bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
User interface design with matrix algebra
Authors: Thimbleby Harold
Published: July 2004

It is usually very hard, both for designers and users, to reason reliably about user interfaces. This article shows that 'push button' and 'point and click' user interfaces are algebraic structures. Users effectively do algebra when they interact, and therefore we can be precise about some important design issues and issues of usability. Matrix algebra, in particular, is useful for explicit calculation and for proof of various user interface properties.With matrix algebra, we are able to undertake with ease unusally thorough reviews of real user interfaces: this article examines a mobile phone, a handheld calculator and a digital multimeter as case studies, and draws general conclusions about the approach and its relevance to design.
Address translation in telecommunication features
Authors: Zave Pamela
Published: July 2004

Address translation causes a wide variety of interactions among telecommunication features. This article begins with a formal model of address translation and its effects, and with principles for understanding how features should interact in the presence of address translation. There is a simple and intuitive set of constraints on feature behavior so that features will interact according to the principles. This scheme (called "ideal address translation") has provable properties, is modular (explicit cooperation among features is not required), and supports extensibility (adding new features does not require changing old features). The article also covers reasoning in the presence of exceptions to the constraints, limitations of the theory, relation to real networks and protocols, and relation to other research.
A declarative approach to optimize bulk loading into databases
Authors: Amer-Yahia Sihem , Cluet Sophie
Published: July 2004

Applications, such as warehouse maintenance, need to load large data volumes regularly. The efficiency of loading depends on the resources that are available at the source and at the target systems. Our work aims to understand the performance criteria that are involved in bulk loading data into a database and to devise tailored optimization strategies.Unlike commercial systems and previous research on the same topic, our approach follows the fundamental database principle of physical-logical independence. A loading program is represented as a sequence of algebraic expressions. This abstraction enables the use of appropriate algebraic rewritings to optimize a loading program and of a cost model that takes into consideration efficiency criteria such as the processing times at the source and target systems and the bandwidth between them. A slow-loading program may be preferable if it does not slow down other applications by consuming too much memory. Thus, we view the problem of optimizing a loading program as finding a compromise between several efficiency criteria.The ability to represent loading programs in an algebra and performance criteria in a cost model has two very desirable properties: reusability and efficiency. Database programmers do not have to write loading programs by hand. In addition, tuning loading programs becomes easier since programmers have a better control on the performance criteria specified in the cost model. The algebra captures data transformations that would have been otherwise hardcoded in loading programs. Consequently, richer optimizations can be explored. Finally, our optimization techniques are not specific to one particular system. They can be used for loading data and from to any structured store (e.g., relational, structured files).We implemented our ideas in a complete environment for migrating ODBC-compliant databases into the O2object-oriented database system. This prototype provides a declarative view language to specify loading, an interface to specify directives, such as desired database physical organization and constraints on several criteria, such as resource and bandwidth consumption, an algebraic optimizer, a code generator, and an execution environment to control failures and guarantee incremental loading. Our experiments show that a tailored optimization is necessary when loading large data volumes into a database.
A compressed accessibility map for XML
Authors: Yu Ting , Srivastava Divesh , Lakshmanan Laks V. S. , Jagadish H. V.
Published: July 2004

XML is the undisputed standard for data representation and exchange. As companies transact business over the Internet, letting authorized customers directly access, and even modify, XML data offers many advantages in terms of cost, accuracy, and timeliness. Given the complex business relationships between companies, and the sensitive nature of information, access must be provided selectively, using sophisticated access control specifications. Using the specification directly to determine if a user has access to an XML data item can be extremely inefficient. The alternative of fully materializing, for each data item, the users authorized to access it can be space-inefficient. In this article, we introduce a compressed accessibility map (CAM) as a space- and time-efficient solution to the access control problem for XML data. A CAM compactly identifies the XML data items to which a user has access, by exploiting structural locality of accessibility in tree-structured data. We present a CAM lookup algorithm for determining if a user has access to a data item that takes time proportional to the product of the depth of the item in the XML data and logarithm of the CAM size. We develop an algorithm for building an optimal size CAM that takes time linear in the size of the XML data set. While optimality cannot be preserved incrementally under data item updates, we provide an algorithm for incrementally maintaining near-optimality. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the CAM for multiple users on a variety of real and synthetic data sets.
Demystifying integration
Authors: Chari Kaushal , Seshadri Saravanan
Published: July 2004

This framework helps navigate the standards maze to develop a flexible applications infrastructure that advances an organization's strategic business needs.
Improving the quality of business object models using collaboration patterns
Authors: Bolloju Narasimha
Published: July 2004

Project managers and systems analysts can tackle the challenges of representing system requirements using the object-oriented approach.
The HIPAA-potamus in health care data security
Authors: Mercuri Rebecca T.
Published: July 2004

