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Articles 2821 - 2850 of 3560

Full-Text Articles in Databases and Information Systems

Unsupervised Face Alignment By Robust Nonrigid Mapping, Jianke Zhu, Luc Van Gool, Steven C. H. Hoi Oct 2009

Unsupervised Face Alignment By Robust Nonrigid Mapping, Jianke Zhu, Luc Van Gool, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a novel approach to unsupervised facial image alignment. Differently from previous approaches, that are confined to affine transformations on either the entire face or separate patches, we extract a nonrigid mapping between facial images. Based on a regularized face model, we frame unsupervised face alignment into the Lucas-Kanade image registration approach. We propose a robust optimization scheme to handle appearance variations. The method is fully automatic and can cope with pose variations and expressions, all in an unsupervised manner. Experiments on a large set of images showed that the approach is effective.


Streaming 3d Meshes Using Spectral Geometry Images, Ying He, Boon Seng Chew, Dayong Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Lap Pui Chau Oct 2009

Streaming 3d Meshes Using Spectral Geometry Images, Ying He, Boon Seng Chew, Dayong Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Lap Pui Chau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transmission of 3D models in the form of Geometry Images (GI) is an emerging and appealing concept due to the reduction in complexity from R3 to image space and wide availability of mature image processing tools and standards. However, geometry images often suffer from the artifacts and error during compression and transmission. Thus, there is a need to address the artifact reduction, error resilience and protection of such data information during the transmission across an error prone network. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, called Spectral Geometry Images (SGI), which naturally combines the powerful spectral analysis with …


Parallel Sets In The Real World: Three Case Studies, Robert Kosara, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, F. Joseph Iii Mako, Tin Seong Kam Oct 2009

Parallel Sets In The Real World: Three Case Studies, Robert Kosara, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, F. Joseph Iii Mako, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Parallel Sets are a visualization technique for categorical data. We recently released an implementation to the public in an effort to make our research useful to real users. This paper presents three case studies of Parallel Sets in use with real data.


Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias Oct 2009

Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless data broadcast is a promising technique for information dissemination that leverages the computational capabilities of the mobile devices in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may then tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. Previous work on spatial query processing for wireless broadcast systems has only considered snapshot queries over static data. In this paper, we propose an air indexing framework that 1) outperforms the existing (i.e., snapshot) techniques in …


A Latent Model For Visual Disambiguation Of Keyword-Based Image Search, Kong-Wah Wan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Joo-Hwee Lim, Liang-Tien Chia, Sujoy Roy Sep 2009

A Latent Model For Visual Disambiguation Of Keyword-Based Image Search, Kong-Wah Wan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Joo-Hwee Lim, Liang-Tien Chia, Sujoy Roy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of polysemy in keyword-based image search arises mainly from the inherent ambiguity in user queries. We propose a latent model based approach that resolves user search ambiguity by allowing sense specific diversity in search results. Given a query keyword and the images retrieved by issuing the query to an image search engine, we first learn a latent visual sense model of these polysemous images. Next, we use Wikipedia to disambiguate the word sense of the original query, and issue these Wiki-senses as new queries to retrieve sense specific images. A sense-specific image classifier is then learnt by combining …


Why Quants Fail, M. Thulasidas Sep 2009

Why Quants Fail, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mathematical finance is built on a couple of assumptions. The most fundamental of them is the one on ma ket efficiency. It states that the market prices every asset fairly, and that the prices contain all the information available in the market.


Localized Matching Using Earth Mover's Distance Towards Discovery Of Common Patterns From Small Image Samples, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo Sep 2009

Localized Matching Using Earth Mover's Distance Towards Discovery Of Common Patterns From Small Image Samples, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes a new approach for the discovery of common patterns in a small set of images by region matching. The issues in feature robustness, matching robustness and noise artifact are addressed to delve into the potential of using regions as the basic matching unit. We novelly employ the many-to-many (M2M) matching strategy, specifically with the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), to increase resilience towards the structural inconsistency from improper region segmentation. However, the matching pattern of M2M is dispersed and unregulated in nature, leading to the challenges of mining a common pattern while identifying the underlying transformation. To avoid …


