Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

The Ethical Phenomenon Of Gm-Corn: Anger, Anxiety, And Arrogance In Crossing American Borders, Jules Simon

Jules Simon

In terms of phenomenology, I often wonder about the relevance of what I do as a philosopher for the life of those with whom I come into contact. This ‘coming into contact’ happens for me on several levels: as one human among many, as a husband and father and son and brother, as a teacher, as a neighbor, and as country or city dweller. I remember with fondness those times in the late sultry summer months when, as a youth, I would drive with my father to this or that local farm-stand on some remote back road in the hills …

A Photovoice Participatory Evaluation Of A School Gardening Program Through The Eyes Of Fifth Graders, Catherine Sands, Krista Harper, Lee Ellen Reed, Maggie Shar

Krista M. Harper

In the springtime, fifth grade students at the Williamsburg Elementary School in rural Western Massachusetts ask to snack on sorrel and chives from the school garden, between planting potatoes and building a shade structure for their outdoor classroom. They are members of the first cohort of the curriculum-integrated program initiated by Fertile Ground, a grassroots organization in western Massachusetts. The children’s delight in the fresh greens they have grown marks a national phenomenon: the farm-to-school movement. With limited resources, parents, teachers, students, administrators, and community activists are developing inroads to better school food and food education, by constructing school teaching …

Ontologies And Rules, Pascal Hitzler, Bijan Parsia

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Ontologies and rules are two established paradigms in knowledge modelling, and play an important role for the Semantic Web. In this chapter, we present an introduction to common approaches for combining OWL ontologies and rules. In particular, we cover the Semantic Web Rules Language SWRL and Description Logic Programs DLP, and give pointers to the literature.

Making Ethical Sense Of Useless Suffering With Levinas, Jules Simon

Jules Simon

No abstract provided.

Semantics-Empowered Social Computing, Amit P. Sheth, Meenakshi Nagarajan

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this article, we discuss some of the challenges in marking-up or annotating UGC, a first step toward the realization of the social semantic Web. Using examples from real- world UGC, we show how domain knowledge can effectively complement statistical natural language processing techniques for metadata creation.

Prom: A Semantic Web Framework For Provenance Management In Science, Satya S. Sahoo, Roger Barga, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pascal Hitzler

Kno.e.sis Publications

The eScience paradigm is enabling researchers to collaborate over the Web in virtual laboratories and conduct experiments on an industrial scale. But, the inherent variability in the quality and trust associated with eScience resources necessitates the use of provenance information describing the origin of an entity. Existing systems often model provenance using ambiguous terminology, have poor domain semantics and include modeling inconsistencies that hinders interoperability. Further, mere collection of provenance information is of little value without a well-defined and scalable query mechanism.

In this paper, we present 'PrOM', a framework that addresses both the modeling and querying issues in eScience …

Citizen Sensing, Social Signals, And Enriching Human Experience, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this article, I introduce the exciting paradigm of citizen sensing enabled by mobile sensors and human computing - that is, humans as citizens on the ubiquitous Web, acting as sensors and sharing their observations and views using mobile devices and Web 2.0 services.

Service Level Agreement In Cloud Computing, Pankesh Patel, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing that provides cheap and pay-as-you-go computing resources is rapidly gaining momentum as an alternative to traditional IT Infrastructure. As more and more consumers delegate their tasks to cloud providers, Service Level Agreements(SLA) between consumers and providers emerge as a key aspect. Due to the dynamic nature of the cloud, continuous monitoring on Quality of Service (QoS) attributes is necessary to enforce SLAs. Also numerous other factors such as trust (on the cloud provider) come into consideration, particularly for enterprise customers that may outsource its critical data. This complex nature of the cloud landscape warrants a sophisticated means of …

Characterization Of 1h Nmr Spectroscopic Data And The Generation Of Synthetic Validation Sets, Paul E. Anderson, Michael L. Raymer, Benjamin J. Kelly, Nicholas V. Reo, Nicholas J. Delraso, Travis E. Doom

Kno.e.sis Publications

Motivation: Common contemporary practice within the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomics community is to evaluate and validate novel algorithms on empirical data or simplified simulated data. Empirical data captures the complex characteristics of experimental data, but the optimal or most correct analysis is unknown a priori; therefore, researchers are forced to rely on indirect performance metrics, which are of limited value. In order to achieve fair and complete analysis of competing techniques more exacting metrics are required. Thus, metabolomics researchers often evaluate their algorithms on simplified simulated data with a known answer. Unfortunately, the conclusions obtained on simulated data are …

User-Generated Content On Social Media Challenges, Opportunities, Meenakshi Nagarajan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Understanding and exploiting user generated (textual) content (UGC) on social media is at the forefront of information management challenges today. The variety of UGC in detailed blog commentaries, collaborative wiki-content, online conversations, short messages in micro-blogs etc., are powering several personalization, monetization, crowd/business intelligence applications, and also providing an electronic microscope on social phenomena at an extraordinary scale. Certain characteristics of UGC however, necessitate key computational linguistic interventions before systems can tap into this data. A large portion of language found on social media is in the Informal English domain a blend of abbreviations, slang and context dependent terms delivered …

Determining The Best K For Clustering Transactional Datasets: A Coverage Density-Based Approach, Hua Yan, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

The problem of determining the optimal number of clusters is important but mysterious in cluster analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find a set of candidate optimal number Ks of clusters in transactional datasets. Concretely, we propose Transactional-cluster-modes Dissimilarity based on the concept of coverage density as an intuitive transactional inter-cluster dissimilarity measure. Based on the above measure, an agglomerative hierachical clustering algorithm is developed and the Merge Dissimilarity Indexes, which are generated in hierachical cluster merging processes, are used to find the candidate optimal number Ks of clusters of transactional data. Our experimental results on …

A Photovoice Participatory Evaluation Of A School Gardening Program Through The Eyes Of Fifth Graders, Catherine Sands, Krista Harper, Lee Ellen Reed, Maggie Shar

Catherine Sands

In the springtime, fifth grade students at the Williamsburg Elementary School in rural Western Massachusetts ask to snack on sorrel and chives from the school garden, between planting potatoes and building a shade structure for their outdoor classroom. They are members of the first cohort of the curriculum-integrated program initiated by Fertile Ground, a grassroots organization in western Massachusetts. The children’s delight in the fresh greens they have grown marks a national phenomenon: the farm-to-school movement. With limited resources, parents, teachers, students, administrators, and community activists are developing inroads to better school food and food education, by constructing school teaching …