Discovering event evolution graphs from newswires In this paper , we propose an approach to automatically mine event evolution graphs from newswires on the Web . Event evolution graph is a directed graph in which the vertices and edges denote news events and the evolutions between events respectively , in a news affair . Our model utilizes the content similarity between events and incorporates temporal proximity and document distributional proximity as decaying functions . Our approach is effective in presenting the inside developments of news affairs along the timeline , which can facilitate users ' information browsing tasks .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

event evolution graph
knowledge management
web content mining


Distribution of relevant documents in domain-level aggregates for topic distillation In this paper , we study the distribution of relevant documents in aggregates , formed by grouping the retrieved documents according to their domain . For each aggregate , we take into account its size , and a measure of the correlation between its incoming and outgoing hyperlinks . We report on a preliminary experiment with two TREC topic distillation tasks , where we find that larger aggregates , or those aggregates with correlated hyperlinks , are more likely to contain relevant documents . This result shows that the distribution of domain-level aggregates is potentially useful for finding relevant documents .

B I I I O O B O O O O O O O O O O B I I I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O

aggregates
distribution of relevant documents


Visually guided bottom-up table detection and segmentation in web documents In the AllRight project , we are developing an algorithm for unsupervised table detection and segmentation that uses the visual rendition of a Web page rather than the HTML code . Our algorithm works bottom-up by grouping word bounding boxes into larger groups and uses a set of heuristics . It has already been implemented and a preliminary evaluation on about 6000 Web documents has been carried out .

O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

document capture
systems and software
web information extraction


Image annotation using search and mining technologies In this paper , we present a novel solution to the image annotation problem which annotates images using search and data mining technologies . An accurate keyword is required to initialize this process , and then leveraging a large-scale image database , it 1 ) searches for semantically and visually similar images , 2 ) and mines annotations from them . A notable advantage of this approach is that it enables unlimited vocabulary , while it is not possible for all existing approaches . Experimental results on real web images show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm .

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


A word at a time : computing word relatedness using temporal semantic analysis Computing the degree of semantic relatedness of words is a key functionality of many language applications such as search , clustering , and disambiguation . Previous approaches to computing semantic relatedness mostly used static language resources , while essentially ignoring their temporal aspects . We believe that a considerable amount of relatedness information can also be found in studying patterns of word usage over time . Consider , for instance , a newspaper archive spanning many years . Two words such as `` war '' and `` peace '' might rarely co-occur in the same articles , yet their patterns of use over time might be similar . In this paper , we propose a new semantic relatedness model , Temporal Semantic Analysis ( TSA ) , which captures this temporal information . The previous state of the art method , Explicit Semantic Analysis ( ESA ) , represented word semantics as a vector of concepts . TSA uses a more refined representation , where each concept is no longer scalar , but is instead represented as time series over a corpus of temporally-ordered documents . To the best of our knowledge , this is the first attempt to incorporate temporal evidence into models of semantic relatedness . Empirical evaluation shows that TSA provides consistent improvements over the state of the art ESA results on multiple benchmarks .

O O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

content analysis and indexing
semantic similarity
temporal dynamics
temporal semantics


Multichannel publication of interactive media documents in a news environment Multichannel publication of multimedia presentations poses a significant challenge on the generic description of the presentation content and the system necessary to convert these descriptions into final-form presentations . We present a solution based on the XiMPF document model and a component based system architecture .

B I O O O O O O O O B I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

device independence
framework
interactivity
multimedia information systems
standards
xml


Function-based object model towards website adaptation

content adaptation
content function
document preparation
html/wml conversion
website understanding


Community detection in incomplete information networks With the recent advances in information networks , the problem of community detection has attracted much attention in the last decade . While network community detection has been ubiquitous , the task of collecting complete network data remains challenging in many real-world applications . Usually the collected network is incomplete with most of the edges missing . Commonly , in such networks , all nodes with attributes are available while only the edges within a few local regions of the network can be observed . In this paper , we study the problem of detecting communities in incomplete information networks with missing edges . We first learn a distance metric to reproduce the link-based distance between nodes from the observed edges in the local information regions . We then use the learned distance metric to estimate the distance between any pair of nodes in the network . A hierarchical clustering approach is proposed to detect communities within the incomplete information networks . Empirical studies on real-world information networks demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively detect community structures within incomplete information networks .

B I O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O

community detection
incomplete information networks


Improved techniques for result caching in web search engines Query processing is a major cost factor in operating large web search engines . In this paper , we study query result caching , one of the main techniques used to optimize query processing performance . Our first contribution is a study of result caching as a weighted caching problem . Most previous work has focused on optimizing cache hit ratios , but given that processing costs of queries can vary very significantly we argue that total cost savings also need to be considered . We describe and evaluate several algorithms for weighted result caching , and study the impact of Zipf-based query distributions on result caching . Our second and main contribution is a new set of feature-based cache eviction policies that achieve significant improvements over all previous methods , substantially narrowing the existing performance gap to the theoretically optimal ( clairvoyant ) method . Finally , using the same approach , we also obtain performance gains for the related problem of inverted list caching .

O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

result caching
search engines
weighted caching

index caching
information search and retrieval


Meteor-s web service annotation framework The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data , but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services . Relevant current standards like UDDI , WSDL , and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology . However , realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation , service discovery , service composition , and process orchestration . Semantics , especially as supported by the use of ontologies , and related Semantic Web technologies , are likely to provide better qualitative and scalable solutions to these requirements . Just as semantic annotation of data in the Semantic Web is the first critical step to better search , integration and analytics over heterogeneous data , semantic annotation of Web services is an equally critical first step to achieving the above promise . Our approach is to work with existing Web services technologies and combine them with ideas from the Semantic Web to create a better framework for Web service discovery and composition . In this paper we present MWSAF ( METEOR-S Web Service Annotation Framework ) , a framework for semi-automatically marking up Web service descriptions with ontologies . We have developed algorithms to match and annotate WSDL files with relevant ontologies . We use domain ontologies to categorize Web services into domains . An empirical study of our approach is presented to help evaluate its performance .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

semantic annotation of web services
wsdl

ontology
semantic web services
web services discovery


Position paper : ontology construction from online ontologies One of the main hurdles towards a wide endorsement of ontologies is the high cost of constructing them . Reuse of existing ontologies offers a much cheaper alternative than building new ones from scratch , yet tools to support such reuse are still in their infancy . However , more ontologies are becoming available on the web , and online libraries for storing and indexing ontologies are increasing in number and demand . Search engines have also started to appear , to facilitate search and retrieval of online ontologies . This paper presents a fresh view on constructing ontologies automatically , by identifying , ranking , and merging fragments of online ontologies .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

automatic ontology construction
ontology reuse


Learning domain ontologies for Web service descriptions : an experiment in bioinformatics The reasoning tasks that can be performed with semantic web service descriptions depend on the quality of the domain ontologies used to create these descriptions . However , building such domain ontologies is a time consuming and difficult task . We describe an automatic extraction method that learns domain ontologies for web service descriptions from textual documentations attached to web services . We conducted our experiments in the field of bioinformatics by learning an ontology from the documentation of the web services used in myGrid , a project that supports biology experiments on the Grid . Based on the evaluation of the extracted ontology in the context of the project , we conclude that the proposed extraction method is a helpful tool to support the process of building domain ontologies for web service descriptions .

