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This paper is about searching literature digital libraries to find "related" publications of a given publication. Existing approaches do not take into account publication topics in the relatedness computation, allowing topic diffusion across query output publications. In this paper, we propose a new way to measure "relatedness" by incorporating "contexts" (representing topics) of publications. We utilize existing ontology terms as contexts for publications, i.e., publications are assigned to their relevant contexts, where a context characterizes one or more publication topics. We define three ways of context-based relatedness, namely, (a) relatedness between two contexts (context-to-context relatedness) by using publications that are assigned to the contexts and the context structures in the context hierarchy, (b) relatedness between a context and a paper (paper-to-context relatedness), which is used to rank the relatedness of contexts with respect to a paper, and (c) relatedness between two papers (paper-to-paper relatedness) by using both paper-to-context and context-to-context relatedness measurements. Using existing biomedical ontology terms as contexts for genomics-oriented publications, our experiments indicate that the context-based approach is accurate, and solves the topic diffusion problem by effectively classifying and ranking related papers of a given paper based on the selected contexts of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document triage is the critical point in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need. This complex process is not yet well understood, and subsequently we have undertaken a comparison of this task in both electronic and paper media. The results reveal that in each medium human judgement is influenced by different factors, and confirm some unproven hypotheses. How users claim they perform triage, and what they actually do, are often not the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most interesting developments within computer system design in recent years have emerged from an exploration of the ways everyday objects and artefacts can be augmented with computational resources. Often under the rubric of "ubiquitous computing", research programmes in Europe, North America and Japan have directed substantial funding towards these initiatives, and leading industrial and academic research laboratories have developed a diverse range of ubiquitous computing "solutions". These developments mark an important shift in system design, a shift that is having a corresponding impact on social science research. Surprisingly though, given the growing commitment to the ubiquitous and the tangible, there is a mundane, even humble artefact that pervades our ordinary lives that has received less attention than one might imagine. This artefact is paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore new metaphors for interaction design on tabletop system. Tabletop systems are shared horizontal surface for co-located collaboration, which leads to original problems when designing interactions. We propose two metaphors based on the paper: the peeling metaphor, and the slot metaphor, and then suggest a way of using them to design new interactions for solving some of the problems of tabletop systems: documents organization, documents transmission and documents duplication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global paper industry needs systems that can be used in all locations. International user studies can be helpful when integrating systems. Not only due to the lack of common language but also the differences in culture and the usage of systems, information from different countries needs to be collected and analyzed so that the integration development is not be biased and unilateral. During the study some food for thought was gathered on what to consider when planning an international user study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contents and topologies of inter-document linkages, such as citations and references among scientific literature, have received increasing research interests in recent years. Some technologies have been fully studied and utilized upon this meaningful information to improve the organization, analysis and evaluation of scientific digital libraries. In this paper, we present a CiteSeer-like system to access scientific papers in computer science discipline by reference linking technique. Moreover, implicit semantics behind reference indices are mined and organized to improve accessibility of scientific papers. In order to model scientific literature and their interlinked relationships, we develop a domain-specific ontology to analyze contents and citation anchor context of scientific papers. Compared with abstract of a specific paper written by authors themselves, we introduce an automatic summary generation algorithm to create objective descriptions from other scholars' perspectives based on the ontology. Semantic queries can also be asked to discover interesting patterns in scientific libraries in order to provide a comprehensive and meaningful guidance for users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content preparation is essential for web design [25]. The objective of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for the development of methods to evaluate the effectiveness of content preparation in information technology operations. Past studies identify information as the dominant concern of users, and delivery mechanism as a secondary concern [20]. The best presentation of the wrong information results in a design with major usability problems and does not aid the user in accomplishing his task. This paper shifts the focus of existing usability evaluation methods. It attempts to fill the void in usability literaoture by addressing the information aspect of usability evaluation. Combining the strengths of content preparation and usability evaluation yields major implications for a broad range of IT uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the progress of Internet technology and the increase of distributed information on networks, the present knowledge management has been based more and more on the performance of various experienced users. In addition to the increase of electronic documents, the