Over the past decade, a variety of expressive linguistic query languages have been developed. The most scalable of these have been implemented on top of an existing database engine. However, with the arrival of efficient, wide-coverage parsers, it is feasible to parse text on a scale that is several orders of magnitude larger. We show that the existing database approach will not scale up, and s...

Many pattern recognition tasks can modeled as proximity searching. From nearest neighbor classification to multimedia databases the common task is to quickly find all the elements close to a given query. This task can be accomplished very easily by sequentially examining all the elements in the collection, but turns to be impractical in two situations: when the distance used to compare elements...

This paper describes a method for establishing ad hoc and infrastructuremode wireless network connections based on physical proximity. Users can easily establish secure wireless connections between two digital devices by putting them in close proximity to each other and pressing the connection button. The devices ”identify” each other by measuring each other’s signal strength. We designed a set...

The concept of similarity is used as the basis for many data exploration and data mining tasks. Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries identify the most similar items, or in terms of distance the closest points to a query point. Similarity is traditionally characterized using a distance function between multi-dimensional feature vectors. However, when the data is high-dimensional, traditional distance f...

Monocular adaptation to flow fields of optic expansion and contraction juxtaposed on either side of fixation influenced subsequently perceived rotation direction of a figure rotating in depth (kinetic depth effect) about its vertical axis with a normally ambiguous direction. This influence was shown to be asymmetric since adapting to optic expansion produced significantly more aftereffects of t...

The computation of the minimum distance between two objects is an important problem in the applications such as haptic rendering, CAD/CAM, NC veri cation, robotics and computer graphics. This paper presents a method to compute the minimum distance between a canal surface and a simple surface (that is, a plane, a natural quadric, or a torus) by nding roots of a function of a single parameter. We...

This paper introduces a novel method for face recognition based on multiple images. When multiple images are considered, the face recognition problem is defined as taking a set of face images from an unknown person and finding the most similar set among the database of labeled image sets. Our proposed method approximates each image set with a geometric convex model (affine/convex hulls) by usin...

In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for computing the Euclidean skeleton of an object directly from a point cloud representation on an underlying grid. The key point of this algorithm is to identify those grid points that are (approximately) on the skeleton using the closest point information of a grid point and its neighbors. The three main ingredients of the algorithm are: (1) co...

We have developed simple algorithms that allow adjacency and proximity searching in Google and the Science Citation Index (SCI). The SCI algorithm exploits the fact that SCI stopwords in a search phrase function as a placeholder. Such a phrase serves effectively as a fixed adjacency condition determined by the number n of adjacent stopwords (i.e., retrieve all records where word A and word B ar...

It has been argued in [7] that using automated provers such as AProVE [4] and CSI [3] can benefit research projects on the topic of datatype defining rewrite systems (DDRSs), as the size of these DDRSs make manual completeness proofs long and error-prone. The authors of [7] note that no similar software exists for the ground-confluence property, and in [1] it is argued that such software should...