Search

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]

This paper presents paper retrieval using the specific paper features chain and laid lines. Paper features are detected in digitized paper images and they are represented such that they could be used for retrieval. Optimal retrieval performance is achieved by means of a trainable similarity measure for a given set of paper features. By means of these methods a retrieval system is developed that art experts could use real-time in order to speed up their paper research. [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]

Researchers from the same lab often spend a considerable amount of time searching for published articles relevant to their current project. Despite having similar interests, they conduct independent, time consuming searches. While they may share the results afterwards, they are unable to leverage previous search results during the search process. We propose a research paper recommender system that avoids such time consuming searches by augmenting existing search engines with recommendations based on previous searches performed by others in the lab. Most existing recommender systems were developed for commercial domains with millions of users. The research paper domain has relatively few users compared to the large number of online research papers. The two major challenges with this type of data are the large number of dimensions and the sparseness of the data. The novel contribution of the paper is a scalable subspace clustering algorithm (SCuBASCuBA: Subspace Clustering Based Analysis.) that tackles these problems. Both synthetic and benchmark datasets are used to evaluate the clustering algorithm and to demonstrate that it performs better than the traditional collaborative filtering approaches when recommending research papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple business factors have emerged to accelerate the necessity of event-driven functionality and make it part of the main-stream computing, instead of a niche technology. Consequently, there is now focus on using high-level software constructs to build these applications. This paper presents a vision for such high-level features and architecture. This paper explains why "event-driven applications" becomes an emerging area, explains the basic terminology of EDA, explains the relationship to business rules, and sets some directions for the future of this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker's electronic information space is frequently overlooked because it is not proactively provided during actual processes or tasks he is involved in. This paper presents a novel prototype for an intelligent office appliance, which results from an integration of three state-of-the-art office applications/appliances: a workflow system, a document classification system, and a multi-functional peripheral. The resulting system allows for leveraging an office worker's papers to her personal knowledge space in order to realize a pro-active and context-sensitive information support within knowledge-intensive tasks and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To facilitate the transition from paper-based patient record (PPR) to computer-based patient record (CPR), engineers should try to improve the usability of CPR system. From the point of view of a physician, we reviewed PPRs written by 8 Japanese physicians. We revealed the characteristics of PPR to find out about the barrier to transition from PPR to CPR. Our findings may be helpful to the engineers who are aiming to develop a CPR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe the design of a hybrid search that combines simple metadata search with a traditional keyword search over unstructured context data. This paradigm provides the inquirer additional options to narrow the search with some semantic aspects through the XML metadata query. We demonstrate a paper search for a case study of the hybrid search, and describe a data integration hub to integrate those data dispersed on the Net. [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]

Paper keeps as a key information medium and this has motivated the development of new technologies for digitally augmented paper (DAP) that enable printed content to be linked with multimedia information. Among those technologies, one simplest approach is to print some visible patterns on paper (e.g., barcodes in the margin) as cross-media links. Due to the latest progress in printing industry, some more sophisticated methods have been developed, that is, some kinds of patterns printed on the background of a page in a high resolution are almost invisible and then we are affected little when reading. For all these pattern-embedding based approaches to integrate printed and multimedia information, we aim to present a unified publishing framework independent of particular patterns and readers(e.g., cameras to capture patterns) used to realize DAP. The presented framework manages semantic information about printed documents, multimedia resources, and patterns as links between them and users are provided with a platform for publishing DAP documents. [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]

This paper presents the advantage that knowledge-intensive activities, such as Scientific Conference Management, can take by the exploitation of expert components in the key tasks. Typically, in this domain the task of scheduling the activities and resources or the assignment of reviewers to papers is performed manually leading therefore to time-consuming procedures with high degree of inconsistency due to many parameters and constraints to be considered. The proposed systems, evaluated on real conference datasets, show good results compared to manual scheduling and assignment, in terms of both accuracy and reduction of runtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we proudly introduce eight awarded papers, selected from the papers presented in the 20th annual conference of Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2006). The conference was held at Tower Hall Funabori located in the east part of Tokyo from June 7 until June 9, 2006. 