The challenges of automatic summarization

Summarization, the art of abstracting key content from one or more information sources, has become an integral part of everyday life. Researchers are investigating summarization tools and methods that automatically extract or abstract content from a range of information sources, including multimedia. Researchers are looking at approaches which roughly fall into two categories. Knowledge-poor approaches rely on not having to add new rules for each new application domain or language. Knowledge-rich approaches assume that if you grasp the meaning of the text, you can reduce it more effectively, thus yielding a better summary. Some approaches use a hybrid. In both methods, the main constraint is the compression requirement. High reduction rates pose a challenge because they are hard to attain without a reasonable amount of background knowledge. Another challenge is how to evaluate summarizers. If you are to trust that the summary is indeed a reliable substitute for the source, you must be confident that it does in fact reflect what is relevant in that source. Hence, methods for creating and evaluating summaries must complement each other     

Public transport accessibility measure based on weighted door to door travel time

Providing accessibility by public transportation is one of the main concerns in sustainable transportation development. An appropriate accessibility index should not only take transportation and land use into account but also the people who want to attend activities via the transport system. Travel time as the most common variable is used to indicate the role of transportation. A trip with public transport includes different parts: walking from the origin point to the bus stop or from the bus stop to the destination point, waiting for the bus to arrive, and in-vehicle time. These different parts have different weight values for passengers which affect their tendency towards traveling by public transportation. In this paper, a GIS-based multimodal gravity model is developed based on the weighted door to door travel time to compute accessibility by public transportation. Five main distinct urban activities including employment, education, healthcare, shop, recreation opportunities, and services are considered and the accessibility of the target population at the census block level to these destinations through public transportation is computed. In the next step, in order to consider all activities together and report a single unique index, the five computed accessibility indices are integrated into a composite index using a principal component analysis (PCA). The integrated accessibility measure helps to get an insight into the relative distribution of the benefits of public transportation and its interaction with the land use. The proposed method is applied to the City of Isfahan in Iran. The results indicate where places, for each activity and in overall, would benefit from the better land use and public transportation interaction and where regions would suffer from low accessibility level. This work provides a methodological framework as a tool for measuring the performance of public transportation and its interaction with the land use pattern.     

在Labview选择结构中实现非全部子框架对输出赋值

本文介绍了在Labview环境下，非全部子框架对输出赋值的三种方法，解决了与Labview要求的每个子框架都必须赋值的矛盾，并给出具体范例。     

Facilitating communications

How often have you felt that the person you were talking to was speaking another language? How often have others seemed bewildered when you described something? We may attribute this to technical jargon or new terminology, but the problem more likely stems from basic communication failure. Since effective communication is essential to a project's success, learning to communicate successfully should be a top priority for anyone in a technical field. The author discusses the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator (MBTI) which can help us understand how natural preferences for gathering information and making decisions shape communication styles. All personalities have value in every organization. Building and maintaining information systems requires many distinct and specialized skills and roles, and each tends to attract a certain personality. To create a comfortable setting for all personality types, you must foster good communication among them     

Avoiding a middleware muddle

Middleware is a layer of software that enables communications between software components regardless of the programming language in which the components are developed, the protocols used to communicate between components, or the platforms on which the components execute. To make sense of the middleware morass and to select the middleware best for you, the author recommends the following steps when constructing your system: identify what type of communication must occur; identify the communications model you will use to implement that communication type; using your communications model, identify the types of middleware you will use to implement the communication; and evaluate candidate products. The author examines each step in detail     

浅谈ILLUSTRATOR教学中“外观面板”的用法

在Illustrator教学中,"外观面板"的作用是非常重要的,但在大多数教材中涉及实例及用法太少."外观面板"在对象的样式控制方面有着神奇的功能,"外观面板"中的每一项都是活动的,这意味着你可以随时更改它们。掌握好"外观面板"的使用,可以高效高质量的完成设计任务。     

Security as a Systems Property

How do we protect systems? The answer is straightforward: each component must be evaluated independently and protected as necessary. Beware the easy answers, such as deploying stronger encryption while ignoring vulnerable end points; that's too much like looking under the streetlamp for lost keys, not because they're likely to be there but because it's an easy place to search. Remember, too, that people and processes are system components as well, and often the weakest ones—think about phishing, but also about legitimate emails that are structurally indistinguishable from phishing attacks. I'm not saying you should ignore one weakness because you can't afford to address another serious one—but in general, your defenses should be balanced. After that, of course, you have to evaluate the security of the entire system. Components interact, not always in benign ways, and there may be gaps you haven't filled.     

More origami solids

There are a bunch of interesting programming projects hiding within the subject of origami, and unit origami in particular. Certainly one of the most straightforward is to write a program that will read some form of origami notation and create a 3D geometry file of the result, which you can then render. Or you can use the same information to create folding diagrams. These are both very hard problems if you go into them deeply. The folding problem requires keeping track of the thickness of the paper at each fold and how bit slides around (for example, if you have two layers of paper involved in a fold, the outermost layer requires more paper than the inner layer). The diagramming problem is pretty tricky, because getting the right point of view and picking the right steps to illustrate it are very personal choices. I made the diagrams in these two columns by hand with a computer-aided drafting program. With my trusty calculator, I computed all the angles and lengths to make sure that everything lined up just where it ought to     

I have seen the future: it is flooded with email

I have been using electronic mail for years, first via Bitnet, then via the Internet. What do you do when you get email from someone you know? Delete it? No, of course not. You read it and you answer it. Therein lies my problem. Everyone is answering me! A few months ago, when I logged on, I had five or six messages each day. Now I log on to find 10 or 20 messages, all of them requiring a response. I suppose I could delete them, but friends are hard to find, so I find myself reading and responding to more and more messages-often on subjects I don't really care about. Everyone, it seems, feels it is better to send than to receive. Did Alvin Toffler warn us about this? I have had a vision of the future. In it, we live in a virtual-reality environment and we spend all our waking hours as employees of the US Electronic Postal Service. Wake me when it's over     

A video-based door monitoring system using local appearance-based face models

In this paper, we present a real-time video-based face recognition system. The developed system identifies subjects while they are entering a room. This application scenario poses many challenges. Continuous, uncontrolled variations of facial appearance due to illumination, pose, expression, and occlusion of non-cooperative subjects need to be handled to allow for successful recognition. In order to achieve this, the system first detects and tracks the eyes for proper registration. The registered faces are then individually classified by a local appearance-based face recognition algorithm. The obtained confidence scores from each classification are progressively combined to provide the identity estimate of the entire sequence. We introduce three different measures to weight the contribution of each individual frame to the overall classification decision. They are distance-to-model (DTM), distance-to-second-closest (DT2ND), and their combination. We have conducted closed-set and open-set identification experiments on a database of 41 subjects. The experimental results show that the proposed system is able to reach high correct recognition rates. Besides, it is able to perform facial feature and face detection, tracking, and recognition in real-time.     

To Drive Is Human

We perform an enormous number of functions while driving, and a computer trying to match a human driver must face all of them. Cornell University researchers offer an insider's perspective on the issues the DARPA Grand Challenge competitors faced in creating a humanlike driver - without the human. In preparing for the Grand Challenge, Cornell University's team divided the driving problem into three basic tasks: (i) localization - knowing where you are, (ii) sensing - seeing what's around you, and (iii) path planning _etermining how to get to a destination. Creating a vehicle capable of driving itself therefore required finding computational solutions to each of these three tasks     

轻松打造多系统环境

随着硬盘容量的变大和操作系统的层出不穷,装双系统甚至多系统的人越来越多了。PowerQuest BootMagic是一个强力磁盘管理工具,可以在单机上运行多个操作系统。每次重新启动计算机时,BootMagic都会提供一个您可以启动的操作系统列表。其中的配置程序可以让您快速选择要在BootMagic菜单中显示的操作系统。     

XML: a door to automated Web applications

In Japanese culture, your meishi conveys your place in the company, even in society, as well as your name, phone number, and e-mail address. That is to say, in Japan, business cards matter. They convey complex metadata about the people who carry them. Like people, Web pages come in an abundance of shapes and sizes (and sounds). What makes them machine interpretable-and therefore a new medium for communicating information globally-is Hypertext Markup Language. HTML allows the structural markup of Web documents, distinguishing the elements of a page with tags and declaring the physical relationships among the various document elements. This organizes the display of information and allows humans to read and use it. To give machines this capability, however, requires semantic markup, identifying what each particular element means on its own (for example, “this is a home street address” or “this is an e-mail address”). Semantic markup would change what is now simply displayed content to machine readable, structured content. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification, first released as two working drafts in 1997 by the World Wide Web Consortium, makes it dramatically easier to develop and deploy domain- and mission-specific Web pages. We describe the evolution of the Web's data representation from display formats to structural markup to semantic markup     

Inviting participants in standard setting

Your daughter is having a birthday party. She wants to invite most of the kids in her class. But a few troublemakers exist. Billy, for example, always disrupts the party: knocking the birthday cake onto the floor spilling ice cream over your Persian rug, stepping on the cat's tail. Must you invite Billy, too! Not in the US: the First Amendment gives you a constitutional right to freedom of association. You don't have to invite troublemakers and other undesirables (as you subjectively define that term) into your home. As far as the law is concerned, your home is your castle. Billy's only recourse is to get his mother to phone you and complain, and you can be unresponsive. Billy has no possible legal claim against you for invidious discrimination. Now, suppose that you are setting a standard for a new bus or optical disk format. Does the principle that your home is your castle apply! That is problematic     

Who ya gonna call! You're on your own [software usability design]

The issue here is not whether discount techniques should be used; they are inevitable. The issue is, in trying to do the best job you can with the ridiculously limited resources provided you, what should you do? How confident should you be in the techniques you are using? A bad design may come back and bite you. When you choose a technique to use in a hurry, you are placing your professional reputation and perhaps your job on the line. You deserve to know four things about any technique that you apply. The hit rate: How many real problems will this technique uncover? The false-alarm rate: How many (and what sorts) of things will it falsely identify as problems (that may not exist, but are costly and time consuming to “fix”)? What does it miss? What types of problems (and how many) does this technique not discover? The correct rejections: How confident are you in your discount technique's ability to flag problems? Discount techniques are not a substitute for the potent combination of analytic and empirical methodologies that usability professionals can bring to bear in designing and evaluating an interface     

Patch Management

Imagine this scenario. As a security manager for your organization, your responsibilities include analyzing and applying patches to all Windows servers across the enterprise. Your process is going to each machine and manually evaluating what patches are missing and installing the most critical security patches as soon as possible. How long does this take? One hour per server? Two hours? Maybe more? How many patches are critical? How often do you do it? And, how many servers do you have? It doesn’t take long to do the math to realize that your battle may be a futile one to keep up with the most critical, let alone every, patch that’s released.     

Maximizing accuracy in large data conversions

Data conversion looks easy to a lot of people. It's not-particularly if it's a large project. There are just too many ways things can go wrong. You can lose data or mess it up. And you can stall the conversion if you don't have enough computing resources. Project size really makes a difference. Some type of mapping tool can improve your chances for success because the data in the specification is the same data that drives the program that loads the target tables. Automation eliminated the mistakes that cause inconsistency. The tools and processes we developed on a large project worked well on a smaller project, but the reverse certainly would not have been true. A systematic process is required with some way to validate each step     

基于VMware软件的虚拟计算机的构建方法

本文介绍了用VMware 4．0软件构建虚拟机和计算环境的方法。利用VMware 4．0，可以把当前计算机的软硬件资源(包括计算能力、存储器、外设接口等)，采用分配或共享的方式将划分出来的资源虚拟成为一台或多台计算机。这些虚拟计算机拥有自己独立的软、硬件资源，可以像使用普通计算机一样进行操作，安装主流的操作系统，并且可在此多个虚拟机之间方便地相互切换。应用这种虚拟机技术使得一些需要复杂环境才能完成的计算机实验在个人微机上就能完成。     

Copyright and work made for hire

Legal and policy aspects of information-technology use and development are discussed. Undoubtedly the most important and powerful legal right you can have as a program writer is to own the copyright to your software. If you have written the program without being hired to do so, you can claim the copyright, usually without complications. The courts have established that programs are no different from any other literary creation. You may claim a copyright just as an author may claim a copyright to a story. Moreover, you don't have to register the copyright; it is automatically in effect when you create the program. But what if you have been hired by someone to write a program? Do you own it, or does the party who hired you? The answer lies in an analysis of the work-made-for-hire doctrine in copyright law. The law maintains that when the program is created by a person employed by another party, the program is considered work made for hire, and the party for whom the work was prepared is the author and has the copyright. This is generally the case unless the parties involved have a written agreement to the contrary     

Which network design tool is right for you?

We've all seen advertisements for commercial network design tools. They usually show colorful workstation and server icons suspended like insects in a spider web of switches and routers, all neatly superimposed on a map of Northern California. But network design is more than dragging, dropping, and connecting icons to build a graphical network infrastructure. Network design is challenging, requiring designers to balance user performance expectations with network-resource costs, capacities, capabilities, and use levels. Network operators want to keep resource utilization high and costs low. But then the resulting design might produce unacceptable service levels when congested links and undersized routers cause too much delay or too many dropped packets. You need a design that will efficiently use your network resources and effectively serve your users. And you want a network design tool that can produce the design you want. Networks are a complicated mix of applications, protocols, device and link technologies, traffic flows, and routing algorithms. There may be tens of thousands of feasible configurations, each with different performance attributes and costs. Can network design tools help you find the combination that is right for your organization? Yes, but it's important to use the right one for the job