Database Systems Laboratory

Sabhash Bhalla Associate Professor	Nadia L. Berthouze Assistant Professor

Many new large applications use database systems as a basic part for web data resources. This year the laboratory organized a 4th workshop on "Databases in Networked Information System (DNIS)" with international participation. It was held during March 28-30, 2005. The proceedings of the workshop were published by Speinger-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. A selected set of 25 manuscripts were presented at the workshop. The workshop was attended by experts and distinguished researchers as invited speakers. The distinguished guests delivered the state-of-the-art lectures on current research problems, and created a focused viewonnew research problems. many current aspects of web related research activity were discussed at the workshop. In addition to complexity in features such as multiple attributed data, many new types of raw data are emerging that need to be captured by DBMSs for information extraction. Many research efforts are being made to make suitable Object-Relational architectures for spatial databases. Most of the advances in techniques concentrate on capturing more meaning within data. Anumber of researchers are actively developing improved data management strategies using XML data. 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 on data modeling as well as transaction processing activity. Data Modeling for Spatial Objects 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 and components 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. Work-flow andWeb Services 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 the laboratory is building a web retrieval system 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. Prototype systems to access dynamic contents through web based information systems are in progress. These emulate mobile e-commerce activity in banking and Geographic Information Systems, for test and studies.

Refereed Journal Papers

[bhalla-01:2004]	Subhash Bhalla. Parallel Concurrency Control Activity for Transaction Management in Real-time Database Systems. The Journal of Supercomputing, 28:345-369, 2004.
	In a real-time database system, an application supports a mix of transactions. These include the real-time transactions that require completion by a given deadline. Time-critical requirements also exist in many distributed multi-media system applications. Existing concurrency control procedures introduce excessive delays due to non-availability of data resources. In this study, we ignore the delays incurred by ordinary transactions, in order to achieve a non-interference mode of execution (near parallel) for the time-critical transactions. For this purpose, a data allocation model has been studied. It is a stochastic process model based on the use of two-phase locking. It highlights the available possibilities for reductions of delays for time-critical transactions within a distributed real-time database systems. Based on the new conceptual model, modified synchronization techniques for time-critical transactions have been proposed.
[nadia-01:2004]	R. De Silva and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Modeling human affective postures: an information theoretic characterization of posture features. Journal of Coputational Agent and Virtual Word, 15(3):269-276, 2004.
	One of the challenging issues in affective computing is to give a machine the ability to recognize themood of aperson. Efforts in that direction havemainly focused on facial and oral cues. Gestures havebeen recently considered aswell, but with less success. Our aim is to fill this gap by identifying and measuring the saliency of posture features that play a role in affective expression. As a case-study, we collected a??ective gestures from human subjects using a motion capture system. We first described these gestures with spatial features, as suggestedin studies on dance.Throughstandard statistical techniques, weverified that there was a statistically significant correlation between the emotion intended by the acting subjects, and the emotion perceived by the observers. We used Discriminant Analysis to build affective posture predictive models and to measure the saliency of the proposed set of posture features in discriminating between 4 basic emotions: angry, fear, happy, and sad. An information theoretic characterization of the models shows that the set of features discriminates well between emotions, and also that the models built over-perform the human observers.
[nadia-02:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze and P. (Guest Editors) Mussio. Context and Emotion Aware Visual Interaction. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 2005.
	This special issue (two installments) discusses important questions and mechanisms underlying social interactive processes and elaborates on howto devise computational tools that support such processes. In the first installment, three papers focus on the criteria that should be taken into account when presenting and personalizing interactive tools that support affective processes. In the second installment, the contributions discuss the merits of computational and visual artifacts that use emotional expressions to support computer-mediated human-human interaction.

