International Computer Science Institute Research Articles

Silver Bullet Talks with Nick Weaver

Gary McGraw speaks with Nick Weaver, staff researcher at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute.

FinnFN 1.0: The Finnish frame semantic database

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.

Teaching Privacy: Multimedia Making a Difference

As part of the Teaching Privacy project, researchers at the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, are developing learning tools to empower K-12 students and college undergraduates in making informed choices about privacy. Teaching Privacy in part grew out of empirical research on the privacy implications of multimedia technology; this research generated a great deal of interest from teachers, who often want to provide students with guidance on online privacy but feel they are not sufficiently versed in the technical details. These interactions inspired the project, which focuses on working with teachers through outreach, curriculum-building, and professional development. This article describes the project team's interdisciplinary approach to developing and disseminating engaging, interactive educational apps that demonstrate what happens to personal information on the Internet, with a particular focus on multimedia, and their approach to explaining the underlying social and technical principles in accessible terms.

Frames and constructions enhance text coherence: The case of DNI resolutions in spoken discourse

AbstractThe paper reports on a corpus-based study investigating the impact of frames and constructions on establishing text coherence. Partly conducted in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute / FrameNet, Berkeley, the study is based on systematic annotations of so-called Definite Null Instantiations (DNIs). A DNI, sometimes also called anaphoric NI, is a syntactically non-instantiated core frame element (FE), whose identity can be inferred from the co(n)text. By analyzing forms and functions of DNIs in spoken discourse, I will argue that omitted core FEs are often found to be specified in adjacent sentences, yielding frame-triggered text coherence. The case study sheds light on the text-linguistic relevance of frames and constructions. At the same time it paves the way for further investigations of textual reference in a cognitive-linguistic framework.

On changing the culture of empirical internet assessment

editorial Free AccessOn changing the culture of empirical internet assessment Author: Mark Allman International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication ReviewVolume 43Issue 3July 2013 pp 78–83https://doi.org/10.1145/2500098.2500110Published:01 July 2013Publication History 6citation170DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations6Total Downloads170Last 12 Months27Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Encounters with Language

First of all, I am overwhelmed and humbled by the honor the ACL Executive Committee has shown me, an honor that should be shared by the colleagues and students I’ve been lucky enough to have around me this past decade-and-a-half while I’ve been engaged in the FrameNet Project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. I’ve been asked to say something about the evolution of the ideas behind the work with which I’ve been associated, so my remarks will be a bit more autobiographical than I might like. I’d like to comment on my changing views of what language is like, and how the facts of language can be represented. As I am sure the ACL Executive Committee knows, I have never been a direct participant in efforts in language engineering, but I have been a witness to, a neighbor of, and an indirect participant in some parts of it, and I have been pleased to learn that some of the resources my colleagues and I are building have been found by some researchers to be useful. I offer a record of my encounters with language and my changing views of what one ought to believe about language and how one might represent its properties. In the course of the narrative I will take note of changes I have observed over the past seven decades or so in both technical and conceptual tools in linguistics and language engineering. One theme in this essay is how these tools, and the representations they support, obscure or reveal the properties of language and therefore affect what one might believe about language. The time frame my life occupies has presented many opportunities to ponder this complex relationship.

Interview with Dr. Roberto Pieraccini, Director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, USA

Interview with Dr. Roberto Pieraccini, Director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, USA

The ICSI RT-09 Speaker Diarization System

The speaker diarization system developed at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) has played a prominent role in the speaker diarization community, and many researchers in the rich transcription community have adopted methods and techniques developed for the ICSI speaker diarization engine. Although there have been many related publications over the years, previous articles only presented changes and improvements rather than a description of the full system. Attempting to replicate the ICSI speaker diarization system as a complete entity would require an extensive literature review, and might ultimately fail due to component description version mismatches. This paper therefore presents the first full conceptual description of the ICSI speaker diarization system as presented to the National Institute of Standards Technology Rich Transcription 2009 (NIST RT-09) evaluation, which consists of online and offline subsystems, multi-stream and single-stream implementations, and audio and audio-visual approaches. Some of the components, such as the online system, have not been previously described. The paper also includes all necessary preprocessing steps, such as Wiener filtering, speech activity detection and beamforming.

Using Contiguous Bi-Clustering for data driven temporal analysis of fMRI based functional connectivity

Using Contiguous Bi-Clustering for data driven temporal analysis of fMRI based functional connectivity

Multimedia Education in Computer Science: A Little Bit of Everything Is Not Enough

Media Impact usually focuses on the practical impact of multimedia research on IT business. Yet given the pervasiveness of multimedia technology in our everyday life, a thorough reflection on the impact of multimedia progress on education and, in particular, multimedia education is overdue. Multimedia teachers at the 2007 ACM Multimedia conference engaged in a panel discussion on the current state and future of multimedia education. In this issue's,Wolfgang Hürst of Utrecht University and his colleagues Gerald Friedland of the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, and Lars Knipping of Berlin University of Technology use this panel as an opportunity to argue the need for a dedicated multimedia curriculum in computer science education.

Guest Editor's Introduction: 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

SINCE 1980, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy has been the premier annual forum for the presentation of scientific developments in information security and privacy technology, and for bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. It is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, in co-operation with The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The program committee of the 2005 conference received 192 submissions, and selected 17 papers to be presented, on the basis of excellence of scientific contribution. Out of these 17 high quality papers, the program committee selected three as the most highly rated papers for this special issue. In no particular order, they are: “Hardware-Assisted Circumvention of Self-Hashing Software Tamper Resistance” by P.C. van Oorschot, Anil Somayaji, and Glenn Wurster; “Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting” by Tadayoshi Kohno, Andre Broido, and K.C. Claffy; “Relating Symbolic and Cryptographic Secrecy” by Michael Backes and Birgit Pfitzmann. Like all scientific conferences, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy lives from the voluntary and hard work of many people. We wish to thank all of them-authors, reviewers, participants and organizers-but in particular the members of the program committee: William Arbaugh, Michael Backes, Josh Benaloh, Marc Dacier, Herve Debar, George Dinolt, Riccardo Focardi, Virgil Gligor, Peter Gutmann, Dogan Kesdogan, Helmut Kurth, Wenke Lee, Roy Maxion, John McHugh, Catherine Meadows, Radia Perlman, Birgit Pfitzmann, Joachim Posegga, Niels Provos, Josyula R. Rao, Michael Reiter Eric Rescorla, Rei SafaviNaini, Pierangela Samarati, Andrei Serjantov, Giovanni Vigna, Dan S. Wallach, Andreas Wespi, and Marianne Winslett. We also thank the anonymous journal reviewers of the three papers published in this special issue for their work. Vern Paxson received the MS and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been (and continues to be) a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Network Research Group for many years. He began at the ICIR group of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in 1999. His main active research projects are Bro, worms (including the network telescope project), DETER, and PREDICT. He has been the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM; program cochair for IEEE Security and Privacy 2005 (Program); and program committee member for SRUTI 2005, RAID 2005, ACSAC 2005, and USENIX/ACM NSDI ’05. He was on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking from 2000-2004.

Tightest constraint first: An efficient delay sensitive multicast routing algorithm

As a key issue in multicast routing with quality of service (QoS) support, constrained minimum Steiner tree (CMST) problem has been a research focus for more than a decade, and tens of heuristics have been developed to solve this NP-complete problem. Among all the previously proposed algorithms, the bounded shortest path algorithm (BSMA) (IEEE INFOCOM'95 1995; 1:377–385) have been proved to be capable of producing a multicast tree that has on average the lowest cost. However, such an excellent cost performance is accompanied with an extremely high time complexity. Recently, Feng et al. presented an alternative implementation of BSMA, which makes use of the latest research results on the delay-constrained least cost (DCLC) routing problem. Simulations indicate that, in comparison with the original implementation, the alternative implementation has a much lower time complexity with virtually identical cost performance, and it also runs much faster than many renowned heuristics such as KPP (IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1993; 1(3):286–292) and CAO (The design and evaluation of routing algorithms for real-time channels. Technical Report ICSI TR-94-024, International Computer Science Institute, University of California at Berkeley, June 1994). In this paper, we propose a brand new heuristic TCF, which is based on an idea called ‘tightest constraint first.’ TCF runs a DCLC heuristic only once for each destination and therefore has a provably low time complexity. We further propose an iterative heuristic ITCF, which uses TCF to obtain an initial tree and then gradually refines it. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, in the average sense, TCF can achieve a cost performance comparable to or better than that of BSMA, the cost performance of ITCF is even better than that of TCF, TCF runs approximately twice as fast as ITCF, and ITCF runs 2–4 times as fast as the best implementation of BSMA. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language understanding and subsequential transducer learning

Language Understanding can be considered as the realization of a mapping from sentences of a natural language into a description of their meaning in an appropriate formal language. Under this viewpoint, the application of the Onward Subsequential Transducer Inference Algorithm (OSTIA) to Language Understanding is considered. The basic version of OSTIA is reviewed and a new version is presented in which syntactic restrictions of the domain and/or range of the target transduction can effectively be taken into account. For experimentation purposes, a task proposed by Feldman, Lakoff, Stolcke and Weber (1990) (International Computer Science Institute, Berkley, California) for assessing the capabilities of language learning and understanding systems has been adopted and three semantic coding schemes have been defined for this task with different sources of difficulty. In all cases the basic version of OSTIA has proved consistently to be able to learn very compact and accurate transducers from relativly small training sets of input–output examples of the task. Moreover, if the input sentences are corrupted with syntactic incorrectness or errors, the new version of OSTIA still provides understandable results that only degrade in a gradual and natural way.

Distributed registration and key distribution (DiRK) : R. Oppliger, University of Berne, Institute for Computer Science, Berne, Switzerland and Andres Albanese, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA

Distributed registration and key distribution (DiRK) : R. Oppliger, University of Berne, Institute for Computer Science, Berne, Switzerland and Andres Albanese, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA

DESIGNING A CONNECTIONIST NETWORK SUPERCOMPUTER

This paper describes an effort at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute to develop a supercomputer for artificial neural network applications. Our perspective has been strongly influenced by earlier experiences with the construction and use of a simpler machine. In particular, we have observed Amdahl's Law in action in our designs and those of others. These observations inspire attention to many factors beyond fast multiply-accumulate arithmetic. We describe a number of these factors along with rough expressions for their influence and then give the applications targets, machine goals and the system architecture for the machine we are currently designing.

A control-theoretic approach to flow control

article Free Access Share on A control-theoretic approach to flow control Author: Srinivasan Keshav Computer Science Division, Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA Computer Science Division, Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication ReviewVolume 21Issue 4Sept. 1991 pp 3–15https://doi.org/10.1145/115994.115995Online:01 August 1991Publication History 500citation2,221DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations500Total Downloads2,221Last 12 Months183Last 6 weeks17 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF