Search services are the main interface through which people discover information on the Internet. A fundamental challenge in testing search services is the lack of oracles. The sheer volume of data on the Internet prohibits testers from verifying the results. Furthermore, it is difficult to objectively assess the ranking quality because different assessors can have very different opinions on th...

Search engines use several criteria to rank webpages and choose which pages to display when answering a request. Those criteria can be separated into two notion, relevance and popularity. This notion of popularity is calculated by the search engine and is related to links made to the webpage. Malicious webmasters want to artificially increase their popularity, the techniques they use are often ...

This paper describes the production of an educational mul-timedia CD-ROM about French rural houses and farms, and how to renovate them without losing their traditional features. The educational message is illustrated with many photographs of non-renovated or renovated houses, and made explicit through comments and descriptions associated with the photos. The paper focuses on the XML metadata de...

Protein glycation is a ubiquitous non-enzymatic post-translational modification, formed by reaction of protein amino and guanidino groups with carbonyl compounds, presumably reducing sugars and α-dicarbonyls. Resulting advanced glycation end products (AGEs) represent a highly heterogeneous group of compounds, deleterious in mammals due to their pro-inflammatory effect, and impact in pathogenesi...

The World Wide Web (WWW) incorporates a huge potential for collaborative working. This paper focuses on Web page annotations that can enhance group–working on the Web drastically. A model of Web page annotations is introduced that defines relations between the users, the Web pages and their annotations. It is taken together with technological restrictions of existing approaches to form a taxono...

Despite years of work on programming languages, programming is still slow and error-prone. In this paper we describe Macho, a system which combines a natural language parser, a database of code, and an automated debugger to write simple programs from natural language and examples of their correct execution. Adding examples to natural language makes it easier for Macho to actually generate a cor...

In this paper we describe the semantic partitioner algorithm, that uses the structural and presentation regularities of the Web pages to automatically transform them into hierarchical content structures. These content structures enable us to automatically annotate labels in the Web pages with their semantic roles, thus yielding meta-data and instance information for the Web pages. Experimental ...

An important characteristic of a Web page|the number of objects embedded in it|is di cult to obtain using publicly available sources of Web characterization data, such as proxy and server traces. It is important, however, to have an estimate for the number of embedded objects found in Web pages for modeling of realistic Web sites and workloads. We analyzed two data sets collected using active m...

The revised edition of Jerome Frank's (1975) seminal text Persuasion and Healing: A Complete Study of Psychotherapy that I own is badly worn. It is yellowed, the pages are dog-eared, and the binding has long been broken, so much so that I keep the book in a plastic bag so that I will not lose any of the pages. I have purchased updated editions over the years; indeed I own a copy of the updated ...