Yuzuru Tanaka

Clip, connect, clone: combining application elements to build custom interfaces for information access

Many applications provide a form-like interface for requesting information: the user fills in some fields, submits the form, and the application presents corresponding results. Such a procedure becomes burdensome if (1) the user must submit many different requests, for example in pursuing a trial-and-error search, (2) results from one application are to be used as inputs for another, requiring the user to transfer them by hand, or (3) the user wants to compare results, but only the results from one request can be seen at a time. We describe how users can reduce this burden by creating custom interfaces using three mechanisms: clipping of input and result elements from existing applications to form cells on a spreadsheet; connecting these cells using formulas, thus enabling result transfer between applications; and cloning cells so that multiple requests can be handled side by side. We demonstrate a prototype of these mechanisms, initially specialised for handling Web applications, and show how it lets users build new interfaces to suit their individual needs.

IntelligentBox: a constructive visual software development system for interactive 3D graphic applications

This paper proposes a constructive visual software development system for interactive 3D graphic applications. Our system called the IntelligentBox is an extension of the 2D media construction system IntelligentPad to 3D application systems. While the IntelligentPad represents any object as a pad, i.e., a reactive 2D media component with a card image, which can be manually pasted on another pad to define a compound document the IntelligentBox represents any objects as reactive 3D visual objects that can be combined with other reactive 3D visual objects. Both provide uniform frameworks for the concurrent definition of both geometrical compound structures among reactive objects and their mutually interactive functional linkages. The IntelligentBox allows us to easily combine existing primitives in order to compose various interactive 3D compound objects and their coordination mechanism. It works as a user-friendly rapid-prototyping software development system for interactive 3D graphic applications and computer animations.<<ETX>>

Slit Style HOG Feature for Document Image Word Spotting

This paper presents a word spotting method based on line-segmentation, sliding window, continuous dynamic programming, and slit style HOG feature. Our method is applicable regardless of what language is written in the manuscript because it does not require any language-dependent preprocess. The slit style HOG feature is a gradient-distribution-based feature with overlapping normalization and redundant expression, and the use of this feature improved the performance of the word spotting. We compared our method with some previously developed word spotting methods, and confirmed that our method outperforms them in both English and Japanese manuscripts.

Spherical lsh for approximate nearest neighbor search on unit hypersphere

LSH (Locality Sensitive Hashing) is one of the best known methods for solving the c-approximate nearest neighbor problem in high dimensional spaces. This paper presents a variant of the LSH algorithm, focusing on the special case of where all points in the dataset lie on the surface of the unit hypersphere in a d-dimensional Euclidean space. The LSH scheme is based on a family of hash functions that preserves locality of points. This paper points out that when all points are constrained to lie on the surface of the unit hypersphere, there exist hash functions that partition the space more efficiently than the previously proposed methods. The design of these hash functions uses randomly rotated regular polytopes and it partitions the surface of the unit hypersphere like a Voronoi diagram. Our new scheme improves the exponent ρ, the main indicator of the performance of the LSH algorithm.

A visual environment for dynamic web application composition

HTML-based interface technologies enable end-users to easily use various remote Web applications. However, it is difficult for end-users to compose new integrated tools of both existing Web applications and legacy local applications such as spreadsheets, chart tools and database. In this paper, the authors propose a new framework where end-users can wrap remote Web applications into visual components called pads, and functionally combine them together through drag & drop-paste operations. The authors use, as the basis, a meme media architecture IntelligentPad that was proposed by the second author. In the IntelligentPad architecture, each visual component called a pad has slots as data I/O ports. By pasting a pad onto another pad users can integrate their functionalities. The framework presented in this paper allows users to visually create a wrapper pad for any Web application by defining HTML nodes within the Web application to work as slots. Examples of such a node include input-forms and text strings on Web pages. Users can directly manipulate both wrapped Web applications and wrapped local legacy tools on their desktop screen to define application linkages among them. Since no programming expertise is required to wrap Web applications or to functionally combine them together, end-users can build new integrated tools of both wrapped Web applications and local legacy applications.

