Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Suite Deal, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

No abstract provided.

The Genius Of The Nation Versus The Gene-Tech Of The Nation: Science, Identity, And Gmo Debates In Hungary, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Introduction In the late 1990s, Hungarian politicians, environmentalists, and agricultural lobbyists weighed the pros and cons of allowing genetically modified (GM) food and seeds to enter the Hungarian market. Starting around 1994, a small group of Hungarian environmentalists began researching GM issues. Initially, they feared that as a post-socialist country seeking foreign investment, Hungary would become prey to multinational corporations seeking an ‘emerging market’ with a lax regulatory environment. The terms of the debate were reframed over time, notably following 1998, when a number of European Union member states banned the imports of GM foods and when Hungarian expatriate geneticist …

Semantic Web Technology In Support Of Bioinformatics For Glycan Expression, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, Christopher Thomas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, John A. Miller, Krzysztof Kochut, Satya S. Sahoo, Xiaochuan Yi

Kno.e.sis Publications

Due to the complexity of biological systems, interpretation of data obtained by a single experimental approach can often be interpreted only if viewed from a broader context, taking into account the information obtained by many diverse techniques. The vast amount of interpreted experimental data that is now available via the internet opens the possibility of collecting the relevant pieces of information that will enable scientists to form hypotheses based on the integration of this diverse information. However, the sheer volume of data that is available makes it very difficult to select the information necessary to make a coherent model of …

Lsdis: Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The LSDIS (Large Scale Distributed Information Systems) lab was established in 1994 with the guidance and direction provided by Dr. Amit P. Sheth with the help of Dr. John A. Miller and Dr. Krzysztof J. Kochut. In 1998 this faculty group was further strengthened by the addition of Dr. Ismailcem B. Arpinar. LSDIS is the largest research group in Computer Science at UGA and one of the strongest in its area. During Fall 2004, it is funding 15 students (majority of them PhD), and has one research staff.

Over the years LSDIS has been actively involved in research projects in …

Logic Programs, Iterated Function Systems, And Recurrent Radial Basis Function Networks, Sebastian Bader, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Graphs of the single-step operator for first-order logic programs—displayed in the real plane—exhibit self-similar structures known from topological dynamics, i.e., they appear to be fractals, or more precisely, attractors of iterated function systems. We show that this observation can be made mathematically precise. In particular, we give conditions which ensure that those graphs coincide with attractors of suitably chosen iterated function systems, and conditions which allow the approximation of such graphs by iterated function systems or by fractal interpolation. Since iterated function systems can easily be encoded using recurrent radial basis function networks, we eventually obtain connectionist systems which …

Enhancing Web Services Description And Discovery To Facilitate Composition, Preeda Rajasekaran, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are in the midst of making the transition from being a promising technology to being widely used in the industry. However, most efforts to use Web services have been manual, thus slowing down the ever changing and dynamic businesses of today. In this paper, we contend that more expressive descriptions of Web services will lead to greater automation and thus provide more agility to businesses. We present the METEOR-S front-end tools for source code annotation and semantic Web service description generation. We also present WSDL-S, a language created for incorporating semantic descriptions in the industry wide accepted WSDL, …

Learning Mixture Models With The Regularized Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a new approach to estimating mixture models based on a recent inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different from Jaynes' maximum entropy principle, standard maximum likelihood, and maximum a posteriori probability estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle by deriving new algorithms for mixture model estimation, and show how robust new variants of the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm can be developed. We show that a regularized version of LME (RLME), is effective at estimating mixture models. It generally yields better results than plain LME, which in turn is often better than …

Exportkreditagenturen Und Erneuerbare Energien: Chancen Und Herausforderungen, Marcus Schaper

Marcus Schaper

Erneuerbare Energien spielen im Kampf gegen die globale Erderwärmung eine Schlüsselrolle. Nur der verstärkte Einsatz von erneuerbaren Energien und die Steigerung von Energieeffizienz werden es ermöglichen, dass die durch klimaschädigende Gase bedingte Erderwärmung kein „gefährliches“ Ausmaß annehmen wird. Während das Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz (EEG), die Deutsche Energieagentur (dena) und andere Initiativen zu einem Boom im nationalen und europäischen Markt für erneuerbare Energien geführt haben und dadurch auch die Wirtschaftlichkeit dieser neuen Energieträger erhöht haben, sieht das Bild außerhalb der europäischen Grenzen weniger gut aus. Jedoch kann keine Klimastrategie ohne große Anstrengungen in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern erfolgreich sein. Noch vor wenigen …

Workflow Management Systems And Erp Systems: Differences, Commonalities, And Applications, Jorge Cardoso, Robert P. Bostrom, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Two important classes of information systems, Workflow Management Systems(WfMSs) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been used to support e-business process redesign, integration, and management. While both technologies can help with business process automation, data transfer, and information sharing, the technological approach and features of solutions provided by WfMS and ERP are different. Currently, there is a lack of understanding of these two classes of information systems in the industry and academia, thus hindering their effective applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison between these two classes of systems. We discuss how the two types of systems …

Discovery Of Web Services In A Federated Registry Environment, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The potential of a large scale growth of private and semi-private registries is creating the need for an infrastructure which can support discovery and publication over a group of autonomous registries. Recent versions of UDDI have made changes to accommodate interactions between distributed registries. In this paper, we discuss METEOR-S Web service Discovery Infrastructure, which provides an ontology-based infrastructure to access a group of registries that are divided based on business domains and grouped into federations. We also discuss how Web service discovery is carried out within a federation.

