1362369
Watermarking in online media e-business
The need for copyright protection has become a detachable requirement for online media e-business as online multimedia businesses and enabling technologies become viable in recent years. Watermarking enables copyright protection in e-business but it also slows down the packaging process for delivery. The requirement of instant delivery is a prime requirement for online business. In the literature, extensive research on watermarking performance has been emphasized on imperceptibility and robustness but not the efficiency factor for online e-business, for example processing time and storage requirement that are crucial to the success of online e-business. We investigate four watermarking schemes derived from one-bit watermarking, multiple-bit watermarking and their combinations in order to identify a viable watermarking scheme that can meet the requirements of online e-business. The performance of these schemes in terms of preparation time, delivery time and storage requirement are measured and reported. Our analysis proves that the watermarking schemes with multiple-bit watermarking can ensure instant delivery with a penalty of some extra storage requirements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
17665082
Generating Cross-lingual Concept Space from Parallel Corpora on the Web
The information available in languages other than English on the World Wide Web is increasing significantly. To cross language boundaries between different languages, dictionaries are the most typical tools. However, the general-purpose dictionary is less sensitive in genre and domain and it is 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 to cross the language boundary. The objective of this research work is to mine English/Chinese parallel documents automatically from the World Wide Web and generate a crosslingual concept space automatically for cross-lingual information retrieval. The alignment method is developed based on dynamic programming to identify the one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs for building parallel corpus. The Hopfield network is then employed to generate the cross-lingual concept space based on the 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.
39597496
A Hybrid Parallel Loop Scheduling Scheme on Grid Environments
Effective loop-scheduling can significantly reduce the total execution time of a program on grid environments, especially for loop-intensive applications. This paper describes a two-phased method, named HPLS (Hybrid Parallel Loop Scheduling), to dynamically schedule loop iterations of a program on grid environments. In the first phase, most of the workload is dispatched to each node for execution according to its performance. Then, some well-known self-scheduling scheme is utilized to schedule the remaining workload. Experimental results showed that in most cases our approach could produce more efficient scheduling than previous schemes on our testbed grid. In addition, the results suggest that our approach is suitable for loop scheduling on grid environments.
1852515
Image database retrieval with multiple-instance learning techniques
In this paper, we develop and test an approach for retrieving images from an image database based on content similarity. First, each picture is divided into many overlapping regions. For each region, the sub-picture is filtered and converted into a feature vector. In this way, each picture is represented by a number of different feature vectors. The user selects positive and negative image examples to train the system. During the training, a multiple-instance learning method known as the diverse density algorithm is employed to determine which feature vector in each image best represents the user's concept, and which dimensions of the feature vectors are important. The system tries to retrieve images with similar feature vectors from the remainder of the database. A variation of the weighted correlation statistic is used to determine image similarity. The approach is tested on a medium-sized database of natural scenes as well as single- and multiple-object images.
33160619
Characterization Of Electroosmotic Flow In Microchannels
This paper presents experimental and theoretical studies of the electroosmotic flow in microchannels. The current monitoring method is used to determine the average flow velocity and the ζ potential by measuring the current-time relationship during electrolyte displacement process. A rigorous mathematical model is developed to describe the electrokinetic transport phenomena in such displacement process. Experiments were carried out for the NaCl electrolyte to evaluate the electroosmotic velocity and the ζ potential under various experimental conditions. The theoretical predictions for the current-time relationship are compared with measured results.
8861403
Design and implementation of the just-in-time retrieving policy for schedule-based distributed multimedia presentations
In order to provide the smooth playback of a distributed multimedia presentation, the object-retrieving engine for the player must fetch each object before its playback time. In this paper, a smart object-retrieving engine is proposed, which adopts a retrieving policy named the just-in-time policy. The policy expects the retrieval process of an object to finish right before the playback time of the object to achieve a better buffer utilization and network bandwidth efficiency. The proposed object-retrieving engine focuses on SMIL1.0-based multimedia presentations. By converting the synchronization relationship of objects in the SMIL 1.0 document to Real-Time Synchronization Model, which simplifies the handling of the synchronization relationship, and considering the end-to-end bandwidth as well as the user interactions, the object-retrieving engine determines the object request time for each object. The engine issues the request to fetch each object for the ongoing presentation at the object request time, and provides the player with proper media objects. The feasibility and better performance of the proposed just-in-time retrieving policy had been proved by performance measurements of system implementation.
137293
Performance issues of grid computing based on different architecture cluster computing platforms
This research paper discusses performance issues of cluster and grid computing platforms, and reasons to support the implementation of these computing infrastructures. A number of benchmark programs are executed in these computing systems, in order to perform performance analysis of experimental results. We are able to show that cluster platforms are excellent alternatives to access to supercomputing, due to its cost/performance, scalability and commodity components factors. In addition, we also show that grid technology is viable by increasing total system performance at no additional cost.