Computer Sciences Commons^™

Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey, Saverio Perugini, Marcos André Gonçalves, Edward A. Fox

Saverio Perugini

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from …

Automatically Generating Interfaces For Personalized Interaction With Digital Libraries, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan, Edward A. Fox

Saverio Perugini

We present an approach to automatically generate interfaces supporting personalized interaction with digital libraries; these interfaces augment the user-DL dialog by empowering the user to (optionally) supply out-of-turn information during an interaction, flatten or restructure the dialog, and inquire about dialog options. Interfaces generated using this approach for CITIDEL are described.

Symbolic Links In The Open Directory Project, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We present a study to develop an improved understanding of symbolic links in web directories. A symbolic link is a hyperlink that makes a directed connection from a web page along one path through a directory to a page along another path. While symbolic links are ubiquitous in web directories such as Yahoo!, they are under-studied, and as a result, their uses are poorly understood. A cursory analysis of symbolic links reveals multiple uses: to provide navigational shortcuts deeper into a directory, backlinks to more general categories, and multiclassification. We investigated these uses in the Open Directory Project (ODP), the …

Interacting With Web Hierarchies, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Web site interfaces are a particularly good fit for hierarchies in the broadest sense of that idea, i.e. a classification with multiple attributes, not necessarily a tree structure. Several adaptive interface designs are emerging that support flexible navigation orders, exposing and exploring dependencies, and procedural information-seeking tasks. This paper provides a context and vocabulary for thinking about hierarchical Web sites and their design. The paper identifies three features that interface to information hierarchies. These are flexible navigation orders, the ability to expose and explore dependencies, and support for procedural tasks. A few examples of these features are also provided

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

Saverio Perugini

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 …

The Staging Transformation Approach To Mixing Initiative, Robert Capra, Michael Narayan, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones

Saverio Perugini

Mixed-initiative interaction is an important facet of many conversational interfaces, flexible planning architectures, intelligent tutoring systems, and interactive information retrieval systems. Software systems for mixed-initiative interaction must enable us to both operationalize the mixing of initiative (i.e., support the creation of practical dialogs) and to reason in real-time about how a flexible mode of interaction can be supported (e.g., from a meta-dialog standpoint). In this paper, we present the staging transformation approach to mixing initiative, where a dialog script captures the structure of the dialog and dialog control processes are realized through generous use of program transformation techniques (e.g., partial …

A Study Of Out-Of-Turn Interaction In Menu-Based, Ivr, Voicemail Systems, Saverio Perugini, Taylor J. Anderson, William F. Moroney

Saverio Perugini

We present the first user study of out-of-turn interaction in menu-based, interactive voice-response systems. Out-ofturn interaction is a technique which empowers the user (unable to respond to the current prompt) to take the conversational initiative by supplying information that is currently unsolicited, but expected later in the dialog. The technique permits the user to circumvent any flows of navigation hardwired into the design and navigate the menus in a manner which reflects their model of the task. We conducted a laboratory experiment to measure the effect of the use of outof- turn interaction on user performance and preference in a …

Personalizing The Gams Cross-Index, Saverio Perugini, Priya Lakshminarayanan, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

The NIST Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) system at http://gams.nist .gov serves as the gateway to thousands of scientific codes and modules for numerical computation. We describe the PIPE personalization facility for GAMS, whereby content from the cross-index is specialized for a user desiring software recommendations for a specific problem instance. The key idea is to (i) mine structure, and (ii) exploit it in a programmatic manner to generate personalized web pages. Our approach supports both content-based and collaborative personalization and enables information integration from multiple (and complementary) web resources. We present case studies for the domain of linear, …

Information Assurance Through Binary Vulnerability Auditing, William B. Kimball, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

The goal of this research is to develop improved methods of discovering vulnerabilities in software. A large volume of software, from the most frequently used programs on a desktop computer, such as web browsers, e-mail programs, and word processing applications, to mission-critical services for the space shuttle, is unintentionally vulnerable to attacks and thus insecure. By seeking to improve the identification of vulnerabilities in software, the security community can save the time and money necessary to restore compromised computer systems. In addition, this research is imperative to activities of national security such as counterterrorism. The current approach involves a systematic …

Personalizing Interactions With Information Systems, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles …

Mining Web-Functional Dependencies For Flexible Information Access, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

We present an approach to enhancing information access through Web structure mining in contrast to traditional approaches involving usage mining. Specifically, we mine the hardwired hierarchical hyperlink structure of Web sites to identify patterns of term-term co-occurrences we call Web functional dependencies (FDs). Intuitively, a Web FD ‘x y’ declares that all paths through a site involving a hyperlink labeled x also contain a hyperlink labeled y. The complete set of FDs satisfied by a site help characterize (flexible and expressive) interaction paradigms supported by a site, where a paradigm is the set of explorable sequences therein. …

Supporting Multiple Paths To Objects In Information Hierarchies: Faceted Classification, Faceted Search, And Symbolic Links, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We present three fundamental, interrelated approaches to support multiple access paths to each terminal object in information hierarchies: faceted classification, faceted search, and web directories with embedded symbolic links. This survey aims to demonstrate how each approach supports users who seek information from multiple perspectives. We achieve this by exploring each approach, the relationships between these approaches, including tradeoffs, and how they can be used in concert, while focusing on a core set of hypermedia elements common to all. This approach provides a foundation from which to study, understand, and synthesize applications which employ these techniques. This survey does not …

Recommender Systems Research, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We outline the history of recommender systems from their roots in information retrieval and filtering to their role in today’s Internet economy. Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. Research in recommender systems lies at the intersection of several areas of computer science, such as artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, and has progressed to an important research area of its own. It is important to note that recommendations are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users …

Realtime Query Expansion And Procedural Interfaces For Information Hierarchies, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We demonstrate the use of two user interfaces for interacting with web hierarchies. One uses the dependencies underlying a hierarchy to perform real-time query expansion and, in this way, acts as an in situ feedback mechanism. The other enables the user to cascade the output from one interaction to the input of another, and so on, and, in this way, supports procedural information-seeking tasks without disrupting the flow of interaction.

The Good, Bad And The Indifferent: Explorations In Recommender System Health, Benjamin J. Keller, Sun-Mi Kim, N. Srinivas Vemuri, Naren Ramakrishnan, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

Our work is based on the premise that analysis of the connections exploited by a recommender algorithm can provide insight into the algorithm that could be useful to predict its performance in a fielded system. We use the jumping connections model defined by Mirza et al. [6], which describes the recommendation process in terms of graphs. Here we discuss our work that has come out of trying to understand algorithm behavior in terms of these graphs. We start by describing a natural extension of the jumping connections model of Mirza et al., and then discuss observations that have come from …

Staging Transformations For Multimodal Web Interaction Management, Michael Narayan, Christopher Williams, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations – …

Vehicle Base Station, Emad William Saad, John L. Vian, Matthew A. Vavrina, Jared A. Nisbett, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A system to load and unload material from a vehicle comprises a vehicle base station and an assembly to autonomously load and unload material from the vehicle.

Interactive Feature Selection And Visualization For Large Observational Data, Jingyuan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Data can create enormous values in both scientific and industrial fields, especially for access to new knowledge and inspiration of innovation. As the massive increases in computing power, data storage capacity, as well as capability of data generation and collection, the scientific research communities are confronting with a transformation of exploiting the advanced uses of the large-scale, complex, and high-resolution data sets in situation awareness and decision-making projects. To comprehensively analyze the big data problems requires the analyses aiming at various aspects which involves of effective selections of static and time-varying feature patterns that fulfills the interests of domain users. …

Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection in sentiment analysis refers to detecting abnormal opinions, sentiment patterns or special temporal aspects of such patterns in a collection of data. The anomalies detected may be due to sudden sentiment changes hidden in large amounts of text. If these anomalies are undetected or poorly managed, the consequences may be severe, e.g. A business whose customers reveal negative sentiments and will no longer support the establishment. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a vast source of information, which includes user feedback, opinion and information on most issues. Many organizations also leverage social media platforms to publish information …

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 …

Theoretical And Experimental (E, 2e) Study Of Electron-Impact Ionization Of Laser-Aligned Mg Atoms, Sadek Amami, Andrew J. Murray, Al Stauffer, Kate Nixon, Gregory Armstrong, James Colgan, Don H. Madison

