15680776
Veterans and internet use: implications for career preparation and development support
This research compares internet usage by veterans of the U.S. armed forces with internet usage by two reference groups - an educational-elite group and an educational-non-elite group. In terms of overall use, veterans are found to use the internet significantly less than members of the educational-elite reference group. This is cause for concern. Somewhat reassuringly, veterans are found to use the internet significantly more than members of the non-elite reference group.Effective and efficient use of the internet can potentially be enormously helpful to veterans in their transition out of armed forces life; and can help them adjust to, and get ahead in, civilian life and careers. This research suggests that agencies that look after veterans' interests, and provide counseling and training services to them, may find it rewarding to focus some of their attention towards increasing veterans' use of the internet. Thus this research has implications for issues related to career preparation and development support for veterans.
18557608
Performance Paradox : Information Technology Investments and Administrative Performance in the Case of the 50 U.S. State Governments
This study introduces the terminology of performance paradox in the context of IT (information technology) investment and use. Although it is somewhat related to the concept of productivity paradox, in the case of performance paradox, the dependent variable (i.e., the measure of performance) is not productivity, but some other measure of performance. This paper presents the results of a study that examined the relationship between IT investments by the 50 state governments of the United States and the administrative performance of these state governments. There are two parts to this study. In the first part, IT investments by state governments were related to multiple measures of state government performance, namely performance in financial management, human resource management, information technology management, capital management, and managing for results. In the second part of the study, IT investments by state governments were related to projected state government budget deficits. State budget deficits are used as a performance measure because they are an indicator of state government planning performance. Structural equation modeling was performed to analyze the data. The results indicate incidence of performance paradox. It appears as though the more U.S. state governments invest in IT, the worse they perform. However, there are also indications that with the passage of time, the relationship between IT investment and performance shows improvement. Thus, over time, the performance paradox becomes less pronounced. In some cases, it appears that past investments in IT actually help future performance.
39123560
High Quality Compression of Educational Videos Using Content-Adaptive Framework
With multimedia E-learning becoming popular, better compression algorithms are required that are space efficient but maintain the quality of video data, particularly slide and blackboard text. In this paper, an educational video compression technique is presented that dynamically allocates the space according to the content importance of each video segment in the educational videos. We present a phase correlation based motion estimation and compensation algorithm to encode important moving objects in efficient manner. Temporal coherence is exploited in a two phase manner. First, the frames with high similarity are categorized and encoded efficiently. Secondly, the compression ratio is adapted according to the frame content. The algorithm is compared with the state-of-the-art standards such as H.261, MPEG-4, etc. on large database. The comparison shows that for similar bit rates, the video quality for our algorithm is significantly better than the other methods.
391822
Using Stationary-Dynamic Camera Assemblies for Wide-area Video Surveillance and Selective Attention
In this paper, we present a prototype video surveillance system that uses stationary-dynamic (or master-slave) camera assemblies to achieve wide-area surveillance and selective focus-of-attention. We address two critical issues in deploying such camera assemblies in real-world applications: off-line camera calibration and on-line selective focus-ofattention. Our contributions over existing techniques are twofold: (1) in terms of camera calibration, our technique calibrates all degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) of both stationary and dynamic cameras, using a closed-form solution that is both efficient and accurate, and (2) in terms of selective focus-of-attention, our technique correctly handles dynamic changes in the scene and varying object depths. This is a significant improvement over existing techniques that use an expensive and non-adaptable table-look-up process.
21804891
Unsupervised texture segmentation using Gabor filters
Abstract This paper presents a texture segmentation algorithm inspired by the multi-channel filtering theory for visual information processing in the early stages of human visual system. The channels are characterized by a bank of Gabor filters that nearly uniformly covers the spatial-frequency domain, and a systematic filter selection scheme is proposed, which is based on reconstruction of the input image from the filtered images. Texture features are obtained by subjecting each (selected) filtered image to a nonlinear transformation and computing a measure of “energy” in a window around each pixel. A square-error clustering algorithm is then used to integrate the feature images and produce a segmentation. A simple procedure to incorporate spatial information in the clustering process is proposed. A relative index is used to estimate the “true” number of texture categories.
1788457
SQL Queries Over Unstructured Text Databases
Text documents often embed data that is structured in nature. By processing a text database with information extraction systems, we can define a variety of structured "relations" over which we can then issue SQL queries. Processing SQL queries in this text-based scenario presents multiple challenges. One key challenge is efficiency: information extraction is a time-consuming process, so query processing strategies should pick efficient extraction systems whenever possible, and also minimize the number of documents that they process. Another key challenge is result quality: extraction systems might output erroneous information or miss information that they should capture; also, efficiency-related query processing decisions (e.g., to avoid processing large numbers of useless documents) may compromise result completeness. To address these challenges, we characterize SQL query processing strategies in terms of their efficiency and result quality, and discuss the (user-specific) tradeoff between these two properties.
5467372
Organizing and Searching the World Wide Web of Facts - Step One: The One-Million Fact Extraction Challenge
Due to the inherent difficulty of processing noisy text, the potential of the Web as a decentralized repository of human knowledge remains largely untapped during Web search. The access to billions of binary relations among named entities would enable new search paradigms and alternative methods for presenting the search results. A first concrete step towards building large searchable repositories of factual knowledge is to derive such knowledge automatically at large scale from textual documents. Generalized contextual extraction patterns allow for fast iterative progression towards extracting one million facts of a given type (e.g., Person-BornIn-Year) from 100 million Web documents of arbitrary quality. The extraction starts from as few as 10 seed facts, requires no additional input knowledge or annotated text, and emphasizes scale and coverage by avoiding the use of syntactic parsers, named entity recognizers, gazetteers, and similar text processing tools and resources.