Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Extracting Interest Tags From Twitter User Biographies, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms, has been studied from different angles. One of the important sources of information in Twitter is users’ biographies, which are short self-introductions written by users in free form. Biographies often describe users’ background and interests. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been much work trying to extract information from Twitter biographies. In this work, we study how to extract information revealing users’ personal interests from Twitter biographies. A sequential labeling model is trained with automatically constructed labeled data. The popular patterns expressing user interests are extracted and …

A Deep Search Architecture For Capturing Product Ontologies, Tejeshwar Sangameswaran

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes a method to populate very large product ontologies quickly. We discuss a deep search architecture to text-mine online e-commerce market places and build a taxonomy of products and their corresponding descriptions and parent categories. The goal is to automatically construct an open database of products, which are aggregated from different online retailers. The database contains extensive metadata on each object, which can be queried and analyzed. Such a public database currently does not exist; instead the information currently resides siloed within various organizations. In this thesis, we describe the tools, data structures and software architectures that allowed …

Detecting Flow Anomalies In Distributed Systems, Freddy Chong-Tat Chua, Ee Peng Lim, Bernardo Huberman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep within the networks of distributed systems, one often finds anomalies that affect their efficiency and performance. These anomalies are difficult to detect because the distributed systems may not have sufficient sensors to monitor the flow of traffic within the interconnected nodes of the networks. Without early detection and making corrections, these anomalies may aggravate over time and could possibly cause disastrous outcomes in the system in the unforeseeable future. Using only coarse-grained information from the two end points of network flows, we propose a network transmission model and a localization algorithm, to detect the location of anomalies and rank …

Towards Intelligent Caring Agents For Aging-In-Place: Issues And Challenges, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The aging of the world’s population presents vast societal and individual challenges. The relatively shrinking workforce to support the growing population of the elderly leads to a rapidly increasing amount of technological innovations in the field of elderly care. In this paper, we present an integrated framework consisting of various intelligent agents with their own expertise and responsibilities working in a holistic manner to assist, care, and accompany the elderly around the clock in the home environment. To support the independence of the elderly for Aging-In-Place (AIP), the intelligent agents must well understand the elderly, be fully aware of the …

From Cells To Streets: Estimating Mobile Paths With Cellular-Side Data, Qatar Computing Research Institute, University Of Birmingham, Seattle University Of Washington, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Through their normal operation, cellular networks are a repository of continuous location information from their subscribed devices. Such information, however, comes at a coarse granularity both in terms of space, as well as time. For otherwise inactive devices, location information can be obtained at the granularity of the associated cellular sector, and at infrequent points in time, that are sensitive to the structure of the network itself, and the level of mobility of the device. In this paper, we are asking the question of whether such sparse information can help to identify the paths followed by mobile connected devices throughout …

A Smart Web Crawler For A Concept Based Semantic Search Engine, Vinay Kancherla

Master's Projects

The internet is a vast collection of billions of web pages containing terabytes of information arranged in thousands of servers using HTML. The size of this collection itself is a formidable obstacle in retrieving information necessary and relevant. This made search engines an important part of our lives. Search engines strive to retrieve information as relevant as possible to the user. One of the building blocks of search engines is the Web Crawler. A web crawler is a bot that goes around the internet collecting and storing it in a database for further analysis and arrangement of the data.

The …

Mind & Matter: The Discursive Construction Of The Iphone In Apple's Advertising, Nicholas Stratton

Theses and Dissertations

The widespread adoption of smartphone technology in the contemporary United States requires critical reflection on its role within society. This thesis compares the way Apple's television advertising discourse, from 2007 to 2011, frames the iPhone to consumers with the way Apple's iAd promotional material frames the iPhone to advertisers, and considers what the disparity between these two frameworks says about the still-evolving role of smartphone technology in society. It argues that the disparity between these two frameworks is indicative of a fundamental tension within smartphone technology. This tension is reflected in Apple's ability to discursively construct the iPhone as a …

