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Database Systems Laboratory |
Sabhash Bhalla
Associate Professor |
Nadia L. Berthouze
Assistant Professor |
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Information systems in health-care and public utility services will depend on computing infrastructure. Many research efforts are being made in mobile computing, web-based computing, information extraction and handling. Government agencies in many countries plan to launch facilities in education, health-care and information support as the new e-government initiative. In this context, Information Interchange Management on the web has become an active research field.
Many types of new data are commonly used within the web data resources. In another area, the internal data of an enterprise is also becoming more complex with an increase in its volume. This year the laboratory organized a workshop on "Databases in Networked Information System (DNIS 2002)". The 2nd DNIS workshop was held on 16-18 December at University of Aizu. The chosen theme of the workshop has been "Information Interchange on the Internet".
At the level of basic research, most of the advances in techniques concentrate on capturing more meaning within data. A number of researchers are actively developing improved data management strategies using XML (extensive mark-up language) technology. This provides a challenging area for study. The domains of activity include :
- Mobile computing and databases for electronic commerce;
- Large Network Management Database Management Systems, for information exchange through XML; and
- Multi-media Synchronization applications
- Data Mining and Data Warehousing applications
The Database Systems Laboratory has research activity concentrating onmodeling accesses, as well as transaction processing activity.
Data Modeling and Access Support
Information Processing Systems of future will be a combination of integrated components. There will be components for intelligent problem solving, or decision making, components for specialized data processing andcomponents for shared information management. The applications will utilize a shared base of information. Some examples are - business automation, industrial automation, computer-aided design and manufacture, and cartography.
With the advent of web technology, many applications are changing their form to become, web based applications. This requires new types of user interfaces and research into access security for evolving application service models.
Work-flow and Electronic Commerce
Traditional approaches to transaction management introduce elements of unpredictable delays during transaction processing. Thus, making these not suitable for adoption in new application environments. The techniques for time-critical transactions are applicable to Mobile databases and multimedia databases.
Digital Library Studies
The goal of this research is to study the feasibility to endow a computational system with the ability to process information. As an experimental platform a web retrieval system is being built, that enables users to retrieve multimedia information carrying a given subjective (Kansei) content. Such system will prove useful in various areas of information technology such as online shopping, advertising industry, entertainment, design, wearable computers. The modeling issues are reformulated from the complementary points of view-
- A multimedia data mining approach to address the mapping between impression (or Kansei) words and multimedia impressions,
- An approach that involves the user in the modeling process.
At any time, search for a data management techniques aim at supporting diverse applications and increasing numbers of web application users and other users of computing for information retrieval.
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| [nadia-01:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze and P. Bottoni. Articulating Action in Multimodal Interaction. The Journal of Three Dimensional Images - 3DForum, 16(4):220-225, 2002.
The space of multimodal interaction is considerably richer than the one usually considered in direct manipulation of WIMP interfaces. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a common structure to these spaces, so as to define abstract notions of actions, gestures, events, presentations. We propose a characterisation of the interaction space in terms of a simple algebraic structure, realised by a basic architecture, and propose a classification of actions. Interaction design, as well as personalisation is seen as a the problem of mapping configurations of sensors to actions, and these to system's classes of responses. This abstract setting is shown at work in two fields: direct manipulation of an iconic interface and recognition of emotional moods from posture analysis in a robotic vision system. |
| Referred Proceeding Papers |
| [bhalla-01:2002] | S. Bhalla. Asynchronous Transaction Processing for Updates With no Wait-for State. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science(LNCS), volume 2552, pages 388-397. Springer Verlag, Germany, December 2002.
In a distributed database system, time-critical transactions need to complete their processing, within a time limit. This is especially true in the case of a real-time database systems, and also in the case of mobile database systems. This study considers server level enhancements. By adopting transaction classification, few changes can be accommodated within 2-phase locking at a low cost that enable the database update by time-critical Clients. We further investigate a procedure that performs critical functions asynchronously |
| [bhalla-02:2002] | S. Saeki, S. Bhalla, and Hasegawa M. Parallel Generation of Base Relation Snapshots for Materialized View Maintenance in a Data Warehouse Environment. In Proceedings of ICPP-HPSECA02. IEEE Computer Society, August 2002.