Batch Mode Active Learning With Applications To Text Categorization And Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin, Michael R. Lyu Sep 2009

Batch Mode Active Learning With Applications To Text Categorization And Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most machine learning tasks in data classification and information retrieval require manually labeled data examples in the training stage. The goal of active learning is to select the most informative examples for manual labeling in these learning tasks. Most of the previous studies in active learning have focused on selecting a single unlabeled example in each iteration. This could be inefficient, since the classification model has to be retrained for every acquired labeled example. It is also inappropriate for the setup of information retrieval tasks where the user's relevance feedback is often provided for the top K retrieved items. In …


Communication-Efficient Classification In P2p Networks, Hock Hee Ang, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan, Wee Keong Ng, Steven C. H. Hoi Sep 2009

Communication-Efficient Classification In P2p Networks, Hock Hee Ang, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan, Wee Keong Ng, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed classification aims to learn with accuracy comparable to that of centralized approaches but at far lesser communication and computation costs. By nature, P2P networks provide an excellent environment for performing a distributed classification task due to the high availability of shared resources, such as bandwidth, storage space, and rich computational power. However, learning in P2P networks is faced with many challenging issues; viz., scalability, peer dynamism, asynchronism and fault-tolerance. In this paper, we address these challenges by presenting CEMPaR—a communication-efficient framework based on cascading SVMs that exploits the characteristics of DHT-based lookup protocols. CEMPaR is designed to be robust …


Accelerating Sequence Searching: Dimensionality Reduction Method, Guojie Song, Bin Cui, Baihua Zheng, Kunqing Xie, Dongqing Yang Sep 2009

Accelerating Sequence Searching: Dimensionality Reduction Method, Guojie Song, Bin Cui, Baihua Zheng, Kunqing Xie, Dongqing Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similarity search over long sequence dataset becomes increasingly popular in many emerging applications, such as text retrieval, genetic sequences exploring, etc. In this paper, a novel index structure, namely Sequence Embedding Multiset tree (SEM − tree), has been proposed to speed up the searching process over long sequences. The SEM-tree is a multi-level structure where each level represents the sequence data with different compression level of multiset, and the length of multiset increases towards the leaf level which contains original sequences. The multisets, obtained using sequence embedding algorithms, have the desirable property that they do not need to keep the …


Visible Reverse K-Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Wang-Chien Lee, Ken C. K. Lee, Qing Li Sep 2009

Visible Reverse K-Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Wang-Chien Lee, Ken C. K. Lee, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reverse nearest neighbor (RNN) queries have a broad application base such as decision support, profile-based marketing, resource allocation, etc. Previous work on RNN search does not take obstacles into consideration. In the real world, however, there are many physical obstacles (e.g., buildings) and their presence may affect the visibility between objects. In this paper, we introduce a novel variant of RNN queries, namely, visible reverse nearest neighbor (VRNN) search, which considers the impact of obstacles on the visibility of objects. Given a data set P, an obstacle set O, and a query point q in a 2D space, a VRNN …


Exploiting Bilingual Information To Improve Web Search, Wei Gao, John Bitzer, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong Aug 2009

Exploiting Bilingual Information To Improve Web Search, Wei Gao, John Bitzer, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web search quality can vary widely across languages, even for the same information need. We propose to exploit this variation in quality by learning a ranking function on bilingual queries: queries that appear in query logs for two languages but represent equivalent search interests. For a given bilingual query, along with corresponding monolingual query log and monolingual ranking, we generate a ranking on pairs of documents, one from each language. Then we learn a linear ranking function which exploits bilingual features on pairs of documents, as well as standard monolingual features. Finally, we show how to reconstruct monolingual ranking from …


Multi-Task Transfer Learning For Weakly-Supervised Relation Extraction, Jing Jiang Aug 2009

Multi-Task Transfer Learning For Weakly-Supervised Relation Extraction, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Creating labeled training data for relation extraction is expensive. In this paper, we study relation extraction in a special weakly-supervised setting when we have only a few seed instances of the target relation type we want to extract but we also have a large amount of labeled instances of other relation types. Observing that different relation types can share certain common structures, we propose to use a multi-task learning method coupled with human guidance to address this weakly-supervised relation extraction problem. The proposed framework models the commonality among different relation types through a shared weight vector, enables knowledge learned from …


Ssnetviz: A Visualization Engine For Heterogeneous Semantic Social Networks, Ee Peng Lim, Maureen Maureen, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Aixin Sun, Anwitaman Datta, Kuiyu Chang Aug 2009

Ssnetviz: A Visualization Engine For Heterogeneous Semantic Social Networks, Ee Peng Lim, Maureen Maureen, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Aixin Sun, Anwitaman Datta, Kuiyu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SSnetViz is an ongoing research to design and implement a visualization engine for heterogeneous semantic social networks. A semantic social network is a multi-modal network that contains nodes representing di®erent types of people or object entities, and edges representing relationships among them. When multiple heterogeneous semantic social networks are to be visualized together, SSnetViz provides a suite of functions to store heterogeneous semantic social networks, to integrate them for searching and analysis. We will illustrate these functions using social networks related to terrorism research, one crafted by domain experts and another from Wikipedia.


Setting Discrete Bid Levels Adaptively In Repeated Auctions, Jilian Zhang, Hoong Chuin Lau, Jialie Shen Aug 2009

Setting Discrete Bid Levels Adaptively In Repeated Auctions, Jilian Zhang, Hoong Chuin Lau, Jialie Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The success of an auction design often hinges on its ability to set parameters such as reserve price and bid levels that will maximize an objective function such as the auctioneer revenue. Works on designing adaptive auction mechanisms have emerged recently, and the challenge is in learning different auction parameters by observing the bidding in previous auctions. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric method for determining discrete bid levels dynamically so as to maximize the auctioneer revenue. First, we propose a non-parametric kernel method for estimating the probabilities of closing price with past auction data. Then a greedy strategy …


A Distributed Spatial Index For Error-Prone Wireless Data Broadcast, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Ken C. K. Lee, Dik Lun Lee, Min Shao Aug 2009

A Distributed Spatial Index For Error-Prone Wireless Data Broadcast, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Ken C. K. Lee, Dik Lun Lee, Min Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information is valuable to users when it is available not only at the right time but also at the right place. To support efficient location-based data access in wireless data broadcast systems, a distributed spatial index (called DSI) is presented in this paper. DSI is highly efficient because it has a linear yet fully distributed structure that naturally shares links in different search paths. DSI is very resilient to the error-prone wireless communication environment because interrupted search operations based on DSI can be resumed easily. It supports search algorithms for classical location-based queries such as window queries and kNN queries …


On Efficient Mutual Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li Aug 2009

On Efficient Mutual Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies a new form of nearest neighbor queries in spatial databases, namely, mutual nearest neighbour (MNN) search. Given a set D of objects and a query object q, an MNN query returns from D, the set of objects that are among the k1 (≥ 1) nearest neighbors (NNs) of q; meanwhile, have q as one of their k2(≥ 1) NNs. Although MNN queries are useful in many applications involving decision making, data mining, and pattern recognition, it cannot be efficiently handled by existing spatial query processing approaches. In this paper, we present …


Optimal-Location-Selection Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li Aug 2009

Optimal-Location-Selection Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces and solves a novel type of spatial queries, namely, Optimal-Location-Selection (OLS) search, which has many applications in real life. Given a data object set D_A, a target object set D_B, a spatial region R, and a critical distance d_c in a multidimensional space, an OLS query retrieves those target objects in D_B that are outside R but have maximal optimality. Here, the optimality of a target object b \in D_B located outside R is defined as the number of the data objects from D_A that are inside R and meanwhile have their distances to b not exceeding …


A Fair Assignment Algorithm For Multiple Preference Queries, Leong Hou U, Nikos Mamoulis, Kyriakos Mouratidis Aug 2009

