33123897
Assessing users' product-specific knowledge for personalization in electronic commerce
While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue-the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study. For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.
20494586
The implementation of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system architecture
While most users currently access Web applications from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location, by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology. This paper describes how MWS was developed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and Java technology. Securing multimodal applications proves more challenging than securing traditional Internet applications. Various standards have been developed within a context of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to secure multimodal and wireless applications. In addition to covering these standards and their applicability to the MWS system implementation, this paper also shows that multimodal user-interface page can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
16824799
A heuristic method for self‐healing ring design in a single‐homing cluster
In this paper, we consider a SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) USHR (Uni‐directional Self‐Healing Ring) design problem for a single‐homing cluster, i.e., a cluster with a single designated hub. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem and a branch and bound heuristic method based on the Lagrangian relaxation and subgradient optimization technique is proposed to handle the problem. In solving any ring design problem, we should deal with two different aspects of the ring design, namely, the ring routing aspect and the ring loading aspect. Both of these two aspects are well integrated and represented in our model. Such an integrated formulation has not been proposed in the existing literature mainly due to its computationally intractable complexity. In order to cope with such complexity, a preprocessing technique for reducing the complexity and several branch and bound strategies are proposed. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested through computational experiments. For the computational experiments, test problems are generated using the data obtained from the actual topologies in Seoul, Korea. The computational experiments show that the proposed method yields near‐optimum designs within reasonable computation time.
37113991
Using Linear Positional Grammars for the LR Parsing of 2-D Symbolic Languages
In this paper we present a grammar formalism for the generation and parsing of two-dimensional symbolic languages. Linear Positional Grammars (or LPGs for short) are an immediate generalization of the context-free string grammars. Through the use of general spatial relations they allow the definition of pictures whose symbols span on a two-dimensional space. Due to their analogy to context-free string grammars, LPGs can be used to construct an LR-based parser which uses the spatial relations to navigate the input. We study ambiguous grammars and present several ways to solve them. Moreover we provide an algorithm to translate a linear positional grammar into a context-free grammar with actions and suggest a general methodology to parse two-dimensional symbolic languages by making use of the well-known tool YACC (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler [25]). As an example, we construct a parser for a subset of the two-dimensional arithmetical expression language.
17464838
VisualSEEk: a fully automated content-based image query system
We describe a highly functional prototype system for searching by visual features in an image database. The VisualSEEk system is novel in that the user forms the queries by diagramming spatial arrangements of color regions. The system nds the images that contain the most similar arrangements of similar regions. Prior to the queries, the system automatically extracts and indexes salient color regions from the images. By utilizing e cient indexing techniques for color information, region sizes and absolute and relative spatial locations, a wide variety of complex joint color/spatial queries may be computed.
5720205
Using Relevance Feedback in Content-Based Image Metasearch
MetaSeek is an image metasearch engine developed to explore the querying of large, distributed, online visual information systems. The current implementation integrates user feedback into a performance-ranking mechanism. MetaSeek selects and queries the target image search engines according to their success under similar query conditions in previous searches. The current implementation keeps track of each target engine's performance by integrating user feedback for each visual query into a performance database. We begin with a review of the issues in content-based visual query, then describe the current MetaSeek implementation. We present the results of experiments that evaluated the implementation in comparison to a previous version of the system and a baseline engine that randomly selects the individual search engines to query. We conclude by summarizing open issues for future research.
517639
CVEPS - a compressed video editing and parsing system
Processing digital video directly in the compressed domain has many advantages in terms of storage efficiency, speed, and video quality. We have developed a compressed video editing and parsing system (CVEPS) with advanced video indexing and manipulation functions. The video parsing tools support automatic extraction of key visual features, e.g., scene cuts, transitional effects, camera operations (zoom/pan), shape and trajectories of prominent moving objects. These visual features are used for etllcient video indexing, retrieval and browsing. The editing tools allow users to perform useful video compositing functions and special visual effects typically seen in video production studios. We contrast our compressed-domain approach with tradhional decode-process-reencode approach with qualitative and/or qualitative performance comparison. We also present a client-server network based CVEPS implementation.