9180515
Incremental Spectral Clustering With Application to Monitoring of Evolving Blog Communities
In recent years, spectral clustering method has gained attentions because of its superior performance compared to other traditional clustering algorithms such as K-means algorithm. The existing spectral clustering algorithms are all off-line algorithms, i.e., they can not incrementally update the clustering result given a small change of the data set. However, the capability of incrementally updating is essential to some applications such as real time monitoring of the evolving communities of websphere or blogsphere. Unlike traditional stream data, these applications require incremental algorithms to handle not only insertion/deletion of data points but also similarity changes between existing items. This paper extends the standard spectral clustering to such evolving data by introducing the incidence vector/matrix to represent two kinds of dynamics in the same framework and by incrementally updating the eigenvalue system. Our incremental algorithm, initialized by a standard spectral clustering, continuously and efficiently updates the eigenvalue system and generates instant cluster labels, as the data set is evolving. The algorithm is applied to a blog data set. Compared with recomputation of the solution by standard spectral clustering, it achieves similar accuracy but with much lower computational cost. Close inspection into the blog content shows that the incremental approach can discover not only the stable blog communities but also the evolution of the individual multi-topic blogs.
57229289
An algorithm for multiple object trajectory tracking
Most tracking algorithms are based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution of a probabilistic framework called Hidden Markov Model, where the distribution of the object state at current time instance is estimated based on current and previous observations. However this approach is prone to errors caused by temporal distractions such as occlusion, background clutter and multi-object confusion. In this paper we propose a multiple object tracking algorithm that seeks the optimal state sequence which maximizes the joint state-observation probability. We name this algorithm trajectory tracking since it estimates the state sequence or "trajectory" instead of the current state. The algorithm is capable of tracking multiple objects whose number is unknown and varies during tracking. We introduce an observation model which is composed of the original image, the foreground mask given by background subtraction and the object detection map generated by an object detector The image provides the object appearance information. The foreground mask enables the likelihood computation to consider the multi-object configuration in its entirety. The detection map consists of pixel-wise object detection scores, which drives the tracking algorithm to perform joint inference on both the number of objects and their configurations efficiently.
7153454
Temporal difference learning to detect unsafe system states
This paper proposes a general framework to detect unsafe states of a system whose basic realtime parameters are captured by multi-sensors. Our approach is to learn a danger level function which can be used to alert the users in advance of dangerous situations. The main challenge to this learning problem is the labelling issue, i.e., it is difficult to assign an objective danger level at each time step to the training data, except at the collapse points where a penalty can be assigned and at the successful ends where a certain reward can be assigned. In this paper, we treat the danger level as expected future reward (penalty is regarded as negative reward) and use temporal difference (TD) learning [2] to learn a function to approximate the expected future reward. The TD learning obtains the approximation by propagating the penalty/reward observable at collapse points or successful ends to the entire feature space following some constraints. Our approach is applied to, but not limited to, the application of monitoring of driving safety and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
15880331
Video Foreground Segmentation Based on Sequential Feature Clustering
Segmentation of videos into layers of foreground objects and background has many important applications, such as video compression, human computer interaction, and motion analysis. Most existing methods work on image pixels or color segmentations which are computation expensive. Some methods require extensive manual input, static cameras, and/or rigid scenes. In this paper we propose a fully automatic segmentation method based on sequential clustering of sparse image features. The sparseness makes the method computation efficient. We use both edge and corner features to capture the outline of the foreground objects. Sequential linear regression is applied to the movement sequences of image features in order to compute the motion parameters for foreground objects and background layers, and consider the temporal smoothness simultaneously. Foreground layer is then extracted by a pyramidal Markov random field (MRF) model taking into account the spatial smoothness constraint. Experimental results on videos taken by webcams are shown and discussed
394877
Exploration and Exploitation in Adaptive Filtering Based on Bayesian Active Learning
In the task of adaptive information filtering, a system receives a stream of documents but delivers only those that match a person's information need. As the system filters it also refines its knowledge about the user's information needs based on relevance feedback from the user. Delivering a document thus has two effects: i) it satisfies the user's information need immediately, and ii) it helps the system better satisfy the user in the future by improving its model of the user's information need. The traditional approach to adaptive information filtering fails to recognize and model this second effect. 
 
This paper proposes utility divergence as the measure of model quality. Unlike the model quality measures used in most active learning methods, utility divergence is represented on the same scale as the filtering system's target utility function. Thus it is meaningful to combine the expected immediate utility with the model quality, and to quantitatively manage the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. The proposed algorithm is implemented for setting the filtering system's dissemination threshold, a major problem for adaptive filtering systems. Experiments with TREC-9 and TREC-10 filtering data demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.