O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

bioinformatics
semantic web
web services

domain ontology
ontology evaluation
ontology learning
owl-s


Deriving knowledge from figures for digital libraries Figures in digital documents contain important information . Current digital libraries do not summarize and index information available within figures for document retrieval . We present our system on automatic categorization of figures and extraction of data from 2-D plots . A machine-learning based method is used to categorize figures into a set of predefined types based on image features . An automated algorithm is designed to extract data values from solid line curves in 2-D plots . The semantic type of figures and extracted data values from 2-D plots can be integrated with textual information within documents to provide more effective document retrieval services for digital library users . Experimental evaluation has demonstrated that our system can produce results suitable for real-world use .

O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

feature extraction
information search and retrieval
machine learning


Learning causality for news events prediction The problem we tackle in this work is , given a present news event , to generate a plausible future event that can be caused by the given event . We present a new methodology for modeling and predicting such future news events using machine learning and data mining techniques . Our Pundit algorithm generalizes examples of causality pairs to infer a causality predictor . To obtain precise labeled causality examples , we mine 150 years of news articles , and apply semantic natural language modeling techniques to titles containing certain predefined causality patterns . For generalization , the model uses a vast amount of world knowledge ontologies mined from LinkedData , containing ~ 200 datasets with approximately 20 billion relations . Empirical evaluation on real news articles shows that our Pundit algorithm reaches a human-level performance .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

applications and expert systems
future prediction
news prediction
web knowledge for future prediction


Pay as you browse : microcomputations as micropayments in web-based services Currently , several online businesses deem that advertising revenues alone are not sufficient to generate profits and are therefore set to charge for online content . In this paper , we explore a complement to the current advertisement model ; more specifically , we propose a micropayment model for non-specialized commodity web-services based on microcomputations . In our model , a user that wishes to access online content offered by a website does not need to register or pay to access the website ; instead , he will accept to run microcomputations on behalf of the website in exchange for access to the content . These microcomputations can , for example , support ongoing computing projects that have clear social benefits ( e.g. , projects relating to HIV , dengue , cancer , etc. ) or can contribute towards commercial computing projects . We argue that this micropayment model is economically and technically viable and that it can be integrated in existing distributed computing frameworks ( e.g. , the BOINC platform ) . We implement a preliminary prototype of a system based on our model through which we evaluate its performance and usability . Finally , we analyze the security and privacy of our proposal and we show that it ensures payment for the content while preserving the privacy of users .

O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed computing
microcomputations
micropayments


Piazza : data management infrastructure for semantic web applications The Semantic Web envisions a World Wide Web in which data is described with rich semantics and applications can pose complex queries . To this point , researchers have defined new languages for specifying meanings for concepts and developed techniques for reasoning about them , using RDF as the data model . To flourish , the Semantic Web needs to be able to accommodate the huge amounts of existing data and the applications operating on them . To achieve this , we are faced with two problems . First , most of the world 's data is available not in RDF but in XML ; XML and the applications consuming it rely not only on the domain structure of the data , but also on its document structure . Hence , to provide interoperability between such sources , we must map between both their domain structures and their document structures . Second , data management practitioners often prefer to exchange data through local point-to-point data translations , rather than mapping to common mediated schemas or ontologies . This paper describes the Piazza system , which addresses these challenges . Piazza offers a language for mediating between data sources on the Semantic Web , which maps both the domain structure and document structure . Piazza also enables interoperation of XML data with RDF data that is accompanied by rich OWL ontologies . Mappings in Piazza are provided at a local scale between small sets of nodes , and our query answering algorithm is able to chain sets mappings together to obtain relevant data from across the Piazza network . We also describe an implemented scenario in Piazza and the lessons we learned from it .

O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data description languages
peer data management systems


A study on the impact of product images on user clicks for online shopping In this paper we study the importance of image based features on the click-through rate ( CTR ) in the context of a large scale product search engine . Typically product search engines use text based features in their ranking function . We present a novel idea of using image based features , common in the photography literature , in addition to text based features . We used a stochastic gradient boosting based regression model to learn relationships between features and CTR . Our results indicate statistically significant correlations between the image features and CTR . We also see improvements to NDCG and mean standard regression .

O O O O O O B I O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


A probabilistic approach to spatiotemporal theme pattern mining on weblogs Mining subtopics from weblogs and analyzing their spatiotemporal patterns have applications in multiple domains . In this paper , we define the novel problem of mining spatiotemporal theme patterns from weblogs and propose a novel probabilistic approach to model the subtopic themes and spatiotemporal theme patterns simultaneously . The proposed model discovers spatiotemporal theme patterns by ( 1 ) extracting common themes from weblogs ; ( 2 ) generating theme life cycles for each given location ; and ( 3 ) generating theme snapshots for each given time period . Evolution of patterns can be discovered by comparative analysis of theme life cycles and theme snapshots . Experiments on three different data sets show that the proposed approach can discover interesting spatiotemporal theme patterns effectively . The proposed probabilistic model is general and can be used for spatiotemporal text mining on any domain with time and location information .

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O

spatiotemporal text mining
theme pattern

information search and retrieval
mixture model
weblog


Object-Z web environment and projections to UML


A general framework for adaptive and online detection of web attacks Detection of web attacks is an important issue in current defense-in-depth security framework . In this paper , we propose a novel general framework for adaptive and online detection of web attacks . The general framework can be based on any online clustering methods . A detection model based on the framework is able to learn online and deal with `` concept drift '' in web audit data streams . Str-DBSCAN that we extended DBSCAN to streaming data as well as StrAP are both used to validate the framework . The detection model based on the framework automatically labels the web audit data and adapts to normal behavior changes while identifies attacks through dynamical clustering of the streaming data . A very large size of real HTTP Log data collected in our institute is used to validate the framework and the model . The preliminary testing results demonstrated its effectiveness .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

anomaly detection
intrusion detection
security and protection


Finding authorities and hubs from link structures on the World Wide Web

bayesian
kleinberg's algorithm
link analysis
salsa
threshold
web searching


P2Cast : peer-to-peer patching scheme for VoD service Providing video on demand ( VoD ) service over the Internet in a scalable way is a challenging problem . In this paper , we propose P2Cast - an architecture that uses a peer-to-peer approach to cooperatively stream video using patching techniques , while only relying on unicast connections among peers . We address the following two key technical issues in P2Cast : ( 1 ) constructing an application overlay appropriate for streaming ; and ( 2 ) providing continuous stream playback ( without glitches ) in the face of disruption from an early departing client . Our simulation experiments show that P2Cast can serve many more clients than traditional client-server unicast service , and that it generally out-performs multicast-based patching if clients can cache more than of a stream 's initial portion . We handle disruptions by delaying the start of playback and applying the shifted forwarding technique . A threshold on the length of time during which arriving clients are served in a single session in P2Cast serves as a knob to adjust the balance between the scalability and the clients ' viewing quality in P2Cast .

