CSIRO INEX experiments: XML Search using PADRE
This paper reports on the CSIRO group's participation in INEX. We indexed documents and document fragments using PADRE, the core of CSIRO's Panoptic Enterprise Search Engine. A query translator converts the INEX topics into queries containing selection and projection constraints for the results. Answers are extracted from ranked documents and document fragments based on the projection constraints in the query.

title: Question-driven classification of retrieved documents
abstract: Many existing information access systems deliver ranked lists of documents in response to users' queries. Some systems also endeavour to represent some of the various types of relationships that can exist between documents. However, few systems provide effective mechanisms to help users discover useful information within the set of retrieved documents. In this paper, we present a question-driven approach to delivering retrieved documents in an attempt to organize them in a way that is closer to the user's mental representation of the expected answer. In our proposed approach, retrieved documents are dynamically classified into categories; an appropriate classification scheme is selected by a user on the basis of his own understanding of the information need. Experimental results show that users are more satisfied with such a directed categorization than with a list of retrieved documents.

title: Using Document Relationships for Better Answers
abstract: In most retrieval systems the answer to a query is a ranked list of documents. There is little information about the ranking and no support for exploring the relationships that may exist between the documents. In this paper we consider the use of clustering answers to better support users satisfying their information needs. We show how clustering reflects the nature of some information needs, and how the clustering can be used to find more relevant documents than would be the case using simple lists. This work contributes to our approach of building answers to information needs, rather than simply providing lists.

title: Using clustering and classification approaches in interactive retrieval
abstract: Satisfying non-trivial information needs involves collecting information from multiple resources, and synthesizing an answer that organizes that information. Traditional recall/precision-oriented information retrieval focuses on just one phase of that process: how to efficiently and effectively identify documents likely to be relevant to a specific, focused query. The TREC Interactive Track has as its goal the location of documents that pertain to different instances of a query topic, with no reward for duplicated coverage of topic instances. This task is similar to the task of organizing answer components into a complete answer. Clustering and classification are two mechanisms for organizing documents into groups. In this paper, we present an ongoing series of experiments that test the feasibility and effectiveness of using clustering and classification as an aid to instance retrieval and, ultimately, answer construction. Our results show that users prefer such structured presentations of candidate result set to a list-based approach. Assessment of the structured organizations based on the subjective judgement of the experiment subjects suggests that the structured organization can be more effective; however, assessment based on objective judgements shows mixed results. These results indicate that a full determination of the success of the approach depends on assessing the quality of the final answers generated by users, rather than on performance during the intermediate stages of answer construction.

title: XML Document Retrieval with PADRE

title: Supporting Group-By and Pipelining in Bitmap-Enabled Query Processors
abstract: The Group-By operation is widely used in relational Data Warehouses for the aggregation and presentation of results according to user-defined criteria. Rearranging Group-By and join operations has been proposed as an optimization technique that reduces the size of the input relation. Pipelining is another optimization technique that promotes intra-query parallelism by transfering intermediate results to the next operation without materializing them. In Data Warehouses and environments in which exploratory on-line queries are common, pipelining can be used both for optimizing joins and for the reduction of response time by presenting partial results to the user. Efficient pipelining often depends on the order of the intermediate results. Order-dependent operations, such as Group-By, typically require the complete result set before ordering it, thereby making efficient pipelining impossible. In this paper we exploit bitmap indexing to implement Group-By in a manner that can be used for pipelining. Algorithms are presented for different assumptions about buffer availability and for different sort orders.

title: Image Tampering Identification using Blind Deconvolution
abstract: Digital images have been used in growing number of applications from law enforcement and surveillance, to medical diagnosis and consumer photography. With such widespread popularity and the presence of low-cost image editing softwares, the integrity of image content can no longer be taken for granted. In this paper, we propose a novel technique based on blind deconvolution to verify image authenticity. We consider the direct output images of a camera as authentic, and introduce algorithms to detect further processing such as tampering applied to the image. Our proposed method is based on the observation that many tampering operations can be approximated as a combination of linear and non-linear components. We model the linear part of the tampering process as a filter, and obtain its coefficients using blind deconvolution. These estimated coefficients are then used to identify possible manipulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image authentication technique and compare our results with existing works.

title: Under My Finger: Human Factors in Pushing and Rotating Documents Across the Table
abstract: When passing a document to someone across a table, the person passing the document often rotates it to face the receiver. In this paper, we present the results of a user evaluation of three Push-and-Rotate schemes that offer different underlying control semantics for how an electronic document can automatically rotate as it is pushed across an interactive tabletop surface. The effects of document size are also discussed.

title: Performance Study on Multimedia Fingerprinting Employing Traceability Codes
abstract: Digital fingerprinting is a tool to protect multimedia content from illegal redistribution by uniquely marking copies of the content distributed to each user. Collusion attack is a powerful attack whereby several differently-fingerprinted copies of the same content are combined together to attenuate or even remove the fingerprint. Coded fingerprinting is one major category of fingerprinting techniques against collusion. Many fingerprinting codes are proposed with tracing capability and collusion resistance, such as Traceability (TA) codes and Identifiable Parent Property (IPP) codes. Most of these works treat the important embedding issue in terms of a set of simplified and abstract assumptions, and they do not examine the end-to-end performance of the coded multimedia fingerprinting. In this paper we jointly consider the coding and embedding issues and examine the collusion resistance of coded fingerprinting systems with various code parameters. Our results show that TA codes generally offer better collusion resistance than IPP codes, and a TA code with a larger alphabet size and a longer code length is preferred.

title: Distortion compensated lookup-table embedding: joint security and robustness enhancement for quantization-based data hiding
abstract: Data embedding mechanism used for authentication applications should be secure in order to prevent an adversary from forging the embedded data at his/her will. Meanwhile, semi-fragileness is often preferred to allow for distinguishing content changes versus non-content changes. In this paper, we focus on jointly enhancing the robustness and security of the embedding mechanism, which can be used as a building block for authentication. The paper presents analysis showing that embedding through a look-up table (LUT) of non-trivial run that maps quantized multimedia features randomly to binary data offers a probability of detection error considerably smaller than that of the traditional quantization embedding. We quantify the security strength of LUT embedding and enhance its robustness through distortion compensation. We introduce a combined security and capacity measure and show that the proposed distortion compensated LUT embedding provides joint enhancement of security and robustness over the traditional quantization embedding.