13990206
Towards a flash search engine based on expressive semantics
Flash, as a multimedia format, becomes more and more popular on the Web. However, previous works on Flash are totally based on low-level features, which make it unpractical to build a content-based Flash search engine. To address this problem, our paper proposes expressive semantics for bridging the gap between low-level features and user queries. To smoothly incorporate expressive semantics into a search engine, an eigenvector-based model is devised to map a user query to expressive semantics with the aid of link analysis method. Our experiment results confirm that expressive semantics is a promising approach to understanding and hence searching Flash movies more efficiently.
7816927
An antiphishing strategy based on visual similarity assessment
The authors' proposed antiphishing strategy uses visual characteristics to identify potential phishing sites and measure suspicious pages similarity to actual sites registered with the system. The first of two sequential processes in the SiteWatcher system runs on local email servers and monitors emails for keywords and suspicious URLs. The second process then compares the potential phishing pages against actual pages and assesses visual similarities between them in terms of key regions, page layouts, and overall styles. The approach is designed to be part of an enterprise antiphishing solution.
1735256
A Web-Based CAD System for Learning and Laboratory Purpose
A Web-based CAD system for learning and laboratory purpose is presented in this paper. The system serves as a three-in-one courseware: a pedagogical tool for teaching, an experimental tool for learning and a programming kit for laboratory. As a pedagogical tool, the system can help teachers interactively demonstrate the properties of curves and their associated equations with animations. The same tool can be used by students to play the animations themselves. As a programming kit, the same CAD system allows some CAD functions to be programmable for laboratory purpose. All activities are available on-line through a standard Web browser. A prototype is implemented and a user study is conducted for evaluation of the system. The result shows that the students like the system since it allows them to learn and practice the subject at home.
30505871
User Interest Detection on Web Pages for Building Personalized Information Agent
In this paper we propose a vision-based approach to detecting user’s interests on web pages. This approach first splits a web page into several blocks of topics according to visual cues and then analyzes the layout structure of the page based on these blocks. The user’s interests are detected according to his browsing behaviors on the blocks and the layout structure of the web page. A personalized information agent is also developed to automatically extract new content from those web pages according to the user’s interests. Our experiments show that our proposed approach to detecting user’s interests on web pages achieves satisfactory accuracy and the personalized information agent significantly saves user’s browsing time and improves user’s browsing experience.
7021428
An online composite graphics recognition approach based on matching of spatial relation graphs
A spatial relation graph (SRG) and its partial matching method are proposed for online composite graphics representation and recognition. The SRG-based approach emphasizes three characteristics of online graphics recognition: partial, structural, and independent of stroke order and stroke number. A constrained partial permutation strategy is also proposed to reduce the computational cost of matching two SRGs, which is originally an NP-complete problem as is graph isomorphism. Experimental results show that our proposed SRG-based approach is both efficient and effective for online composite graphics recognition in our sketch-based graphics input system - SmartSketchpad.
11837218
Using Web Based Answer Hunting System to Promote Collaborative Learning
In this paper, we share our pedagogical experience to motivate and facilitate an interactive and collaborative learning atmosphere by using an answer hunting system. In the software engineering practice course we are teaching, a problem that may deteriorate the learning quality is that, the students lack the opportunities of communication and discussion with the instructor both in class and out of class since they do not have many common time slots. Therefore, a web based answer hunting system is carefully designed and built to facilitate the communications between the students and instructor, and among the students. This system is designed based on the Q&A competition metaphor. The students are encouraged to participate in the competition to learn more knowledge, share more knowledge, and earn more participation marks.
864760
Bayesian Tensor Inference for Sketch-Based Facial Photo Hallucination
This paper develops a statistical inference approach, Bayesian Tensor Inference, for style transformation between photo images and sketch images of human faces. Motivated by the rationale that image appearance is determined by two cooperative factors: image content and image style, we first model the interaction between these factors through learning a patch-based tensor model. Second, by introducing a common variation space, we capture the inherent connection between photo patch space and sketch patch space, thus building bidirectional mapping/inferring between the two spaces. Subsequently, we formulate a Bayesian approach accounting for the statistical inference from sketches to their corresponding photos in terms of the learned tensor model. Comparative experiments are conducted to contrast the proposed method with state-of-the-art algorithms for facial sketch synthesis in a novel face hallucination scenario: sketch-based facial photo hallucination. The encouraging results obtained convincingly validate the effectiveness of our method.
