Everyone in the academic community is today confronted with an unprecedented problem. One click of the mouse can provide a student with enough source material to construct a doctoral thesis. Thus, the problem is no longer to locate the relevant material; today the difficulty is in separating the wheat from the chaff, or a more apt analogy, finding the few gold nuggets in the mountains of dross....

In point-and-click interfaces the location of targets is sometimes known to the user before visually identifying it, and sometimes not. This experiment investigates how pointing is affected by whether the target location is precued so that users know it in advance or non-precued so that users learn it only at the onset of pointing trials. We investigate this for young, adult, and elderly partic...

Existing methods for white balancing photographs tend to rely on skilled interaction from the user, which is prohibitive for most amateur photographers. We propose a minimal interaction system for white balancing photographs that contain humans. Many of the pictures taken by amateur photographers fall into this category. Our system matches a user-selected patch of skin in a photograph to an ent...

In view of parallel-processing nature and circuit-implementation convenience, recurrent neural networks are often employed to solve optimization problems. Recently, a primal-dual neural network based on linear variational inequalities (LVI) was developed by Zhang et al. for the online solution of linear-programming (LP) and quadratic-programming (QP) problems simultaneously subject to equality,...

Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) tools are pieces of software responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, their cleansing, customization and insertion into a data warehouse. Literature and personal experience have guided us to conclude that the problems concerning the ETL tools are primarily problems of complexity, usability and price. To deal with these problems we prov...

In sponsored search auctions advertisers typically pay a fixed amount per click that their advertisements receive. In particular, the advertiser and the publisher enter into a contract (e.g., the publisher displays the ad; the advertiser pays the publisher 10 cents per click), and each party’s subjective value for such a contract depends on their estimated click-through rates (CTR) for the ad. ...

We present the design and evaluation of Passport, a system that allows source addresses to be validated within the network. Passport uses efficient, symmetric-key cryptography to place tokens on packets that allow each autonomous system (AS) along the network path to independently verify that a source address is valid. It leverages the routing system to efficiently distribute the symmetric keys...

We present a set of interactive, free-form editing operators for direct manipulation of level-set models. The mathematics, algorithms and techniques needed to implement numerous level-set modeling capabilities have been developed. The operators have been combined with an OpenGL interface and the VISPACK level-set library to create a preliminary interactive level-set modeling system. VISPACK’s n...

First we prove the important result stated last lecture about sponsored search auctions. Recall the setup: there are k slots with click-through-rates (CTRs) α1 ≥ α2 ≥ · · · ≥ αk, and each bidder i = 1, 2, . . . , n has a private valuation per-click vi. (Bids and prices are also per-click.) Our first attempt to generalize the Vickrey auction to sponsored search results in the “Generalized Second...