Department of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004

This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department\u27s research activity during that period

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning:Foregrounding lived experience and community voices in studies of cities with participatory and digital visual methods

“Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning” synthesizes more than three years of industrial research conducted within Gehl and the Techno–Anthropology Lab at Aalborg University. Through practical experiments with social media images, digital photovoice, and participatory mapmaking, the project explores how visual materials created by citizens can be used within a digital and participatory methodology to reconfigure the empirical ground of data-driven urbanism. Drawing on a data feminist framework, the project uses visual research to elevate community voices and situate urban issues in lived experiences. As a Science and Technology Studies project, the PhD also utilizes its industrial position as an opportunity to study Gehl’s practices up close, unpacking collectively held narratives and visions that form a particular “data imaginary” and contribute to the production and perpetuation of the role of data in urban planning. The dissertation identifies seven epistemological commitments that shape the data imaginary at Gehl and act as discursive closures within their practice. To illustrate how planners might expand on these, the dissertation uses its own data experiments as speculative demonstrations of how to make alternative modes of knowing cities possible through participatory and digital visual methods

Hybrid approaches based on computational intelligence and semantic web for distributed situation and context awareness

2011 - 2012The research work focuses on Situation Awareness and Context Awareness topics. Specifically, Situation Awareness involves being aware of what is happening in the vicinity to understand how information, events, and one’s own actions will impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. Thus, Situation Awareness is especially important in application domains where the information flow can be quite high and poor decisions making may lead to serious consequences. On the other hand Context Awareness is considered a process to support user applications to adapt interfaces, tailor the set of application-relevant data, increase the precision of information retrieval, discover services, make the user interaction implicit, or build smart environments. Despite being slightly different, Situation and Context Awareness involve common problems such as: the lack of a support for the acquisition and aggregation of dynamic environmental information from the field (i.e. sensors, cameras, etc.); the lack of formal approaches to knowledge representation (i.e. contexts, concepts, relations, situations, etc.) and processing (reasoning, classification, retrieval, discovery, etc.); the lack of automated and distributed systems, with considerable computing power, to support the reasoning on a huge quantity of knowledge, extracted by sensor data. So, the thesis researches new approaches for distributed Context and Situation Awareness and proposes to apply them in order to achieve some related research objectives such as knowledge representation, semantic reasoning, pattern recognition and information retrieval. The research work starts from the study and analysis of state of art in terms of techniques, technologies, tools and systems to support Context/Situation Awareness. The main aim is to develop a new contribution in this field by integrating techniques deriving from the fields of Semantic Web, Soft Computing and Computational Intelligence. From an architectural point of view, several frameworks are going to be defined according to the multi-agent paradigm. Furthermore, some preliminary experimental results have been obtained in some application domains such as Airport Security, Traffic Management, Smart Grids and Healthcare. Finally, future challenges is going to the following directions: Semantic Modeling of Fuzzy Control, Temporal Issues, Automatically Ontology Elicitation, Extension to other Application Domains and More Experiments. [edited by author]XI n.s

Self-organizing distributed digital library supporting audio-video

The StreamOnTheFly network combines peer-to-peer networking and open-archive principles for community radio channels and TV stations in Europe. StreamOnTheFly demonstrates new methods of archive management and personalization technologies for both audio and video. It also provides a collaboration platform for community purposes that suits the flexible activity patterns of these kinds of broadcaster communities

Разрешавање идентитета и груписање дигиталних доказа о осумњиченима применом технологија препознавања лица и система софтверских интелигентих агената заснованог на неаксиоматском резоновању

The work of criminal police in modern society is characterized by the proliferation of data and information to be processed, greater demands for restrictions on personal data, increased public monitoring, and higher expectations in the efficiency of detecting perpetrators, but still lack resources, both human and material. One of the more complex tasks is to resolve the identity, the change of which seeks to cover up criminal activities, i.e., the perpetrator himself, who is on the run. In order to resolve the identity, it is necessary to group and present all available evidence related to specific persons. The thesis proposes a clustering approach by comparing pairs of face feature vectors extracted from images created in unconstrained conditions and based on reasoning using non-axiomatic logic and graphs. Face clusters will be the central points around which data from various police reports will be grouped. A system model has also been proposed in which software agents will play a significant role, primarily in connecting the distribution environment points formed in practice by police information systems. The clustering approach was experimentally tested with six different face image databases characterized by the fact that they were created in a way that simulates unconstrained conditions. The obtained results of the proposed solution are compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The results showed that the approach gives similar but mostly better results than the others. What gives a notable advantage over other methods is the possibility of using mechanisms from non-axiomatic logic such as revision and deduction, which can be used to acquire new knowledge based on information from different system nodes, or in the local knowledge base, respectively.Рад криминалистичке полиције у савременом друштву одликује пролиферација података и информација које треба обрађивати, већи захтеви за ограничењима у раду са личним подацима, појачани надзор пре свега јавности, већа очекивања у ефикасности откривања извршилаца кривичних дела, али и даље недостатак ресурса, како људских тако и материјалних. Један од сложенијих задатака јесте разрешавање идентитета чијом променом се настоје прикрити криминалне активности, односно сам извршилац који је у бекству. Да би се разрешио идентитет, потребно је груписати и презентовати све расположиве доказе везане за одређене особе. У дисертацији је предложен нови приступ кластеровању поређењем парова вектора одлика лица екстрахованих из слика насталих у неконтролисаним условима, а заснован на резоновању применом неаксиоматске логике и графова. Кластери слика лица представљају централне тачке око којих се групишу подаци из различитих полицијских извештаја. Такође је предложен модел система у коме ће значајну улогу имати софтверски агенти, пре свега у повезивању тачака дистрибуираног окружења које у пракси формирају полицијски информациони системи. Нови приступ кластеровању је експериментално испитан са шест различитих база података лица карактеристичних по томе што су креиране на начин којим се симулирају неконтролисани услови. Добијени резултати предложеног решења су упоређени са осталим врхунским методама. Резултати су показали да приступ даје приближне, али углавном боље резултате од осталих. Оно што даје посебну предност у односу на остале методе јесте могућност коришћења механизама из неаксиоматске логике попут ревизије и дедукције, помоћу којих се могу стицати нова знања на основу информација из различитих нодова система, или у локалној бази знања, респективно

Dagstuhl News January - December 2002

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic