Subjective Relevance: Implications on Digital Libraries for Experts and Novices
Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems are developed based on the “best match” principle which assumes that users can specify their needs in a query and documents retrieved are relevant to users. However, this objective measure of relevance is limited as it does not consider differences in experts' and novices' knowledge and context. This paper presents initial work towards addressing this limitation by investigating subjective relevance (that can include topical, pertinence, situational, and motivational relevance) features that can be incorporated into digital library interfaces to help experts and novices search and judge relevance more effectively. A pilot study was conducted to elicit initial subjective relevance features from experts and novices. The paper concludes with a discussion of elicited design features and their implications for user-centered digital libraries.

title: Creative Interface Design for Information Seeking
abstract: Inspired by Weisberg's argument that everyone is creative, and exists in varying degrees, this PhD proposal aims to investigate the relationship between creativity and information seeking, and explores implications for interface design with design features that might support users' information seeking behaviours. A holistic model of creativity was proposed synthesizing established models in creativity. Based on the model, five approaches investigating relationships between creativity and information seeking were highlighted. Initial work carried out attempted to understand users' information seeking behaviours to elicit supportive features. Discussion of on-going work is also presented to indicate approaches proposed to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype with design features to support information seeking.

title: Creativity in Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval Environments
abstract: Inspired by Weisberg’s [20] argument that creativity exists in everyone and on the assumption that every information seeker is creative and undergoes a creative process in information seeking, this paper synthesizes a holistic “creativity” model and “information seeking” model to identify stages in a creative process for information seeking. A pilot study was conducted to verify these stages and also examine if present digital libraries and information retrieval environments provide “creative” features to support creative information seeking. We discussed these initial findings and made recommendations for further work to better support creative information seeking in digital libraries and information retrieval environments.

title: Cooperative peer groups in NICE
abstract: A distributed scheme for trust inference in peer-to-peer networks is presented. Our work is in context of the NICE system, which is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the Internet. We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this information can be used to efficiently identify noncooperative users in NICE. We present a simulation based study of our algorithms, in which we show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node. Lastly, we show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.

title: Link-disjoint embedding of complete binary trees in meshes

title: Optimal Transmission Schedules in TWDM Optical Passive Star Networks
abstract: This paper is concerned with optimal transmission schedules in the TWDM (time and wavelength division multiplexed) optical passive star network. Our model of the network consists of a set V of N nodes with N tunable transmitters and N fixed-tuned receivers (where each node is assigned a transmitter-receiver pair), k wavelengths (each wavelength is shared by N k receivers where N k is an integer), and tuning time δ > 0 (in units of time slot, for transmitters to tune from one wavelength to another). We assume that at any given time slot, at most one transmission can be done per wavelength. An optimal transmission schedule is defined to be the one that schedules transmissions such that for each node v in V, the transmitter in v transmits once to every receiver in V — {v} within a repeating cycle of minimum length. We present an optimal transmission schedule for each tuning time, and show that the cycle length of any optimal transmission schedule is max {N(N — 1)/k, kδ + N — 1}.

title: 3D Medical Volume Reconstruction Using Web Services
abstract: We address the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction using Web services. The use of proposed Web services is motivated by the fact that the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction requires significant computer resources and human expertise in medical and computer science areas. Web services were implemented as an additional layer to a dataflow framework called data to knowledge. In the collaboration between UIC and NCSA, pre-processed input images at NCSA were made accessible to medical collaborators for registration. Every time medical collaborators inspected images and selected corresponding features for registration, the Web server at NCSA was contacted and the registration processing query was executed using the image to knowledge library of registration methods. Co-registered frames were returned for verification by medical collaborators in a new window. This paper presents 3D volume reconstruction problem requirements, architecture of the developed prototype system and the tradeoffs of our system design.

title: Building information systems based on neural networks