly more information has become available online in real time. However, there is not sufficient time for users to read large volumes of information and make decisions accordingly. The problem of information-overloading can be resolved through the application of automatic summarization. Many summarization systems for documents in different languages have been implemented. However, the performance of summarization system on documents in different languages has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we compare the result of fractal summarization technique on parallel documents in Chinese and English. The grammatical and lexical differences between Chinese and English have significant effect on the summarization processes. Their impact on the performances of the summarization for the Chinese and English parallel documents is compared.
16831415
Automatic construction of English/Chinese parallel corpora
As the demand for global information increases significantly, multilingual corpora has become a valuable linguistic resource for applications to cross-lingual information retrieval and natural language processing. In order to cross the boundaries that exist between different languages, dictionaries are the most typical tools. However, the general-purpose dictionary is less sensitive in both genre and domain. It is also impractical to manually construct tailored bilingual dictionaries or sophisticated multilingual thesauri for large applications. Corpus-based approaches, which do not have the limitation of dictionaries, provide a statistical translation model with which to cross the language boundary. There are many domain-specific parallel or comparable corpora that are employed in machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Most of these are corpora between Indo-European languages, such as English/French and English/Spanish. The Asian/Indo-European corpus, especially English/Chinese corpus, is relatively sparse. The objective of the present research is to construct English/ Chinese parallel corpus automatically from the World Wide Web. In this paper, an alignment method is presented which is based on dynamic programming to identify the one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs. The method includes alignment at title level, word level and character level. The longest common subsequence (LCS) is applied to find the most reliable Chinese translation of an English word. As one word for a language may translate into two or more words repetitively in another language, the edit operation, deletion, is used to resolve redundancy. A score function is then proposed to determine the optimal title pairs. Experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method using the daily press release articles by the Hong Kong SAR government as the test bed. The precision of the result is 0.998 while the recall is 0.806. The release articles and speech articles, published by Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, are also used to test our method, the precision is 1.00, and the recall is 0.948.
15408418
CatRelate: A New Hierarchical Document Category Integration Algorithm by Learning Category Relationships
We address the problem of integrating documents from a source catalog into a master catalog. Current technologies for solving the problem deem it as a flat category integration problem without considering the useful hierarchy information in the catalog, or deal with it hierarchically but without a rigorous model. In contrast, our method is based on correctly identifying relationships among categories, such as Match, Disjoint, SubConcept, SuperConcept, and Overlap, which come from the relations of sets in Set theory. Compared with traditional Match/NotMatch relationship in literature, our approach is more expressive in defining the relationship. The relationships among categories are first learned in a probabilistic way, and then refined by considering the hierarchy context. Our preliminary experiments show that it can help to correctly identify category relationships, and thus increase the accuracy of document integration.
12111283
A Grid Resource Broker with Network Bandwidth-Aware Job Scheduling for Computational Grids
This work presents a workflow-based computational resource broker whose main functions are matching available resources with user requests and considering network information statuses during matchmaking. The resource broker provides an interface for accessing available and appropriate resources via user credentials. We use the Ganglia and NWS tools to monitor resource status and network-related information, respectively. We also report on using the Globus Toolkit to construct a grid platform called the TIGER project that integrates the distributed resources of five universities in Taichung, Taiwan, where the resource broker was developed. The proposed broker provides secure, updated information about available resources and serves as a link to the diverse systems available in the Grid.
6374629
A Multimedia Synchronization Model and Its Implementation in Transport Protocols
An implementation of a synchronization mechanism in transport protocol to support multimedia applications over a packet or cell switched network is proposed. In designing such a mechanism for practical use, ease of implementation and capability of handling random delay of packets are two key issues for success. Since the random delay of packet or cell switched networks makes synchronization among media more complicated after the transmission across the network, a model which considers the random transmission delay is hence required to specify the temporal relationship among media. Therefore, a real-time synchronization model is presented to satisfy this requirement in the paper. Based on the proposed synchronization model, a transport protocol, namely the multimedia synchronization transport protocol (MSTP), is designed and implemented. We have implemented a prototype system using the MSTP protocol and built a simulation system for the wide area network (WAN) environment in order to evaluate the performance of the MSTP protocol.
14357839
Clustering-training for Data Stream Mining
Mining data streams has attracted much attention recently. Labeled samples needed by most current stream classification methods are more difficult and expensive to obtain than unlabeled ones. This paper proposed a semi-supervised learning algorithm - clustering-training to utilize the unlabeled samples. It uses clustering to select confidently unlabeled samples, and uses them to re-train the classifier incrementally. Experiments on synthetic and real data set showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm
350148
Visualization tools for self-organizing maps
Various statistical and pattern recognition techniques, such as concept spaces and category maps in the Illinois Digital Library project, has been explored to solve the semantic interoperability problem in DLI-1. Self-organizing category map is identified as a powerful tool for information summarization. However, visualizing a large-scale self-organizing map in a restricted size of window is difficult. For smaller regions, displaying labels is infeasible. In this paper, two visualization tools, fisheye view and fractal view, are presented. It assists users to visualize a largescale self-organizing map geographically and semantically.
11357878
Pseudorandom bit generators in stream-cipher cryptography
Progress in the design and analysis of pseudorandom bit generators over the last decade is surveyed. Background information is provided, and the linear feedback shift registers that serve as building blocks for constructing the generators are examined. Three methods for attacking keystream generators are reviewed, and three techniques for designing them are considered, focusing on how they fail or how their weakness is exposed under the attacks previously described. These techniques are nonlinear feedforward transformation, step control, and multiclocking.<<ETX>>