O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

peer-to-peer networks
performance evaluation
video on-demand service


Selective early request termination for busy internet services Internet traffic is bursty and network servers are often overloaded with surprising events or abnormal client request patterns . This paper studies a load shedding mechanism called selective early request termination ( SERT ) for network services that use threads to handle multiple incoming requests continuously and concurrently . Our investigation with applications from Ask.com shows that during overloaded situations , a relatively small percentage of long requests that require excessive computing resource can dramatically affect other short requests and reduce the overall system throughput . By actively detecting and aborting overdue long requests , services can perform significantly better to achieve QoS objectives compared to a purely admission based approach . We have proposed a termination scheme that monitors running time of requests , accounts for their resource usage , adaptively adjusts the selection threshold , and performs a safe termination for a class of requests . This paper presents the design and implementation of this scheme and describes experimental results to validate the proposed approach .

O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

internet services
load shedding
request termination


XML screamer : an integrated approach to high performance XML parsing , validation and deserialization This paper describes an experimental system in which customized high performance XML parsers are prepared using parser generation and compilation techniques . Parsing is integrated with Schema-based validation and deserialization , and the resulting validating processors are shown to be as fast as or in many cases significantly faster than traditional nonvalidating parsers . High performance is achieved by integration across layers of software that are traditionally separate , by avoiding unnecessary data copying and transformation , and by careful attention to detail in the generated code . The effect of API design on XML performance is also briefly discussed . .

B O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O

jax-rpc
sax
schema compilation
xml schema


A diagrammatic inference system for the web We developed a diagrammatic inference system for the World Wide Web . Our system enables the creation of diagrams such that the information contained in them can be searched and inference can be performed on it . We developed an XMLSchema for bar , line , and pie charts . Based on it , we developed software that transforms a corresponding XML file into an SVG image , which in turn is rendered by the client as an image . Additionally , we developed a search engine which enables a user to find information explicitly contained in the XML file , and as such in the image . Furthermore , we developed an inference engine which enables a user to locate information that is implicitly contained in the image .

O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Clustering for probabilistic model estimation for CF Based on the type of collaborative objects , a collaborative filtering ( CF ) system falls into one of two categories : item-based CF and user-based CF. Clustering is the basic idea in both cases , where users or items are classified into user groups where users share similar preference or item groups where items have similar attributes or characteristics . Observing the fact that in user-based CF each user community is characterized by a Gaussian distribution on the ratings for each item and the fact that in item-based CF the ratings of each user in item community satisfy a Gaussian distribution , we propose a method of probabilistic model estimation for CF , where objects ( user or items ) are classified into groups based on the content information and ratings at the same time and predictions are made considering the Gaussian distribution of ratings . Experiments on a real-world data set illustrate that our approach is favorable .

O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

collaborative filtering
probabilistic model


Modeling the temporal dynamics of social rating networks using bidirectional effects of social relations and rating patterns A social rating network ( SRN ) is a social network in which edges represent social relationships and users ( nodes ) express ratings on some of the given items . Such networks play an increasingly important role in reviewing websites such as Epinions.com or online sharing websites like Flickr.com . In this paper , we first observe and analyze the temporal behavior of users in a social rating network , who express ratings and create social relations . Then , we model the temporal dynamics of an SRN based on our observations , using the bidirectional effects of ratings and social relations . While existing models for other types of social networks have captured some of the effects , our model is the first one to represent all four effects , i.e. social relations-on-ratings ( social influence ) , social relations-on-social relations ( transitivity ) , ratings-on-social relations ( selection ) , and ratings-on-ratings ( correlational influence ) . Existing works consider these effects as static and constant throughout the evolution of an SRN , however our observations reveal that these effects are actually dynamic . We propose a probabilistic generative model for SRNs , which models the strength and dynamics of each effect throughout the network evolution . This model can serve for the prediction of future links , ratings or community structures . Due to the sensitive nature of SRNs , another motivation for our work is the generation of synthetic SRN data sets for research purposes . Our experimental studies on two real life datasets ( Epinions and Flickr ) demonstrate that the proposed model produces social rating networks that agree with real world data on a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria .

O O B I O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

social rating networks
temporal dynamics

generative models
user behavioral modeling


Rapid development of spreadsheet-based web mashups The rapid growth of social networking sites and web communities have motivated web sites to expose their APIs to external developers who create mashups by assembling existing functionalities . Current APIs , however , aim toward developers with programming expertise ; they are not directly usable by wider class of users who do not have programming background , but would nevertheless like to build their own mashups . To address this need , we propose a spreadsheet-based Web mashups development framework , which enables users to develop mashups in the popular spreadsheet environment . First , we provide a mechanism that makes structured data first class values of spreadsheet cells . Second , we propose a new component model that can be used to develop fairly sophisticated mashups , involving joining data sources and keeping spreadsheet data up to date . Third , to simplify mashup development , we provide a collection of spreadsheet-based mashup patterns that captures common Web data access and spreadsheet presentation functionalities . Users can reuse and customize these patterns to build spreadsheet-based Web mashups instead of developing them from scratch . Fourth , we enable users to manipulate structured data presented on spreadsheet in a drag-and-drop fashion . Finally , we have developed and tested a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

graphical user interfaces
interaction styles
spreadsheet-based mashup patterns
spreadsheets
web data mashups


Incremental maintenance for materialized XPath\/XSLT views This paper proposes an incremental maintenance algorithm that efficiently updates the materialized XPath\/XSLT views defined using XPath expressions in XP ( ( ) , \* , \/ \/ , vars ) . The algorithm consists of two processes . 1 ) The dynamic execution flow of an XSLT program is stored as an XT ( XML Transformation ) tree during the full transformation . 2 ) In response to a source XML data update , the impacted portions of the XT-tree are identified and maintained by partially re-evaluating the XSLT program . This paper discusses the XPath\/XSLT features of incremental view maintenance for subtree insertion\/deletion and applies them to the maintenance algorithm . Experiments show that the incremental maintenance algorithm outperforms full XML transformation algorithms by factors of up to 500 .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O


