Abstract

Automating the process of indexing journal abstracts has been a topic of research for several years. Biomedical Semantic Indexing aims to assign correct MeSH terms to the PubMed documents. In this paper we report our participation in the Task 3a of BioASQ challenge 2015. The participating teams were provided with PubMed articles and asked to return relevant MeSH terms. We tried three different approaches: Nearest Neighbours, IDF-Ratio based indexing and multi-label classification. The official challenge results demonstrate that we consistently performed better than the baseline approaches for Task 3a.

Abstract

Face frontalization is the process of synthesizing a frontal view of a face, given its non-frontal view. Frontalization is used in intelligent photo editing tools and also aids in improving the accuracy of face recognition systems. For example, in the case of photo editing, faces of persons in a group photo can be corrected to look into the camera, if they are looking elsewhere. Similarly, even though recent methods in face recognition claim accuracy which surpasses that of humans in some cases, perfor- mance of recognition systems degrade when profile view of faces are given as input. One way to address this issue is to synthesize frontal views of faces before recognition. We propose a simple and efficient method to address the face frontalization problem. Our method leverages the fact that faces in general have a definite structure and can be represented in a low dimensional subspace. We employ an exemplar based approach to find the transformation that relates the profile view to the frontal view, and use it to generate realistic frontalizations. Our method does not involve estimating 3 D model of the face, which is a common approach in previous work in this area. This leads to an efficient solution, since we avoid the complexity of adding one more dimension to the problem. Our method also retains the structural information of the individual as compared to that of a recent method [4], which assumes a generic 3 D model for synthesis. We show impressive qualitative and quantitative results in comparison to the state-of-the-art in this field.

Abstract

We propose a framework for automatically generating multiple clips suitable for video editing by simulating pan-tilt-zoom camera movements within the frame of a single static camera. Assuming important actors and objects can be localized using computer vision techniques, our method requires only minimal user input to define the subject matter of each sub-clip. The composition of each sub-clip is automatically computed in a novel L1-norm optimization framework. Our approach encodes several common cinematographic practices into a single convex cost function minimization problem, resulting in aesthetically pleasing sub-clips which can easily be edited together using off-the-shelf multi-clip video editing software. We demonstrate our approach on five video sequences of a live theatre performance by generating multiple synchronized subclips for each sequence.

Abstract

e propose set of guidelines for virtual labs to improve end user experience based on analysis of experimental results. Virtual labs were designed and developed by people with different technical backgrounds based on their familiarity with the technologies and the complexity of virtual lab. As a result each lab developer decided to use his or her own set of tools and technologies leading to performance issues during execution of the virtual labs. Performance of a web application depends upon the content of the web page. Therefore, we did analysis on web pages of virtual lab and listed guidelines to enhance user experience.

Abstract

Presence of information from multiple sources on the internet requires evaluating the credibility of the information, before its utilization. Researchers have suggested that internet users experience difficulty in accessing necessary information and do not pay enough attention to its credibility. We present here the design and implementation of an automated Web Credibility Assessment Support Tool (WebCAST) that considers multiple factors (type of website, popularity, sentiment, date of last update, reputation and review based on users' ratings reflecting personal experience) for assessing the credibility of information and returns a summary indication of the credibility of a website. We use Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) method of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to give weights to the scale values on each factor, representing the relative importance of the attributes. An empirical evaluation of the tool was conducted by computing the correlation between the tool-generated credibility scores and that of human judges. The correlation was found to be 0.89, thus verifying the validity of the tool. In the future the proposed tool can be made useful to students in their learning process of credibility assessment.

Abstract

Cross origin interactions constitute the core of today’s collaborative Word Wide Web. They are, however, also the cause of malicious behaviour like Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), clickjacking, and cross-site timing attacks, which we collectively refer as Web Infiltration attacks. These attacks are a rampant source of information stealth and privacy intrusion on the web. Existing browser security policies like Same Origin Policy, either ignore this class of attacks or, like Content Security Policy, insufficiently deal with them. In this paper, we propose a new declarative browser security policy — “Cross Origin Request Policy” (CORP) — to mitigate such attacks. CORP enables a server to have fine-grained control on the way different sites can access resources on the server. The server declares the policy using HTTP response headers. The web browser monitors cross origin HTTP requests targeting the server and blocks those which do not comply with CORP. Based on lessons drawn from examining various types of cross origin attacks, we formulate CORP and demonstrate its effectiveness and ease of deployment. We formally verify the design of CORP by modelling it in the Alloy model checker. We also implement CORP as a browser extension for the Chrome web browser and evaluate it against real-world cross origin attacks on open source web applications. Our initial investigation reveals that most of the popular websites already segregate their resources in a way which makes deployment of CORP easier.

Abstract

For many, Accessibility is about disability and aiding the disabled user. We argue for a much broader definition: One that is inclusive of not only the disabled and the technologically deprived, but also the able-bodied, who may still be facing linguistic, socio-cultural, cognitive type barriers. Further, we discuss how to overcome this new broad set of barriers (which have elsewhere been called New Accessibility). Modification of original static content to new target content – a technique of Renarration – is modeled as a webpage transformation. This is operationally realized as "Sweets". Sweets are external meta data used for transformation of the web page. They are collaboratively and socially produced either by humans or human triggered Sweet based web applications. The entire web architecture featuring Sweets, their repositories and their web applications is explained and shared as a potential mechanism for overcoming New Accessibility barriers. Two web applications, Alipi and Mural Annotation for IDH, are finally showcased to highlight that Sweets based architecture does indeed help in facing the barriers of New Accessibility.

Abstract

Refactoring tools suffer from usability in the areas of automating mundane tasks, providing user customization, and providing strategies for error recovery. The automation of refactoring tools can be a risky undertaking since user intervention is required in many scenarios to maintain the internal quality of the system. Any type of design level refactoring requires complex changes to the code, the validation of preconditions, and could potentially harm the system. Smaller refactorings that handle code-smells can be carried out automatically with considerably lower risk. This paper discusses the current state of automated refactoring tools, and the development of an automated refactoring tool to extract and propagate Java literal expressions in IntelliJ IDEA.

Abstract

Buildings in urban areas and metropolitan cities are constructed very close to each other. This is because of the requirement of functional usage and high land value. Because of the insufficient gap between the adjacent buildings or adjacent units of the same buildings, they are most vulnerable for seismic damage like pounding. The adjacent land generally belongs to different land owners, where they construct the buildings for different requirements (residential, public). This leads to different dynamic properties of the adjacent buildings. During the earthquakes these may vibrate in or out-of-phase leading to damages, varying from slight architectural damages to severe structural damages. In this paper the pounding analysis is done for different cases of different building positions like buildings of same height and same floor level to buildings in row, are analyzed using SAP (2000) software package. When the two buildings are placed at different floor levels the impact force is more than buildings with the same floor levels. Also when buildings are in a row exterior building suffers more pounding damage than the interior building.

Abstract

According to current seismic zone map around 60% of India’s land area is prone to moderate to severe earthquakes. And earthquake losses, in terms of life and property in last 2 decades have been high, with housing contributing to over 95% of life loss; this failure attributed to improper design and construction practices of housing.Thus, all the three factors influencing earthquake risk of houses in India are above danger levels in many districts of India – hazard, exposure and vulnerability. This paper classifies housing risk in the entire country into four groups; about 47% of population is living in the highest risk. Gigantic effort is required to mitigate the risk. The paper also suggests some steps to move forward to reduce earthquake risk to housing in India.