ANATAGONOMY: a personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web

This paper describes a personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web (WWW), called ANATAGONOMY. The main feature of this system is that the newspaper is personalized without asking the users to specify their preferences explicitly. The system monitors user operations on the articles and reflects them in the user profiles. Differently from conventional newspapers on the WWW, our system sends an interaction agent implemented as a Java applet to the client side, and the agent monitors the user operations and creates each user's newspaper pages automatically. The server side manages user profiles and anticipates how interesting an article would be for each user. The interaction agent on the client side manages all the user interactions, including the automatic layout of pages. Our system has page multiple layout algorithms and the user can switch from one view to another anytime, according to the preference or machine environment. On one of the views, the user can even see all the articles sequentially without performing any operations. We evaluated a scheme in which the user scores each article explicitly, and a scheme in which all the personalization is done automatically. The results show that automatic personalization works well when some parameters are set properly.     

Solubilization of Fish Muscle Myosin by Sorbitol

Sugars and their reduced forms decreased the turbidity of myofibril suspension in a concentration dependent relation. The extent of turbidity decrease was compound specific; glucose sorbitol lactitol = lactose=maltitol. Turbidity decreasing effect of sugars correlated well with the number of hydroxyl groups. Sorbitol reduced the NaCl concentration required for solubilization of myofibrils. Moreover, filament formation by myosin was strongly inhibited by sorbitol.     

Improved water resistance in edible zein films and composites for biodegradable food packaging

Zein, corn prolamine, was dissolved in several organic solvents to make films and their properties were examined. Ethanol with 20% water and acetone with 30% water were found to dissolve zein well and transform it into a transparent flexible film after moderate drying. Both films showed similar breaking strength to that of commercial thin film of polyvinylidene chloride for food use and were digested with proteases. Only the film prepared from acetone solution showed a relatively low water permeability. This water permeation was found to depend strongly on the rate of diffusion. 1,2-Epoxy-3-chloropropane (ECP) was added into the acetone solution to cross-link the zein molecules for the purpose of improving the breaking strength and water-resistant properties of the film. Alpha-chymotrypsin was found to digest the film even after the modification with ECP. However, this cross-linking resulted in little improvement in the water-resistant properties of the film and also reduced its flexibility.     

基于Internet的课件信息发现和收集Agent的研究

文中介绍一个基于ｎｔｅｒｎｅｔ的信息检索系统：ＤＯＬＴＲＩ－Ａｇｅｎｔ．ＤＯＩＴＲＩ－Ａｇｅｎｔ用于从Ｉｎｔｅｒｎｅｔ上发现和收集用于远程武术和教学。     

Estimation of surface orientation from directional derivatives of shading image

A new estimation approach is proposed to reconstruct the surface shape from shading images. The reflectance property of the object surface material is the uniform lambertian property; the light source produces a uniform parallel beam, and image projection is orthographic. The illuminating direction is varied slightly to obtain directional derivatives of image density. The new approach shows that the local surface orientation is reconstructed from the directional derivatives of the image density. Differently from other approaches, all components of the illuminating direction vector or the proportional constant are not necessary for this reconstruction. Computer simulations show the evaluation of errors in approximating and quantizing process. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated in the shape reconstruction simulations for the curved objects