Meme media and a world-wide meme pool

Computers are expanding their target of augmentation from individuals to groups, and furthermore from groups to societies. While people in a group share a definite common task goal, people in a society share their knowledge resources and reuse them to produce new ones. The augmentation of societies requires a new type of media that can carry varieties of knowledge resources, replicate themselves, recombine themselves, and be naturally selected by their environment. They may be called meme media since they carry what R. Dawkins called “memed’. The accumulation of memes in a society will form a meme pool, which will work as a gene pool to bring a rapid evolution of knowledge resources shared by this society. We need a world-wide repository of memes, and a good browser to access this repository. This repository works as a marketplace where people can publish memes, browse through them, and reuse some of them. This paper reviews IntelligentPad as a meme media architecture, and proposes two new system architectures that work as marketplace systems for meme media.

Collaborative environments of IntelligentBox for distributed 3D graphics applications

An IntelligentBox is a user-friendly rapidprototyping software development system for interactive 3D graphics applications. It represents objects as reactive 3D visual objects (called boxes) that can manually be combined with other boxes. A RoomBox is a particular box provided for constructing distributed 3D graphics applications. Multiple RoomBoxes on different computers share specific user-operation events with each other and virtually provide some users with a shared 3D space. Already developed boxes work in a shared 3D space without any modifications. Therefore, it is possible to construct distributed 3D graphics applications without creating any programs.

Federation over the Web

Knowledge Look-Up and Matching.- Text Mining Using Markov Chains of Variable Length.- Faster Pattern Matching Algorithm for Arc-Annotated Sequences.- VSOP (Valued-Sum-of-Products) Calculator for Knowledge Processing Based on Zero-Suppressed BDDs.- Knowledge Search and Clustering.- A Method for Pinpoint Clustering of Web Pages with Pseudo-Clique Search.- Specific-Purpose Web Searches on the Basis of Structure and Contents.- Graph Clustering Based on Structural Similarity of Fragments.- Knowledge Mediation.- Connecting Keywords Through Pointer Paths over the Web.- Querying with Preferences in a Digital Library.- Interoperation of Web-Based Resources.- An Enhanced Spreadsheet Supporting Calculation-Structure Variants, and Its Application to Web-Based Processing.- Knowledge Federation over the Web Based on Meme Media Technologies.- Knowledge Evolution.- Towards Understanding Meme Media Knowledge Evolution.- Mechanisms of Knowledge Evolution for Web Information Extraction.

Locality Sensitive Pseudo-Code for Document Images

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for representing character string images in the scanned document. We converted conventional multi-dimensional descriptors into pseudo-codes which have a property that: if two vectors are near in the original space then encoded pseudo-codes are semi equivalent with high probability. For this conversion, we combined locality sensitive hashing (LSH) indices and at the same time we also developed a new family of LSH functions that is superior to earlier ones when all vectors are constrained to lie on the surface of the unit sphere. Word spotting based on our pseudo-code becomes faster than multi-dimensional descriptor-based method while it scarcely degrades the accuracy.

C3W: clipping, connecting and cloning for the web

Many of todays Web applications support just simple trial-and error retrievals: supply one set of parameters, obtain one set of results. For a user who wants to examine a number of alternative retrievals, this form of interaction is inconvenient and frustrating. It can be hard work to keep finding and adjusting the parameter specification widgets buried in a Web page, and to remember or record each result set. Moreover, when using diverse Web applicationsin combination - transferring result data from one into the parameters for another - the lack of an easy way to automate that transfer merely increases the frustration. Our solution is to integrate techniques for each of three key activities: clipping elements from Web pages to wrap an application; connecting wrapped applications using spreadsheet-like formulas; and cloning the interfaceelements so that several sets of parameters and results may behandled in parallel. We describe a prototype that implements this solution, showing how it enables rapid and flexible exploration ofthe resources accessible through user-chosen combinations of Web applications. Our aim in this work is to contribute to research on making optimal use of the wealth of information on the Web, by providing interaction techniques that address very practical needs.