User interface handles for web objects

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-158).On the desktop, users are accustomed to having visible handles to objects that they can organize, share, and manipulate. Web applications today feature many loosely defined classes of such objects, like flight itineraries, products for sale, people, recipes, and restaurants, but there are no interoperable handles for these high-level semantic objects. On the web, users need visible handles that can represent an evolving set of semantically rich objects. Such handles would enable a simple, direct, and consistent interface for data representation and transfer. This thesis proposes Clui, a platform for exploring a new data type, called a Webit, that provides uniform handles to objects. Users drag and drop Webits between sites to transfer data, auto-fill search forms, map associated locations, or share Webits with others. While Clui offers a developer API to add Webit support to web sites, Clui plugins allow users to use Webits immediately. Plugins create Webits by extracting semantic data from existing web pages, and they augment sites with drag and drop targets that accept and interpret Webits, all without requiring the cooperation of site developers. Contributions of this thesis include design principles, derived from experimentation, that guide the functionality and behavior of handles for web objects; a system design that provides an adoption path for such handles; and a scalable approach for realizing handles that enforce access controls. To evaluate the usability of Webits, we conducted two in-laboratory studies and collected qualitative observations and feedback. The results suggest that the system is usable and effective in improving user efficiency. While using the system, participants expressed enthusiasm and delight, and believed that Webits would be useful for their daily web activities.by Hubert Pham.Ph.D

PantheonRL: A MARL Library for Dynamic Training Interactions

We present PantheonRL, a multiagent reinforcement learning software package for dynamic training interactions such as round-robin, adaptive, and ad-hoc training. Our package is designed around flexible agent objects that can be easily configured to support different training interactions, and handles fully general multiagent environments with mixed rewards and n agents. Built on top of StableBaselines3, our package works directly with existing powerful deep RL algorithms. Finally, PantheonRL comes with an intuitive yet functional web user interface for configuring experiments and launching multiple asynchronous jobs. Our package can be found at https://github.com/Stanford-ILIAD/PantheonRL.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Published in Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Demo Track) 202

JaxoDraw: A graphical user interface for drawing Feynman diagrams

JaxoDraw is a Feynman graph plotting tool written in Java. It has a complete graphical user interface that allows all actions to be carried out via mouse click-and-drag operations in a WYSIWYG fashion. Graphs may be exported to postscript/EPS format and can be saved in XML files to be used in later sessions. One of the main features of JaxoDraw is the possibility to produce LaTeX code that may be used to generate graphics output, thus combining the powers of TeX/LaTeX with those of a modern day drawing program. With JaxoDraw it becomes possible to draw even complicated Feynman diagrams with just a few mouse clicks, without the knowledge of any programming language.Comment: 15 pages, no figures; typos corrected; visit the JaxoDraw home page at http://altair.ific.uv.es/~JaxoDraw/home.htm

Distributed Object Medical Imaging Model

Abstract- Digital medical informatics and images are commonly used in hospitals today,. Because of the interrelatedness of the radiology department and other departments, especially the intensive care unit and emergency department, the transmission and sharing of medical images has become a critical issue. Our research group has developed a Java-based Distributed Object Medical Imaging Model(DOMIM) to facilitate the rapid development and deployment of medical imaging applications in a distributed environment that can be shared and used by related departments and mobile physiciansDOMIM is a unique suite of multimedia telemedicine applications developed for the use by medical related organizations. The applications support realtime patients’ data, image files, audio and video diagnosis annotation exchanges. The DOMIM enables joint collaboration between radiologists and physicians while they are at distant geographical locations. The DOMIM environment consists of heterogeneous, autonomous, and legacy resources. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), and Java language provide the capability to combine the DOMIM resources into an integrated, interoperable, and scalable system. The underneath technology, including IDL ORB, Event Service, IIOP JDBC/ODBC, legacy system wrapping and Java implementation are explored. This paper explores a distributed collaborative CORBA/JDBC based framework that will enhance medical information management requirements and development. It encompasses a new paradigm for the delivery of health services that requires process reengineering, cultural changes, as well as organizational changes

A modularized electronic payment system for agent-based e-commerce

With the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic-commerce (e-commerce) is an increasingly important segment of commercial activities on the web. The Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming (SAFER) architecture was proposed to further facilitate e-commerce using agent technology. In this paper, the electronic payment aspect of SAFER will be explored. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol and E-Cash were selected as the bases for the electronic payment system implementation. The various modules of the payment system and how they interface with each other are shown. An extensible implementation done using JavaTM will also be elaborated. This application incorporates agent roaming functionality and the ability to conduct e-commerce transactions and carry out intelligent e-payment procedures

The PAX Toolkit and its Applications at Tevatron and LHC

At the CHEP03 conference we launched the Physics Analysis eXpert (PAX), a C++ toolkit released for the use in advanced high energy physics (HEP) analyses. This toolkit allows to define a level of abstraction beyond detector reconstruction by providing a general, persistent container model for HEP events. Physics objects such as particles, vertices and collisions can easily be stored, accessed and manipulated. Bookkeeping of relations between these objects (like decay trees, vertex and collision separation, etc.) including deep copies is fully provided by the relation management. Event container and associated objects represent a uniform interface for algorithms and facilitate the parallel development and evaluation of different physics interpretations of individual events. So-called analysis factories, which actively identify and distinguish different physics processes and study systematic uncertainties, can easily be realized with the PAX toolkit. PAX is officially released to experiments at Tevatron and LHC. Being explored by a growing user community, it is applied in a number of complex physics analyses, two of which are presented here. We report the successful application in studies of t-tbar production at the Tevatron and Higgs searches in the channel t-tbar-Higgs at the LHC and give a short outlook on further developments

A Semantic Web Annotation Tool for a Web-Based Audio Sequencer

Music and sound have a rich semantic structure which is so clear to the composer and the listener, but that remains mostly hidden to computing machinery. Nevertheless, in recent years, the introduction of software tools for music production have enabled new opportunities for migrating this knowledge from humans to machines. A new generation of these tools may exploit sound samples and semantic information coupling for the creation not only of a musical, but also of a "semantic" composition. In this paper we describe an ontology driven content annotation framework for a web-based audio editing tool. In a supervised approach, during the editing process, the graphical web interface allows the user to annotate any part of the composition with concepts from publicly available ontologies. As a test case, we developed a collaborative web-based audio sequencer that provides users with the functionality to remix the audio samples from the Freesound website and subsequently annotate them. The annotation tool can load any ontology and thus gives users the opportunity to augment the work with annotations on the structure of the composition, the musical materials, and the creator's reasoning and intentions. We believe this approach will provide several novel ways to make not only the final audio product, but also the creative process, first class citizens of the Semantic We

Managing complexity in a distributed digital library

As the capabilities of distributed digital libraries increase, managing organizational and software complexity becomes a key issue. How can collections and indexes be updated without impacting queries currently in progress? How can the system handle several user-interface clients for the same collections? Computer science professors and lectors from the University of Waikato have developed a software structure that successfully manages this complexity in the New Zealand Digital Library. This digital library has been a success in managing organizational and software complexity. The researchers' primary goal has been to minimize the effort required to keep the system operational and yet continue to expand its offerings