ACM President David Patterson Elected to National Academy
of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
AScribe Newswire (04/27/06)
ACM President David Patterson has been elected to the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) as well as to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Patterson is a professor of computer science at the University of
California, Berkeley, and one of the few computer scientists to achieve
such recognition. He is the founding director of the Berkeley campus' new
RAD (Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems) Laboratory, which was
announced in December 2005. The RAD Lab will strive to design computing
systems that are more reliable, and is being underwritten by Google,
Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. Patterson has also been instrumental in
designing RISC 1, which formed the basis of the SPARC architecture used by
firms such as Sun Microsystems. He also led the Redundant Arrays of
Inexpensive Disks (RAID) project, which has helped create reliable storage
system for many firms. Patterson's teaching has also been recognized by
the ACM, the IEEE, and the University of California.
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Pioneering Leaps in Technology: From Heart Surgery to
Virtual Reality
Business Wire (04/26/06)
A total of 36 technologies will be displayed in Boston at the SIGGRAPH
2006 Emerging Technologies program, and attendees will be permitted to
interact with the technologies. The three dozen technologies, which were
chosen from a total of 110 submissions from 18 countries, provide insight
into how humans and digital systems will interact in the future. The 36
technologies that were chosen represent the most thought-provoking and
technically astute of the submissions, including an open heart surgery
simulator, a forehead retina system, and a virtual humanoid "companion"
that is capable of reacting to tactile interactions with its caregiver.
The technology submissions come from universities, research labs,
independents, and members of industry. The open heart surgery simulator,
submitted by Denmark's University of Aarhus, is a virtual training program
for complex surgical procedures in congenital heart disease, allowing
surgeons to rehearse open-heart surgery. The virtual humanoid melds
several technologies, including artificial intelligence and mixed reality,
and is capable of distinguishing between petting, slapping, tickling,
scratching, and other tactile interactions. It has future applications as
a companion and automatic medical communicator. Some 25,000 computer
graphics and interactive technology professionals from across the world are
expected to attend the SIGGRAPH event.
For more on SIGGRAPH 2006, or to register, visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/
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CFP: IEEE/WIC/ACM Web Intelligence 2006
Digital Opportunity Channel (04/28/06)
In the fields of artificial intelligence and advanced information
technology, one of the most important developments today is Web
intelligence (WI). This year, the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International
Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'06) will be held in December in
conjunction with the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on
Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'06) and the 6th IEEE International
Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'06). The aim is to provide synergism
within these three research areas. Participants will have opportunities
for collaboration that go beyond those at previous conferences. The three
meetings will have a shared opening, keynote, reception, and banquet, and
participants are required to register only once to attend events at all
three summits. Scheduled topics for discussion include distributed
resources optimization, data stream mining, knowledge grids, Web
information indexing, context aware computing, and soft computing. Papers
related to WI can be submitted online and will be reviewed on the basis of
technical soundness, relevance, and clarity, and the best papers will
receive awards.
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Need More Engineers? Recruit Women
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (04/27/06) Wei, Belle
The United States produces 60,000 engineers per year, compared with
350,000 produced by India and 600,000 produced by China. President Bush
recently visited Silicon Valley to address this disturbing gap, which
threatens America's ability to remain competitive technologically, writes
Belle Wei, dean of the college of engineering at San Jose State University.
Bush and the Democratic Innovation Agenda are proposing to close the
engineering gap with a plan that includes funding for advanced placement
science and math teachers and grants and scholarships to needy students in
science and engineering programs. While this initiative should be
commended, it does nothing to encourage more women to become engineers.
Women, the largest U.S. demographic group, remain a largely untapped
resource for engineering, with just 0.5 percent of female freshman students
majoring in engineering or computer science in 2003, compared with 4.25
percent in the early 1980s. "Overall interest in computer science among
women fell 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak
in 1982," says UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute. The best way to
attract more female engineering students is to show them that the field can
be applied in ways that are useful to them and to the rest of society--it
should be stressed, for example, that engineering has applications in the
arts, education, and saving lives. This is important because, according to
a Carnegie Mellon study, female students find computing more attractive
when it is taught in a manner that emphasizes its social applications.
