Search

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]

Wet paper codes were proposed as a tool for constructing steganographic schemes with an arbitrary selection channel that is not shared between the sender and the recipient. In this paper, we describe new approaches to wet paper codes that enjoy low computational complexity and improved embedding efficiency (number of message bits per embedding change). Some applications of wet paper codes to steganography and data embedding in binary images are discussed. [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]

U-Healthcare promises increases in efficiency, accuracy and availability of medical treatment; however it also introduces the potential for serious abuses including major privacy violations, staff discrimination and even life-threatening attacks. In this position paper we highlight some potential threats and open the discussion about the security requirements of this new scenario. We take a few initial steps towards a U-Healthcare security policy and propose a system architecture designed to help enforce the policy's goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed AirTransNote, a computer-mediated classroom collaboration system. The system enables real-time note-sharing. AirTransNote manages notes written by students on paper and enables the teacher to browse through the notes or show them to the students. AirTransNote can analyze students' answers, helping the teacher better understand their problems. The system is not meant to provide an alternative to the conventional way of instruction; rather, it is designed to enhance class interaction. We conducted a preliminary study using questionnaires and found that this system can be feasible to apply for classroom environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SimStudent is a machine-learning agent that learns cognitive skills by demonstration. It was originally developed as a building block of the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT), so that the authors do not have to build a cognitive model by hand, but instead simply demonstrate solutions for SimStudent to automatically generate a cognitive model. The SimStudent technology could then be used to model human students' performance as well. To evaluate the applicability of SimStudent as a tool for modeling real students, we applied SimStudent to a genuine learning log gathered from classroom experiments with the Algebra I Cognitive Tutor. Such data can be seen as the human students' "demonstrations" of how to solve problems. The results from an empirical study show that SimStudent can indeed model human students' performance. After training on 20 problems solved by a group of human students, a cognitive model generated by SimStudent explained 82% of the problem-solving steps performed correctly by another group of human students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active Learning in the classroom domain presents an interesting case for integrating physical and digital affordances. Traditional physical handouts and transparencies are giving way to new digital slides and PCs, but the fully digital systems still lag behind the physical artifacts in many aspects such as readability and tangibility. To better understand the interplay between physical and digital affordances in this domain, we developed PaperCP, a paper-based interface for a Tablet PC-based classroom interaction system (Classroom Presenter), and deployed it in an actual university course. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment studying the use of the system in a real-world scenario. The experiment confirms the feasibility of the paper interface in supporting student-instructor communication for Active Learning. We also discuss the challenges associated with creating a physical interface such as print layout, the use of pen gestures, and logistical issues. [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]