use of paper documents has not been reduced because of their convenience. This paper describes a method of tracking paper document locations and contents using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This research also focused on the expression of a task process and the seamless structuring of related electronic and paper documents as a result of task knowledge formalization using information organizing. A system is proposed here that implements information organization for both Web documents and paper documents with the task model description and RFID technology. Examples of a prototype system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papers in HCI play different roles, whether to inspire, solve industrial problems or further the science of HCI. There is a potential conflict between the different views, and a danger that different forms of validity are assumed by author and reader — deliberately or accidentally. This paper reviews some of the issues in this complex area and makes practical recommendations. In particular, the paper introduces the term "cross-validity" to help make explicit the issues, problems and means to tackle them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranking publications of Online Digital Libraries (ODLs) is useful for (i) providing comparative assessment of publications and (ii) listing relevant ODL search results first in search outputs, enabling users to aggregate pertinent results quickly and easily. Studies show that effective citation-based scoring functions, namely, PageRank, HITS and Citation Count, are highly skewed, and have accuracy problems, possibly due to topic diffusion. In this paper, based on the notion of research pyramids, we propose an a priori technique to assign more effective publication scores. Using the ACM SIGMOD Anthology ODL as a testbed, we show that our approach provides more accurate and less skewed publication scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a community such as conferences, numerous service providers and service users exist, and people interact using contexts. With the improvements in context-awareness computing and mobile computing technologies, human-computer interactions for exchanging contexts started increasing. In this paper, we introduce some interaction techniques such as tag interaction and service discovery interaction using a mobile device to provide an efficient user interface to exchange contexts in a conference room. We identified typical situations in which these interactions can be used in a paper, poster session, and for providing individual information among the attendees. We analyzed the two interaction techniques to be suitable to improve the interactions for exchanging contexts in a conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some results of a project that studied how multimedia can help the worker in an assembly task. The test case was a deep-cut assembly of a grid-anode for a cathodic protection system. A multimedia tool was implemented and compared with the conventional support method for the same task. The tool helps the worker by providing training and background information. During the task the tool acts as a guide and a set of well-defined instructions. The comparison of the methods was done by means of a field experiment. The results show that the use of the implemented tool helps to produce a slight increase to the quality of the work. However, the execution time of the work was not better when using the multimedia tool. According to a user questionnaire done in the test situation, the multimedia tool was more useful and easier to use, and gave the users more confidence than the conventional support method. It can be said that the use of multimedia support helps the worker to produce better quality in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This edited volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the Second Workshop on Data Mining for Biomedical Applications (BioDM'07) held in Nanjing, China on 22nd of May 2007. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2007), a leading international conference in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. The aim of this workshop was to provide a forum for discussing research topics related to biomedical applications where data mining techniques were found to be necessary and/or useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider disaster management as the coordination of resources in space and time, and contrast this with the Joint Operational Picture (JOP) used in military planning. The basic premise is that the processes involved in the collection and management of information could interfere with the priorities of dealing with immediate demands on ‘rescuers' and their managers. Thus, we explore ways in which collaboration could be made as implicit as possible. The paper includes small-scale user trials of prototypes to highlight potential benefits and shortcomings. The paper concludes with consideration of how brokering approaches to coordination could be realized using the prototypes described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of easy-to-use mobile systems for collecting and handling emergency medical care data in the field can significantly improve the effectiveness of rescue operations. In particular, this paper focuses on the design and evaluation of a mobile application that replaces ambulance run paper sheets. First, we discuss the limitations of traditional ambulance run paper sheets. Then, we present the PDA-based system we have developed. Finally, we discuss in detail the usability study we have carried out with first responders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe emergency physicians are still using paper-based emergency report forms to document medical procedure at accident scenes. The forms are quite similar, but they differ in certain parameters or attributes. There are ongoing endeavours to combine the paper-based protocols and then transfer this new protocol standard into a software-based Emergency Patient Care Report Form (EPCRF). However during the transformation from a paper-based to an electronic solution, many problems occur. To keep the users' acceptance of the emergency medical services personnel, it is crucial that electronic EPCRF supports the central process efficiently. Therefore