5879747
Automatic information discovery from the "invisible Web"
A large amount of online information resides on the "invisible Web" - Web pages that are generated dynamically from databases and other data sources hidden from the user. They are not indexed by a static URL but are generated when queries are made via a search interface (a specialized search engine). In this paper, we propose a system that is capable of automatically making use of these specialized engines to find information on the invisible Web. We describe our overall architecture and process: from obtaining the search engines to picking the right engines to query. Experiments show that we can find information that is not found by traditional search engines.
46019766
A Study on Textual Entailment
In this paper we study a graph-based approach to the task of textual entailment between a text and hypothesis. The approach takes into account the full lexico-syntactic context of both the text and hypothesis and relies heavily on the concept of subsumption. It starts with mapping the text and hypothesis into graph structures where nodes represent concepts and edges represent lexico-syntactic relations among concepts. Based on a subsumption score between the text-graph and hypothesis-graph an entailment decision is then made. The impact of synonymy on entailment is quantified and discussed. An important advantage of our solution is the ability to customize it so that high-confidence results are obtained
7539391
Compressed-domain video indexing techniques using DCT and motion vector information in MPEG video
Development of various multimedia applications hinges on the availability of fast and efficient storage, browsing, indexing, and retrieval techniques. Given that video is typically stored efficiently in a compressed format, if we can analyze the compressed representation directly, we can avoid the costly overhead of decompressing and operating at the pixel level. Compressed domain parsing of video has been presented in earlier work where a video clip is divided into shots, subshots, and scenes. In this paper, we describe key frame selection, feature extraction, and indexing and retrieval techniques that are directly applicable to MPEG compressed video. We develop a frame-type independent representation of the various types of frames present in an MPEG video in which al frames can be considered equivalent. Features are derived from the available DCT, macroblock, and motion vector information and mapped to a low-dimensional space where they can be accessed with standard database techniques. The spatial information is used as primary index while the temporal information is used to enhance the robustness of the system during the retrieval process. The techniques presented enable fast archiving, indexing, and retrieval of video. Our operational prototype typically takes a fraction of a second to retrieve similar video scenes from our database, with over 95% success.
18594508
An index structure for efficient reverse nearest neighbor queries
The Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN) problem is to find all points in a given data set whose nearest neighbor is a given query point. Just like the Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, the RNN queries appear in many practical situations such as marketing and resource management. Thus, efficient methods for the RNN queries in databases are required. The paper introduces a new index structure, the Rdnn-tree, that answers both RNN and NN queries efficiently. A single index structure is employed for a dynamic database, in contrast to the use of multiple indexes in previous work. This leads to significant savings in dynamically maintaining the index structure. The Rdnn-tree outperforms existing methods in various aspects. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data show that our index structure outperforms previous methods by a significant margin (more than 90% in terms of number of leaf nodes accessed) in RNN queries. It also shows improvement in NN queries over standard techniques. Furthermore, performance in insertion and deletion is significantly enhanced by the ability to combine multiple queries (NN and RNN) in one traversal of the tree. These facts make our index structure extremely preferable in both static and dynamic cases.
17442336
Ordinal association rules for error identification in data sets
A new extension of the Boolean association rules, ordinal association rules, that incorporates ordinal relationships among data items, is introduced. One use for ordinal rules is to identify possible errors in data. A method that finds these rules and identifies potential errors in data is proposed.
18266651
A similarity-based soft clustering algorithm for documents
Document clustering is an important tool for applications such as Web search engines. Clustering documents enables the user to have a good overall view of the information contained in the documents that he has. However, existing algorithms suffer from various aspects, hard clustering algorithms (where each document belongs to exactly one cluster) cannot detect the multiple themes of a document, while soft clustering algorithms (where each document can belong to multiple clusters) are usually inefficient. We propose SISC (similarity-based soft clustering), an efficient soft clustering algorithm based on a given similarity measure. SISC requires only a similarity measure for clustering and uses randomization to help make the clustering efficient. Comparison with existing hard clustering algorithms like K-means and its variants shows that SISC is both effective and efficient.
24712591
Integrating Priority with Share in the Priority-Based Weighted Fair Queuing Scheduler for Real-Time Networks
The Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) scheduler has been closely studied due to its desirable properties of bandwidth guarantee and bounded delay. However, the queuing delay bound of a communication session is tightly coupled with the session's allocated service share. To receive a low queuing delay, a session must reserve a high share. In this paper, we study a new fair queuing algorithm called Priority-based Weighted Fair Queuing (PWFQ). PWFQ combines a session's allocated share to achieve the bandwidth guarantee and the session's priority to adjust the delay bound inside a sliding window. The new algorithm decouples the delay from the service share so that a session with a low share but a high priority may still receive a small delay. We analyze the worst-case delay bound of PWFQ and propose a simple algorithm to assign session priorities.
14548816
Enhancing the real-time capability of the Linux kernel
Linux has become one of the most popular UNIX operating systems. Commercial support for Linux and adoption of Linux in real world applications have now started to emerge. Some of the applications have strict real-time requirements. We discuss how to make Linux a real-time operating system. The real-time capability is achieved by three new kernel mechanisms. We port a microtimer into the kernel. We adopt the time-driven scheduling paradigm and implement a time-driven scheduler in the Linux kernel. Finally, we insert preemption points in the kernel to make it more preemptable so that real-time jobs may experience shorter blockings. Our approach is general and may be used to enhance the real-time capability of other non-real-time operating systems as well.
45567604
Hierarchical budget management in the RED-Linux scheduling framework
A hierarchical scheduling mechanism has been implemented in RED-Linux to integrate different scheduling paradigms together. We extend the concept of group so that the execution budget for jobs in RED-Linux can be managed in a hierarchical way. A budget group contains a set of jobs that share the available budget for the group. The jobs in a budget group could be a normal job or another budget group job, which contains its own group of jobs. Every job has its system budget. But if it belongs to a budget group, the job's budget is also constrained by its group's budget. We discuss how the budget group mechanism is implemented in RED-Linux. We also show how to use the mechanism to implement several schedulers.
13951248
A survey on evaluating and realizing IS/IT benefits in Taiwanese b2bec companies
A number of issues have emerged from the analysis of the data collected via a survey conducted in Taiwanese B2BEC companies. The results show relatively high usage of IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits realization methodologies, and yet, these methodologies were generally not used effectively within the responding organizations. Most of these organizations were not yet mature in terms of their IT. However, there was a clear association between level of IT maturity and both wide and effective use of methodologies for IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits management.
27737931
Designing multimedia applications on real-time systems with SMP architecture
Large real-time multimedia systems such as flight simulators have adopted multiprocessor architecture to handle the large amount of events and computations. Existing realtime scheduling algorithms designed for single-processor systems such as Rate Monotonic (RM) and Earliest Deadline First Algorithm (EDF) have very poor performance on multiprocessor systems. On the other hand, most online scheduling algorithms for multiprocessor systems have poor schedulability conditions for real-time applications. In this paper, we study different ways to design real-time applications on SMP machines.