36092896
Fractionally cascaded information in a sensor network
207794
Trade-Offs between Stretch Factor and Load-Balancing Ratio in Routing on Growth-Restricted Graphs
An unweighted graph has density rho and growth rate k if the number of nodes in every ball with radius r is bounded by rhork. The communication graphs of wireless networks and peer-to-peer networks often have constant bounded density and small growth rate. In this paper, we study the trade-off between two quality measures for routing in growth-restricted graphs. The two measures we consider are the stretch factor, which measures the lengths of the routing paths, and the load-balancing ratio, which measures the evenness of the traffic distribution. We show that if the routing algorithm is required to use paths with stretch factor c, then its load-balancing ratio is bounded by O(rho1/k(n/c)1-1/k), and the bound is tight in the worst case. We show the application and extension of the trade-off to the wireless network routing and VLSI layout design. We also present a load-balanced routing algorithm with the stretch factor constraint in an online setting, in which the routing requests come one by one.
10628567
Shape Segmentation and Applications in Sensor Networks
Many sensor network protocols in the literature implicitly assume that sensor nodes are deployed uniformly inside a simple geometric region. When the real deployment deviates from that, we often observe degraded performance. It is desirable to have a generic approach to handle a sensor field with complex shape. In this paper, we propose a segmentation algorithm that partitions an irregular sensor field into nicely shaped pieces such that algorithms and protocols that assume a nice sensor field can be applied inside each piece. Across the segments, problem dependent structures specify how the segments and data collected in these segments are integrated. This unified topology-adaptive spatial partitioning would benefit many settings that currently assume a nicely shaped sensor field. Our segmentation algorithm does not require sensor locations and only uses network connectivity information. Each node is given a 'flow direction' that directs away from the network boundary. A node with no flow direction becomes a sink, and attracts other nodes in the same segment. We evaluate the performance improvements by integrating shape segmentation with applications such as distributed indices and random sampling.
45076012
Discrete Mobile Centers 


Abstract. We propose a new randomized algorithm for maintaining a set of clusters among moving nodes in the plane. Given a specified cluster radius, our algorithm selects and maintains a variable subset of the nodes as cluster centers. This subset has the property that (1) balls of the given radius centered at the chosen nodes cover all the others and (2) the number of centers selected is a constant-factor approximation of the minimum possible. As the nodes move, an event-based kinetic data structure updates the clustering as necessary. This kinetic data structure is shown to be responsive, efficient, local, and compact. The produced cover is also smooth, in the sense that wholesale cluster re-arrangements are avoided. This clustering algorithm is distributed in nature and can enable numerous applications in ad hoc wireless networks, where mobile devices must be interconnected to perform various tasks collaboratively.

47344583
Double rulings for information brokerage in sensor networks
We study the problem of information brokerage in sensor networks, where information consumers (sinks, users) search for data acquired by information producers (sources). In-network storage such as geographical hash table (GHT) has been proposed to store data at rendezvous nodes for consumers to retrieve. In this paper, we propose a double rulings scheme that stores data replicas on a curve instead of one or multiple isolated sensors. The consumer travels along another curve that is guaranteed to intersect the producer curve. The double rulings is a natural extension of the flat hashing scheme such as GHTs. It has improved query locality--i.e., consumers close to producers find the data quickly--and structured aggregate queries, i.e., a consumer following a curve is able to retrieve all the data. Furthermore, by the flexibility of retrieval mechanisms, we have better routing robustness (as multiple retrieval paths are available) and data robustness against regional node failures. We show by simulation that the double rulings scheme provides reduced communication costs and more balanced traffic load on the sensors.
