This thesis presents a research work based on an integrated multi-modal approach for sports video indexing and retrieval. By combining specific features extractable from multiple (audio-visual) modalities, generic structure and specific events can be detected and classified. During browsing and retrieval, users will benefit from the integration of high-level semantic and some descriptive mid-level features such as whistle and close-up view of player(s). The main objective is to contribute to the three major components of sports video indexing systems. The first component is a set of powerful techniques to extract audio-visual features and semantic contents automatically. The main purposes are to reduce manual annotations and to summarize the lengthy contents into a compact, meaningful and more enjoyable presentation. The second component is an expressive and flexible indexing technique that supports gradual index construction. Indexing scheme is essential to determine the methods by which users can access a video database. The third and last component is a query language that can generate dynamic video summaries for smart browsing and support user-oriented retrievals.

This experiment was designed to investigate the effectiveness of the CDROM hands on instruction program provided by the University of Canberra library by comparing it with demonstration only sessions and a group that received no instruction at all. The results indicated that the hands-on instruction program evaluated did not prove to be superior to a demonstration in providing students with necessary skills to search CDROM databases. A sample of 98 novice users enrolled in Research Skills were randomly allocated to three groups. The first group received hands on instruction on CD-ROM searching. The second group watched a demonstration using a liquid crystal display. The third group acted as a control group and received no instruction. Each group conducted a search on three pre-determined questions. The experiment was conducted in three stages. The first stage was a pretest in which students searched the three search questions. The second stage was instruction. Two groups of students were instructed, either hands on or demonstration. The final stage was a post-test which involved searching the three questions used in the pre-test. The following databases were used in the study: ERIC, MEDLINE and Sports Discus. The results were measured in terms of a number of search terms used, number of retrieved records, number of Boolean operators used, and a appropriate choice of a database. The statistical significance level among the groups was tested by the means of the technique of oneway analysis of variance to test The F test was used to compare differences between the different groups. The results of this experiment indicated that groups of students instructed on either method of instruction, hands-on and demonstration, performed significantly better than the control group. However, there was no significant difference between the two methods of instruction. This research confirms the need for CD-ROM instruction for novice users if CD-ROM databases are to be used effectively by students. Furthermore, this result shows that demonstrations can be used as alternative methods of instruction.

The emergence of ontologies has marked another stage in the evolution of knowledge engineering. In the biomedical domain especially, a notable number of ontologies have been developed for knowledge acquisition, maintenance, sharing and reuse from large and distributed databases in order to reach the critical requirements of biomedical analysis and application. This research aims at the development of a Brain Gene Ontology by adopting a constructive IS methodology which tightly combines the processes of ontology learning, building, reuse and evaluation together. Brain Gene Ontology is a part of the BGO project that is being developed by KEDRI (Gottgtroy and Jain, 2005). The objective is to represent knowledge of the genes and proteins that are related to specific brain disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia. The current stage focuses on the crucial neuronal parameters such as AMPA, GABA, CLC and SCN through their direct or indirect interactions with other genes and proteins. In this case, ontological representations were able to provide the conceptual framework and the knowledge itself to understand more about relationships among those genes and their links to brain disorders. It also provided a semantic repository of systematically ordered molecules concerned. The research adopts Protégé-Frames, which is an open source ontology tool suite for BGO development. Some Protégé plug-ins were also used to extend the applicable functions and improve knowledge representation. Basically, the research discusses the availability and the framework of the constructive Information System research methodology for ontology development, it also describes the process that bridges different notions of the brain, genes and proteins in various databases, and illustrates how to build and implement the ontology with Protégé-Frames and its plug-ins. The results of the BGO development proved that the constructive IS methodology does help to fill in the cognitive gap between domain users and ontology developers, the extensible, component-based architectures of Protégé-Frames significantly support the various activities in the ontology development process, and through explicitly specifying the meaning of fundamental concepts and their relations, ontology can actually integrate knowledge from multiple biological knowledge bases.

<p>The aim of this thesis project was to migrate an existing excel-based application, used</p><p>to analyze energy use and carbon dioxide emission of companies, to a web-based application.</p><p>Special development questions were put around which software development process,</p><p>solution stack and user interface to be used according to the company needs. The spiral</p><p>lifecycle model has been chosen because it provides a clear view of the process and has the</p><p>concept of early prototypes. A solution stack based on Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL has</p><p>been chosen because such approach has met the company requirements in terms of cost,</p><p>security, support, and maintenance. As a result, the developed web-based system overcomes</p><p>the problems normally found in excel-based applications, such as application deployment and</p><p>maintenance, and provides a more usable and richer user interface.</p>

<p>The aim of this thesis project was to migrate an existing excel-based application, used</p><p>to analyze energy use and carbon dioxide emission of companies, to a web-based application.</p><p>Special development questions were put around which software development process,</p><p>solution stack and user interface to be used according to the company needs. The spiral</p><p>lifecycle model has been chosen because it provides a clear view of the process and has the</p><p>concept of early prototypes. A solution stack based on Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL has</p><p>been chosen because such approach has met the company requirements in terms of cost,</p><p>security, support, and maintenance. As a result, the developed web-based system overcomes</p><p>the problems normally found in excel-based applications, such as application deployment and</p><p>maintenance, and provides a more usable and richer user interface.</p>

<p>Child abuse content on the Internet is today an increasing problem and difficult to dealwith. The techniques used by paedophiles are getting more sophisticated which means ittakes more effort of the law enforcement to locate this content.</p><p>To help solving this issue, a EU-funded project named FIVES is developing a set oftools to help investigations involving large amounts of image and video material. One ofthese tools aims to help identifying potentially illegal files by hash signatures derived fromusing classification information from another project.</p> / FIVES

Richard A. Flower. / Originally presented as the author's thesis, (Ph.D.). M.I.T. Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 1974. / Bibliography: p. 66.

In this paper, we present a P2P-based database sharing system that provides information sharing capabilities through keyword-based search techniques. Our system requires neither a global schema nor schema mappings between different databases, and our keyword-based search algorithms are robust in the presence of frequent changes in the content and membership of peers. To facilitate data integration, we introduce keyword join operator to combine partial answers containing different keywords into complete answers. We also present an efficient algorithm that optimize the keyword join operations for partial answer integration. Our experimental study on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our algorithms, and the efficiency of the proposed query processing strategies. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

by Victor O.K. Li. / Bibliography: p. 22. / "July, 1981." / Office of Naval Research contract ONR/N 00014-77-C-0532 (NR 041-519)

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. School of Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-121).