Searcher performance in question answering
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: 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: 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: 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: Using Document Relationships for Better Answers
abstract: In most retrieval systems the answer to a query is a ranked list of documents. There is little information about the ranking and no support for exploring the relationships that may exist between the documents. In this paper we consider the use of clustering answers to better support users satisfying their information needs. We show how clustering reflects the nature of some information needs, and how the clustering can be used to find more relevant documents than would be the case using simple lists. This work contributes to our approach of building answers to information needs, rather than simply providing lists.

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: 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.

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: 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 resource allocation via video content and short-term traffic statistics
abstract: The reliable and efficient transmission of high-quality variable bit rate (VBR) video through the Internet generally requires network resources be allocated in a dynamic fashion. This includes the determination of when to renegotiate for network resources, as well as how much to request at a given time. The accuracy of any resource request method depends critically on its prediction of future traffic patterns. Such a prediction can be performed using the content and traffic information of short video segments. This paper presents a systematic approach to select the best features for prediction, indicating that while content is important in predicting the bandwidth of a video hit stream, the use of both content and available short-term bandwidth statistics can yield significant improvements. A new framework for traffic prediction is proposed in this paper; experimental results show a smaller mean-square resource prediction error and higher overall link utilization.