Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Second Life Virtual Universities: A Visual Analysis, Zeenath Haniff

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

General academic objectives include producing an educational experience that is engaging, interactive, collaborative, experiential and productive. The goal is to promote learner engagement through the visual power of a newly adopted medium in education – universities in the multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) of Second Life. Attributes of the virtual reality aid visual learning in the online environment: (1) computer-generated content, (2) three-dimensional graphics, and (3) interactivity. Visual renditions of campus buildings and fellow students as avatars emotionally connect students to feel a sense of presence and community within the virtual learning platform. Additionally, the ability to see and hear their …

Adaptation Of The Nevada Climate Change Data Portal Web Interface To Small-Screen Mobile Devices, Tsvetan Komarov

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Robust and convenient access to the Nevada Climate Change Data Portal is vital for the project’s success, because of the researchers’ need to gather and analyze large volumes of data with minimal effort. However, the current version of the data portal web interface is not optimized for small-screen mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPads, NetBooks, and others. The proposed research will address this issue by exploring the current methods for creating a client-aware web interface adaptable to the variety of small-screen devices, designing and implementing the most appropriate solution, and finally, user testing of the implemented solution.

Identifying And Implementing The Underlying Operators For Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Based Metabolomics Data Analysis, Ashwin Manjunatha, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Paul E. Anderson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The science of metabolomics is a relatively young field that requires intensive signal processing and multivariate data analysis for interpretation of experimental results. The lack of integration and standardization for metabolomics compounded by the complexity of the experimental data has lead to a fragmented research community. While efforts have been undertaken to approach these problems, the efforts to develop a set of standards for reporting processing and analysis procedures has stalled.

In this paper, we propose a set of fundamental operators for nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) based metabolomics. These operators are implementation independent, and can be used to easily and precisely …

Pricing Strategies In A Digital World, Laura Martin, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

No abstract provided.

Territorios Digitales: El Camino A La Sociedad De La Innovación. El Caso De San Luis, Argentina, Lucas Jolías, Susana Finquelievich, Alejandro Prince

Lucas Jolías

El artículo describe los resultados de una investigación de campo que estudia los alcances del programa San Luis Digital en Argentina, originado por el gobierno provincial y en el que los municipios de la Provincia han participado activamente. Se hace foco sobre los procesos de innovación social basados en la utilización de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) promovidos por la Gobierno administración provincial a través de acuerdos con otros actores sociales. La metodología utilizada para la investigación fue principalmente la de meta research, es decir la integración de modelos, teorías, datos e información provenientes de diversas …

Etapas De La Inclusión Digital En Argentina: Difusión Y Adopción De Tic, Lucas Jolías, Alejandro Prince

Lucas Jolías

La inclusión digital es uno de los principales desafíos de los gobiernos en los próximos años, pero para cumplir con éste objetivo se debe prestar atención a las particularidades de la adopción de TIC en nuestra región, contemplando las diferencias socioeconómicas, culturales y motivacionales. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la inclusión digital en América Latina y el Caribe, con particular atención al caso de Argentina. Las hipótesis más importantes pueden resumirse en dos: primero, que los niveles de inclusión digital en la actualidad son en gran medida producto del mercado y la capacidad económica y de consumo de …

Rough Consensus And Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles Into Internet Policy Debates, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This is the introduction to a symposium issue for a conference designed to bring the engineering community, policymakers, legal academics, and industry participants together in an attempt to provide policymakers with a better understanding of the Internet’s technical aspects and to explore emerging issues of particular importance to current broadband policy.

