An architecture of a user-centred digital library for the academic community

An architecture of a user-centred digital library, designed to lead users of an academic community to the required information resources based on their tasks, is proposed. Information resources include full-text articles, databases, theses and dissertations, e-journals, e-books, multimedia databases, and so on. Other information resources such as university course calendars, university statutes, course registration, thesis and dissertation guidelines, style guides, and so on, are also needed by users. A prototype has been designed and developed using the School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as an example of such an environment to provide access to these information resources which are spread across different servers and in different home pages This prototype provides links to various information resources according to users' needs, as well as a personal work space to record/store his/her publications, frequently used or favorite hyperlinks and references or notes. Various stages of the prototype design and development are described and future works on this line are highlighted

Metastable States in Two-Lane Traffic Flow Models With Slow-To-Start Rule

Using computer simulations, we show that metastable states still occur in two-lane traffic models with slow to start rules. However, these metastable states no longer exist in systems where aggressive drivers (\textit{which do not look back before changing lanes}) are present. Indeed, the presence of only one aggressive driver in the circuit, triggers the breakdown of the high flow states. In these systems, the steady state is unique and its relaxation dynamics should depend on the lane changing probability $p_{ch}$ and the number of aggressive drivers present in the circuit. It is found also that the relaxation time $\tau$ diverges as the form of a power-law : $\tau\propto p_{ch}^{-\beta}, \beta=1$.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Know2Look: Commonsense Knowledge for Visual Search

With the rise in popularity of social media, images accompanied by contextual text form a huge section of the web. However, search and retrieval of documents are still largely dependent on solely textual cues. Although visual cues have started to gain focus, the imperfection in object/scene detection do not lead to significantly improved results. We hypothesize that the use of background commonsense knowledge on query terms can significantly aid in retrieval of documents with associated images. To this end we deploy three different modalities - text, visual cues, and commonsense knowledge pertaining to the query - as a recipe for efficient search and retrieval

Ground state phase diagram and magnetoconductance of a one-dimensional Hubbard superlattice at half-filling

We have studied a one dimensional Hubbard superlattice with different Coulomb correlations at alternating sites for a half-filled band. Mean field calculations based on the Hartree-Fock approximation together with a real space renormalization group technique were used to study the ground state of the system. The phase diagrams obtained in these approaches agree with each other from the weak to the intermediate coupling regime. The mean field results show very quick convergence with system size. The renormalization group results indicate a spatial modulation of local moments that was identified in some previous work. Also we have studied the magnetoconductance of such superlattices which reveals several interesting points.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures. to be published in Phys. Rev. B, vol. 75, Issue 23 (tentative