A Fair Assignment Algorithm For Multiple Preference Queries, Leong Hou U, Nikos Mamoulis, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consider an internship assignment system, where at the end of each academic year, interested university students search and apply for available positions, based on their preferences (e.g., nature of the job, salary, office location, etc). In a variety of facility, task or position assignment contexts, users have personal preferences expressed by different weights on the attributes of the searched objects. Although individual preference queries can be evaluated by selecting the object in the database with the highest aggregate score, in the case of multiple simultaneous requests, a single object cannot be assigned to more than one users. The challenge is …


Scalable Verification For Outsourced Dynamic Databases, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis Aug 2009

Scalable Verification For Outsourced Dynamic Databases, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Query answers from servers operated by third parties need to be verified, as the third parties may not be trusted or their servers may be compromised. Most of the existing authentication methods construct validity proofs based on the Merkle hash tree (MHT). The MHT, however, imposes severe concurrency constraints that slow down data updates. We introduce a protocol, built upon signature aggregation, for checking the authenticity, completeness and freshness of query answers. The protocol offers the important property of allowing new data to be disseminated immediately, while ensuring that outdated values beyond a pre-set age can be detected. We also …


Inferring Player Rating From Performance Data In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (Mmorpgs), Kyong Jin Shim, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Nishith Pathak, Jaideep Srivastava Aug 2009

Inferring Player Rating From Performance Data In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (Mmorpgs), Kyong Jin Shim, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Nishith Pathak, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines online player performance in EverQuest II, a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Sony Online Entertainment. The study uses the game's player performance data to devise performance metrics for online players. We report three major findings. First, we show that the game's point-scaling system overestimates performances of lower level players and underestimates performances of higher level players. We present a novel point-scaling system based on the game's player performance data that addresses the underestimation and overestimation problems. Second, we present a highly accurate predictive model for player performance as a function of past behavior. …


Symphony: Enabling Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw Aug 2009

Symphony: Enabling Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the design of Symphony, a platform that enables non-developers to build and deploy a new class of search-driven applications that combine their data and domain expertise with content from search engines and other web services. The Symphony prototype has been built on top of Microsoft’s Live Search infrastructure. While Symphony naturally makes use of the customization capabilities exposed by Live Search, its distinguishing feature is the capability it provides to the application creator to combine their proprietary data and domain expertise with content obtained from Live Search. They can also integrate specialized data obtained from web services to …


Measuring Method Complexity: Uml Versus Bpmn, Jan Recker, Michael Zur Muehlen, Keng Siau, John Erickson, Marta Indulska Aug 2009

Measuring Method Complexity: Uml Versus Bpmn, Jan Recker, Michael Zur Muehlen, Keng Siau, John Erickson, Marta Indulska

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphical models are used to depict relevant aspects of real-world domains intended to be supported by an information system. Various approaches for modeling exist and approaches such as object-oriented and process-oriented modeling methods are in widespread use. These modeling methods differ in their expressive power as well as in their complexity of use, thereby leading to an important investment decision for organizations seeking to conduct modeling projects. In this paper, we used an established approach for evaluating the complexity of conceptual modeling methods and compared two important industry standards for modeling, Unified Modeling Language and Business Process Modeling Notation, based …


Are Male And Female Avatars Perceived Equally In 3-D Virtual Worlds?, David Dewester, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Sarah Gervais, Keng Siau Aug 2009

Are Male And Female Avatars Perceived Equally In 3-D Virtual Worlds?, David Dewester, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Sarah Gervais, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional, computer-generated worlds in which users take the form of avatars and use those avatars to interact with objects and other avatars in the virtual world. Virtual worlds are growing in importance in both educational institutions and businesses. Educational institutions have adopted virtual worlds as a medium for instructional delivery whereas businesses are using virtual worlds for recruitment, training, collaboration, and marketing. Given these emerging phenomena, a better understanding of behavioral and perceptual issues in virtual worlds is warranted. We propose a research model to study the interaction effects of gender stereotypicality of male and female avatars …


3-D Virtual Worlds And Higher Education, X. Chen, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah Aug 2009

