SyD: A Middleware Testbed for Collaborative Applications over Small Heterogeneous Devices and Data Stores
Developing a collaborative application running on a collection of heterogeneous, possibly mobile, devices, each potentially hosting data stores, using existing middleware technologies such as JXTA, BREW, compact .NET and J2ME requires too many ad-hoc techniques as well as cumbersome and time-consuming programming. Our System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware, on the other hand, has a modular architecture that makes such application development very systematic and streamlined. The architecture supports transactions over mobile data stores, with a range of remote group invocation options and embedded interdependencies among such data store objects. The architecture further provides a persistent uniform object view, group transaction with Quality of Service (QoS) specifications, and XML vocabulary for inter-device communication. This paper presents the basic SyD concepts and introduces the architecture and the design of the SyD middleware and its components. We also provide guidelines for SyD application development and deployment process. We include the basic performance figures of SyD components and a few SyD applications on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) platforms. We believe that SyD is the first comprehensive working prototype of its kind, with a small code footprint of 112 KB with 76 KB being device-resident, and has a good potential for incorporating many ideas for performance extensions, scalability, QoS, workflows and security.

title: Measuring the meaning in time series clustering of text search queries
abstract: We use a combination of proven methods from time series analysis and machine learning to explore the relationship between temporal and semantic similarity in web query logs; we discover that the combination of correlation and cycles is a good, but not perfect, sign of semantic relationship.

title: A small listener for heterogeneous mobile devices: a service enabler with a uniform Web object view
abstract: We recently developed "system on mobile devices" (SyD) middleware for rapidly developing and deploying collaborative distributed applications over a collection of autonomous Web objects and data-stores, independent of the underlying device, data, or network. SyDListener is a key component of SyD middleware. SyDListener provides a set of interfaces and classes that allows distributed SyD-based application components to communicate seamlessly in mobile environments. SyDListener provides a uniform object view of the underlying server application and enables client applications to remotely invoke those methods using XML messages. SyDListener is implemented as a multi-threaded wrapper with simple persistence management and asynchronous invocation functionality for J2ME mobile information device profile (MIDP) on connected limited device configuration (CLDL) devices. We discuss the functionality, architecture, implementation, and performance of SyDListener. We believe it is the first comprehensive working prototype of its kind for Java-enabled handhelds with a small footprint of 10 KB.

title: Opportunity map: a visualization framework for fast identification of actionable knowledge
abstract: Data mining techniques frequently find a large number of patterns or rules, which make it very difficult for a human analyst to interpret the results and to find the truly interesting and actionable rules. Due to the subjective nature of "interestingness", human involvement in the analysis process is crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel visual data mining framework for the purpose of identifying actionable knowledge quickly and easily from discovered rules and data. This framework is called the Opportunity Map. It is inspired by some interesting ideas from Quality Engineering, in particular Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the House of Quality. It associates summarized data or discovered rules with the application objective using an interactive matrix, which enables the user to quickly identify where the opportunities are. The proposed system can be used to visually analyze discovered rules, and other statistical properties of the data. The user can also interactively group actionable attributes and values, and see how they affect the targets of interest. Combined with drill-down and comparative analysis, the user can analyze rules and data at different levels of detail. The proposed visualization framework thus represents a systematic and yet flexible method of rule analysis. Applications of the system to large-scale data sets from our industrial partner have yielded promising results.

title: A Distributed Data Server in Grid Environment
abstract: This paper introduces a high-performance distributed data server called DRB (Data Request Broker). DRB is the core of GridDaEn system which is a general Data Grid middleware that can provide uniform access and management of distributed and heterogeneous storage resources. DRB provides most of the core functions of GridDaEn including its uniform access to all kinds of geographically distributed, heterogeneous storage resources from a uniform and virtual view, and its supporting simple and complicated coordination across multiple administrative domains to form a federation, etc. DRB has the capability of providing high-performance and federated data service for data-intensive applications and researches over wide area networks.

title: Automatic extraction of outbreak information from news
abstract: With the explosion of unstructured data on the Web, especially in the form of text, there has been a lot of interest to mine knowledge from these data for variety of purposes. In this thesis, we study a particular problem: how to extract disease outbreak information from news. 
By defining Emergent Disease Report, we focus on extracting disease name and outbreak location from the news report emergent disease outbreaks. First, we study the problem how to classify those sentences reporting disease outbreak, and propose to a new method by integrating semantic features with the bag-of-words scheme. Experimental result shows the integrated approach is better than each individual approach alone. Second, a novel method based on sequential rules is introduced to extract the outbreak locations from the outbreak reporting sentences, and the new method outperforms conditional random fields in our experimental data. Finally, we discuss how to do classification and extraction together using label sequential rules and how to geocode the extracted location named entities into geographical locations accurately. Evaluations on classification-extraction including geocoding are conducted, and the proposed method is shown to improve the overall performance.

title: JOINT ESTIMATION OF IMAGE AND COIL SENSITIVITIES IN PARALLEL SPIRAL MRI
abstract: Spiral MRI has received increasing attention due to its reduced T 2*-decay and robustness against bulk physiologic motion. In parallel imaging, spiral trajectories are especially of great interest due to their inherent self-calibration capabilities, which is especially useful for dynamic imaging applications such as fMRI and cardiac imaging. The existing self-calibration techniques for spiral use the k-space center data that are sampled densely in the accelerated acquisition for coil sensitivity estimation. There exists a trade-off in choosing the radius of the center data: it must be sufficiently large to contain all major spatial frequencies of coil sensitivity, but not too large to cause significant aliasing artifacts due to undersampling below Nyquist rate as the trajectory moves away from the center k-space. To address this tradeoff, we generalize the JSENSE approach, which has demonstrated success in Cartesian case, to spiral trajectory. Specifically, the method jointly estimates the coil sensitivities and reconstructs the desired image through cross validations so that the sensitivities are estimated from the full data recovered by SENSE instead of the center k-space data only, thereby increasing high frequency information without introducing aliasing artifacts. We use experimental results to show the proposed method improves sensitivities, which leads to a more accurate SENSE reconstruction

title: Discovering Interesting Holes in Data
abstract: Current machine learning and discovery techniques focus on discovering rules or regularities that exist in data. An important aspect of the research that has been ignored in the past is the learning or discovering of interesting holes in the database. If we view each case in the database as a point in a it-dimensional space, then a hole is simply a region in the space that contains no data point. Clearly, not every hole is interesting. Some holes are obvious because it is known that certain value combinations are not possible. Some holes exist because there are insufficient cases in the database. However, in some situations, empty regions do carry important information. For instance, they could warn us about some missing value combinations that are either not known before or are unexpected. Knowing these missing value combinations may lead to significant discoveries. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to discover holes in databases.