Infosphere Project: An Overview, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We describe the Infosphere project, which is building the systems software support for information-driven applications such as digital libraries and electronic commerce. The main technical contribution is the Infopipe abstraction to support information flow with quality of service. Using building blocks such as program specialization, software feedback, domain-specific languages, and personalized information filtering, the Infopipe software generates code and manage resources to provide the specified quality of service with support for composition and restructuring.

A More Efficient Document Retrieval Method For Texpros, Yin Dong

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Through document classification, extraction and filing, documents are automatically placed into a knowledge base according to certain rules. Document retrieval is a process to get a document back according to a user's requirements and to show the results to the user. Hence, a good user-interface and an efficient retrieval algorithm become core parts of document retrieval.

Unlike previous browsers that have been proposed for this purpose, this dissertation develops a new browser that has a user interface with more tools, and one that has a more efficient retrieval algorithm that can …

A "Converse" Of The Banach Contraction Mapping Theorem, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We prove a type of converse of the Banach contraction mapping theorem for metric spaces: if X is a T₁ topological space and f: X -> X is a function with the unique fixed point a such that fⁿ(x) converges to a for each x is a member of X, then there exists a distance function d on X such that f is a contraction on the complete ultrametric space (X,d) with contractivity factor 1/2. We explore properties of the resulting space (X,d).

Unique Supported-Model Classes Of Logic Programs, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We study classes of programs, herein called unique supported-model classes, with the property that each program in the class has a unique supported model. Elsewhere, the authors examined these classes from the point of view of operators defined relative to certain three-valued logics. In this paper, we complement our earlier results by considering how unique supported-model classes fit into the framework given by various classes of programs in several well-known approaches to semantics.

Kontraktionssatze Auf Verallgemeinerten Metrischen Raumen, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Bookmark Search: A Web-Based Bookmark Search Engine, Yun Sang Lee

Theses Digitization Project

The objective of the project is to create a search engine in which the databases of links are the bookmarks uploaded by the user. The main idea of the BOOKMARK-SEARCH system is the sharing of bookmarks resources required carrying on an Internet search. It aims to provide an affordable search solution to users while sharing bookmarks resouces.

Application Of Active Rules To Support Database Integrity Constraints And View Management, Suwanna Visavapattamawon

Theses Digitization Project

The project demonstrates the enforcement of integrity constraints in both the conventional and active database systems. The project implements a more complex user-defined constraint, a complicated view and more detailed database auditing on the active database system.

The Partial Evaluation Approach To Information Personalization, Naren Ramakrishnan, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Information personalization refers to the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to an individual user. By reducing information overload and customizing information access, personalization systems have emerged as an important segment of the Internet economy. This paper presents a systematic modeling methodology— PIPE (‘Personalization is Partial Evaluation’) — for personalization. Personalization systems are designed and implemented in PIPE by modeling an information-seeking interaction in a programmatic representation. The representation supports the description of information-seeking activities as partial information and their subsequent realization by partial evaluation, a technique for specializing programs. We describe the modeling methodology at a …

Latent Maximum Entropy Principle For Statistical Language Modeling, Shaojun Wang, Ronald Rosenfeld, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe a unified probabilistic framework for statistical language modeling, the latent maximum entropy principle. The salient feature of this approach is that the hidden causal hierarchical dependency structure can be encoded into the statistical model in a principled way by mixtures of exponential families with a rich expressive power. We first show the problem formulation, solution, and certain convergence properties. We then describe how to use this machine learning technique to model various aspects of natural language, such as syntactic structure of sentences, semantic information in a document. Finally, we draw a conclusion and point out future research directions.

Expanding The Notion Of Relevance In Is Research: A Proposal And Some Recommendations, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Based on an analysis of a priori discussion on the notion of relevance, this paper proposes a holistic view of relevance in IS research. This expanded notion of relevance incorporates a broader definition of audience/stakeholder, and includes additional dimensions such as scope/value of relevant research, time frame, and "situatedness" of relevance. In view of this definition, it is argued that "practical relevance" is not the sole goal of academic research. Hence, the authors recommend, for example, that knowledge claims in IS need to be better communicated and targeted for the future development and recognition of the IS discipline.

Web-Based Database Management System For Research And Development Laboratories: Technical Service Support System, Benito Solórzano

Theses Digitization Project

With the use of the Internet and the emerging of e-commerce, new and improved technologies and modeling techniques have been used to design and implement web-based database management systems.

