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Current Projects
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Image annotation is a very common task for medical research and clinics,
and
collaborative image annotation can bring participation of multiple users,
and
harness the collective intelligence. Most current medical image
annotation
applications, however, are workstation based applications (e.g., PACS
\cite{dicom} workstations), which make it very difficult to
collaboratively
review and annotate images from multiple users. Although Web-based
annotation
software can be supported with Java Applets, Flash, or ActiveX components,
cumbersome and insecure characteristics make users reluctant to use.
Moreover,
people are using their own proprietary methods to represent annotations,
and
there lacks a common data model for easily exchanging and visualizing
annotations. On the other hand, the evolution of Web technology is
transiting
to a new paradigm -- the Web is moving quickly on supporting interaction,
participation and collaboration. There are several new trends on Web
technology: i) Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is becoming
ubiquitous
and is making the Web more interactive; ii) JavaScript is becoming a
full-fledged scripting language; and iii) SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
becomes a standard language for vector graphics on the Web, which, indeed,
is
recently natively supported by latest web browsers. In fact, this brings a
new
opportunity to support collaborative image annotations on the Web. In our
work, we propose a general collaborative annotation data model for 2-D
images,
which can be implemented with SVG. Then we present a lightweight Web-based
authoring tool for image annotations, which is simply integrated into HTML
pages. Based on a collaboration server, we can easily support
collaborative
authoring, management, query and exchange of these annotations. Our
approach
is very general and can be used to support a number of new applications,
such
as Web-based collaborative annotations on medical images, personal photos
and
maps; and collaborative reviewing of documents and presentations.
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Contemporary imaging instruments make it very easy to produce
large-scale image data for medical diagnosis, part visualization and
inspection, content retrieval, analysis, e-reporting, and so on. In
many applications, service and non-textual annotations are made on
top of the raw images to provide essential information on regions of
interest, diseases, defects, evaluations, comments, and etc. These
applications pose several challenges: i) The data volume is often
huge, and the latency of data transfer over the Internet leads to a
performance bottleneck; ii) The applications need advanced query
support such as similarity queries on the multidimensional
annotation data; and iii) local applications need synchronizing data
with a remote central database. In particular, the non-traditional
database queries demand efficient access methods, which, however,
are limitedly supported in the current commercial DBMS. In our work,
we develop a general multimedia data management system that achieves
these goals by providing: i) an intelligent multimedia content
caching system; ii) a loosely coupled extensible multi-indexing
server to support different types of multimedia queries including
similarity queries; iii) unified multimedia data access interfaces;
and iv) an integrated architecture that brings these technologies
together. The system can be used to support image-based inspection
and diagnosis applications such as global part inspection and
knowledge database guided medical diagnosis.
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RFID technology can be used to significantly improve the efficiency of business
processes by providing the capability of automatic identification and data capture.
This technology poses many new challenges on current data management systems.
RFID data are time-dependent, dynamically changing, in large volumes,
and carry implicit semantics. RFID data management systems need to effectively
support such large scale temporal data created by RFID applications.
These systems need to have an explicit temporal data model for RFID data to support
tracking and monitoring queries. In addition, they need to have an automatic method
to transform the primitive observations from RFID readers into derived data used in
RFID-enabled applications. In this project, we present an integrated RFID data
management system -- Siemens RFID Middleware -- based on an expressive temporal
data model for RFID data. Our system enables semantic RFID data filtering and
automatic data transformation based on declarative rules, provides powerful
query support of RFID object tracking and monitoring, and can be adapted to
different RFID-enabled applications.
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Scientific research is becoming increasingly relied on collaborative
effort
among multiple institutions and inter-disciplinary consortium, through
sharing
experiments and data, and joint effort on analysis of data and results.
Scientific researchers need not only a convenient system to manage their
data, results, and the experiments that generate the results, but also a
platform to share these across multiple institutions, to pool expertise
and
validate approaches. In this project, we propose a very general
transformation-centric data model to represent scientific experiments, and
a
hierarchical data organization to link experiments across the consortium.
We
then propose to manage it based on metadata management, by concisely
capturing
the context of experiments. Finally, we build SciPort -- a collaborative
scientific research platform that provides a centralized integration of
metadata of scientific experiments and a virtual integration of experiment
data.
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Past Projects
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Poweful Archival Information Systems can be built by combining XML and
relational DBs. XML supports a temporally-grouped view of the
transaction-time history of the underlying DB, whereby powerful temporal
queries are expressed in XQuery (with no extension required). Internally,
RDBMSs support these temporal views and queries efficiently via SQL/XML.
Demo
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ICAP: Incorporating Change Management into Archival
Processes
The project aims at preserving and using temporal and multi-version functionality of the original record.
This project will enhance the basic archival ability to retrieve any version of an important record,
with the ability of comparing versions, retrieving changes between versions,
and asking historical queries on the editorial history of the electronic record and on the real-world information they contain.
Demo
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An NSF-IIS SGER, Science of Design, Collaborative
Research project. The objective is to develop the enabling DB
technology for information systems to gracefully adapt to changes.
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