Abstract not found

The proliferation of mobile computing devices and local-area wireless networks has fostered a growing interest in location-aware systems and services. In this paper we present RADAR, a radio-frequency (RF) based system for locating and tracking users inside buildings. RADAR operates by recording and processing signal strength information at multiple base stations positioned to provide overlapping coverage in the area of interest. It employs techniques that combine empirical measurements with signal propagation modeling to enable location-aware services and applications. We present concrete experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of using RADAR to estimate user location with a high degree of accuracy.

We introduce a new approach to planning in STRIPS-like domains based on constructing and analyzing a compact structure we call a Planning Graph. We describe a new planner, Graphplan, that uses this paradigm. Graphplan always returns a shortest possible partial-order plan, or states that no valid plan exists. We provide empirical evidence in favor of this approach, showing that Graphplan outperforms the total-order planner, Prodigy, and the partial-order planner, UCPOP, on a variety of interesting natural and artificial planning problems. We also give empirical evidence that the plans produced by Graphplan are quite sensible. Since searches made by this approach are fundamentally different from the searches of other common planning methods, they provide a new perspective on the planning problem.

Consider a set S of n data points in real d-dimensional space, R d , where distances are measured using any Minkowski metric. In nearest neighbor searching we preprocess S into a data structure, so that given any query point q 2 R d , the closest point of S to q can be reported quickly. Given any positive real ffl, a data point p is a (1 + ffl)-approximate nearest neighbor of q if its distance from q is within a factor of (1 + ffl) of the distance to the true nearest neighbor. We show that it is possible to preprocess a set of n points in R d in O(dn log n) time and O(dn) space, so that given a query point q 2 R d , and ffl ? 0, a (1 + ffl)-approximate nearest neighbor of q can be computed in O(c d;ffl log n) time, where c d;ffl d d1 + 6d=ffle d is a factor depending only on dimension and ffl. In general, we show that given an integer k 1, (1 + ffl)-approximations to the k nearest neighbors of q can be computed in additional O(kd log n) time.

Abstract. This paper addresses the problem of segmenting an image into regions. We define a predicate for measuring the evidence for a boundary between two regions using a graph-based representation of the image. We then develop an efficient segmentation algorithm based on this predicate, and show that although this algorithm makes greedy decisions it produces segmentations that satisfy global properties. We apply the algorithm to image segmentation using two different kinds of local neighborhoods in constructing the graph, and illustrate the results with both real and synthetic images. The algorithm runs in time nearly linear in the number of graph edges and is also fast in practice. An important characteristic of the method is its ability to preserve detail in low-variability image regions while ignoring detail in high-variability regions.

In this paper we present a statistical framework for modeling the appearance of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to model an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We use these models to address the problem of detecting an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, and present efficient algorithms for both these problems. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.

Recent work in supervised learning has shown that a surprisingly simple Bayesian classifier with strong assumptions of independence among features, called naive Bayes, is competitive with state-of-the-art classifiers such as C4.5. This fact raises the question of whether a classifier with less restrictive assumptions can perform even better. In this paper we evaluate approaches for inducing classifiers from data, based on the theory of learning Bayesian networks. These networks are factored representations of probability distributions that generalize the naive Bayesian classifier and explicitly represent statements about independence. Among these approaches we single out a method we call Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN), which outperforms naive Bayes, yet at the same time maintains the computational simplicity (no search involved) and robustness that characterize naive Bayes. We experimentally tested these approaches, using problems from the University of California at Irvine repository, and compared them to C4.5, naive Bayes, and wrapper methods for feature selection.

Modelling sequential data is important in many areas of science and engineering. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and Kalman filter models (KFMs) are popular for this because they are simple and flexible. For example, HMMs have been used for speech recognition and bio-sequence analysis, and KFMs have been used for problems ranging from tracking planes and missiles to predicting the economy. However, HMMs and KFMs are limited in their “expressive power”. Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) generalize HMMs by allowing the state space to be represented in factored form, instead of as a single discrete random variable. DBNs generalize KFMs by allowing arbitrary probability distributions, not just (unimodal) linear-Gaussian. In this thesis, I will discuss how to represent many different kinds of models as DBNs, how to perform exact and approximate inference in DBNs, and how to learn DBN models from sequential data. In particular, the main novel technical contributions of this thesis are as follows: a way of representing Hierarchical HMMs as DBNs, which enables inference to be done in O(T) time instead of O(T 3), where T is the length of the sequence; an exact smoothing algorithm that takes O(log T) space instead of O(T); a simple way of using the junction tree algorithm for online inference in DBNs; new complexity bounds on exact online inference in DBNs; a new deterministic approximate inference algorithm called factored frontier; an analysis of the relationship between the BK algorithm and loopy belief propagation; a way of applying Rao-Blackwellised particle filtering to DBNs in general, and the SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) problem in particular; a way of extending the structural EM algorithm to DBNs; and a variety of different applications of DBNs. However, perhaps the main value of the thesis is its catholic presentation of the field of sequential data modelling.

FFTW is an implementation of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) that adapts to the hardware in order to maximize performance. This paper shows that such an approach can yield an implementation that is competitive with hand-optimized libraries, and describes the software structure that makes our current FFTW3 version flexible and adaptive. We further discuss a new algorithm for real-data DFTs of prime size, a new way of implementing DFTs by means of machine-specific single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, and how a special-purpose compiler can derive optimized implementations of the discrete cosine and sine transforms automatically from a DFT algorithm.

We investigate new approaches for frequent graph-based pattern mining in graph datasets and propose a novel algorithm called gSpan (graph-based Substructure pattern mining) , which discovers frequent substructures without candidate generation. gSpan builds a new lexicographic order among graphs, and maps each graph to a unique minimum DFS code as its canonical label. Based on this lexicographic order, gSpan adopts the depth-first search strategy to mine frequent connected subgraphs efficiently. Our performance study shows that gSpan substantially outperforms previous algorithms, sometimes by an order of magnitude.