Regulations intended to improve health care data access have created new security risks along with headaches for patients and practitioners.
More lawyers than programmers?
Authors: Cusumano Michael A.
Published: July 2004

Microsoft must alter its strategy to avoid an increasingly litigious future.
National borders emerge in cyberspace
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: July 2004

Amidst the high-flying, oxygen-deprived hype at the zenith of the Internet economic bubble several truths had seemed inevitable: that notions of career and workplace would forever be changed, that generation of wealth would follow a brand new set of rules, and that political boundaries would sink below the rising tide of the global Internet. But as Web surfers around the world are starting to discover, national borders don't necessarily disappear as soon as you switch on the computer.
Subscription psychology
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: July 2004

The Internet is really brimming with free stuff, and not just illicit trading of copyrighted music and movies on P2P networks. You can get your intellectual stimulation gratis from
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post,
and many local newspapers, plus essays from
The Atlantic Monthly, Slate
and countless number of Web sites where folks share thoughts great and small. You can be entertained---assuming that your Internet connection is fast enough---with music videos from MTV, Launch.com, and SonicNet, plus view feature film trailers and full-length independent films. It's a pretty great deal, if you're on the receiving end. But for those making and providing all these free words, sounds, and images, times are getting tough. It may be true that 90 percent of everything is crap, but even excreta costs something to produce.
Words to the wise
Authors: Korman Ken
Published: July 2004

"Digital content is getting a lot of attention---but not at the board level, where it is urgently needed .... Media companies are focusing too much on encryption and other defensive technologies while failing to develop proactive strategies that recognize and leverage their intellectual property assets. Protection remains vital, but innovative business models are also needed to derive new revenue from digital content."
Solving convex programs by random walks
Authors: Bertsimas Dimitris , Vempala Santosh
Published: July 2004

Minimizing a convex function over a convex set in
n
-dimensional space is a basic, general problem with many interesting special cases. Here, we present a simple new algorithm for convex optimization based on sampling by a random walk. It extends naturally to minimizing quasi-convex functions and to other generalizations.
The random oracle methodology, revisited
Authors: Canetti Ran , Goldreich Oded , Halevi Shai
Published: July 2004

We take a critical look at the relationship between the security of cryptographic schemes in the Random Oracle Model, and the security of the schemes that result from implementing the random oracle by so called "cryptographic hash functions".The main result of this article is a negative one: There exist signature and encryption schemes that are secure in the Random Oracle Model, but for which
any implementation
of the random oracle results in insecure schemes. In the process of devising the above schemes, we consider possible definitions for the notion of a "good implementation" of a random oracle, pointing out limitations and challenges.
Quantum lower bounds for the collision and the element distinctness problems
Authors: Aaronson Scott , Shi Yaoyun
Published: July 2004

Given a function
f
as an oracle, the collision problem is to find two distinct indexes
i
and
j
such that
f
(
i
) =
f
(
j
), under the promise that such indexes exist. Since the security of many fundamental cryptographic primitives depends on the hardness of finding collisions, our lower bounds provide evidence for the existence of cryptographic primitives that are immune to quantum cryptanalysis. We prove that any quantum algorithm for finding a collision in an
r
-to-one function must evaluate the function Ω((
n
/
r
)
1/3
) times, where
n
is the size of the domain and
r
|
n
. This matches an upper bound of Brassard, Høyer, and Tapp. No lower bound better than constant was previously known. Our result also implies a quantum lower bound of Ω(
n
2/3
) queries for the element distinctness problem, which is to determine whether
n
integers are all distinct. The best previous lower bound was Ω(√
n
) queries.
Approximating extent measures of points
Authors: Agarwal Pankaj K. , Har-Peled Sariel , Varadarajan Kasturi R.
Published: July 2004

We present a general technique for approximating various descriptors of the extent of a set
P
of
n
points in R

d

when the dimension
d
is an arbitrary fixed constant. For a given extent measure μ and a parameter ε > 0, it computes in time
O
(
n
+ 1/ε

O
(1)

) a subset
Q
⊆
P
of size 1/ε

O
(1)

, with the property that (1 − ε)μ(
P
) ≤ μ(
Q
) ≤ μ(
P
). The specific applications of our technique include ε-approximation algorithms for (i) computing diameter, width, and smallest bounding box, ball, and cylinder of
P
, (ii) maintaining all the previous measures for a set of moving points, and (iii) fitting spheres and cylinders through a point set
P
. Our algorithms are considerably simpler, and faster in many cases, than previously known algorithms.
A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries
Authors: Jerrum Mark , Sinclair Alistair , Vigoda Eric
Published: July 2004