The Universal Service Fund: What Do High-Cost Subsidies Subsidize?, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

The universal service program in the United States currently transfers about $7.5 billion per year from telephone subscribers to certain telephone companies. Those funds are intended to help achieve particular policy goals, such as subsidizing telephone service in rural areas and making phone service more affordable to low-income people. The bulk of the funds, about $4.5 billion per year, subsidizes firms operating in high-cost areas. A large literature documents the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of these subsidies, raising the question of where the money goes. This paper uses data submitted by about 1,400 recipients of high-cost subsidies from 1998 – 2008 …

Privacy-Aware An Scalable Content Dissemination In Distributed Social Networks, Pavan Kapanipathi, Julia Anaya, Amit P. Sheth, Brett Slatkin, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Centralized social networking websites raise scalability issues - due to the growing number of participants - and, as well as, policy concerns - such as control, privacy and ownership over the user's published data. Distributed Social Networks aim to solve this issue by enabling architecture where people own their data and share it their own way. However, the privacy and scalability challenge is still to be tackled. This paper presents a privacy-aware extension to Google's PubSubHubbub protocol, using Semantic Web technologies, solving both the scalability and the privacy issues in Distributed Social Networks. We enhanced the traditional feature of PubSubHubbub …

A Unified Framework Fro Managing Provenance Information In Translational Research, Satya S. Sahoo, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Priti Parikh, Todd Minning, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background

A critical aspect of the NIH Translational Research roadmap, which seeks to accelerate the delivery of "bench-side" discoveries to patient's "bedside," is the management of the provenance metadata that keeps track of the origin and history of data resources as they traverse the path from the bench to the bedside and back. A comprehensive provenance framework is essential for researchers to verify the quality of data, reproduce scientific results published in peer-reviewed literature, validate scientific process, and associate trust value with data and results. Traditional approaches to provenance management have focused on only partial sections of the translational research …

Technology Adoption And Use: Theory Review For Studying Scientists Continued Use Of Cyber-Infrastructure, Youngseek Kim, Kevin Crowston

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

In this paper, we seek to identify factors that might increase the likelihood of adoption and continued use of cyberinfrastructure by scientists. To do so, we review the main research on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) adoption and use by addressing research problems, theories and models used, findings, and limitations. We focus particularly on the individual user perspective. We categorize previous studies into two groups: Adoption research and post-adoption (continued use) research. In addition, we review studies specifically regarding cyberinfrastructure adoption and use by scientists and other special user groups. We identify the limitations of previous theories, models and research …

El Desarrollo De La Ciencia Política En México. Una Mirada A Través De Los Estudios Sobre El Estado De La Disiciplina, J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

Se presenta una revisión de los títulos publicados hasta 2009 que han analizado la situación de la ciencia política en México o algún aspecto de ésta. Destaca el crecimiento y la diversificación de autores e instituciones, de las revistas publicadas y de los enfoques y temas recurrentes. Hasta fines de los años noventa se ven autores recurrentes y momentos de auge en las publicaciones asociados a coyunturas como congresos, procesos de modificación a planes de estudio, etc., Después de estos años hay la emergencia de nuevos autores y enfoques de estudio, y que el desarrollo de estos trabajos en su …

Analyzing The Role Of Icts In The Tunisian And Egyptian Unrest From An Information Warfare Perspective, Brett Van Niekerk, Kiru Pillay, Manoj Maharaj

Manoj Maharaj

In January 2011, the Tunisian government stepped down after weeks of protests; this was followed by unrest and protests in Egypt against the Egyptian government, leading also to the resignation of its president. Demonstrations in both countries were facilitated in some part by the online social media and related information and communications technologies that impacted the flow of information. The manner in which the information and communication technologies were employed suggests that the uprisings were a form of social information warfare. To provide an alternative understanding of the role of technology and information in the events that led to the …

The Information Warfare Lifecycle Model, Manoj Maharaj, Brett Van Nikerk

Manoj Maharaj

No abstract provided.

Strategic Planning For Digital Convergence In South African Businesses, Manoj Maharaj, Kiru Pillay

Manoj Maharaj

No abstract provided.

