Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Measurement Of The Ocean And Coastal Economy: Theory And Methods, Charles S. Colgan

Publications

This paper supplements reports and data released on the coastal and ocean economy of the United States by the National Ocean Economics Project. It provides a discussion of the relevant literature involved in the investigation of the ocean and coastal related economy, the theoretical background of measures such as gross domestic and gross state product, and provides details on sources, methods, assumptions, and limitations of the data provided by NOEP.

Semantic (Web) Technology In Action: Ontology Driven Information Systems For Search, Integration, And Analysis, Amit P. Sheth, Cartic Ramakrishnan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantics is seen as the key ingredient in the next phase of the Web infrastructure as well as the next generation of information systems applications. In this context, we review some of the reservations expressed about the viability of the Semantic Web. We respond to these by identifying a Semantic Technology that supports the key capabilities also needed to realize the Semantic Web vision, namely representing, acquiring and utilizing knowledge. Given that scalability is a key challenge, we briefly review our observations from developing three classes of real world applications and corresponding technology components: search/browsing, integration, and analytics. We distinguish …

Semantic Web Processes: Semantics Enabled Annotation, Discovery, Composition, And Orchestration Of Web Scale Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This tutorial deals with the evolution of inter- Enterprise and Web scale process to support e-commerce and e-services. It taps into the promises of two of the hottest R&D and technology areas: Web services and the Semantic Web. It presents how applying semantics to each of the steps in the Semantic Web Process lifecycle can help address critical issues in reuse, integration and scalability.

Validating And Refining Clusters Via Visual Rendering, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

The automatic clustering algorithms are known to work well in dealing with clusters of regular shapes, e.g. compact spherical/elongated shapes, but may incur higher error rates when dealing with arbitrarily shaped clusters. Although some efforts have been devoted to addressing the problem of skewed datasets, the problem of handling clusters with irregular shapes is still in its infancy, especially in terms of dimensionality of the datasets and the precision of the clustering results considered. Not surprisingly, the statistical indices works ineffective in validating clusters of irregular shapes, too. We address the problem of clustering and validating arbitrarily shaped clusters with …

Race, Place, And Information Technology, Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert

National Center for Digital Government

What role does environment play in influencing information technology access and skills – over and above individual characteristics such as income, education, race, and ethnicity? One of the puzzles that emerged from our recent research on the “digital divide” was that African-Americans, and to a lesser extent, Latinos, had more positive attitudes toward information technology than similarly-situated whites. And yet, African-Americans and Latinos are less likely to have information technology access and skills, even when controlling for other factors such as income and education (Mossberger, Tolbert and Stansbury 2003). The research presented in this paper takes a first step toward …

Technology Goes Home Evaluation – Executive Summary, Donna H. Friedman, Michelle Kahan, Tatjana Meschede, Consuela Greene

Center for Social Policy Publications

Technology Goes Home (TGH) is an innovative program designed to bridge the digital divide by bringing technology into low-income families’ homes. This Boston Digital Bridge Foundation (BDBF) program strives to prepare adults for employment opportunities and to help children improve academic performance by offering computer training and equipment to families in Boston neighborhoods and schools. Classes are offered in groups, with parents and children learning together in order to strengthen families and build community as well as skills. Neighborhood programs are operated in six communities through Neighborhood Technology Collaboratives, coalitions of community-based organizations. These coalitions select participating families, and provide …

Towards (Semi-) Automatic Generation Of Bio-Medical Ontologies, Vipul Kashyap, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Thomas Rindflesch

Kno.e.sis Publications

The design and construction of domain specific ontologies and taxonomies requires allocation of huge resources in terms of cost and time. These efforts are human intensive and we need to explore ways of minimizing human involvement and other resources. In the biomedical domain, we seek to leverage resources such as the UMLS1 Metathesaurus and NLP-based applications such as MetaMap2 in conjunction with statistical clustering techniques, to (partially) automate the process. This is expected to be useful to the team involved in developing MeSH and other biomedical taxonomies to identify gaps in the existing taxonomies, and to be able to quickly …

Semantic E-Workflow Composition, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Systems and infrastructures are currently being developed to support Web services. The main idea is to encapsulate an organization's functionality within an appropriate interface and advertise it as Web services. While in some cases Web services may be utilized in an isolated form, it is normal to expect Web services to be integrated as part of workflow processes. The composition of workflow processes that model e-service applications differs from the design of traditional workflows, in terms of the number of tasks (Web services) available to the composition process, in their heterogeneity, and in their autonomy. Therefore, two problems need to …

Bring The President's Nerds Back In From The Cold, Robert Hahn, Scott J. Wallsten

Scott J. Wallsten

No abstract provided.

