Brahma: Browsing and Retrieval Architecture for Hierarchical Multimedia Annotation

Traditional browsing of large multimedia documents (e.g., video, audio) is primarily sequential. In the absence of an index structure browsing and searching for relevant information in a long video, audio or other multimedia document becomes difficult. Manual annotation can be used to mark various segments of such documents. Different segments can be combined to create new annotated segments, thus creating hierarchical annotation structures. Given the lack of structure in media data, it is natural for different users to have different views on the same media data. Therefore, different users can create different annotation structures. Users may also share some or all of each other's annotation structures. The annotation structure can be browsed or used to playback as a composed video consisting of different segments. Finally, the annotation structures can be manipulated dynamically by different users to alter views on a document. BRAHMA is a multimedia environment for browsing and retrieval of multimedia documents based on such hierarchical annotation structures.     

Methods for defining user groups and user-adjusted information structures

A common problem in the design of information systems is how to structure the information in a way that is most useful to different groups of users. This paper describes some statistical methods for revealing the structure inherent in empirical data elicited from users. It is illustrated by the application of these methods to the design of some web pages giving information about the Universitat de Valencia. Three potential user groups were identified, administrative staff, teaching staff and students. The first analysis demonstrated that users within these three groups assign relatively homogeneous structures, but that the structures assigned by the three groups are not the same, and also, teaching and administrative staff were shown to be relatively similar and different from students. Second, the ideal information structures for each group were identified and validated against the original data. The methods described can be applied to any design situation where there is an existing user population that can be called on to provide data.     

Model-free data interpretation for continuous monitoring of complex structures

Civil engineering structures are difficult to model accurately and this challenge is compounded when structures are built in uncertain environments. As consequence, their real behavior is hard to predict; such difficulties have important effects on the reliability of damage detection. Such situations encourage the enhancement of traditional approximate structural assessments through in-service measurements and interpretation of monitoring data. While some proposals have recently been made, in general, no current methodology for detection of anomalous behavior from measurement data can be reliably applied to complex structures in practical situations.This paper presents two new methodologies for model-free data interpretation to identify and localize anomalous behavior in civil engineering structures. Two statistical methods (i) moving principal component analysis and (ii) moving correlation analysis have been demonstrated to be useful for damage detection during continuous static monitoring of civil structures.The algorithms are designed to learn characteristics of time series generated by sensor data during a period called the initialization phase where the structure is assumed to behave normally. This phase subsequently helps identify those behaviors which can be classified as anomalous. In this way the new methodologies can effectively identify anomalous behaviors without explicit (and costly) knowledge of structural characteristics such as geometry and models of behavior. The methodologies have been tested on numerically simulated elements with sensors at a range of damage severities. A comparative study with wavelet and other statistical analyses demonstrates superior performance for identifying the presence of damage.     

CAE system in mechanical engineering

Two interactive CAE systems in mechanical engineering were developed. One is a general purpose system for structural design. All stages of design from the beninning of structural analysis to the last stage of strength evaluation can be treated so that optimal structures can be obtained by using this system with changing shapes and dimensions of the structures.

The other one is limited for turbomachinery design. But this includes not only analysis and simulation programs but also design programs and accumulated data for the products, etc.

This paper explains these systems and some element programs which support the system.     

Extending STL with Efficient Data Structures

The Standard Template Library(STL)is a C library that provides a set of well structured generic C components that work together.Based on its well-structured design,STL can be extended by adding new generic algorithms or new generic containers.In this paper,the work on extending STY by adding several efficient container classes for threaded binary search trees is discussed.It is shown that the addition of threads significantly increases the efficiency of some important access operations on the binary tree containers.In general,significant gain in efficiency can be expected in situations where the data structures ar relatively stable,that is,the data structures are looked up often but modified little.     