A data warehouse supports information processing by providing a platform of integrated, historical data for analysis. The contents of a data warehouse are evolved in an evolutionary, step-at-a-time fashion. Detecting and extracting modifications from information sources is an integral part of data warehouse. It is often necessary to infer modifications by periodically comparing snapshots and backup copies of data from the source. Various implementation and performance evaluation of the differential snapshot algorithms have been compared for evaluation of suitable alternatives |
| [bhalla-03:2002] | S. Bhalla, M. Hasegawa, and N. Berthouze. |
| [bhalla-04:2002] | S. Bhalla and Hasegawa M. Query-By-Object Interface for Accessing Dynamic Contents on the Web. In Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computers, Communications, Control, and Power Engineering (TENCON'02), October 2002.
Many web based information systems plan to support database query facilities for the web users. This will enable the users to seek the desired information from vast data resources. A natural inclination exists among the users for object-by-object traction to find information. The proposed interface introduces simplicity and avoids communication ambiguities. |
| [bhalla-05:2002] | Bhalla, T. Hosozawa, S., H. Sasaki, K.Watanabe, T. Yatsunami, N. Berthouze, and T Izumita. A User Interface for a Web-Geographic Information System. In 6th World Multi-Conference on Systems, Cybernetics, and Informatics, July 2002.
A geographic information system is used to locate objects. Typically, a user interface presents a language for communication. Inorderto find a path to locate an object, the users adopt a step-wise navigation approach.We demonstrate a prototype of a high level interface based on simplified relational algebra. The system is supported by an Object-Relational Database Management System based on PostGreSQL. A sample set of queries have been generated and have been tested for ease of access by the user of a GIS system |
| [nadia-02:2002] | N. (inivited speaker) Bianchi-Berthouze. Subjective perception of natural scenes: the role of color. In R. Eschbach and G.G. Marcu, editors, Proceeding of 15th Symposium on Electronic Imagining, IS/SPIE, pages 1{13, Bellingham, WA, USA, January 2003. IS, IS/SPIE.
The subjective perception of colors has been extensively studied, with a focus on single colors or on combinations of a few colors. Not much has been done, however, to understand the subjective perception of colors in other contexts, where color is nota single feature. This is what the Kansei community in Japan has set itself to, by exploring subjective experiences of perceptions, and colors in particular, given its obvious influence on humans' emotional changes. The motivation is to create computational models of user visual perceptions, so that computers can be endowed with the ability to personalize visual aspects of their computational task, according to their user. Such a capability is hypothesized to be very important in fields such as printing, information search, design support, advertisement, etc. In this paper, we present our experimental results in the study of color as a contextual feature of images, rather than in isolation. The experiments aim at understanding the mechanisms linked to the personal perception of colors in complex images, and to understand the formation of color categories when labeling experiences related to color perception. |
| [nadia-03:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze and T. Hayashi. Interpretation of complex data: requirements to support kansei mining. InD. Chabane, S. Simoff, and O. Zaiane, editors, Proceeding of International workshop on multimedia data mining, Edmonton, July 2002.
Nowadays technology makes it possible to easily access huge amount of complex data. This possibility has required the search for techniques that allow accessing the semantic of such data and supporting the users in finding in the huge pool of data the interesting ones. Moreover, relational databases as well as meta-language such as XML are proposed to facilitate the access to the semantics of such data. However, complex data such as images, video, sounds as well as any other non verbal channel of communication, has a semantic that is very subjective, i.e. whose interpretation vary overtime and between person. Accessing the subjective semantics is becoming critical aswe think we are going to interact more and more with robots and a large part of human communication is based on such aspects. In this work we attempt to identify the requirements for supporting the access to subjective semantic of complex data. In particular we focus not only on subjective aspects of the users, such as their sensitivity, but mainly on analyzing the multi- interpretation of the complex data. We propose a data warehouse as a support for the mining process of such information. A unique characteristic of our data warehouse lays in its ability to store multiple hierarchical descriptions of the multimedia data. Such characteristic is necessary to allow the mining of complex data, not only at different levels of abstraction, but also according to multiple interpretation of the content. We report on our case study of image retrieval by visual impression. The framework we propose can be generalized to support the analysis of any type of complex data that relates to subjective cognitive processes and hence whose interpretation is greatly variable. |
| [nadia-04:2002] | T. Hayashi, A. Sato, and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. A Hierarchical Model to Support Kansei Mining Process. In H. Yin, N. Allison, R. Freeman, J. Keane, and S. Editors Hubbard, editors, Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning IDEAL'02, pages 56{61, Berlin, August 2002. IDEAL, LCNS 2412, Springer-Verlag.
