Japanese
Centers

Core and Information Technology Center

Tetsuhiko IkegamiMasamichi HashimotoVitaly Klyuev
Tetsuhiko Ikegami
President
Masamichi Hashimoto
Visiting Professor
Vitaly Klyuev
Associate Professor
As represented by the Japan Gigabit Network (JGN), a national project for research and development of advanced information network technologies, researchon high-speed networking are actively promoted worldwide. In response to these developments, CoreandInformationTechnologyCenter(CITEC)was foundedat the University of Aizu in April l999. At the center headed by Dr. T. Ikegami, intensive research and development have been conducted for the five year period, focusing on the basic and applied technologies of the next-generation super high-speed networks. In particular, as one of the connection sites of theJGNnational project, the University of Aizu has been working with various research institutions connected to JGN on research and development of basic and applied network technologies including applications to distance education, medical and nursing care, information retrieval, and e-commerce. Some of these research outcomes are now in real use.
  The OASIS (Open Architecture Server for Information Search and Delivery) project was one of the major projects of CITEC. Its focus was on research related to Information Retrieval and Web Search. These topics are key themes in the current network application studies. In the frame of this project, a new model of a distributed search system for a JGN environment was proposed. This model was successfully tested utilizing the JGN nodes in Koriyama, Tokyo and Aizu. The aforementioned application of high-speed networks is important in practice. OASIS was designed to support multiple languages. It participated in the NTCIR 2 and 3Workshops (in 2000 - 2003) to check its ability to search for Japanese data. At present, several scientific English and Japanese collections of Internet data have been compiled semi automatically employing OASIS technology and tools.
  The university has also collaborated withFukushima Technology Center (HitechPlaza), Nishi Aizu Machi CATV, which were connected through Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) links (135Mbps and 20Mbps respectively) during the JGN project. The Japanese government plans to install the second generation JGN (JGN2) with 10Gbps backbone capacity starting April 2004. Some research will be carried on to JGN2 after the termination of CITEC.

Refereed Journal Papers

[vkluev-01:2003]Vitaliy KLUEV. Results Merging with the OASIS System: An Experimental Comparison of two Techniques. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, E86-D(9):1773-1780, September 2003.

Mechanisms used for results merging are very important for distributed search systems. They are to select the most relevant documents retrieved by different servers and put them on the top of the list returned to the end user. There are several approaches to solve key problems of this task such as eliminating duplicates and ranking results combined. But it is still not clear how to achieve this. We use the clustering technique to divide retrieved results into several groups and a metric on the base of the vector space model to arrange items inside each group. Preliminary tests were conducted using the OASIS system and several collections of real Internet data. They showed relatively superior results when compared to the neural network clustering and LSI calculation. Proposed mechanisms can be applied to meta search systems and to distributed search systems as well because such mechanisms do not require any special information except standard de facto data received from servers.
[vkluev-02:2003]V. V.KLUEV. Query Expansion in a Distributed Search system. WSEASTransactions on Computers, 2(2):311-314, 2003.

One of the major tasks in Web search technology is query expansion. End users interacting with the results of a search may refine the initial query submitting, for example, the URL to the system. Tasks for that system are then to find appropriate information in the document pointed to by this URL and to use it in a new search. This task has to be resolved automatically. In this paper, we explore a technique to extract context information from given a document and to apply it to query expansion. The preliminary experiments showed promising results for distributed search architecture and for searching inside narrow topic-specific homogenous datasets.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

[vkluev-03:2003]V. V. Kluev. OASIS: Text Search Using High-Speed Networks. In Editor K.Nygard, editor, In Proceedings of the ISCA 16th International Conference on Computer Applications in Industry and Engineering, pages 62-67. ACM, The International Society for Computers and Their Applications - ISCA, November 2003.

In this paper, our vision of an architecture of information retrieval systems in the Internet has been presented. The necessity of communication of such kinds of systems with high-speed networks has been explained. Results of experiments conducted using the OASIS system and Japan Gigabit Network have been shown and discussed. Future plans have been described as well.
[vkluev-04:2003]V. V.KLUEV. Query Expansion in a Distributed Search system. In Editor Nikos N. Mastorakis, editor, The 4th WSEAS International Conference on Applied Mathematics. Book of Abstracts and Program, pages 25-26. WSEAS,WSEAS Press, 2003.

Unrefereed Papers

[hashi-01:2003]Masamichi Hashimoto. A study of electronic commerce community network. In Tokai-Section Joint Conference of the eight Institues of Electrical and Related Engineers,2003, page 252, Oct. 2003.

Grants

[vkluev-05:2003]Vitaly Klyuev. Fukushima Prefectural Foundation for Advancement of Science and Education, 2003.

Academic Activities

[vkluev-06:2003]V. Kluev, November 2003.

Member of International Technical Program Committee of the ISCA 16th International Conference on Computer Applications in Industry and Engineering, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
[vkluev-07:2003]V. Kluev, November 2003.

Steering Committee Member, ACM International Collegiat eProgramming Contest. Asian Regional Contest, Aizu, Japan
[vkluev-08:2003]V. Kluev, September 2003.

Member of International Scientific Committee of the The 4th WSEASInternational Conference on Applied Mathematics, Malta.