1503292
A Potential IRI Based Phishing Strategy
We anticipate a potential phishing strategy by obfuscation of Web links using Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI). In the IRI scheme, the glyphs of many characters look very similar while their Unicodes are different. Hence, certain different IRIs may show high similarity. The potential phishing attacks based on this strategy are very likely to happen in the near future with the boosting utilization of IRI. We report this potential phishing strategy to provoke much further dissections of related counter measures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
8941770
Efficient and flexible architectural support for dynamic monitoring
Recent impressive performance improvements in computer architecture have not led to significant gains in the case of debugging. Software debugging often relies on inserting run-time software checks. In many cases, however, it is hard to find the root cause of a bug. Moreover, program execution typically slows down significantly, often by 10--100 times.To address this problem, this paper introduces the intelligent watcher (iWatcher), a novel architectural scheme to monitor dynamic execution automatically, flexibly, and with minimal overhead. iWatcher associates program-specified monitoring functions with memory locations. When any such location is accessed, the monitoring function is automatically triggered with low overhead. To further reduce overhead and support rollback, iWatcher can optionally leverage thread-level speculation (TLS). The iWatcher architecture can be used to detect various bugs, including buffer overflow, accessing freed locations, memory leaks, stack-smashing and value-invariant violations. To evaluate iWatcher, we use seven applications with various real and injected bugs. Our results show that iWatcher detects many more software bugs than Valgrind, a well-known open-source bug detector. Moreover, iWatcher only induces a 0.1--179&percent; execution overhead, which is orders of magnitude less than Valgrind. Our sensitivity study shows that even with 20&percent; of the dynamic loads monitored in a program, iWatcher adds only 72--182&percent; overhead. Finally, TLS is effective at reducing overheads for programs with substantial monitoring.
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.
6564204
A robust method for shape-based 3D model retrieval
Proliferation of 3D models necessitates developing efficient methods for indexing or retrieving the models in a large database. Many previous methods for this purpose defined functions on concentric spheres as approximation of 3D geometry for spherical harmonic transform (SHT). In this paper, we point out that this is not robust as the surface of a model may shift between different shells under perturbation, and multi-layer of surfaces may exist in one shell, making the function definition ambiguous. To solve these problems, we propose a method to characterize 3D shape using delta functions. Then, spherical functions are defined by sampling in the frequency domain of the delta functions for SHT. By doing so, our method can support retrieval with controllable acuity, which benefits wider range of applications and facilitates customization to different users. Experiments have shown that our method is more robust than previous approaches.
5327855
Enhancing Commitment Machines
Agent interaction protocols are usually specified in terms of permissible sequences of messages. This representation is, unfortunately, brittle and does not allow for flexibility and robustness. The commitment machines framework of Yolum and Singh aims to provide more flexibility and robustness by defining interactions in terms of the commitments of agents. In this paper we identify a number of areas where the commitment machines framework needs improvement and propose an improved version. In particular we improve the way in which commitments are discharged and the way in which pre-conditions are specified.
33842812
Anycast-Based Cooperative Proxy Caching
As one of the most popular applications currently running on the Internet, the World Wide Web is of an exponential growth in size, which results in the network congestion and server overloading. Web caching as an important technique aims at reducing network traffic, server load, and user-perceived retrieval delays by replicating popular contents on proxy caches. In our paper, we develop an anycast-based cooperative web proxy caching mechanism. It puts response time, hop counts, self-organized load balancing, adaption, and self-configuration as primary concerns. In our scheme, anycast is used to bring a server “nearest” to a client to improve overall performance, all proxies in a local network consists an anycast group. The object placement and replacement problems are formulated as an optimization problem and the solution is obtained by using an anycast-based cooperative proxy caching algorithm. Some simulation experiments have been conduced to evaluate the proposed scheme in terms of a wide range of performance metrics. Analytical and experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms some existing algorithms in response time, hop counts.