We present a polynomial-time randomized algorithm for estimating the permanent of an arbitrary
n
×
n
matrix with nonnegative entries. This algorithm---technically a "fully-polynomial randomized approximation scheme"---computes an approximation that is, with high probability, within arbitrarily small specified relative error of the true value of the permanent.
Efficient mining of both positive and negative association rules
Authors: Wu Xindong , Zhang Chengqi , Zhang Shichao
Published: July 2004

This paper presents an efficient method for mining both positive and negative association rules in databases. The method extends traditional associations to include association rules of forms
A
⇒ ¬
B
, ¬
A
⇒
B
, and ¬
A
⇒ ¬
B
, which indicate negative associations between itemsets. With a pruning strategy and an interestingness measure, our method scales to large databases. The method has been evaluated using both synthetic and real-world databases, and our experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.
Discrete event fluid modeling of background TCP traffic
Authors: Nicol David M. , Yan Guanhua
Published: July 2004

TCP is the most widely used transport layer protocol used in the Internet today. A TCP session adapts the demands it places on the network to observations of bandwidth availability on the network. Because TCP is adaptive, any model of its behavior that aspires to be accurate must be influenced by other network traffic. This point is especially important in the context of using simulation to evaluate some new network algorithm of interest (e.g., reliable multicast) in an environment where the background traffic affects---and is affected by---its behavior. We need to generate background traffic efficiently in a way that captures the salient features of TCP, while the reference and background traffic representations interact with each other. This article describes a fluid model of TCP and a switching model that has flows represented by fluids interacting with packet-oriented flows. We describe conditions under which a fluid model produces exactly the same behavior as a packet-oriented model, and we quantify the performance advantages of the approach both analytically and empirically. We observe that very significant speedups may be attained while keeping high accuracy.
An open architecture for next-generation telecommunication services
Authors: Bond Gregory W. , Cheung Eric , Purdy K. Hal , Zave Pamela , Ramming J. Christopher
Published: July 2004

An open (in the sense of extensible and programmable) architecture for IP telecommunications must be based on a comprehensive strategy for managing feature interaction. We describe our experience with BoxOS, an IP telecommunication platform that implements the DFC technology for feature composition. We present solutions to problems, common to all efforts in IP telecommunications, of feature distribution, interoperability, and media management. We also explain how BoxOS addresses many deficiencies in SIP, including how BoxOS can be used as a SIP application server.
Accessibility
Authors: Hull Larry
Published: July 2004

Many of us think of Web accessibility in terms of accommodating users with disabilities, particularly visual disabilities. Larry Hull sees it as a wee bit more than that. In this
Whiteboard
he tells us why, and proposes a different way of addressing accessibility---an approach that just might surprise us.---
Elizabeth Buie
Attention deficit disorder
Authors: Skrebowski Luke
Published: July 2004

Media companies are losing our attention and their profits. What can they do to regain both?
Toward an integrated framework for modeling enterprise processes
Authors: Dalal Nikunj P. , Kamath Manjunath , Kolarik William J. , Sivaraman Eswar
Published: July 2004

Enterprise process modeling is the most important element in the design of next-generation ERP systems.
The role of personality in Web-based distance education courses
Authors: Kim Eyong B. , Schniederjans Marc J.
Published: July 2004

Before investing in a Web-based education program, managers should consider how effective it will be when paired with employee personality traits.
Who is liable for bugs and security flaws in software?
Authors: Cusumano Michael A.
Published: July 2004

Attempting to determine fault and responsibility based on available evidence.
Cyber defense technology networking and evaluation
Authors: Bajcsy R. , Benzel T. , Bishop M. , Braden B. , Brodley C. , Fahmy S. , Floyd S. , Hardaker W. , Joseph A. , Kesidis G. , Levitt K. , Lindell B. , Liu P. , Miller D. , Mundy R. , Neuman C. , Ostrenga R. , Paxson V. , Porras P. , Rosenberg C. , Tygar J. D. , Sastry S. , Sterne D. , Wu S. F.
Published: July 2004

Creating an experimental infrastructure for developing next-generation information security technologies.
Mobility and the first responder
Authors: Sawyer Steve , Tapia Andrea , Pesheck Leonard , Davenport John
Published: July 2004

Supporting secure wireless access to databases via public telecommunications infrastructure.
Resolution lower bounds for the weak pigeonhole principle
Authors: Raz Ran
Published: July 2004

We prove that any Resolution proof for the weak pigeonhole principle, with
n
holes and any number of pigeons, is of length Ω(2

n
ϵ

), (for some global constant ϵ > 0). One corollary is that a certain propositional formulation of the statement
NP
⊄
P
/
poly
does not have short Resolution proofs.
The security of all RSA and discrete log bits
Authors: Håstad Johan , Nåslund Mats
Published: July 2004