2237682
Document clustering based on non-negative matrix factorization
In this paper, we propose a novel document clustering method based on the non-negative factorization of the term-document matrix of the given document corpus. In the latent semantic space derived by the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), each axis captures the base topic of a particular document cluster, and each document is represented as an additive combination of the base topics. The cluster membership of each document can be easily determined by finding the base topic (the axis) with which the document has the largest projection value. Our experimental evaluations show that the proposed document clustering method surpasses the latent semantic indexing and the spectral clustering methods not only in the easy and reliable derivation of document clustering results, but also in document clustering accuracies.
24579136
The Periodic Solution of a Class of Two Neurons Hopfield Network with Distributed Delay
This paper considers the two neurons Hopfield network with distributed delay, which can be transformed into the three-dimensional differential system. Then we use the result of competitive system to get the periodic solution of the system. We also show that existence and uniqueness of equilibrium point, and if the equilibrium is unstable, then an orbitally asymptotically stable periodic solution exists.
13542388
Efficient Adaptive Resource Allocation for Multiuser OFDM Systems with Minimum Rate Constraints
This paper investigates the adaptive resource allocation scheme for the downlink of multiuser OFDM systems. We focus on the problem of maximizing the overall spectral efficiency while maintaining the QoS requirements of users, including bit error rate and individual minimum rate requirements. Under the assumption of equal power allocation, an efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain the suboptimal solution of the resource allocation. In this algorithm, we first introduce some positive multipliers, one for each user, according to their minimum rate constraints (MRC), and then a parallel subcarrier-and-bit allocation scheme is designed using these multipliers with low complexity. The numerical results show that our algorithm not only substantially reduces the computational complexity of the existing algorithm, but also provides a noticeable performance improvement.
2497607
Comparative Hypertext Approaches to Ergonomic Training
Training users to utilize ergonomic information effectively in workplace design requires the application and integration of multiple sources of information (e.g., interdependent criteria for furniture adjustability and keyboard/display location). To aid users in coping with such a complex task, the use of hypertext representation of complex documents is increasing. However, when searching in a complex hypertext application, users may experience navigation disorientation and cognitive overload. This study examined the relative effectiveness of a semantic relationship for a hypertext interface, and the relationship between semantic representations and complexity of search task. The goal was to design a more effective hypertext interface for complex documents in support of users' problem solving.
1723065
An approach for realizing privacy-preserving web-based services
The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of users who routinely use the web to obtain information, conduct research, or carry out financial transactions. While the ability of the web to provide customized information and financial services has boosted personal and business productivity, it has raised significant concerns regarding an individual’s privacy. The privacy concerns are exacerbated further with the advent of more complex services that involve multiple service providers, as it raises the potential of personal information being shared across these providers in ways that weren’t intended by the owner of the information. To illustrate the increased privacy concerns raised by composite web-based services, consider a web-based service that allows an individual to research and order over-the-counter medication (or health supplements) at a low cost, while ensuring that there are no adverse interactions based on the individuals current prescription. Such a service will require access to the individual’s personal medical history, and will also require interaction with other entities such as web-based medical references, discount pharmacies and creditcard companies. Users may not want their personal health histories to be shared with discount pharmacies or credit card companies. Similarly, they may not want their credit card information to be shared with providers of free on-line information. Web-based service providers have long recognized the importance of addressing user privacy concerns, and taken steps to state their policies regarding the storage and use of personal user information. Unfortunately, since these policies are stated in English, they are imprecise and ambiguous, posing problems in accountability and enforceability, as well as in checking compatibility between consumer and provider policies. Indeed, the verbose nature of these policies discourage most users from even reading them! To address the above problem, we present a new approach where the consumers as well as providers can express their privacy concerns in a formal way. Specifically, consumers express their requirements in the form of policies, while providers specify their use of consumer data using models. Our approach automates compatibility checking between policies and models. If there is an incompatibility, the consumer is informed how she can refine her policies in order to use the service. If she does not want to change her policies in any way, the approach passes on additional privacy requirements to the provider. Service access can continue in case
3137385
Automatic Recognition of Logical Relations for English, Chinese and Japanese in the GLARF Framework
We present GLARF, a framework for representing three linguistic levels and systems for generating this representation. We focus on a logical level, like LFG's F-structure, but compatible with Penn Treebanks. While less finegrained than typical semantic role labeling approaches, our logical structure has several advantages: (1) it includes all words in all sentences, regardless of part of speech or semantic domain; and (2) it is easier to produce accurately. Our systems achieve 90% for English/Japanese News and 74.5% for Chinese News -- these F-scores are nearly the same as those achieved for treebank-based parsing.