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Nokia Phones Go to Natural Language Class
Technology Review (04/27/06) Bourzac, Katherine
As part of a research collaboration with computer scientists at MIT, the
Nokia Research Center Cambridge in Cambridge, Mass. is working on
developing cell phones that can interpret and respond to written commands
typed in English. The phones use a Web-based software system called Start,
which was developed in 1993 by Boris Katz, lead research scientist at MIT's
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Group, the principal group
working with Nokia. The software interprets a question the user types into
a text field by breaking it down into a series of relationships between
object, property, and value. After Start interprets the question, it
decides where to look for the answer--either in its database or another Web
site--and responds with a written explanation, a link to a Web site, or an
image. The cell phone version of this software, called MobileStart, has a
number of potential applications, such as giving a lost user directions to
his destination from his current location. MobileStart will also enable
people to use their cell phones to communicate with other devices. For
example, a user could tell a MobileStart phone to "remind my mother to take
her medicine at three tomorrow," and the application would set up an alarm
in the mother's phone calendar if she also has a MobileStart phone.
However, the system may begin to bog down when called on to perform more
complicated tasks, such as when a user tells it to "call Joe" when there is
more than one Joe in the phone's address book. But perhaps the biggest
challenge, according to Katz, is programming MobileStart to correctly
interpret commonly used text-messaging shorthand, such as using the number
"2" instead of the word "to."
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Your Thoughts Are Your Password
Wired News (04/27/06) Sandhana, Lakshmi
Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, believe it may be
possible to observe a brain signal that is encoded with thousands of bits
of information in a repeatable manner. Julie Thorpe, Anil Somayaji, and
Adrian Chan are pursuing the idea of developing a system that would enable
people to log on by thinking "yes" or "no" to a "pass thought," such as the
memory of a birthday, or a predetermined song, picture, or video clip. The
biometric security tool would monitor the individual's brain activity, and
unlike other biometric security devices, would also allow people to change
their pass code occasionally. The project builds on the research of those
working to develop a brain-computer interface (BCI) that would allow
prosthetic devices to read the brain-wave signals of people who are
disabled. The project has its doubters in Iead Rezek, of the Pattern
Analysis Research Group at the University of Oxford, and Jacques Vidal, a
BCI expert in the computer science department of UCLA. Rezek says picking
up signals would be "akin to recognizing speakers from muffled voices
because, for example, the speakers are some distance away." Vidal contends
that "the link between thought and brain waves is immensely indirect." The
Carleton researchers face other challenges, including designing a system
that is able to recognize the changes in the signature of a pass thought
over time, and making it more convenient to transmit brain signals without
having to wear an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap, smeared with conductive
gel, on the head.
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New Software Protects Confidentiality of Data While
Enabling Access and Sharing
Penn State Live (04/27/06) Hopkins, Margaret; DuBois, Charles
Researchers at Penn State have developed new software called the
Privacy-preserving Access Control Toolkit (PACT) that enables databases to
communicate with one another automatically without compromising the
security of the data and metadata. The software acts like a filter but is
protected from eavesdropping and other attacks because the queries and
other information are encrypted. PACT could prove to be beneficial to
organizations such as government agencies, non-profits, and corporations,
which frequently need to access data belonging to other organizations.
Sharing data is normally difficult for these organizations because
databases are usually constructed using different terms or vocabularies.
As a result, organizations have to develop special-purpose applications in
order to share data. But these applications must also address security,
since organizations need to protect sources, intellectual property, and
competitive advantages. These applications are often time consuming to
develop, and are expensive since they have limited use. But PACT is more
generic--which means that it can be applied to a wide range of scenarios,
said Prasenjit Mitra, assistant professor of information sciences and
technology at Penn State and a member of the research team that developed
the software. In addition, researchers note that PACT is the first
software to provide a framework that protects metadata while enabling
"semantic operation" or sharing of information. Results from the
researchers' experiments also demonstrate that PACT can be easily extended
to large database systems in practical locations, Mitra said.
