Generating Personal Travel Guides - And Who Wants Them?
In this paper we describe a system that generates synthesized web pages as a travel guide through integrating a discourse planner with a document retrieval system. We then present our investigation on whether the guide generated by such a system is actually preferred by users over a more general guide.

title: Using clustering and classification approaches in interactive retrieval
abstract: Satisfying non-trivial information needs involves collecting information from multiple resources, and synthesizing an answer that organizes that information. Traditional recall/precision-oriented information retrieval focuses on just one phase of that process: how to efficiently and effectively identify documents likely to be relevant to a specific, focused query. The TREC Interactive Track has as its goal the location of documents that pertain to different instances of a query topic, with no reward for duplicated coverage of topic instances. This task is similar to the task of organizing answer components into a complete answer. Clustering and classification are two mechanisms for organizing documents into groups. In this paper, we present an ongoing series of experiments that test the feasibility and effectiveness of using clustering and classification as an aid to instance retrieval and, ultimately, answer construction. Our results show that users prefer such structured presentations of candidate result set to a list-based approach. Assessment of the structured organizations based on the subjective judgement of the experiment subjects suggests that the structured organization can be more effective; however, assessment based on objective judgements shows mixed results. These results indicate that a full determination of the success of the approach depends on assessing the quality of the final answers generated by users, rather than on performance during the intermediate stages of answer construction.

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: XML Document Retrieval with PADRE

title: The role of a judge in a user based retrieval experiment (poster session)
abstract: A tuning device for tympani that displays the pitch of each instrument's tympanum. The pitch is determined by measuring the strain in an adjustable tensioning mechanism employed in all tympani to keep proper tension on the tympanum. The pitch or tone of the tympani is determined by the vibration frequency of the tympanum when the tympani is played and the frequency is determined by the tension in the tympanum. A transducer measures the strain in the tensioning mechanism to give an accurate indication of what the tympanum tension, and therefore the pitch, of the tympani would be when played. The transducer includes a resistance-type strain gage mounted on the tympanum tensioning mechanism. The length of the conductor in the strain gage and therefore its resistance, changes with stress changes in the tensioning mechanism used to tune the tympani. A switch means selects a desired one of the strain gages mounted on each of the one or more tympani for inclusion as one section of a four-section resistance bridge circuit configuration. A signal conditioning module provides excitation to the bridge circuit and also conditions the output of the bridge circuit. The output of the bridge circuit varies as the resistance of the strain gage varies. The conditioned output of the bridge circuit is displayed on a voltmeter whose scale has been calibrated to indicate the pitch of the tympani being monitored.

title: CSIRO INEX experiments: XML Search using PADRE
abstract: This paper reports on the CSIRO group's participation in INEX. We indexed documents and document fragments using PADRE, the core of CSIRO's Panoptic Enterprise Search Engine. A query translator converts the INEX topics into queries containing selection and projection constraints for the results. Answers are extracted from ranked documents and document fragments based on the projection constraints in the query.

title: Do security toolbars actually prevent phishing attacks?
abstract: Security toolbars in a web browser show security-related information about a website to help users detect phishing attacks. Because the toolbars are designed for humans to use, they should be evaluated for usability -- that is, whether these toolbars really prevent users from being tricked into providing personal information. We conducted two user studies of three security toolbars and other browser security indicators and found them all ineffective at preventing phishing attacks. Even though subjects were asked to pay attention to the toolbar, many failed to look at it; others disregarded or explained away the toolbars' warnings if the content of web pages looked legitimate. We found that many subjects do not understand phishing attacks or realize how sophisticated such attacks can be.

title: Building Sparse Large Margin Classifiers
abstract: This paper presents an approach to build Sparse Large Margin Classifiers (SLMC) by adding one more constraint to the standard Support Vector Machine (SVM) training problem. The added constraint explicitly controls the sparseness of the classifier and an approach is provided to solve the formulated problem. When considering the dual of this problem. it can be seen that building an SLMC is equivalent to constructing an SVM with a modified kernel function. Further analysis of this kernel function indicates that the proposed approach essentially finds a discriminating subspace that can be spanned by a small number of vectors, and in this subspace different classes of data are linearly well separated. Experimental results over several classification benchmarks show that in most cases the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art sparse learning algorithms.

title: Participatory design with individuals who have amnesia
abstract: We present experiences and insights into participatory design with individuals who have anterograde amnesia and therefore have extreme difficulty storing new memories. We discuss our design of the design process, and present a set of techniques used to support memory during and between design sessions. From this experience, we identify cognitive assumptions of participatory design that break down when working with amnestics. We generalize these ideas into an analytical framework for researchers and practitioners who intend to use participatory design with persons having various kinds of cognitive impairments. We illustrate the framework by analyzing a cognitive deficit unrelated to memory that we encountered, and an unanticipated benefit from what at first appeared to be a liability in working with this design team.

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: Classification-based spatial error concealment for images
abstract: This paper presents a new, classification-based spatial error concealment algorithm for images. The proposed scheme takes advantage of two state-of-the-art concealment schemes and adaptively selects a better suitable concealment scheme for each corrupted block. Using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, our proposed approach outperforms the prior art in terms of the concealment quality and has moderate computational complexity.