Referred Proceeding Papers

[bhalla-02:2004]	S. Bhalla, M. Hasegawa, E. L. D. L. Gutierrez, N. Berthouze, and T Izumita. An Interface for Web Based Access to Dynamic Contents. In Editor S. Bhalla, editor, Workshop on Databases in Networked Information Systems, pages 70-77, Germany, March 2005. LNCS Series editorial board, Springer Verlag.
	Many research efforts aim to provide access to database contents through the medium of the web. At the human end, manyweb users have little or no database query language skills. Most users are highly skilled at referring to tabular data, as in an Air-line time plan. Natural inclination exists among the users for object-by-object traction to find information. For example, for browsing through a book/handbook - users tend to locate objects and path by following an item-wise (step-by-step) link approach. We propose such an approach based on object based traction (calculations). It is termed as Object-by-Object Calculate (OBOC) approach. Many web users tend to reject the available SQL type or form based black-box approaches
[nadia-03:2004]	R. De Silva and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Measuring posture features saliency in expressing a??ective states. In P. Chen K. Deguchi, K. Hashimoto, editor, IEEE International conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS'04), pages 2003-2008, Sendai, September 2004. IEEE, Sendai Kyoto Printing Co.. LTD Japan.
	Today, creating systems that are capable of interacting naturally and efficiently with humans on many levels is essential. One step toward achieving this is the recognition of emotion from whole body postures of human partners. Currently, little research in this area exists in computer science. Therefore, ouraim is to identify andmeasurethe saliency of posture features that play a role in affective expression. As a case-study, we collected affective gestures from human subjects using a motion capture system. We first described these gestures with spatial features. Through standard statistical techniques, we verified that there was a statistically significant correlation between the emotion intended by the acting subjects, and the emotion perceived by the observers. We examined the use of Discriminant Analysis to measure the saliency of the proposed set of posture features in discriminating between 4 basic emotions: angry, fear, happy, and sad. Our results show that the set of features discriminates well between emotions, and also provides evidence about the strong overlap between descriptors in both acting and observing activities.
[nadia-04:2004]	L. Berthouze and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Affective appraisal of avatar postures: a FMRI study. In 11th Annual Meeting of Human Brain Mapping Organization, Toronto, June 2005. HBM.
	This study focuses on the processing of emotional expressiveness of postural information. An event-related fMRI study was realized in which eighteen subjects rated the emotional expressiveness of 30 ostures displayed in the form of an anthropomorphic avatar with no facial features. Cerebral activation was nalyzed by regressing the ratings of expressiveness for each stimulus with hemodynamic responses (parametric random-effect analysis, p < .05 FWE). The study shows the contribution of fusiform face-responsive areas to processing of expressiveness of postures, even when the stimulus is only a coarse approximation of a human body, and no facial cues are available.
[nadia-05:2004]	D.R. Wanasinghe, C.N.W. Giragama, and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Color tone Perception and naming: development in acquisition of color modifiers. In Editor M.P. Bekakos, editor, The 4th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'05), pages 21-40, Osaka, July 2005. IEEE.
	Color is one of the most obvious attributes with which children usually start to classify the objects they see. The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of children's ability to discriminate and name colors that varied in saturation and intensity for a given hue (i.e., color tones). Perceptual and naming behaviors were assessed in 171 children, aged between 8 and 15, grouped in two categories, elementary and junior high school. Fifty university students, aged between 19 and 24, were treated as a representative group of adult development. Color tone perception was observed through odd one out task and naming responses were obtained in terms of modifiers vivid, strong, dark, bright, dull, and pale. Results revealed that the discrimination of subtle variations of color tones in both groups was similar to that of the university students. We argue that the perception on color tones is already established by the age of elementary level. In addition, it was found that elementary school children reliably start interpreting their experience of such variations with just three modifier terms, bright, strong, and dark. The knowledge of colormodifier terms varied with age andwhen the naming task was constrained, a developmental order in the acquisition of such terms was observed. Salient dimensions underlying the judgments of color modifier terms were identified. The importance of each dimension varied with age. At the level of elementary, the semantic classification of color tones was strongly based on intensity only. For instance, in the elementary group, the three terms, bright, vivid, and pale, were used as synonyms when labeling color tones with high intensity. Finally, it was found that saturation only emerged as a reliable naming dimension in the junior high school group.
[nadia-06:2004]	A. Kleinsmith, T. Fushimi, and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. An incremental and interactive affective posture recognition system. In Workshop on Adapting the Interaction Style to Affective Factors, in conjunction with the International Conference on Unser Modeling. UM, July 2005.
	The role of body posture in affect recognition, and the importance of emotion in the development and support of intelligent and social behavior have been accepted and researched within several fields. While posture is considered important, much research has focused on extracting emotion information from dance sequences. Instead, our focus is on creating an affective posture recognition system that incrementally learns to recognize and react to people's affective behaviors. We tested and compared the performance of our system using 182 standing postures described as a combination of form features and motion flow features, across 4 emotion categories, with a typical algorithm used for recognition, back-propagation, and with human observers. The observed results indicate that the performance of our system was quite significant. We also created a simulated, interactive and continuous learning situation using a database of postures comprised of standing and sitting postures with 9 affective states. Again, positive results were attained. Our system could be implemented within educational software to enhance learning.
[nadia-07:2004]	A. Kleinsmith, R. De Silva, and N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition of Affective Body Postures. In P. Brna L. Ardissono and Editor A. Mitrovic, editors, International Conference on User Modeling '05, pages 50-59, Berlin Heidelberg, July 2005. UM, Springer Verlag, LNCS 3538.
	Abstract. The conveyance and recognition of human emotion and affective expression is influenced bymany factors, including culture. Within the area of user modeling, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the role affect can play in personalizing interactive interfaces using embodied animated agents. Currently, little research focuses on the importance of emotion expression through body posture. Furthermore, little research aims at understanding cultural di??erences within this vein. Therefore, our goal is to evaluate whether or not differences exist in the way various cultures perceive emotion from body posture.We used images of 3D affectively expressive avatars to conduct recognition experiments with subjects from 3 cultures. The subject's judgments were analyzed using multivariate analysis. We grounded the identified differences into a set of low-level posture features. Our results could prove useful for constructing affective posture recognition systems in crosscultural environments.

