PUBLIC MARKS with search evaluation

Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.

One of the infrastructure tools that we've identified for the future internal architecture of Second Life is messaging. Message queuing systems allow systems that send messages to not have to worry about how they will be delivered, and allow consumers of messages to gather whichever ones interest them, at their own pace.

And the winner is…

As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be re-used to reduce future programming costs. Conventional languages place conceptual limits on the way problems can be modularised. Functional languages push those limits back. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute greatly to modularity. As examples, we manipulate lists and trees, program several numerical algorithms, and implement the alpha-beta heuristic (an algorithm from Artificial Intelligence used in game-playing programs). Since modularity is the key to successful programming, functional languages are vitally important to the real world.

Color-Structured Image Search

Jingdong Wang, Xian-Sheng Hua, and Yinghai Zhao

6 July 2009

In this paper, we propose a novel interactive image ranking technique, color-structured image search, by exploiting color spatial relation information, and demonstrate it in image research results refinement. This technique enables users to draw a few color strokes, called target color structure, to indicate the intent. Beyond the conventional image retrieval methods based on query by image content that simply view the target color structure as an image and compute the similarity merely according to the spatial correspondence criterion, the proposed method represents the target color structure using a set of spatially relational colors, and evaluates the similarities between target color structure and image color structure by exploiting their spatial correspondence information, and an extra novel criterion, the consistency of spatial relation of colors implied in target color structure, and even offering a scheme to handle the uncertainty of target color structure. This similarity evaluation process can be accomplished efficiently. Moreover, a convenient interactive interface is presented to allow users to specify target color structure flexibly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

It was shown that for best results all the elements have to be included in the classification process. The exact way of combining the significance indicators turned out not to be overly important: using the F1 measure, the best combination of significance indicators yielded no more than 3 % higher performance results than the baseline.

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