Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

How Science Is Visually Portrayed In The Media: An Examination Of Science Times, Rachel Toyer, Larry Mullen

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA) (2010 - 2017)

This poster will illustrate preliminary findings of how science images are portrayed in the New York Times, specifically, the Science Times section that is published every Tuesday and has grown in readership and popularity. Science images, five issues per year, have been coded over the past 34 years since the Science Times section first appeared in print. Our work follows trends that observe types of images, how many images are present, and whether the image is a photo or graphic of some sort.

A New Concept For Privacy In The Light Of Emerging Sciences And Technologies, Michael Friedewald

Michael Friedewald

Privacy is recognized as a fundamental human right. It underpins human dignity and other values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. It has become one of the most important human rights of the modern age. However, privacy is challenged in the net- worked society. New technologies undermine the individual right because they facilitate to collect, store, process and combine personal data for the use of security agencies but also of businesses. In many cases this means that the notion of privacy is losing its value. Thus a new concept seems to be necessary.

Challenges And Opportunities Of Creating Library Services For The Singapore Campus, Lateka Grays

Library Faculty Publications

When the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, opened its Singapore campus, it was critical that library services be provided and integrated into the curriculum. The University Libraries team overcame many challenges to create a libraries services infrastructure to support the students. Work began with then-hospitality liaison librarian Cory Tucker and has been carried on by current hospitality liaison librarian Lateka Grays. Our greatest strengths were the expertise of the liaisons and the support of the university.

We faced challenges to our mission of establishing library services in three key areas: access, communication, and technology. We developed a list of questions …

Semantics-Empowered Text Exploration For Knowledge Discovery, Delroy H. Cameron, Pablo N. Mendes, Amit P. Sheth, Victor Chan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The interaction paradigm offered by most contemporary Web Information Systems is a search-and-sift paradigm in which users manually seek information using hyperlinked documents. This paradigm is derived from a document-centric model that gives users minimal support for scanning through high volumes of text. We present a novel information exploration paradigm based on a data-centric view of corpora, along with a prototype implementation that demonstrates the value in content-driven navigation. We leverage semantic metadata to link data in documents by exploiting named relationships between entities. We also present utilities for gathering user generated navigation trails, critical for knowledge discovery. We discuss …

What Goes Around Comes Around - Improving Linked Open Data Through On-Demand Model Creation, Christopher Thomas, Wenbo Wang, Pankaj Mehra, Delroy H. Cameron, Pablo N. Mendes, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web 2.0 has changed the way we share and keep up with information. We communicate through social media platforms and make the information we exchange to a large extent publicly available. Linked Open Data (LOD) follows the same paradigm of sharing information but also makes it machine accessible. LOD provides an abundance of structured information albeit in a less formally rigorous form than would be desirable for Semantic Web applications. Nevertheless, most of the LOD assertions are community reviewed and we can rely on their accuracy to a large extent. In this work we want to follow the Web 2.0 …

Dynamic Associative Relationships On The Linked Open Data Web, Pablo N. Mendes, Pavan Kapanipathi, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We provide a definition of context based on theme, time and location, and propose a mixed retrieval/extraction model for the dynamic suggestion of trending relationships to LOD resources.

Network Neutrality Or Internet Innovation?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these …

Residential Broadband Competition In The United States, Scott J. Wallsten, Colleen Mallahan

Scott J. Wallsten

This paper uses a new FCC dataset on residential broadband subscribership and speeds at the census tract level combined with data from a number of additional sources to explore the state of broadband competition in the U.S. and test the effects of competition on speeds, penetration, and prices.

We find that the number of wireline providers in a census tract is positively correlated with the highest available broadband speeds, even when controlling for housing density, household income, state fixed effects, and endogenizing the number of providers. That is, we find that DSL, cable, and fiber speeds are each significantly higher …

Adaptive Foresight In The Creative Content Industries: Anticipating Value Chain Transformations And Need For Policy Action, Fabienne Abadie, Michael Friedewald, Matthias Weber

Michael Friedewald

This paper discusses the approach adopted to carry out a techno-economic foresight on the creative content industries, within the European Perspectives on the Information Society project. The novelty of the methodology lies in the mix of tools used, the embedding in an adaptive foresight framework and the implementation of a real-time Delphi which lead to interesting methodological lessons. The project succeeded in defining scenarios for the creative content industries, offering distinct trajectories and raising different policy challenges. The impact of the foresight on policy was limited, as it did not lead to direct policy measures, nevertheless, it confirmed some issues …

Linked Open Social Signals, Pablo N. Mendes, Alexandre Passant, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we discuss the collection, semantic annotation and analysis of real-time social signals from micro-blogging data. We focus on users interested in analyzing social signals collectively for sensemaking. Our proposal enables flexibility in selecting subsets for analysis, alleviating information overload. We define an architecture that is based on state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies and a distributed publish subscribe protocol for real time communication. In addition, we discuss our method and application in a scenario related to the health care reform in the United States.

