quality gains when considering text delivery sepa-rately from the video stream and in the development of more accurate multimedia quality models. Background Previous research showed a strong influence of text legibility on overall video quality [1]. Aim of study Assess the contribution of text quality

October 21, 1976) requires the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Bureau of Mines to conduct mineral surveys on U.S. Bureau of Land Management administered land designated as Wilderness Study Areas "... to determine the mineral values, if any, that may be present...." Results must be made

Mines to conduct mineral surveys on U.S. Bureau of Land Management administered lands designated as Wi lderness Study Areas II •• • to determine the mineral values, if any, that may be present ••.. 11 Results must be made available to the public and be submitted to the President and the Congress

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We investigate the determinants of capital structure choice by analyzing the financing decisions of public firms in the major industrialized countries. At an aggregate level, firm leverage is fairly similar across the G-7 countries. We find that factors identified by previous studies as correlated

, and boosting. This paper reviews these methods and explains why ensembles can often perform better than any single classifier. Some previous studies comparing ensemble methods are reviewed, and some new experiments are presented to uncover the reasons that Adaboost does not overfit rapidly.

We provide formal definitions and efficient secure techniques for • turning noisy information into keys usable for any cryptographic application, and, in particular, • reliably and securely authenticating biometric data. Our techniques apply not just to biometric information, but to any keying material that, unlike traditional cryptographic keys, is (1) not reproducible precisely and (2) not distributed uniformly. We propose two primitives: a fuzzy extractor reliably extracts nearly uniform randomness R from its input; the extraction is error-tolerant in the sense that R will be the same even if the input changes, as long as it remains reasonably close to the original. Thus, R can be used as a key in a cryptographic application. A secure sketch produces public information about its input w that does not reveal w, and yet allows exact recovery of w given another value that is close to w. Thus, it can be used to reliably reproduce error-prone biometric inputs without incurring the security risk inherent in storing them. We define the primitives to be both formally secure and versatile, generalizing much prior work. In addition, we provide nearly optimal constructions of both primitives for various measures of “closeness” of input data, such as Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference.

A hybrid automaton is a formal model for a mixed discrete-continuous system. We classify hybrid automata acoording to what questions about their behavior can be answered algorithmically. The classification reveals structure on mixed discrete-continuous state spaces that was previously studied

This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research

layer. We present our observations based on an extensive series of experiments, draw conclusions from a wide range of scenarios, and are more cautious and less optimistic as compared to previous studies.