Large bilingual parallel texts (also known as bitexts) are usually stored in a compressed form, and previous work has shown that they can be more efficiently compressed if the fact that the two texts are mutual translations is exploited. For example, a bitext can be seen as a sequence of biwords ---pairs of parallel words with a high probability of co-occurrence--- that can be used as an intermediate representation in the compression process. However, the simple biword approach described in the literature can only exploit one-to-one word alignments and cannot tackle the reordering of words. We therefore introduce a generalization of biwords which can describe multi-word expressions and reorderings. We also describe some methods for the binary compression of generalized biword sequences, and compare their performance when different schemes are applied to the extraction of the biword sequence. In addition, we show that this generalization of biwords allows for the implementation of an efficient algorithm to look on the compressed bitext for words or text segments in one of the texts and retrieve their counterpart translations in the other text ---an application usually referred to as translation spotting--- with only some minor modifications in the compression algorithm.

Approximating non-linear kernels using feature maps has gained a lot of interest in recent years due to applications in reducing training and testing times of SVM classifiers and other kernel based learning algorithms. We extend this line of work and present low distortion embeddings for dot product kernels into linear Euclidean spaces. We base our results on a classical result in harmonic analysis characterizing all dot product kernels and use it to define randomized feature maps into explicit low dimensional Euclidean spaces in which the native dot product provides an approximation to the dot product kernel with high confidence.

This paper introduces SIFU, a system that recruits in real time native speakers as online volunteer tutors to help answer questions from Chinese language learners in reading news articles. SIFU integrates the strengths of two effective online language learning methods: reading online news and communicating with online native speakers. SIFU recruits volunteers from an online social network rather than recruits workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk.Initial experiments showed that the proposed approach is able to effectively recruit online volunteer tutors, adequately answer the learners' questions, and efficiently obtain an answer for the learner. Our field deployment illustrates that SIFU is very useful in assisting Chinese learners in reading Chinese news articles and online volunteer tutors are willing to help Chinese learners when they are on social network service.

Service composition, which achieves the goal of value-added services, has been considered as the core technique of Service-oriented Computing (SOC). To cope with the challenge of ever-increasing number of web services, graph-based web service network has emerged as a potential solution to the state of art SOC. In such a way, composite services are constructed by applying searching algorithms to the built graph, and proved to achieve outstanding performance in complexity. However, web service network suffers two crucial disadvantages: poor connectivity and negative links, and both of them have crucial negative impact on service composition. To cope with the problems, we propose two methods in this paper. Firstly, leveraging social network analysis, we focus on enriching web service network by adding valuable services, which will play positive roles in solving poor connective problem. Secondly, we show a serious status that numerous negative links contained in the underlying networks, and then we propose to identify and remove the negative links based on users’ historical composite services.

This paper focuses on care plans (i.e., rough schedules) in care houses and evaluates them from the viewpoint of a deep and stable sleep which contributes to provide comfortable and healthy life for aged persons. For this purpose, this paper investigates the care plans which are basically based on the current care plans but change a small part of a schedule as an aged person desires. Through the human subject experiments in the actual care house, the following implications have been revealed: (1) the proposed care plan decreases the time of the light sleep; and (2) the proposed care plan provides the deep sleep (i.e., 9 years younger sleep in our experiment).

Hybrid group autonomy, organizations and teams composed of humans, machines and robots, are important to AI. Unlike the war in Iraq in 2002, the war in Afghanistan has hundreds of mobile robots aloft, on land, or under the sea. But when it comes to solving problems as part of a team, these agents are socially passive. Were the problem of aggregation and the autonomy of hybrids to be solved, robot teams could accompa- ny humans to address and solve problems together on Mars, under the sea, or in dan- gerous locations on earth (such as, fire-fighting, reactor meltdowns, and future wars). “Robot autonomy is required because one soldier cannot control several robots ... [and] because no computational system can discriminate between combatants and innocents in a close-contact encounter.” (Sharkey, 2008) Yet, today, one of the fundamental unsolved problems in the social sciences is the aggregation of individual data (such as preferences) into group (team) data (Giles, 2011) The original motivation behind game theory was to study the effect that multi- ple agents have on each other (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1953), known as interdependence or mutual dependence. Essentially, the challenge addresses the ques- tion: why is a group different from the collection of individuals who comprise the group? That the problem remains unsolved almost 70 years later is a remarkable com- ment on the state of the social sciences today, including game theory and economics. But solving this challenge is essential for the science and engineering of multiagent, multirobot and hybrid environments (that is, humans, machines and robots working together).

This paper focuses on age-related change in sleep and improves our sleep estimation method by employing the feature of such relation between sleep stage and age. In particular, the wake stage increases as the age increases, while Non-REM stage decrease as the age increase. Using such distinctive features, we propose a new determination sleep stages, and introduce it into for our sleep estimation method based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs), which evolve the sleep stage for each person according to the fitness. To investigate an effectiveness of a new determination of sleep stages, we compare the estimated sleep stages of our method employing the proposed fitness function with that of Hirose’s method. The experimental results suggest that our method employed the proposed discretization of sleep stages has a capability to estimate the sleep stage accurately than Hirose’s method.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has received much interest due to its potential to tackle many adaptive system architecture issues that were previously hard to overcome by other computing paradigms. However, it has been facing great difficulty in quickly discovering and dynamically combing available Web services to satisfy given request on-demand. Most of the current researches concentrated o n the semantic model for service discovery, composition, and so on. But there are few studies concerned the intrinsic pattern and law of the service interactions and relationships. To achiev e the vision of SOC in heterogeneous and open environment, in our opinion, not only the semantics of individual Web service but also the interactions and relationships among Web services are needed to be considered seriously. In this paper, beginning with combining Semantic Web and social networking technology within SOC paradigm, we study associations between Web services, mine the relationships among services to design and build Service Network (SN), anal y z e the structural and social characteristics and complexity of SN to reveal the user interests, business requests, information and data flow and direction. In short, we would like to reassess and reconsider the SOC paradigm from the network perspective, through finding new knowledge to build new theoretical basis and approach which can be used to guide and promote the service discovery, composition, and so on, in SOC paradigm.

This paper introduces the ongoing MyFinder project, which was launched in October 2010. The goals of this project are: (1) to propose an intimate personal genome information environment, MyFinder, which supports the search for our inborn talents and maximizes our potential for a meaningful life; and (2) to contribute to scientific discoveries in the biomedical or psychological research domains through intelligent community computing, or in other words, citizen science. This paper describes our research framework and the ongoing challenges to achieving these two goals. We also discuss the technical and social issues related to possible personal genome applications in non-medical domains.

When market works and when it fails has been an issue long pursued by economists. While to an extreme extent the view, as characterized by the “invisible hand” or “market mechanism”, has been so dominant in economics education and public policy debates, it is generally acceptable that markets are not out there and have to designed properly so as to work (McMillan, 2004). The significance of designs has been further illustrated by experimental economics. As opposed to designs, what, however, has been drawn less attention is the role of traders, their characteristics and behavior. To one extreme, one may consider that a good design is so dominant that there leaves little room for individual traders to play a role. The literature inspired by the zero-intelligence agent (Gode and Sunder, 1993) provides a good background of this issue, and many later studies do cast doubt on the sufficiency of this minimal intelligence and propose different versions of additional intelligence.