Semantics Centric Solutions For Application And Data Portability In Cloud Computing, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing has become one of the key considerations both in academia and industry. Cheap, seemingly unlimited computing resources that can be allocated almost instantaneously and pay-as-you-go pricing schemes are some of the reasons for the success of Cloud computing. The Cloud computing landscape, however, is plagued by many issues hindering adoption. One such issue is vendor lock-in, forcing the Cloud users to adhere to one service provider in terms of data and application logic. Semantic Web has been an important research area that has seen significant attention from both academic and industrial researchers. One key property of Semantic Web …

Hope-In-The-Wall? A Promise Of Free Learning, Payal Arora

Payal Arora

Hole-in-the-Wall as a concept has attracted worldwide attention. It involves providing unconditional access to computer-equipped kiosks in playgrounds and out-of-school settings, children taking ownership of their learning and learning driven by the children's natural curiosity. It is posited that this approach, which is being used in India, Cambodia and several countries in Africa, can pave the way for a new education paradigm and be the key to providing literacy and basic education and bridging the digital divide in remote and disadvantaged regions. This paper seeks to establish why two such open access, self-directed and collaborative learning systems failed to take …

Assessing National Policies To Support Software In Europe, Timo Leimbach, Michael Friedewald

Michael Friedewald

Software and Software Based Services (SSBS) are a major domain of the European ICT industry and is recognised as a key element in developing the Information Society. This article aims to shed light on the various strategies, policies and activities pursued by the EU and their member states. It is based upon a survey of national programmes that are aimed specifically or in substantial part at the software sector. This analysis and assessment usually face two challenges: (1) Unlike other technologies that have the same significance and/or the same attractiveness, the SSBS industry is a very dy- namic one, due …

Sorting Out Smart Surveillance, David Wright, Michael Friedewald, Serge Gutwirth, Marc Langheinrich, Emilio Mordini, Rocco Bellanova, Paul De Hert, Kush Wadhwa, Didier Bigo

Michael Friedewald

Surveillance is becoming ubiquitous in our society. We can also see the emergence of “smart” surveillance technologies and the assemblages (or combinations) of such tech- nologies, supposedly to combat crime and terrorism, but in fact used for a variety of purposes, many of which are intrusive upon the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Following the dark days of 9/11, security and surveillance became paramount. More recently, in Europe, there has been a policy commitment to restore privacy to centre stage. This paper examines the legal tools available to ensure that privacy and personal data protection are respected in attempts to ensure …

Collaborative Community-Based Natural Resource Management, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

This article analyzes the importance of increasing civil society actor access to and influence in international legal and policy negotiations, drawing from academic scholarship on governance, conservation and environmental sustainability, natural resource management, observations of civil society actors, and the authors’ experiences as participants in international environmental negotiations.

Emerging Law Addressing Climate Change And Water, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

The World Economic Forum recognizes that while restrictions on energy affect water systems and vice versa, energy and water policy are rarely coordinated. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that wet places will become wetter and dry places will become dryer. Transboundary water, energy and climate coordination can occur through international consensus building.

The Neoliberal University And Agricultural Biotechnology: Reports From The Field, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

Following in the footsteps of a variety of previous research that elaborates on the current state of affairs in academia, this article sets out the argument that neoliberalism and its corresponding iterations of science and technology and research funding policies in this country have implications for the types of knowledge that can be generated within and communicated without contemporary institutions of higher education. Using agricultural biotechnology as the lens through which to focus analysis, the article outlines a number of empirical examples that illustrate how the free flow of knowledge either critical of or not readily appropriated by capital is …

Google Analytics: Analyzing The Latest Wave Of Legal Concerns For Google In The U.S. And The E.U., 7 Buff. Intell. Prop. L.J. 135 (2010), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The next wave of concern regarding Google involves web analytics. Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. The concerns of web analytics use touches on issues of online user privacy, government use of personal information, and information on website user activity. While Google Analytics is not the sole web analytics product on the market, it is widely used by corporate, non-profit, and government organizations. The product has been reported to have a 59% market share among web analytics vendors in a 2008 study.