2954526
Analysis of Incomplete Data and an Intrinsic-Dimension Helly Theorem
The analysis of incomplete data is a long-standing challenge in practical statistics. When, as is typical, data objects are represented by points in ℝd, incomplete data objects correspond to affine subspaces (lines or Δ-flats). With this motivation we study the problem of finding the minimum intersection radiusr(ℒ) of a set of lines or Δ-flats ℒ: the least r such that there is a ball of radius r intersecting every flat in ℒ. Known algorithms for finding the minimum enclosing ball for a point set (or clustering by several balls) do not easily extend to higher-dimensional flats, primarily because “distances” between flats do not satisfy the triangle inequality. In this paper we show how to restore geometry (i.e., a substitute for the triangle inequality) to the problem, through a new analog of Helly’s theorem. This “intrinsic-dimension” Helly theorem states: for any family ℒ of Δ-dimensional convex sets in a Hilbert space, there exist Δ+2 sets ℒ′⊆ℒ such that r(ℒ)≤2r(ℒ′). Based upon this we present an algorithm that computes a (1+ε)-core set ℒ′⊆ℒ, |ℒ′|=O(Δ4/ε), such that the ball centered at a point c with radius (1+ε)r(ℒ′) intersects every element of ℒ. The running time of the algorithm is O(nΔ+1dpoly (Δ/ε)). For the case of lines or line segments (Δ=1), the (expected) running time of the algorithm can be improved to O(ndpoly (1/ε)). We note that the size of the core set depends only on the dimension of the input objects and is independent of the input size n and the dimension d of the ambient space.
12419149
On the use of words and n-grams for Chinese information retrieval
In the processing of Chinese documents and queries in information retrieval (IR), one has to identify the units that are used as indexes. Words and n-grams have been used as indexes in several previous studies, which showed that both kinds of indexes lead to comparable IR performances. In this study, we carry out more experiments on different ways to segment documents and queries, and to combine words with n-grams. Our experiments show that a combination of the longest-matching algorithm with single characters is the best choice.
11423197
Unsupervised Learning of Dependency Structure for Language Modeling
This paper presents a dependency language model (DLM) that captures linguistic constraints via a dependency structure, i.e., a set of probabilistic dependencies that express the relations between headwords of each phrase in a sentence by an acyclic, planar, undirected graph. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we incorporate the dependency structure into an n-gram language model to capture long distance word dependency. Second, we present an unsupervised learning method that discovers the dependency structure of a sentence using a bootstrapping procedure. Finally, we evaluate the proposed models on a realistic application (Japanese Kana-Kanji conversion). Experiments show that the best DLM achieves an 11.3% error rate reduction over the word trigram model.
9243283
Self-occlusion immune video tracking of objects in cluttered environments
We propose a new approach that uses a motion-estimation based framework for video tracking of objects in the presence of self-occlusion in cluttered environments. What makes our work different from others is that, instead of carrying out the motion estimation between two adjacent frames, we tackle the self-occlusion problem from the view of multiple frames. The heart of our approach lies in extracting features appearing in different time frames, genesis frames, and setting up a motion estimation scheme through multiple applications of Kalman filtering based on the different genesis indices. To make the tracked object look visually familiar to the human observer, the system also makes its best attempt at extracting the boundary contour of the object - a difficult problem in its own right, since self-occlusion created by any rotational motion of the tracked object would cause large sections of the boundary contour in the previous frame to disappear in the current frame. Our approach has been tested on a wide variety of video sequences, some of which are presented.
15028798
An active networking approach to service customization
Active networking is a powerful technology to insert new functionality into networking. We look at how active networking technology can be used to customize network services. We observe that users often want slightly different versions of network services such as multicast and network quality of service. We propose to implement these services as a base service that provides the basic service functionality and a customization code module that allows users to customize the service. The customization module uses a service-specific API to modify service behavior. We compare this architecture with the traditional active networking architecture based on execution environments and active applications. We also present several examples of customizable network services.
9676949
Automatic recognition of eye blinking in spontaneously occurring behavior
Previous research in automatic facial expression recognition has been limited to recognition of gross expression categories (e.g., joy or anger) in posed facial behavior under well-controlled conditions (e.g., frontal pose and minimal out-of-plane head motion). We developed a system that detects discrete and important facial actions, (e.g., eye blinking), in spontaneously occurring facial behavior with non-frontal pose, moderate out-of-plane head motion, and occlusion. The system recovers 3D motion parameters, stabilizes facial regions, extracts motion and appearance information, and recognizes discrete facial actions in spontaneous facial behavior. We tested the system in video data from a 2-person interview. Subjects were ethnically diverse, action units occurred during speech, and out-of-plane motion and occlusion from head motion and glasses were common. The video data were originally collected to answer substantive questions in psychology, and represent a substantial challenge to automated AU recognition. In the analysis of 335 single and multiple blinks and non-blinks, the system achieved 98% accuracy.