COSIMA- your smart, speaking E-salesperson
We present a new cooperative user interface for e-shopping. COSIMA is an intelligent Internet avatar with dynamic voice output that assists customers through their e-shopping tours and advises them like a real salesperson. COSIMA uses a meta search engine based on Preference SQL, computing best matching results to the customer's wishes. COSIMA can qualify these results and generates proper voice output. Our presentation shows COSIMA in action for comparison shopping.

title: Experiences with an Emotional Sales Agent
abstract: With COSIMAB2B we demonstrate a prototype of a complex and visionary e-procurement application. The embodied character agent named COSIMA is able to respect a customer’s preferences and deals with him or her via natural speech. She expresses various emotions via mimic, gesture, combined with speech synthesis, and COSIMA is even able to consider the customer’s emotions via mimic recognition. As first observations show, this is a very promising approach to improve the bargaining with the customer or the recommendation of products.

title: Optimizing the catalog search process for e-procurement platforms
abstract: Many e-procurement platforms support XML-based e-catalogs combined with standardized feature descriptions. Beyond the usual keyword search this opens the arena for attribute-based search engines, including parametric search and preference search. We analyze the impact of different search techniques for such e-catalogs on the overall search process costs. It turns out that preference search has a high potential to significantly reduce the process costs. A large-scale use case with the MAN2B e-procurement platform supports our claim. We identify improvements achievable by using preference search, in particular less navigation steps during the product search and better search results due to the BMO query model. Expensive cases, where frustrated users accept bad search results or phone up the company's purchasing department, should decrease significantly. This in turn will enable the purchasing department to focus more on strategic issues like supplier relationship management than on operative issues as it still happens widely today.

title: Evaluation and optimization of the catalog search process of e-procurement platforms
abstract: With the emerging of e-catalog standards the product search can be used in a very different and improved matter. Beyond the usual keyword search this opens the arena for attribute-based search engines, including parametric search and preference search. We analyze the impact of different search techniques for such e-catalogs on the overall search process costs. It turns out that preference search has a high potential to significantly reduce the process costs. A large-scale use case with the MAN2B e-procurement platform supports our claim. We identify improvements achievable by using preference search, in particular less navigation steps during the product search and better search results due to the BMO query model. Expensive cases, where frustrated users accept bad search results or phone up the company's purchasing department, should decrease significantly. This in turn will enable the purchasing department to focus more on strategic issues like supplier relationship management than on operative issues as it still happens widely today.

title: COSIMA/sup B2B/ - sales automation for e-procurement
abstract: We present a fully automated electronic sales agent for e-procurement portals. The key technologies for this breakthrough are based on preferences modeled as strict partial orders, enabling a deep personalization of the B2B sales process. The interplay of several novel middleware components achieves to automate skills that so far could be executed only by a human vendor. As personalized search engine for XML based e-catalogs, we use Preference XPath; the Preference Presenter implements a sales psychology based presentation of search results, supporting various human sales strategies; the Preference Repository provides the management of situated long-term preferences; the flexible Personalized Price Offer and the multi-objective Preference Bargainer provide a personalized price fixing and the opportunity to bargain about the price of an entire product bundle, applying up/cross and down selling techniques. Our prototype COSIMA/sup B2B/, supported by industrial partners, has been successfully demonstrated at a large computer fair.

title: The COSIMA prototype for multi-objective bargaining
abstract: Multi-objective bargaining is a challenging business model for B2C or B2B Internet applications. Our visual bargaining agent COSIMA builds on cooperative database technology like Preference SQL or Preference XPATH, which can efficiently implement \linebreak[4] multi-dimensional search engines with a Pareto-optimality semantics to find best alternative offers. COSIMA is a smart avatar with dynamically generated speech output. We have implemented several well-known bargaining strategies for a sample e-shop, where the customer can bargain on more attributes than just the price. The life-like appearance of COSIMA is supported by randomizing her bargaining tactics and by expressing visual emotions during bargaining. She can also learn and adapt dynamically to various bargaining preferences of the customers. The COSIMA prototype is carefully engineered by means of component-ware and IT-standards including SQL, XML and Java. This makes it scalable even to very large e-shop databases. Measurements show that this advanced user interface of COSIMA requires only a small overhead of a few seconds, including the bidding process. Thus real-time performance using state-of-the art software components and hardware is feasible. A preliminary user feedback has been very encouraging. COSIMA gave her debut to a large professional audience at the computer fair CeBIT 2002.

