Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Personalizing Interactions With Information Systems, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles …

The Staging Transformation Approach To Mixing Initiative, Robert Capra, Michael Narayan, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Mixed-initiative interaction is an important facet of many conversational interfaces, flexible planning architectures, intelligent tutoring systems, and interactive information retrieval systems. Software systems for mixed-initiative interaction must enable us to both operationalize the mixing of initiative (i.e., support the creation of practical dialogs) and to reason in real-time about how a flexible mode of interaction can be supported (e.g., from a meta-dialog standpoint). In this paper, we present the staging transformation approach to mixing initiative, where a dialog script captures the structure of the dialog and dialog control processes are realized through generous use of program transformation techniques (e.g., partial …

Covert Shells, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

The potential for covert communications exist anywhere that legitimate communication channels are in use. In order to maintain control of the channel once exploited, the insertion of a backdoor Trojan horse server, to be used with a client that provides shell access, is often a necessary prerequisite to establishing and using a covert channel long term.

We discuss covert channel communications methods ranging from embedded channels to disguised protocols. What follows is a review of available covert shell tools. The underground, historical evolution of covert shells is reviewed, focusing on selected, available tools, which range from simple encapsulation methods to …

Personalizing The Gams Cross-Index, Saverio Perugini, Priya Lakshminarayanan, Naren Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The NIST Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) system at http://gams.nist .gov serves as the gateway to thousands of scientific codes and modules for numerical computation. We describe the PIPE personalization facility for GAMS, whereby content from the cross-index is specialized for a user desiring software recommendations for a specific problem instance. The key idea is to (i) mine structure, and (ii) exploit it in a programmatic manner to generate personalized web pages. Our approach supports both content-based and collaborative personalization and enables information integration from multiple (and complementary) web resources. We present case studies for the domain of linear, …