Extracting Causal Relations between News Topics from Distributed Sources

The overwhelming amount of online news presents a challenge called news information overload. To mitigate this challenge we propose a system to generate a causal network of news topics. To extract this information from distributed news sources, a system called Forest was developed. Forest retrieves documents that potentially contain causal information regarding a news topic. The documents are processed at a sentence level to extract causal relations and news topic references, these are the phases used to refer to a news topic. Forest uses a machine learning approach to classify causal sentences, and then renders the potential cause and effect of the sentences. The potential cause and effect are then classified as news topic references, these are the phrases used to refer to a news topics, such as “The World Cup” or “The Financial Meltdown”. Both classifiers use an algorithm developed within our working group, the algorithm performs better than several well known classification algorithms for the aforementioned tasks. In our evaluations we found that participants consider causal information useful to understand the news, and that while we can not extract causal information for all news topics, it is highly likely that we can extract causal relation for the most popular news topics. To evaluate the accuracy of the extractions made by Forest, we completed a user survey. We found that by providing the top ranked results, we obtained a high accuracy in extracting causal relations between news topics

Biometric Systems

Biometric authentication has been widely used for access control and security systems over the past few years. The purpose of this book is to provide the readers with life cycle of different biometric authentication systems from their design and development to qualification and final application. The major systems discussed in this book include fingerprint identification, face recognition, iris segmentation and classification, signature verification and other miscellaneous systems which describe management policies of biometrics, reliability measures, pressure based typing and signature verification, bio-chemical systems and behavioral characteristics. In summary, this book provides the students and the researchers with different approaches to develop biometric authentication systems and at the same time includes state-of-the-art approaches in their design and development. The approaches have been thoroughly tested on standard databases and in real world applications

The Legacies of Exclusion: Asian Americans and the California Voting Rights Act

A quiet revolution has spread throughout California. Since the California Voting Rights Act became law in 2001, 170 cities have transitioned from at-large to by-district elections, where voters in a geographic district elect one city council member. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the California Voting Rights Act on Asian American political participation and representation in local elections. I begin by tracing the roots of discrimination against Asian immigrants and exploring the construction of the pan-Asian identity. I examine the legacies of exclusion on Asian political participation and representation in political offices. I analyze Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the impetus for the CVRA’s enactment, which lowered the legal standards to prove a violation. The CVRA’s legal remedies for minority vote dilution evolved to match California’s unique demographics as a minority-majority state. I conduct one case study on the City of Santa Clara, which is the only city to go to trial against Asian American plaintiffs. I found data on seventy California cities with above a 20% Asian population and identified each city’s electoral system and Asian city council members. I argue that the context matters when evaluating the effectiveness of the CVRA and by-district elections. While the CVRA has done significant work in dismantling the minority vote diluting effects of at-large elections, it employs too little discretion in switching from at-large to by-district elections. Switching from at-large to by-district elections should be done intentionally and deliberately while considering and preserving communities of interest. The CVRA remains important legislation for Asian communities as barriers to political empowerment persist. The California Voting Rights Act takes a significant step forward in the fight for Asian American representation and participation at the local level