7453479
Dienst: an architecture for distributed document libraries
As one of the five universities participating in the ARPA-sponsored Computer Science Technical Report project, we at Cornell have developed a digital library architecture called Dienst. Dienst is a protocol and implementation that provides Internet access to a distributed, decentralized multi-format document collection. The collection is managed by a set of interoperating Dienst servers distributed over the Internet. These servers provide three digital library services: repositories of multi-format documents; indexes into the document collection and search engines for these indexes; and user interfaces for browsing, searching, and accessing the collection.
9694396
Assigning Intonational Features in Synthesized Spoken Directions
Speakers convey much of the information hearers use to interpret discourse by varying prosodic features such as PHRASING, PITCH ACCENT placement, TUNE, and PITCH RANGE. The ability to emulate such variation is crucial to effective (synthetic) speech generation. While text-to-speech synthesis must rely primarily upon structural information to determine appropriate intonational features, speech synthesized from an abstract representation of the message to be conveyed may employ much richer sources. The implementation of an intonation assignment component for Direction Assistance, a program which generates spoken directions, provides a first approximation of how recent models of discourse structure can be used to control intonational variation in ways that build upon recent research in intonational meaning. The implementation further suggests ways in which these discourse models might be augmented to permit the assignment of appropriate intonational features.
37350008
On Edge-Disjoint Spanning Trees in Hypercubes
In this note we give a construction for obtaining the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in a hypercube. The result has applications to multicast communication in wormhole-routed parallel computers.
736283
System support for pervasive applications
Pervasive computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. Computational power will be available everywhere. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help people in accomplishing their tasks. For this vision to become a reality, developers must build applications that constantly adapt to a highly dynamic computing environment. To make the developers' task feasible, we present a system architecture for pervasive computing, called <i>one.world</i>. Our architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. It includes services, such as discovery and migration, that help to build applications and directly simplify the task of coping with constant change. We describe our architecture and its programming model and reflect on our own and others' experiences with using it.
62531827
Robust detection of people in thermal imagery
We present a new contour analysis technique to detect people in thermal imagery. Background-subtraction is first used to identify local regions-of-interest. Gradient information within each region is then combined into a contour saliency map. To extract contour fragments, a watershed-based selection algorithm is used. A path-constrained A* search is employed to complete any broken contours, from which silhouettes are formed. Results using thermal video sequences demonstrate the capability of the approach to robustly detect people across a wider range of environmental conditions than is possible with standard approaches.
8652205
Copy detection mechanisms for digital documents
In a digital library system, documents are available in digital form and therefore are more easily copied and their copyrights are more easily violated. This is a very serious problem, as it discourages owners of valuable information from sharing it with authorized users. There are two main philosophies for addressing this problem: prevention and detection. The former actually makes unauthorized use of documents difficult or impossible while the latter makes it easier to discover such activity.In this paper we propose a system for registering documents and then detecting copies, either complete copies or partial copies. We describe algorithms for such detection, and metrics required for evaluating detection mechanisms (covering accuracy, efficiency, and security). We also describe a working prototype, called COPS, describe implementation issues, and present experimental results that suggest the proper settings for copy detection parameters.
239186
Recognizing human action efforts: an adaptive three-mode PCA framework
We present a computational framework capable of labeling the effort of an action corresponding to the perceived level of exertion by the performer (low - high). The approach initially factorizes examples (at different efforts) of an action into its three-mode principal components to reduce the dimensionality. Then a learning phase is introduced to compute expressive-feature weights to adjust the model's estimation of effort to conform to given perceptual labels for the examples. Experiments are demonstrated recognizing the efforts of a person carrying bags of different weight and for multiple people walking at different paces.