Non-intrusive monitoring and service adaptation for WS-BPEL Web service processes currently lack monitoring and dynamic ( runtime ) adaptation mechanisms . In highly dynamic processes , services frequently need to be exchanged due to a variety of reasons . In this paper we present VieDAME , a system which allows monitoring of BPEL processes according to Quality of Service ( QoS ) attributes and replacement of existing partner services based on various ( pluggable ) replacement strategies . The chosen replacement services can be syntactically or semantically equivalent to the BPEL interface . Services can be automatically replaced during runtime without any downtime of the overall system . We implemented our solution with an aspect-oriented approach by intercepting SOAP messages and allow services to be exchanged during runtime with little performance penalty costs , as shown in our experiments , thereby making our approach suitable for high-availability BPEL environments .

O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O


Position paper : a comparison of two modelling paradigms in the Semantic Web Classical logics and Datalog-related logics have both been proposed as underlying formalisms for the Semantic Web . Although these two different formalism groups have some commonalities , and look similar in the context of expressively-impoverished languages like RDF , their differences become apparent at more expressive language levels . After considering some of these differences , we argue that , although some of the characteristics of Datalog have their utility , the open environment of the Semantic Web is better served by standard logics .

O O O O O O O B O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O

knowledge representation formalisms and methods


Towards practical genre classification of web documents Classification of documents by genre is typically done either using linguistic analysis or term frequency based techniques . The former provides better classification accuracy than the latter but at the cost of two orders of magnitude more computation time . While term frequency analysis requires much less computational resources than linguistic analysis , it returns poor classification accuracy when the genres are not sufficiently distinct . A method that removes or approximates the expensive portions of linguistic analysis is presented . The accuracy and computation time of this method then compared with both linguistic analysis and term frequency analysis . The results in this paper show that this method can significantly reduce the computation of both time of linguistic analysis and term frequency analysis , while retaining an accuracy that is higher than that of term frequency analysis .

O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O

genre classification
linguistic
term frequency


Standing on the shoulders of ants : stigmergy in the web Stigmergy is a biological term used when discussing insect or swarm behavior , and describes a model supporting environmental communication separately from artefacts or agents . This phenomenon is demonstrated in the behavior of ants and their food gathering process when following pheromone trails , or similarly termites and their termite mound building process . What is interesting with this mechanism is that highly organized societies are achieved without an apparent management structure . Stigmergic behavior is implicit in the Web where the volume of users provides a self-organizing and self-contextualization of content in sites which facilitate collaboration . However , the majority of content is generated by a minority of the Web participants . A significant contribution from this research would be to create a model of Web stigmergy , identifying virtual pheromones and their importance in the collaborative process . This paper explores how exploiting stigmergy has the potential of providing a valuable mechanism for identifying and analyzing online user behavior recording actionable knowledge otherwise lost in the existing web interaction dynamics . Ultimately this might assist our building better collaborative Web sites .

O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Performing grouping and aggregate functions in XML queries Since more and more business data are represented in XML format , there is a compelling need of supporting analytical operations in XML queries . Particularly , the latest version of XQuery proposed by W3C , XQuery 1.1 , introduces a new construct to explicitly express grouping operation in FLWOR expression . Existing works in XML query processing mainly focus on physically matching query structure over XML document . Given the explicit grouping operation in a query , how to efficiently compute grouping and aggregate functions over XML document is not well studied yet . In this paper , we extend our previous XML query processing algorithm , VERT , to efficiently perform grouping and aggregate function in queries . The main technique of our approach is introducing relational tables to index values . Query pattern matching and aggregation computing are both conducted with table indices . We also propose two semantic optimizations to further improve the query performance . Finally we present experimental results to validate the efficiency of our approach , over other existing approaches .

O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Hierarchical organization of unstructured consumer reviews In this paper , we propose to organize the aspects of a specific product into a hierarchy by simultaneously taking advantages of domain structure knowledge as well as consumer reviews . Based on the derived hierarchy , we generate a hierarchical organization of the consumer reviews based on various aspects of the product , and aggregate consumer opinions on the aspects . With such hierarchical organization , people can easily grasp the overview of consumer reviews and opinions on various aspects , as well as seek consumer reviews and opinions on any specific aspect by navigating through the hierarchy . We conduct evaluation on two product review data sets : Liu et al. 's data set containing 314 reviews for five products ( 2 ) , and our review corpus which is collected from forum Web sites containing 60,786 reviews for five popular products . The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

consumer review organization
product aspect hierarchy


On the bursty evolution of blogspace We propose two new tools to address the evolution of hyperlinked corpora . First , we define time graphs to extend the traditional notion of an evolving directed graph , capturing link creation as a point phenomenon in time . Second , we develop definitions and algorithms for time-dense community tracking , to crystallize the notion of community evolution . We develop these tools in the context of Blogspace , the space of weblogs ( or blogs ) . Our study involves approximately 750K links among 25K blogs . We create a time graph on these blogs by an automatic analysis of their internal time stamps . We then study the evolution of connected component structure and microscopic community structure in this time graph . We show that Blogspace underwent a transition behavior around the end of 2001 , and has been rapidly expanding over the past year , not just in metrics of scale , but also in metrics of community structure and connectedness . This expansion shows no sign of abating , although measures of connectedness must plateau within two years . By randomizing link destinations in Blogspace , but retaining sources and timestamps , we introduce a concept of randomized Blogspace . Herein , we observe similar evolution of a giant component , but no corresponding increase in community structure . Having demonstrated the formation of micro-communities over time , we then turn to the ongoing activity within active communities . We extend recent work of Kleinberg ( 11 ) to discover dense periods of `` bursty '' intra-community link creation .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Optimizing web search using social annotations This paper explores the use of social annotations to improve websearch . Nowadays , many services , e.g. del. icio . us , have been developed for web users to organize and share their favorite webpages on line by using social annotations . We observe that the social annotations can benefit web search in two aspects : 1 ) the annotations are usually good summaries of corresponding webpages ; 2 ) the count of annotations indicates the popularity of webpages . Two novel algorithms are proposed to incorporate the above information into page ranking : 1 ) SocialSimRank ( SSR ) calculates the similarity between social annotations and webqueries ; 2 ) SocialPageRank ( SPR ) captures the popularity of webpages . Preliminary experimental results show that SSR can find the latent semantic association between queries and annotations , while SPR successfully measures the quality ( popularity ) of a webpage from the web users ' perspective . We further evaluate the proposed methods empirically with 50 manually constructed queries and 3000 auto-generated queries on a dataset crawledfrom delicious . Experiments show that both SSR and SPRbenefit web search significantly .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O

evaluation
information search and retrieval
social annotation
social page rank
social similarity


Propagation of trust and distrust A ( directed ) network of people connected by ratings or trust scores , and a model for propagating those trust scores , is a fundamental building block in many of today 's most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems . We develop a framework of trust propagation schemes , each of which may be appropriate in certain circumstances , and evaluate the schemes on a large trust network consisting of 800K trust scores expressed among 130K people . We show that a small number of expressed trusts\/distrust per individual allows us to predict trust between any two people in the system with high accuracy . Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting .

O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B I O O

information search and retrieval
web of trust


An environment for collaborative content acquisition and editing by coordinated ubiquitous devices Digital content is not only stored by servers on the Internet , but also on various embedded devices belonging to ubiquitous networks . In this paper , we propose a content processing mechanism for use in an environment enabling collaborative acquisition of embedded digital content in real-world situations . We have developed a network management device that makes it possible to acquire embedded content using coordinated ubiquitous devices . The management device actively configures a network that includes content-providing devices and browsing devices to permit sharing of various items with digital content . We also developed a Functional web mechanism for processing embedded web content in the real-world without a keyboard . This mechanism adds various functions to conventional web content . These functions are activated by messages from a Field in a content processing device . We construct a practical prototype system , which is simple enough for children to use , that we called the `` Virtual Insect Catcher '' . Through a test with 48 children , we demonstrated that this system can be used to acquire embedded web content , retrieve related content from the Internet , and then create new web content . We will also describe the proposed mechanism and the system testing .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

multiple device operating
rfid
software architectures
ubiquitous computing
ubiquitous network


Visualizing differences in web search algorithms using the expected weighted hoeffding distance We introduce a new dissimilarity function for ranked lists , the expected weighted Hoeffding distance , that has several advantages over current dissimilarity measures for ranked search results . First , it is easily customized for users who pay varying degrees of attention to websites at different ranks . Second , unlike existing measures such as generalized Kendall 's tau , it is based on a true metric , preserving meaningful embeddings when visualization techniques like multi-dimensional scaling are applied . Third , our measure can effectively handle partial or missing rank information while retaining a probabilistic interpretation . Finally , the measure can be made computationally tractable and we give a highly efficient algorithm for computing it . We then apply our new metric with multi-dimensional scaling to visualize and explore relationships between the result sets from different search engines , showing how the weighted Hoeffding distance can distinguish important differences in search engine behavior that are not apparent with other rank-distance metrics . Such visualizations are highly effective at summarizing and analyzing insights on which search engines to use , what search strategies users can employ , and how search results evolve over time . We demonstrate our techniques using a collection of popular search engines , a representative set of queries , and frequently used query manipulation methods .

O O O O O O O O B I I I O O O O O O O O O O O B I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Fast dynamic reranking in large graphs In this paper we consider the problem of re-ranking search results by incorporating user feedback . We present a graph theoretic measure for discriminating irrelevant results from relevant results using a few labeled examples provided by the user . The key intuition is that nodes relatively closer ( in graph topology ) to the relevant nodes than the irrelevant nodes are more likely to be relevant . We present a simple sampling algorithm to evaluate this measure at specific nodes of interest , and an efficient branch and bound algorithm to compute the top k nodes from the entire graph under this measure . On quantifiable prediction tasks the introduced measure outperforms other diffusion-based proximity measures which take only the positive relevance feedback into account . On the Entity-Relation graph built from the authors and papers of the entire DBLP citation corpus ( 1.4 million nodes and 2.2 million edges ) our branch and bound algorithm takes about 1.5 seconds to retrieve the top 10 nodes w.r.t. this measure with 10 labeled nodes .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

harmonic function
random walk
semi-supervised learning


Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet . However , it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks . In this paper , we compare the structures of three online social networking services : Cyworld , MySpace , and orkut , each with more than 10 million users , respectively . We have access to complete data of Cyworld 's ilchon ( friend ) relationships and analyze its degree distribution , clustering property , degree correlation , and evolution over time . We also use Cyworld data to evaluate the validity of snowball sampling method , which we use to crawl and obtain partial network topologies of MySpace and orkut . Cyworld , the oldest of the three , demonstrates a changing scaling behavior over time in degree distribution . The latest Cyworld data 's degree distribution exhibits a multi-scaling behavior , while those of MySpace and orkut have simple scaling behaviors with different exponents . Very interestingly , each of the two e ponents corresponds to the different segments in Cyworld 's degree distribution . Certain online social networking services encourage online activities that can not be easily copied in real life ; we show that they deviate from close-knit online social networks which show a similar degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Object views : fine-grained sharing in browsers Browsers do not currently support the secure sharing of JavaScript objects between principals . We present this problem as the need for object views , which are consistent and controllable versions of objects . Multiple views can be made for the same object and customized for the recipients . We implement object views with a JavaScript library that wraps shared objects and interposes on all access attempts . The security challenge is to fully mediate access to objects shared through a view and prevent privilege escalation . We discuss how object views can be deployed in two settings : same-origin sharing with rewriting-based JavaScript isolation systems like Google Caja , and inter-origin sharing between browser frames over a message-passing channel . To facilitate simple document sharing , we build a policy system for declaratively defining policies for document object views . Notably , our document policy system makes it possible to hide elements without breaking document structure invariants . Developers can control the fine-grained behavior of object views with an aspect system that accepts programmatic policies .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O

coding tools and techniques
ecmascript
membrane
reference monitor
remote object
same origin policy
security and protection
web security
wrapper


The slashdot zoo : mining a social network with negative edges We analyze the corpus of user relationships of the Slashdot technology news site . The data was collected from the Slashdot Zoo feature where users of the website can tag other users as friends and foes , providing positive and negative endorsements . We adapt social network analysis techniques to the problem of negative edge weights . In particular , we consider signed variants of global network characteristics such as the clustering coefficient , node-level characteristics such as centrality and popularity measures , and link-level characteristics such as distances and similarity measures . We evaluate these measures on the task of identifying unpopular users , as well as on the task of predicting the sign of links and show that the network exhibits multiplicative transitivity which allows algebraic methods based on matrix multiplication to be used . We compare our methods to traditional methods which are only suitable for positively weighted edges .