We study the security of individual bits in an RSA encrypted message
E

N

(
x
). We show that given
E

N

(
x
), predicting any single bit in
x
with only a nonnegligible advantage over the trivial guessing strategy, is (through a polynomial-time reduction) as hard as breaking RSA. Moreover, we prove that blocks of
O
(log log
N
) bits of
x
are computationally indistinguishable from random bits. The results carry over to the Rabin encryption scheme.Considering the discrete exponentiation function
g

x

modulo
p
, with probability 1 −
o
(1) over random choices of the prime
p
, the analog results are demonstrated. The results do not rely on group representation, and therefore applies to general cyclic groups as well. Finally, we prove that the bits of
ax
+
b
modulo
p
give hard core predicates for any one-way function
f
.All our results follow from a general result on the
chosen multiplier hidden number problem:
given an integer
N
, and access to an algorithm
P

x

that on input a random
a
∈ Z

N

, returns a guess of the
i
th bit of
ax
mod
N
, recover
x
. We show that for any
i
, if P
x
has at least a nonnegligible advantage in predicting the
i
th bit, we either recover
x
, or, obtain a nontrivial factor of
N
in polynomial time. The result also extends to prove the results about simultaneous security of blocks of
O
(log log
N
) bits.
Crossing the divide
Authors: Grudin Jonathan
Published: July 2004

This essay summarizes the editor's views of publication in the field of human-computer interaction. Digital technologies have begun changing the way journal articles and conference papers are produced, reviewed, published, accessed, and used. This period of profound change presents challenges and opportunities for both new and existing channels of scientific and technical communication.
Hancock
Authors: Cortes Corinna , Fisher Kathleen , Pregibon Daryl , Rogers Anne , Smith Frederick
Published: July 2004

Massive transaction streams present a number of opportunities for data mining techniques. The transactions in such streams might represent calls on a telephone network, commercial credit card purchases, stock market trades, or HTTP requests to a web server. While historically such data have been collected for billing or security purposes, they are now being used to discover how the transactors, for example, credit-card numbers or IP addresses, use the associated services.Over the past 5 years, we have computed evolving profiles (called
signatures
) of transactors in several very large data streams. The signature for each transactor captures the salient features of his or her behavior through time. Programs for processing signatures must be highly optimized because of the size of the data stream (several gigabytes per day) and the number of signatures to maintain (hundreds of millions). Originally, we wrote such programs directly in C, but because these programs often sacrificed readability for performance, they were difficult to verify and maintain.Hancock is a domain-specific language we created to express computationally efficient signature programs cleanly. In this paper, we describe the obstacles to computing signatures from massive streams and explain how Hancock addresses these problems. For expository purposes, we present Hancock using a running example from the telecommunications industry; however, the language itself is general and applies equally well to other data sources.
Traversals of object structures
Authors: Lieberherr Karl , Patt-Shamir Boaz , Orleans Doug
Published: July 2004

Separation of concerns and loose coupling of concerns are important issues in software enginnering. In this paper we show how to separate traversal-related concerns from other concerns, how to loosely couple traversal-related concerns to the structural concern, and how to efficiently implement traversal-related concerns. The stress is on the detailed description of our algorithms and the traversal specifications they operate on.Traversal of object structures is a ubiquitous routine in most types of information processing. Ad hoc implementations of traversals lead to scattered and tangled code and in this paper we present a new approach, called
traversal strategies,
to succinctly modularize traversals. In our approach traversals are defined using a high-level directed graph description, which is compiled into a dynamic road map to assist run-time traversals. The complexity of the compilation algorithm is polynomial in the size of the traversal strategy graph and the class graph of the given application. Prototypes of the system have been developed and are being successfully used to implement traversals for Java and AspectJ [Kiczales et al. 2001] and for generating adapters for software components. Our previous approach, called
traversal specifications
[Lieberherr 1992; Palsberg et al. 1995], was less general and less succinct, and its compilation algorithm was of exponential complexity in some cases. In an additional result we show that this bad behavior is inherent to the static traversal code generated by previous implementations, where traversals are carried out by invoking methods without parameters.
Time-space consistency in large-scale distributed virtual environments
Authors: Zhou Suiping , Cai Wentong , Lee Bu-Sung , Turner Stephen J.
Published: July 2004

