Last updated on July 08, 2007
 
Welcome to the home of the Multimedia Information System Technology Group (MIST)! MIST is an interdisciplinary research group based in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in collaboration with the UCLA School of Medicine and the Department of Radiological Sciences. The group is immersed in competitive and exciting R&D in the fields of multimedia technology and its application, and is constantly working on the fringe of the cutting edge. In this site, you will find information about the people who are a part of MIST as well as information about the work of the group, both in the past and present.

Directions of Research
Several new R&D thrusts are being undertaken including mobile medical patient data management and access, image stream data management and visualization, intelligent searching and retrieval of interesting information in the internet, and social networks. Our advances and innovations are described in our publications listed in this web site.

iScore

The definition of what makes an article interesting - or its “interestingness” - varies from user to user and is continually evolving, calling for adaptable user personalization. Furthermore, due to the nature of news articles, most are uninteresting since many are similar or report events outside the scope of an individual’s concerns. There has been much work in news recommendation systems, but none have yet addressed the question of what makes an article interesting. In our system, iScore, we make the following contributions to news filtering in a limited user environment:
  1. We show that filtering based on only topic relevancy is insufficient for identifying interesting articles.
  2. We extract a variety of features, ranging from topic relevancy to source reputation. No single feature can characterize the interestingness of an article for a user. It is the combination of multiple features that yields higher quality results. For each user, these features have different degrees of usefulness for predicting interestingness.
  3. We evaluate several classifiers for combining these features to find an overall interestingness score. Through user-feedback, the classifiers find features that are useful for predicting interestingness for the user.
  4. Current evaluation corpora, such as TREC, do not capture all aspects of personalized news filtering systems necessary for system evaluation.

List of Publications
  • Pon, R. K., Cárdenas, A. F., Buttler, D., and Critchlow, T., "Improving Naive Bayes with Online Feature Selection for Quick Adaptation to Evolving Feature Usefulness," 2008 SIAM SDM Text Mining Workshop, Atlanta, GA, April 26, 2008. (PDF Version)
  • Pon, R. K., Cárdenas, A. F., and Buttler, D., "Measuring the Interestingness of Articles," Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining (Second Edition), 2008, in press.
  • Pon, R. K., Cárdenas, A. F., Buttler, D., Critchlow, T., "Tracking Multiple Topics for Finding Interesting Articles", Thirteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2007. (PDF Version)
  • Pon, R. K., Cárdenas, A. F., Buttler, D., Critchlow, T., "iScore: Measuring the Interestingness of Articles in a Limited User Environment", presented at IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining 2007, Honolulu, HI, April 1-5, 2007. (PDF Version)
  • Aoyama, D. A., Hsiao, J. T., Cárdenas, A. F., Pon, R. K., "TimeLine and Visualization of Multiple-Data Sets and the Visualization Querying Challenge", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (2007), Vol. 18, 1-21, February 2007. (PDF version)
  • Chan, S., Pon, R. K, and Cardenas, A. F., "Visualization and Clustering of Author Social Networks", 2006 Distributed Multimedia Systems Conference, Grand Canyon, Arizona, August 30 - September 1, 2006, pp.174-180. (PDF Version)
  • Cárdenas, A. F., Pon, R. K, and Islam, B. S., "The Image Stack Stream Model, Querying and Architecture", 2005 Distributed Multimedia Systems Conference, Banff, Canada, September 5-7, 2005. (PDF version)
  • Pon, R. K. and Cárdenas, A. F., "Data Quality Inference," Second International ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Information Quality in Information Systems (IQIS 2005), Baltimore, MD, June 17, 2005. (PDF version)
  • Cárdenas, A. F., Pon, R. K., Cameron, R. B., and Coyle, M. A., "The Mobile Patient and Mobile Physician Data Access and Transmission," The 2005 International Conference on Mathematics and Engineering Techniques in Medicine and Biological Sciences (METMBS '05), June 20-25, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada. (PDF version)
  • Brown, M. S., Shah, S. K., Pais, R. C., Lee, Y., McNitt-Gray, M. F., Goldin, J. G., Cárdenas, A. F., and Aberle, D. R., "Database Design and Implementation for Quantitative Image Analysis Research", IEEE Transactions on Information Technology and Biomedicine, Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 99-108. (PDF Version)
  • Cárdenas, A. F., Pon, R. K., Michael, P. A., Hsiao, J. T., "Image Stack Viewing and Access," In Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Vol. 14, Academic Press Ltd., pp. 421-441, 2003. (PDF version)
  • Cárdenas, A. F., Pon, R. K., and Cameron, R. B., "Management of Streaming Body Sensor Data for Medical Information Systems," The 2003 International Conference on Mathematics and Engineering Techniques in Medicine and Biological Sciences (METMBS '03), June 23-26, 2003, Las Vegas, Nevada. (PDF version)
June 20, 2003
MIST has been accepted into the FastObjects Leaders of Science program!  The program is one in which FastObjects Inc. seeks to contribute to worthy fields of academic study as well as receive feedback on how developers may exploit the various capabilities of their technology to solve complex data management problems.  Along with a $23,600 gift in products and services, this program brings a continued partnership between MIST and FastObjects through which both groups may continue to work together in breaking new ground in research of new technologies.


cardenas@cs.ucla.edu
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Los Angeles

The members of the research team in the BEL laboratory in 3881, Boelter Hall, UCLA. Standing From left to right: Jacky Chow, Jack Yuan, Dan Kozin, Professor Alfonso Cardenas, Tony Hsiao, Bassam Islam, Raymond Pon; Sitting from Left to Right: Amy Lau, Lan Tran  Missing: Panayiotis Michael, He-Joon Kim, Marcus Chang, Sven Mawson Rod Son (October 2002)

The members of the research team in the BEL laboratory in 3881, Boelter Hall, UCLA. Standing From left to right: Bassam Islam, He-Joon Kim, Tony Hsiao, Mansoor Mirza, Panayiotis Michael, Marcus Chang, Professor Alfonso Cardenas; Sitting from Left to Right: Satik Yeghiazarian, Raymond Pon, Amy Lau, Ari Shapiro Missing: Rod Son (April 2002)
 
The Multimedia Information System Technology Group Web site is maintained by Bassam Islam.  Comments and questions can be sent to bassam@cs.ucla.edu.