title: Face Authentication Using Morphological Dynamic Link Architecture
abstract: A very attractive approach for face detection is based on multiresolution images (also known as mosaic images). Motivated by the simplicity of this approach, a rule-based face detection algorithm in frontal views is developed first. Second, a novel dynamic link architecture based on multiscale morphological dilation-erosion is proposed for face authentication. More specifically, a sparse grid is placed over the outcome of face detection stage for each person in a reference set. Subsequently, multiscale morphological operations are employed to yield a feature vector at each node of the grid and dynamic link matching is applied to verify the identity of each person from a test set. The first experimental results reported in this paper verify the superiority of the proposed method over the (standard) dynamic link matching that is based on Gabor wavelets.

title: Non-randomness in eSTREAM Candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4
abstract: Stream cipher initialisation should ensure that the initial state or keystream is not detectably related to the key and initialisation vector. In this paper we analyse the key/IV setup of the eSTREAM Phase 2 candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4. In the case of Salsa20 we demonstrate a key recovery attack on six rounds and observe non-randomness after seven. For TSC-4, non-randomness over the full eight-round initialisation phase is detected, but would also persist for more rounds.

title: Nonuniform charge scaling (NUCS): A practical approximation of solvent electrostatic screening in proteins
abstract: In molecular mechanics calculations, electrostatic interactions between chemical groups are usually represented by a Coulomb potential between the partial atomic charges of the groups. In aqueous solution these interactions are modified by the polarizable solvent. Although the electrostatic effects of the polarized solvent on the protein are well described by the Poisson--Boltzmann equation, its numerical solution is computationally expensive for large molecules such as proteins. The procedure of nonuniform charge scaling (NUCS) is a pragmatic approach to implicit solvation that approximates the solvent screening effect by individually scaling the partial charges on the explicit atoms of the macromolecule so as to reproduce electrostatic interaction energies obtained from an initial Poisson--Boltzmann analysis. Once the screening factors have been determined for a protein the scaled charges can be easily used in any molecular mechanics program that implements a Coulomb term. The approach is particularly suitable for minimization-based simulations, such as normal mode analysis, certain conformational reaction path or ligand binding techniques for which bulk solvent cannot be included explicitly, and for combined quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical calculations when the interface to more elaborate continuum solvent models is lacking. The method is illustrated using reaction path calculations of the Tyr 35 ring flip in the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor.

title: Symmetry based indexing of diatoms in an image database
abstract: We introduce several methods for symmetry detection and present results of their experimental evaluation on diatom images. The methods are based on distance lists, cyclic string matching, and gray level gradient direction histograms. From the experimental results it can be concluded that symmetry information is useful for various indexing tasks in image databases. Types of symmetry considered in this paper are rotational and reflectional symmetry of the shape as well as symmetry of the gray level distribution of the internal structure of objects. Using the symmetry based indexing scheme proposed, the effort for the subsequent task of diatom classification can significantly be reduced.

title: Fusion of audio and video information for multi modal person authentication
abstract: We present an algorithm functioning as a supervisor module in a multi-expert decision making machine. It uses the Bayes theory in order to estimate the biases of individual expert opinions. The biases are used to calibrate and conciliate expert opinions to a single decision. This supervision technique is applied to the real case of a person authentication technique using two modalities, face and speech. The visual part involves the matching of a coarse grid containing Gabor phase information from face images. The acoustic part is performed by a text-dependent speaker verification system based on Hidden Markov Models. Experimental results show that the proposed fusion method improves the quality of individual expert decisions by reaching success rates of 99.5%.