Maintaining a consistent view of the simulated world among different simulation nodes is a fundamental problem in large-scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs). In this paper, we characterize this problem by quantifying the time-space inconsistency in a DVE. To this end, a metric is defined to measure the time-space inconsistency in a DVE. One major advantage of the metric is that it may be estimated based on some characteristic parameters of a DVE, such as clock asynchrony, message transmission delay, the accuracy of the dead reckoning algorithm, the kinetics of the moving entity, and human factors. Thus the metric can be used to evaluate the time-space consistency property of a DVE without the actual execution of the DVE application, which is especially useful in the design stage of a DVE. Our work also clearly shows how the characteristic parameters of a DVE are interrelated in deciding the time-space inconsistency, so that we may fine-tune the DVE to make it as consistent as possible. To verify the effectiveness of the metric, a Ping-Pong game is developed. Experimental results show that the metric is effective in evaluating the time-space consistency property of the game.
Modeling train movements through complex rail networks
Authors: Lu Quan , Dessouky Maged , Leachman Robert C.
Published: July 2004

Trains operating in densely populated metropolitan areas typically encounter complex trackage configurations. To make optimal use of the available rail capacity, some portions of the rail network may consist of single-track lines while other locations may consist of double- or triple-track lines. Because of varying local conditions, different points in the rail network may have different speed limits. We formulate a graphical technique for modeling such complex rail networks; and we use this technique to develop a deadlock-free algorithm for dispatching each train to its destination with nearly minimal travel time while (a) abiding by the speed limits at each point on each train's route, and (b) maintaining adequate headways between trains. We implemented this train-dispatching algorithm in a simulation model of the movements of passenger and freight trains in Los Angeles County, and we validated the simulation as yielding an adequate approximation to the current system performance.
A month to topic detection and tracking in Hindi
Authors: Allan James , Lavrenko Victor , Connell Margaret E.
Published: July 2004

We describe the one-month (June 2003) effort to create a topic detection and tracking (TDT) system to support news stories in Hindi. The University of Massachusetts submitted results for three different TDT tasks in the DARPA surprise language evaluation. The official task was topic tracking, but we also provided results for the new event detection and topic detection (clustering) tasks. Our approach to all three tasks was based on the vector-space model of information retrieval. We also describe the process we used to create the relevance judgments used to evaluate the system. Results suggest that topic tracking effectiveness is comparable to that of TDT tracking systems in other languages. Results for clustering and new event detection indicate that parameter settings for those tasks are sensitive to the language being used.
Rapid porting of DUSTer to Hindi
Authors: Dorr Bonnie J. , Ayan Necip Fazil , Habash Nizar , Madnani Nitin , Hwa Rebecca
Published: July 2004

The frequent occurrence of
divergences
—structural differences between languages---presents a great challenge for statistical word-level alignment and machine translation. This paper describes the adaptation of DUSTer, a divergence unraveling package, to Hindi during the DARPA TIDES-2003 Surprise Language Exercise. We show that it is possible to port DUSTer to Hindi in under 3 days.
Extracting named entity translingual equivalence with limited resources
Authors: Huang Fei , Vogel Stephan , Waibel Alex
Published: July 2004

In this article we present an automatic approach to extracting Hindi-English (H-E) Named Entity (NE) translingual equivalences from bilingual parallel corpora. In the absence of a Hindi NE tagger or H-E translation dictionary, this approach adapts a Chinese-English (C-E) surface string transliteration model for H-E NE extraction. The model is initially trained using automatically extracted C-E NE pairs, then iteratively updated based on newly extracted H-E NE pairs. For each English person and location NE in each sentence pair, this approach searches for its Hindi correspondence with minimum transliteration cost and constructs an H-E NE list from the bilingual corpus. Experiments show that this approach extracted 1000 H-E NE pairs with a precision of 91.8%.
Cross-lingual retrieval for Hindi
Authors: Xu Jinxi , Weischedel Ralph
Published: July 2004

In this paper we describe the evaluation results of applying a cross-lingual retrieval model to retrieve Hindi documents relevant to an English query. Though the technique has been previously applied and evaluated for retrieving Chinese and Arabic documents given an English query, what is new about these experiments is porting the model to Hindi in two weeks' time.
A normal form for XML documents
Authors: Arenas Marcelo , Libkin Leonid
Published: July 2004

This article takes a first step towards the design and normalization theory for XML documents. We show that, like relational databases, XML documents may contain redundant information, and may be prone to update anomalies. Furthermore, such problems are caused by certain functional dependencies among paths in the document. Our goal is to find a way of converting an arbitrary DTD into a well-designed one, that avoids these problems. We first introduce the concept of a functional dependency for XML, and define its semantics via a relational representation of XML. We then define an XML normal form, XNF, that avoids update anomalies and redundancies. We study its properties, and show that XNF generalizes BCNF; we also discuss the relationship between XNF and normal forms for nested relations. Finally, we present a lossless algorithm for converting any DTD into one in XNF.
Software project risks and their effect on outcomes
Authors: Wallace Linda , Keil Mark
Published: July 2004

