Watermarking for image authentication
A data embedding method is proposed for image authentication based on table look-up in frequency domain. A visually meaningful watermark and a set of simple features are embedded invisibly in the marked image, which can be stored in the compressed form. The scheme can detect and localize alterations of the original image, such as the tampering of images exported from a digital camera.

title: Security evaluation for communication-friendly encryption of multimedia
abstract: This paper addresses the access control issues unique to multimedia, by using a joint signal processing and cryptographic approach to multimedia encryption. Based on three atomic encryption primitives, we present a systematic study on how to strategically integrate different atomic operations to build a video encryption system. We also propose a set of multimedia-specific security metrics to quantify the security against approximation attacks and to complement the existing notion of generic data security. The resulting system can provide superior performance to both generic encryption and its simple adaptation to video in terms of a joint consideration of security, bitrate overhead, and communication friendliness.

title: Data hiding in binary image for authentication and annotation
abstract: This paper proposes a new method to embed data in binary images, including scanned text, figures, and signatures. The method manipulates "flippable" pixels to enforce specific block-based relationship in order to embed a significant amount of data without causing noticeable artifacts. Shuffling is applied before embedding to equalize the uneven embedding capacity from region to region. The hidden data can be extracted without using the original image, and can also be accurately extracted after high quality printing and scanning with the help of a few registration marks. The proposed data embedding method can be used to detect unauthorized use of a digitized signature, and annotate or authenticate binary documents. The paper also presents analysis and discussions on robustness and security issues.

title: Collusion-resistant multimedia fingerprinting: a unified framework
abstract: Digital fingerprints are unique labels inserted in different copies of the same content before distribution. Each digital fingerprint is assigned to an inteded recipient, and can be used to trace the culprits who use their content for unintended purposes. Attacks mounted by multiple users, known as collusion attacks, provide a cost-effective method for attenuating the identifying fingerprint from each coluder, thus collusion poses a reeal challenge to protect the digital media data and enforce usage policies. This paper examines a few major design methodologies for collusion-resistant fingerprinting of multimedia, and presents a unified framework that helps highlight the common issues and the uniqueness of different fingerprinting techniques.

title: Anti-collusion codes: multi-user and multimedia perspectives
abstract: Digital fingerprinting is an effective method to identify users who might try to redistribute multimedia content, such as images and video. These fingerprints are typically embedded into the content using watermarking techniques that are designed to be robust to a variety of attacks. A cheap and effective attack against such digital fingerprints is collusion, where several differently marked copies of the same content are averaged or combined to disrupt the underlying fingerprint. We present a construction of collusion-resistant fingerprints based upon anti-collusion codes (ACC) and binary code modulation. ACC have the property that the composition of any subset of K or fewer codevectors is unique. Using this property, we build fingerprints that allow for the identification of groups of K or less colluders. We present a construction of binary-valued ACC under the logical AND operation using the theory of combinatorial designs. Our code construction requires only /spl Oscr/(/spl radic/n) orthogonal signals to accommodate n users. We demonstrate the performance of our ACC for fingerprinting multimedia by identifying colluders through experiments using real images.

title: Digital watermarking using shuffling
abstract: This paper applies shuffling to digital watermarking and data hiding. The data embedding capacity in the multimedia source generally varies significantly from one part of the source to another. Sequential embedding is very sensitive to noise which may cause synchronization problem; the common but conservative solution via partitioning an image into large segments and embedding only one bit per segment is wasteful of the data embedding capacity. This paper shows how random shuffling can be used to equalize the uneven distribution of embedding capacity. The effectiveness of random shuffling is demonstrated by analysis and experiments.

title: Research Issues in Data Warehousing
abstract: Data warehousing is a booming industry with many interesting research problems. The database research community has concentrated on only a few aspects. In this paper, We summarize the state of the art, suggest architectural extensions and identify research problems in the areas of warehouse modeling and design, data cleansing and loading, data refreshing and purging, metadata management, extensions to relational operators, alternative implementations of traditional relational operators, special index structures and query optimization with aggregates.

title: Myriad: An Architecture for Contextualized Information Retrieval and Delivery
abstract: Users’ information needs are largely driven by the context in which they make their decisions. This context is dynamic. It includes the users’ characteristics, their current domain of application, the tasks they commonly perform and the device they are currently using. This context is also evolving. When one information need is satisfied, another is likely to emerge. An information access system must, therefore, be able to track this dynamic and evolving context, and exploit it to retrieve actionable information from appropriate sources and deliver it in a form suitable for the current situation. This paper presents a generic architecture that supports the construction of information retrieval and delivery systems that make use of context. The architecture, called Myriad, includes an adaptive virtual document planner, and explicit, dynamic representations of the user’s current context.

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: Balancing productivity and consumer satisfaction for profitability: Statistical and fuzzy regression analysis
abstract: This paper examines the relationships among productivity, consumer satisfaction and profitability using the conventional statistical regression and the new fuzzy regression approaches. For service firms in the context of Hong Kong, we verify the profit hypothesis that individually both productivity and consumer satisfaction are positively linked to profitability as well as the tradeoff hypothesis that aggregately there are negative interactions between productivity and consumer satisfaction for enhancing profitability. Hence service firms should balance their efforts in productivity and consumer satisfaction, possibly by employing appropriate information technologies to improve productivity while without hurting consumer satisfaction, to optimize their profitability. The study takes advantage of the Hong Kong Consumer Satisfaction Index and deliberately focuses on total rather than partial productivity. Several models are first estimated using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method and the results generally support the two hypotheses, but the OLS approach also leaves two puzzles that estimates of the regression coefficients are: (1) not significant before considering the interactions between consumer satisfaction and productivity but significant after introducing the interaction term, and (2) significant although sample data for productivity and the interaction term are highly correlated. These puzzles, together with the observed imprecision in productivity and profitability measurements and especially the subjectivity in measuring consumer satisfaction, lead us to adopt the fuzzy linear regression (FLR) techniques to further examine the two hypotheses. The popular FLR model continues to favor our research hypotheses but fail to offer any additional insights into the examined relationships over the OLS models. We then propose a revised FLR model which, in addition to reconfirming the hypotheses, does help to explain the encountered puzzles and fuzziness, and hence suggests an encouraging methodology for marketing.

title: A Bayesian Method for Guessing the Extreme Values in a Data Set
abstract: For a large number of data management problems, it would be very useful to be able to obtain a few samples from a data set, and to use the samples to guess the largest (or smallest) value in the entire data set. Min/max online aggregation, top-k query processing, outlier detection, and distance join are just a few possible applications. This paper details a statistically rigorous, Bayesian approach to attacking this problem. Just as importantly, we demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how it can be applied to two specific problems that arise in the context of data management.