Proactive information gathering for homeland security teams
Supporting counterterrorism analysts with software agents that dynamically anticipate their information requirements.

title: A Market-Based Adaptation for Resolving Competing Needs for Scarce Resources
abstract: The dynamic nature of many real-world domains (e.g., military, emergency first response and hurricane relief, etc) requires adaptive resource allocation to respond to changes in the environment that trigger additional resource requirements. Since the total resources are limited, there are often conflicts among various tasks regarding their resource needs. Thus, resources must be reallocated in order to maximize global utility for the current situation. This problem is further complicated when scarce resources are owned by distributed teams, each of which needs to allocate resources among tasks assigned to them, because each team has limited information about the other teams' resources and states. In this paper, we propose a market-based approach that uses an agent-based auction mechanism to enable teams to communicate and coordinate their utility information about possibly competing resource needs. As a result, the teams can collaboratively assess trade-offs among competing needs to allocate resources efficiently.

title: Decentralized Fair Scheduling in Two-Hop Relay-Assisted Cognitive OFDMA Systems
abstract: In this paper, we consider a two-hop relay-assisted cognitive downlink Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) system (named as secondary system) dynamically accessing a spectrum licensed to a primary network, thereby improving the efficiency of spectrum usage. A cluster-based relay-assisted architecture is proposed for the secondary system, where relay stations are employed for minimizing the interference to the users in the primary network and achieving fairness for cell-edge users in the secondary system. Based on this architecture, an asymptotically optimal solution is derived for jointly controlling data rates, transmission power, and subchannel allocation to optimize the average weighted sum goodput where the proportional fair scheduling (PFS) is included as a special case. This solution supports decentralized implementation, requires small communication overhead, and is robust against imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and imperfect sensing measurement. The proposed solution achieves significant throughput gain and better user-fairness compared with the existing designs. Finally, we derive a simple and asymptotically optimal scheduling solution as well as the associated closed-form performance under the proportional fair scheduling for a large number of users. The system throughput is shown to be O(N(1-qp)(1-qpN)lnlnKc), where Kc is the number of users in one cluster, N is the number of subchannels, and qp is the active probability of primary users.

title: Information Synthesis for Answer Validation
abstract: This paper proposes an integration of Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) with other additional information to deal with the Answer Validation task. The additional information used in our participation in the Answer Validation Exercise (AVE 2008) is from named-entity (NE) recognizer, question analysis component, etc. We have submitted two runs, one run for English and the other for German, achieving f-measures of 0.64 and 0.61 respectively. Compared with our system last year, which purely depends on the output of the RTE system, the extra information does show its effectiveness.

title: A Cognitive Study on the Effectiveness of an Augmented Virtuality-Based Collaborative Design Space
abstract: This paper presents one empirical study on an Augmented Virtuality (AV)-based virtual environment dedicated for remote collaboration. This AV-based system enables a remote designer to explore a virtual counterpart of a remote built environment that needs to be re-designed. Results of the study demonstrate that the AV system is effective and achieves good overall satisfaction, but involves some issues. Results also reveals that the participants all gain a similar sense in the AV environment as experienced in the real space.

title: Fusion of Near Infrared Face and Iris Biometrics
abstract: In this paper, we present a method for fusing face and iris biometrics using single near infrared (NIR) image. Fusion of NIR face and iris modalities is a natural way of doing multi-model biometrics because they can be acquired in a single image. An NIR face image is taken using a high resolution NIR camera. Face and iris are segmented from the same NIR image. Face and iris features are then extracted from the segmented parts. Matching of face and iris is done using the respective features. The matching scores are fused using various rules. Experiments give promising results.

title: Ontology-based Query Construction for GeoCLEF
abstract: This paper describes experiments with geographical information retrieval (GIR). Being different from the traditional information IR, we focus more on the query expansion instead of document ranking. We parse each topic into the event part and the geographic part and use different ontologies to expand both parts respectively. The results show promising results of our strategy for this task.