How to identify the risks that interact to pose the most significant threats to successful project outcomes.
Managing knowledge in distributed projects
Authors: Desouza Kevin C. , Evaristo J. Roberto
Published: July 2004

A hybrid approach to knowledge management helps maximize the benefits of the centralized and P2P approaches.
Informational cascades in IT adoption
Authors: Li Xiaotong
Published: July 2004

Before adopting new systems and procedures, IT managers should ensure they are not unwittingly following the herd.
Trust online, trust offline
Authors: Uslaner Eric M.
Published: July 2004

Online businesses would do well to cultivate their visitors' adventurous, trusting, optimistic, risk-taking world views.
Etiquette and the design of educational technology
Authors: Mishra Punya , Hershey Kathryn A.
Published: July 2004

Motives for designing tact, courtesy, and even humor into educational tools must be intrinsically understood and appreciated before applied.
Etiquette online
Authors: Preece Jenny
Published: July 2004

In the early days of the Internet, an occasional sarcastic or confrontational remark was considered part of its "charm."
Times have changed.
The viability of supporting anonymous employees
Authors: Gerdes John
Published: July 2004

Identifying contractual mechanisms to support anonymity in the employment environment.
Optimal length tree-like resolution refutations for 2SAT formulas
Authors: Subramani K.
Published: July 2004

In this article, we exploit the graphical structure of 2SAT formulas to show that the shortest tree-like resolution refutation of an unsatisfiable 2SAT formula can be determined in polynomial time.
Adaptive Hindi OCR using generalized Hausdorff image comparison
Authors: Ma Huanfeng , Doermann David
Published: July 2004

We present an adaptive Hindi OCR implemented as part of a rapidly retargetable language tool effort. The system includes: script identification, character segmentation, training sample creation, and character recognition. In script identification, Hindi words are identified from bilingual or multilingual documents based on features of the Devanagari script or using Support Vector Machines. Identified words are then segmented into individual characters in the next step, where the composite characters are identified and further segmented based on the structural properties of the script and statistical information. Segmented characters are recognized using generalized Hausdorff image comparison (GHIC) and postprocessing is applied to improve the performance. The OCR system, which was designed and implemented in one month, was applied to a complete Hindi--English bilingual dictionary and a set of ideal images extracted from Hindi documents in PDF format. Experimental results show the recognition accuracy can reach 88% for noisy images and 95% for ideal images. The presented method can also be extended to design OCR systems for different scripts.
Cross-language headline generation for Hindi
Authors: Dorr Bonnie , Zajic David , Schwartz Richard
Published: July 2004

This paper presents new approaches to
headline generation
for English newspaper texts, with an eye toward the production of document surrogates for document selection in cross-language information retrieval. This task is difficult because the user must make decisions about relevance based on (often poor) translations of retrieved documents. To facilitate the decision-making process we need translations that can be assessed rapidly and accurately; our approach is to provide an English headline for the non-English document. We describe two approaches to headline generation and their application to the recent DARPA TIDES-2003 Surprise Language Exercise for Hindi. For comparison, we also implemented an alternative method for surrogate generation: a system that produces topic lists for (Hindi) articles. We present the results of a series of experiments comparing each of these approaches. We demonstrate in both automatic and human evaluations that our linguistically motivated approach outperforms two other surrogate-generation methods: a statistical system and a topic discovery system.
Rapid development of Hindi named entity recognition using conditional random fields and feature induction
Authors: Li Wei , McCallum Andrew
Published: July 2004

This paper describes our application of conditional random fields with feature induction to a Hindi named entity recognition task. With only five days development time and little knowledge of this language, we automatically discover relevant features by providing a large array of lexical tests and using feature induction to automatically construct the features that most increase conditional likelihood. In an effort to reduce overfitting, we use a combination of a Gaussian prior and early stopping based on the results of 10-fold cross validation.
From bits to hits
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: July 2004

Can Microsoft and Apple really transform themselves into glitzy entertainment companies?
Open systems for collaboration
Authors: Treese Win
Published: July 2004

In the history of computer software, the most interesting tools often start as something simple and readily (even freely) available, with no big marketing campaign attached. Eventually, the key ideas become part of major products and a routine element of computing.
Streams, structures, spaces, scenarios, societies (5s)
Authors: Gonçalves Marcos André , Fox Edward A. , Watson Layne T. , Kipp Neill A.
Published: July 2004