A Framework For Performance And Value Assessment Of E-Business Systems In Corporate Travel Distribution, A.M. Chircu, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This chapter proposes and illustrates a framework that the authors call the value life cycle for e-commerce systems. Based on recent research results that relate to technology investments in the corporate travel industry and related theoretical and empirical perspectives, the authors lay out the corporate travel e-commerce system solutions value life cycle. The perspective involves estimating the maximum value that that an organization can obtain by implementing an e-commerce system in a specific industry and competitive environment. It also considers multiple factors that act as value contingencies for the implementation process. These create barriers to value accrual and to …

Incorporating Window-Based Passage-Level Evidence In Document Retrieval, Wensi Xi, Richard Xu-Rong, Christopher Soo Guan Khoo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study investigated whether document retrieval can be improved if documents are divided into smaller sub-documents or passages and the retrieval score for these passages are incorporated in the final retrieval score for the whole document. The documents were segmented by sliding a window of a certain size across the document and extracting the words displayed each time the window stopped. A retrieval score was calculated for each of the passages extracted and the highest score obtained by a passage of that size was taken as the document’s passage-level score for that window size. A range of window sizes was …

Ontologies And Electronic Commerce, Dieter Fensel, Deborah L. Mcguinness, Ellen Schulten, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim, Guanghao Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ontologies are the first step toward realizing the full power of online e-commerce. Ontologies enable machine-understandable semantics of data, and building this data infrastructure will enable completely new kinds of automated services. Software agents can search for products, form buyer and seller coalitions, negotiate about products, or help automatically configure products and services according to specified user requirements. The combination of machine-processable semantics of data based on ontologies and the development of many specialized reasoning services will bring the Web to its full power. The authors discuss: taxonomies; information sources; future issues; business viewpoints; the e-marketplace; and B2B e-commerce standardisation …

Perceptual Cues And Subjective Organization In A Virtual Information Workspace, Todd M. Eischeid

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The key to effectively using the immense body of data on the Internet is an efficient method of organizing relevant information. Researchers and designers are beginning to promote the advantages of three-dimensional (3D) models of information storage and retrieval; however, the potential benefits of perceptual depth cues have not been systematically studied.

The present study used a computer task to examine the effectiveness of three types of virtual desktops. A two-dimensional (2D) virtual desktop display, lacking in the cues that give the illusion of depth, was compared to two different 3D virtual desktops, both of which used perceptual cues to …

Efficient Storage And Retrieval Of Georeferenced Objects In A Semantic Database For Web-Based Applications, Debra Lee Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use and dissemination of remotely-sensed data is an important resource that can be used for environmental, commercial and educational purposes. Because of this, the use and availability of remotely-sensed data has increased dramatically in recent years. This usefulness, however, is often overshadowed by the difficulty encountered with trying to deal with this type of data. The amount of data available is immense. Storing, searching and retrieving the data of interest is often difficult, time consuming and inefficient. This is particularly true when these types of data need to be rapidly and continually accessed via the Internet, or combined with …

Covert Shells, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

The potential for covert communications exist anywhere that legitimate communication channels are in use. In order to maintain control of the channel once exploited, the insertion of a backdoor Trojan horse server, to be used with a client that provides shell access, is often a necessary prerequisite to establishing and using a covert channel long term.

We discuss covert channel communications methods ranging from embedded channels to disguised protocols. What follows is a review of available covert shell tools. The underground, historical evolution of covert shells is reviewed, focusing on selected, available tools, which range from simple encapsulation methods to …

Classes Of Logic Programs Which Possess Unique Supported Models, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Logic programming is concerned with the use of logic as a programming language. The main manifestation of this computing paradigm is in the various versions of Prolog which are now available, in which computation is viewed as deduction from sets of Horn clauses, although there is also growing interest in the related form known as answer set programming, see [10]. The reference [1] contains a good survey of the growth of logic programming over the last twenty-five years both as a stand-alone programming language and as a software component of large information systems. One advantage a logic program P has …

Side Collision Warning System For Transit Buses, Sue Mcneil, David Duggins, Christoph Mertz, Arne Suppe, Chuck Thorpe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transit buses are involved in many more accidents than other vehicles. Collision warning systems (CWS) are therefore placed most efficiently on these buses. In our project, we investigate their operating environment and available technologies to develop performance specifications for such CWS. The paper discusses our findings of transit buses driving through very cluttered surroundings and being involved in many different types of accidents where currently available CWS no not work effectively. One of the focuses of our work is pedestrians around the bus and their detection.

Semantic Web And Information Brokering: Opportunities, Commercialization, And Challenges, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

From the chairs' report published in SIGMOD record: The keynote address entitled 'Semantic Web and Information Brokering: Opportunities, Early Commercializations, and Challenges' was delivered by Amit Sheth (University of Georgia and Taalee Corp). Sheth characterized semantics as the next step in the evolution of the WWW and stressed the importance of semantically organized information for supporting ubiquitous, powerful, accurate and efficient access to this information. Sheth also reviewed proposals for semantic interoperability frameworks such as the DAML(DARPA Agent Mark-Up Language), the Oingo family of tools for defining concepts and extracting knowledge from large databases, as well as several scenarios on …

Exception Handling In Workflow Systems, Zongwei Luo, Amit P. Sheth, Krzysztof J. Kochut, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, defeasible workflow is proposed as a framework to support exception handling for workflow management. By using the “justified” ECA rules to capture more contexts in workflow modeling, defeasible workflow uses context dependent reasoning to enhance the exception handling capability of workflow management systems. In particular, this limits possible alternative exception handler candidates in dealing with exceptional situations. Furthermore, a case-based reasoning (CBR) mechanism with integrated human involvement is used to improve the exception handling capabilities. This involves collecting cases to capture experiences in handling exceptions, retrieving similar prior exception handling cases, and reusing the exception handling experiences …