Image retrieval by subjective content has been recently addressed by the Kansei engineering community in Japan. Such information retrieval systems aim to include subjective aspects of the users, such as his/her sensibility, in the querying criteria. While many techniques have been proposed in modeling such users' aspects, little attention has been placed on analyzing the amount of information involved in this modeling process and the multi- interpretation of such information. We propose a data warehouse as a support for the mining of the multimedia feedback entered by the user when using such retrieving systems. A unique characteristic of our data warehouse lays in its ability to store multiple hierarchical descriptions of images. Such characteristic is necessary to allow the mining of the multimedia data, not only at different levels of abstraction, but also according to multiple interpretation of their content. Hence multiple hierarchies with different depth and type of value can be stored, analyzed and compared. By using inheritance mechanism, the values of the description stored can range from simple numerical type, indicating for example the quantity of a particular color in an image, to complex data such as geometrical shapes, indicating regions of interest (focus of attention) in an image. The proposed data warehouse has been used to support the adaptation of web-based image retrieval systems by impression words. |
| [nadia-05:2002] | S. Bhalla, M. Hasegawa, and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. A framework for high level user interface for accessing dynamic contents on the web. In E. Damiani, R.J. Howlett, L.C. Jain, and N. Ichalkaranje, editors, Proceeding of International conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, pages 785-790, Amsterdam, September 2002. IOS Press.
Most users of the web are highly skilled at referring to tabular data. A natural inclination exists among the users for object-by-object transection to find information. We propose a convenient approach for the web information system users. The user are assumed to be not skilled at using the traditional DBMS query interfaces as the SQL language. The proposed interface introduces simplicity and avoids communication ambiguities. |
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| [nadia-06:2002] | S. Bhalla, Hozozawa, H. T. Sasaki, K. Watanabe, T. Yatsunami, N. Bianchi-Berthouze, and T. Izumita. A User Interface for a Web Geographic Information System (Web-GIS). In N. Callaos, Y. He, and J.A. Perez-Peraz, editors, Proceeding of International conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, pages 217-222. International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS), July 2002.
A geographic information system is often sought to locate objects of users' interest. In order to ??nd a path to locate an object, the user adopts a stepwise navigation approach. We demonstrate a prototype of a high-level interface basedon simplified relational algebra. A prototype system based on the notion of Query-By-Object(QBO) has been proposed. The system is supported by an O-RDBMS based on Post GreSQL. A sample set of queries has been generated and have been tested for ease of access by the user of a GIS system. |
| [bhalla-06:2002] | S. Bhalla, editor. Databases in Networked Information Systems, volume 2544. Springer-Verlag, Germany, December 2002. |
| [bhalla-07:2002] | S. Bhalla. Asynchronous Reading of Consistent Copy of a Large Database, volume Practical Applications of Parralel Computing of Advances in Computation Theory and Practices (ACTP), page 303. Nova Science Publishers, New York, 2002. |
| [bhalla-08:2002] | S. Bhalla. Parallel Concurrency Control for Data Access Within Real-time Database Systems, volume Practical Applications of Parralel Computing of Advances in Computation Theory and Practices (ACTP), page 317. Nova Science Publishers, NewYork, 2002. |
| [nadia-07:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze and T. Izumita. University of Aizu, Competitive Grant, 2002-2003. |
| [nadia-08:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2002. Member, IEEE |
| [nadia-09:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2002. Member, ACM |
| [nadia-10:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2002. Member, Cognitive Science Society |
| [nadia-11:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2002. Member, SPIE: the International Society for Optical Engineering |
| [nadia-12:2002] | Harutaka Yoneyama. Graduation Thesis: Integrating Web Technology with Database Management Systems to Access Data Semantics, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-13:2002] | Hayato Takenaka. Graduation Thesis: Capturing Emotion from Body language, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-14:2002] | Yuichi Tomizawa. Graduation Thesis: Exploring the relevance of image features in image similarity, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-15:2002] | Naoto Kastumi. Graduation Thesis: Web Personalization: Integrating Relevance and Usage Feedback, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-16:2002] | Makoto Hasegawa. Graduation Thesis: Recognition, Action and Re-Action in Affective Multi-Modal Communication, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-17:2002] | Tsuyoshi Fushimi. Graduation Thesis: Exploring Body Language in Affective Communication, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-18:2002] | Kouta Murase. Graduation Thesis: Exploring user's externalization as a support to image retrieval personalization, University of Aizu, 2002.
Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N. |
| [nadia-19:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Member of the organizing commitee for the international workshop DNIS'02, Aizu-Wakanmatsu, Japan, 2002 |
| [nadia-20:2002] | N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Member of the organizing commitee for the international workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Multimedia snd Complex Data, Taipei, Taiwan, 2002 |
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Annual Review 2002