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We have performed calculations of the fully differential cross sections for electron-impact ionization of magnesium atoms. Three theoretical approximations, the time-dependent close coupling, the three-body distorted wave, and the distorted wave Born approximation, are compared with experiment in this article. Results will be shown for ionization of the 3s ground state of Mg for both asymmetric and symmetric coplanar geometries. Results will also be shown for ionization of the 3p state which has been excited by a linearly polarized laser which produces a charge cloud aligned perpendicular to the laser beam direction and parallel to the linear polarization. Theoretical and …

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 …

Issues Of Social Data Analytics With A New Method For Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor J. C. Tong, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social media data consists of feedback, critiques and other comments that are posted online by internet users. Collectively, these comments may reflect sentiments that are sometimes not captured in traditional data collection methods such as administering a survey questionnaire. Thus, social media data offers a rich source of information, which can be adequately analyzed and understood. In this paper, we survey the extant research literature on sentiment analysis and discuss various limitations of the existing analytical methods. A major limitation in the large majority of existing research is the exclusive focus on social media data in the English language. There …

X-Ray Emission Produced In Charge-Exchange Collisions Between Highly Charged Ions And Argon: Role Of The Multiple Electron Capture, Sebastian Otranto, N. D. Cariatore, Ronald E. Olson

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this work we use the classical trajectory Monte Carlo method within an eight-electron scheme to theoretically study photonic spectra that follow charge-exchange processes between highly charged ions of charge states 10+, 17+, 18+, and 36+ with neutral argon. The energy range considered is 18 eV/amu to 4 keV/amu, covering typical electron beam ion traps and solar wind energies. The role played by multiple electron capture processes for the different collision systems under consideration is explicitly analyzed and its contribution separated as arising from radiative decay and autoionizing multiple capture. For the present collision systems we find that multiple electron …

A Pareto-Frontier Analysis Of Performance Trends For Small Regional Coverage Leo Constellation Systems, Christopher Alan Hinds

Master's Theses

As satellites become smaller, cheaper, and quicker to manufacture, constellation systems will be an increasingly attractive means of meeting mission objectives. Optimizing satellite constellation geometries is therefore a topic of considerable interest. As constellation systems become more achievable, providing coverage to specific regions of the Earth will become more common place. Small countries or companies that are currently unable to afford large and expensive constellation systems will now, or in the near future, be able to afford their own constellation systems to meet their individual requirements for small coverage regions.

The focus of this thesis was to optimize constellation geometries …

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 …

Boscor: Extending R From The Desktop To The Grid, Derek J. Weitzel, Jaime Frey, Marco Mambelli, Dan Fraser, Miha Ahronovitz, David Swanson

Holland Computing Center: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we describe a framework to execute R functions on remote resources from the desktop using Bosco. The R language is attractive to researchers because of its high level programming constructs which lower the barrier of entry for use. As the use of the R programming language in HPC and High Throughput Computing (HTC) has grown, so too has the need for parallel libraries in order to utilize computing resources.

Bosco is middleware that uses common protocols to manage job submissions to a variety of remote computational platforms and resources. The researcher is able to control and monitor …

Estimating The Flight Path Of Moving Objects Based On Acceleration Data, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Inertial navigation is the problem of estimating the flight path of a moving object based on only acceleration measurements. This paper describes and compares two approaches for inertial navigation. Both approaches estimate the flight path of the moving object using cubic spline interpolation, but they find the coefficients of the cubic spline pieces by different methods. The first approach uses a tridiagonal matrix, while the second approach uses recurrence equations. They also require different boundary conditions. While both approaches work in O(n) time where n is the number of given acceleration measurements, the recurrence equation-based method can be easier updated …

Cubic Spline Interpolation By Solving A Recurrence Equation Instead Of A Tridiagonal Matrix, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

The cubic spline interpolation method is proba- bly the most widely-used polynomial interpolation method for functions of one variable. However, the cubic spline method requires solving a tridiagonal matrix-vector equation with an O(n) computational time complexity where n is the number of data measurements. Even an O(n) time complexity may be too much in some time-ciritical applications, such as continuously estimating and updating the flight paths of moving objects. This paper shows that under certain boundary conditions the tridiagonal matrix solving step of the cubic spline method could be entirely eliminated and instead the coefficients of the unknown cubic polynomials …

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 …