Sweto: Large-Scale Semantic Web Test-Bed, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Chris Halaschek, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Gowtham Sannapareddy

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergent Semantic Web community needs a common infrastructure for testing the scalability and quality of new techniques and software which use machine processable data. Since ontologies are a centerpiece of most approaches, we believe that for an accurate evaluation of tools for quality, scalability and performance, the research community needs a freely available ontology with a large description base. If the use of tools is to be for advanced semantic applications, such as those in business intelligence and national security, then instances in the knowledge base should be highly interconnected. Thus, we propose and describe a Semantic WEb Technology …

Semantic Web Technology Evaluation Ontology (Sweto): A Test Bed For Evaluating Tools And Benchmarking Applications, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Chris Halaschek

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

The Digital Divide: A Study Of The Intra-Ethnic Divide Within The African American Population In Johnson City, Tennessee., Sonja E. Schreckenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how much access African American adults 25 years and older, living in Johnson City, Tennessee had to computers, and the factors that most influenced such access. Data was collected from 271 persons living in the area. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS software to determine how certain demographics would contribute to the level of computer access.

Results from the study revealed that a digital divide existed within the African American community, with income being a strong determinant of access to computers. The highest level of access for the sample was in the salary range of $50,000-74,999. Computer …

Indexing Genomic Databases, Gina Cooper, Michael L. Raymer, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Natsuhiko Futamura

Kno.e.sis Publications

Current biological sequence comparison tools utilize full database searches to find approximate matches between a database and a query. A new approach to sequence comparisons can be performed by indexing the database using a novel indexing scheme. An indexed scheme can immediately eliminate highly mismatched sequences thereby improving performance and accuracy. iBlast is proposed as an indexed version of BLAST. In its initial implementation, iBlast uses a sequence-based index to catalog genomic databases in an NCR Teradata RDBMS. Several types of indexes and querying methods are explored to determine the most efficient solution utilizing the parallel nature of the Teradata …

Sempl: A Semantic Portal, Matthew Perry, Eric Stiles

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic Web technology is intended for the retrieval, collection, and analysis of meaningful data with significant automation afforded by machine understandability of data [1]. As one illustration of semantic web technology in action, we present SEMPL, a semantic web portal for the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia. SEMPL, which is powered by a state of the art commercial system, Semagix Freedom [7], uses an ontology-driven approach to provide semantic browsing, linking, and contextual querying of content within the portal. By using the ontology based information integration technique, SEMPL can specify the context of …

Meteor-S Web Service Annotation Framework, Abhijit A. Patil, Swapna A. Oundhakar, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data, but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services. Relevant current standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology. However, realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation, service discovery, service composition, and process orchestration. Semantics, especially as supported by the use of ontologies, …

The Airline Quality Rating 2004, Brent D. Bowen, Dean Headley, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 04-1

The Airline Quality Rating (AQR) was developed and first announced in early 1991 as an objective method of comparing airline quality on combined multiple performance criteria. This current report, the Airline Quality Rating 2004, reflects monthly Airline Quality Rating scores for 2003. AQR scores far the calendar year 2003 are based on 15 elements in four major areas that focus on airline performance aspects important to air travel consumers.

The Airline Quality Rating 2004 is a summary of month-by-month quality ratings for U.S. airlines that have at least 1% of domestic passenger volume during 2003. Using the …

Quality Of Service For Workflows And Web Service Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Jonathan Arnold, Krzysztof J. Kochut

Kno.e.sis Publications

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows or Web processes for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying quality of service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows or Web processes, the underlying workflow engine must accept …

Ten Suggestions To Strengthen The Science Of Ecology, Gary E. Belovsky, Daniel B. Botkin, Todd A. Crowl, Kenneth W. Cummins, Jerry F. Franklin, Malcolm L. Hunter, Anthony Joern, David B. Lindenmayer, James A. Macmahon, Chris R. Margules, J. Michael Scott

Papers in Ecology

There are few well-documented, general ecological principles that can be applied to pressing environmental issues. When they discuss them at all, ecologists often disagree about the relative importance of different aspects of the science’s original and still important issues. It may be that the sum of ecological science is not open to universal statements because of the wide range of organizational, spatial, and temporal phenomena, as well as the sheer number of possible interactions.We believe, however, that the search for general principles has been inadequate to establish the extent to which generalities are possible.We suggest that ecologists may need to …

High Tech Cluster Bombs: Why Successful Biotech Hubs Are The Exception, Not The Rule, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

No abstract provided.

