Accommodating colorblind users in image search
There are about 8% of men and 0.8% of women suffering from colorblindness. Due to certain loss of color information, the existing image search techniques may not provide satisfactory results for these users. In this demonstration, we show an image search system that can accommodate colorblind users. It can help these special users find and enjoy what they want by providing multiple services for them, including search results reranking, image recoloring and color indication.

title: Accessible image search
abstract: There are about 8% of men and 0.8% of women suffering from colorblindness. We show that the existing image search techniques cannot provide satisfactory results for these users, since many images will not be well perceived by them due to the loss of color information. In this paper, we introduce a scheme named Accessible Image Search (AIS) to accommodate these users. Different from the general image search scheme that aims at returning more relevant results, AIS further takes into account the colorblind accessibilities of the returned results, i.e., the image qualities in the eyes of colorblind users. The scheme includes two components: accessibility assessment and accessibility improvement. For accessibility assessment, we introduce an analysisbased method and a learning-based method. Based on the measured accessibility scores, different reranking methods can be performed to prioritize the images with high accessibilities. In accessibility improvement component, we propose an efficient recoloring algorithm to modify the colors of the images such that they can be better perceived by colorblind users. We also propose the Accessibility Average Precision (AAP) for AIS as a complementary performance evaluation measure to the conventional relevance-based evaluation methods. Experimental results with more than 60,000 images and 20 anonymous colorblind users demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed scheme.

title: Classification using support vector machines with graded resolution
abstract: A method which we call support vector machine with graded resolution (SVM-GR) is proposed in this paper. During the training of the SVM-GR, we first form data granules to train the SVM-GR and remove those data granules that are not support vectors. We then use the remaining training samples to train the SVM-GR. Compared with the traditional SVM, our SVM-GR algorithm requires fewer training samples and support vectors, hence the computational time and memory requirements for the SVM-GR are much smaller than those of a conventional SVM that use the entire dataset. Experiments on benchmark data sets show that the generalization performance of the SVM-GR is comparable to the traditional SVM.

title: Improving an Association Rule Based Classifier
abstract: Existing classification algorithms in machine learning mainly use heuristic search to find a subset of regularities in data for classification. In the past few years, extensive research was done in the database community on learning rules using exhaustive search under the name of association rule mining. Although the whole set of rules may not be used directly for accurate classification, effective classifiers have been built using the rules. This paper aims to improve such an exhaustive search based classification system CBA (Classification Based on Associations). The main strength of this system is that it is able to use the most accurate rules for classification. However, it also has weaknesses. This paper proposes two new techniques to deal with these weaknesses. This results in remarkably accurate classifiers. Experiments on a set of 34 benchmark datasets show that on average the new techniques reduce the error of CBA by 17% and is superior to CBA on 26 of the 34 datasets. They reduce the error of C4.5 by 19%, and improve performance on 29 datasets. Similar good results are also achieved against RIPPER, LB and a Naive-Bayes classifier.

title: On the temporal dimension of search
abstract: Web search is probably the single most important application on the Internet. The most famous search techniques are perhaps the PageRank and HITS algorithms. These algorithms are motivated by the observation that a hyperlink from a page to another is an implicit conveyance of authority to the target page. They exploit this social phenomenon to identify quality pages, e.g., "authority" pages and "hub" pages. In this paper we argue that these algorithms miss an important dimension of the Web, the temporal dimension. The Web is not a static environment. It changes constantly. Quality pages in the past may not be quality pages now or in the future. These techniques favor older pages because these pages have many in-links accumulated over time. New pages, which may be of high quality, have few or no in-links and are left behind. Bringing new and quality pages to users is important because most users want the latest information. Research publication search has exactly the same problem. This paper studies the temporal dimension of search in the context of research publication search. We propose a number of methods deal with the problem. Our experimental results show that these methods are highly effective.

title: A Bottom-up Distance-based index Tree for Metric Space
abstract: Similarity search is of importance in many new database applications. These operations can generally be referred as similarity search in metric space. In this paper, a new index construction algorithm is proposed for similarity search in metric space. The new data structure, called bu-tree (bottom-up tree), is based on constructing the index tree from bottom-up, rather than the traditional top-down approaches. The construction algorithm of bu-tree and the range search algorithm based on it are given in this paper. And the update to bu-tree is also discussed. The experiments show that bu-tree is better than sa-tree in search efficiency, especially when the objects are not uniform distributed or the query has low selectivity

title: Research on Service-Oriented Workflow and Performance Evaluation
abstract: The advent of SOA and Grid technology has brought new challenges to workflow operation and performance evaluation. In this paper, the characteristics of service-oriented workflow are presented, based on which the service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described and the performance analysis methods are depicted. Finally the design and implementation of our prototype system are introduced briefly.