Question-driven classification of retrieved documents
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: Generating Personal Travel Guides from Discourse Plans
abstract: This paper describes a system that delivers travel guides tailored to individual needs. It does so by integrating a discourse planner with a system for querying the web and generating synthesised web pages using document prescriptions. We show by way of example how a user model can lead to a personal travel guide, and show what this might look like in different media. We briefly describe the investigations we are undertaking to determine the utility of such approaches.

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: 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: Searcher performance in question answering
abstract: There are many tasks that require information finding. Some can be largely automated, and others greatly benefit from successful interaction between system and searcher. We are interested in the task of answering questions where some synthesis of information is required-the answer would not generally be given from a single passage of a single document. We investigate whether variation in the way a list of documents is delivered affected searcher performance in the question answering task. We will show that there is a significant difference in performance using a list customized to the task type, compared with a standard web-engine list. This indicates that paying attention to the task and the searcher interaction may provide substantial improvement in task performance.

title: Generating Personal Travel Guides - And Who Wants Them?
abstract: 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: Collusion-Resistant Video Fingerprinting for Large User Group
abstract: Digital fingerprinting protects multimedia content from illegal redistribution by uniquely marking copies of the content distributed to users. Most existing multimedia fingerprinting schemes consider a user set on the scale of thousands. However, in such real-world applications as video-on-demand distribution, the number of potential users can be as many as 10-100 million. This large user size demands not only strong collusion resistance but also high efficiency in fingerprint construction, and detection, which makes most existing schemes incapable of being applied to these applications. A recently proposed joint coding and embedding fingerprinting framework provides a promising balance between collusion resistance, efficient construction, and detection, but several issues remain unsolved for applications involving a large group of users. In this paper, we explore how to employ the joint coding and embedding framework and develop practical algorithms to fingerprint video in such challenging settings as to accommodate more than ten million users and resist hundreds of users' collusion. We investigate the proper code structure for large-scale fingerprinting and propose a trimming detection technique that can reduce the decoding computational complexity by more than three orders of magnitude at the cost of less than 0.5% loss in detection probability under moderate to high watermark-to-noise ratios. Both analytic and experimental results show a high potential of joint coding and embedding to meet the needs of real-world large-scale fingerprinting applications.

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: EITH - A Unifying Representation for Database Schema and Application Code in Enterprise Knowledge Extraction
abstract: The integration of heterogeneous legacy databases requires understanding of database structure and content. We previously developed a theoretical and software infrastructure to support the extraction of schema and business rule information from legacy sources, combining database reverse engineering with semantic analysis of associated application code (DRE/SA). In this paper, we present a compact formalism called EITH that unifies the representation of database schema and application code. EITH can be efficiently derived from various types of schema representations, particularly the relational model, and supports comparison of a wide variety of schema and code constructs to enable interoperation. Unlike UML or E/R diagrams, for example, EITH has compact notation, is unambiguous, and uses a small set of efficient heuristics. We show how EITH is employed in the context of SEEK, using a construction project management example. We also show how EITH can represent various structures in relational databases, and can serve as an efficient representation for E/R diagrams. This suggests that EITH can support efficient matching of more complex, hierarchical structures via indexed tree representations, without compromising the EITH design philosophy or formalism.

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.

title: Dynamic join-exit amortization and scheduling for time-efficient group key agreement
abstract: We propose a time-efficient contributory key agreement framework for secure communications in dynamic groups. The proposed scheme employs a special join-tree/exit-tree topology in the logical key tree and effectively exploits the efficiency of amortized operations. We derive the optimal parameters and design an activation algorithm for the join and exit trees. We also show that the asymptotic average time cost per user join and leave event is /spl theta/(log (log n)), where n is the group size. Our experiment results on both simulated user activities and the real MBone data have shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing tree-based schemes.