Mydeal: A Mobile Shopping Assistant Matching User Preferences To Promotions, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large urban cities is the huge number of retail options available. In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones. However, these applications mostly allow users to know where stores are or find promotions on specific items. What is missing is a system that factors in a user's shopping preferences and automatically tells them which stores are of their interest. The key challenge in this system is twofold; 1) building a matching algorithm that can combine user preferences with fairly unstructured deals and store information to generate a final rank ordered …

Data Preparation For Social Network Mining And Analysis, Yazhe Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the problem of preparing good-quality social network data for data analysis and mining. Modern online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have rapidly grown in popularity. The consequent availability of a wealth of social network data provides an unprecedented opportunity for data analysis and mining researchers to determine useful and actionable information in a wide variety of fields such as social sciences, marketing, management, and security. However, raw social network data are vast, noisy, distributed, and sensitive in nature, which challenge data mining and analysis tasks in storage, efficiency, accuracy, etc. Many mining algorithms cannot …

Probabilistic Latent Document Network Embedding, Tuan M. V. Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A document network refers to a data type that can be represented as a graph of vertices, where each vertex is associated with a text document. Examples of such a data type include hyperlinked Web pages, academic publications with citations, and user profiles in social networks. Such data have very high-dimensional representations, in terms of text as well as network connectivity. In this paper, we study the problem of embedding, or finding a low-dimensional representation of a document network that "preserves" the data as much as possible. These embedded representations are useful for various applications driven by dimensionality reduction, such …

Android Or Ios For Better Privacy Protection?, Jin Han, Qiang Yan, Debin Gao, Jianying Zhou, Huijie Robert Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of the mobile market, security of mobile platforms is receiving increasing attention from both research community as well as the public. In this paper, we make the first attempt to establish a baseline for security comparison between the two most popular mobile platforms. We investigate applications that run on both Android and iOS and examine the difference in the usage of their security sensitive APIs (SS-APIs). Our analysis over 2,600 applications shows that iOS applications consistently access more SS-APIs than their counterparts on Android. The additional privileges gained on iOS are often associated with accessing private …

High-Dimensional Data Stream Classification Via Sparse Online Learning, Dayong Wang, Pengcheng Wu, Peilin Zhao, Yue Wu, Chunyan Miao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The amount of data in our society has been exploding in the era of big data today. In this paper, we address several open challenges of big data stream classification, including high volume, high velocity, high dimensionality, and high sparsity. Many existing studies in data mining literature solve data stream classification tasks in a batch learning setting, which suffers from poor efficiency and scalability when dealing with big data. To overcome the limitations, this paper investigates an online learning framework for big data stream classification tasks. Unlike some existing online data stream classification techniques that are often based on first-order …

Factors Impacting Information Security Noncompliance When Completing Job Tasks, Martha Nanette Harrell

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Work systems are comprised of the technical and social systems that should harmoniously work together to ensure a successful attainment of organizational goals and objectives. Information security controls are often designed to protect the information system and seldom consider the work system design. Using a positivist case study, this research examines the user's perception of having to choose between completing job tasks or remaining compliant with information security controls. An understanding of this phenomenon can help mitigate the risk associated with an information system security user's choice. Most previous research fails to consider the work system perspective on this issue. …

Anonymized Video Analysis Methods And Systems, Marjorie Skubic, James M. Keller, Fang Wang, Derek T. Anderson, Erik Stone, Robert H. Luke Iii, Tanvi Banerjee, Marilyn J. Rantz

Kno.e.sis Publications

Methods and systems for anonymized video analysis are described. In one embodiment, a first silhouette image of a person in a living unit may be accessed. The first silhouette image may be based on a first video signal recorded by a first video camera. A second silhouette image of the person in the living unit may be accessed. The second silhouette image may be of a different view of the person than the first silhouette image. The second silhouette image may be based on a second video signal recorded by a second video camera. A three-dimensional model of the person …

Iii: Small: Information Integration And Human Interaction For Indoor And Outdoor Spaces, Michael Worboys, Nicholas Giudice

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

The goal of this research project is to provide a framework model that integrates existing models of indoor and outdoor space, and to use this model to develop an interactive platform for navigation in mixed indoor and outdoor spaces. The user should feel the transition between inside and outside to be seamless, in terms of the navigational support provided. The approach consists of integration of indoors and outdoors on several levels: conceptual models (ontologies), formal system designs, data models, and human interaction. At the conceptual level, the project draws on existing ontologies as well as examining the "affordances" that the …

