The important growth of available multimedia information shows the limits of traditional information retrieval systems. In this paper, we describe the design of a metadata engine dedicated to retrieve annotated images using meta-information, and part of the more general MediaSys Image Search Engine. As a case study, we use medicinal plant images and their detailed description. We propose a flex...

We present a measure of the similarity of the long-term structure of musical pieces. The system deals with raw polyphonic data. Through unsupervised learning, we generate an abstract representation of music the “texture score”. This “texture score” can be matched to other similar scores using a generalized edit distance, in order to assess structural similarity. We notably apply this algorithm ...

Retrieving similar questions in online Q&A community sites is a difficult task because different users may formulate the same question in a variety of ways, using different vocabulary and structure. In this work, we propose a new neural network architecture to perform the task of semantically equivalent question retrieval. The proposed architecture, which we call BOW-CNN, combines a bag-ofwords...

As more and more documents become available on the internet, finding documents that fit users’ needs from databases containing millions of documents is becoming increasingly important. Since a scientific document is a structured text, it has some useful features that can be used to improve retrieval performance. In this work, we investigate three such features: fonts, position and cited referen...

This work demonstrates the feasibility of building a PIR system with performance similar to non-PIR systems in real situations. Prior Chor PIR systems have chosen block sizes that are theoretically optimized to minimize communication. This (ironically) reduces the throughput of the resulting system by roughly 50x. We constructed a Chor PIR system called upPIR that is efficient by choosing block...

Co-operative ground / aerial vehicle pairs can potentially be utilised for search and retrieve applications in disaster scenarios. A simplified setup has been implemented using an iRobot Create platform, coloured retrieval targets and a roof-mounted camera for localisation. This paper outlines the design of the entire system, with particular emphasis on perception, navigation, guidance and cont...

Governing documents are long textual documents containing information about how different operations are to be carried out in a business. The information spans from overall policies and standards to detailed guidelines, and the amount of such documents in larger corporations tend to be substantial. In business process models the aim is to model the same domain from a process perspective. In thi...

We have studied the retrieve-and-propose problem solving method, a specialization of the general case-based reasoning method, in terms of its tasks in the context of fault-recovery domains. We have analyzed the case retrieval and learning tasks that are primarily used in the retrieveand-propose method, decomposed them into appropriate subtasks, associated decisions for selecting each subtask, a...

This paper investigates and improves an important algorithm that is used in the Traffic-Flow Analysis (TFA). TFA can be used for the fast and approximate (performance) analysis of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems. The method contains an algorithm for the spatial distribution of the traffic in the system. It is shown how the error of the spatial distribution can be measured...

This paper presents a concise yet comprehensive description of a multi-channel Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication system. Existing mathematical models for such a system overlook some of its essential behavioural characteristics such as the reneging, force-termination and ultimately blocking of service requests. A multi-server queueing model with First-In-First-Out (FIFO) service poli...