Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cross Media Hyperlinking For Search Topic Browsing, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Lei Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, there are plenty of information sources freely available online for use. Nevertheless, how to synchronize and leverage these diverse forms of information for multimedia applications remains a problem yet to be seriously studied. This paper investigates the synchronization of multiple media content in the physical form of hyperlinking them. The ultimate goal is to develop browsing systems that author search results with rich media information mined from various knowledge sources. The authoring enables the vivid visualization and exploration of different information landscapes inherent in search results. Several key techniques are studied in this …

Agile Innovation Management, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The volume and velocity of innovations are on the increase resulting in increased pressures on every company for attaining, retaining and increasing its market leadership. Many companies need to retool their innovation management processes to address two agility related objectives in order to survive and grow in such a rapidly changing innovation environment. The first objective would be the ability to assemble an innovation team within the shortest possible time. This can only be satisfied by companies that are capable of forming innovation teams rather quickly. The related second objective would be to reduce the I2M (Idea to Market) cycle …

Launching Return-Oriented Programming Attacks Against Randomized Relocatable Executables, Limin Liu, Jin Han, Debin Gao, Jiwu Jing, Daren Zha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since the day it was proposed, return-oriented programming has shown to be an effective and powerful attack technique against the write or execute only (W ⊕ X) protection. However, a general belief in the previous research is, systems deployed with address space randomization where the executables are also randomized at run-time are able to defend against return-oriented programming, as the addresses of all instructions are randomized. In this paper, we show that due to the weakness of current address space randomization technique, there are still ways of launching return-oriented programming attacks against those well-protected systems efficiently. We demonstrate and evaluate …

A Model Checking Framework For Hierarchical Systems., Truong Khanh Nguyen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

BDD-based symbolic model checking is capable of verifying systems with a large number of states. In this work, we report an extensible framework to facilitate symbolic encoding and checking of hierarchical systems. Firstly, a novel library of symbolic encoding functions for compositional operators (e.g., parallel composition, sequential composition, choice operator, etc.) are developed so that users can apply symbolic model checking techniques to hierarchical systems with little knowledge of symbolic encoding techniques (like BDD or CUDD). Secondly, as the library is language-independent, we build an extensible framework with various symbolic model checking algorithms so that the library can be easily …

Search-Based Fault Localization, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, - Lucia, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many spectrum-based fault localization measures have been proposed in the literature. However, no single fault localization measure completely outperforms others: a measure which is more accurate in localizing some bugs in some programs is less accurate in localizing other bugs in other programs. This paper proposes to compose existing spectrum-based fault localization measures into an improved measure. We model the composition of various measures as an optimization problem and present a search-based approach to explore the space of many possible compositions and output a heuristically near optimal composite measure. We employ two search-based strategies including genetic algorithm and simulated annealing …

No Fear: Leadership, "Digital Cowboys" And The "Playstation Generation", Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Finnish entrepreneur Pekka Viljakainen would be considered as successful by most measures. At only 38 years of age, he has managed a staff of 8,000 across 20 countries from Munich. His information technology (IT) consultancy, Oy Visual Systems, had merged with Tieto, another European IT firm, and Viljakainen was made executive vice-president.

A Visual Analytics System For Metropolitan Transportation, Siyuan Liu, Ce Liu, Qiong Luo, Lionel M. Ni, Huamin Qu

LARC Research Publications

With the increasing availability of metropolitan transportation data, such as those from vehicle GPSs (Global Positioning systems) and road-side sensors, it becomes viable for authorities, operators, as well as individuals to analyze the data for a better understanding of the transportation system and possibly improved utilization and planning of the system. We report our experience in building the VAST (Visual Analytics for Smart Transportation) system. Our key observation is that metropolitan transportation data are inherently visual as they are spatiotemporal around road networks. Therefore, we visualize traffic data together with digital maps and support analytical queries through this interactive visual …

Are There Contagion Effects In Information Technology And Business Process Outsourcing?, Arti Mann, Robert J. Kauffman, Kunsoo Han, Barrie R. Nault

