32927228
Infrared Face Recognition by Using Blood Perfusion Data
This paper presents a blood perfusion model of human faces based on thermodynamics and thermal physiology. The target is to convert the facial temperature data which are liable to ambient temperature into consistent blood perfusion data in order to improve the performance of infrared (IR) face recognition. Our large number of experiments has demonstrated that the blood perfusion data are less sensitive to ambient temperature if the human bodies are in steady state, and the real data testing demonstrated that the performance by means of blood perfusion data is significantly superior to that via temperature data in terms of recognition rate.
39269573
An adaptive edge-preserving artifacts removal filter for video post-processing
We propose an adaptive edge-preserving artifacts removal filter (EPARF) for post-processing video compressed using block-based motion compensation so as to improve visual quality. The proposed filter is based on half-quadratic regularization, and it can adaptively remove both blocking and ringing artifacts while preserving object edges. The proposed algorithm has been applied to video sequences compressed by the MSRA scalable video coding (SVC) codec with block-based motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF). Experimental results demonstrate that EPARF can significantly improve both subjective and objective quality.
9260921
Complexity adaptive quantization for intra-frames in very low bit rate video coding
Conventional rate control schemes focus on the problem of finding an optimal quantization value for P- and B-frames. No rate control is available for the encoding of I-frames. This could pose big problems due to the large number of bits an I-frame could generate, and due to the fact that the number of bits varies drastically from sequence to sequence, depending on their image complexity. This problem becomes severe especially at very low bit rate. Therefore, a mechanism to allocate data bits to an I-frame according to its complexity is indispensable in order to have constant coding quality. This work presents a mechanism to establish for I-frames a generic relationship between the quantization value, data bits, and their image complexity. Experimental results show that this generic relationship provides a fairly accurate estimation of quantization value for an I-frame at given data bits and image complexity, and is very useful in controlling the data bits generated by an I-frame.
981043
Learning Event Durations from Event Descriptions
We have constructed a corpus of news articles in which events are annotated for estimated bounds on their duration. Here we describe a method for measuring inter-annotator agreement for these event duration distributions. We then show that machine learning techniques applied to this data yield coarse-grained event duration information, considerably outperforming a baseline and approaching human performance.
11110859
A locally-adaptive algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos
Block transform coding is the most popular approach for image and video compression. The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos. It exhibits unique and useful features: 1) it examines the blocks individually so that it can measure the severity of blocking artifacts locally; 2) it is a one-pass algorithm in the sense that the image needs to be accessed only once; 3) it takes into account the blocking artifacts for high bit rate images and the flatness for the very low bit rate images; 4) the blocking artifacts measure is well-defined in the range of 0-10. Experiments on various still images and videos show that this blockiness measure is very efficient in terms of computational complexity and memory usage, and can produce consistent blocking artifacts measurement.
8588212
Temporal Aggregates in OWL-Time
In this paper, we describe our approach for representing temporal aggregates in OWL-Time, and a systematic way of mapping iCalendar recurrence sets to OWL-Time temporal sequences. We present several examples of natural language expressions for temporal aggregates and how they would be represented in OWL-Time; some examples can be described in both iCalendar and OWL-Time, while others can only be represented in OWL-Time. We also illustrate how we can translate from a natural language sentence to our representation.
16926436
Optimal Interdiction of Unreactive Markovian Evaders
The interdiction problem arises in a variety of areas including military logistics, infectious disease control, and counter-terrorism. In the typical formulation of network interdiction, the task of the interdictor is to find a set of edges in a weighted network such that the removal of those edges would maximally increase the cost to an evader of traveling on a path through the network. 
 
Our work is motivated by cases in which the evader has incomplete information about the network or lacks planning time or computational power, e.g. when authorities set up roadblocks to catch bank robbers, the criminals do not know all the roadblock locations or the best path to use for their escape. 
 
We introduce a model of network interdiction in which the motion of one or more evaders is described by Markov processes and the evaders are assumed not to react to interdiction decisions. The interdiction objective is to find an edge set of size B , that maximizes the probability of capturing the evaders. 
 