276 papers were presented in about 60 sessions and over 500 people participated in the conference. Sessions vary from the fundamental issues to the state-of-the-art applications. Session for regular papers are as follows; Logic and learning, Reinforcement learning and agent learning, Agent theory, Auction/Game/Economics, Agent learning, Agent planning, Agent simulation and interaction, Genetic algorithm, Image processing, Information extraction and classification, Clustering/self-organization, Classifi- cation learning, Text mining, Graph mining, Mining algorithm, Web mining, Pre- and post-processing for data mining, Practices of data mining, Cognitive modeling, Language processing and dialogue, Robot/sensor network, Web information system, Semantic Web, Knowledge modeling and knowledge sharing, Support of knowledge management, knowledge modeling/ontology,Web service, Human interface and communication support, Education support, Learning support environment, and Musical and auditory information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children's health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases. Keywords: Vertical Knowledge Integration, Approximate Queries, Ontology Views, Semantic Bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bearing in mind the changeable and complicated needs of business environment, in this paper we examine the necessity of evolution in the traditional decision support techniques. Our aim is to intensify the need for integrated performance measurement and management, as a way to ameliorate the existing tools for decision making, which are currently based on historical data. Because of the nature of challenges and trends in the retail industry, it is considered to be an appropriate application scenario. In addition to that, a framework is proposed and a case study is described as a proof of our claim. Keywords: Performance management, business intelligence, retailing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will propose our ideas for a semantically ready competency model. The model will allow semantic enrichment on different levels, creating truly meaningful competencies. The aim of this model is to provide a flexible approach for (re)use, matching, interpretation, exchange and storage for competencies. Our competency model is based on the DOGMA ontology framework and the proposed IEEE standards RCD and SCRM. We will focus on the model itself and how semantics can be applied to it as these elements form the basis for any kind of processing on them. Keywords: competence, competency, RCD, semantics, DOGMA, e-HRM, HRM, occupation, ontology, Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic computing is an upcoming research area with strong relationships to the ideas and concepts of agent-based systems. In this paper, we therefore will have a closer look at agent systems, organic computing systems (as well as autonomic computing systems) and state commonalities and divergences between them. We then propose a common view on these technologies and show, how they can benefit from each other with regard to software engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss importance and usefulness of interpersonal network in a community support system. We built a scheduling support system for an academic conference. Our system supports information exchange among participants and information discovery with generating participants' interpersonal network. This system was used in an academic conference called JSAI2003 involving 276 active users. The analysis of the networks reveals that interpersonal networks can promote information exchange among people by indicating existence of people to the others, and that it can also support information discovery by recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a new binning technic for informed data hiding problem. In information theoretical point of view, the blind watermarking problem can be seen as transmitting a secret message M through a noisy channel on top of an interfered host signal S that is available only at the encoder. We propose an embedding scheme based on Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) codes, in order to quantize the host signal in an intelligent manner so that the decoder can extract the hidden message with a high probability. A mixture of erasure and symmetric error channel is realized for the analysis of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we introduce five awarded papers, selected from the 19th annual conference of JSAI (Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence) 2005. These five papers are truly excellent, for they were selected out of over 290 papers, the rate of which was less than 2%, voted by the total number of approximately seventy reviewers. As has been often mentioned, the research of artificial intelligence branches to many fields; among them, we could observe such tendency that empirical methods were rather prevalent compared with theoretical issues. However, we contend that the following five papers were both sound in theory and practical in feasibility. We show the synopses of the five papers, adding short comments for the award for each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On behalf of the program committee (PC) of JSAI 2003, I would like to thank all the chair persons, discussants, and attentive audience who contributed to select these awarded papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore trends in computer crime and cybercrime research from 1974 to 2006. All publications for this analysis were drawn from the ISI Web of Science, the Science Citation Index (SCI), and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The ISI Web of Science is considered a powerful and relatively accurate tool in bibliometric studies. About 292 papers related to computer crime and cybercrime were published during this period. The greatest number of these papers was written in English, and the annual output increased significantly after 2003. In the period under study, most papers originated in the USA. Approximately 57% of the publications were articles, and 72% of these articles had single authors. More bibliometric analyses are described in this study, which shows a high scientific production of articles on computer crime and cybercrime publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's mobile data applications aspire to deliver services to a user anywhere - anytime while fulfilling his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the success of the service delivery heavily relies on the QoS offered by the underlying networks. As the services operate in a heterogeneous networking environment, we argue that the generic information about the networks' offered-QoS may enable an anyhow mobile service delivery based on an intelligent (proactive) selection of ‘any' network available in the user's context (location and time). Towards this direction, we develop a QoS-predictions service provider, which includes functionality for the acquisition of generic offered-QoS information and which, via a multidimensional processing and history-based reasoning, will provide predictions of the expected offered-QoS in a reliable and timely manner. We acquire the generic QoS-information from distributed mobile services' components quantitatively (actively and passively) measuring the applicationlevel QoS, while the reasoning is based on statistical data mining and pattern recognition techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research community plays a very important role in helping researchers undertake new research topics. The authors propose a community mining system that helps to find communities of researchers by using bibliography data. The basic concept of this system is to provide interactive visualization of communities both local and global communities. We implemented this concept using actual bibliography data and present a case study using the proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing and understanding mathematics from print form is an important task in translating written mathematical knowledge into electronic form. While the problem of syntactically recognising mathematical formulas from scanned images has received attention, very little work has been done on semantic validation and correction of recognised formulas. We present a first step towards such an integrated system by combining the Infty system with a semantic analyser for matrix expressions. We applied the combined system in experiments on the semantic analysis of matrix images scanned from textbooks. While the first results are encouraging, they also demonstrate many ambiguities one has to deal with when analysing matrix expressions in different contexts. We give a detailed overview of the problems we encountered that motivate further research into semantic validation of mathematical formula recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today the proliferation of the availability of the information of scientific events on the Web has created the necessity to offer a quickly access to up-to-date information about the quality of these events. This requirement demands for (semi) automatic tools to speedily provide this information. The human-performed activity of the information quality evaluation is extremely time consuming and easily leads to failures. The application OntoQualis here described was motivated to support the quality evaluation of Scientific Conferences, in the Computer Science area, based on the graduated programs evaluation protocol of the Brazilian agency CAPES. The evaluation mechanism is specified in the QUALIS document specifically designed to assess journals and conferences ranking. This paper presents a brief vision of the ongoing process of domain analysis and ontology prototyping aiming to classify Scientific Conferences: the OntoQualis project. Some results of OntoQualis preliminary evaluation have shown a satisfactory classification level in comparison with CAPES-QUALIS ranking. [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]

A programming model for the automatic construction of USN applications based on Nano-Qplus is proposed in this paper. Nano-Qplus is a sensor network platform developed by ETRI. Programs of nodes such as sensors, routers, sinks and actuators in a sensor network are automatically generated through the technique of this paper. Developers can implement USN applications from models of sensor networks. The configuration information of each node is automatically generated from a model. Then, the execution code is automatically generated using the configuration information. Through the technique of this paper, developers can easily implement USN applications even if they do not know the details of low-level information. The development effort of USN applications also will be decreased because execution codes are automatically generated. Furthermore, developers can consistently construct USN applications from USN models using the proposed tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern information systems interact with a wide variety of users ranging from people with specific roles in business processes to end-users who access information in various ways and in different environments. Therefore, an application has to adhere to a well defined security policy on one hand and be highly adaptable to context on the other. We have extended the OM data model, with its rich support for role modelling, with concepts for modelling interactions between users and applications. In this paper, we show how the resulting interaction model can be used for role-based access control, as well as for modelling interactions in context-aware applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Neurovision System can be defined as an artificial tool that sees our physical world. The purpose of this paper is to show a novel tool to design a 3D artificial vision system based on Resilient Neural Networks. Camera Calibration (CC) is a fundamental issue for Computational-Vision. Classical CC methods comprise of taking images of objects with known geometry, extracting the features of the objects from the images, and minimizing their 3D backprojection errors. In this paper, a novel implicit-CC model based on Resilient Neural Networks, CR, has been introduced. The CR is particularly useful for 3D reconstruction of the applications that do not require explicitly computation of physical camera parameters in addition to the expert knowledge. The CR supports intelligent-photogrammetry, photogrammetron. In order to evaluate the success of the proposed implicit-CC model, the 3D reconstruction performance of the CR has been compared with two different well-known implementations of the Direct Linear Transformation (DLT). The proposed method is also robust sufficiently for dealing with different cameras because it is capable of fusion of the image coordinates sourced from different cameras once the neural network has been trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a kind of remote rendering method based on awareness model. This method takes the additional cost caused by the movement of the viewpoint into cost calculation and designs a cost prediction algorithm based on the vision field divided by awareness model. The simulation results show that the improved method can not only improve the quality of the remote rendering, but also make full use of the bandwidth of the network, as well as make the remote rendering more fluent when the viewpoint moves fast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to discover services in business-driven Web service composition conveniently, accurately, and efficiently, this paper proposes a business process-oriented service discovery approach. In order to link business property with services, this paper proposes a business related description model of operations. Based on the business related relation model proposed in this paper, a relation-driven discovering algorithm for business process-oriented service discovery is presented. Compared