Spatial temporal concealment of lost blocks in coded video
When errors are introduced into a compressed video bit-stream, blocks of pixels are lost. The decoder attempts to conceal this loss to maximize the displayed picture quality. Previous approaches use either surrounding pixels in the current picture to conceal lost blocks (spatial concealment) or pixels from the previous picture (temporal concealment). We show how joint spatial temporal concealment can be implemented to provide higher quality concealment. To do that we model video sequences as mixtures of simple Markov processes and utilise the model for concealment of portions of video which are missing. This model allows us to combine spatial and temporal information in a seamless manner when performing concealment on the missing blocks.

title: Learning to Separate Text Content and Style for Classification
abstract: Many text documents naturally have two kinds of labels. For example, we may label web pages from universities according to their categories, such as “student” or “faculty”, or according the source universities, such as “Cornell” or “Texas”. We call one kind of labels the content and the other kind the style. Given a set of documents, each with both content and style labels, we seek to effectively learn to classify a set of documents in a new style with no content labels into its content classes. Assuming that every document is generated using words drawn from a mixture of two multinomial component models, one content model and one style model, we propose a method named Cartesian EM that constructs content models and style models through Expectation Maximization and performs classification of the unknown content classes transductively. Our experiments on real-world datasets show the proposed method to be effective for style independent text content classification.

title: RankCut - A Domain Independent Forward Pruning Method for Games
abstract: Forward pruning, also known as selective search, is now employed in many strong game-playing programs. In this paper, we introduce RankCut – a domain independent forward pruning technique which makes use of move ordering, and prunes once no better move is likely to be available. Since gameplaying programs already perform move ordering to improve the performance of αβ search, this information is available at no extra cost. As RankCut uses additional information untapped by current forward pruning techniques, RankCut is a complementary forward pruning method that can be used with existing methods, and is able to achieve improvements even when conventional pruning techniques are simultaneously employed. We implemented RankCut in a modern open-source chess program, CRAFTY. RankCut reduces the game-tree size by approximately 10%-40% for search depths 8-12 while retaining tactical reliability, when implemented alongside CRAFTY’s existing forward pruning techniques.

title: Partially Supervised Classification of Text Documents
abstract: We investigate the following problem: Given a set of documents of a particular topic or class P , and a large set M of mixed documents that contains documents from class P and other types of documents, identify the documents from class P in M . The key feature of this problem is that there is no labeled nonP document, which makes traditional machine learning techniques inapplicable, as they all need labeled documents of both classes. We call this problem partially supervised classification. In this paper, we show that this problem can be posed as a constrained optimization problem and that under appropriate conditions, solutions to the constrained optimization problem will give good solutions to the partially supervised classification problem. We present a novel technique to solve the problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique through extensive experimentation.

title: Text classification with kernels on the multinomial manifold
abstract: Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been very successful in text classification. However, the intrinsic geometric structure of text data has been ignored by standard kernels commonly used in SVMs. It is natural to assume that the documents are on the multinomial manifold, which is the simplex of multinomial models furnished with the Riemannian structure induced by the Fisher information metric. We prove that the Negative Geodesic Distance (NGD) on the multinomial manifold is conditionally positive definite (cpd), thus can be used as a kernel in SVMs. Experiments show the NGD kernel on the multinomial manifold to be effective for text classification, significantly outperforming standard kernels on the ambient Euclidean space.

title: A Theoretical Analysis of Query Selection for Collaborative Filtering
abstract: We consider the problem of determining which of a set of experts has tastes most similar to a given user by asking the user questions about his likes and dislikes. We describe a simple and fast algorithm for a theoretical model of this problem with a provable approximation guarantee, and prove that solving the problem exactly is NP-Hard.

title: Adaptive frame-skipping for video transcoding
abstract: In video transcoding, the compressed video bitstream is often converted to the reduced frame-rate video bitstream in order to reduce bit-rate or implement fast forward and reverse video playback. One way to perform this is to decompress the compressed video bitstream and drop several specific frames, then compress those nonskipped frames to another compressed video bitstream. This method has heavy computation complexity. In this paper, we propose two new methods to reduce the complexity. The first method is simple frame-skipped video transcoder architecture which can reduce frame rate of recompressed video bitstream adaptively and quickly. The second method is bidirection dominant vector selection method which converts the popular I-B-P frame structure of video bitstream to be the I-P frame structure quickly through reusing the decoded incoming motion vectors. Experimental results are reported in this paper to show the efficacy of the proposed methods.

title: Towards an Information-Theoretic Framework for Analyzing Intrusion Detection Systems
abstract: IDS research still needs to strengthen mathematical foundations and theoretic guidelines. In this paper, we build a formal framework, based on information theory, for analyzing and quantifying the effectiveness of an IDS. We firstly present a formal IDS model, then analyze it following an information-theoretic approach. Thus, we propose a set of information-theoretic metrics that can quantitatively measure the effectiveness of an IDS in terms of feature representation capability, classification information loss, and overall intrusion detection capability. We establish a link to relate these metrics, and prove a fundamental upper bound on the intrusion detection capability of an IDS. Our framework is a practical theory which is data trace driven and evaluation oriented in this area. In addition to grounding IDS research on a mathematical theory for formal study, this framework provides practical guidelines for IDS fine-tuning, evaluation and design, that is, the provided set of metrics greatly facilitates a static/dynamic fine-tuning of an IDS to achieve optimal operation and a fine-grained means to evaluate IDS performance and improve IDS design. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the utility of our framework in practice.

title: Spatial Index on Air
abstract: With the advent of wireless networking and personal digital devices, the population of mobile users will increase significantly. Broadcasting is particularly suitable for environments having a large number of clients. In this paper, we study the query processing of some typical location-dependent queries, such as window queries and kNN queries, in a broadcast system. To reduce clients' power consumption and provide efficient services, a transformation of the objects is applied based on Hilbert curve. Furthermore, a linear index structure is constructed and several algorithms are devised to answer spatial queries. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed transformation and related algorithms. Results show that the proposed schemes outperform existing algorithms significantly.

title: q-gram matching using tree models
abstract: q-gram matching is used for approximate substring matching problems in a wide range of application areas, including intrusion detection. In this paper, we present a tree-based model to perform fast linear time q-gram matching. All q-grams present in the text are stored in a tree structure similar to trie. We use a tree redundancy pruning algorithm to reduce the size of the tree without losing any information. We also use suffix links for fast q-gram search during query matching. We compare our work with the Rabin-Karp-based hash-table technique, commonly used for multiple q-gram search. We present results of experiments on system call sequence data used for intrusion detection.

title: A Multiple Model Cost-Sensitive Approach for Intrusion Detection
abstract: Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) need to maximize security while minimizing costs. In this paper, we study the problem of building cost-sensitive intrusion detection models to be used for real-time detection. We briefly discuss the major cost factors in IDS, including consequential and operational costs. We propose a multiple model cost-sensitive machine learning technique to produce models that are optimized for user-defined cost metrics. Empirical experiments in off-line analysis show a reduction of approximately 97% in operational cost over a single model approach, and a reduction of approximately 30% in consequential cost over a pure accuracy-based approach.