Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Climate Of Trust: Perceptions Of Legitimate Authority In A Volunteer Computing Project, Peter Darch, Annamaria Carusi, Marina Jirotka

Peter Darch

Volunteer computing projects are computationally-intensive scientific research projects which seek to meet their need for data processing capacity by asking members of the public to download and process project data on their personal computers. This paper presents findings from a study of the interactions in an online forum of participants in such a project, climateprediction.net. It focuses upon the beliefs of one group of participants, who have been identified as particularly critical to the success of volunteer computing projects, about the organizational policies of climateprediction.net and what are appropriate and inappropriate ways for other participants to behave in the forums.

A Climate Of Trust: Perceptions Of Legitimate Authority In A Volunteer Computing Project, Peter Darch, Annamaria Carusi, Marina Jirotka

Peter Darch

Volunteer computing projects are computationally-intensive scientific research projects which seek to meet their need for data processing capacity by asking members of the public to download and process project data on their personal computers. This paper presents findings from a study of the interactions in an online forum of participants in such a project, climateprediction.net. It focuses upon the beliefs of one group of participants, who have been identified as particularly critical to the success of volunteer computing projects, about the organizational policies of climateprediction.net and what are appropriate and inappropriate ways for other participants to behave in the forums.

Challenges Of Creating A Knowledge-Based Society: Education & Research For India & Gujarat, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Perceived Faculty And Staff Ccomputing Behaviors That Protect Or Expose Them Or Others To Information Security Attacks., Chiwaraidzo Judith Nyabando

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A mixed-methods study, conducted in 2007-2008, designed to quantify and assess behaviors that either protect or expose data at academic institutions to information security attacks. This study focused on computing practices at two academic institutions: East Tennessee State University and Milligan College. Interviews with six information technology professionals and online surveys were used to assess faculty and staff members' awareness and practice of safe computing behaviors. The constant comparison method was used to analyze qualitative data. Descriptive statistics and univariate and multivariate analysis of variance techniques were used to analyze the quantitative data.

Overall, the analyses indicated that the faculty …

Emergence Of Nanodistricts In The United States: Path Dependency Or New Opportunities?, Philip Shapira, Jan Youtie

Philip Shapira

Multiple economic development theories suggest that research and innovation in emerging technologies will cluster in certain locations rather then distributing equally among all regions. If this is the case, this distributional pattern has implications for where future economic opportunities as well as future risks will be concentrated. In this paper, we probe nanotechnology (hereafter nano) research and commercialization at a regional level. The study examines the top 30 US “nanodistricts” or metropolitan areas which lead in nanotechnology research activity over the 1990-2006 timeframe. We explore the factors underlying the emergence of these 30 metropolitan areas through exploratory cluster analysis. We …

Eureka! Winning Ways: Analysis Of Early Client Experiences, Lynne Manrique, Kamau Bobb, David Roessner, Jan Youtie, Philip Shapira

Philip Shapira

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a longstanding record of helping small- and medium-sized (SME) manufacturers to identify and implement technologies and practices that improve manufacturing efficiency and product quality. More recently, MEP has begun to build a growth services portfolio to assist manufacturers with the development of new products, new customers, and new markets. Its first growth services offering, called Eureka! Winning Ways (E!WW), was piloted in late 2006 and has been implemented widely since the beginning of 2008. To explore the nature of early E!WW client experiences, as well …

Connectionist Model Generation: A First-Order Approach, Sebastian Bader, Pascal Hitzler, Steffen Holldobler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Knowledge-based artificial neural networks have been applied quite successfully to propositional knowledge representation and reasoning tasks. However, as soon as these tasks are extended to structured objects and structure-sensitive processes as expressed e.g., by means of first-order predicate logic, it is not obvious at all what neural-symbolic systems would look like such that they are truly connectionist, are able to learn, and allow for a declarative reading and logical reasoning at the same time. The core method aims at such an integration. It is a method for connectionist model generation using recurrent networks with feed-forward core. We show in this …

Module 1.3.A: Transnational Diffusion Of Ideas And Practices, M.J. Peterson

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

Understanding the processes by which ideas and debates diffuse across countries is an important precursor to understanding several concepts and issues in international ethics. Includes Chart for Discussion of National Differences in Technology Use; Appropriate Technology Reading and Exercise; and Transnational Diffusion of Ideas and Technologies.

Module 2.3.A: Ethical Conflicts Between Nations, M.J. Peterson

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

Developing effective international level regulatory responses is particularly difficult when national ethical preferences collide. This module seeks to develop sensitivity to these difficulties.

