Since a complete Chinese font has typically several thousand or more Chinese characters and symbols, and most of them are much more complicated than English alphabets, it takes a lot of time and efforts for even professional font engineers to create a Chinese font. Although several attempts had been made to synthesize Chinese characters from strokes and components, it is still not easy to synthesize so many Chinese characters at one time. In this paper, we present an easy and fast solution for an ordinary user to create a Chinese font of his or her handwriting style. We adopt the approach: to synthesize Chinese characters using components extracted from the user's handwritings. In the preprocessing phase, we built a Web interface for crowds to label the positions and sizes of components of every Chinese character in the target character set. The standard Kai font was selected as a reference. We also devised an algorithm to find a small subset of Chinese characters having all required components to synthesize other Chinese characters. To create a personal handwriting font, with commonly-used 3,914 traditional Chinese characters, a user only has to handwrite 400 or so Chinese characters on a pad. One character by one character, our system can track every stroke, recognize and extract components from the user's handwritings. Then, every target Chinese character is synthesized from the extracted components, by placing them properly according to their position and size information. The experiment results show that although manually fine-tune is still required for few synthesized Chinese characters, users can create a Chinese font of their personal handwriting styles more easily and quickly.

We present a system to detect seizure and spike in Epilepsy Electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis and characterize different epilepsy EEG types. After extracting features from three EEG types, Normal, Seizure and Spike, with Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), we do Analysis of variance (ANOVA) to classify conspicuous features and low-resolution features, and build Gaussian distributions of conspicuous features for probability density function (PDF) to do classification. Using EMD, the recognition rate improved from 70% to 90%. With ANOVA, the recognition rate can reach 99%. The linear model accelerates the system from 2 hours to 90 seconds compare to the previous approach.

Multiclass classification is an important technique to many complex biomedicine problems. Genetic algorithms (GA) are proven to be effective to select features prior to multiclass classification by support vector machines (SVM). However, their use is computation intensive. Based on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) design principles, this paper proposes a cloud computing framework that exploits the inherent parallelism of GA-SVM classification to speed up the work. The performance evaluations on an mRNA benchmark cancer dataset have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework. With a user-friendly web interface, the framework provides researchers an easy way to investigate the unrevealed secrets in the fast-growing repository of biomedical data.

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals play an important role in the diagnosis of epilepsy. In addition, multi-channel EEG signals have much more discrimination information than a single channel. However, traditional recognition algorithms of EEG signals are lack of multichannel EEG signals. In this paper, we propose a new method of epileptic seizure detection based on multichannel EEG signals. Both unipolar and bipolar EEG signals are considered in our approach. We make use of approximate entropy (ApEn) and statistic values to extract features. Furthermore, we tested the performance of four different Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The results reveal that the grid SVM achieves the highest totally classification accuracy (98.91%).

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, broadcast is required for many operations. For structured P2P networks, Ji Li et al. proposed to build a broadcast spanning tree so that each non-leaf peer forwards broadcast messages to its children along the tree. When peers are uniformly distributed, it is highly expected that a broadcast message will reach all peers by at most O(log N) hops, where TV is the network size. We study DHT-based P2P broadcast in finer time granularity. In a round, an activated peer - that has received the broadcast message - can send the message to a non-activated peer. In this paper, we present a fully-distributed algorithm to schedule the message forwardings of a non-leaf peer in a spanning tree. We use a bottom-up approach: each non-activated peer finds an activated peer along the path from its parent to the root. Simulation results show that the time required for broadcast is significantly reduced.