DifX:利用动态索引体系实现高效的XML数据查询

已有的XML数据索引方法从实现思想上可分为两类：结构归纳法和节点定位法．这两种方法都存在一定的问题,结构归纳法的缺点是索引规模较大而且难以有效支持较复杂的查询,而节点定位法的主要缺点是容易形成过多的连接操作．针对这些问题,提出了一种新的动态的XML索引体系DifX。它扩展了已有的动态索引方法,采用一种动态的Bisimilarity的概念,可以根据实际查询需求以及最优化的要求动态决定索引中保存的结构信息,以实现对各种形式的查询最有效的支持．实验结果证明DifX是一种有效而且高效的XML索引方法,其可以获得比已有的XML索引方法更高的查询执行效率．     

On distributing JASMIN's optimistic multiversioning page manager

JASMIN is a functionally distributed database system running on multiple microcomputers that communicate with each other by message passing. The software modules in JASMIN can be cloned and distributed across computer boundaries. One important module is the intelligent store, a page manager that includes transaction-management facilities. It provides an optimistic, multiversioning concurrency control scheme. This scheme allows read-only transactions to run almost without conflict checking; this is important in some real-time database applications like telephone switching and routing services. The initial implementation of the intelligent store deals with centralized database only. Experiences in modifying the JASMIN intelligent store module to handle distributed databases are described. Design principles and system implementation techniques in the following areas are explored; process structure, data structures and synchronization on data structures. The process structure is aimed to provide high throughput and the data structures are designed to facilitate fast response time     

Programming with partially specified aggregates in Java

Various forms of data aggregates, e.g., arrays, lists, sets, etc., are usually provided by programming languages, either as primitive entities or as additional features made available by standard libraries. In conventional programming languages these data structures are usually specified by completely and precisely enumerating all their constituent elements. Conversely, in (constraint) logic programming languages it is common to deal with partially specified aggregates where either some elements or some parts of the aggregate are left unknown. In this paper we consider the case where partially specified aggregates can occur in a conventional O-O programming language. Specifically, we consider partially specified lists and sets as provided by the Java library JSetL. The definition of such data structures is strongly based on the notion of logical (or constrained) variable usually provided by languages and libraries to support constraint programming. We show through simple examples using Java and JSetL how partially specified lists and sets, along with a few basic constraints over them, can be conveniently exploited in a number of common programming problems.     

Structured extension of COBOL for handling data bases

The most important aspects of a modest data base management system are described on the basis of our experiences in implementing it. Data structuring facilities of the system include two basic data structures: lists and binary search trees; and a simple rule of their top-down composition. The class of structures that may be obtained this way is rather restricted in comparison with the CODASYL proposal, but still fairly powerfull and permits definition and easy implementation of an elegant data manipulation language (DML). Operations of the DML have simple syntax and semantics and allow implementation in which the structure of the data base is protected against illegal actions on the part of the programmer. Since implementation of the system requires some modest effort, we offer it as an experiment which shows how existing software facilities can be extended in simple and still essential ways, for applications where all the generality of general data base management systems is not really necessary. Design of the system was motivated by the work of Schneidermann and Scheuerman on structured data structures and it contains several important clarifications and improvements of their suggestions, together with implementation aspects.     

On multikey sorting

Few studies of sorting deal with sorting on multikeys. In some applications it is required that the data be sorted on more than one key and in different orders. That is, in ascending on some keys and in descending on some others. In this paper, we propose two different data structures, multikey matrix (MKM) and multikey multilevel linked list (MMLL), and discuss their suitability for multikey sorting. An improved efficiency for multikey sorting is achieved by these data structures. Further, we study their space and time performance and conclude with an algorithm for the distribution of MKM.     