Appropriate Technology, M.J. Peterson

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

Appropriate Technology described as "low impact technology" is based on highly advanced scientific and engineering research. The strong attraction to industrial and developing countries is due to its low cost, small scale, and low environmental impact.

Ethical Evaluation Of New Technologies: Genetically Modified Organisms And Plants, M.J. Peterson, Ronald Sandler

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

As developments in biotechnology continue, new ethical questions arise concerning our ability to manipulate and intervene with what is conceived as "natural". Genetic modification (GM) is one clear example of this revolutionary development in biotechnology which inspires debate on its impact to human welfare.

Mechanisms Of Transnational Accountability, M.J. Peterson

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

The absence of a world government means there are no central world courts or regulatory agencies who can step-in when an individual or a corporation causes harm to others on a transnational level. However, there are ways to take advantage of regulatory and standard systems around the world that when enforced, can hold persons or groups doing the harm accountable for.

Transnational Diffusion Of Ideas And Technologies, M.J. Peterson

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

Most historians of ideas and technological change agree that a hazard model can best describe the spread of ideas, practices, or innovations from the originators to others. The elements of the hazard model also direct attention to the likelihood that people will first learn about a new idea or technological advance and then choose to adopt it.

Book Review: Tourists In Space: A Practical Guide, T. D. Oswalt

Publications

This document is Dr. Oswalt’s review of Tourists in Space : a Practical Guide by Erik Seedhouse. Springer/Praxis, 2008 314p, 9780387746432 $34.95

W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory, Visitor Engagement Study, Summary Of Findings,, Amy E. Ryken

All Faculty Scholarship

Summary of findings: Study of visitor engagement and learning at the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma, Washington. Findings include: analysis of visitor responses to a survey and analysis of observations of visitor engagement. Written for Metro Parks, Tacoma, Washington.

Applications Of Voting Theory To Information Mashups, Alfredo Alba, Varun Bhagwan, Julia Grace, Daniel Gruhl, Kevin Haas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Jan Pieper, Christine Robson, Nachiketa Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

Blogs, discussion forums and social networking sites are an excellent source for people's opinions on a wide range of topics. We examine the application of voting theory to "information mashups" - the combining and summarizing of data from the multitude of often-conflicting sources. This paper presents an information mashup in the music domain: a Top 10 artist chart based on user comments and listening behavior from several Web communities. We consider different voting systems as algorithms to combine opinions from multiple sources and evaluate their effectiveness using social welfare functions. Different voting schemes are found to work better in some …

Text Analytics For Semantic Computing - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This tutorial was give at the Second IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing Santa Clara, CA, USA - August 4-7, 2008.

Tcruzikb: Enabling Complex Queries For Genomic Data Exploration, Pablo N. Mendes, Bobby Mcknight, Amit P. Sheth, Jessica C. Kissinger

Kno.e.sis Publications

We developed a novel analytical environment to aid in the examination of the extensive amount of interconnected data available for genome projects. Our focus is to enable flexibility and abstraction from implementation details, while retaining the expressivity required for post-genomic research. To achieve this goal, we associated genomics data to ontologies and implemented a query formulation and execution environment with added visualization capabilities. We use ontology schemas to guide the user through the process of building complex queries in a flexible Web interface. Queries are serialized in SPARQL and sent to servers via Ajax. A component for visualization of the …

Mediatability: Estimating The Degree Of Human Involvement In Xml Schema Mediation, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Lakshmish Ramaswamy, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Mediation and integration of data are significant challenges because the number of services on the Web, and heterogeneities in their data representation, continue to increase rapidly. To address these challenges we introduce a new measure, mediatability, which is a quantifiable and computable metric for the degree of human involvement in XML schema mediation. We present an efficient algorithm to compute mediatability and an experimental study to analyze how semantic annotations affect the ease of mediating between two schemas. We validate our approach by comparing mediatability scores generated by our system with user-perceived difficulty. We also evaluate the scalability of our …

An Xml-Based Approach To Handling Tables In Documents, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni

Kno.e.sis Publications

We explore application of XML technology for handling tables in legacy semi-structured documents. Specifically, we analyze annotating heterogeneous documents containing tables to obtain a formalized XML Master document that improves traceability (hence easing verification and update) and enables manipulation using XSLT stylesheets. This approach is useful when table instances far outnumber distinct table types because the effort required to annotate a table instance is relatively less compared to formalizing table processing that respects table’s semantics. This work is also relevant for authoring new documents with tables that should be accessible to both humans and machines.