key elements within the emergency report form are the anatomical diagrams and the chronological sequence diagrams. These diagrams allow the emergency physician to track and record patient's parameters in a very fast and understandable and user friendly way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple viewed search engine presented here retrieves documents of an indicated search area and displays a matrix of the distribution of the clustering from two aspects of the retrieval result. The search engine provides a visual and semantic bird's-eye view of the entire retrieval result. In addition, the characteristic words of each cluster are displayed in the matrix, and supports narrowing of the search. Furthermore, it is possible to immediately change the analysis criteria or the number of clusters and to use a zooming function. Thus, various retrieval conditions for a query can be attempted immediately and continuously. As a case study, this paper performs several analyses on the electronic journal Zoological Science using a multiple viewed search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In current work for web service composition, the schema and structure of XML messages are abstracted and the messages are assumed to be flat, which is not the case as far as current standards and specifications are concerned. This paper proposes a method for web service composition based on message schema analysis. This method starts from message schema matching between two web services. The concepts of composable web services and composition context are defined to guide the synthesizing process. To perform message schema analysis, a method for MSL schema matching is discussed, where MSL is a formal model for XML Schema. Some usually used web service composition examples are collected from the literature to evaluate the method in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a multi-dependency language modeling approach to information retrieval. The approach extends the basic KL-divergence retrieval approach by introducing the hybrid dependency structure, which includes syntactic dependency, syntactic proximity dependency and co-occurrence dependency, to describe dependencies between terms. Term and dependency language models are constructed for both document and query. The relevant between a document and a query is then evaluated by using the KL-divergence between their corresponding models. The new dependency retrieval model has been compared with other traditional retrieval models. Experiment results indicate that it produces significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present web is existing in the HTML and XML formats for persons to browse. Recently there is a trend towards the semantic web where the information can be can be processed and understood by agents. Most of the present research works focus on the translation from HTML to semantic web, but seldom on XML. In this paper, we design a method to translate XML to semantic web. It is known that ontologies play an important role in the semantic web, therefore firstly, we propose a genetic model to organize ontologies, and based on this model, we use three steps, viz. semantic translation, structural translation and schematic translation, to translate XML to semantic web. The aim of the paper is to facilitate the wide use of semantic web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on e-learner community building has attracted much attention for its effectiveness in sharing the learning experience and resources among geographically dispersed e-learners. While collaborative filtering proves its success as one of the most efficient methods in finding similar users in e-commerce domain, it does meet special challenges in e-learning areas. In this paper, we incorporate multi-agent techniques into collaborative filtering and propose a novel community building scheme. By doing so, we manage to collect useful information from the learner behaviors and thus increase the scalability and flexibility of traditional collaborative filtering methods. The experiment on a standard benchmark shows that our scheme has reasonable community building quality and e-learners can make better recommendations to each other inside the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of language and culture in the effective design and widespread acceptance of handheld devices in foreign markets. To this end, key challenges that usability experts and interaction designers face while designing foreign language keypads for handheld devices are discussed and analyzed. The discussion presupposes English as the point of reference for design decisions but focuses on the challenges faced when considering foreign language devices. For the context of this paper, Arabic is cited as the ‘foreign' language in the design of BlackBerry devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a human-robot interface in networked and multi-sensored environments. The human robot interface is an essential part of intelligent robotic system. Through the human robot interface, human being can interact with the robot. Especially, in multi-sensored environment, the human robot interface can be developed with remarkably extended functionality. Generally, handheld device such as PDA is a suitable for human robot interface because of its mobility and network ability. In this paper, we select PDA as device of human robot interface. In the implemented framework, the robot user can monitor what happens in multi-sensored environment and control the mobile robot easily and intuitively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial safety can be regarded as a major issue of industrial environments nowadays. This is why industries are currently spending huge amounts of resources to improve safety in all levels by reducing risks of causing damages to equipment, human injuries or even fatalities. This paper describes how Virtual Reality, Human Factors and Rule-based technologies are used in the framework of the VIRTHUALIS Integrated Project towards industrial training, safety management and accident investigation. The paper focuses mainly on the VR system specification and basic modules, while at the same time it presents the main system modules that synthesize the tool as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the conscious experience of love is a puzzle to people all around the world. Many of us want to understand our love in order to make it more sustainable. An application developed for this purpose is presented in this paper: Rose is a self-evaluation application that aims to help individuals evaluate and understand the many dimensions of their love. Rose is freely available on the Internet. In this paper, we summarize the results of everybody who has taken part in the on-line self-evaluation using this application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely traffic identification is critical in network security monitoring and traffic engineering. Traditional methods using well-known ports, protocols and precise signature matching are no longer accurate with the proliferation of new applications. Recently, applying pattern recognition methods to classify network application traffic based on the flow parameters (e.g. port, flow duration, etc.) has become increasing popular. However, many methods developed in the previous works are either too complex to be applied in real-time, or suffer from lower accuracy due to the insufficient knowledge of the application. In this paper, we first give an overview on the developments of pattern recognition methods as traffic classification tools. We then develop two separate pattern recognition methods: one with supervised learning, and one with un-supervised learning, and apply them to classify traffic captured from a campus backbone network. The supervised learning method (an optimized SVM method) yields approximately 99.41% accuracy for the collected traffic. The un-supervised learning method (an entropy based clustering method) gets the average accuracy of 92.41% for the top 20 traffic generating hosts during the same time period. Performance test on a single PC with 3GHz Pentium 4 processors and 1GB of memory show that both methods can handle more than 10000 network flows per second, close to real time requirements for many situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of expert finding in a social network. The task of expert finding, as one of the most important research issues in social networks, is aimed at identifying persons with relevant expertise or experience for a given topic. In this paper, we propose a propagation-based approach that takes into consideration of both person local information and network information (e.g. relationships between persons). Experimental results show that our approach can outperform the baseline approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the problem of efficient processing of XQueries in single-user relational environment where the queries are formulated using a user-friendly GUI. We take a novel and non-traditional approach to improving query performance by prefetching data during the formulation of a query. The latency offered by GUI-based query formulation is utilized to prefetch portions of the query results. To realize this, we present an algorithm for prefetching based on data synopses statistics and GUI actions during visual query formulation. Experimental evaluation indicates that prefetching is viable as the combined time taken by all the prefetching operations is not significantly more than normal query execution time. Our experiments in the context of biological data show that prefetching improves the query response time by 7-96% with a greater improvement for larger data sets. Also, we show the impact of errors committed by users during query formulation on the query performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many data stream processing systems are increasingly being used to support applications that handle sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and locations of soldiers in battleground [1,2,3,6]. These data have to be protected from unauthorized accesses. However, existing access control models and mechanisms cannot be adequately adopted on data streams. In this paper, we propose a novel access control model for data streams based on the Aurora data model [2]. Our access control model is role-based and has the following components. Objects to be protected are essentially views (or rather queries) over data streams. We also define two types of privileges - Read privilege for operations such as Filter, Map, BSort, and a set of aggregate privileges for operations such as Min, Max, Count, Avg and Sum. The model also allows the specification of temporal constraints either to limit access to data during a given time bound or to constraint aggregate operations over the data within a specified time window. In the paper, we present the access control model and its formal semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On-time data management is becoming a key difficulty faced by the information infrastructure of most organizations. In fact, database applications for critical areas are increasingly giving more importance to the timely execution of transactions. Database applications with timeliness requirements have to deal with the possible occurrence of timing failures, when the operations specified in the transaction do not complete within the expected deadlines. In spite of the importance of timeliness requirements in database applications, typical commercial DBMS do not assure any temporal properties, not even the detection of the cases when the transaction takes longer than the expected/desired time. This paper discusses the problem of timing failure detection in database applications and proposes a transaction programming approach to help developers in programming database applications with time constraints. The paper illustrates the proposed programming model with a practical example using the Oracle 10g DBMS running a performance benchmark for real-time database applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to propose a decision making model for the Taiwanese shipping logistics company in China to select the best container distribution center location. The representation of multiplication operation on fuzzy numbers is useful for the decision makers to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problems of container distribution center location selection. In the past, few papers discussed the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Thus this paper first compute and obtain the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Based on this representation, the decision maker can rank quickly the ordering of each alternative location and then select easily the best one. Finally, the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers is applied to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problem of container distribution center location selection in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes new method for object reference which enables a person to find surrounding objects and develops a navigation system named CoCo. CoCo employs an ultrasonic directional speaker with a rotating base. Ultrasonic wave transmitted by an ultrasonic directional speaker is converted to audible sound when it reflects on floor, wall, or object. Based on this property, CoCo can emit audible sound from arbitrary place using a rotating base. When CoCo navigates a person to an object, CoCo transmits ultrasonic wave so as to hear audible sound continuously from the line between the ultrasonic directional speaker and the object. We designed and implemented an object management system as an application using 3D position sensors and a navigation system CoCo. This paper shows how CoCo navigates a person to an object using position data from an object management system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is amble evidence that supports true interactivity, both in the interface and in the presentation methodology, will further enhance learning and knowledge retention among students. The real challenge is how to implement it, measure and evaluate this outcome. This paper presents findings that look into the efficacy of the combination of virtual environments and interactive teaching techniques in enhancing learning and increasing the knowledge retention level of students.It is now widely accepted that the conventional way of lecturing students has certain limitations. E-learning and the use of ICT, interactive tools in the education field has proven to be effective in assisting the teaching and learning experience. It has been observed that the one way communication method of lecturing with limited or no opportunity for feedback from students and audiences in general has a major impact on their attention span and the retention level. There are issues related to the establishment and implementation of interactive learning tools as an aid for teaching and especially in continuous evaluation of students' achievements. We point out that it is not only the 'teaching' tasks that are impacted by the use of ICT but also current methods of evaluation including written examinations which have proven to be time consuming and inaccurate reflection of students' achievements. The introduction of interactive learning and evaluation has several advantages and this paper will give a convincing support to the fact that the advantages are more than the fact that it makesthe teaching and evaluation process easy, simple and rapid. Educators should not fail to adapt and respond to the needs of 21st century bust and multi-tasking students for innovative learning methods, i.e. interactive learning. The role of education institutions and educators in the future will become demand-driven; to satisfy technically sophisticated student clients. The paper recommends that we should not ignore the use of interactive technology used as it should be, as a tool, to enhance sound pedagogical methods, however, we should also be able to measure its contribution in enhancing teaching and learning. It is pertinent to synthesize a framework that encompasses ways to compliment existing methods of teaching with interactive learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As extensive amount information is required within a R&D environment, an automated information system could save a considerable amount of time and efforts. There are currently many researches to overcome the information overload phenomenon, including information systems, recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia, and this paper presents an adaptive information providing system utilising some characteristics of these technologies to support R&D and collaborative meeting environments. The system described in this paper aims to present the potential synergy between recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of video games is a complex software engineering activity bringing together large multidisciplinary teams under stringent constraints. While much has been written about how to develop video games, there has been as yet little attempt to view video game development from a quality perspective, attempting to enumerate the quality attributes that must be satisfied by game implementations, and to relate implementation techniques to those quality attributes. In this paper, we discuss desired quality attributes of 3D computer games, and we use the development of our own Life is a Village game to illustrate architectural tactics that help achieve these desired qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing popularity of self-organized communication systems, distributed trust and reputation systems in particular have received increasing attention. By formalizing trust relationships, trust between parties within the community can be derived by analyzing the trust paths linking the parties together. This paper treats trust network as an emergent property. The emergence interpretation concerns both the maintenance and usage of trust network inference. Specifically, in P2P system, trust network is maintained by individual agents at micro level, and it is used (i.e., queried) as one entity at macro level. In this paper, we first discuss micro level activities, that is, we classifies trust into functional trust and referral trust to facilitate trust inference, and extend the referral trust to include factors of similarity and truthfulness, so that our approach can accommodate the personalized feature of reputation rating, and reduce trust inference error effectively; then we discuss macro level properties of trust network. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of network structural properties of trust and reputation system in terms of efficiency and cost. That is, efficiency measures how well information propagates over trust system, and cost measures how expensive it is to build this system. Preliminary simulation results show the performance improvement of P2P community and the emergence of economical small-world trust network, namely relatively high efficiency and low cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality management is, not only for digital libraries, an important task in which many dimensions and different aspects have to be considered. The following paper gives a short overview on DBLP in which the data acquisition and maintenance process underlying DBLP is discussed from a quality point of view. The paper finishes with a new approach to identify erroneous person names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CiteSeer began as the first search engine for scientific literature to incorporate Autonomous Citation Indexing, and has since grown to be a well-used, open archive for computer and information science publications, currently indexing over 730,000 academic documents. However, CiteSeer currently faces significant challenges that must be overcome in order to improve the quality of the service and guarantee that CiteSeer will continue to be a valuable, up-to-date resource well into the foreseeable future. This paper describes a new architectural framework for CiteSeer system deployment, named CiteSeer Plus. The new framework supports distributed indexing and storage for load balancing and fault-tolerance as well as modular service deployment to increase system flexibility and reduce maintenance costs. In order to facilitate novel approaches to information extraction, a blackboard framework is built into the architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-structured data has become more and more attention-getting with the emergence of XML, and it has aroused much enthusiasm for integrating XML and SQL in database community. Due to the complexity of XQuery, graphical XML query languages have been developed to help users query XML data. In this paper, we propose a new XML-to-SQL solution on the base of ORA-SS, a rich semantic model for semi-structured data. We model the data by ORA-SS schema and store them in an ORDB. Based on ORA-SS, we developed a graphical XML query language GLASS that not only expresses the query constraints and reconstruction structure in XML view but also the relational semantic in the XML view. This paper focuses on the translation algorithm from GLASS to SQLX, an XML extension on traditional SQL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pattern-based clustering has broad applications in microarray data analysis, customer segmentation, e-business data analysis, etc. However, pattern-based clustering often returns a large number of highly-overlapping clusters, which makes it hard for users to identify interesting patterns from the mining results. Moreover, there lacks of a general model for pattern-based clustering. Different kinds of patterns or different measures on the pattern coherence may require different algorithms. In this paper, we address the above two problems by proposing a general quality-driven approach to mining top-k quality pattern-based clusters. We examine our quality-driven approach using real world microarray data sets. The experimental results show that our method is general, effective and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the existing web-based Learning Management Systems(LMSs), there is an exponentially increasing need of content interoperability. This has caused the apparition of different standardization initiatives. In this paper we describe our approach to the design of , a new LMS which adheres closely to IMS standards in an attempt to evaluate the practical viability of those standards. The architecture of our system, focused on the IMS manifest, has yielded a powerful and modular system that goes beyond the initial intention of evaluating the proposed standard and can be used as a robust production system in a real environment. We describe our IMS driven approach, as well as an architecture based on this approach that has been implemented using well-known and robust Java based web technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PAKDD 2007 Industrial Track Workshop was held on the 22nd of May 2007 in conjunction with The 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2007) at the Mandarin Garden Hotel in Nanjing, China. Following the PAKDD conference tradition to promote industry applications of new data mining techniques, methodologies and systems, the theme of this workshop was defined as "Data Mining for Practitioners". Industrial oriented papers on innovative applications of data mining technology to solve real world problems were solicited with emphasis on the following areas: 1New data mining methodologies1Data mining application systems1Data cleansing and transformation in data mining1New application problems and data mining solutions1Data mining in government applications1Innovative data mining case studiesThe workshop received 82 submissions from 9 countries and regions in Asia, Europe and North America. The topics of these submissions covered new techniques, algorithms, systems, traditional applications, such as banking and finance, and new applications in manufacturing, facility management, environment and government services. After a rigorous review by the committee members, 13 papers were selected for presentation at the workshop. The acceptance rate was about 16%. For the industrial track papers in PAKDD series conferences, this low acceptance rate was unprecedented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach of using game-like techniques to engage firemen from the Paris Fire Brigade into a participatory design process of wearable computing for emergency response. The approach is motivated by explaining the specific difficulties of the domain and technology and by explaining how to address them in a user-centered design approach featuring multiple prototyping steps. A multiplayer virtual reality computer game is one of these techniques. The paper shows how the design of the computer game is informed and validated by other techniques and how it can be used successfully to simulate certain characteristics of the domain and the technologies that are relevant for design. As such we present it as a tool to mediate and facilitate the collaboration of technology providers and users, empowering end-users to leverage their domain expertise to explore, assess and design well-fitting solutions in a creative, reflective and enjoyable collaborative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes ongoing work and research perspectives for integrating cartographic presentations into decision-support systems for crisis management and resource planning in emergency situations. The spatial visualizations shall improve the communication and analysis of the situation at different decision levels. The information has to be adequately prepared and presented according to the user's role, position and utilized device. The outstanding characteristics of the presented solution are (1) a context-dependent selection and visualization of data through location-based services and (2) a visualization of the situation at different perspectives. This reduces the amount of presented data and improves the understanding of the user's current environment. The paper describes an application prototype designed for the European project SHARE and outlines perspectives by introducing time as another information dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have been described as complex organized states and some Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have been developed based on them. TUIs using some kind of physical interfaces called Phidgets, have included a strong emphasis on touch and physicality as well as on exploiting the meaning and cultural usage associated with everyday physical objects. However, there is a gap between emotions and knowledge management. This paper presents a detailed analysis to show how this relationship is developed in several cultures, trying to find a common understanding to relate them. From a cognitive point of view, some image schemas have been established and extended using metaphors. As a result it is possible to relate schemas that come from perception to abstract schemas. For instance, several physical properties as position in a frame or curve shape properties used in aesthetics designs can be associated to some kind of emotions as ‘joy for speed'. Cultural profiles are the missing element to formalize it because emotion expression can be different in every culture; moreover scientific knowledge and emotions come together in the same representation in some cultures. As conclusion, a research line is exposed for integrating knowledge management in TUIs, and in this paper a previous prototype has been developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new control system interface which utilises the user's eye gaze to enable severely disabled individuals control electronic devices easily. The system is based upon a novel human computer interface, which facilitates simple control of electronic devices by predicting and responding to the user's possible intentions, based intuitively upon their point of gaze. The interface responds by automatically pre-selecting and offering only those controls appropriate to the specific device that the user looks at, in a simple and accessible manner. It therefore affords the user conscious choice of the appropriate range of control actions required, which may be executed by simple means and without the need to navigate manually through potentially complex control menus to reach them. Two systems using the head-mounted and the remote eye tracker respectively are introduced, compared and evaluated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of the art in vehicle configuration is still very much characterized by a face-to-face sales situation. In addition, web browsers are becoming market places. But direct sales over the internet, without contact with a sales person constitute still a small segment of the market, of only a few percent for European manufacturers. The internet is more used as a medium to gather information. A standardised DIYD vehicle configuration is thus a must for European manufacturers today. This paper presents an Intelligent DIY e-commerce system for vehicle design, based on Ontologies and 3D Visualization, that aims at enabling a suitable representation of products with the most realistic possible visualisation outcome. The platform, designed for the automotive sector, includes all the practicable electronic commerce variants and its on-line product configuration process is controlled by an ontology, that was created using the OWL Web Ontology Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new method for robustly extracting moving objects in an environment with varying illuminations. The proposed method applies background subtraction scheme based on hue and hue gradient to minimize the effect of the illumination change. First, we train the background images in the HSI color space and build the Gaussian background model with respect to the hue and hue gradient. Next, image subtraction is performed between the trained background image and the current input image based on the Gaussian background model. Finally, the morphological operations are applied to remove the background noise. In this paper, we compare the previous subtraction schemes to our method applied to both the hand and body tracking in order to prove the robustness of the proposed method in sudden illumination changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of personal electronic equipment has significantly increased during recent years. Augmented Reality (AR) technology enables mobile devices to provide a very rich user experience by combining mobile computing with connectivity and location-awareness. In this paper we discuss the approach and development of an Augmented Reality-based personal assistant, combining the familiar interface of a human person with the functionality of a location-aware digital information system. The paper discusses the main components of the system, including the anthropomorphic user interface as well as the results of an initial prototype evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real life, most of the tasks we perform throughout the day are first person tasks. Shouldn't these same tasks be realized from a first person point of view in virtual reality? This paper presents a first person Projection-based Visuo-Haptic Environment, and virtual prototyping and data exploration applications taking advantage of the first person visuo-haptic features of this configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]