O B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

negative edge
slashdot zoo
social network


Topical TrustRank : using topicality to combat web spam Web spam is behavior that attempts to deceive search engine ranking algorithms . TrustRank is a recent algorithm that can combat web spam . However , TrustRank is vulnerable in the sense that the seed set used by TrustRank may not be sufficiently representative to cover well the different topics on the Web . Also , for a given seed set , TrustRank has a bias towards larger communities . We propose the use of topical information to partition the seed set and calculate trust scores for each topic separately to address the above issues . A combination of these trust scores for a page is used to determine its ranking . Experimental results on two large datasets show that our Topical TrustRank has a better performance than TrustRank in demoting spam sites or pages . Compared to TrustRank , our best technique can decrease spam from the top ranked sites by as much as 43.1 % .

O B O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
pagerank
web search engine


Efficient diversification of search results using query logs We study the problem of diversifying search results by exploiting the knowledge mined from query logs . Our proposal exploits the presence of different `` specializations '' of queries in query logs to detect the submission of ambiguous\/faceted queries , and manage them by diversifying the search results returned in order to cover the different possible interpretations of the query . We present an original formulation of the results diversification problem in terms of an objective function to be maximized that admits the finding of an optimal solution in linear time .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

query log analysis
search results diversification


Efficient edge-services for colorblind users

colorblindness
computers and society
edge services
vision
web accessibility


LiteMinutes : an Internet-based system for multimedia meeting minutes

computer conferencing, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing


Generating query substitutions We introduce the notion of query substitution , that is , generating a new query to replace a user 's original search query . Our technique uses modifications based on typical substitutions web searchers make to their queries . In this way the new query is strongly related to the original query , containing terms closely related to all of the original terms . This contrasts with query expansion through pseudo-relevance feedback , which is costly and can lead to query drift . This also contrasts with query relaxation through boolean or TFIDF retrieval , which reduces the specificity of the query . We define a scale for evaluating query substitution , and show that our method performs well at generating new queries related to the original queries . We build a model for selecting between candidates , by using a number of features relating the query-candidate pair , and by fitting the model to human judgments of relevance of query suggestions . This further improves the quality of the candidates generated . Experiments show that our techniques significantly increase coverage and effectiveness in the setting of sponsored search .

O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O


Flexible on-device service object replication with replets An increasingly large amount of Web applications employ service objects such as Servlets to generate dynamic and personalized content . Existing caching infrastructures are not well suited for caching such content in mobile environments because of disconnection and weak connection . One possible approach to this problem is to replicate Web-related application logic to client devices . The challenges to this approach are to deal with client devices that exhibit huge divergence in resource availabilities , to support applications that have different data sharing and coherency requirements , and to accommodate the same application under different deployment environments . The Replet system targets these challenges . It uses client , server and application capability and preference information ( CPI ) to direct the replication of service objects to client devices : from the selection of a device for replication and populating the device with client-specific data , to choosing an appropriate replica to serve a given request and maintaining the desired state consistency among replicas . The Replet system exploits on-device replication to enable client - , server - and application-specific cost metrics for replica invocation and synchronization . We have implemented a prototype in the context of Servlet-based Web applications . Our experiment and simulation results demonstrate the viability and significant benefits of CPI-driven on-device service object replication .

O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O

capability preference replication service synchronization


Helix : online enterprise data analytics The size , heterogeneity and dynamicity of data within an enterprise makes indexing , integration and analysis of the data increasingly difficult tasks . On the other hand , there has been a massive increase in the amount of high-quality open data available on the Web that could provide invaluable insights to data analysts and business intelligence specialists within the enterprise . The goal of Helix project is to provide users within the enterprise with a platform that allows them to perform online analysis of almost any type and amount of internal data using the power of external knowledge bases available on the Web . Such a platform requires a novel , data-format agnostic indexing mechanism , and light-weight data linking techniques that could link semantically related records across internal and external data sources of various characteristics . We present the initial architecture of our system and discuss several research challenges involved in building such a system .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data integration
enterprise data management
linked data
on-line information services
semantic link discovery


Query topic detection for reformulation In this paper , we show that most multiple term queries include more than one topic and users usually reformulate their queries by topics instead of terms . In order to provide empirical evidence on user 's reformulation behavior and to help search engines better handle the query reformulation problem , we focus on detecting internal topics in the original query and analyzing users . reformulation to those topics . Particularly , we utilize the Interaction Information ( II ) to measure the degree of one sub-query being a topic based on the local search results . The experimental results on query log show that : most users reformulate query at the topical level ; and our proposed II-based algorithm is a good method to detect topics from original queries .

O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

interaction information
query reformulation
topic


Using context - and content-based trust policies on the semantic web The current discussion about a future Semantic Web trust architecture is focused on reputational trust mechanisms based on explicit trust ratings . What is often overlooked is the fact that , besides of ratings , huge parts of the application-specific data published on the Semantic Web are also trust relevant and therefore can be used for flexible , fine-grained trust evaluations . In this poster we propose the usage of context - and content-based trust mechanisms and outline a trust architecture which allows the formulation of subjective and task-specific trust policies as a combination of reputation - , context - and content-based trust mechanisms .

O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O B I O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O

semantic web
trust mechanisms
trust policies


Factorizing personalized Markov chains for next-basket recommendation Recommender systems are an important component of many websites . Two of the most popular approaches are based on matrix factorization ( MF ) and Markov chains ( MC ) . MF methods learn the general taste of a user by factorizing the matrix over observed user-item preferences . On the other hand , MC methods model sequential behavior by learning a transition graph over items that is used to predict the next action based on the recent actions of a user . In this paper , we present a method bringing both approaches together . Our method is based on personalized transition graphs over underlying Markov chains . That means for each user an own transition matrix is learned - thus in total the method uses a transition cube . As the observations for estimating the transitions are usually very limited , our method factorizes the transition cube with a pairwise interaction model which is a special case of the Tucker Decomposition . We show that our factorized personalized MC ( FPMC ) model subsumes both a common Markov chain and the normal matrix factorization model . For learning the model parameters , we introduce an adaption of the Bayesian Personalized Ranking ( BPR ) framework for sequential basket data . Empirically , we show that our FPMC model outperforms both the common matrix factorization and the unpersonalized MC model both learned with and without factorization .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O