with other discovering approach, the proposed discovering approach considers the business relation between operations and can solve the problem of discovering services with meaningful business relation. The experimentation shows the better performance of this algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we suggest a postal RFID application model that can be used for real time trace and tracking system implementation of parcel processing and pallet management. This paper also shows the tag recognition performance of parcels by speed and mounting tag material such as thin cans, water bottles, and paper using an implemented postal RFID system to find the best solution for RFID adaptation in postal logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an analytical approach which is provided to calculate the downlink and uplink capacities of the time division duplex (TDD) system utilizing the underused frequency division duplex (FDD) uplink which shares the same frequency band. Then the ratio of downlink and uplink slots in one frame is adjusted, so as to prevent the radio resource waste due to asymmetric traffic characteristic in mobile multimedia services. The computer simulation shows that the resource waste problem can be considerably solved through the asymmetric slot allocation. Thus, this paper can be useful as a guideline in the course of planning a two-layer hierarchical cell structure (HCS) employing the TDD system as a microcell and FDD system as a macrocell as well as a mean to increase the performance of such a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the invited session of "Intelligent Agents and their Applications" being presented at the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems. This session concentrates on discussing Intelligent Agents and uses some applications to demonstrate the theories reported. An update on last years session [1] is included to report on several key advances in technology that further enable the ongoing development of multi-agent systems. A brief summary of the impediments presented to researchers is also provided to highlight why innovation must be used to sustain the evolution of Artificial Intelligence. This year a variety of challenges and concepts are presented, together with a collection of thoughts about the direction and vision of Intelligent Agents ands their Applciations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object-level vertical search engine has been the research focus recently where the resource collecting problem is still an open area. It is difficult to adapt the traditional link-based web crawler for this task because of the sparse linkage and data-centered webpage of the relevant resources. In this paper, we propose a meta-search based method enhanced with auxiliary crawling to address the problem caused by sparse linkage of the relevant resources. And to retrieve the data-centered webpages efficiently, domain schema is defined to describe the target resource, and representative data instances are selected for meta-search query composing. Moreover, evaluation criteria for the domain resource survey are also proposed as the guideline for query composing and auxiliary crawling, which enable the resource discovery to be automatically performed by computers. Experiment results on real-world data show that our method is effective and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a survey of the current state of ARTIC - the modern Czech concatenative corpus-based text-to-speech system. All stages of the system design are described in the paper, including the acoustic unit inventory building process, text processing and speech production issues. Two versions of the system are presented: the single unit instance system with the moderate output speech quality, suitable for low-resource devices, and the multiple unit instance system with a dynamic unit instance selection scheme, yielding the output speech of a high quality. Both versions make use of the automatically designed acoustic unit inventories. In order to assure the desired prosodic characteristics of the output speech, system-version-specific prosody generation issues are discussed here too. Although the system was primarily designed for synthesis of Czech speech, ARTIC can now speak three languages: Czech (both female and male voices are available), Slovak and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance on a statistical language processing task relies upon accurate information being found in a corpus. However, it is known (and this paper will confirm) that many perfectly valid word sequences do not appear in training corpora. The percentage of n-grams in a test document which are seen in a training corpus is defined as n-gram coverage, and work in the speech processing community [7] has shown that there is a correlation between n-gram coverage and word error rate (WER) on a speech recognition task. Other work (e.g. [1]) has shown that increasing training data consistently improves performance of a language processing task. This paper extends that work by examining n-gram coverage for far larger corpora, considering a range of document types which vary in their similarity to the training corpora, and experimenting with a broader range of pruning techniques. The paper shows that large portions of language will not be represented within even very large corpora. It confirms that more data is always better, but how much better is dependent upon a range of factors: the source of that additional data, the source of the test documents, and how the language model is pruned to account for sampling errors and make computation reasonable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender algorithms have been quite successfully employed in a variety of scenarios from filtering applications to recommendations of movies and books at Amazon.com. However, all these algorithms focus on single item recommendations and do not consider any more complex recommendation structures. This paper explores how semantically rich complex recommendation structures, represented as RDF graphs, can be exchanged and shared in a distributed social network. After presenting a motivating scenario we define several annotation ontologies we use in order to describe context information on the user's desktop and show how our ranking algorithm can exploit this information. We discuss how social distributed networks and interest groups are specified using extended FOAF vocabulary, and how members of these interest groups share semantically rich recommendations in such a network. These recommendations transport shared context as well as ranking information, described in annotation ontologies. We propose an algorithm to compute these rankings