Finding the right material on the Web could be a worthwhile result. Users waste too much time to discover the useful information. Recommender system can provide some shortcuts to the user, but if the recommendation is based on people's opinion, one question remains — how relevant is a user's opinion? This paper presents a model to define the user's relevance opinion in a recommender system. This metric aims to help the target user to decide in what recommendation he should focus his attention. Beyond the model, we present a real experiment using an e-government database. Keywords: User modeling, Authority, Recommender System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the security of dirty paper trellis (DPT) watermarking schemes which use both informed coding and informed embedding. After recalling the principles of message embedding with DPT watermarking, the secret parameters of the scheme are highlighted. The security weaknesses of DPT watermarking are then presented: in the watermarked contents only attack (WOA) setup, the watermarked data-set exhibits clusters corresponding to the different patterns attached to the arcs of the trellis. The K-means clustering algorithm is used to estimate these patterns and a co-occurrence analysis is performed to retrieve the connectivity of the trellis. Experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to accurately estimate the trellis configuration, which enables to perform attacks much more efficient than simple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of an in-depth study of Bluetooth naming practices which took place in the UK in August 2006. There is a significant culture of giving Bluetooth names to mobile phones in the UK, and this paper's main contribution is to provide an account of those Bluetooth naming practices, putting them in their social, physical and intentional context. The paper also uncovers how users have appropriated the ways in which Bluetooth, with its relatively short range of about 10-100m, operates between their mobile phones as a partially embodied medium, making it a distinctive paradigm of socially and physically embedded communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, personalized information recommendation services automatically infer the user profile, a structured model of the user interests, from documents that were already deemed relevant by the user. We present an approach based on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) for the extraction of user profiles from documents. This approach relies on a knowledge-based WSD algorithm, called JIGSAW, for the semantic indexing of documents: JIGSAW exploits the WordNet lexical database to select, among all the possible meanings (senses) of a polysemous word, the correct one. Semantically indexed documents are used to train a naïve Bayes learner that infers "semantic", sense-based user profiles as binary text classifiers (user-likes and user-dislikes). Two empirical evaluations are described in the paper. In the first experimental session, JIGSAW has been evaluated according to the parameters of the Senseval-3 initiative, that provides a forum where the WSD systems are assessed against disambiguated datasets. The goal of the second empirical evaluation has been to measure the accuracy of the user profiles in selecting relevant documents to be recommended. Performance of classical keyword-based profiles has been compared to that of sense-based profiles in the task of recommending scientific papers. The results show that sense-based profiles outperform keyword-based ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative tagging has grown on the Internet as a new paradigm for web information discovering, filtering and retrieval. In the physical world, we use visual tags: labels readable by smartphones with cameras. While visual tags are usually related to a web site address, collaborative tagging, instead, provides updated, recommended information contributed and shared by users. In this paper we investigate the combination of collaborative tagging systems with visual tags. We present a prototype of a semiautomatic system generating visual tags which gather information from collaborative tagging. The user can interact with a list of relevant tags (built by clustering closely related tags) that can be further encoded in a visual tag, according to user's preferences. The user experience is enriched by retrieving multimedia content linked to the selected tags, present on the web. We finally show a case study illustrating our approach. [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 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]

Firms are increasingly embedded in networks of relationships with other organizations that are of strategic importance. An organization's participation in a network may provide access to information, resources, markets, and technologies, or it may lock it in unproductive relationships from which it may be difficult to extricate. Therefore, it is no longer adequate to analyze firms' conduct and performance by examining firms in isolation from their network partners. Strategy research has investigated inter-organizational alliances for some time. However, the primary focus of this research has been to examine the antecedents of network formation and relatively lesser attention has been paid to the implications of alliances and networks on a firm's performance. Since virtual organizations are conceptualized as strategic networks and alliances among organizations, we examined literature on virtual organizations to understand what has been done in inter-organizational context. We found 34 papers out of a total of 117 papers on virtual organization that examined virtual organizing at inter-organizational level. We classified each of the short-listed papers by virtual organizing type (network membership, network structure, tie modality, and time-frame), performance, and dilemmas of virtual organizing. Our analyses showed that inter-organization virtual organizing strategy varied with the goals of virtual organizing. Across the short-listed papers we found a pattern of organizing that depended on whether organizing was for abstract resources (knowledge, skills, competencies, etc.) or for specific goals (outsourcing key components). Virtual organizing for abstract resources tended to exhibit decentralized network structure and collaborative ties with partners, while virtual organizing for specific goals tended to exhibit centralized network structure and opportunistic ties. We found a lack of empirical literature examining the process of inter-organization virtual organizing strategy and its consequences. [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]

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]

