Sharif Digital Repository

Clustering has become an increasingly important and highly complicated research area for targeting useful and relevant information in modern application domains such as the World Wide Web. Recent studies have shown that the most commonly used partitioning-based clustering algorithm, the K-means algorithm, is more suitable for large datasets. However, the K-means algorithm may generate a local optimal clustering. In this paper, we present novel document clustering algorithms based on the Harmony Search (HS) optimization method. By modeling clustering as an optimization problem, we first propose a pure HS based clustering algorithm that finds near-optimal clusters within a reasonable time.... 

In this research, a web-based simulator is developed, which can be used for generating image sequences of moving spermatozoa cells. It can be used for assessment of multiple object tracking algorithms, especially Computer Aided Sperm Analysis (CASA) systems. The developed software has many useful parameters such as blurring images or adding noise and it also gives full control of sperm counts and types. To illustrate performance of the developed simulator, three parameters (spermatozoa population, standard deviation of Gaussian blur filter and noise intensity) have been swept and the results of three different multiple object tracking algorithms were compared as an application of this... 

Exceptions are an indispensable part of the software development process. However, developers usually rely on imprecise results from a web search to resolve exceptions. More specifically, they should personally take into account the context of an exception, then, choose and adapt a relevant solution to solve the problem. In this paper, we present Exception Tracer, an Eclipse plug in that helps developers to resolve exceptions with respect to the stack trace in Java programs. In particular, Exception Tracer automatically provides candidate solutions to an exception by mining software systems in the Source Forge, as well as listing relevant discussions about the problem from the Stack Overflow... 

Nowadays, a great amount of information is circulated through the Internet. Some of them exclusively belong to a special group of users and require protection and safeguarding against unauthorized access. To this end, a category of systems called HIP (Human Interactive Proof) are designed to distinguish between various groups of users. An important task on the Internet websites is registration. Some hackers write programs to make fake registration that waste the resources of the web sites or even stop them from providing services. Therefore, human users should be distinguished from computer programs. CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computer and Human Apart) methods... 

Web is one of the biggest sources of information. The tremendous size, the dynamicity, and the structure of the Web have made the information retrieval process of the web a challenging issue. Web Search Engines (WSEs) have started to help users with this matter. However, these types of application, to perform more effectively, always need current information about many characteristics of the Web. To determine these characteristics, one way is to use statistical sampling of the Web pages. In this kind of approaches, instead of analyzing a large number of Web pages, a rather smaller and more uniform set of Web pages is used. This research attempts to analyze the presented methods for... 

Clustering search results helps the user to overview returned results and to focus on the desired clusters. Most of search result clustering methods use title, URL and snippets returned by a search engine as the source of information for creating the clusters. In this paper we propose a new method for search results clustering (SRC) which uses social annotations as the main source of information about web pages. Social annotations are high-level descriptions for web pages and as the experiments show, clustering based on social annotations yields good clusters with informative labels. © 2008 Springer-Verlag  

XML has emerged as a common standard for data exchange over the World Wide Web. One way to manage XML data is to use the power of relational databases for storing and querying them. So the hierarchical XML data should be mapped into flat relational structure. In this paper we propose an algorithm which maps DTD to relational schema and as well as content and structure it preserves the functional dependencies during the mapping process in order to produce relations with less redundancy. This is done by categorizing functional dependencies and introducing four rules to be applied to the relations created by the hybrid inlining algorithm according to each category. These rules will reduce... 

One of the distributed solutions for scaling Web Search Engines (WSEs) may be peer-to-peer (P2P) structures. P2P structures are successfully being used in many systems with lower cost than ordinary distributed solutions. However, the fact that they can also be beneficial for large-scale WSEs is still a controversial subject. In this paper, we introduce challenges in using P2P structures to design a large-scale WSE. Considering different types of P2P systems, we introduce possible P2P models for this purpose. Using some quantitative evaluation, we compare these models from different aspects to find out which one is the best in order to construct a large-scale WSE. Our studies indicate that... 

In this paper, we present a new and fast algorithm for generating the seeds set for web crawlers. A typical crawler normally starts from a fixed set like DMOZ links, and then continues crawling from URLs found in these web pages. Crawlers are supposed to download more good pages in less iterations. Crawled pages are good if they have high PageRanks and are from different communities. In this paper, we present a new algorithm with O(n) running time for generating crawler's seeds set based on HITS algorithm. A crawler can download qualified web pages, from different communities, starting from generated seeds set using our algorithm in less iteration  

Clustering is one of the most important approaches for mining and extracting knowledge from the web. In this paper a method for clustering the web data is presented which using a Bayesian network, finds appropriate representatives for each of the clusters. Having those representatives, we can create more accurate clusters. Also the contents of the web pages are converted into vectors which firstly, the number of dimensions is reduced, and secondly the orthogonality problem is solved. Experimental results show about the high quality of the resultant clusters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007  

Graph data structures are fundamental for studying connected entities. With an increase in the number of applications where data is represented as graphs, the problem of graph generation has recently become a hot topic. However, despite its significance, conditional graph generation that creates graphs with desired features is relatively less explored in previous studies. This paper addresses the problem of class-conditional graph generation that uses class labels as generation constraints by introducing the Class Conditioned Graph Generator (CCGG). We built CCGG by injecting the class information as an additional input into a graph generator model and including a classification loss in its... 