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Telecoms Groups Win 'Net Neutrality' Battle in
Congress
Financial Times (04/27/06) P. 4; Waldmeir, Patti; Johnson, Jenny
Wednesday's defeat in the House Energy and Commerce Committee of a
Democrat-sponsored amendment to prevent telecoms and cable companies from
charging higher fees for priority access to high-speed networks represents
a major win for big corporate interests in the battle over "net
neutrality." The telecoms companies claim it would be impossible to build
networks that offer broadband services without provisions to charge more
for faster transmission speeds, while civil libertarians, Internet content
companies, and consumer groups counter that such as move would endanger the
freedom of the Internet and put a chokehold on innovation. Net neutrality
amendment supporter Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) warned that price
differentiation would erect insurmountable obstacles for startups that can
ill afford to compete with established firms offering their services in the
fast Internet traffic lane. Prior to yesterday's vote, the AARP, Consumers
Union, the Consumer Federation of America, and other influential consumer
organizations sent a letter to the House committee arguing that net
neutrality was "the first amendment of the Internet." They said American
consumers had only a few broadband options open to them, and given the low
level of competition, "it is imperative that consumers enjoy the fruits of
a non-discriminatory marketplace."
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Virtual World Meets the Real World
MSNBC (04/26/06) Boyle, Alan
The movie "Minority Report" features futuristic surveillance technology
that may not be too distant a reality thanks to the work of researchers at
the University of Southern California. The USC Geospatial Decision Making,
or GeoDec, project integrates real-time data layering, live video, and
existing visualization databases such as Google Earth and MSN Virtual Earth
with querying capabilities. Using a haptic glove, images can be
manipulated, depending on the needs of the user. "Once you have all the
data about the area, in addition to just visualizing what's there with the
3D models and the video and so on, you can start asking questions," says
computer scientist Cyrus Shahabi, one of the leaders of the USC research
team. "You might say, 'I want to see all the accidents in this area." Or
you might ask where's the best place to catch a bus to so and so or what
trees need trimming due to proximity to power lines. The tool could be
used for urban planning, emergency response, or even during war time.
"It's Web-based," said USC graduate student Arjun Rihan during a
demonstration earlier this month, "so you could have somebody in another
aircraft or location looking at this on a PDA, so you're looking at the
same information." But commercialization of the product is likely still
years away, say project participants.
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Purdue Libraries, IT Team Up to Create Data-Management
Solutions
Purdue University News (04/21/06)
The Distributed Institutional Repository project, a collaboration between
Purdue Libraries and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), is expected
to enable researchers to store, sort, and archive data and information.
The Web-based data portal will allow researchers to use available tools to
manipulate and discover the origins of data, but first, researchers need to
identify metadata, develop vocabularies for the system, test applications,
and create and categorize data sets. Not only will the system use a single
software, but also it will provide access to electronic dissertations
e-prints and archival special collections. The repository will store data
from traditional journals and books, Web pages, digital videos, electronic
documents, and future data sources. The system should improve the ability
of researchers to efficiently gather and use data from across the
university campus. Researchers are hopeful that the project will reveal
the best ways for the university and others to overcome interoperability
issues of data, digital rights management concerns, how intellectual
property should be shared, and the best length and format for digital data
archival storage purposes. Krishna Madhaven, project leader with ITaP's
Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, says, "Projects like this are another
example of how we are bridging discovery and learning in non-traditional
ways. We're starting to see the big picture of how large data computation,
learning, research and network are coming together."
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Technology to Improve Learning for Visually-Impaired
Children
IST Results (04/27/06)
Haptics and multimodal-human-computer interaction leaders in Europe and
other parts of the world are using a common software architecture to
develop interfaces and applications that visually-impaired children can use
to handle data, work with and communicate with others, and be creative.
