Alcatel-Lucent

About: Alcatel-Lucent is a based out in Stuttgart, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Network packet. The organization has 37003 authors who have published 53332 publications receiving 1430547 citations. The organization is also known as: Alcatel-Lucent S.A. & Alcatel.

Method and apparatus for sharing asymmetric information and services in simultaneously viewed documents on a communication system

Abstract: An arrangement for realizing asymmetric collaboration utilizes a “shared Web-top”, i.e., a work space, in which different in-document applications can run and be shared. Specifically, in one embodiment of the invention employed in asymmetric collaboration, documents to be collaborated on at different users' terminals are logically identical but structurally different. Indeed, one of the collaborators, for example, a customer service agent, may have access to information that should not be made available to others of the collaborators. This asymmetric collaboration is realized by assigning a unique logical name to each information entity. Then, changes in the entity captured by some detection technique, for example, the use of document polling or event handlers, are propagated along with the name of the entity to the collaborators, where they are processed only if the relevant named entity exists. If the entity exists the logical name of the entity is mapped into its physical name which, therefore, allows asymmetric collaboration. Consequently, the name-based technique allows the collaborators, e.g., customer and agent, to share changes in the logically common portions of documents, which are structurally different.

Digital data encoding in video signals using data modulated carrier signals at non-peaks in video spectra

Abstract: Digital information is encoded in the video portion of a television signal such that "n" (n is an integer) bits of the digital information are carried by each successive frame in a group of frames. The digital information is encoded by modulating a carrier signal, using, for example, either amplitude shift keying (ASK) or frequency shift keying (FSK), and the modulated carrier is then added to the video signal selectively, only in portions of the television program that (a) are not likely to be perceptible by a viewer, and (b) are of sufficient intensity to transmit the data. The video signal including the encoded digital data, may be transmitted, in real time, to a television receiver, or recorded for later playback. In either event, at a receiver, when the video signal containing the encoded information is displayed on a screen, the image is sensed or "viewed" by a photo detector, the output of which is applied to a band pass filter having a center frequency that corresponds to the oscillator frequency(s) in the encoder. The filter output is thresholded or FM detected, so that the receiver can recover the encoded data. By appropriately including checks bits and synchronization patterns, the bit stream output from the decoder can be synchronized, and the original encoded data recovered. Advantageously, the frequency of the oscillator in the ASK or FSK encoder is chosen so that the energy added to the video signal is in a portion of the frequency spectrum that otherwise contains little energy. This makes the added digital data imperceptible to a viewer. If desired, the same data may be repetitively encoded in several groups of frames, so as to increase the redundancy and thus the reliability of the overall system.

Confidence Bands for Survival Functions With Censored Data: A Comparative Study

Abstract: Consider the problem of obtaining simultaneous confidence bands for the survival function S(x) when the data are arbitrarily right censored. The usual pointwise confidence intervals based on Greenwood's variance formula can be adapted to yield a large-sample confidence band. This band has, in a certain sense, equal precision at each point of S(x). It is compared with the censored versions of the Kolmogorov band and the Renyi band. The comparisons are made in terms of the widths and the adequacy of large-sample approximations and are carried out under various censoring models and degrees of censoring. The bands are illustrated by applying them to data from a mechanical-switch life test.

Efficient filtering of XML documents with XPath expressions

Abstract: The publish/subscribe paradigm is a popular model for allowing publishers (i.e., data generators) to selectively disseminate data to a large number of widely dispersed subscribers (i.e., data consumers) who have registered their interest in specific information items. Early publish/subscribe systems have typically relied on simple subscription mechanisms, such as keyword or ”bag of words” matching, or simple comparison predicates on attribute values. The emergence of XML as a standard for information exchange on the Internet has led to an increased interest in using more expressive subscription mechanisms (e.g., based on XPath expressions) that exploit both the structure and the content of published XML documents. Given the increased complexity of these new data-filtering mechanisms, the problem of effectively identifying the subscription profiles that match an incoming XML document poses a difficult and important research challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel index structure, termed XTrie, that supports the efficient filtering of XML documents based on XPath expressions. Our XTrie index structure offers several novel features that, we believe, make it especially attractive for large-scale publish/subscribe systems. First, XTrie is designed to support effective filtering based on complex XPath expressions (as opposed to simple, single-path specifications). Second, our XTrie structure and algorithms are designed to support both ordered and unordered matching of XML data. Third, by indexing on sequences of elements organized in a trie structure and using a sophisticated matching algorithm, XTrie is able to both reduce the number of unnecessary index probes as well as avoid redundant matchings, thereby providing extremely efficient filtering. Our experimental results over a wide range of XML document and XPath expression workloads demonstrate that our XTrie index structure outperforms earlier approaches by wide margins.

Arrangement for improving retention of call center's customers

Abstract: In a call center (100) of a business, if it is determined (314-318 or 320) during the handling of a call involving a party who is a customer of the business that the party is at risk of being lost as a customer to the business, an identifier of the party, such as ANI, is captured (300) and stored (322) along with an "at risk" indication. The determination may be made either automatically by detecting (314-318) that the party terminated the call while on hold, or manually (320) by the agent handling the call or a service observer whereupon the agent or observer pressed an "at risk" feature button (112) on their terminal (105, 110). On a subsequent call to or from that party, the stored identifiers (380) are searched (306), and when it is determined (308) that the party is identified therein as being at risk, the call is given (310) special treatment (400-426)~a higher-than-normal level of service~and is identified (428) to the call's handler .as involving an "at risk" customer, in an attempt to avoid loss of the party as a customer.