Communication Commons^™

Predicting The Longevity Of Dvdr Media By Periodic Analysis Of Parity, Jitter, And Ecc Performance Parameters, Daniel Patrick Wells

Theses and Dissertations

For the last ten years, DVD-R media have played an important role in the storage of large amounts of digital data throughout the world. During this time it was assumed that the DVD-R was as long-lasting and stable as its predecessor, the CD-R. Several reports have surfaced over the last few years questioning the DVD-R's ability to maintain many of its claims regarding archival quality life spans. These reports have shown a wide range of longevity between the different brands. While some DVD-Rs may last a while, others may result in an early and unexpected failure. Compounding this problem is …

Report Of The Commission To Assess The Threat To The United States From Emp Attack: Critical National Infrastructures, William R. Graham

George H Baker

The physical and social fabric of the United States is sustained by a system of systems; a complex and dynamic network of interlocking and interdependent infrastructures (“critical national infrastructures”) whose harmonious functioning enables the myriad actions, transactions, and information flow that undergird the orderly conduct of civil society in this country. The vulnerability of these frastructures to threats — deliberate, accidental, and acts of nature — is the focus of greatly heightened concern in the current era, a process accelerated by the events of 9/11 and recent hurricanes, including Katrina and Rita. This report presents the results of the Commission’s …

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 …

Mapping The Multi-Tiered Impacts Of The Growth Of It Industries In India: A Combined Scale-And-Scope Externalities Perspective, Robert J. Kauffman, Ajay Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Externalities occur among agglomerated firms. Scale externalities occur between firms in the same industry. Scope externalities occur when heterogeneous industries are collocated. Combined scale-and-scope externalities exist when the scale of one industry is beneficial to the growth of another collocated industry. In the Sein and Haridranath (2004) framework of information technology (IT) impacts on development, scale externalities correspond to second-order impacts, while combined scale and scope eternalities correspond to third-order impacts. We use an agglomeration perspective to explain the growth of IT industries in India. We study growth patterns of four specific IT industries: computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing, semiconductor …

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 …

An Assessment Of Local Peoples Opinions Of Community Conservation Initiatives In Relation To Livelihood Strategies In Kenya, Jill Mechtenberg

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract This paper analyzed the changing livelihood strategies in Kenya, and their cultural impacts via a literature review. I then combined this understanding with the data I collected while in Kenya to examine the opinions local people have of community conservation initiatives, based on their changing livelihood strategies. I expected to find that the following factors would have an affect on the opinions local community members have of community conservation initiatives: livelihood strategy, gender, ethnicity, whether or not they believe the distribution of benefits coming from wildlife conservation is equitable, what issues they would like to see improved within community …

On Profiling Blogs With Representative Entries, Jinfeng Zhuang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With an explosive growth of blogs, information seeking in blogosphere becomes more and more challenging. One example task is to find the most relevant topical blogs against a given query or an existing blog. Such a task requires concise representation of blogs for effective and efficient searching and matching. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of profiling a blog by choosing a set of m most representative entries from the blog, where m is a predefined number that is application-dependent. With the set of selected representative entries, applications on blogs avoid handling hundreds or even thousands of entries …

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 …

Agenda: Shifting Baselines And New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, And The Transformation Of The American West, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

The Center’s 29th annual conference will focus on the changes in the West resulting from rapid population growth, development, disrupted historical weather patterns and the effects of those changes on land, water, and energy resources. Speakers and panelists will address the adaptability of the legal and political institutions and how the transformation of the West may foreshadow fundamental changes to these institutions.

The agenda includes panel discussions that will address:

• Water for the 21^st Century —the big questions in Western water and rethinking Western water law.
• The Future of Energy —practical and sophisticated solutions to overcome the energy …

A Forgetting-Based Approach For Reasoning With Inconsistent Distributed Ontologies, Guilin Qi, Yimin Wang, Peter Haase, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In the context of multiple distributed ontologies, we are often confronted with the problem of dealing with inconsistency. In this paper, we propose an approach for reasoning with inconsistent distributed ontologies based on concept forgetting. We firstly define concept forgetting in description logics. We then adapt the notions of recoveries and preferred recoveries in propositional logic to description logics. Two consequence relations are then defined based on the preferred recoveries.