Protecting Web Servers From Web Robot Traffic, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Triad-Based Role Discovery For Large Social Systems, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

The social role of a participant in a social system conceptualizes the circumstances under which she chooses to interact with others, making their discovery and analysis important for theoretical and practical purposes. In this paper, we propose a methodology to detect such roles by utilizing the conditional triad censuses of ego-networks. These censuses are a promising tool for social role extraction because they capture the degree to which basic social forces push upon a user to interact with others in a system. Clusters of triad censuses, inferred from network samples that preserve local structural properties, define the social roles. The …

Design Of Randomized Experiments In Networks, Dylan Walker, Lev Muchnik

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Over the last decade, the emergence of pervasive online and digitally enabled environments has created a rich source of detailed data on human behavior. Yet, the promise of big data has recently come under fire for its inability to separate correlation from causation-to derive actionable insights and yield effective policies. Fortunately, the same online platforms on which we interact on a day-to-day basis permit experimentation at large scales, ushering in a new movement toward big experiments. Randomized controlled trials are the heart of the scientific method and when designed correctly provide clean causal inferences that are robust and reproducible. However, …

"Be Our Guest:" Crafting A Magical Client Experience, Rebecca Klein, Kevin Steele

Information Technology Faculty and Staff Publications

The Client Services team of Valparaiso University’s IT department found inspiration in Disney’s guest service models and has been building a culture of superior service throughout IT. Come along on a magic carpet ride to discover how this new world is transforming delivery of technological services to the campus. From Help Desk to training to assessment, we are increasing satisfaction levels among campus constituents as we meet their needs. We will show how we created a guest service compass that guides our decision-making and service delivery. Further, we will share areas where we learned we were creating our own obstacles …

An Analysis Of Mayo Clinic Search Query Logs For Cardiovascular Diseases, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Increasingly, individuals are taking active participation in learning and managing their health by leveraging online resources. Understanding online health information searching behavior can help us to study what health topics users search for and how search queries are formulated. In this work, we analyzed 10 million cardiovascular diseases (CVD) related search queries from MayoClinic.com. We performed semantic analysis on the queries using UMLS MetaMap and analyzed structural and textual properties as well as linguistic characteristics of the queries.

Discovering Perceptions In Online Social Media: A Probabilistic Approach, Derek Doran, Swapna S. Gokhale, Aldo Dagnino

Kno.e.sis Publications

People across the world habitually turn to online social media to share their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and opinions as they go about their daily lives. These posts collectively contain a wealth of insights into how masses perceive their surroundings. Therefore, extracting people’s perceptions from social media posts can provide valuable information about pertinent issues such as public transportation, emergency conditions, and even reactions to political actions or other activities. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract such perceptions from a corpus of social media posts originating from a given broad geographical region. The approach divides the broad region into …

Online Information Searching For Cardiovascular Diseases: An Analysis Of Mayo Clinic Search Query Logs, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Since the early 2000’s, Internet usage for health information searching has increased significantly. Studying search queries can help us to understand users “information need” and how do they formulate search queries (“expression of information need”). Although cardiovascular diseases (CVD) affect a large percentage of the population, few studies have investigated how and what users search for CVD. We address this knowledge gap in the community by analyzing a large corpus of 10 million CVD related search queries from MayoClinic.com. Using UMLS MetaMap and UMLS semantic types/concepts, we developed a rule-based approach to categorize the queries into 14 health categories. We …

Exploiting Geographical Neighborhood Characteristics For Location Recommendation, Yong Liu, Wei Wei, Aixin Sun, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Geographical characteristics derived from the historical check-in data have been reported effective in improving location recommendation accuracy. However, previous studies mainly exploit geographical characteristics from a user’s perspective, via modeling the geographical distribution of each individual user’s check-ins. In this paper, we are interested in exploiting geographical characteristics from a location perspective, by modeling the geographical neighborhood of a location. The neighborhood is modeled at two levels: the instance-level neighborhood defined by a few nearest neighbors of the location, and the region-level neighborhood for the geographical region where the location exists. We propose a novel recommendation approach, namely Instance-Region Neighborhood …