¿Gobernadores Eternos? Un Análisis Comparativo De Las Reelecciones En Argentina Y Brasil, Lucas Jolías, Augusto Reina

Lucas Jolías

Cuando se plantea el tema de las reelecciones a nivel provincial emerge una idea directa y sencilla: esto es que las reelecciones son instituciones forzadas por los gobernadores para enquistarse en el poder. Y que, de forma consecuente, estos mecanismos permiten que ciertas oligarquías políticas provinciales se mantengan en el poder a su gusto. Pero, tal como queremos plasmar en el presente artículo, achacarle tantas cosas a la reelección es sobreestimar los efectos de la institución. Plantear el tema en términos tan simples pone de lado otros procesos políticos que facilitan la estabilidad de las elites en la cima del …

Un Modelo Analítico De Ciudades Del Conocimiento En América Latina, Lucas Jolías, Alejandro Prince, Susana Finquelievich

Lucas Jolías

El análisis de las Ciudades Digitales ha ocupado en los últimos años un lugar importante en la academia, aunque eso no significa que exista un corpus conceptual y teórico que nos ayude a comprender mejor el tema. Las actuales coyunturas mundiales exigen una renovación en los estudios y prácticas sobre la interfase entre redes electrónicas y ciudades. Surgen nuevos conceptos, nuevas nociones y las ciudades comienzan a ser vistas como medios innovadores, tanto para sus ciudadanos como en relación a las regiones circundantes y a sus países de pertenencia. El objetivo de este artículo es brindar un modelo de análisis …

Minimizing Technology Risks With Pias, Precaution And Participation, Raphael Gellert, David Wright, Serge Gutwirth, Michael Friedewald

Michael Friedewald

Privacy impact assessment can be seen as a tool for responsible research and innovation (RRI). RRI can be defined as a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products in order to allow a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society [1]. Such a definition is close to how one could define privacy impact assessment (PIA), i.e., PIA is a process of engaging stakeholders in order to consider how privacy might …

Computersoftware Als Digitales Erbe: Probleme Aus Sicht Der Technikgeschichte, Michael Friedewald, Timo Leimbach

Michael Friedewald

No abstract provided.

Analysis On Partial Relationship In Lod, Kalpa Gunaratna, Sarasi Lalithsena, Cory Andrew Henson, Prateek Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Relationships play a key role in Semantic Web to connect the dots between entities (concepts or instances) in a way that enables to absorb the real sense of the entities. Some interesting relationships would give proof for the existence of subject and object in triples which in tern can be defined as evidential relationships. Identifying evidential relationships will yield solutions to some existing inference problems and open doors for new applications and research. Part_of relationships are identified as a special kind of an evidential relationship out of membership, causality and etc. Linked Open data as a global data space would …

A Genetic Optimization Approach For Isolating Translational Efficiency Bias, Douglas W. Raiford, Dan E. Krane, Travis E. Doom, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

The study of codon usage bias is an important research area that contributes to our understanding of molecular evolution, phylogenetic relationships, respiratory lifestyle, and other characteristics. Translational efficiency bias is perhaps the most well studied codon usage bias, as it is frequently utilized to predict relative protein expression levels. We present a novel approach to isolating translational efficiency bias in microbial genomes. There are several existent methods for isolating translational efficiency bias. Previous approaches are susceptible to the confounding influences of other potentially dominant biases. Additionally, existing approaches to identifying translational efficiency bias generally require both genomic sequence information and …

A Systematic Property Mapping Using Category Hierarchy And Data, Kalpa Gunaratna, Sarasi Lalithsena, Prateek Jain, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Relationships play a key role in Semantic Web to connect the dots between entities (concepts or instances in a way that enables to absorb the real sense of the entities. Even though relationships are important, it is difficult to categorize or identify them because they consist of complex knowledge in the schema. Therefore systematically identifying relationships yield many advantages and open doors for new research avenues. In this work, we try to identify a specific type of relationship (part of) in a multi-domain dataset and devised an algorithm using Wikipedia to identify patterns of part of relationships in the dataset. …

Reconciling Owl And Rules, David Carral Martinez, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Frederick Maier, Kunal Sengupta, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We report on a recent advance in integrating Rules and OWL. We discuss a recent proposal, known as nominal schemas, which realizes a seamless integration of Datalog rules into the description logic SROIQ which underlies OWL 2 DL. We present extensions of the standardized OWL syntaxes to incorporate nominal schemas, reasoning algorithms, and a first naive implementation. And we argue why this approach goes a long way towards overcoming the present paradigm split.

