A wearable digital library of personal conversations
We have developed a wearable, personalized digital library system, which unobtrusively records the wearer's part of a conversation, recognizes the face of the current dialog partner and remembers his/her voice. The next time the system sees the same person and hears the same voice, it can replay parts of the last conversation in compressed form. Results from a prototype system show the effectiveness of combining of face recognition and speaker identification for retrieving conversations.

title: Identifying Perspectives at the Document and Sentence Levels Using Statistical Models
abstract: In this paper we investigate the problem of identifying the perspective from which a document was written. By perspective we mean a point of view, for example, from the perspective of Democrats or Republicans. Can computers learn to identify the perspective of a document? Furthermore, can computers identify which sentences in a document strongly convey a particular perspective? We develop statistical models to capture how perspectives are expressed at the document and sentence levels, and evaluate the proposed models on a collection of articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results show that the statistical models can successfully learn how perspectives are reflected in word usage and identify the perspective of a document with very high accuracy.

title: A Top-Down Processor Allocation Scheme for Hypercube Computers
abstract: An efficient processor allocation policy is presented for hypercube computers. The allocation policy is called free list since it maintains a list of free subcubes available in the system. An incoming request of dimension k (2/sup k/ nodes) is allocated by finding a free subcube of dimension k or by decomposing an available subcube of dimension greater than k. This free list policy uses a top-down allocation rule in contrast to the bottom-up approach used by the previous bit-map allocation algorithms. This allocation scheme is compared to the buddy, gray code (GC), and modified buddy allocation policies reported for the hypercubes. It is shown that the free list policy is optimal in a static environment, as are the other policies, and it also gives better subcube recognition ability compared to the previous schemes in a dynamic environment. The performance of this policy, in terms of parameters such as average delay, system utilization, and time complexity, is compared to the other schemes to demonstrate its effectiveness. The extension of the algorithm for parallel implementation, noncubic allocation, and inclusion/exclusion allocation is also given.

title: Coloring of distance graphs with intervals as distance sets
abstract: Let D be a set of positive integers. The distance graph G(Z, D) with distance set D is the graph with vertex set Z in which two vertices x, y are adjacent if and only if |x - y| ∈ D. The fractional chromatic number, the chromatic number, and the circular chromatic number of G(Z, D) for various D have been extensively studied recently. In this paper, we investigate the fractional chromatic number, the chromatic number, and the circular chromatic number of the distance graphs with the distance sets of the form Dm, [k,k'] = {1, 2, ..., m} - {k, k + 1, ..., k'}, where m, k, and k' are natural numbers with m ≥ k' ≥ k. In particular, we completely determine the chromatic number of G(Z, Dm, [2,k']) for arbitrary m, and k'.

title: Analysis of two restart algorithms
abstract: Since the backpropagation algorithm used for neural network training suffers from a slow convergence and often sticking in local minima, the restart mechanism has been introduced, whose strategy is to cut off the training process and restart it with a fresh initialization when it seems unlikely to converge in a relatively short time. In this paper, we give detailed mathematical analysis on two versions of the restart algorithms. By deriving analytic expressions of the expected convergence time and the success rate, we illustrate why the restart algorithms work well and gain insights into the proper use of restarting. Numerical simulations are performed on the XOR problem, symmetry detection, parity problem and Arabic numeral recognition. We show the effectiveness of the restart algorithms, and compare them with simulated annealing. The analysis can also be applied to many other fields.

title: Self-organizing fuzzy control of multi-variable systems using learning vector quantization network
abstract: Using learning vector quantization (LVQ) network to construct a self-organizing fuzzy controller (SOFC) for multi-variable nonlinear composite systems is developed in this paper. The LVQ network is used to provide information about the better locations of the IF-part membership functions through un-supervised learning. The generated fuzzy rule base is applied to the SOFC and updated by a self-learning procedure. Using Lyapunov stability methods, the proposed adaptive scheme is proven to provide the SOFC some degree of robust properties and guarantee uniform ultimate boundedness in the presence of disturbances, measurement noise and perturbed initialization error. The effectiveness of the proposed controller has been demonstrated numerically by applying to control a two-link manipulator.

title: A Lattice-Based MRF Model for Dynamic Near-Regular Texture Tracking
abstract: A near-regular texture (NRT) is a geometric and photometric deformation from its regular origin - a congruent wallpaper pattern formed by 2D translations of a single tile. A dynamic NRT is an NRT under motion. Although NRTs are pervasive in man-made and natural environments, effective computational algorithms for NRTs are few. This paper addresses specific computational challenges in modeling and tracking dynamic NRTs, including ambiguous correspondences, occlusions, and drastic illumination and appearance variations. We propose a lattice-based Markov-random-field (MRF) model for dynamic NRTs in a 3D spatiotemporal space. Our model consists of a global lattice structure that characterizes the topological constraint among multiple textons and an image observation model that handles local geometry and appearance variations. Based on the proposed MRF model, we develop a tracking algorithm that utilizes belief propagation and particle filtering to effectively handle the special challenges of the dynamic NRT tracking without any assumption on the motion types or lighting conditions. We provide quantitative evaluations of the proposed method against existing tracking algorithms and demonstrate its applications in video editing