Knowledge Discovery In Biological Databases : A Neural Network Approach, Qicheng Ma

Dissertations

Knowledge discovery, in databases, also known as data mining, is aimed to find significant information from a set of data. The knowledge to be mined from the dataset may refer to patterns, association rules, classification and clustering rules, and so forth. In this dissertation, we present a neural network approach to finding knowledge in biological databases. Specifically, we propose new methods to process biological sequences in two case studies: the classification of protein sequences and the prediction of E. Coli promoters in DNA sequences. Our proposed methods, based oil neural network architectures combine techniques ranging from Bayesian inference, coding theory, …

Integration And Querying Of Heterogeneous, Autonomous, Distributed Database Systems, Rukshan Indika Athauda

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, databases have become an integral part of information systems. In the past two decades, we have seen different database systems being developed independently and used in different applications domains. Today's interconnected networks and advanced applications, such as data warehousing, data mining & knowledge discovery and intelligent data access to information on the Web, have created a need for integrated access to such heterogeneous, autonomous, distributed database systems. Heterogeneous/multidatabase research has focused on this issue resulting in many different approaches. However, a single, generally accepted methodology in academia or industry has not emerged providing ubiquitous intelligent data access from heterogeneous, …

Dimensionality Reduction Using Genetic Algorithms, Michael L. Raymer, William F. Punch, Erik D. Goodman, Leslie A. Kuhn, Anil K. Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Pattern recognition generally requires that objects be described in terms of a set of measurable features. The selection and quality of the features representing each pattern affect the success of subsequent classification. Feature extraction is the process of deriving new features from original features to reduce the cost of feature measurement, increase classifier efficiency, and allow higher accuracy. Many feature extraction techniques involve linear transformations of the original pattern vectors to new vectors of lower dimensionality. While this is useful for data visualization and classification efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce the number of features to be measured since each …

A New Fixed-Point Theorem For Logic Programming Semantics, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a new fixed-point theorem akin to the Banach contraction mapping theorem, but in the context of a novel notion of generalized metric space, and show how it can be applied to analyse the denotational semantics of certain logic programs. The theorem is obtained by generalizing a theorem of Priess-Crampe and Ribenboim, which grew out of applications within valuation theory, but is also inspired by a theorem of S.G. Matthews which grew out of applications to conventional programming language semantics. The class of programs to which we apply our theorem was defined previously by us in terms of operators …

Is Information Systems A Science? An Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Information Systems Discipline, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The Information Systems (IS) discipline is apparently undergoing an identity crisis. Academicians question the need for IS departments in colleges stating the absence of a core for the field and its integration within other business functions as a basis for its elimination. At the same time, many practitioners, as reflected in the US government's recent IT labor shortage report, continue to ignore IS as a distinct field of study. This article briefly outlines these and other challenges and argues that notwithstanding underlying philosophical differences, it can be concluded that IS is an emerging scientific discipline. This conclusion is reached through …

On-Line Bayesian Speaker Adaptation By Using Tree-Structured Transformation And Robust Priors, Shaojun Wang, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents new results by using our previously proposed on-line Bayesian learning approach for affine transformation parameter estimation in speaker adaptation. The on-line Bayesian learning technique allows updating parameter estimates after each utterance and it can accommodate flexible forms of transformation functions as well as prior probability density functions. We show through experimental results the robustness of heavy tailed priors to mismatch in prior density estimation. We also show that by properly choosing the transformation matrices and depths of hierarchical trees, recognition performance improved significantly.

Dtd-Miner: A Tool For Mining Dtds From Xml Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

XML documents are semistructured and the structure of the documents is embedded in the tags. Although XML documents can be accompanied by a DTD that defines the structure of the documents, the presence of a DTD is not mandatory. The difficulty in deriving the DTD for XML documents lies in the fact that DTDs are of different syntax as XML and that prior knowledge of the structure of the documents is required. In this paper, we introduce DTD-Miner, an automatic structure-mining tool for XML documents. Using a Web-based interface, the user will be able to submit a set of similarly …

Re-Engineering Structures From Web Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To realize a wide range of applications (including digital libraries) on the Web, a more structured way of accessing the Web is required and such requirement can be facilitated by the use of XML standard. In this paper, we propose a general framework for reverse engineering (or re-engineering) the underlying structures i.e.,the DTD from a collection of similarly structured XML documents when they share some common but unknown DTDs. The essential data structures and algorithms for the DTD generation have been delveloped and experiments on real Web collections have been conducted to demonstrate their feasibilty. In addition, we also proposed …

Genetically Evolved Dynamic Control For Quadruped Walking, Giorgio Grasso

Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to show that dynamic control of quadruped locomotion is achievable through the use of genetically evolved central pattern generators. This strategy is tested both in simulation and on a walking robot. The design of the walker has been chosen to be statically unstable, so that during motion less than three supporting feet may be in contact with the ground.

The control strategy adopted is capable of propelling the artificial walker at a forward locomotion speed of ~1.5 Km/h on rugged terrain and provides for stability of motion. The learning of walking, based on simulated …