2,075 research outputs found
Combining information seeking services into a meta supply chain of facts
The World Wide Web has become a vital supplier of information that allows organizations to carry on such tasks as business intelligence, security monitoring, and risk assessments. Having a quick and reliable supply of correct facts from perspective is often mission critical. By following design science guidelines, we have explored ways to recombine facts from multiple sources, each with possibly different levels of responsiveness and accuracy, into one robust supply chain. Inspired by prior research on keyword-based meta-search engines (e.g., metacrawler.com), we have adapted the existing question answering algorithms for the task of analysis and triangulation of facts. We present a first prototype for a meta approach to fact seeking. Our meta engine sends a user's question to several fact seeking services that are publicly available on the Web (e.g., ask.com, brainboost.com, answerbus.com, NSIR, etc.) and analyzes the returned results jointly to identify and present to the user those that are most likely to be factually correct. The results of our evaluation on the standard test sets widely used in prior research support the evidence for the following: 1) the value-added of the meta approach: its performance surpasses the performance of each supplier, 2) the importance of using fact seeking services as suppliers to the meta engine rather than keyword driven search portals, and 3) the resilience of the meta approach: eliminating a single service does not noticeably impact the overall performance. We show that these properties make the meta-approach a more reliable supplier of facts than any of the currently available stand-alone services
Towards Practical Graph-Based Verification for an Object-Oriented Concurrency Model
To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the
development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers,
different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed.
Despite the practical importance of analysing SCOOP programs, there are
currently no general verification approaches that operate directly on program
code without additional annotations. One reason for this is the multitude of
partially conflicting semantic formalisations for SCOOP (either in theory or
by-implementation). Here, we propose a simple graph transformation system (GTS)
based run-time semantics for SCOOP that grasps the most common features of all
known semantics of the language. This run-time model is implemented in the
state-of-the-art GTS tool GROOVE, which allows us to simulate, analyse, and
verify a subset of SCOOP programs with respect to deadlocks and other
behavioural properties. Besides proposing the first approach to verify SCOOP
programs by automatic translation to GTS, we also highlight our experiences of
applying GTS (and especially GROOVE) for specifying semantics in the form of a
run-time model, which should be transferable to GTS models for other concurrent
languages and libraries.Comment: In Proceedings GaM 2015, arXiv:1504.0244
AXES at TRECVID 2012: KIS, INS, and MED
The AXES project participated in the interactive instance search task (INS), the known-item search task (KIS), and the multimedia event detection task (MED) for TRECVid 2012. As in our TRECVid 2011 system, we used nearly identical search systems and user interfaces for both INS and KIS. Our interactive INS and KIS systems focused this year on using classifiers trained at query time with positive examples collected from external search engines. Participants in our KIS experiments were media professionals from the BBC; our INS experiments were carried out by students and researchers at Dublin City University. We performed comparatively well in both experiments. Our best KIS run found 13 of the 25 topics, and our best INS runs outperformed all other submitted runs in terms of P@100. For MED, the system presented was based on a minimal number of low-level descriptors, which we chose to be as large as computationally feasible. These descriptors are aggregated to produce high-dimensional video-level signatures, which are used to train a set of linear classifiers. Our MED system achieved the second-best score of all submitted runs in the main track, and best score in the ad-hoc track, suggesting that a simple system based on state-of-the-art low-level descriptors can give relatively high performance. This paper describes in detail our KIS, INS, and MED systems and the results and findings of our experiments
Computer Analysis of Architecture Using Automatic Image Understanding
In the past few years, computer vision and pattern recognition systems have
been becoming increasingly more powerful, expanding the range of automatic
tasks enabled by machine vision. Here we show that computer analysis of
building images can perform quantitative analysis of architecture, and quantify
similarities between city architectural styles in a quantitative fashion.
Images of buildings from 18 cities and three countries were acquired using
Google StreetView, and were used to train a machine vision system to
automatically identify the location of the imaged building based on the image
visual content. Experimental results show that the automatic computer analysis
can automatically identify the geographical location of the StreetView image.
More importantly, the algorithm was able to group the cities and countries and
provide a phylogeny of the similarities between architectural styles as
captured by StreetView images. These results demonstrate that computer vision
and pattern recognition algorithms can perform the complex cognitive task of
analyzing images of buildings, and can be used to measure and quantify visual
similarities and differences between different styles of architectures. This
experiment provides a new paradigm for studying architecture, based on a
quantitative approach that can enhance the traditional manual observation and
analysis. The source code used for the analysis is open and publicly available
Collaborative Summarization of Topic-Related Videos
Large collections of videos are grouped into clusters by a topic keyword,
such as Eiffel Tower or Surfing, with many important visual concepts repeating
across them. Such a topically close set of videos have mutual influence on each
other, which could be used to summarize one of them by exploiting information
from others in the set. We build on this intuition to develop a novel approach
to extract a summary that simultaneously captures both important
particularities arising in the given video, as well as, generalities identified
from the set of videos. The topic-related videos provide visual context to
identify the important parts of the video being summarized. We achieve this by
developing a collaborative sparse optimization method which can be efficiently
solved by a half-quadratic minimization algorithm. Our work builds upon the
idea of collaborative techniques from information retrieval and natural
language processing, which typically use the attributes of other similar
objects to predict the attribute of a given object. Experiments on two
challenging and diverse datasets well demonstrate the efficacy of our approach
over state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 201
The C Object System: Using C as a High-Level Object-Oriented Language
The C Object System (Cos) is a small C library which implements high-level
concepts available in Clos, Objc and other object-oriented programming
languages: uniform object model (class, meta-class and property-metaclass),
generic functions, multi-methods, delegation, properties, exceptions, contracts
and closures. Cos relies on the programmable capabilities of the C programming
language to extend its syntax and to implement the aforementioned concepts as
first-class objects. Cos aims at satisfying several general principles like
simplicity, extensibility, reusability, efficiency and portability which are
rarely met in a single programming language. Its design is tuned to provide
efficient and portable implementation of message multi-dispatch and message
multi-forwarding which are the heart of code extensibility and reusability.
With COS features in hand, software should become as flexible and extensible as
with scripting languages and as efficient and portable as expected with C
programming. Likewise, Cos concepts should significantly simplify adaptive and
aspect-oriented programming as well as distributed and service-oriented
computingComment: 18
Designometry – Formalization of Artifacts and Methods
Two interconnected surveys are presented, one of artifacts and one of designometry. Artifacts are objects, which have an originator and do not exist in nature. Designometry is a new field of study, which aims to identify the originators of artifacts. The space of artifacts is described and
also domains, which pursue designometry, yet currently doing so without collaboration or common methodologies. On this basis, synergies as well as a generic axiom and heuristics for the quest of the creators of artifacts are introduced. While designometry has various areas of applications, the research of methods to detect originators of artificial minds, which constitute a subgroup of artifacts, can be seen as particularly relevant and, in the case of malevolent artificial minds, as contribution to AI safety
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