The TREC2001 video track: information retrieval on digital video information

The development of techniques to support content-based access to archives of digital video information has recently started to receive much attention from the research community. During 2001, the annual TREC activity, which has been benchmarking the performance of information retrieval techniques on a range of media for 10 years, included a ”track“ or activity which allowed investigation into approaches to support searching through a video library. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive picture of the different approaches taken by the TREC2001 video track participants but instead we give an overview of the TREC video search task and a thumbnail sketch of the approaches taken by different groups. The reason for writing this paper is to highlight the message from the TREC video track that there are now a variety of approaches available for searching and browsing through digital video archives, that these approaches do work, are scalable to larger archives and can yield useful retrieval performance for users. This has important implications in making digital libraries of video information attainable

Digital Government: Knowledge Management Over Time-Varying Geospatial Datasets

Spatially-related data is collected by many government agencies in various formats and for various uses. This project seeks to facilitate the integration of these data, thus providing new uses. This will require the development of a knowledge management framework to provide syntax, context, and semantics, as well as exploring the introduction of time-varying data into the framework. Education and outreach will be part of the project through the development of an on-line short courses related to data integration in the area of geographical information systems. The grantees will be working with government partners (National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and the US Army Topographic Engineering Center), as well as an industrial organization, Base Systems, and the non-profit OpenGIS Consortium, which works closely with vendors of GIS products

Dynamic-parinet (D-parinet) : indexing present and future trajectories in networks

While indexing historical trajectories is a hot topic in the field of moving objects (MO) databases for many years, only a few of them consider that the objects movements are constrained. DYNAMIC-PARINET (D-PATINET) is designed for capturing of trajectory data flow in multiple discrete small time interval efficiently and to predict a MO’s movement or the underlying network state at a future time. The cornerstone of D-PARINET is PARINET, an efficient index for historical trajectory data. The structure of PARINET is based on a combination of graph partitioning and a set of composite B+-tree local indexes tuned for a given query load and a given data distribution in the network space. D-PARINET studies continuous update of trajectory data and use interpolation to predict future MO movement in the network. PARINET and D-PARINET can easily be integrated into any RDBMS, which is an essential asset particularly for industrial or commercial applications. The experimental evaluation under an off-the-shelf DBMS using simulated traffic data shows that DPARINET is robust and significantly outperforms the R-tree based access methods

A study in the cognition of individuals’ identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties

Querying Spatio-temporal Patterns in Mobile Phone-Call Databases

Abstract — Call Detail Record (CDR) databases contain millions of records with information about cell phone calls, including the position of the user when the call was made/received. This huge amount of spatiotemporal data opens the door for the study of human trajectories on a large scale without the bias that other sources (like GPS or WLAN networks) introduce in the population studied. Also, it provides a platform for the development of a wide variety of studies ranging from the spread of diseases to planning of public transport. Nevertheless, previous work on spatiotemporal queries does not provide a framework flexible enough for expressing the complexity of human trajectories. In this paper we present the Spatiotemporal Pattern System (STPS) to query spatiotemporal patterns in very large CDR databases. STPS defines a regular-expression query language that is intuitive and that allows for any combination of spatial and temporal predicates with constraints, including the use of variables. The design of the language took into consideration the layout of the areas being covered by the cellular towers, as well as “areas ” that label places of interested (e.g. neighborhoods, parks, etc) and topological operators. STPS includes an underlying indexing structure and algorithms for query processing using different evaluation strategies. A full implementation of the STPS is currently running with real, very large CDR databases on Telefónica Research Labs. An extensive performance evaluation of the STPS shows that it can efficiently find complex mobility patterns in large CDR databases. I