which exploits available context information and show how rankings are influenced by the context received from other users as well as by the reputation of the members of the social network with whom the context is exchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on the development of the formal framework to design strategies for multi-issue non-symmetric meaning negotiations among software agents in a distributed information retrieval system. The advancements of the framework are the following. A resulting strategy compares the contexts of two background domain theories not concept by concept, but the whole context to the other context by accounting the relationships among concepts, the properties, the constraints over properties, and the available instances. It contains the mechanisms for measuring contextual similarity through assessing propositional substitutions and to provide argumentation through generating extra contexts. It uses presuppositions for choosing the best similarity hypotheses and to make the mutual concession to the common sense monotonic. It provides the means to evaluate the possible eagerness to concede through semantic commitments and related notions of knowledgeability and degree of reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Software Engineering track received 63 papers from which 7 papers were selected after an intensive reviewing and selection process. Many good papers could not be selected due to lack of space in the program. The selected papers cover a diverse range of topics within software engineering: from software reliability prediction to middle-ware for component management to runtime validation and code generation. The paper by Roychoudhury, Negi and Mitra analyzes programs loops for estimating program execution time. They use constraint propagation techniques to detect infeasible paths followed by timing analysis that employ memoization techniques. The paper by Sengupta and Cleaveland presents the operational semantics of timed message sequence charts to help detect errors and inconsistencies in specifications. Tripathi and Mall present a method for making predictions about reliability of software during the software development process itself when the failure data from the field cannot be available. The paper by Wang presents a logic programming framework for integrating architecture description languages (ADLs) which allows tools developed for one ADL to be used even though the architectural specification is written in another ADL. In a similar vain, the paper by Stevenson, Fu and Dong presents a framework for automated and validated realization of software architecture designs. The paper by Bhattarcharjee and Shyamsundar presents a method for validated code generation for activity diagrams which are useful in model driven design of software. Finally, the paper by Mousavi et al presents techniques that exploit symmetry for tackling the state-space explosion problem that arises in model checking. [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]

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 characterizes the family of truthful double-sided auctions. Despite the importance of double-sided auctions to market design, to date no characterization of truthful double-sided auctions was made. This paper characterizes truthful mechanisms for double-sided auctions by generalizing Roberts' classic result [18], to show that truthful double-sided auctions must "almost" be affine maximizers. Our main result of characterizing double-sided auctions required the creation of a new set of tools, reductions that preserve economic properties. This paper utilizes two such reductions; a truth-preserving reduction and a non-affine preserving reduction. The truth-preserving reduction is used to reduce the double-sided auction to a special case of a combinatorial auction to make use of the impossibility result proved in [11]. Intuitively, our proof shows that truthful double-sided auctions are as hard to design as truthful combinatorial auctions. Two important concepts are developed in addition to the main result. First, the form of reduction used in this paper is of independent interest as it provides a means for comparing mechanism design problems by design difficulty. Second, we define the notion of extension of payments; which given a set of payments for some players finds payments for the remaining players. The extension payments maintain the truthful and affine maximization properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we give the definition of randomized symmetric incentive compatible auctions. Then we define three monotone properties of such auctions and study the implication relationships among them. This paper extends our previous work [4] which was focused on deterministic symmetric incentive compatible auctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an online sponsored search auction that motivates advertisers to report their true budget, arrival time, departure time, and value per click. The auction is based on a modified Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) mechanism that allows for advertisers who arrive and depart in an online fashion, have a value per click, and are budget constrained. In tackling the problem of truthful budget, arrival and departure times, it turns out that it is not possible to achieve truthfulness in the classical sense (which we show in a companion paper). As such, we define a new concept called δ-gain. δ-gain bounds the utility a player can gain by lying as opposed to his utility when telling the truth. Building on the δ-gain concept we define another new concept called relative ε-gain, which bounds the relative ratio of the gain a player can achieve by lying with respect to his true utility. We argue that for many practical applications if the δ-gain and or the relative ε-gain are small, then players will not invest time and effort in making strategic choices but will truthtell as a default strategy. These concepts capture the essence of dominant strategy mechanisms as they lead the advertiser to choose truthtelling over other strategies. In order to achieve δ-gain truthful mechanism this paper also presents a new payment scheme, Time series Truthful Payment Scheme (TTPS), for an online budget-constrained auction mechanism. The payment scheme is a generalization of the VCG principles for an online scheduling environment with budgeted players. Using the concepts of δ-gain truthful we present the only known budget-constrained sponsored search auction with truthful guarantees on budget, arrivals, departures, and valuations. Previous works that deal with advertiser budgets only deal with the non-strategic case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]