Tag-based social interest discovery The success and popularity of social network systems , such as del. icio . us , Facebook , MySpace , and YouTube , have generated many interesting and challenging problems to the research community . Among others , discovering social interests shared by groups of users is very important because it helps to connect people with common interests and encourages people to contribute and share more contents . The main challenge to solving this problem comes from the difficulty of detecting and representing the interest of the users . The existing approaches are all based on the online connections of users and so unable to identify the common interest of users who have no online connections . In this paper , we propose a novel social interest discovery approach based on user-generated tags . Our approach is motivated by the key observation that in a social network , human users tend to use descriptive tags to annotate the contents that they are interested in . Our analysis on a large amount of real-world traces reveals that in general , user-generated tags are consistent with the web content they are attached to , while more concise and closer to the understanding and judgments of human users about the content . Thus , patterns of frequent co-occurrences of user tags can be used to characterize and capture topics of user interests . We have developed an Internet Social Interest Discovery system , ISID , to discover the common user interests and cluster users and their saved URLs by different interest topics . Our evaluation shows that ISID can effectively cluster similar documents by interest topics and discover user communities with common interests no matter if they have any online connections .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

del.icio.us
performance evaluation
social networks
tag


Web service derivatives Web service development and usage has shifted from simple information processing services to high-value business services that are crucial to productivity and success . In order to deal with an increasing risk of unavailability or failure of mission-critical Web services we argue the need for advanced reservation of services in the form of derivatives . The contribution of this paper is twofold : First we provide an abstract model of a market design that enables the trade of derivatives for mission-critical Web services . Our model satisfies requirements that result from service characteristics such as intangibility and the impossibility to inventor services in order to meet fluctuating demand . It comprehends principles from models of incomplete markets such as the absence of a tradeable underlying and consistent arbitrage-free derivative pricing . Furthermore we provide an architecture for a Web service market that implements our model and describes the strategy space and interaction of market participants in the trading process of service derivatives . We compare the underlying pricing processes to existing derivative models in energy exchanges , discuss eventual shortcomings , and apply Wavelets to analyze actual data and extract long - and short-term trends .

O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O

derivatives
incomplete markets
wavelets
web services


Enabling full service surrogates using the portable channel representation

content distribution
dynamic content
mirroring
portability
replication
surrogate
web server


Turning portlets into services : the consumer profile Portlets strive to play at the front end the same role that Web services currently enjoy at the back end , namely , enablers of application assembly through reusable services . However , it is well-known in the component community that , the larger the component , the more reduced the reuse . Hence , the coarse-grained nature of portlets ( they encapsulate also the presentation layer ) can jeopardize this vision of portlets as reusable services . To avoid this situation , this work proposes a perspective shift in portlet development by introducing the notion of Consumer Profile . While the user profile characterizes the end user ( e.g. age , name , etc ) , the Consumer Profile captures the idiosyncrasies of the organization through which the portlet is being delivered ( e.g. the portal owner ) as far as the portlet functionality is concerned . The user profile can be dynamic and hence , requires the portlet to be customized at runtime . By contrast , the Consumer Profile is known at registration time , and it is not always appropriate\/possible to consider it at runtime . Rather , it is better to customize the code at development time , and produce an organization-specific portlet which built-in , custom functionality . In this scenario , we no longer have a portlet but a family of portlets , and the portlet provider becomes the `` assembly line '' of this family . This work promotes this vision by introducing an organization-aware , WSRPcompliant architecture that let portlet consumers registry and handle `` family portlets '' in the same way that `` traditional portlets '' . In so doing , portlets are nearer to become truly reusable services .

O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O

adaptability
portals
product lines
reusable software
soa
wsrp


SLA based profit optimization in web systems With the rapid growth of eBusiness , the Web services are becoming a commodity . To reduce the management cost for the IT infrastructure , companies often outsource their IT services to third party service providers . Large service centers have been setup to provide services to many customers by sharing the IT resources . This leads to the efficient use of resources and a reduction of the operating cost . The service provider and their customers often negotiate utility based Service Level Agreements ( SLAs ) to determine the cost and penalty based on the achieved performance level . The system is based on a centralized controller which can control the request volumes at various servers and the scheduling policy at each server . The controller can also decide to turn ON or OFF servers depending on the system load . This paper designs a resource allocation scheduler for such web environments so as to maximize the profits associated with multiple class SLAs .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

load balancing
quality of service
sla optimization
utility function


An abuse-free fair contract signing protocol based on the RSA signature A fair contract signing protocol allows two potentially mistrusted parities to exchange their commitments ( i.e. , digital signatures ) to an agreed contract over the Internet in a fair way , so that either each of them obtains the other 's signature , or neither party does . Based on the RSA signature scheme , a new digital contract signing protocol is proposed in this paper . Like the existing RSA-based solutions for the same problem , our protocol is not only fair , but also optimistic , since the third trusted party is involved only in the situations where one party is cheating or the communication channel is interrupted . Furthermore , the proposed protocol satisfies a new property , i.e. , it is abuse-free . That is , if the protocol is executed unsuccessfully , none of the two parties can show the validity of intermediate results to others . Technical details are provided to analyze the security and performance of the proposed protocol . In summary , we present the first abuse-free fair contract signing protocol based on the RSA signature , and show that it is both secure and efficient .

O O O B I O O O O B O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O

cryptographic protocols
e-commerce
fair-exchange
network protocols


Protecting electronic commerce from distributed denial-of-service attacks It is widely recognized that distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks can disrupt electronic commerce and cause large revenue losses . However , effective defenses continue to be mostly unavailable . We describe and evaluate VIPnet , a novel value-added network service for protecting e-commerce and other transaction-based sites from DDoS attacks . In VIPnet , e-merchants pay Internet Service Providers ( ISPs ) to carry the packets of the e-merchants ' best clients ( called VIPs ) in a privileged class of service ( CoS ) , protected from congestion , whether malicious or not , in the regular CoS. . VIPnet rewards VIPs with not only better quality of service , but also greater availability . Because VIP rights are client - and server-specific , can not be forged , are usage-limited , and are only replenished after successful client transactions ( e.g. , purchases ) , it is impractical for attackers to mount and sustain DDoS attacks against an e-merchant 's VIPs . VIPnet can be deployed incrementally and does not require universal adoption . Experiments demonstrate VIPnet 's benefits .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

denial of service
financial
security and protection


Verifying genre-based clustering approach to content extraction The content of a webpage is usually contained within a small body of text and images , or perhaps several articles on the same page ; however , the content may be lost in the clutter , particularly hurting users browsing on small cell phone and PDA screens and visually impaired users relying on speed rendering of web pages . Using the genre of a web page , we have created a solution , Crunch that automatically identifies clutter and removes it , thus leaving a clean content-full page . In order to evaluate the improvement in the applications for this technology , we identified a number of experiments . In this paper , we have those experiments , the associated results and their evaluation .

O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

accessibility
context
electronic publishing
html
reformatting
speech rendering
website classification


Towards the theoretical foundation of choreography With the growth of interest on the web services , people pay increasinglyattention to the choreography , that is , to describe collaborations ofparticipants in accomplishing a common business goal from a globalviewpoint . In this paper , based on a simple choreography language and arole-oriented process language , we study some fundamental issues relatedto choreography , especially those related to implementation , includingsemantics , projection and natural projection , dominant role in choices anditerations , etc. . We propose the concept of dominant role and somenovel languages structures related to it . The study reveals some cluesabout the language , the semantics , the specification and theimplementation of choreography .