Testimony For Fcc En Banc Hearing At Carnegie Mellon University On Broadband And The Digital Future, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

No abstract provided.

10th Annual International Global Business & Technology Association Conference | Madrid, Spain, Patrick Flanagan

Patrick Flanagan

At this annual international meeting of the Global Business and Technology Association held in Madrid, Spain, Patrick Flanagan co-authored two papers with Frank P. Le Veness, Department of Government and Politics, St. John's University, Queens, NY (www.stjohns.edu) and served as a discussant for one concurrent session.

Ored Quarterly Newsletter, Sadiq Shah

ORED Quarterly Newsletter

Connecting Knowledge with Businesses and Society to Promote Economic Growth and to Enhance the Quality of Life

Description Logic Rules, Markus Krotzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We introduce description logic (DL) rules as a new rule-based formalism for knowledge representation in DLs. As a fragment of the Semantic Web Rule Language SWRL, DL rules allow for a tight integration with DL knowledge bases. In contrast to SWRL, however, the combination of DL rules with expressive description logics remains decidable, and we show that the DL SROIQ – the basis for the ongoing standardisation of OWL 2 – can completely internalise DL rules. On the other hand, DL rules capture many expressive features of SROIQ that are not available in simpler DLs yet. While reasoning in SROIQ …

Boosting With Incomplete Information, Gholamreza Haffari, Yang Wang, Shaojun Wang, Greg Mori, Feng Jiao

Kno.e.sis Publications

In real-world machine learning problems, it is very common that part of the input feature vector is incomplete: either not available, missing, or corrupted. In this paper, we present a boosting approach that integrates features with incomplete information and those with complete information to form a strong classifier. By introducing hidden variables to model missing information, we form loss functions that combine fully labeled data with partially labeled data to effectively learn normalized and unnormalized models. The primal problems of the proposed optimization problems with these loss functions are provided to show their close relationship and the motivations behind them. …

Semantic Web: Promising Technologies, Current Applications & Future Directions, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Dependence Of Binary Associations On Co-Occurrence Granularity In News Documents, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni, Mastan Vali Shaik

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe and formalize an approach to correlate binary associations (such as between entities and events, between persons and events, etc.) implied by News documents on the co-occurrence granularity (such as document-level, paragraph-level, sentence-level, etc.) of the corresponding text phrases in the documents. Specifically, we present both qualitative and quantitative characterization of searching News documents: former in terms of the nature of the content and the queries, and latter in terms of a metric obtained by adapting the notions of precision and recall. Specifically, the approach tries to reduce the manual effort required to analyze the News documents to compare …

Coercing Consensus: Unintended Success Of The Octopus Electronic Payment System, Leung-Sea, Lucia Siu

Prof. SIU Leung-sea, Lucia

This paper contrasts the success and failure of two electronic payment systems in Hong Kong, Octopus and Mondex, during 1996-2002. The case illustrates the new properties of electronic currencies, and provides insights for product designers and regulators. Mondex was endowed with the full legal status of money, launched by a mammoth banking group, with Mondex cards given away for free to consumers. Yet the Mondex system went into oblivion within five years. Octopus started as a modest stored value transport ticket that required a deposit. It ended up as a city-wide multipurpose payment card used by 95% of the adult …

Achieving Participatory Privacy Regulation: Guidelines For Cens Urban Sensing, Katie Shilton, Jeffrey A. Burke, Deborah Estrin, Mark Hansen, Mani B. Srivastava

Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

This technical report is intended to help CENS urban sensing researchers incorporate participation and respect privacy while conducting research about people. The goal is to provide a framework by which to assess an appropriate level of participation and meaningful policy and technical responses to privacy concerns. By keeping in mind the five guidelines outlined here, system developers can respond to participant needs and balance the benefits of data gathering with individual and group privacy.

The Introduction defines and describes participatory privacy regulation: the approach to privacy design taken at CENS. Sections I-V provide descriptions and planning tools for each …

A Framework For Trust And Distrust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this age of internet and electronic commerce it is becoming increasingly important to have and to manipulate information about the trustworthiness of the content or service providers in order to make informed decisions. This paper explores realistic models of trust and distrust based on partially ordered discrete values and proposes a framework, which is sensitive to local, relative ordering of values rather than their magnitudes. The framework distinguishes between direct and inferred trust, preferring direct information over possibly conflicting inferred information. It also represents ambiguity or inconsistency explicitly. The framework is capable of handling general trust and belief networks …