Data Storage Systems Commons^™

Community As A Connector: Associating Faces With Celebrity Names In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Juan Cao, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating celebrity faces appearing in videos with their names is of increasingly importance with the popularity of both celebrity videos and related queries. However, the problem is not yet seriously studied in Web video domain. This paper proposes a Community connected Celebrity Name-Face Association approach (CCNFA), where the community is regarded as an intermediate connector to facilitate the association. Specifically, with the names and faces extracted from Web videos, C-CNFA decomposes the association task into a three-step framework: community discovering, community matching and celebrity face tagging. To achieve the goal of efficient name-face association under this umbrella, algorithms such as …

Predicting Domain Adaptivity: Redo Or Recycle?, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shiai Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the years, the academic researchers have contributed various visual concept classifiers. Nevertheless, given a new dataset, most researchers still prefer to develop large number of classifiers from scratch despite expensive labeling efforts and limited computing resources. A valid question is why not multimedia community “embrace the green” and recycle off-the-shelf classifiers for new dataset. The difficulty originates from the domain gap that there are many different factors that govern the development of a classifier and eventually drive its performance to emphasize certain aspects of dataset. Reapplying a classifier to an unseen dataset may end up GIGO (garbage in, garbage …

Fashionask: Pushing Community Answers To Your Fingertips, Wei Zhang, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We demonstrate a multimedia-based question-answering system, named FashionAsk, by allowing users to ask questions referring to pictures snapped by mobile devices. Specifically, instead of asking verbose questions to depict visual instances, direct pictures are provided as part of questions. To answer these multi-modal questions, FashionAsk performs a large-scale instance search to infer the names of instances, and then matches with similar questions from communitycontributed QA websites as answers. The demonstration is conducted on a million-scale dataset of Web images and QA pairs in the domain of fashion products. Asking a multimedia question through FashionAsk can take as short as five …

Beaglebone Webcam Server, Alexander Corcoran

Computer Engineering

The Beaglebone Webcam Server is a Linux based IP webcam, based on an inexpensive ARM development board, which hosts its own web server to display the webcam feed. The server has the ability to either connect to a wired router, or to act as a wireless access point in order for users to connect and control its functions via any Wi-Fi enabled device.

A Scalable Inline Cluster Deduplication Framework For Big Data Protection, Yinjin Fu, Hong Jiang, Nong Xiao

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Cluster deduplication has become a widely deployed technology in data protection services for Big Data to satisfy the requirements of service level agreement (SLA). However, it remains a great challenge for cluster deduplica- tion to strike a sensible tradeoff between the conflicting goals of scalable dedu- plication throughput and high duplicate elimination ratio in cluster systems with low-end individual secondary storage nodes. We propose Σ-Dedupe, a scalable inline cluster deduplication framework, as a middleware deployable in cloud da- ta centers, to meet this challenge by exploiting data similarity and locality to op- timize cluster deduplication in inter-node and intra-node scenarios, …

How Is M&S Interoperability Different From Other Interoperability Domains?, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo, Jose J. Padilla, Charles D. Turnitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

During every standard workshop or event, the examples of working interoperability solutions are used to motivate for 'plug and play' standards for M&S as well, like standardized batteries for electronics, or the use of XML to exchange data between heterogeneous systems. While these are successful applications of standards, they are off the mark regarding M&S interoperability. The challenge of M&S is that the product that needs to be made interoperable is not the service or the system alone, but the model behind it as well. The paper shows that the alignment of conceptualizations is the real problem that is not …

Tracking Web Video Topics: Discovery, Visualization, And Monitoring, Juan Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong-Dong Zhang, Jin-Tao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the massive growth of web-shared videos in Internet, efficient organization and monitoring of videos remains a practical challenge. While nowadays broadcasting channels are keen to monitor online events, identifying topics of interest from huge volume of user uploaded videos and giving recommendation to emerging topics are by no means easy. Specifically, such process involves discovering of new topic, visualization of the topic content, and incremental monitoring of topic evolution. This paper studies the problem from three aspects. First, given a large set of videos collected over months, an efficient algorithm based on salient trajectory extraction on a topic evolution …

