46672294
Guest editorial
Why model, analyze and build trust in the context of Agent-based systems? : An additional argument. One of the more interesting and relevant characteristics of the agent paradigm is the so-called autonomous behavior of the agent. We can say that almost each deÐnition of agent includes this concept of autonomy ; even if not always in the literature, this characteristic is so well deÐned and completely shared. In particular, an autonomous agent acts without the direct and complete intervention or control of any other agent (either user or software). More precisely, an autonomous agent can independently look for and acquire information, react to local contexts and events, have an evolving internal state, learn or evolve, and decide how and with whom to achieve a task that is not completely speciÐed. In general, when an agent has to collaborate with other agents to obtain its own goals (and this is in fact necessary for software agents that have limited resources and abilities, and operate in open and uncertain worlds), it should allocate (and receive allocation of) tasks to or by other agents. In sum, the characterization of an agent as autonomous and its need for collaboration with other agents to realize its own plans is one of the main reasons for introducing the notion of trust, analyzing its internal components, and adapting it to the various collaborative contexts. In this sense, to build an adequate model of trust would allow an agent (user) to evaluate
27173472
Guest editorial
increasing relevance of security, safety and privacy issues 2 and of d the their perceived or subjective counterpartÈin IT and in particular on the web ; fact that trust is essential for any organization, or any human social d the relation, and thus should be maintained and created in new forms of computer supported collaboration and computer mediated communities ; fact that what is growing on the web is a new market, Electronic d the Commerce (EC), and since a market is mainly based on selÐsh interests, it is open to cheating and to competition between attractive alternatives. Hence, this new virtual market strongly requires trust in the chosen partner, trust in rules and procedures, trust in guaranties and enforcing authorities.
21500667
Efficient block-matching motion estimation based on Integral frame attributes
Block-based motion estimation is widely used in video compression for exploiting video temporal redundancy. Although effective, the process is arguably the most computationally intensive part of a typical video encoder. To speed up the process, a large number of fast block-matching algorithms (BMAs) have been proposed for motion estimation by limiting the number of search locations or simplifying the measure of match between the two blocks under comparison. In this paper we propose a new BMA that measures the match by using such features as block sum and block variance, which can be easily computed using integral frame attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed BMA can reduce the computational complexity notably and achieve compression performance very close to that of existing BMAs using conventional block-matching measures.
20191236
Optimal Rebating Strategies in Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution
Developed the algorithms that were the firm's core Intellectual Property (IP) at founding.
31919378
A risk management of ASPs
Application service providers (ASPs) provide access to application software over wide area networks and have been viewed as a means of making the benefits of outsourcing available to small businesses. However, many enterprise ASPs get the majority of their revenue from very large businesses while many vertical niche ASPs get their revenue from small businesses. We analyze this seeming anomaly from a risk management perspective. ASPs present a greater risk management problem to would-be customers than traditional outsourcing. We analyze the nature of the risk differences and then propose a model of how would-be customers process those risks. In our model, prospects first assess whether they can tolerate the worst case scenario and if they are able to do due diligence on the likely outcome. They consider benefits only if one of the previous assertions is true. The worst case scenario for enterprise applications is truly dire and only technologically sophisticated businesses are better able to identify the true risk profile. For vertical niche ASPs the worst case scenario is relatively mild, but economies of scale make the benefits relatively more appealing to small businesses.
181942
Search engine driven author disambiguation
In scholarly digital libraries, author disambiguation is an important task that attributes a scholarly work with specific authors. This is critical when individuals share the same name. We present an approach to this task that analyzes the results of automatically-crafted Web searches. A key observation is that pages from rare Web sites are stronger source of evidence than pages from common Web sites, which we model as inverse host frequency (IHF). Our system is able to achieve an average accuracy of 0.836
30616381
Constructive Default Logic and the Control of defeasible reasoning