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We model the diffusion of IT outsourcing using announcements about IT outsourcing deals. We estimate a lognormal diffusion curve to test whether IT outsourcing follows a pure diffusion process or there are contagion effects involved. The methodology permits us to study the consequences of outsourcing events, especially mega-deals with IT contract amounts that exceed US$1 billion. Mega-deals act, we theorize, as precipitating events that create a strong basis for contagion effects and are likely to affect decision-making by other firms in an industry. Then, we evaluate the role of different communication channels in the diffusion process of IT outsourcing by …

A Brain-Inspired Model Of Hierarchical Planner, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical planning is an approach of planning by composing and executing hierarchically arranged plans to solve some problems. Most symbolic-based hierarchical planners have been devised to allow the knowledge to be described expressively. However, a great challenge is to automatically seek and acquire new plans on the fly. This paper presents a novel neural-based model of hierarchical planning that can seek and acquired new plans on-line if the necessary knowledge are lacking. Inspired by findings in neuropsychology, plans can be inherently learnt, retrieved, and manipulated simultaneously rather than discretely processed like in most symbolic approaches. Using a multi-channel adaptive resonance …

Software Process Evaluation: A Machine Learning Approach, Ning Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software process evaluation is essential to improve software development and the quality of software products in an organization. Conventional approaches based on manual qualitative evaluations (e.g., artifacts inspection) are deficient in the sense that (i) they are time-consuming, (ii) they suffer from the authority constraints, and (iii) they are often subjective. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel semi-automated approach to software process evaluation using machine learning techniques. In particular, we formulate the problem as a sequence classification task, which is solved by applying machine learning algorithms. Based on the framework, we define a new quantitative indicator to …

Pat 3: An Extensible Architecture For Building Multi-Domain Model Checkers, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking is emerging as an effective software verification method. Although it is desirable to have a dedicated model checker for each application domain, implementing one is rather challenging. In this work, we develop an extensible and integrated architecture in PAT3 (PAT version 3.*) to support the development of model checkers for wide range application domains. PAT3 adopts a layered design with an intermediate representation layer (IRL), which separates modeling languages from model checking algorithms so that the algorithms can be shared by different languages. IRL contains several common semantic models to support wide application domains, and builds both explicit …

Consistent Community Identification In Complex Networks, Haewoon Kwak, Young-Ho Eom, Yoonchan Choi, Hawoong Jeong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We have found that known community identification algorithms produce inconsistent communities when the node ordering changes at input. We use the pairwise membership probability and consistency to quantify the level of consistency across multiple runs of an algorithm. Based on these two metrics, we address the consistency problem without compromising the modularity. The key insight of the algorithm is to use pairwise membership probabilities as link weights. It offers a new tool in the study of community structures and their evolutions.

Coping With Distance: An Empirical Study Of Communication On The Jazz Platform, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform -- a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 …

Finding Relevant Answers In Software Forums, Swapna Gottopati, David Lo, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to …

Applying Time-Bound Hierarchical Key Assignment In Wireless Sensor Networks, Wentao Zhu, Robert H. Deng, Jianying Zhou, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Access privileges in distributed systems can be effectively organized as a partial-order hierarchy that consists of distinct security classes, and are often designated with certain temporal restrictions. The time-bound hierarchical key assignment problem is to assign distinct cryptographic keys to distinct security classes according to their privileges so that users from a higher class can use their class key to derive the keys of lower classes, and these keys are time-variant with respect to sequentially allocated temporal units called time slots. In this paper, we explore applications of time-bound hierarchical key assignment in a wireless sensor network environment where there …

Managing Successive Generation Product Diffusion In The Presence Of Strategic Consumers, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Frequent new product release and technological uncertainty about the release time pose significant challenges for firms to manage successive generation of products. On the one hand, strategic consumers may delay their purchase decision and substitute the earlier generation with the newer generation product. On the other hand, the firm must fully anticipate consumer reactions and take into account the effect of their strategic behavior on product pricing and successive generation product diffusion. This paper proposes a prediction market to forecast new product release. We show that the market information aggregation mechanism can improve forecast accuracy of new product launch. Better …

