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Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Image Segmentation With Ratio Cut, Song Wang, Jeffrey Mark Siskind
Image Segmentation With Ratio Cut, Song Wang, Jeffrey Mark Siskind
Faculty Publications
This paper proposes a new cost function, cut ratio, for segmenting images using graph-based methods. The cut ratio is defined as the ratio of the corresponding sums of two different weights of edges along the cut boundary and models the mean affinity between the segments separated by the boundary per unit boundary length. This new cost function allows the image perimeter to be segmented, guarantees that the segments produced by bipartitioning are connected, and does not introduce a size, shape, smoothness, or boundary-length bias. The latter allows it to produce segmentations where boundaries are aligned with image edges. Furthermore, the …
Identity Management, Duncan A. Buell, Ravi Sandhu
Identity Management, Duncan A. Buell, Ravi Sandhu
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Sentient Web, Michael N. Huhns
The Sentient Web, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
In a startling revelation, a team of university scientists has reported that a network of computers has become conscious and sentient, and is beginning to assume control of online information system. In spite of the ominous tone typically chosen for dramatic effect, a sentient Web would be more helpful and much easier for people to use. An agent is an active, persistent software component that perceives, reasons, and acts, and whose actions include communication. Agents inherently take intentional actions based on sensory information and memories of past actions. All agents have necessary communication ability, but they do not necessarily possess …
The Zen Of The Web, Jeff Heflin, Michael N. Huhns
The Zen Of The Web, Jeff Heflin, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Commitments Among Agents, Ashok U. Mallya, Michael N. Huhns
Commitments Among Agents, Ashok U. Mallya, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Commitments are a powerful representation for modeling multiagent interactions. Previous approaches have considered the semantics of commitments and how to check compliance with them. However, these approaches do not capture some of the subtleties that arise in real-life applications such as e-commerce, in which contracts and institutions have implicit temporal references. In this column, we describe a rich representation for the temporal content of commitments that lets us capture realistic contracts and avoid ambiguities. Consequently, this approach lets us reason about whether, and at what point, a commitment is satisfied or breached, and whether it is or ever becomes unenforceable.
Consensus Software: Robustness And Social Good, Michael N. Huhns
Consensus Software: Robustness And Social Good, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
In this column I explore some far-reaching issues of software development that lie at the intersection of robust software and sociopolitical systems. These two areas might seem unrelated-and most software developers would likely be horrified to have politics intrude on their programming efforts-but the intersection occurs through these premises: software systems administer and control much of our societal infrastructure; people would appreciate and better accept that control if they had input into the nature of the control and the systems' behavior; designers can make software systems more robust through redundancy, in which different versions of software components might cover for …
Being And Acting Rational, Michael N. Huhns
Being And Acting Rational, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Rationality alone is insufficient to specify agent design. Using economic theory, we can program agents to behave in ways that maximize their utility while responding to environmental changes. However, economic models for agents, although general in principle, are typically limited in practice because the value functions that are tractable essentially reduce an agent to acting selfishly. Building a stable social system from a collection of agents motivated by self-serving interests is difficult. Finally, understanding rationality and knowledge requires interdisciplinary results from artificial intelligence, distributed.
Massive Deliberation, William H. Turkett Jr., John R. Rose, Michael N. Huhns
Massive Deliberation, William H. Turkett Jr., John R. Rose, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Agents are proliferating on the Web, making it conceivable that their collective reasoning ability might someday be harnessed for robust decision-making. The hope is that massive deliberation power can soon help solve problems that require knowledge, reasoning, and intelligence. Until recently, working individually or in small groups, agents across the Web could barely communicate and could only reason under conditions of severely bounded rationality. Projects such as Agentcities showed that widespread heterogeneous agents could collaborate on specific predefined tasks and provide diverse agent-based services. When the tasks are dynamic, of long duration, and ill defined, however, success requires planning that …