Neighborhood linear embedding for intrinsic structure discovery

In this paper, an unsupervised learning algorithm, neighborhood linear embedding (NLE), is proposed to discover the intrinsic structures such as neighborhood relationships, global distributions and clustering property of a given set of input data. This algorithm eases the process of intrinsic structure discovery by avoiding the trial and error operations for neighbor selection, and at the same time, allows the discovery to adapt to the characteristics of the input data. In addition, it is able to explore different intrinsic structures of data simultaneously, and the discovered structures can be used to compute manipulative embeddings for potential data classification and recognition applications. Experiments for image object segmentation are carried out to demonstrate some potential applications of the NLE algorithm.     

基于互信息的贝叶斯网络结构学习算法

结构学习是贝叶斯网络的重要分支之一,而由数据学习贝叶斯网络是NP-完全问题,提出了一个由数据学习贝叶斯网络的改进算法。该算法基于互信息知识构造初始无向图,并通过条件独立测试对无向边添加方向;同时提出了一个针对4节点环和5节点环的局部优化方法来构造初始框架,最后利用贪婪搜索算法得到最优网络结构。数值实验结果表明,改进的算法无论是在BIC评分值,还是在结构的误差上都有一定的改善,并且在迭代次数、运行时间上均有明显降低,能较快地确定出与数据匹配程度最高的网络结构。     

图的数据挖掘算法研究

在计算机科学领域，图是最复杂的数据结构之一。它具有直观的表达形式，无论在研究领域还是在商业领域都有着广泛的应用。因此，如何从大量的图中挖掘出令人感兴趣的子图模式已经成为数据挖掘领域研究的热点之一。结合图论知识，对经典的Apriori算法进行改进，提出了一种图的数据挖掘方法，该方法能够有效地进行频繁子图的挖掘。     

加速PMR四分树构造的研究

PMR四分树空间索引结构在包含空间连接的空间数据库的查询中是很有效的，本文对桶载入PMR四分树的算法做了一些改进，即两种互补的技术：一种改进的插入算法和一种桶载入方法。该技术使得四分树的构造速度相对于传统的四分树构造方法大大提高。该方法可运用到许多基于规则划分的空间数据结构上，来加快它们的构造。     

Focusing in algorithm explanation

Algorithm animation attempts to explain an algorithm by visualizing interesting events of the execution of the implemented algorithm on some sample input. Algorithm explanation describes the algorithm on some adequate level of abstraction, states invariants, explains how important steps of the algorithm preserve the invariants, and abstracts from the input data up to the relevant properties. It uses a small focus onto the execution state. This paper is concerned with the explanation of algorithms on linked data structures. The thesis of the paper is that shape analysis of such algorithms produces abstract representations of such data structures, which focus on the “active” parts, i.e., the parts of the data structures, which the algorithm can access during it's next steps. The paper presents a concept of visually executing an algorithm on these abstract representations of data     

Generation of 3-dimensional microstructure by metal jet

 The author developed a process to form micro functional structures by a metal jet. In this process, a first layer is formed using molten metal drops, which are jetted out of a nozzle, and a second layer is then formed on the first layer. The repetition of this process produces 3-dimensional structures. This paper shows a modeling system that can make 3-dimensional structures from CAD data, and some products made by this system. Moreover, it is shown that this technique can be applied to the generation of functional structures using multi nozzles. Received: 10 August 2001/Accepted: 24 September 2001 This paper was presented at the Fourth International Workshop on High Aspect Ratio Microstructure Technology HARMST 2001 in June 2001.     

Effective homology of bicomplexes, formalized in Coq

In this paper, we present a complete formalization in the Coq theorem prover of an important algorithm in computational algebra, namely the calculation of the effective homology of a bicomplex. As a necessary tool, we encode a hierarchy of algebraic structures in constructive type theory, including graded and infinite data structures. The experience shows how some limitations of the Coq proof assistant to deal with this kind of algebraic data can be overcome by applying a separation of concerns principle; more concretely, we propose to distinguish in the representation of an algebraic structure (such as a group or a module) a behavioural part, containing operation signatures and axioms, and a structural part determining if the algebraic data is free, of finite type and so on.