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.
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.
1955475
An Answer Fusion Model for Web-based Question Answering
Many question answering systems are now focusing on the research of question-based answer mining from the Web information or snippets returned by the search engine. However, their main goal is only to get the related answers instead of the correct answers because answers are inconsistent. An answer fusion model and method is proposed, which makes semantic analysis of the various answers to the same question returned by search engines or question answering systems and return the fused answer based on fusion rules and data quality. Experimental test in our QA system shows that the method is effective.
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.
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.
1862113
iWatcher: efficient architectural support for software debugging
Recent impressive performance improvements in computer architecture have not led to significant gains in ease 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), novel architectural support to monitor dynamic execution with minimal overhead, automatically, and flexibly. 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 leverage Thread-Level Speculation (TLS). To test iWatcher, we use applications with various 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 4-80% execution overhead, which is orders of magnitude less than Valgrind. Even with 20% of the dynamic loads monitored in a program, iWatcher adds only 66-174% overhead. Finally, TLS is effective at reducing overheads for programs with substantial monitoring.
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.
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.
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.
5248211
A smart bi-directional telemetry unit for retinal prosthetic device
This paper describes a smart bi-directional telemetry unit for an implantable retinal prosthetic device. The system is designed to deliver 250 mW to the intra-ocular unit via an inductive link and provide wireless communication capability. A novel dual frequency carrier approach is used to optimize the power link for maximum transfer efficiency and the forward telemetry for high data rates. The power link uses a smart feedback system via reverse telemetry to compensate for instantaneous changes in power level due to coil misalignment and load variations. The system is optimized to minimize the power losses in the analog front-end of the intraocular unit while ensuring proper device operation. Preliminary results are shown in AMI 1.6 /spl mu/m bulk CMOS process for the reverse telemetry and power feedback system.