Many efforts in past years have been made to lower the linguistic barriers for non-native English speakers to access the Internet. Internet standard RFC 3490, referred to as IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications), focuses on access to IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) in a range of scripts that is broader in scope than the original ASCII. However, the use of character variants that have similar appearances and/or interpretations could create confusion. A variant IDL (Internationalized Domain Label), derived from an IDL by replacing some characters with their variants, should match the original IDL; and thus a variant IDN does. In RFC 3743, referred to as JET (Joint Engineering Team) Guidelines, it is suggested that zone administrators model this concept of equivalence as an atomic IDL package. When an IDL is registered, an IDL package is created that contains its variant IDLs generated according to the zone-specific Language Variant Tables (LVTs). In addition to the registered IDL, the name holder can request the domain registry to activate some of the variant IDLs, free or by an extra fee. The activated variant IDLs are stored in the zone files, and thus become resolvable. However, an issue of scalability arises when there is a large number of variant IDLs to be activated. In this article, the authors present a resolution protocol that resolves the variant IDLs into the registered IDL, specifically for Han character variants. Two Han characters are said to be variants of each other if they have the same meaning and are pronounced the same. Furthermore, Han character variants usually have similar appearances. It is not uncommon that a Chinese IDL has a large number of variant IDLs. The proposed protocol introduces a new RR (resource record) type, denoted as VarIdx RR, to associate a variant expression of the variant IDLs with the registered IDL. The label of the VarIdx RR, denoted as the variant index, is assigned by an indexing function that is designed to give the same value to all of the variant IDLs enumerated by the variant expression. When one of the variant IDLs is accessed, Internet applications can compute the variant index, look up the VarIdx RRs, and resolve the variant IDL into the registered IDL. The authors examine two sets of Chinese IDLs registered in TWNIC and CNNIC, respectively. The results show that for a registered Chinese IDL, a very small number of VarIdx RRs, usually one or two, are sufficient to activate all of its variant IDLs. The authors also represent a Web redirection service that employs the proposed resolution protocol to redirect a URL addressed by a variant IDN to the URL addressed by the registered IDN. The experiment results show that the proposed protocol successfully resolves the variant IDNs into the registered IDNs.

Traffic smoothing is an efficient means to reduce the bandwidth requirement for transmitting a variable-bit-rate video stream. Several traffic-smoothing algorithms have been presented to offline compute the transmission schedule for a prerecorded video. For live video applications, Sen present a sliding-window algorithm, referred to as SLWIN(k), to online compute the transmission schedule on the fly. SLWIN(k) looks ahead W video frames to compute the transmission schedule for the next k frametimes, where klesw. Note that W is upper bounded by the initial delay of the transmission. The time complexity of SLWIN(k) is O(W*N/k) for an N frame live video. In this paper, we present an O(N) online traffic-smoothing algorithm and two variants, denoted as FOS, FOS1 and FOS2, respectively. Note that O(N) is a trivial lower bound of the time complexity of the traffic-smoothing problem. Thus, the proposed algorithm is optimal. We compare the performance of our algorithms with SLWIN(k) based on several benchmark video clips. Experiment results show that FOS2, which adopts the aggressive workahead heuristic, further reduces the bandwidth requirement and better utilizes the client buffer for real-time interactive applications in which the initial delays are small

The composition of traditional domain names are restricted to ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens (abbreviated as LDH). This makes it difficult for many to use their native language to name and access their Internet hosts. The IETF IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) Working Group proposes a mechanism, IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications), for internationalized access to multilingual domain names. The proposal uses a preparation process that converts a Unicode IDN into an ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding) string that uses only LDH. Thus, applications can look up the ACE string by using the existing DNS infrastructure. However, some of the domain name strings embedded in multilingual content do not have any charset tag so they cannot appropriately be converted into ACE strings. We noticed that many Internet applications allow users to use non-ASCII domain names. We were motivated to design an architecture for IDN resolution as well as to minimize the cost of modifying legacy Internet applications. We specifically focus on designing an IDN server proxy, which is located on the domain name server side, to handle domain names in multiple encodings. In this article, we study several architecture design issues including detection of charset encoding, routing of non-ACE IDN lookup requests, and so on.With respect to these design issues, we present an IDN server proxy architecture which stores ACE IDNs in domain name servers. Note that traditional domain name servers can be used without modification. An IDN server proxy, called Octopus, is employed on the domain name server side. Octopus converts a non-ACE IDN string into ACE upon receiving an IDN lookup request from remote users or autonomous systems. The ACE string is then forwarded to backend domain name servers (where the traditional domain names and ACE IDNs are stored) for further processing. This allows Internet users to access IDNs without having to upgrade their software.Based on the design and implementation of Octopus, we deployed a CDN (Chinese domain name) trial in July 2002. In this article, we present the results of testing Octopus IDN lookup functions as well as our experiences in providing CDN Web services. Several types of errors can occur if applications are unable to handle IDNs adequately. For example, a Web browser may erroneously parse an IDN within a URL. Many legacy Web servers are unable to process the IDN of a virtual host. Web application servers may have trouble completing some actions such as redirecting Web pages to alternative Web pages. Our studies help service providers understand potential problems when non-ASCII domain names are used and the best common practice at this stage. As well, the experiences give some guidance for software developers to develop IDNA-compliant Internet applications.