Digital libraries (DLs) are complex information systems and therefore demand formal foundations lest development efforts diverge and interoperability suffers. In this article, we propose the fundamental abstractions of Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S), which allow us to define digital libraries rigorously and usefully. Streams are sequences of arbitrary items used to describe both static and dynamic (e.g., video) content. Structures can be viewed as labeled directed graphs, which impose organization. Spaces are sets with operations on those sets that obey certain constraints. Scenarios consist of sequences of events or actions that modify states of a computation in order to accomplish a functional requirement. Societies are sets of entities and activities and the relationships among them. Together these abstractions provide a formal foundation to define, relate, and unify concepts---among others, of digital objects, metadata, collections, and services---required to formalize and elucidate "digital libraries". The applicability, versatility, and unifying power of the 5S model are demonstrated through its use in three distinct applications: building and interpretation of a DL taxonomy, informal and formal analysis of case studies of digital libraries (NDLTD and OAI), and utilization as a formal basis for a DL description language.
Verifiable encryption of digital signatures and applications
Authors: Ateniese Giuseppe
Published: July 2004

This paper presents a new simple schemes for verifiable encryption of digital signatures. We make use of a trusted third party (TTP) but in an
optimistic
sense, that is, the TTP takes part in the protocol only if one user cheats or simply crashes. Our schemes can be used as primitives to build efficient fair exchange and certified e-mail protocols.
How to measure the relationship between training and job performance
Authors: Devaraj Sarv , Babu S. Ramesh
Published: July 2004

Software companies could better predict the effect of training on their technical professionals' on-the-job performance and design training courses for future employees.
Matching methodology to problem domain
Authors: Glass Robert L.
Published: July 2004

Soliciting advice on choosing and applying appropriate software development methodologies.
Introduction
Authors: Kumar Kuldeep , van Hillegersberg Jos
Published: July 2004

The financial services industry is in transition. Traditionally, financial services have been structured into four broad industry sectors: banking, insurance, equities/stock brokerage, and transaction services. The recent confluence of three trends---deregulation, globalization, and spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs)---has created new business opportunities. Deregulation has made it possible for financial service providers to expand their portfolio of services beyond their traditional sectorial offerings, while also allowing a variety of non-traditional participants to enter the financial services market. Concurrently, international and global trade agreements, for example, within the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations are attempting to harmonize regulations and standards across nations. Specification of international bank account formats, standardization of transaction interfaces for cross-bank and cross-national payments, security, and common customer-data privacy regulations are examples of such attempts at harmonization.
Flexible value structures in banking
Authors: Homann Ulrich , Rill Michael , Wimmer Andreas
Published: July 2004

How service-oriented architectures can help achieve the business objectives of the transformation process in banking.
An alternative architecture for financial data integration
Authors: Pan Alberto , Viña Ángel
Published: July 2004

Exploring a new paradigm for mediated data integration.
ODC
Authors: Chandrasekaran N. , Ensing Geert
Published: July 2004

Achieving organizational innovation through modularization and outsourcing of business processes.
Financial services business process outsourcing
Authors: Tas Jeroen , Sunder Shyam
Published: July 2004

Applying lessons learned from manufacturing to workflow processes in the financial services industry.
Detecting money laundering and terrorist financing via data mining
Authors: Zdanowicz John S.
Published: July 2004

Using import-export information to improve financial transaction security.
Who will rob you on the digital highway?
Authors: Slewe Ton , Hoogenboom Mark
Published: July 2004

Traditionally at the forefront of security awareness, financial organizations must maintain this status as they move further into the Internet realm.
Comma-free design for DNA words
Authors: Arita Masanori
Published: July 2004

Considering data-coding procedures and sequence design.
Stairway compaction using corner block list and its applications with rectilinear blocks
Authors: Ma Yuchun , Hong Xianlong , Dong Sheqin , Cai Yici , Cheng Chung-Kuan , Gu Jun
Published: July 2004

Corner Block List (CBL) was recently proposed as an efficient representation for MOSAIC packing of rectangles. Although the original method is really innovative, there still remains room for improvement for our purpose. This article proposes a compact algorithm for placement based on corner block list. By introducing the dummy blocks in CBL, our algorithm can intellectively employ dummy blocks in the packing to represent the placement including empty rooms, which corner block list cannot represent. Our algorithm can obtain the fast convergence to an optimal solution. Based on the compact approach, we propose a new way to handle arbitrary shaped rectilinear modules. The experimental results are demonstrated by some benchmark data and the performance shows effectiveness of the proposed method.
Buffer merging—a powerful technique for reducing memory requirements of synchronous dataflow specifications
Authors: Murthy Praveen K. , Bhattacharyya Shuvra S.
Published: July 2004

