32681772
Visual MeSH
Visual MeSH is a graphical interface developed to interact with real world databases such as the National Library of Medicine’s MetaThesaurus and MEDLINE. Visual MeSH makes it easy for the user to browse complex relationships through visual representation of thesaurus structures. It helps the user to select controlled vocabulary terms for online searching in the click-andchoose environment.
207195547
Graphical table of contents
This paper proposes a graphical table of contents (GTOC) that is functionally analogous to the table of contents. The proposed GTOC can be generated automatically from the text of documents. It visualizes document contents and relationships to allow easy access of underlying documents. It also provides various interactive tools to let the user explore the documents. Issues of how to generate such GTOC include how documents are indexed and organized, how the organized documents are visualized, and what interactive means are needed to provide necessary functionality of GTOC. These issues are discussed in this paper with a GTOC prototype based on Kohonen’s selforganizing featore map algorithm.
6221918
Efficiently Matching Proximity Relationships in Spatial Databases
Spatial data mining recently emerges from a number of real applications, such as real-estate marketing, urban planning, weather forecasting, medical image analysis, road traffic accident analysis, etc. It demands for efficient solutions for many new, expensive, and complicated problems. In this paper, we investigate a proximity matching problem among clusters and features. The investigation involves proximity relationship measurement between clusters and features. We measure proximity in an average fashion to address possible nonuniform data distribution in a cluster. An efficient algorithm, for solving the problem, is proposed and evaluated. The algorithm applies a standard multistep paradigm in combining with novel lower and upper proximity bounds. The algorithm is implemented in several different modes. Our experiment results do not only give a comparison among them but also illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm.
1977537
Active layout engine: Algorithms and applications in variable data printing
Variable Data Printing (VDP) refers to the process of generating and printing dynamic or personalized contents. A core technology required by highly customized VDP applications is the automatic document layout design engine, whose task is to adjust the original design or generate a new layout to present variable contents. This paper presents a novel document layout design engine, called Active Layout Engine (ALE). 'Active' reflects several unique features of the engine: first, through linear text block modeling and two-pass constraint solving algorithm, it supports a rich set of layout operations, such as simultaneous optimization of text block width and height, integrated image cropping, and non-rectangular text wrapping. Second, it does not rely on a particular layout description language and thus can actively pursue emerging formats and standards. This paper describes the various technical aspects of ALE: linearization of the text block modeling, two-pass constraint solving algorithm, format-neutral Active Layout Template (ALT), system optimization, and typical VDP applications around the core engine.
1773095
Delay Optimization in Quorum Consensus
Abstract
 The management of replicated data in distributed database systems is a classic problem with great
practical importance. Quorum consensus is one of the popular methods, combined with eager replication, for
managing replicated data. In this paper we investigate the problems of delay-optimal quorum consensus.
Firstly, we show that the problem of minimizing the total delay (or mean delay) restricted to a ring can be
solved in a constant time in contrast to the existing approximation results. Secondly, we show that the problem
of minimizing the total delay (or mean delay) is NP-hard. Thirdly, we present an approximate algorithm with
an approximate ratio 2; and the approximate algorithm can guarantee the exact solutions for some specific
network topology, such as trees and meshes. Finally, we present an improvement on the existing algorithm
to solve the problem of minimizing the maximal delay; this reduces the time complexity from O(n3 log n) to
O(n3) where n is the number of nodes.
27372511
A comprehensive image processing suite for book re-mastering
Converting paper books into electronic form provides benefits for archiving, distribution and content reuse. However, directly scanned images are usually undesirable for electronic books, and automated content re-mastering is required. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive image processing suite consisting of three major components: 1) image enhancement with deskew, cropping, color correction, contrast enhancement and text sharpening, 2) compound document image compression, and 3) extraction of TOC (table of content) and linking. We built a processing pipeline that automatically converts a set of scanned page images into a high quality and highly compressed e-book in the popular PDF format.
4444141
Similarity Search with Implicit Object Features
Driven by many real applications, in this paper we study the problem of similarity search with implicit object features; that is, the features of each object are not pre-computed/evaluated. As the existing similarity search techniques are not applicable, a novel and efficient algorithm is developed in this paper to approach the problem. The R-tree based algorithm consists of two steps: feature evaluation and similarity search. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that the algorithm is very efficient for large spatial datasets.