Unsupervised Multiple Kernel Learning, Jinfeng Zhuang, Jialei Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiangyang Lan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional multiple kernel learning (MKL) algorithms are essentially supervised learning in the sense that the kernel learning task requires the class labels of training data. However, class labels may not always be available prior to the kernel learning task in some real world scenarios, e.g., an early preprocessing step of a classification task or an unsupervised learning task such as dimension reduction. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Unsupervised Multiple Kernel Learning (UMKL), which does not require class labels of training data as needed in a conventional multiple kernel learning task. Since a kernel essentially defines pairwise similarity …

Towards Trajectory-Based Experience Sharing In A City, Byoungjip Kim, Youngki Lee, Sangjeong Lee, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As location-aware mobile devices such as smartphones have now become prevalent, people are able to easily record their trajectories in daily lives. Such personal trajectories are a very promising means to share their daily life experiences, since important contextual information such as significant locations and activities can be extracted from the raw trajectories. In this paper, we propose MetroScope, a trajectory-based real-time and on-the-go experience sharing system in a metropolitan city. MetroScope allows people to share their daily life experiences through trajectories, and enables them to refer to other people's diverse and interesting experiences in a city. Eventually, MetroScope aims …

Profit-Maximizing Firm Investments In Customer Information Security, Yong Yick Lee, Robert J. Kauffman, Ryan Sougstad

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a customer interacts with a firm, extensive personal information often is gathered without the individual's knowledge. Significant risks are associated with handling this kind of information. Providing protection may reduce the risk of the loss and misuse of private information, but it imposes some costs on both the firm and its customers. Nevertheless, customer information security breaches still may occur. They have several distinguishing characteristics: (1) typically it is hard to quantify monetary damages related to them; (2) customer information security breaches may be caused by intentional attacks, as well as through unintentional organizational and customer behaviors; and (3) …

Price Points And Price Rigidity, Daniel Levy, Dongwon Lee, Haipeng (Allen) Lee, Robert J. Kauffman, Mark Bergen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the link between price points and price rigidity using two data sets: weekly scanner data and Internet data. We find that ‘‘9’’ is the most frequent ending for the penny, dime, dollar, and ten-dollar digits; the most common price changes are those that keep the price endings at ‘‘9’’; 9-ending prices are less likely to change than non-9-ending prices; and the average size of price change is larger for 9-ending than non-9- ending prices. We conclude that 9-ending contributes to price rigidity from penny to dollar digits and across a wide range of product categories, retail formats, and …

A Pomdp Model For Guiding Taxi Cruising In A Congested Urban City, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model for improving a taxi agent cruising decision in a congested urban city. Using real-world data provided by a large taxi company in Singapore as a guide, we derive the state transition function of the POMDP. Specifically, we model the cruising behavior of the drivers as continuous-time Markov chains. We then apply dynamic programming algorithm for finding the optimal policy of the driver agent. Using a simulation, we show that this policy is significantly better than a greedy policy in congested road network.

Exploring Tweets Normalization And Query Time Sensitivity For Twitter Search, Zhongyu Wei, Wei Gao, Lanjun Zhou, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents our work for the Realtime Adhoc Task of TREC 2011 Microblog Track. Microblog texts like tweets are generally characterized by the inclusion of a large proportion of irregular expressions, such as ill-formed words, which can lead to significant mismatch between query terms and tweets. In addition, Twitter queries are distinguished from Web queries with many unique characteristics, one of which reflects the clearly distinct temporal aspects of Twitter search behavior. In this study, we deal with the first problem by normalizing tweet texts and the second by capturing the temporal characteristics of topic. We divided topics into …