We develop a new technique called buffer merging for reducing memory requirements of synchronous dataflow (SDF) specifications. SDF has proven to be an attractive model for specifying DSP systems, and is used in many commercial tools like System Canvas, SPW, and Cocentric. Good synthesis from an SDF specification depends crucially on scheduling, and memory is an important metric for generating efficient schedules. Previous techniques on memory minimization have either not considered buffer sharing at all, or have done so at a fairly coarse level (the meaning of this will be made more precise in the article). In this article, we develop a buffer overlaying strategy that works at the level of an input/output edge pair of an actor. It works by algebraically encapsulating the lifetimes of the tokens on the input/output edge pair, and determines the maximum amount of the input buffer space that can be reused by the output. We develop the mathematical basis for performing merging operations, and develop several algorithms and heuristics for using the merging technique for generating efficient implementations. We show improvements of up to 48% over previous techniques.
Real-time rendering of translucent meshes
Authors: Hao Xuejun , Varshney Amitabh
Published: July 2004

Subsurface scattering is important for photo-realistic rendering of translucent materials. We make approximations to the BSSRDF model and propose a simple lighting model to simulate the effects on translucent meshes. Our approximations are based on the observation that subsurface scattering is relatively local due to its exponential falloff.In the preprocessing stage we build subsurface scattering neighborhood information, which includes all the vertices within effective scattering range from each vertex. We then modify the traditional local illumination model into a run-time two-stage process. The first stage involves computation of reflection and transmission of light on surface vertices. The second stage bleeds in scattering effects from a vertex's neighborhood to generate the final result. We then merge the run-time two-stage process into a run-time single-stage process using precomputed integrals, and reduce the complexity of our run-time algorithm to
O
(
N
), where
N
is the number of vertices. The selection of the optimum set size for precomputed integrals is guided by a standard imagespace error-metric. Furthermore, we show how to compress the precomputed integrals using spherical harmonics. We compensate for the inadequacy of spherical harmonics for storing high frequency components by a reference points scheme to store high frequency components of the precomputed integrals explicitly. With this approach, we greatly reduce memory usage without loss of visual quality under a high-frequency lighting environment and achieve interactive frame rates for medium-sized scenes. Our model is able to capture the most important features of subsurface scattering: reflection and transmission due to multiple scattering.
Pop-up light field
Authors: Shum Heung-Yeung , Sun Jian , Yamazaki Shuntaro , Li Yin , Tang Chi-Keung
Published: July 2004

In this article, we present an image-based modeling and rendering system, which we call
pop-up light field
, that models a sparse light field using a set of
coherent layers
. In our system, the user specifies how many coherent layers should be modeled or popped up according to the scene complexity. A coherent layer is defined as a collection of corresponding planar regions in the light field images. A coherent layer can be rendered free of aliasing all by itself, or against other background layers. To construct coherent layers, we introduce a Bayesian approach,
coherence matting
, to estimate alpha matting around segmented layer boundaries by incorporating a coherence prior in order to maintain coherence across images.We have developed an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface (UI) to facilitate pop-up light field construction. The key to our UI is the concept of human-in-the-loop where the user specifies where aliasing occurs in the rendered image. The user input is reflected in the input light field images where pop-up layers can be modified. The user feedback is instant through a hardware-accelerated real-time pop-up light field renderer. Experimental results demonstrate that our system is capable of rendering anti-aliased novel views from a sparse light field.
Removing excess topology from isosurfaces
Authors: Wood Zoë , Hoppe Hugues , Desbrun Mathieu , Schröder Peter
Published: July 2004

Many high-resolution surfaces are created through isosurface extraction from volumetric representations, obtained by 3D photography, CT, or MRI. Noise inherent in the acquisition process can lead to geometrical and
topological
errors. Reducing geometrical errors during reconstruction is well studied. However, isosurfaces often contain many topological errors in the form of tiny handles. These nearly invisible artifacts hinder subsequent operations like mesh simplification, remeshing, and parametrization. In this article we present a practical method for removing handles in an isosurface. Our algorithm makes an axis-aligned sweep through the volume to locate handles, compute their sizes, and selectively remove them. The algorithm is designed to facilitate out-of-core execution. It finds the handles by incrementally constructing and analyzing a Reeb graph. The size of a handle is measured by a short nonseparating cycle. Handles are removed robustly by modifying the volume rather than attempting "mesh surgery." Finally, the volumetric modifications are spatially localized to preserve geometrical detail. We demonstrate topology simplification on several complex models, and show its benefits for subsequent surface processing.
Selective Markov models for predicting Web page accesses
Authors: Deshpande Mukund , Karypis George
Published: July 2004

The problem of predicting a user's behavior on a Web site has gained importance due to the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the need to personalize and influence a user's browsing experience. Markov models and their variations have been found to be well suited for addressing this problem. Of the different variations of Markov models, it is generally found that higher-order Markov models display high predictive accuracies on Web sessions that they can predict. However, higher-order models are also extremely complex due to their large number of states, which increases their space and run-time requirements. In this article, we present different techniques for intelligently selecting parts of different order Markov models so that the resulting model has a reduced state complexity, while maintaining a high predictive accuracy.