The IST program is funding the construction of the multimodal software
architecture, and participants in the MICOLE project have begun to test
interfaces and application prototypes. The use of haptic technology will
allow the visual applications to also take advantage of the sense of touch,
and the multimodal capability enables the system to accommodate users'
different levels of disability using touch and hearing. "The system adapts
to the users," says project coordinator Roope Raisamo of the University of
Tampere in Finland. "It is aimed at visually-impaired children, but
because it facilitates collaboration among sighted and visually-impaired
children, its also supports sighted children." An electronic browser,
rhythm reproduction, post-its with a haptic bar code, virtual maracas
(percussion instruments), a tactile maze game, memory games, a haptic
version of Pong, and explorative learning of the internal layers of the
earth are among the interfaces and application prototypes that have been
developed or tested so far. A three-year initiative, the MICOLE project
will continue until August 2007.
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Computer Engineers Look at Mona Lisa
Belleville News-Democrat (IL) (04/24/06) Kline, Greg
University of Illinois computer and electrical engineering professor
Thomas Huang continues to receive requests to use facial-recognition
software to analyze art work. The technology gained international
attention in December when it was used to study the emotional state of the
model in Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting. Among other examinations
of paintings, the facial-recognition software has since been used to
analyze Mona Lisa to determine the likely gender of the subject, which has
come under question in the art world. Some art critics have speculated
that the portrait may not have been of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a
successful silk merchant from Florence, but possibly of da Vinci himself,
his mother, a female friend, the Duchess of Milan Isabella of Aragon, or
another man. There is a 60 to 40 probability that the painting is of a
female, according to the recent test. When the Human-Computer Intelligent
Interaction group at the university's Beckman Institute is not using the
facial-recognition software for such exercises, Huang, his colleagues, and
students are focused on applying the technology to security systems and to
computers so that they can recognize individuals. Huang also believes
banks could use the technology so that "smart kiosks" can determine the
identity of the user and respond in a specific manner to the particular
customer.
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Should Owners of Web Sites Be Anonymous?
Wall Street Journal (04/27/06) P. B1; Bulkeley, William M.
ICANN appears to be on track to adopt revised rules concerning the
disclosure of Web site registrants' contact information in the Whois
database. Privacy advocates convinced the ICANN committee that oversees
Whois to restrict such information only to people who can fix technical
"configuration" problems with a Web site, rather than including the name,
phone number, and street address of staffers to resolve technical as well
as administrative problems. Supporters of the rule changes say the
disclosure regulations were designed to ensure the availability of someone
to address Web site problems that were disrupting the broader network, and
the revisions dovetail with the Web's original goals for allowing
free-wheeling communications. The Electronic Privacy Information Center's
Marc Rotenberg says the changes uphold privacy and make bloggers and other
individuals who run their own sites less vulnerable to stalkers or
lawsuits, but government and corporate investigators worry that reduced
disclosure requirements will make it harder to identify the owners of
fraudulent sites and trademark violators. ICANN's decision to restrict
disclosure in Whois is a sign "that ICANN isn't under the control of
trademark interests and the U.S. government," according to Syracuse
University professor Milton Mueller, who warns that the government may
attempt to bypass the amended regulations. A member of an ICANN task force
says the U.S. government wants more disclosure, not less. Rotenberg says
the government desires the U.S.-based ICANN to govern the Internet rather
than the United Nations, which makes it vital for ICANN to operate as an
independent body.
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IBM Eyes Programming for the Masses
CNet (04/26/06) LaMonica, Martin
IBM vice president of emerging technology Rod Smith will tout QEDwiki, or
quick and easily done wiki, at the PHP Web development conference on
Wednesday. The tool enables users to create their own Web pages by
dragging and dropping online content onto a pallet. Thus, businesspersons
can create their own applications without the need for professional
programmers. The platform uses AJAX scripting and a wiki on a server to
gather and disseminate data. "These ideas of enterprise mashups are
getting a lot of attention from IT shops," Smith says. "All of a sudden,
we're seeing a new generation of applications come out." Smith the says
the end-user programming tool should be released on the company's emerging
technology Alphaworks Web site this year.