Context Event-Driven Software (EDS) is a class of software whose behavior is driven by incoming events. Web and desktop applications that respond to user-initiated events on their Graphical User Interface (GUI), or embedded software responding to events and signals received from the equipment in its operating environment are examples of EDS. Testing EDS poses great challenges to software testers. One of these challenges is the need to generate a huge number of possible event sequences that could sufficiently cover the EDS's state space. Objective In this paper, we introduce a new six-stage testing procedure for event-driven web applications to overcome EDS testing challenges. Method The... 

Web Engineering has been enriched with processes and modeling languages that focus on the specific features of web-based systems, taking into account the special requirements and constraints that are associated with this specific context. Process Patterns, on the other hand, represent elements of knowledge and experience in software engineering; they also act as reusable method chunks that can be used for constructing bespoke methodologies that are tailored to fit specific project situations. We propose a set of process patterns based on current web development practices. A number of prominent web development methodologies have been studied, and a set of process patterns has been elicited... 

"Web 2.0" refers to a second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. The truth is that Web 2.0 is a difficult term to define, even for web experts. Usually phrases like "the web as platform" and "architecture of participation" are used to describe this term. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. The Internet is changing medicine and Web 2.0 is the current buzz word in the World Wide Web dictionary. Radiology in the Web 2.0 probably refers to... 

Progressive use of Web based information retrieval systems such as general purpose search engines and dynamic nature of the Web make it necessary to continually maintain Web based information retrieval systems. Crawlers facilitate this process by following hyperlinks in Web pages to automatically download new and updated Web pages. Freshness (recency) is one of the important maintaining factors of Web search engine crawlers that takes weeks to months. Many large Web crawlers start from seed pages, fetch every links from them, and continually repeat this process without any policies that help them to better crawling and improving performance of those. We believe that data mining techniques... 

Recommendation plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Recommender systems automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Recent studies illustrate that incorporating social trust in Matrix Factorization methods demonstrably improves accuracy of rating prediction. Such approaches mainly use the trust scores explicitly expressed by users. However, it is often challenging to have users provide explicit trust scores of each other. There exist quite a few works, which propose Trust Metrics to compute and predict trust scores between users based on their interactions. In this paper, first we present how social relation can be extracted from users'... 

Recommendation plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Recommender systems automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Recent studies illustrate that incorporating social trust in Matrix Factorization methods demonstrably improves accuracy of rating prediction. Such approaches mainly use the trust scores explicitly expressed by users. However, it is often challenging to have users provide explicit trust scores of each other. There exist quite a few works, which propose Trust Metrics to compute and predict trust scores between users based on their interactions. In this paper, first we present how social relation can be extracted from users'... 

Clustering has become an increasingly important task in modern application domains. Targeting useful and relevant information on the World Wide Web is a topical and highly complicated research area. Clustering techniques have been applied to categorize documents on web and extracting knowledge from the web. In this paper we propose novel clustering algorithms based on Harmony Search (HS) optimization method that deals with web document clustering. By modeling clustering as an optimization problem, first, we propose a pure HS based clustering algorithm that finds near global optimal clusters within a reasonable time. Then we hybridize K-means and harmony clustering to achieve better... 

In some websites it is necessary to distinguishing between human users and computer programs which is known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart). CAPTCHA methods are mainly based on the weak points of OCR systems and using them are undesirable to human users. In this paper a method has been presented for distinguishing between human users and computer programs on the basis of choice of an object shown on the screen. In this method some objects are chosen randomly and the pictures of these topics are downloaded from the Internet. Then after applying some effects such as rotation, all of the pictures are shown on the screen. Then we ask the... 

Web services foster functionality of current web to service oriented architecture. Nascent semantic web is capable of automating activities by annotating shared ontological semantics to documents and services. Although, a zillion web services with diversity have been made since the inception of its diffusion, it is not a panacea for software development and it is still in its infancy. A middle agent (broker) simplifies the interaction of service providers and service requester, especially in the case that an atomic web service cannot fulfill user's need. The broker composes a desired value-added service and orchestrates the execution of bundled sub-processes. It is inevitable that several...