Is Necessity The Mother Of Innovation? The Adoption And Use Of Web Technologies Among Congressional Offices, Kevin M. Esterling, David M.J. Lazer, Michael Neblo

National Center for Digital Government

From first paragraph: Communication between legislator and constituents is fundamental to effective democratic representation, and devising the institutional means for citizen/legislator communication stands as one of the core and persistent problems in the practice of democracy. A legislator needs information about the preferences, ideals, norms, and beliefs of her constituents in order to do her job well. Similarly, citizens need information about the actions and decisions of their representative in order to maintain appropriate accountability. But as national problems become more complex, and as the political process grows more and more dominated by experts and organized groups, it is becoming …

International Environmental Justice: Building The Natural Assets Of The World’S Poor, Krista Harper, S. Ravi Rajan

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

In recent years, vibrant social movements have emerged across the world to fight for environmental justice –- for more equitable access to natural resources and environmental quality, including clean air and water. In seeking to build community rights to natural assets, these initiatives seek to advance simultaneously the goals of environmental protection and poverty reduction. This paper sketches the contours of struggles for environmental justice within and among countries, and illustrates with examples primarily drawn from countries of the global South and the former Soviet bloc.

This working paper is also accessible at the folllowing URL:

http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/28d064d65f/publication/107/

A newer, revised …

Predicting The Success Of Commercial Aska Services, In The United States And Abroad, Kate Lyons, Jenny M. Baum

Publications and Research

This article discusses the quality of commercial and library-sponsored AskA services and uses this as a prediction for the success of the programs. The authors also explore the idea of the commoditization of information and its acceptance rates in different countries, and use these to predict the success of commercial and library-sponsored AskA services both in the United States and abroad.

Service Oriented Architectures And Semantic Web Processes, Francisco Cubera, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Semantic Web Research Center Report: Lsdis Lab, Research In Semantic Bioinformatics, Semantic Analytics And Semantic Web Processes, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The LSDIS Lab advances the field of distributed information systems by researching semantic techniques for exploiting heterogeneous multimedia information and improving processes, encompassing the central promise of the Semantic Web initiative. It is pursuing cutting edge research in ontology development for demanding scientific domains, semantic heterogeneity and integration, complex relationships discovery and semantic analytics, and Semantic Web services and processes. Past work of the LSDIS lab can be characterized by keywords: semantic interoperability, syntactic and semantic metadata for text and digital media, metadata based integration of Web content, ontology-driven information systems, multi-ontology query processing, transactional workflows and workflow management. Significant …

From ‘Apprenticeship’ To ‘Training’: An Empirical Enquiry Into, Manuel Fernández-Esquinas

Manuel Fernández-Esquinas

When a person embarks upon a professional scientific career, what features define their training process? How is this process related to scientific practice and, in general, its development within the organisational setting of the R&D system? The changes affecting contemporary science since the late 20th century mirror several characteristic features of the scientific profession, namely the working conditions of scientists, how professional careers are organised, the way in which scientific work is assessed and how scientists are trained in the academic world. Researchers in academic science today are faced with far-reaching reforms which are currently taking place in universities and …

Evaluación Del Plan Andaluz De Investigación, Manuel Fernández-Esquinas, Manuel Pérez-Yruela, Javier López-Facal

Manuel Fernández-Esquinas

Este documento presenta las conclusiones del ejercicio de evaluación del Plan Andaluz de Investigación llevado a cabo por el IESA-CSIC. El procedimiento de evaluación se ha basado en paneles de expertos, análisis de datos estadísticos y revisión de documentación.

Health As Foreign Policy: A U.S.-German Dialogue On Governance And Global Health., Marcus Schaper

Marcus Schaper

Health has become an issue with significant implications for economies, trade, and security in today’s globalized world. Epidemics like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) carry an impact far beyond the epicenters of the disease. The spread of HIV-AIDS leads to fundamental changes in social cohesion and state structures with far reaching international consequences. Bioterrorism with its potential for rapid pandemic poses a threat to many countries of the world. In a globalized world, health has developed into an issue of soft power. It has become part of deliberations on foreign policy and of the development of civil society and democracy. …

Future Impact Of Digital Tv Services And Broadband Internet Connections On Residential Energy Consumption, Clemens Cremer, Michael Friedewald, Barbara Schlomann, Alois Huser

Michael Friedewald

No abstract provided.

The Genius Of The Nation Versus The Gene-Tech Of The Nation: Science, Identity, And Gmo Debates In Hungary, Krista Harper

Krista M. Harper

Introduction In the late 1990s, Hungarian politicians, environmentalists, and agricultural lobbyists weighed the pros and cons of allowing genetically modified (GM) food and seeds to enter the Hungarian market. Starting around 1994, a small group of Hungarian environmentalists began researching GM issues. Initially, they feared that as a post-socialist country seeking foreign investment, Hungary would become prey to multinational corporations seeking an ‘emerging market’ with a lax regulatory environment. The terms of the debate were reframed over time, notably following 1998, when a number of European Union member states banned the imports of GM foods and when Hungarian expatriate geneticist …