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France Launches 'Quaero' Search Engine Project
EE Times (04/25/06) Pele, Anne-Francoise
Google is expected to have a new search engine rival in a multimedia
offering from France. "Quaero," which means "I search for" in Latin, is
part of a new technological, industrial, and economic development program
that France is investing about $2.5 billion in to ensure that the nation
remains competitive in the years to come. France has teamed up with
Germany to develop multimedia software that people will be able to use on
computers and mobile phones to conduct searches. "Quaero, defined as a
digital information process and an easy access to multimedia content, is a
major Franco-German project built with Thomson, France Telecom, and
Exalead," French President Jacques Chirac said on Tuesday. "Faced with
exponential growth of search engines, France, with its German partners and
tomorrow, I hope, its European partners, had to draw level with this key
challenge." In addition to funding from France and Germany, the Quaero
project will receive another $110 million or so from the French Agency for
Industrial Innovation (All), which is managing the implementation of the
development program. France announced five other projects, including an
effort to develop a standard for bringing television to mobile phones.
Sagem Communications, Aliena Space Philips, and the National Center for
Scientific Research are all participating on the approximately $120 million
Mobile TV Without Limits (TVMSL) project, which is receiving roughly $47
million from All.
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Google's China Problem (And China's Google
Problem)
New York Times Magazine (04/23/06) P. 64; Thompson, Clive
Google is taking a lot of flak from U.S. lawmakers for complying with the
Chinese government's directives to censor Internet content and stifle free
speech in China. Domestic Chinese Internet firms such as Baidu appeal to
young people who are nationalistic and attracted to pirated online content,
which is so commonplace in China that there are few protections against it,
while Google has been a hit with big-city, white-collar Chinese
professionals with more cosmopolitan attitudes. However, access to Google
was blocked by the Chinese government for two weeks in 2002, and it has
been speculated that the driving force behind the shutdown was a domestic
competitor--perhaps Baidu--that wanted to get Google out of the way, and
complained to the government that the U.S. search engine was allowing
people to access illicit content. Google decided that it would adhere to
the government's requirement to block access to politically sensitive Web
sites, pornography, and other content deemed objectionable by Chinese
authorities while alerting users that such information is being withheld
through disclaimers displayed on google.cn. Google co-founder Sergey Brin
has argued that Google's Chinese operations still uphold the spirit of
self-empowerment his company embodies by giving users access to other
information. The Chinese government uses vague language to describe
material that should be censored, leaving Internet companies to decide for
themselves what content falls into this category; through a combination of
self-censorship and hard penalties for offenders, the government ensures
that Chinese Internet executives attempt to censor as much content as
possible. Chinese censorship practices are not concealed from the public,
which may have helped contribute to a general disinterest among Chinese
citizens toward democracy. Kai-Fu Lee, director of Google's China
operations, believes the Internet by itself will sow the seeds of democracy
in China by giving young, apolitical users a platform for public speech.
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Average IT Manager Makes $99,000, Staffer $73,000,
Information Week Survey Finds
Information Week (04/24/06)No. 1086, P. 55; McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
With the average IT manager earning $99,000 a year, and the average
staffer pulling in $73,000, technology workers are not going hungry, though
it is only through bonuses, rather than base pay, that IT pay is keeping up
with inflation, according to a recent survey. While median base salaries
only increased by a little more than 1 percent this year, overall
compensation increased 3 percent for staffers and 4 percent for managers,
finally surpassing the median pay rate of 2001. The median pay for
managers exceeded $100,000 in 10 categories, compared with just six last
year. The most lucrative areas for managers are data mining, human
resources IT, Web infrastructure, ERP, and enterprise application
integration. At 8 percent of total pay, bonuses accounted for the largest
portion of IT managers' salaries since 2001, when they capped out at 18
percent of overall compensation. Staff received 4 percent of their
compensation through bonuses, well off the 2001 mark of 16 percent.
