This thesis proposes an improved interactive brain tumor segmentation method based on graph cuts, which is an efficient global optimization framework for image segmentation, and star shape, which is a general segmentation shape prior with minimal user assistance. Our improvements lie in volume ballooning, compactness measure and inclusion constraints. Volume ballooning is incorporated to help t...

A central task when integrating data from different sources is to detect identical items. For example, price comparison websites have to identify offers for identical products. This task is known, among others, as record linkage, object identification, or duplicate detection. In this work, we examine problem settings where some relations between items are given in advance – for example by EAN a...

Knockout tournaments provide a common and important framework for structuring sporting competitions, worth billions of dollars every year in the global economy. Knockout tournaments also model a specific type of election scheme: namely, sequential pairwise elimination elections. The designer of a tournament typically controls both the shape of the tournament (usually a binary tree) and the seed...

let $g$ be a non-abelian group of order $p^n$‎, ‎where $nleq 5$ in which $g$ is not extra special of order $p^5$‎. ‎in this paper we determine the maximal size of subsets $x$ of $g$‎ ‎with the property that $xyneq yx$ for any $x,y$ in $x$ with‎ ‎$xneq y$‎.

This paper presents Illinois-Coref, a system for coreference resolution that participated in the CoNLL-2011 shared task. We investigate two inference methods, Best-Link and All-Link, along with their corresponding, pairwise and structured, learning protocols. Within these, we provide a flexible architecture for incorporating linguistically-motivated constraints, several of which we developed an...

Semi-supervised clustering aims to improve clustering performance by considering user supervision in the form of pairwise constraints. In this paper, we study the active learning problem of selecting pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints for semisupervised clustering. We consider active learning in an iterative manner where in each iteration queries are selected based on the current cl...

Traditional supervised band selection (BS) methods mainly consider reducing the spectral redundancy to improve hyperspectral imagery (HSI) classification with class labels and pairwise constraints. A key observation is that pixels spatially close to each other in HSI have probably the same signature, while pixels further away from each other in the space have a high probability of belonging to ...

Recently we have developed a normal-modes-based algorithm that predicts the direction of protein conformational changes given the initial state crystal structure together with a small number of pairwise distance constraints for the end state. Here we significantly extend this method to accurately model both the direction and amplitude of protein conformational changes. The new protocol implemen...

Virtualization has been proposed as a vehicle for overcoming the growing problem of internet ossification [1]. This paper studies the problem of mapping diverse virtual networks onto a common physical substrate. In particular, we develop a method for mapping a virtual network onto a substrate network in a cost-efficient way, while allocating sufficient capacity to virtual network links to ensur...