3-D Virtual Worlds And Higher Education, X. Chen, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conducting education in three-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds is an emerging phenomenon in the educational arena. The objective of this research is to investigate the factors influencing students’ intention to adopt the 3-D virtual worlds for delivery of education. Drawing on existing technology acceptance models as well as studies in traditional and distance education, we developed a model to study students’ acceptance of using a 3-D virtual world for education and propose to test the model empirically using survey data collected from college students. We also study the use of two instructional methods in the 3-D virtual world. This study contributes …


Bonus Plans Of Mice And Men, M. Thulasidas Jul 2009

Bonus Plans Of Mice And Men, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our best-laid plans often go awry. We see it all the time at a personal level -- accidents (both good and bad), deaths (both of loved ones and rich uncles), births, and lotteries all conspire to reshuffle our priorities and render our plans null and void. In fact, there is nothing like a solid misfortune to get us to put things in perspective. This opportunity may be the proverbial silver lining we are constantly advised to see. What is true at a personal level holds true also at a larger scale. The industry-wide financial meltdown has imparted a philosophical clarity …


A Bayesian Approach Integrating Regional And Global Features For Image Semantic Learning, Luong-Dong Nguyen, Ghim-Eng Yap, Ying Liu, Ah-Hwee Tan, Liang-Tien Chia, Joo-Hwee Lim Jul 2009

A Bayesian Approach Integrating Regional And Global Features For Image Semantic Learning, Luong-Dong Nguyen, Ghim-Eng Yap, Ying Liu, Ah-Hwee Tan, Liang-Tien Chia, Joo-Hwee Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In content-based image retrieval, the “semantic gap” between visual image features and user semantics makes it hard to predict abstract image categories from low-level features. We present a hybrid system that integrates global features (Gfeatures) and region features (R-features) for predicting image semantics. As an intermediary between image features and categories, we introduce the notion of mid-level concepts, which enables us to predict an image’s category in three steps. First, a G-prediction system uses G-features to predict the probability of each category for an image. Simultaneously, a R-prediction system analyzes R-features to identify the probabilities of mid-level concepts in that …


Learning And Inferencing In User Ontology For Personalized Semantic Web Search, Xing Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan Jul 2009

Learning And Inferencing In User Ontology For Personalized Semantic Web Search, Xing Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User modeling is aimed at capturing the users’ interests in a working domain, which forms the basis of providing personalized information services. In this paper, we present an ontology based user model, called user ontology, for providing personalized information service in the Semantic Web. Different from the existing approaches that only use concepts and taxonomic relations for user modeling, the proposed user ontology model utilizes concepts, taxonomic relations, and non-taxonomic relations in a given domain ontology to capture the users’ interests. As a customized view of the domain ontology, a user ontology provides a richer and more precise representation of …


Continuous Obstructed Nearest Neighbor Queries In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng Jul 2009

Continuous Obstructed Nearest Neighbor Queries In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study a novel form of continuous nearest neighbor queries in the presence of obstacles, namely continuous obstructed nearest neighbor (CONN) search. It considers the impact of obstacles on the distance between objects, which is ignored by most of spatial queries. Given a data set P, an obstacle set O, and a query line segment q in a two-dimensional space, a CONN query retrieves the nearest neighbor of each point on q according to the obstructed distance, i.e., the shortest path between them without crossing any obstacle. We formulate CONN search, analyze its unique properties, and develop …


Compositemap: A Novel Framework For Music Similarity Measure, Bingjun Zhang, Jialie Shen, Qiaoliang Xiang, Ye Wang Jul 2009

Compositemap: A Novel Framework For Music Similarity Measure, Bingjun Zhang, Jialie Shen, Qiaoliang Xiang, Ye Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the continuing advances in data storage and communication technology, there has been an explosive growth of music information from different application domains. As an effective technique for organizing, browsing, and searching large data collections, music information retrieval is attracting more and more attention. How to measure and model the similarity between different music items is one of the most fundamental yet challenging research problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework based on a multimodal and adaptive similarity measure for various applications. Distinguished from previous approaches, our system can effectively combine music properties from different aspects into a …