Description: This paper describes a system that automatically links study materials to encyclopedic knowledge, and shows how the availability of such knowledge within easy reach of the learner can improve both the quality of the knowledge acquired and the time needed to obtain such knowledge.

Description: This paper discusses the main lines of research in deriving efficient Word Sense Disambiguation. In the past few years, we have witnessed a tremendous growth of the World Wide Web, both in terms of number of Web pages accessible online - resulting in what represents today the largest publicly available corpus, and in terms of number of Web users - who now these two main dimensions - pages and users - has opened the doors to a realm of new approaches to data-hungry and knowledge-hungry language processing applications. Among these, Word Sense Disambiguation is one of the applications that has the potential of benefiting the most from the large amounts of Web-based data and from the availability of inexpensive Web user supervision. In this paper, the author discusses the main lines of research in deriving efficient Word Sense Disambiguation methods that exploit: (1) the Web as a corpus - which represents a view of the Web seen as an enormous collection of Web pages; and (2) the Web as collective mind - where the Web is regarded as a large group of Web users who can contribute their knowledge to the process of identifying word meanings.

Description: This paper discusses reconfigurable block encryption logic. Existing block cipher function designs have tended to deploy the secret bits in a specific and limited way. The authors generalize the role of the secret as truth tables of Boolean gates in a carefully designed logic schema. The authors' claims are: these reconfigurable functions are pseudo one-way and pseudo random functions. Such a function family is proposed using reconfigurable gates. Based on this function family the authors create REBEL, Reconfigurable Block Encryption Logic, which is an LR-Network. The authors prove cryptographic and cryptanalytic security for REBEL. From cryptographic perspective, this function is a pseudo-permutation. From cryptanalysis perspective, any observable attribute appears to be a random process.

Description: This paper describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting students to undergraduate computer science and engineering programs at the University of North Texas (UNT). Such recruitment of students is critical to the country's efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and is a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT.

Description: This paper introduces the semantic wildcard. The IRSLO (Information Retrieval using Semantic and Lexical Operators) project aims at integrating semantic and lexical information into the retrieval process, in order to overcome some of the impediments currently encountered with today's information retrieval systems. This paper introduces the semantic wildcard, one of the most powerful operators implemented in IRSLO, which allows for searches along general-specific lines. The semantic wildcard, denoted with #, acts in a manner similar with the lexical wildcard, but at semantic levels, enabling the retrieval of subsumed concepts. For instance, a search for animal# will match any concept that is of type animal, including dog, goat, and so forth, thereby going beyond the explicit knowledge stated in texts. This operator, together with a lexical locality operator that enables the retrieval of paragraphs rather than entire documents, have been both implemented in the IRSLO system and tested on requests of information run against an index of 130,000 documents. Significant improvement was observed over classic keyword-based retrieval systems in terms of precision, recall and success rate.