23049563
A Framework for Multi-Agent Belief Revision, Part I: The Role of Ontology
In this paper, we identify that failure to cater for the various forms of heterogeneity is one of the major drawbacks of the previous research on multi-agent belief revision (MABR). Three major categories of heterogeneity, namely social, semantic and syntactic heterogeneity are clarified. Several issues posed by such heterogeneities are addressed in the context of BR. The use of ontology is proposed as a powerful tool to tackle the heterogeneity issues so as to achieve the necessary reliable communication find system interoperability required by MABR. The question of what kind of ontology would be suitable to support MABR in a heterogenous setting is answered in Part I. In its sequel, Part II, a general framework for MABR is presented based on a shared knowledge structure which serves as the theoretical basis for ontology design.
11440085
A Mapping Methodology for Designing Software Task Pipelines for Embedded Signal Processing
In this paper, we present a methodology for mapping an Embedded Signal Processing (ESP) application onto HPC platforms such that the throughput performance is maximized. Previous approaches used a linear pipelined execution model which restrict the mapping choices. We show that the “optimal” solution obtained under that model can be improved, using the proposed execution model. Based on the new model, a three-step task mapping methodology is developed. The methodology is demonstrated by designing Software Task Pipelines for modern radar and sonar signal processing applications. Experimental results show improved performance using our approach over those obtained by previous approaches.
16581375
Visualizing the scientific world and its evolution
We propose an approach to visualizing the scientific world and its evolution by constructing minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and a two‐dimensional map of scientific journals using the database of the Science Citation Index (SCI) during 1994–2001. The structures of constructed MSTs are consistent with the sorting of SCI categories. The map of science is constructed based on our MST results. Such a map shows the relation among various knowledge clusters and their citation properties. The temporal evolution of the scientific world can also be delineated in the map. In particular, this map clearly shows a linear structure of the scientific world, which contains three major domains including physical sciences, life sciences, and medical sciences. The interaction of various knowledge fields can be clearly seen from this scientific world map. This approach can be applied to various levels of knowledge domains.
893220
PathExpander: Architectural Support for Increasing the Path Coverage of Dynamic Bug Detection
Dynamic software bug detection tools are commonly used because they leverage run-time information. However, they suffer from a fundamental limitation, the path coverage problem: they detect bugs only in taken paths but not in non-taken paths. In other words, they require bugs to be exposed in the monitored execution. This paper makes one of the first attempts to address this fundamental problem with a simple hardware extension. First, we propose PathExpander, a novel design that dynamically increases the code path coverage of dynamic bug detection tools with no programmer involvement. As a program executes, PathExpander selectively executes non-taken paths in a sandbox without side effects. This enables dynamic bug detection tools to find bugs that are present in these non-taken paths and would otherwise not be detected. Second, we propose a simple hardware extension to control the huge overhead in its pure software implementation to a moderate level. To further minimize overhead, PathExpander provides an optimization option to execute non-taken paths on idle cores in chip multi-processor architectures that support speculative execution. To evaluate PathExpander, we use three dynamic bug detection methods: dynamic software-only checker (CCured), dynamic hardware-assisted checker (iWatcher) and assertions; and conduct side-by-side comparison with PathExpander's counterpart software implementation. Our experiments with seven buggy programs using general inputs that do not expose the tested bugs show that PathExpander is able to help these tools detect 21 (out of 38) tested bugs that are otherwise missed. This is because PathExpander increases the code coverage of each test case from 40% to 65% on average, based on the branch coverage metric. When applications are tested with multiple inputs, the cumulative coverage also significantly improves by 19%. We also show that PathExpander introduces modest false positives (4 on average) and overhead (less than 9.9%). The 3-4 orders of magnitude lower overhead compared with pure-software implementation further justifies the hardware design in PathExpander