Activity sensing in the home has a variety of important applications, including healthcare, entertainment, home automation, energy monitoring and post-occupancy research studies. Many existing systems for detecting occupant activity require large numbers of sensors, invasive vision systems, or extensive installation procedures. We present an approach that uses a single plug-in sensor to detect a variety of electrical events throughout the home. This sensor detects the electrical noise on residential power lines created by the abrupt switching of electrical devices and the noise created by certain devices while in operation. We use machine learning techniques to recognize electrically noisy events such as turning on or off a particular light switch, a television set, or an electric stove. We tested our system in one home for several weeks and in five homes for one week each to evaluate the system performance over time and in different types of houses. Results indicate that we can learn and classify various electrical events with accuracies ranging from 85-90%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demands of the global world increasingly dictate that people travel in order to conduct work. Oftentimes, this means that team members are neither strictly here nor there. Teams such as these are hybrids, where members alternate between co-located and distributed contexts. The pervasive nature of information and communication technologies, however, continues to impose an expectation of availability on the team members even as they travel. In this paper, we take a reflexive research stance to inform our understanding of the complexities of accomplishing knowledge work within a hybrid team configuration. An illustrative case highlights issues and outcomes associated with member availability that arose during the writing of a research paper. Categorical reasons for member unavailability are identified and contrasted with the expectation of availability. We suggest that the issues and conflict we experienced may be traced to the ambiguous nature of the task and the early project phase requiring problem for mulation. [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]

In spite of the importance of natural drawing with input device, the interface between the device and virtual brush's status has been dealt less in literatures. Through this paper, we present a natural interface between pen-tablet device and virtual brush. Proposed system uses pressure instead of z-coordinate of pen to allow drawing with the similar feeling to the real brush. The contribution of this paper is as follows: first, a brush model interacting with pressure is generated. Second, 3D brush model is allowed to be folded back decreasing droplet size intensively according to pen direction changes. [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]

We develop a novel user-centric modeling technology, which can dynamically describe and update a person's expertise profile. In an enterprise environment, the technology can enhance employees' collaboration and productivity by assisting in finding experts, training employees, etc. Instead of using the traditional search methods, such as the keyword match, we propose to use relational and evolutionary graph models, which we call ExpertiseNet, to describe and find experts. These ExpertiseNets are used for mining, retrieval, and visualization. We conduct experiments by building ExpertiseNets for researchers from a research paper collection. The experiments demonstrate that expertise mining and matching are more efficiently achieved based on the proposed relational and evolutionary graph models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed AirTransNote, a student notes sharing system to facilitate collaborative and interactive learning in a regular lecture at conventional classrooms. Our former student system employed ultrasonic digital pens to capture student notes on a usual paper sheet. Although the paper-based approach is intuitive for learners, the ultrasonic pen with a PDA created some difficulties when used by senior high school students. In order to eliminate those difficulties, we have introduced anoto-based pens and a data gathering system called "digital pen gateway." Owing to the improved student system, students could easily submit their answers with handling of multiple paper sheets. The teacher could refer the answers to choose students who need assistance during the lecture. Questionnaire results showed that the simpler student interface is quite acceptable, and the system can realize our augmented classroom concept in a practical way. [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]

Request Processing Systems should exhibit predictable behavior by guaranteeing Quality-of-Service parameters. One of the important requirements of predictability is that requests should have maximum acceptable response time thresholds, denoted as deadlines in this paper. In order to provide QoS, the system should try to guarantee these deadlines. This way, it is desirable to use a load-balancing algorithm that tries to both maximize the throughput and minimize the missed deadlines. Assuming that all requests durations are known a priori, this paper shows, with the help of a simulator, how the control over the big tasks plays a crucial role in the pursuit of the objective. Finally, this paper presents a derived form of the traditional Least-Work-Remaining algorithm, named Task Assignment by Isolating Big Tasks, that proved to be a better alternative in such scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UML is being increasing used for the analysis and design of Web Information Systems. At the same time, many XML-based languages are cornerstones in the development of this kind of system. As a consequence of the predominance of these languages, there are many works in the literature devoted to exploring the relationships between UML and XML. In this paper we present a survey of current approaches to the transformation of UML models into XML schemas. The study is focused on the case of transformation of UML class diagrams to XML schemas, since we have not found any proposal regarding other kinds of UML diagrams. [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]