Galaxy Browser: Exploratory Search Of Web Videos, Lei Pang, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most search engines return a ranked list of items in response to a query. The list however tells very little about the relationship among items. For videos especially, users often read to spend significant amount of time to navigate the search result. Exploratory search presents a new paradigm for browsing where the browser takes up the role of information exploring and presents a well-organized browsing structure for users to navigate. The proposed interface Galaxy Browser adopts the recent advances in near-duplicate detection and then synchronizes the detected near-duplicate information with comprehensive background knowledge derived from online external resources. The result …

Cross Media Hyperlinking For Search Topic Browsing, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Lei Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, there are plenty of information sources freely available online for use. Nevertheless, how to synchronize and leverage these diverse forms of information for multimedia applications remains a problem yet to be seriously studied. This paper investigates the synchronization of multiple media content in the physical form of hyperlinking them. The ultimate goal is to develop browsing systems that author search results with rich media information mined from various knowledge sources. The authoring enables the vivid visualization and exploration of different information landscapes inherent in search results. Several key techniques are studied in this …

On The Pooling Of Positive Examples With Ontology For Visual Concept Learning, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common obstacle in effective learning of visual concept classifiers is the scarcity of positive training examples due to expensive labeling cost. This paper explores the sampling of weakly tagged web images for concept learning without human assistance. In particular, ontology knowledge is incorporated for semantic pooling of positive examples from ontologically neighboring concepts. This effectively widens the coverage of the positive samples with visually more diversified content, which is important for learning a good concept classifier. We experiment with two learning strategies: aggregate and incremental. The former strategy re-trains a new classifier by combining existing and newly collected examples, …

Fusing Heterogeneous Modalities For Video And Image Re-Ranking, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia documents in popular image and video sharing websites such as Flickr and Youtube are heterogeneous documents with diverse ways of representations and rich user-supplied information. In this paper, we investigate how the agreement among heterogeneous modalities can be exploited to guide data fusion. The problem of fusion is cast as the simultaneous mining of agreement from different modalities and adaptation of fusion weights to construct a fused graph from these modalities. An iterative framework based on agreement-fusion optimization is thus proposed. We plug in two well-known algorithms: random walk and semi-supervised learning to this framework to illustrate the idea …

Semi-Automatic Management Of Knowledge Bases Using Formal Ontologies, Andreas Textor

Theses

This thesis presents an approach that deals with the ever-growing amount of data in knowledge bases, especially concerning knowledge interoperability and formal representation of domain knowledge. There arc multiple issues that must be addressed with current systems. A multitude of different formats, sources and tools exist in a domain, and it is desirable to develop their use further towards a standardised environment. Such an environment should support both the representation and processing of data from this domain, and the connection to other domains, where necessary. In order to manage large amounts of data, it should be possible to perform whatever …

Development Of Visualization Facility At The Gis And Remote Sensing Core Lab, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Haroon Stephen, William J. Smith, Zhongwei Liu

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Presentations

Visualization using advanced computational and graphic equipment has become a standard way of present day research. Availability of low cost and fast processing units, high resolution displays with graphic processing units, and specialized software has brought complex visualization capabilities to an office desktop. Nevertheless, when dealing with large datasets such as, global climate, geospatial, and social data the office desktop falls short and calls for a centralized visualization facility with high end computing and graphics equipment.

Visualization Facility at GIS and Remote Sensing Core Lab would be a useful and important addition to the UNLV IT infrastructure. It would provide …

Mining Event Structures From Web Videos, Xiao Wu, Yi-Jie Lu, Qiang Peng, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The article is discussing the issues of mining event structures from Web video search results using text analysis, burst detection, and clustering as with the proliferation of social media, the volume of Web videos have grown exponentially.

