36512646
A Peer-to-Peer Communication System
The demand of communicating anywhere, anytime on any device is growing with the development of modern information technology. Current instant messaging services enable people to be aware of each other's presence and to exchange text information. However, almost all of these services are based on client/server architecture. If servers crash, all connections are lost. As an alternative, peer-to-peer architecture basically relies on clients, but existing systems usually emphasize sharing of computing resources and files. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer communication system, which combines the advantages of instant messaging services and peer-to-peer networking. In the system, in addition to being aware of each other's presence, users can simultaneously attend multiple multimedia meetings with each meeting allowing multiple attendees. Users have full control over the exchange of real-time text/voice/video information in these meetings.
16143751
Portrait video phone
As the Internet and wirless networks are developed rapidly, the demand of communicating anywhere, anytime on any device emerges. However, most of the current wireless networks still work in low bandwidths, and mobile devices still suffer from weak computational power, short battery lifetime and limited display capability. We developed portrait video phone systems that can run on Pcs and Pocket Pcs at very low bit rates through the Internet. The core technology that portrait video phones employ is the so-called portrait video (or bi-level video) codec. Portrait video codec first converts a full-color video into a black/white image sequence and then compresses it into a black/white portrait-like video. Portrait video processes clearer shape, smoother motion, shorter initial latency, and cheaper computational cost than MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.263 for low bandwidths. Typically the portrait video phone provides QCIF-size video with a frame rate of 5-15 fps for a 9.6 Kbps video bandwidth. The portrait video is so small that it can even be transmitted through an HTTP proxy as text. Experiments show that the portrait video phones work well on ordinary GSM wireless telecommunication networks.
31845675
Alternating Fixpoint Theory for Logic Programs with Priority
van Gelder's alternating fixpoint theory has proven to be a very useful tool for unifying and characterizing various semantics for logic programs without priority. In this paper we propose an extension of van Gelder's alternating fixpoint theory and show that it can be used as a general semantic framework for logic programs with priority. Specifically, we define three declarative and model-theoretic semantics in this framework for prioritied logic programs: prioritized answer sets, prioritized regular extensions and prioritized well-founded model. We show that all of these semantics are natural generalizations of the corresponding semantics for logic programs without priority. We also show that these semantics have some other desirable properties. In particular, they can handle conflicts caused indirectly by the priorities.
2174685
Privacy-enhancing personalized web search
Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals. However, users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines. On the other hand, privacy is not absolute, and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user. Thus, a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection. This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles. These profiles summarize a user.s interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests. Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine. Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings. More importantly, results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information, which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information.
1098870
Hierarchical Document Clustering using Frequent Itemsets
A major challenge in document clustering is the extremely high dimensionality. For example, the vocabulary for a document set can easily be thousands of words. On the other hand, each document often contains a small fraction of words in the vocabulary. These features require special handlings. Another requirement is hierarchical clustering where clustered documents can be browsed according to the increasing specificity of topics. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of frequent itemsets, which comes from association rule mining, for document clustering. The intuition of our clustering criterion is that each cluster is identified by some common words, called frequent itemsets, for the documents in the cluster. Frequent itemsets are also used to produce a hierarchical topic tree for clusters. By focusing on frequent items, the dimensionality of the document set is drastically reduced. We show that this method outperforms best existing methods in terms of both clustering accuracy and scalability.
52857898
Schema Discovery for Semistructured Data
To formulate a meaningful query on semistructured data, such as on the Web, that matches some of the source's structure, we need first to discover something about how the information is represented in the source. This is referred to as schema discovery and was considered for a single object recently. In the case of multiple objects, the task of schema discovery is to identify typical structuring information of those objects as a whole. We motivate the schema discovery in this general setting and propose a framework and algorithm for it. We apply the framework to a real Web database, the Internet Movies Database, to discover typical schema of most voted movies.
52857819
QUICK: graphical user interface to multiple databases
Formulating queries to access multiple databases can be a formidable task, especially when many terms from various databases and complex constraints are involved. To specify a multidatabase query, the user usually has to search through documents for exact database terms and learn the multidatabase language. The report presents QUICK (QUery Interface to CPL-Kleisli), a graphical user interface to multiple databases, CPL is a high-level multidatabase language built on top of an open query system Kleisli. QUICK allows users to handle overwhelming information from different data sources in an intuitive and uniform manner. The query specification is reduced to specifying user's terms in his/her own world, selecting paths and specifying constraints in a graph. QUICK is able to automatically generate a CPL query that corresponds to the user's intent.