Learning Human Emotion Patterns For Modeling Virtual Humans, Shu Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emotion modeling is a crucial part in modeling virtual humans. Although various emotion models have been proposed, most of them focus on designing specific appraisal rules. As there is no unified framework for emotional appraisal, the appraisal variables have to be defined beforehand and evaluated in a subjective way. In this paper, we propose an emotion model based on machine learning methods by taking the following position: an emotion model should mirror actual human emotion in the real world and connect tightly with human inner states, such as drives, motivations and personalities. Specifically, a self-organizing neural model called Emotional Appraisal …

Beyond Search: Event-Driven Summarization For Web Videos, Richard Hong, Jinhui Tang, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shuicheng Yan, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The explosive growth of Web videos brings out the challenge of how to efficiently browse hundreds or even thousands of videos at a glance. Given an event-driven query, social media Web sites usually return a large number of videos that are diverse and noisy in a ranking list. Exploring such results will be time-consuming and thus degrades user experience. This article presents a novel scheme that is able to summarize the content of video search results by mining and threading "key" shots, such that users can get an overview of main content of these videos at a glance. The proposed …

Enabling Gpu Acceleration With Messaging Middleware, Randall E. Duran, Li Zhang, Tom Hayhurst

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics processing units (GPUs) offer great potential for accelerating processing for a wide range of scientific and business applications. However, complexities associated with using GPU technology have limited its use in applications. This paper reviews earlier approaches improving GPU accessibility, and explores how integration with middleware messaging technologies can further improve the accessibility and usability of GPU-enabled platforms. The results of a proof-of-concept integration between an open-source messaging middleware platform and a general-purpose GPU platform using the CUDA framework are presented. Additional applications of this technique are identified and discussed as potential areas for further research.

Designing Low-Cost Mobile Websites For Libraries, Tiffini Travis, Chee Hsien Aaron (Zheng Zhixian) Tay

Research Collection Library

As smartphone ownership rises, usage patterns are expanding. Libraries face an increasing demand for online content delivered in a mobile compatible format while being constrained by financial and staffing limitations. Solutions are readily available through free and low-cost products to create mobile web pages and existing design models from which to draw inspiration. Platform-specific apps can easily support the kinds of content most commonly delivered on library mobile pages: basic contact information and outbound links to the catalog, databases, and other resources. Two software platforms for creating simple pages were tested, the free software from WordPress with mobile detection formatting …

Active Multiple Kernel Learning For Interactive 3d Object Retrieval Systems, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An effective relevance feedback solution plays a key role in interactive intelligent 3D object retrieval systems. In this work, we investigate the relevance feedback problem for interactive intelligent 3D object retrieval, with the focus on studying effective machine learning algorithms for improving the user's interaction in the retrieval task. One of the key challenges is to learn appropriate kernel similarity measure between 3D objects through the relevance feedback interaction with users. We address this challenge by presenting a novel framework of Active multiple kernel learning (AMKL), which exploits multiple kernel learning techniques for relevance feedback in interactive 3D object retrieval. …

Efficient Evaluation Of Continuous Text Seach Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consider a text filtering server that monitors a stream of incoming documents for a set of users, who register their interests in the form of continuous text search queries. The task of the server is to constantly maintain for each query a ranked result list, comprising the recent documents (drawn from a sliding window) with the highest similarity to the query. Such a system underlies many text monitoring applications that need to cope with heavy document traffic, such as news and email monitoring.In this paper, we propose the first solution for processing continuous text queries efficiently. Our objective is to …

Strategic Responses To Standardization: Embrace, Extend Or Extinguish?, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level.

We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” …

Prts: An Approach For Model Checking Probabilistic Real-Time Hierarchical Systems, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Songzheng Song, Jin Song Dong, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model Checking real-life systems is always difficult since such systems usually have quantitative timing factors and work in unreliable environment. The combination of real-time and probability in hierarchical systems presents a unique challenge to system modeling and analysis. In this work, we develop an automated approach for verifying probabilistic, real-time, hierarchical systems. Firstly, a modeling language called PRTS is defined, which combines data structures, real-time and probability. Next, a zone-based method is used to build a finite-state abstraction of PRTS models so that probabilistic model checking could be used to calculate the probability of a system satisfying certain property. We …