Concept-Driven Multi-Modality Fusion For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is true for human perception that we gather information from different sources in natural and multi-modality forms, learning from multi-modalities has become an effective scheme for various information retrieval problems. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality fusion approach for video search, where the search modalities are derived from a diverse set of knowledge sources, such as text transcript from speech recognition, low-level visual features from video frames, and high-level semantic visual concepts from supervised learning. Since the effectiveness of each search modality greatly depends on specific user queries, prompt determination of the importance of a modality …

Topical Summarization Of Web Videos By Visual-Text Time-Dependent Alignment, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Search engines are used to return a long list of hundreds or even thousands of videos in response to a query topic. Efficient navigation of videos becomes difficult and users often need to painstakingly explore the search list for a gist of the search result. This paper addresses the challenge of topical summarization by providing a timeline-based visualization of videos through matching of heterogeneous sources. To overcome the so called sparse-text problem of web videos, auxiliary information from Google context is exploited. Google Trends is used to predict the milestone events of a topic. Meanwhile, the typical scenes of web …

Investigating Perceptions Of A Location-Based Annotation System, Huynh Nhu Hop Quach, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Tan Phat Pham, Yin-Leng Theng, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce MobiTOP, a Web-based system for organizing and retrieving hierarchical location-based annotations. Each annotation contains multimedia content (such as text, images, video) associated with a location, and users are able to annotate existing annotations to an arbitrary depth, in effect creating a hierarchy. An evaluation was conducted on a group of potential users to ascertain their perceptions of the usability of the application. The results were generally positive and the majority of the participants saw MobiTOP as a useful platform to share location-based information. We conclude with implications of our work and opportunities for future research.

On The Annotation Of Web Videos By Efficient Near-Duplicate Search, Wan-Lei Zhao, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications, usersupplied social tags are commonly available in social media as a means to bridge the semantic gap. On the other hand, the explosive expansion of social web makes an overwhelming number of web videos available, among which there exists a large number of near-duplicate videos. In this paper, we investigate techniques which allow effective annotation of web videos from a data-driven perspective. A novel classifier-free video annotation framework is proposed by first retrieving visual duplicates and then suggesting representative tags. The significance of this paper lies in the addressing of two timely issues …

On The Sampling Of Web Images For Learning Visual Concept Classifiers, Shiai Zhu, Gang Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual concept learning often requires a large set of training images. In practice, nevertheless, acquiring noise-free training labels with sufficient positive examples is always expensive. A plausible solution for training data collection is by sampling the largely available user-tagged images from social media websites. With the general belief that the probability of correct tagging is higher than that of incorrect tagging, such a solution often sounds feasible, though is not without challenges. First, user-tags can be subjective and, to certain extent, are ambiguous. For instance, an image tagged with “whales” may be simply a picture about ocean museum. Learning concept …

Coherent Bag-Of Audio Words Model For Efficient Large-Scale Video Copy Detection, Yang Liu, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chang-Sheng Xu, Han-Qing Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current content-based video copy detection approaches mostly concentrate on the visual cues and neglect the audio information. In this paper, we attempt to tackle the video copy detection task resorting to audio information, which is equivalently important as well as visual information in multimedia processing. Firstly, inspired by bag-of visual words model, a bag-of audio words (BoA) representation is proposed to characterize each audio frame. Different from naive singlebased modeling audio retrieval approaches, BoA is a highlevel model due to its perceptual and semantical property. Within the BoA model, a coherency vocabulary indexing structure is adopted to achieve more efficient …

Co-Reranking By Mutual Reinforcement For Image Search, Ting Yao, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most existing reranking approaches to image search focus solely on mining “visual” cues within the initial search results. However, the visual information cannot always provide enough guidance to the reranking process. For example, different images with similar appearance may not always present the same relevant information to the query. Observing that multi-modality cues carry complementary relevant information, we propose the idea of co-reranking for image search, by jointly exploring the visual and textual information. Co-reranking couples two random walks, while reinforcing the mutual exchange and propagation of information relevancy across different modalities. The mutual reinforcement is iteratively updated to constrain …

Engaging Students In Real-Life Data And Network Security Assessment Of Pace Computing Environment, Narayan Murthy, Ravi Ravishanker

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Naked Object File System (Nofs): A Framework To Expose An Object-Oriented Domain Model As A File System, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We present Naked Objects File System (NOFS), a novel framework that allows a developer to expose a domain model as a file system by leveraging the Naked Objects design principle. NOFS allows a developer to construct a file system without having to understand or implement all details related to normal file systems development. In this paper we explore file systems frameworks and object-oriented frameworks in a historical context and present an example domain model using the framework. This paper is based on a fully-functional implementation that is distributed as free/open source software, including virtual machine images to demonstrate and study …

