From:                     Kendra Smith

Sent:                      Tuesday, August 01, 2000 8:59 PM

To:                         Research Division (FULL)

Cc:                         Kendra Smith

Subject:                 New MSR Technical Reports - July 2000

The following Tech Reports were published in July, 2000:

 

MSR-TR-2000-76
Screening Effect Due to Heavy Lower Tails on One-dimensional Parabolic Anderson Model
Biskup, Marek ; Koenig, Wolfgang
June 2000
13 p.

Download:  http://research.M?crosöft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2000-76

 

Click on the link above to view abstract.

 

MSR-TR-2000-75
CyberAll: A Personal Store for Everything
Bell, Gordon
July 2000
11 p.

Download: http://research.M?crosöft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2000-75

CyberAll is a project to encode, store, and be able to retrieve all of a person’s information for personal and professional use. The archive includes books, CDs, correspondence (i.e. letters, memos, and email), transactions, papers, photos and albums, and video.

In 2000, only 16 gigabytes are required to store all the media in my personal and professional life -- costing $160 of disk storage. Two gigabytes are expected to be added next year. Encoding, indexing, and data-management costs swamp the storage cost.

One challenge is to automate the capture, search, and retrieval so that it comes close to the storage cost. It is inconceivable to think of manually managing or purging this electronic file since the storage costs are only $100. Indeed, copies are stored in 2 or 3 locations for redundancy.

A second challenge is adding facilities that justify the cyberization investment. Use includes everything from retrieval of professional information to personal and family apps such as “playing” CDs, photos, and video on home computers and TV sets.

 

MSR-TR-2000-74
The Impact of Internet Policy and Topology on Delayed Routing Convergence
Labovitz, Craig ; Wattenhofer, Roger ; Venkatachary, Srinivasan ; Ahuja, Abha
July 2000
22 p.

Download: http://research.M?crosöft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2000-74

This paper examines the roles of inter-domain topology and routing policy in the process of delayed Internet routing convergence. In recent work, we found that the Internet lacks effective inter-domain path fail-over. Unlike switches in the public telephony network which exhibit fail-over on the order of milliseconds, we showed Internet backbone routers may take tens of minutes to reach a consistent view of the network topology after a fault. In this paper, we expand on our earlier work by exploring the impact of specific Internet provider policies and topologies on the speed of routing convergence. Based on data from the experimental injection and measurement of several hundred thousand inter-domain routing faults, we show that the time for end-to-end Internet convergence depends on the length of the longest possible backup autonomous system path between a source and destination node. We also demonstrate significant variation in the convergence behaviors of Internet service providers, with the larger providers exhibiting the fastest convergence latencies. Finally, we discuss possible modifications to BGP and provider routing policies which if deployed, would improve inter-domain routing convergence.

 

MSR-TR-2000-65
Constrained K-Means Clustering
Bradley, P.S. ; Bennett, K.P. ; Demiriz, A.
May 2000
8 p.

Download: http://research.M?crosöft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2000-65

We consider practical methods for adding constraints to the K-Means Clustering algorithm in order to avoid local solutions with empty clusters or clusters having very few points. We often observe this phenomena when applying K-Means to datasets where the number of dimensions is n > 10 and the number of desired clusters is k > 20. We propose explicitly adding k constraints to the underlying clustering optimization problem requiring that each cluster have at least a minimum number of points in it. We then investigate the resulting cluster assignment step. Preliminary numerical tests on real datasets indicate the the constrained approach is less prone to poor local solutions, producing a better summary of the underlying data.

 

MSR-TR-2000-11
Rapid Modeling of Animated Faces From Video
Liu, Zicheng ; Zhang, Zhengyou ; Jacobs, Chuck ; Cohen, Michael
February 2000
21 p.

Download: http://research.M?crosöft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2000-11

Generating realistic 3D human face models and facial animations has been a persistent challenge in computer graphics. We have developed a system that constructs textured 3D face models from videos with minimal user interaction. Our system takes images and video sequences of a face with an ordinary video camera. After five manual clicks on two images to tell the system where the eye corners, nose top and mouth corners are, the system automatically generates a realistic looking 3D human head model and the constructed model can be animated immediately. A user, with a PC and an ordinary camera, can use our system to generate his/her face model in a few minutes.