We present a new approach for propagating spam scores in web graphs, in order to combat link spam. The resulting spam rating is then used for propagating popularity scores like PageRank. Both propagations work even in presence of censure links that represent distrust. Initial testing using a C++ prototype on small examples show more reasonable results than other published approaches.

This paper presents Adaptive Web Search (AWS), a novel search technique that combines personalized, social, and real-time collaborative search. Preliminary empirical results from a small sample suggest that an AWS prototype built on WAMP platform using Yahoo! Web Search API generates more relevant results and allows faster discovery of information.

Communication can be more effective when several media (such as text, speech, or graphics) are integrated and coordinated to present information. This changes the nature of media-specific generation (e.g., language or graphics generation), which must take into account the multimedia context in which it occurs. This paper presents work on coordinating and integrating speech, text, static and animated three-dimensional graphics, and stored images, as part of several systems we have developed at Columbia University. A particular focus of our work has been on the generation of presentations that brief a user on information of interest

We present a novel approach for anytime reasoning with probabilistic inequalities. In our anytime approach, the accuracy of results improve gradually as computation time increases, providing a trade-off between resource consumption and output quality. Our approach can be used for computing probabilities of arbitrary propositional clauses, is tractable in providing the initial approximate answers, and provides exact answers in the limiting case. Reasoning is made tractable by restricting it to a set of clauses in a control set that can be gradually enlarged as more resources are made available. We present three strategies that differ in the way constraints are generated from the clauses in the control set. We provide examples of our approach using an ignorant belief network.

An anytime family of propositional reasoners is a sequence |-/sub 0/,|-/sub 1/,...of inference relations such that each |-/sub k/ is sound, tractable, and makes more inferences than |-/sub k-1/, and each theory has a complete reasoner in the family. Anytime families are useful for resource-bounded reasoning in knowledge representation systems. We describe implementations of an anytime family {|-/sub k/} of clausal propositional reasoners using three different strategies. We present empirical results comparing the three strategies, the completeness of reasoning, the time for making inferences, and the space used for reasoning. Our results show that the reasoners with higher values of k infer significantly more formulas than reasoners with lower valves of k, and the time for inferencing decreases significantly as k is increased from 0 to 2.

Creating high-quality multimedia presentations requires much skill, time, and effort.This is particularly true when temporal media, such as speech and animation, are involved.We describe the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system that generates customized temporal multimedia presentations.We provide art overview of the system's architecture, and explain how speech, written text, and graphics are generated and coordinated.Our emphasis is on how temporal media are coordinated by the system through a multi-stage negotiation process.In negotiation, media-specific generation components interact with a novel coordination component that solves temporal constraints provided by the generators.We illustrate our work with a set of examples generated by the system in a testbed application intended to update hospital caregivers on the status of patients who have undergone a cardiac bypass operation.