13392863
A Smart Itsy Bitsy Spider for the Web
As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative are expected to worsen as the amount of online informaproject, this research proposes an intelligent agent aption increases. This is mainly due to the problems of proach to Web searching. In this experiment, we develinformation overload and vocabulary differences (Chen, oped two Web personal spiders based on best first 1994; Furnas, Landauer, Gomez, & Dumais, 1987). search and genetic algorithm techniques, respectively. Many researchers consider that devising a scalable apThese personal spiders can dynamically take a user’s selected starting homepages and search for the most proach to Web search is critical to the success of Internet closely related homepages in the Web, based on the and Intranet services, and other current and future Nalinks and keyword indexing. A graphical, dynamic, Javational Information Infrastructure (NII) applications based interface was developed and is available for Web (Chen & Schatz, 1994; Schatz & Chen, 1996). access. A system architecture for implementing such an The main information retrieval mechanisms provided agent-based spider is presented, followed by detailed discussions of benchmark testing and user evaluation by the prevailing Internet WWW-based software are results. In benchmark testing, although the genetic algobased on either keyword search (e.g., Lycos, Alta Vista, rithm spider did not outperform the best first search spiand Yahoo servers) or hypertext browsing (e.g., NCSA der, we found both results to be comparable and comMosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft Internet Explementary. In user evaluation, the genetic algorithm spiplorer) . Keyword search often results in low precision, der obtained significantly higher recall value than that of the best first search spider. However, their precision poor recall, and slow response time because of the limitavalues were not statistically different. The mutation protions of indexing and communication methods (bandcess introduced in genetic algorithm allows users to find width) , controlled language-based interfaces (the vocabother potential relevant homepages that cannot be exulary problem), and the inability of searchers themselves plored via a conventional local search process. In addition, we found the Java-based interface to be a necesto fully articulate their needs. Furthermore, browsing sary component for design of a truly interactive and dyallows users to explore only a very small portion of the namic Web agent. large Web information space. An extensive information
818365
Effects of luminance quantization error on color image processing
A common approach to color image processing is to apply monochrome techniques to the quantized intensity component. However, the quantization error in the intermediate intensity image propagates to the final processed image. This can lead to significant distortion, depending on the input RGB values and on the particular image processing function being applied. A theoretical analysis of the worst-case quantization error is presented. Experimental results with histogram equalization demonstrate how the histogram resolution affects the performance.
206564363
High-Resolution Histogram Modification of Color Images
Abstract For color images, histogram modification is usually applied to the quantized luminance component. However, the luminance quantization error can be significantly magnified by the transformation function, leading to distortion in the processed image. The propagation of the quantization error is analyzed theoretically to determine the worst-case error, The relationship between the number of luminance quantization levels and the output quantization error is derived. Experimental results with histogram equalization demonstrate that the use of a higher resolution histogram leads to reduced distortion as well as a "flatter" output histogram.
46320705
Intelligent Internet searching engine based on hybrid simulated annealing
The World Wide Web (WWW) based Internet services have become a major channel for information delivery. For the same reason, information overload also has become a serious problem to the users of such services. It has been estimated that the amount of information stored on the Internet doubled every 18 months. The speed of increase of home pages can be even faster, some people estimated that it doubled every six months. Therefore, a scalable approach to support Internet searching is critical to the success of Internet services and other current or future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. We discuss using a modified version of simulated annealing algorithm to develop an intelligent personal spider (agent), which is based on automatic textual analysis of the Internet documents and hybrid simulated annealing.
15819383
Watermark design pattern for intellectual property protection in electronic commerce applications
We propose watermark design patterns to model the characteristics of digital watermarks in electronic commerce applications. A watermark design pattern preserves the properties of a digital watermark in a binary tree representation. Applying the survey results and characteristics of existing watermarking techniques, watermark design patterns for four media (data-video, image, audio, and text), are derived and expressed as WDP/sub video/, WDP/sub image/, WDP/sub audio/ and WDP/sub text/ respectively. Our results show that watermarks for video and audio data have to be invisible and robust, and watermarks for text data has to be invisible and fragile, while watermark for image has to be either visible and fragile, or invisible and robust for electronic commerce applications. The watermark design pattern is further used to relate electronic commerce applications and digital watermarking techniques. This facilitates electronic commerce application developers to select adequate digital watermarking techniques and off-the-shelf systems for their development.
10473585
Metadata design for Chinese medicine digital library using XML
The development of Chinese medicine has been growing rapidly and is beginning to draw significant attention globally. In Hong Kong in particular, the government has targeted Chinese medicine as one of its major future developments. A system for registering Chinese medical practitioners is being set up and a Chinese medicine port for medical manufacturing and research is being investigated. Although it has drawn significant attention, information about Chinese medicine is not yet widely available on the Internet, and searching for such information is extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an XML metadata design for Chinese medicine. The system encompasses a register server, information servers, a search engine and client programs that have been developed to browse and search the XML documents that are available in distributed Chinese medicine digital libraries.