Web analytics technology …

A Reasonable Semantic Web, Pascal Hitzler, Frank Van Harmelen

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which forces us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches. We argue that reasoning for the Semantic Web should be understood as "shared inference," which is not necessarily based on deductive methods. Model-theoretic semantics (and sound and complete reasoning based on it) functions as a gold standard, but applications dealing with large-scale and noisy data usually cannot afford the required runtimes. Approximate methods, including deductive ones, but also approaches based on …

Approximate Instance Retrieval On Ontologies, Tuvshintur Tserendorj, Stephan Grimm, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With the development of more expressive description logics (DLs) for the Web Ontology Language OWL the question arises how we can properly deal with the high computational complexity for efficient reasoning. In application cases that require scalable reasoning with expressive ontologies, non-standard reasoning solutions such as approximate reasoning are necessary to tackle the intractability of reasoning in expressive DLs. In this paper, we are concerned with the approximation of the reasoning task of instance retrieval on DL knowledge bases, trading correctness of retrieval results for gain of speed. We introduce our notion of an approximate concept extension and we provide …

Nominal Schemas For Integrating Rules And Ontologies, Frederick Maier, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We propose a description-logic style extension of OWL DL, which includes DL-safe variable SWRL and seamlessly integrates datalog rules. Our language also sports a tractable fragment, which we call ELP 2, covering OWL EL, OWL RL, most of OWL QL, and variable restricted datalog.

Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Advocates, Agendas, And Nay-Sayers: Science And Technology In The Public Arena, Arthur Greenberg

The University Dialogue

No abstract provided.

Sensor Data And Perception: Can Sensors Play 20 Questions, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Currently, there are many sensors collecting information about our environment, leading to an overwhelming number of observations that must be analyzed and explained in order to achieve situation awareness. As perceptual beings, we are also constantly inundated with sensory data, yet we are able to make sense of our environment with relative ease. Why is the task of perception so easy for us, and so hard for machines; and could this have anything to do with how we play the game 20 Questions?

Twitris 2.0 : Semantically Empowered System For Understanding Perceptions From Social Data, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Hemant Purohit, Pavan Kapanipathi, Pramod Anantharam, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Vinh Nguyen, Pablo N. Mendes, Alan Gary Smith, Michael Cooney, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present Twitris 2.0, a Semantic Web application that facilitates understanding of social perceptions by Semantics-based processing of massive amounts of event-centric data. Twitris 2.0 addresses challenges in large scale processing of social data, preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties. Twitris 2.0 also covers context based semantic integration of multiple Web resources and expose semantically enriched social data to the public domain. Semantic Web technologies enable the systematic integration and analysis abilities.

Automated Isolation Of Translational Efficiency Bias That Resists The Confounding Effect Of Gc(At)-Content, Douglas W. Raiford, Dan E. Krane, Travis E. Doom, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Genomic sequencing projects are an abundant source of information for biological studies ranging from the molecular to the ecological in scale; however, much of the information present may yet be hidden from casual analysis. One such information domain, trends in codon usage, can provide a wealth of information about an organism's genes and their expression. Degeneracy in the genetic code allows more than one triplet codon to code for the same amino acid, and usage of these codons is often biased such that one or more of these synonymous codons is preferred. Detection of this bias is an important tool …

Loqus: Linked Open Data Sparql Querying System, Prateek Jain, Kunal Verma, Peter Z. Yeh, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The LOD cloud is gathering a lot of momentum, with the number of contributors growing manifold. Many prominent data providers have submitted and linked their data to other dataset with the help of manual mappings. The potential of the LOD cloud is enormous ranging from challenging AI issues such as open domain question answering to automated knowledge discovery. We believe that there is not enough technology support available to effectively query the LOD cloud. To this effect, we present a system called Linked Open Data SPARQL Querying System (LOQUS), which automatically maps users queries written in terms of a conceptual …

Computing For The Human Experience: Semantics-Empowered Sensors, Services, And Social Computing On The Ubiquitous Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

People are on the verge of an era in which the human experience can be enriched in ways they couldn't have imagined two decades ago. Rather than depending on a single technology, people progressed with several whose semantics-empowered convergence and integration will enable us to capture, understand, and reapply human knowledge and intellect. Such capabilities will consequently elevate our technological ability to deal with the abstractions, concepts, and actions that characterize human experiences. This will herald computing for human experience (CHE). The CHE vision is built on a suite of technologies that serves, assists, and cooperates with humans to nondestructively …

A Qualitative Examination Of Topical Tweet And Retweet Practices, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Hemant Purohit, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work contributes to the study of retweet behavior on Twitter surrounding real-world events. We analyze over a million tweets pertaining to three events, present general tweet properties in such topical datasets and qualitatively analyze the properties of the retweet behavior surrounding the most tweeted/viral content pieces. Findings include a clear relationship between sparse/dense retweet patterns and the content and type of a tweet itself; suggesting the need to study content properties in link-based diffusion models.

A Study In Hadoop Streaming With Matlab For Nmr Data Processing, Kalpa Gunaratna, Paul E. Anderson, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Applying Cloud computing techniques for analyzing large data sets has shown promise in many data-driven scientific applications. Our approach presented here is to use Cloud computing for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)data analysis which normally consists of large amounts of data. Biologists often use third party or commercial software for ease of use. Enabling the capability to use this kind of software in a Cloud will be highly advantageous in many ways. Scripting languages especially designed for clouds may not have the flexibility biologists need for their purposes. Although this is true, they are familiar with special software packages that allow …