Books

[bhalla-03:2004]

Subhash Bhalla. Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS) 2005. Number 3433 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series. Springer-Verlag, Germany, 2005.

Grants

[nadia-08:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Ministry of Education Scientific Research Fund, 2003-2004.
[nadia-09:2004]	N Bianchi-Berthouze. University of Aizu, Competitive Grant, 2004-2005.

Academic Activities

[nadia-10:2004]	N Bianchi-Berthouze, October 2004. JSKE Member
[nadia-11:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2004. IEEE Member
[nadia-12:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze, 2004. ACM Member

Ph.D. and Other Theses

[bhalla-04:2004]	YutaAbe. Graduation Thesis: Query-By-Object: AGIS Interface For Supporting Web-Users, University of Aizu, 2005. Thesis Advisor: Bhalla, S.
[bhalla-05:2004]	Kio Banno. Graduation Thesis: Study and Comparison of High Speed Backup Algorithms, University of Aizu, 2005. Thesis Advisor: Bhalla, S.
[bhalla-06:2004]	Syougo Hamada. Graduation Thesis: Performance Evaluation of Transaction Management Using mixed Concurrency Control, University of Aizu, 2005. Thesis Advisor: Bhalla, S.
[bhalla-07:2004]	Mayumi Hashimoto. Graduation Thesis: Appearance Based Selection from Japanese Language Dictionary for Web Users, University of Aizu, 2005. Thesis Advisor: Bhalla, S.
[bhalla-08:2004]	Yusuke Noguchi. Graduation Thesis: Web-based Query Navigation for Accessing Database Contents, University of Aizu, 2005. Thesis Advisor: Bhalla, S.
[nadia-13:2004]	Kunihiro Doi. Graduation Thesis: An Interactive Environemnt for Affective Mouse Motion Analysis, University of Aizu, 2004. Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N.
[nadia-14:2004]	Tsuyoshi Fushimi. Master Thesis: A System for Automatically Recognizing Emotions from Human Posture, University of Aizu, 2004. Thesis Advisor: Bianchi-Berthouze, N.

Others

[nadia-15:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Grant Reviewer for HUMAINE (Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion), Network of Excellence in the EU's 6th Framework Programme, 2005-2008
[nadia-16:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Reviewer for the Journal of Cognitive Systems Research
[nadia-17:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. PC member for the international workshop DNIS, Aizu Wakanmatsu, Japan, March 2005
[nadia-18:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. PC member for the International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems (DMS), 2004
[nadia-19:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. PC member for HC'04, University of Aizu, 2004
[nadia-20:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. PC member for Epirob'05, Nara, 2005
[nadia-21:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Reviewer for Epirob'04, Genova (Italy), 2005
[nadia-22:2004]	N. Bianchi-Berthouze. Reviewer for IEEE International Conferences on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Alberta, 2005

2006 THE UNIVERSITY OF AIZU ALL RIGHTS RESERVED