Contextual Ontology Alignment Of Lod With An Upper Ontology: A Case Study With Proton, Prateek Jain, Peter Z. Yeh, Kunal Verma, Reymonrod G. Vasquez, Mariana Darnorva, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Linked Open Data (LOD) is a major milestone towards realizing the Semantic Web vision, and can enable applications such as robust Question Answering (QA) systems that can answer queries requiring multiple, disparate information sources. However, realizing these applications requires relationships at both the schema and instance level, but currently the LOD only provides relationships for the latter. To address this limitation, we present a solution for automatically finding schema-level links between two LOD ontologies – in the sense of ontology alignment. Our solution, called BLOOMS+, extends our previous solution (i.e. BLOOMS) in two significant ways. BLOOMS+ 1) uses a …

Cloudvista: Visual Cluster Exploration For Extreme Scale Data In The Could, Keke Chen, Huiqi Xi, Fengguang Tian, Shumin Guo

Kno.e.sis Publications

The problem of efficient and high-quality clustering of extreme scale datasets with complex clustering structures continues to be one of the most challenging data analysis problems. An innovate use of data cloud would provide unique opportunity to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose the CloudVista framework to address (1) the problems caused by using sampling in the existing approaches and (2) the problems with the latency caused by cloud-side processing on interactive cluster visualization. The CloudVista framework aims to explore the entire large data stored in the cloud with the help of the data structure visual frame and …

Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics And Development Centric Web Applications, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Selvam Velmuru

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid rise in the popularity of social media (500M+ Facebook users, 100M+ twitter users), and near ubiquitous mobile access (4.1 billion actively-used mobile phones), the sharing of observations and opinions has become common-place (nearly 100M tweets a day, 1.8 trillion SMSs in US last year). This has given us an unprecedented access to the pulse of a populace and the ability to perform analytics on social data to support a variety of socially intelligent applications -- be it towards targeted online content delivery, crisis management, organizing revolutions or promoting social development in underdeveloped and developing countries. This tutorial …

Semantic Social Mashup Approach For Designing Citizen Diplomacy, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Advancement in technology has brought exceptional connectivity, easy and open access to communication mediums via Internet. Everyday millions of people are interactively communicating to each other and sharing multimedia content through Social Media/Networks, Web-based and mobile-based technologies. Social media provides variety of interesting, engaging applications such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flicker, Blogs. People interested in contributing to global welfare and improving humanity are connected to various NGO's like Red Cross, Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com), eMoksha (emoksha.org), etc. Social media and NGOs are acting as an excellent medium of communication and sharing, connected diverse people irrespective of their nationality, religion, culture, etc. Social …

Demonstration: Real-Time Semantic Analysis Of Sensor Streams, Harshal Kamlesh Patni, Cory Andrew Henson, Michael Cooney, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergence of dynamic information sources - including sensor networks - has led to large streams of real-time data on the Web. Research studies suggest, these dynamic networks have created more data in the last three years than in the entire history of civilization, and this trend will only increase in the coming years. With this coming data explosion, real-time analytics software must either adapt or die. This paper focuses on the task of integrating and analyzing multiple heterogeneous streams of sensor data with the goal of creating meaningful abstractions, or features. These features are then temporally aggregated into feature …

The Cloud Agnostic E-Science Analysis Platform, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Paul E. Anderson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The amount of data being generated for e-Science domains has grown exponentially in the past decade, yet the adoption of new computational techniques in these fields hasn't seen similar improvements. The presented platform can exploit the power of cloud computing while providing abstractions for scientists to create highly scalable data processing workflows.

The Obvious Invisibility Of The Relationship Between Technology And Social Values, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

We all too often assume that technology is the product of objective scientific research and that technology’s moral value lies in only the moral character of its user. To remove technology from a moral realm, we assume value and context neutrality. Yet the power of technology is a reflection of the values that exist in its developmental context. Technology’s moral realm is visible in the reciprocal relationship between culture and technology in the epidemiology of AIDS, clinical research and practice regarding heart disease, and DNA research. Cultural values decide what counts as a scientific question. When we look at the …