Online Passive Aggressive Active Learning And Its Applications, Jing Lu, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate online active learning techniques for classification tasks in data stream mining applications. Unlike traditional learning approaches (either batch or online learning) that often require to request the class label of each incoming instance, online active learning queries only a subset of informative incoming instances to update the classification model, which aims to maximize classification performance using minimal human labeling effort during the entire online stream data mining task. In this paper, we present a new family of algorithms for online active learning called Passive-Aggressive Active (PAA) learning algorithms by adapting the popular Passive-Aggressive algorithms in an online active …

Band Selection For Hyperspectral Images Using Probabilistic Memetic Algorithm, Liang Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Meng-Hiot Lim, Si Wei Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Band selection plays an important role in identifying the most useful and valuable information contained in the hyperspectral images for further data analysis such as classification, clustering, etc. Memetic algorithm (MA), among other metaheuristic search methods, has been shown to achieve competitive performances in solving the NP-hard band selection problem. In this paper, we propose a formal probabilistic memetic algorithm for band selection, which is able to adaptively control the degree of global exploration against local exploitation as the search progresses. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic mechanism, empirical studies conducted on five well-known hyperspectral images against two …

Perspectives On Task Ownership In Mobile Operating System Development [Invited Talk], Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There can be little contention about Stroustrup's epigrammatic remark: our civilization runs on software. However a caveat is increasingly due, much of the software that runs our civilization, runs on mobile devices today. Mobile operating systems have come to play a preeminent role in the ubiquity and utility of such devices. The development ecosystem of Android - one of the most popular mobile operating systems - presents an interesting context for studying whether and how collaboration dynamics in mobile development differ from conventional software development. In this paper, we examine factors that influence task ownership in Android development. Our results …

Dynamic Clustering Of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits, Trong T. Nguyen, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the prevalence of the Web and social media, users increasingly express their preferences online. In learning these preferences, recommender systems need to balance the trade-off between exploitation, by providing users with more of the "same", and exploration, by providing users with something "new" so as to expand the systems' knowledge. Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a framework to balance this trade-off. Most of the previous work in MAB either models a single bandit for the whole population, or one bandit for each user. We propose an algorithm to divide the population of users into multiple clusters, and to customize the …

Celelabel: An Interactive System For Annotating Celebrities In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Jinfeng Bai, Chong-Wah Ngo, Bailan Feng, Bo Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Manual annotation of celebrities in Web videos is an essential task in many people-related Web services. The task, however, poses a significant challenge even to skillful annotators, mainly due to the large quantity of unfamiliar and greatly varied celebrities, and the lack of a customized system for it. This work develops CeleLabel, an interactive system for manually annotating celebrities in the Web video domain. The peculiarity of CeleLabel is to exploit and display multiple types of information that could assist the annotation, including video content, context surrounding and within a video, celebrity images on the Web, and human factors. Using …

Developer Involvement Considered Harmful? An Empirical Examination Of Android Bug Resolution Times, Subhajit Datta, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large scale software development ecosystems, there is a common perception that higher developer involvement leads to faster resolution of bugs. This is based on conjectures around more ``eyeballs" making bugs "shallow" -- whose validity and applicability are not without dispute. In this paper, we posit that the level of developer attention as well as its extent of diversity influence how quickly bugs get resolved. We report results from a study of 1,000+ Android bugs. We find statistically significant evidence that attention and diversity have contrasting relationships with the resolution time of bugs, even after controlling for factors such as …

An Ecological Model For Digital Platforms Maintenance And Evolution, Paolo Rocchi, Paolo Spagnoletti, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The maintenance of software products has been studied extensively in both software engineering and management information systems. Such studies are mainly focused on the activities that take place prior to starting the maintenance phase. Their contribution is either related to the improvement of software quality or to validating contingency models for reducing maintenance efforts. The continuous maintenance philosophy suggests to shift the attention within the maintenance phase for better coping with the evolutionary trajectories of digital platforms. In this paper, we examine the maintenance process of a digital platform from the perspective of the software vendor. Based on our empirical …