5563875
Intelligent agents for retrieving chinese Web financial news
As the popularity of World Wide Web increases, many newspapers expand their services by providing news information on the Web in order to be competitive and increase benefit. The Web provides real time dissemination of financial news to investors. However, most investors find it difficult to search for the financial information of interest from the huge Web information space. Most of the commercial search engines are not user friendly and do not provide any tailor-made intelligent agents to search for relevant Web documents on behalf of users. Users have to exert a lot of effort to submit an appropriate query to obtain the information they want. Intelligent agents that learn user preferences and monitor the postings of Web information providers are desired. In this paper, we present an intelligent agent that utilizes user profiles and user feedback to search for the Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. A Chinese indexing component is developed to index the continuously fetched Chinese financial news articles. User profiles capture the basic knowledge of user preferences based on the sources of news articles, the regions of the news reported, categories of industries related, the listed companies, and user specified keywords. User feedback captures the semantics of the user rated news articles. The search engine will rank the top 20 news articles that users are most interested in based on these inputs. Experiments were conducted to measure the performance of the agents based on the inputs from user profile and user feedback.
9223359
Image browsing for infomediaries
Information intermediary or infomediary is likely to claim a major segment of the revenue of e-commerce transactions. Infomediaries are e-commerce companies leveraging the Internet to unite buyers and suppliers in a single efficient virtual marketplace to facilitate the consummation of a transaction. Most of the search facilities in the infomediaries are text- and navigation-based, for example by keyword and category searches. The search facility can handle most of the products, but it is inefficient to handle feature-based products, such as textile and shoes with different colors and textures. It will be difficult for buyers to speck searches of feature-based products in describing the product features and characteristics. For example, it is hot easy to describe the pattern and color of a T-shirt using textural expression. In this paper, we propose an image browsing technique to facilitate search of feature-based products for infomediaries. We implemented an image-based retrieval system with the proposed image browsing technique for textile industrial and evaluated the performance of the browsing technique.
39221190
A personal agent for Chinese financial news on the Web
As the Web has become a major channel of information dissemination, many newspapers expand their services by providing electronic versions of news information on the Web. However, most investors find it difficult to search for the financial information of interest from the huge Web information space-information overloading problem. In this article, we present a personal agent that utilizes user profiles and user relevance feedback to search for the Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. A Chinese indexing component is developed to index the continuously fetched Chinese financial news articles. User profiles capture the basic knowledge of user preferences based on the sources of news articles, the regions of the news reported, categories of industries related, the listed companies, and user-specified keywords. User feedback captures the semantics of the user rated news articles. The search engine ranks the top 20 news articles that users are most interested in and report to the user daily or on demand. Experiments are conducted to measure the performance of the agents based on the inputs from user profiles and user feedback. It shows that simply using the user profiles does not increase the precision of the retrieval. However, user relevance feedback helps to increase the performance of the retrieval as the user interact with the system until it reaches the optimal performance. Combining both user profiles and user relevance feedback produces the best performance.
36980746
Decision tree construction for data mining on grid computing
Decision tree is one of the frequently used methods in data mining for searching prediction information. Due to its characteristics which are suitable for parallelism, it has been widely adopted in high performance field and developed into various parallel decision tree algorithms to deal with huge data and complex computation. Following the development of other technology fields, grid computing is regarded as the extension of PC cluster and therefore it future research development is highly valued. This new wave of Internet application is the 3rd generation of Internet applications following the traditional Internet and Web application. We have presented a grid-based decision tree architecture, and hope it can be applied on both parallel and sequential algorithms for the decision tree applications. Also, based on the scope and model of data mining applied in grid environment as well as user equivalent perspective, grid roles can be categorized into three types. We are hoping that through these definitions, software developers can define clear system processes and differentiate the application scope for software applications. To fulfil our architecture, we first apply an existing parallel decision tree algorithm-SPRINT algorithm in the grid environment. The performance and differences in many other areas are compared using different sizes of dataset. The experimental results are used for future reference and further development.
6822991
An Integrated Pipeline of Decompression, Simplification and Rendering for Irregular Volume Data
Very large irregular-grid volume data sets are typically represented as tetrahedral mesh and require substantial disk I/O and rendering computation. One effective way to reduce this demanding resource requirement is compression. Previous research showed how rendering and decompression of a losslessly compressed irregular-grid data set can be integrated into a one-pass computation. This work advances the state of the art one step further by showing that a losslessly compressed irregular volume data set can be simplified while it is being decompressed and that simplification, decompression, and rendering can again be integrated into a pipeline that requires only a single pass through the data sets. Since simplification is a form of lossy compression, the on-the-fly volume simplification algorithm provides a powerful mechanism to dynamically create versions of a tetrahedral mesh at multiple resolution levels directly from its losslessly compressed representation, which also corresponds to the finest resolution level. In particular, an irregular-grid volume renderer can exploit this multi-resolution representation to maintain interactivity on a given hardware/software platform by automatically adjusting the amount of rendering computation that could be afforded, or performing so called time-critical rendering. The proposed tetrahedral mesh simplification algorithm and its integration with volume decompression and rendering has been successfully implemented in the Gatun system. Performance measurements on the Gatun prototype show that simplification only adds less than 5% of performance overhead on an average and with multi-resolution pre-simplification the end-to-end rendering delay indeed decreases in an approximately linear fashion with respect to the simplification ratio.