Organisations want nowadays more controlled processes and easily usable solutions, but achieving them requires winning many challenges. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based technology has been proposed for improving mobile solution workflows and usability. NFC (Near Field Communication) technology is based on integrating RFID on mobile devices. This paper identifies how NFC based systems could be used to improve mobile solution workflows and usability. The results of this study are based on the implementation of six pilot cases in 2005-2007. This paper concludes that use of NFC provides both advantages and disadvantages and, therefore, to estimate the potential of NFC, its pros and cons have to be weighed up for each case in question. This paper also concludes that only a comprehensive solution achieves the full potential of NFC from users' point of view. Considering mobile solution usability, this paper concludes that NFC based solutions are easy to use, but the small and limited keyboard of mobile devices poses challenges to the design of these solutions. NFC use poses new organizational challenges like need for the rest of the system to catch up and feeling of distrust from the user side. [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]

Software watermarking is a technique to protect programs from piracy through embedding secret information into the programs. As software unauthorized use and modification are ubiquitous in the world, progresses in software watermarking will certainly benefit software research and industry. In this paper, we study one of core concepts in this area - informed recognition. To recognize a watermark in a software is to judge the existence of such a watermark in the corresponding software code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various organizations use the RFID technology for linking, tracking and identifying objects in their operative context. Nevertheless, the RFID components cannot yet be considered as mobile, intelligent and communicating elements of the organization's information infrastructure. They are not always used for accomplishing the linkage between the physical world and the adopted Information Technologies (IT) solutions. Therefore, they are not used for enabling organizations to automatically monitor, decide, and take actions. Heterogeneous networked devices and services installed within the organizations, often work independently instead of collaborating for offering a better quality of the daily activities to the end-user. This paper discusses the adoption of a Smart Ubiquitous Platform (SUP) for monitoring and managing the documents circulation by using the RFID technology. Advantages of the adoption of RFID are discussed too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a neural-based method to map facial expressions between human and robot. We applied the method to a sensitivity communication robot, Ifbot, which has been developed by our industry-university joint research project. The method enables the robot to imitate an arbitrary human facial expression. The paper describes the feature extraction from face image, and proposes neural network based parameter matching between human facial expression and Ifbot's facial expression mechanism. This paper also reports the evaluation of the facial expression transmission performance of Ifbot with the proposed system. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of emphasizing emotional expressions and the possibility of using Ifbot as an agent for distance communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an association method using Concept-base. Concept-base is a large-scale relational database constructed by some electronic dictionaries and some newspapers. Each concept which is defined in Concept-base has attributes which characterize the concept and weights which show each attribute's importance. Concept-base enables to calculate the depth of relationship (Degree of Association) of two any concepts using attributes and weights. This paper proposes One Word Association Method which associates one word (concept) with some relative words (concepts). Also, a threshold of Degree of Association is defined using the evaluation result of One Word Association Method. Finally, Two Words Association Method is proposed based on the threshold of Degree of Association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose gesture recognition in multiple people environment. Our system is divided into two modules: Segmentation and Recognition. In segmentation part, we extract foreground area from input image, and we decide the closest person as a recognition subject. In recognition part, firstly we extract feature point of subject's both hands using contour based method and skin based method. Extracted points are tracked using Kalman filter. We use trajectories of both hands for recognizing gesture. In this paper, we use the simple queue matching method as a recognition method. We also apply our system as an animation system. Our method can select subject effectively and recognize gesture in multiple people environment. Therefore, proposed method can be used for real world application such as home appliance and humanoid robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based Geographic Information System(WebGIS) is a key direction towards GIS development. By analysing of the deficiency in the design of conventional WebGIS, this paper proposes an architecture of the intelligent WebGIS based on Multi-Agent, which has been applied in a agricultural WebGIS. In order to solve the key problem of Agent communication, the paper also presents an Agent communication model, which decreases the working capacity to maintain the communication protocl and enhances the system's adaptability and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many