O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O B O O B O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O

choreography
dominant role
implementation
projection


Efficient similarity joins for near duplicate detection With the increasing amount of data and the need to integrate data from multiple data sources , a challenging issue is to find near duplicate records efficiently . In this paper , we focus on efficient algorithms to find pairs of records such that their similarities are above a given threshold . Several existing algorithms rely on the prefix filtering principle to avoid computing similarity values for all possible pairs of records . We propose new filtering techniques by exploiting the ordering information ; they are integrated into the existing methods and drastically reduce the candidate sizes and hence improve the efficiency . Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve up to 2.6 x - 5x speed-up over previous algorithms on several real datasets and provide alternative solutions to the near duplicate Web page detection problem .

O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


BackRank : an alternative for PageRank ? This paper proposes to extend a previous work , The Effect of the Back Button in a Random Walk : Application for PageRank ( 5 ) . We introduce an enhanced version of the PageRank algorithm using a realistic model for the Back button , thus improving the random surfer model . We show that in the special case where the history is bound to an unique page ( you can not use the Back button twice in a row ) , we can produce an algorithm that does not need much more resources than a standard PageRank . This algorithm , BackRank , can converge up to 30 % faster than a standard PageRank and suppress most of the drawbacks induced by the existence of pages without links .

O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Mining directed social network from message board In the paper , we present an approach to mining a directed social network from a message board on the Internet where vertices denote individuals and directed links denote the flow of influence . The influence is measured based on propagating terms among individuals via messages . The distance with respect to contextual similarity between individuals is acquired since the influence indicates the degree of their shared interest represented as terms .

O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

computer-communication networks
internet message board


Learning from the past : answering new questions with past answers Community-based Question Answering sites , such as Yahoo ! Answers or Baidu Zhidao , allow users to get answers to complex , detailed and personal questions from other users . However , since answering a question depends on the ability and willingness of users to address the asker 's needs , a significant fraction of the questions remain unanswered . We measured that in Yahoo ! Answers , this fraction represents 15 % of all incoming English questions . At the same time , we discovered that around 25 % of questions in certain categories are recurrent , at least at the question-title level , over a period of one year . We attempt to reduce the rate of unanswered questions in Yahoo ! Answers by reusing the large repository of past resolved questions , openly available on the site . More specifically , we estimate the probability whether certain new questions can be satisfactorily answered by a best answer from the past , using a statistical model specifically trained for this task . We leverage concepts and methods from query-performance prediction and natural language processing in order to extract a wide range of features for our model . The key challenge here is to achieve a level of quality similar to the one provided by the best human answerers . We evaluated our algorithm on offline data extracted from Yahoo ! Answers , but more interestingly , also on online data by using three `` live '' answering robots that automatically provide past answers to new questions when a certain degree of confidence is reached . We report the success rate of these robots in three active Yahoo ! Answers categories in terms of both accuracy , coverage and askers ' satisfaction . This work presents a first attempt , to the best of our knowledge , of automatic question answering to questions of social nature , by reusing past answers of high quality .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

community-based question answering
question-answering systems


Designing an architecture for delivering mobile information services to the rural developing world Implementing successful rural computing applications requires addressing a number of significant challenges . Recent advances in mobile phone computing capabilities make this device a likely candidate to address the client hardware constraints . Long battery life , wireless connectivity , solid-state memory , low price and immediate utility all make it better suited to rural conditions than a PC . However , current mobile software platforms are not as appropriate . Web-based mobile applications are hard to use , do not take advantage of the mobile phone 's media capabilities and require an online connection . Custom mobile applications are difficult to develop and distribute . To address these limitations we present CAM - a new framework for developing and deploying mobile computing applications in the rural developing world . CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes using the mobile phone camera , or entering numeric strings with the keypad . Supporting minimal navigation , direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction , CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device , user and infrastructure constraints . To illustrate the breadth of the framework , we list a number of CAM-based applications that we have implemented or are planning . These include processing microfinance loans , facilitating rural supply chains , documenting grassroots innovation and accessing electronic medical histories .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

client-server distributed systems
communications applications
ict
mobile phones
paper user interface
rural development


Web image retrieval reranking with multi-view clustering General image retrieval is often carried out by a text-based search engine , such as Google Image Search . In this case , natural language queries are used as input to the search engine . Usually , the user queries are quite ambiguous and the returned results are not well-organized as the ranking often done by the popularity of an image . In order to address these problems , we propose to use both textual and visual contents of retrieved images to reRank web retrieved results . In particular , a machine learning technique , a multi-view clustering algorithm is proposed to reorganize the original results provided by the text-based search engine . Preliminary results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework .

B I I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
multi-view clustering


Brand awareness and the evaluation of search results We investigate the effect of search engine brand ( i.e. , the identifying name or logo that distinguishes a product from its competitors ) on evaluation of system performance . This research is motivated by the large amount of search traffic directed to a handful of Web search engines , even though most are of equal technical quality with similar interfaces . We conducted a laboratory study with 32 participants to measure the effect of four search engine brands while controlling for the quality of search engine results . There was a 25 % difference between the most highly rated search engine and the lowest using average relevance ratings , even though search engine results were identical in both content and presentation . Qualitative analysis suggests branding affects user views of popularity , trust and specialization . We discuss implications for search engine marketing and the design of search engine quality studies .

B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


ALVIN : a system for visualizing large networks

information search and retrieval
network visualization
sampling
visualizing the web


Spatio-temporal models for estimating click-through rate We propose novel spatio-temporal models to estimate click-through rates in the context of content recommendation . We track article CTR at a fixed location over time through a dynamic Gamma-Poisson model and combine information from correlated locations through dynamic linear regressions , significantly improving on per-location model . Our models adjust for user fatigue through an exponential tilt to the first-view CTR ( probability of click on first article exposure ) that is based only on user-specific repeat-exposure features . We illustrate our approach on data obtained from a module ( Today Module ) published regularly on Yahoo ! Front Page and demonstrate significant improvement over commonly used baseline methods . Large scale simulation experiments to study the performance of our models under different scenarios provide encouraging results . Throughout , all modeling assumptions are validated via rigorous exploratory data analysis .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

ctr positional correlation
on-line information services


Privacy-enhancing personalized web search Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals . However , users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines . On the other hand , privacy is not absolute , and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user . Thus , a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection . This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles . These profiles summarize a user . s interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests . Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine . Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings . More importantly , results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information , which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

hierarchical user profile
personalized search


Building a distributed full-text index for the Web

distributed indexing
embedded databases
inverted files
pipelining
text retrieval