Rapport: Semantic-Sensitive Namespace Management In Large-Scale File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Explosive growth in volume and complexity of data exacerbates the key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage data in a way that fundamentally improves the ease and efficacy of their use. Existing large-scale file systems rely on hierarchically structured namespace that leads to severe performance bottlenecks and renders it impossible to support real-time queries on multi-dimensional attributes. This paper proposes a novel semantic-sensitive scheme, called Rapport, to provide dynamic and adaptive namespace management and support complex queries. The basic idea is to build files’ namespace by utilizing their semantic correlation and exploiting dynamic evolution of attributes to support namespace management. …

Pagesense: Style-Wise Web Page Advertising, Lusong Li, Tao Mei, Xiang Niu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an innovative style-wise advertising platform for web page. Web page “style” mainly refers to visual effects, such as color and layout. Unlike the most popular ad-network such as Google AdSense which needs publishers to change the original structure of their pages and define the position and style of the embedded ads manually, stylewise page advertising aims to automatically deliver styleconsistent ads at proper positions within the web page, without breaking the layout of the original page. Our system is motivated from the fact that almost 90% web pages contain blank regions without any content. Given a web …

Dsfs: Decentralized Security For Large Parallel File Systems, Zhongying Niu, Hong Jiang, Ke Zhou, Dan Feng, Tianming Yang, Dongliang Lei, Anli Chen

School of Computing: Technical Reports

This paper describes DSFS, a decentralized security system for large parallel file system. DSFS stores global access control lists (ACLs) in a centralized decisionmaking server and pushes pre-authorization lists (PALs) into storage devices. Thus DSFS allows users to flexibly set any access control policy for the global ACL or even change the global ACL system without having to upgrade the security code in their storage devices. With pre-authorization lists, DSFS enables a networkattached storage device to immediately authorize I/O, instead of demanding a client to acquire an authorization from a centralized authorization server at a crucial time. The client needs …

Codifying Information Assurance Controls For Department Of Defense (Dod) Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (Scada) Systems (U), Eddie A. Mendezllovet

Theses and Dissertations

Protecting DoD critical infrastructure resources and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems from cyber attacks is becoming an increasingly challenging task. DoD Information Assurance controls provide a sound framework to achieve an appropriate level of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. However, these controls have not been updated since 2003 and currently do not adequately address the security of DoD SCADA systems. This research sampled U.S. Air Force Civil Engineering subject matter experts representing eight Major Commands that manage and operate SCADA systems. They ranked 30 IA controls in three categories, and evaluated eight SCADA specific IA controls for inclusion into …

Utilizing The Digital Fingerprint Method For Secure Key Generation, Jennifer C. Anilao

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines a new way to generate an uncloneable secure key by taking advantage of the delay characteristics of individual transistors. The user profiles the circuit to deduce the glitch count of each output line for each number of selectable buffers added to the circuit. The user can then use this information to generate a specific glitch count on each output line, which is passed to an encryption algorithm as its key. The results detail tests of two configurations for adding a selectable amount of buffers into each glitch circuit in order to induce additional delay. One configuration adds …

An Investigation Of Multiple Integration Techniques For Information Systems: A Model For Integrating Data Warehousing, Erp, And Soa In Practice, Jessie Burns

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This study addressed issues associated with implementing multiple data integrators. The process included implementing the same data integrator multiple times or implementing multiple different data integrators. It was shown that single data integrators implementations were failing at high rates. Environments were complicated because there were more acquisitions and mergers now than in the past, companies were required to be competitive while implementations were taking place, and possibly had short implementation time frames.

The main goal of this study was to develop an agile, sturdy, and rigorous model that addressed the needs of companies that found themselves in situations where they …

A Robust Damage Assessment Model For Corrupted Database Systems, Ge Fu, Hong Zhu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An intrusion tolerant database uses damage assessment techniques to detect damage propagation scales in a corrupted database system. Traditional damage assessment approaches in a intrusion tolerant database system can only locate damages which are caused by reading corrupted data. In fact, there are many other damage spreading patterns that have not been considered in traditional damage assessment model. In this paper, we systematically analyze inter-transaction dependency relationships that have been neglected in the previous research and propose four different dependency relationships between transactions which may cause damage propagation. We extend existing damage assessment model based on the four novel dependency …