business solutions provide best practice process templates, both generic as well as for specific industry sectors. However, it is often the variance from template solutions that provide organizations with intellectual capital and competitive differentiation. In this paper, we present a modeling framework that is conducive to constrained variance, by supporting user driven process adaptations. The focus of the paper is on providing a means of utilizing the adaptations effectively for process improvement through effective management of the process variants repository (PVR). In particular, we will provide deliberations towards a facility to provide query functionality for PVR that is specifically targeted for effective search and retrieval of process variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an identities(ID) based watermarking scheme for Java programs. In our scheme, the watermark is generated by participants’ identities, embedded via the watermarked opaque predicates, and verified using zero-knowledge proof. We also present a construction of a family of opaque predicates by Legendre symbol, which is resilient, cheap, and stealthy. The order of the watermark is encoded and embedded into the watermarked opaque predicates, and the watermarked opaque predicates are treated as threads of a Java program. Thus, the embedded watermark is dynamic and secure against all usual types of watermarks algorithms attacks and watermarks protocols attacks, and also secure against static and dynamic attacks. Keywords: Java programs, watermarked opaque predicates, ID, aggregate signature, watermarking scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for sensitivity communication robots which infer their dialogist's emotion. The method is based on the Bayesian approach: by using a Bayesian modeling for prosodic features. In this research, we focus the elements of emotion included in dialogist's voice. Thus, as training datasets for learning Bayesian networks, we extract prosodic feature quantities from emotionally expressive voice data. Our method learns the dependence and its strength between dialogist's utterance and his emotion, by building Bayesian networks. Bayesian information criterion, one of the information theoretical model selection method, is used in the building Bayesian networks. The paper finally proposes a reasoner to infer dialogist's emotion by using a Bayesian network for prosodic features of the dialogist's voice. The paper also reports some empirical reasoning performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a state transition model using context based approach for gesture analysis. This method defines the analysis situation as five different states; NULL, OBJECT, POSTURE, LOCAL, and GLOBAL. We first infer the situation of the system by estimating the transition of the state model, and then apply different analysis algorithms according to the system state. Gestures are analyzed with the queue-based matching method which is newly proposed in the paper instead of general gesture spotting algorithms. In the algorithm, movement of feature points; face and both hands, is compared directly, so gesture can be recognized quickly without applying any constraints for real world application. The transition of the states can be interpreted as the context of motion and that is estimated with conditional probability between the states in the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social aspects of security of information systems are often discussed in terms of "actual security" and "perceived security". This may lead to the hypothesis that e-voting is controversial because in paper voting, actual and perceived security coincide, whereas they do not in electronic systems. In this paper, we argue that the distinction between actual and perceived security is problematic from a philosophical perspective, and we develop an alternative approach, based on the notion of trust. We investigate the different meanings of this notion in computer science, and link these to the philosophical work of Luhmann, who distinguishes between familiarity, confidence and trust. This analysis yields several useful distinctions for discussing trust relations with respect to information technology. We apply our framework to electronic voting, and propose some hypotheses that can possibly explain the smooth introduction of electronic voting machines in the Netherlands in the early nineties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International workshop on Risk Mining (RM2006) was held in conjunction with the 20th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence(JSAI2005), Tokyo Japan, June 2005. The workshop aimed at sharing and comparing experiences on risk mining techniques applied to risk detection, risk clarification and risk utilization. In summary, the workshop gave a discussion forum for researchers working on both data mining and risk management where the attendees discussed various aspects on data mining based risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a security analysis for data hiding methods based on nested lattice codes, extending the analysis provided by previous works. The security is quantified in an information-theoretic sense by means of the information leakage between the watermarked signals seen by the attacker and the secret key used in the embedding process. The theoretical analysis accomplished in the first part of the paper addresses important issues such as the possibility of achieving perfect secrecy and the impact of the embedding rate and channel coding in the security level. In the second part, a practical algorithm for estimating the secret key is proposed, and the information extracted is used for implementing a reversibility attack on real images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]