Papers.

High-bandwidth mesh-based overlay multicast in heterogeneous environments

Flow-insensitive type qualifiers

Introduction to the special issue on XML retrieval

Modeling performance-driven workload characterization of web search systems

Estimating corpus size via queries

Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later

Design, implementation and evaluation of security in iSCSI-based network storage systems

Atomicity via source-to-source translation

Templates, Microformats and Structured Editing

Synergistic Integration of Agent Technologies for Military Simulation

An object-oriented approach to datatype-generic programming

Datatype-generic programming (DGP) is the next step beyond abstracting over types using parametric polymorphism, which is often called "genericity" in object-oriented languages. However, unlike genericity, DGP has not received much attention in the OO community. Nonetheless, in the context of functional languages, it has proven to make programs more robust with respect to changes in the type structure, as well as in many other applications, such as type-safe XML processing and marshalling. To carry these strengths over to an OO language, we present an extensible library for lightweight DGP in Scala, based on an existing lightweight approach in Haskell. We discuss the challenges in developing and using our library, and explore ways to overcome them.

Acclimatizing taxonomic semantics for hierarchical content classification from semantics to data-driven taxonomy

Clustering of search results using temporal attributes

Generalizing PageRank

Championing of an LTV model at LTC

Introduction to the special issue on successful real-world data mining applications

Friends, foes, and fringe

A software framework for integrated sensor network applications

LINQ: reconciling object, relations and XML in the .NET framework

Many software applications today need to handle data from different data models; typically objects from the host programming language along with the relational and XML data models. The ROX impedance mismatch makes programs awkward to write and hard to maintain.The .NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) framework, proposed for the next release of the .NET framework, approaches this problem by defining a pattern of general-purpose standard query operators for traversal, filter, and projection. Based on this pattern, any .NET language can define special query comprehension syntax that is subsequently compiled into these standard operators (our code examples are in VB).Besides the general query operators, the LINQ framework also defines two domain specific APIs that work over XML (XLinq) and relational data (DLinq) respectively. The operators over XML use a lightweight and easy to use in-memory XML representation to provide XQuery-style expressiveness in the host programming language. The operators over relational data provide a simple OR mapping by leveraging remotable queries that are executed directly in the back-end relational store.

Untangling Enterprise Java

Separation of concerns is one of the oldest concepts in computer science. The term was coined by Dijkstra in 1974. It is important because it simplifies software, making it easier to develop and maintain. Separation of concerns is commonly achieved by decomposing an application into components. There are, however, crosscutting concerns, which span (or cut across) multiple components. These kinds of concerns cannot be handled by traditional forms of modularization and can make the application more complex and difficult to maintain.

Thesaurus based automatic keyphrase indexing

Measuring inter-indexer consistency using a thesaurus

Distributed collaborative filtering for peer-to-peer file sharing systems

A content and structure website mining model

Relationship between web links and trade

The web beyond popularity: a really simple system for web scale RSS

Popularity based search engines have served to stagnate information retrieval from the web. Developed to deal with the very real problem of degrading quality within keyword based search they have had the unintended side effect of creating "icebergs" around topics, where only a small minority of the information is above the popularity water-line. This problem is especially pronounced with emerging information--new sites are often hidden until they become popular enough to be considered above the water-line. In domains new to a user this is often helpful--they can focus on popular sites first. Unfortunately it is not the best tool for a professional seeking to keep up-to-date with a topic as it emerges and evolves.We present a tool focused on this audience--a system that addresses the very large scale information gathering, filtering and routing, and presentation problems associated with creating a useful incremental stream of information from the web as a whole. Utilizing the WebFountain platform as the primary data engine and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as the delivery mechanism, our "Daily Deltas" (Delta) application is able to provide an informative feed of relevant content directly to a user. Individuals receive a personalized, incremental feed of pages related to their topic allowing them to track their interests independent of the overall popularity of the topic.

Effective static race detection for Java

Contrasting portraits of email practices

A design flow to optimize circuit delay by using standard cells and PLAs

Near-optimal sensor placements: maximizing information while minimizing communication cost

Dance your work away

The WS-DAI family of specifications for web service data access and integration

Hidden in Plain Sight

In December 1997, Sun Microsystems had just announced its new flagship machine: a 64-processor symmetric multiprocessor supporting up to 64 gigabytes of memory and thousands of I/O devices. As with any new machine launch, Sun was working feverishly on benchmarks to prove the machine’s performance. While the benchmarks were generally impressive, there was one in particular that was exhibiting unexpectedly low performance. The benchmark machine would occasionally become mysteriously distracted: Benchmark activity would practically cease, but the operating system kernel remained furiously busy. After some number of minutes spent on unknown work, the operating system would suddenly right itself: Benchmark activity would resume at full throttle and run to completion. Those running the benchmark could see that the machine was on course to break the world record, but these minutes-long periods of unknown kernel activity were enough to be the difference between first and worst.

Frequency and amplitude derivatives as syllable-level F0 features

Language and gender differences in speech overlaps in conversation

Superconducting niobium nanowire single photon detectors

Multisensor data analysis and aerosol background characterization

Full scale simulation of a field-emitter arrays based electron source for free-electron lasers

We describe the computer modeling of relativistic electron guns (0.5MeV) using pulsed field emitter arrays. The special challenge lies in the fact, that current distributions vary at a submicron scale, whereas structural dimensions are in the millimeter range. The general approach uses two steps. The first one is the computation of individual field-emitter tips including gate and focusing layers. Real world influences as, e.g., the effect of adsorbates on the emitted currents are taken into account by parameterizing the phase space of the tips. Together with a stochastic distribution of emitter properties, this leads to an equivalent current distribution on the cathode itself, which is used in the second step for the calculation of the electron dynamics in the gun itself. We present results for a source using a field-emitter array of 17 700 tips. For the current field-emitter geometry, we see a large high base line effect resulting from nonlinear focusing forces inside the emitter itself. Of special interest are the effects of spatial correlations in the stochastic distribution on the emittance, showing pronounced performance degradations in the case of large correlation lengths.

Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia: A Case Study

GMSP: a generalized multi-hop security protocol for heterogeneous multi-hop wireless network

Using Design Patterns in Mobility Management Protocol Design for Multi-Hop Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Semantic Web Services for Human Activit

Semantic Web services (SWSs) extend current Web services standards to help facilitate their usages. While current SWS approaches have shown some early promising results, they have focused on somewhat unrealistic use-cases that make various problematic assumptions and focus on somewhat farfetched usage scenarios. In this paper we present a category of use case scenarios for SWSs that centers around keeping human users in the automation process while facilitating their activities. We demonstrate our approach with a simplified scenario and highlight some of the details of our architecture and implementation. Finally, we also discuss how our approach could be extended and applied in other domains; namely, the domain of asset-based business approach to creating IT computing infrastructure

Web Services on Rails: Using Ruby and Rails for Web Services Development and Mashups

One of the interesting aspects of the Web 2.0 'evolution' is the wide-availability of various Web applications as APIs or Web services. These APIs expose informational services on the Web and take many forms of remote invocation of functions using standard Web protocols and XML for data representations, e.g., REST, SOAP/WSDL, XML-RPC, and other approaches. The services (or APIs) are also usually accompanied by user facing Web applications for human-consumption. Canonical examples are Google Maps, Yahoo! Flykr and del.icio.us, EVDB's Eventful's application and API, Amazon.com's S3, ECS, Alexa, and many others. The Ruby programming language and its Rails framework are ideal for programming Web applications and services in the Web 2.0. Ruby's modern and dynamic features make it an excellent language for rapid prototyping and integration of various Web services. Rails' superb support for rapid Web application development, database access, and AJAX, make it well suited for creating front-ends and back-ends to the next generation of Web applications and services. In this tutorial we will take a hands-on deep-dive into the Ruby and Rails platform and learn how they can be used to: (1) create Web applications backed by a relational database, (2) consume Web services, (3) create and deploy APIs or Web services, and (4) mashup of existing Web services and applications. No a priori knowledge of Ruby or Rails is required - although some programming in a modern OO language and Web application development are definite plus.

Anytime path planning and replanning in dynamic environments

We present an efficient, anytime method for path planning in dynamic environments. Current approaches to planning in such domains either assume that the environment is static and replan when changes are observed, or assume that the dynamics of the environment are perfectly known a priori. Our approach takes into account all prior information about both the static and dynamic elements of the environment, and efficiently updates the solution when changes to either are observed. As a result, it is well suited to robotic path planning in known or unknown environments in which there are mobile objects, agents or adversaries

Comparison of Image Similarity Queries in P2P Systems

Given some of the recent advances in distributed hash table (DHT) based peer-to-peer (P2P) systems we ask the following questions: are there applications where unstructured queries are still necessary (i.e., the underlying queries do not efficiently map onto any structured framework), and are there unstructured P2P systems that can deliver the high bandwidth and computing performance necessary to support such applications. Toward this end, we consider an image search application which supports queries based on image similarity metrics, such as color histogram intersection, and discuss why in this setting, standard DHT approaches are not directly applicable. We then study the feasibility of implementing such an image search system on two different unstructured P2P systems: power-law topology with percolation search, and an optimized super-node topology using structured broadcasts. We examine the average and maximum values for node bandwidth, storage and processing requirements in the percolation and super-node models, and show that current high-end computers and high-speed links have sufficient resources to enable deployments of large-scale complex image search systems

Agile software testing in a large-scale project

Agile software development in general and Extreme Programming (XP) in particular, promote radical changes in how software development organizations traditionally work. We present and analyze new data from a real, large-scale agile project to develop a business-critical enterprise information system for the Israeli Air Force (IAF). Our results offer new evidence that agile testing practices actually work, dramatically improving development quality and productivity. We describe the organization's successful practices and guidelines in four key areas: test design and activity execution, working with professional testers, planning, and defect management

Collaborative Spam Filtering Using E-Mail Networks

Almost all of us have multiple cyberspace identities, and these cyberalter egos are networked together to form a vast cyberspace social network. This network is distinct from the world-wideweb (WWW), which is being queried and mined to the tune of billions of dollars everyday, and until recently, has gone largely unexplored. Empirically, the cyberspace social networks have been found to possess many of the same complex features that characterize its real counterparts, including scalefree degree distributions, low diameter, and extensive connectivity. We show that these topological features make the latent networks particularly suitable for explorations and management via localonly messaging protocols. Cyberalter egos can communicate via their direct links (i.e., using only their own address books) and set up a highly decentralized and scalable message passing network that can allow large-scale sharing of information and data. As one particular example of such collaborative systems, we provide a design of a spam filtering system, and our large-scale simulations show that the system achieves a spam detection rate close to 100%, while the false positive rate is kept around zero. This system of letting cyberalter egos network among themselves has several advantages over other recent proposals for collaborative spam filtering: (i) It uses an already existing network, created by the same social dynamics that govern our daily lives, and no dedicated peerto-peer (P2P) systems or centralized server-based systems need be constructed; (ii) It utilizes a percolation search algorithm (which can be viewed as mimicking how rumor is spread in a social network) that makes the query-generated traffic scalable; (iii) The network has a built in trust system (just as in social networks) that can be used to thwart malicious attacks; and (iv) It can be implemented right now as a plugin to popular email programs, such as MS Outlook, Eudora, and Sendmail.

WIM: An Information Mining Model for the Web

Web Mining

Modeling User Search Behavior