Computer Science

The departments of electrical engineering and computer science at Technion offer a broad spectrum of courses in digital and optical signals and imaging systems, and a research environment most suitable for specialization in image system engineering. We describe a few of the courses and discuss some issues related to their teaching

Gabor features are a common choice for texture analysis. There are several pop- ular sets of Gabor lters. These sets are usually designed based on representation considerations. We propose here an alternative criterion for designing the lters set. We consider a set of lters and their responses to a pairs of harmonic signals. Two signals are considered separable if the corresponding two sets of responses are disjoint in at least one of the responses. We look for the set of Gabor lters maximizing the fraction of separable harmonic signals. The proposed semi-analytical algorithm calculates lters parameters for the optimal set, given the desired number of lters and the frequency range of possible signals. The resulting lters are signican tly dieren t from those traditionally used. We tested the proposed lters both in texture segmentation and texture recogni- tion aspects with commonly used discrimination algorithms for each of the tasks. We show that, as expected, the resulting lters pe...

The localization and the recognition tasks are analyzed here relying on a probabilistic model, and independently of the recognition method used. Rigorous upper and lower bounds on the probability that a set of measurements is sufficient to localize an object within a certain precision, are derived. The bounds quantify the difficulty of the localization task regarding many of its aspects,

Argumentation-based negotiation approaches have been proposed to capture realistic negotiation contexts where all issues being negotiated are not fixed a priori and the negotiatorýs beliefs may be influenced during the negotiation process. We have proposed a novel Bayesian network based argumentation and decision making framework that allows agents to utilize models of other agents. We discuss a decision mechanism for

In this chapter I identify three problems affecting the plausibility of group privacy and argue in favour of their resolution. The first problem concerns the nature of the groups in question. I shall argue that groups are neither discovered nor invented, but designed by the level of abstraction (LoA) at which a specific analysis of a social system is developed. Their design is therefore justified insofar as the purpose, guiding the choice of the LoA, is justified. This should remove the objection that groups cannot have a right to privacy because groups are mere artefacts (there are no groups, only individuals) or that, even if there are groups, it is too difficult to deal with them. The second problem concerns the possibility of attributing rights to groups. I shall argue that the same logic of attribution of a right to individuals may be used to attribute a right to a group, provided one modifies the LoA and now treats the whole group itself as an individual. This should remove the objection that, even if groups exist and are manageable, they cannot be treated as holders of rights. The third problem concerns the possibility of attributing a right to privacy to groups. I shall argue that sometimes it is the group and only the group, not its members, that is correctly identified as the correct holder of a right to privacy. This should remove the objection that privacy, as a group right, is a right held not by a group as a group but rather by the group's members severally. The solutions of the three problems supports the thesis that an interpretation of privacy in terms of a protection of the information that constitutes an individual—both in terms of a single person and in terms of a group—is better suited than other interpretations to make sense of group privacy.

Abstract Autonomic computing systems are capable of adapting their behavior and resources thousands of times a second to automatically decide the best way to accomplish a given goal despite changing environmental conditions and demands. Different decision mechanisms are considered in the literature, but in the vast majority of the cases a single technique is applied to a given instance of the problem. This article proposes a comparison of some state of the art approaches for decision making, applied to a self-optimizing ...