Personal performance accounted for 60 percent of bonuses, with the
remaining 40 percent coming as a result of profit sharing programs.
Networking, training, and IT support were the sectors with the weakest
levels of compensation. The median pay for staff members with the titles
of architect and sales support engineer topped $100,000, while project
managers netted a median compensation of $93,000. The increasing use of
middleware will eventually eliminate the positions of many software
workers. "A lot of our staff knows the writing is on the wall," said Damon
Bollin, an IT executive at a Georgia frozen foods manufacturer who expects
to prune his staff by as much as one-third over the next two years. The
gap between men and women increased this year, with male staffers earning a
median $70,000 while women earned $64,000.
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Rebuilding the Legacy--Modernizing Mainframe Code
Computerworld (04/24/06) P. 27; Mitchell, Robert L.
Legacy mainframe code primarily written in Cobol is not well-aligned to
modern-day distributed systems, and rewriting all that code entails a
massive effort; in addition, programmers with expertise in Cobol are a
vanishing breed. A code transition plan is a balancing act involving
decisions over what applications to update, how to modernize them, and
where they should be located. Gartner analyst Dale Vecchio says the scale
of applications determines what systems they end up in: Applications under
500 MIPS are going to distributed systems, applications with 1,000 MIPS or
higher are usually in mainframes, and applications between 500 and 1,000
MIPS are more often being incorporated into a service-oriented architecture
(SOA). Rewriting applications is not always a practical solution,
according to MIB Group CIO Bob DiAngelo, whose company has set out to
re-engineer its system in Java using a three-tired framework, which
operates within a single logical partition on a 210 MIPS uniprocessor IBM
zSeries 880 with a z/OS Application Assist Processor (zAAP) that deals with
the workload. "Doing a rip-and-replace is a big thing," DiAngelo notes.
"There are things you can't afford to re-engineer, and they will probably
always sit in the place where they were developed." There is no universal
solution to modernizing legacy applications, says Share President Robert
Rosen, who adds that trying to force-fit a solution is an invitation to
trouble. "Taking the best of both worlds, that's the key," Rosen
advises.
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An Antiphishing Strategy Based on Visual Similarity
Assessment
Internet Computing (04/06) Vol. 10, No. 2, P. 58; Liu, Wenyin; Deng,
Xiaotie; Huang, Guanglin
City University of Hong Kong researchers propose an antiphishing strategy
that identifies potential phishing sites and evaluates suspicious pages'
resemblance to actual sites registered with the system through visual cues.
The SiteWatcher system employs two sequential processes: The first
process runs on local email servers and watches emails for specific
keywords and questionable URLs, and then the second process matches the
potential phishing pages against actual pages and determines visual
similarity by focusing on key regions, page layouts, and overall styles.
SiteWatcher sends a phishing report to the customer if the visual
similarity between the Web pages exceeds the corresponding threshold. The
system represents block-level similarity as the weighted average of the
visual similarities of all matched-block pairs between two pages. Layout
similarity is defined as the proportion of the weighted number of matched
blocks to the number of total blocks in the true page, and this similarity
is measured by identifying a few blocks with identical contents and then
matching other blocks based on the spatial relations of all blocks on the
page via the neighborhood relationship model; two blocks are considered to
be matches if both bear a high visual resemblance to one another and
fulfill the same position constraints with corresponding already-matched
blocks. The similarity in overall style between two pages is defined as
the correlation coefficient of the pages' histograms of the style feature
values. The researchers built a prototype SiteWatcher system whose
results showed promise, and they are currently focusing on making the
system more efficient and weighing the possibility of deploying commercial
applications. The researchers believe the SiteWatcher strategy could be a
component of a larger enterprise antiphishing solution.
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