Graph Summaries For Subgraph Frequency Estimation, Angela Maduko, Kemafor Anyanwu, Amit P. Sheth, Paul Schliekelman

Kno.e.sis Publications

A fundamental problem related to graph structured databases is searching for substructures. One issue with respect to optimizing such searches is the ability to estimate the frequency of substructures within a query graph. In this work, we present and evaluate two techniques for estimating the frequency of subgraphs from a summary of the data graph. In the first technique, we assume that edge occurrences on edge sequences are position independent and summarize only the most informative dependencies. In the second technique, we prune small subgraphs using a valuation scheme that blends information about their importance and estimation power. In both …

Defeasible Inference With Circumscriptive Owl Ontologies, Stephan Grimm, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) adheres to the openworld assumption and can thus not be used for forms of nonmonotonic reasoning or defeasible inference, an acknowledged desirable feature in open Semantic Web environments. We investigate the use of the formalism of circumscriptive description logics (DLs) to realise defeasible inference within the OWL framework. By example, we demonstrate how reasoning with (restricted) circumscribed OWL ontologies facilitates various forms of defeasible inference, also in comparison to alternative approaches. Moreover, we sketch an extension to DL tableaux for handling the circumscriptive case and report on a preliminary implementation.

Empowering Translational Research Using Semantic Web Technologies, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Climate Change Education And The Ecological Footprint, Eugene Cordero, Anne Marie Todd, D. Abellerra

Anne Marie Todd

No abstra

The Guacamole Fund Presents...

Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues

Special Bonnie Raitt Benefit Tickets

Sa-Rest: Using Semantics To Empower Restful Services And Smashups With Better Interoperability And Mediation, Karthik Gomadam, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Dynamic And Agile Soa Using Sawsdl, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between …

An Investigation Of Communication Patterns And Strategies Between International Teaching Assistants And Undergraduate Students In University-Level Science Labs, Barbara Elas Gourlay

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Investigates communication between international teaching assistants and their undergraduate students in university-level chemistry labs. Qualitative and quantitative data from observations and interviews with study participants guide the analysis of laboratory interactions, which examines patterns of conversational listening. Results reveal that successful communication depends on teaching assistant listening comprehension skills and on the coordination of verbal and visual (gestural and physical resources) sources of information.

System Analysis Of The Uri Hurricane Preparedness Plan, Rebecca Harlow

Senior Honors Projects

If a hurricane were to hit URI in the upcoming fall semester what would happen? This project is a thorough evaluation of the current URI plan, how it works, how it doesn’t and who has the answers. The project is framed from an information systems perspective. The analysis of the system is based on where vital information is stored, how it is communicated when needed and who is involved. To find the answers to these questions, in depth interviews were conducted with key emergency personnel. Among them are URI’s Director of Safety and Risk, J Kevin Culley, Major Baker of …

Ws3: International Workshop On Context-Enabled Source And Service Selection, Integration And Adaptation, Quan Z. Sheng, Ullas Nambiar, Amit P. Sheth, Biplav Srivastava, Zakaria Maamr, Said Elnaffar

Kno.e.sis Publications

This write-up provides a summary of the International Workshop on Context enabled Source and Service Selection, Integration and Adaptation (CSSSIA 2008), organized in conjunction with WWW2008, at Beijing, China on April 22nd 2008. We outline the motivation for organizing the work-shop, briefly describe the organizational details and program of the workshop, and summarize each of the papers accepted by the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/∼csssia08/.

Native American Forum On Nuclear Issues Evaluation

Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues

Evaluation paper

Rdb2rdf: Incorporating Domain Semantics In Structured Data, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Inside Unlv, Shane Bevell, Mamie Peers, David Ashley, Diane Russell, Michelle Mouton, Grace Russell

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

The Planet, 2008, Spring, Page A. Buono, Huxley College Of The Environment, Western Washington University

The Planet

No abstract provided.

Artist Ranking Through Analysis Of On-Line Community Comments, Julia Grace, Daniel Gruhl, Kevin Haas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Christine Robson, Nachiketa Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe an approach to measure the popularity of music tracks, albums and artists by analyzing the comments of music listeners in social networking online communities such as MySpace. This measure of popularity appears to be more accurate than the traditional measure based on album sales figures, as demonstrated by our focus group study. We faced many challenges in our attempt to generate a popularity ranking from the user comments on social networking sites, e.g., broken English sentences, comment spam, etc. We discuss the steps we took to overcome these challenges and describe an end to end system for generating …

Traveling The Semantic Web Through Space, Time, And Theme, Amit P. Sheth, Matthew Perry

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this installment of Semantics and Services, we further develop the idea of spatial, temporal, and thematic (STT) processing of semantic Web data and describe the Web infrastructure needed to support it. Starting from Ramesh Jain's vision of the EventWeb as a view of what's possible with a Web that better accommodates all three dimensions of event-related information (thematic, spatial, and temporal), we outline the architecture needed to support it and current research that aims to realize it.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.