We prove that similar to the standard least-cost formulation for deterministic motion this interdiction problem is also NP-hard. But unlike that problem our interdiction problem is submodular and the optimal solution can be approximated within 1 *** 1/e using a greedy algorithm. Additionally, we exploit submodularity through a priority evaluation strategy that eliminates the linear complexity scaling in the number of network edges and speeds up the solution by orders of magnitude. Taken together the results bring closer the goal of finding realistic solutions to the interdiction problem on global-scale networks.
14283892
Analyzing the Energy-Time Trade-Off in High-Performance Computing Applications
Although users of high-performance computing are most interested in raw performance both energy and power consumption has become critical concerns. One approach to lowering energy and power is to use high-performance cluster nodes that have several power-performance states so that the energy-time trade-off can be dynamically adjusted. This paper analyzes the energy-time trade-off of a wide range of applications-serial and parallel-on a power-scalable cluster. We use a cluster of frequency and voltage-scalable AMD-64 nodes, each equipped with a power meter. We study the effects of memory and communication bottlenecks via direct measurement of time and energy. We also investigate metrics that can, at runtime, predict when each type of bottleneck occurs. Our results show that, for programs that have a memory or communication bottleneck, a power-scalable cluster can save significant energy with only a small time penalty. Furthermore, we find that, for some programs, it is possible to both consume less energy and execute in less time by increasing the number of nodes while reducing the frequency-voltage setting of each node
3069611
A General Framework for Fast Co-clustering on Large Datasets Using Matrix Decomposition
Simultaneously clustering columns and rows (co- clustering) of large data matrix is an important problem with wide applications, such as document mining, microarray analysis, and recommendation systems. Several co-clustering algorithms have been shown effective in discovering hidden clustering structures in the data matrix. For a data matrix of m rows and n columns, the time complexity of these methods is usually in the order of mtimesn (if not higher). This limits their applicability to data matrices involving a large number of columns and rows. Moreover, an implicit assumption made by existing co-clustering methods is that the whole data matrix needs to be held in the main memory. In this paper, we propose a general framework, CRD, for co-clustering large datasets utilizing recently developed sampling- based matrix decomposition methods. The time complexity of our approach is linear in m and n. And it does not require the whole data matrix be in the main memory. Experimental results show that CRD achieves competitive accuracy to existing co-clustering methods but with much less computational cost.
2768791
Finding representative set from massive data
In the information age, data is pervasive. In some applications, data explosion is a significant phenomenon. The massive data volume poses challenges to both human users and computers. In this project, we propose a new model for identifying representative set from a large database. A representative set is a special subset of the original dataset, which has three main characteristics: It is significantly smaller in size compared to the original dataset. It captures the most information from the original dataset compared to other subsets of the same size. It has low redundancy among the representatives it contains. We use information-theoretic measures such as mutual information and relative entropy to measure the representativeness of the representative set. We first design a greedy algorithm and then present a heuristic algorithm that delivers much better performance. We run experiments on two real datasets and evaluate the effectiveness of our representative set in terms of coverage and accuracy. The experiments show that our representative set attains expected characteristics and captures information more efficiently.
8585778
Web-based infectious disease reporting using XML forms
OBJECTIVE
Exploring solutions for infectious disease information sharing among hospital and public health information systems is imperative to the improvement of disease surveillance and emergent response. This paper aimed at developing a method to directly transmit real-time data of notifiable infectious diseases from hospital information systems to public health information systems on the Internet by using a standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format.


METHODS
The mechanism and work flow by which notifiable infectious disease data are created, reported and used at health agencies in China was evaluated. The capacity of all participating providers to use electronic data interchange to submit transactions of data required for the notifiable infectious disease reporting was assessed. The minimum data set at national level that is required for reporting for national notifiable infectious disease surveillance was determined. The standards and techniques available worldwide for electronic health data interchange, such as XML, HL7 messaging, CDA and ATSM CCR, etc. were reviewed and compared, and an XML implementation format needed for this purpose was defined for hospitals that are able to access the Internet to provide a complete infectious disease reporting.


RESULTS
There are 18,703 county or city hospitals in China. All of them have access to basic information infrastructures including computers, e-mail and the Internet. Nearly 10,000 hospitals possess hospital information systems used for electronically recording, retrieving and manipulating patients' information. These systems collect 23 data items required in the minimum data set for national notifiable infectious disease reporting. In order to transmit these data items to the disease surveillance system and local health information systems instantly and without duplication of data input, an XML schema and a set of standard data elements were developed to define the content, structure and semantics of the data set. These standards make it possible to view and analyse the data accurately outside the hospital information systems in many different document formats. The paper also identified other issues involved in notifiable disease reporting in the future, such as the adoption of approved vocabulary standards and implementation problems such as the route, secure transfer, parsing, and objective identifying of the XML message.


CONCLUSIONS
XML is an increasingly important standard for exchange and transmission of data between disparate applications and systems. As in its early stages of developing an interoperable health information system in China, the XML document structures could be a way to exchange the notifiable case information among interest parties on the web at present.