^April May – 2006 ^June

he talk will be a potpourri of recent applications of geometry and statistics to computer vision tasks.

The talk will be assessable to non experts.

1. Affine Invariance Revisited.
2. How to Put Probabilities on Homographies.
3. Vertical Parallax from Moving Shadows.

and some other topics if time remains.

Kolmogorov introduced a combinatorial measure of the information $I(x:sy)$ about the unknown value of a variable $sy$ conveyed by an input variable $sx$ taking a given value $x$.

In this talk I will introduce an extension of this definition of information to a more general setting where $sx=x$ may provide a vaguer description of the possible value of $sy$.I apply this to classes of binary functions and obtain estimates of the information value for two extreme cases.

Web enabled application servers and the clients for their Web services have increased in both the sophistication of server capabilities as well as in the demand for client customization. Therefore, there is a necessity of a specification language for sophisticated client needs and a framework for resource monitoring and data delivery that goes beyond existing standards. After presenting the current state-of-affair in Web resource monitoring, the talk will focus on efficient scheduling algorithms for monitoring an information source whose contents change at times modeled by a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. In a given time period of length T, we enforce a server-side politeness constraint that we may only probe the source at most n times. This constraint, along with an optional constraint that no two probes may be spaced less than delta time units apart, is intended to prevent the monitor from being classified as a nuisance to be "locked out" of the information source.

This work is a joint work with Jonathan Eckstein and Sarit Reiner

Bio: Avigdor Gal is a faculty member at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management at the Technion. He received his D.Sc. degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1995 in the area of temporal active databases. During his studies, Avigdor has received the Miriam and Aaron Gutwirth Scholarship three years in a row (1993-1995). He has published more than 50 papers in journals (e.g. Journal of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering), books (Temporal Databases: Research and Practice) and conferences (e.g. CoopIS'98 - best paper award-, ER'2005, CoopIS'2005, BPM'2005) on the topics of information systems architectures, active databases and temporal databases. Avigdor is a three time recepient of the IBM Academic Fellow Award. He was an Associate Editor of SIGMOD Record and is a member of the CoopIS Advisory Board.