What Can Semantics Do For Bioinformatics?, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

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E-Government Cross-Agency And Intergovernmental Initiatives Research Project: Web Survey Results, Jane E. Fountain, Robin Mckinnon, Eunyun Park

National Center for Digital Government

One of the central challenges of E-Government is organizational and institutional change. Professor Jane E. Fountain, the founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and her research team are currently continuing a practical research program on the development of crossagency collaboration and integration using information technologies. The project is designed to describe and explain critical success factors in successful E-Government cross-agency collaborative projects. The study should contribute significant management, economic and policy benefits as a result of better understanding how to structure conditions for success in cross-agency initiatives that …

Bureaucratic Networks Or Networked Bureaucracies? Knowledge Sharing In Ict-Enabled Innovation Projects, Maria C. Binz-Scharf

National Center for Digital Government

This paper examines knowledge sharing processes in digital government projects (DGPs). Although knowledge sharing processes are a central feature of the functioning of government, they have received little attention in the literature. The importance of knowledge sharing has become even more evident with the rise of digital government initiatives, as these have a networking effect on bureaucracies. With multiple agencies and multidisciplinary knowledge coming together, it is necessary to combine and reconnect the required knowledge. Based on empirical data from four DGPs in Switzerland and the United States, a theoretical model for knowledge sharing in DGPs is proposed. The model …

Semantic Web In Action: Ontology-Driven Information Search, Integration And Analysis, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Continuity Of Semantic Operators In Logic Programming And Their Approximation By Artificial Neural Networks, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

One approach to integrating first-order logic programming and neural network systems employs the approximation of semantic operators by feedforward networks. For this purpose, it is necessary to view these semantic operators as continuous functions on the reals. This can be accomplished by endowing the space of all interpretations of a logic program with topologies obtained from suitable embeddings. We will present such topologies which arise naturally out of the theory of logic programming, discuss continuity issues of several well-known semantic operators, and derive some results concerning the approximation of these operators by feedforward neural networks.

Context-Aware Semantic Association Ranking, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Christian Halaschek-Wiener, I. Budak Arpinar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering complex and meaningful relationships, which we call Semantic Associations, is an important challenge. Just as ranking of documents is a critical component of today's search engines, ranking of relationships will be essential in tomorrow's semantic search engines that would support discovery and mining of the Semantic Web. Building upon our recent work on specifying types of Semantic Associations in RDF graphs, which are possible to create through semantic metadata extraction and annotation, we discuss a framework where ranking techniques can be used to identify more interesting and more relevant Semantic Associations. Our techniques utilize alternative ways of specifying the …

Technology Education And Integrated Learning For Adult Learners, Karen K. Lawson

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

Adult learning and achievement in technology education can be enhanced through the process of integrated learning, rather than through learning skills in isolation. An integrated learning program helps provide the opportunity for instructors to help their students make connections and form relationships across the boundaries of classroom, discipline, skill, and background. Situated cognition refers to the idea that cognitive processes (including thinking and learning) are located in physical and social contexts. By providing technology education using information contexts (histories, stories, explanations, backgrounds), adult learners can draw on both what they have learned in life and are learning in the classroom.

Why Should Students Do Research?, Bruce R. Branchini

Convocation Addresses

No abstract provided.

Context-Aware Semantic Association Ranking, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Chris Halaschek, I. Budak Arpinar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering complex and meaningful relationships, which we call Semantic Associations, is an important challenge. Just as ranking of documents is a critical component of today's search engines, ranking of relationships will be essential in tomorrow's semantic search engines that would support discovery and mining of the Semantic Web. Building upon our recent work on specifying types of Semantic Associations in RDF graphs, which are possible to create through semantic metadata extraction and annotation, we discuss a framework where ranking techniques can be used to identify more interesting and more relevant Semantic Associations. Our techniques utilize alternative ways of specifying the …

Learning Mixture Models With The Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new approach to estimating mixture models based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes’ maximum entropy principle and from standard maximum likelihood estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle by deriving new algorithms for mixture model estimation, and show how robust new variants of the EM algorithm can be developed. Our experiments show that estimation based on LME generally yields better results than maximum likelihood estimation, particularly when inferring latent variable models from small amounts of data.

Boltzmann Machine Learning With The Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new statistical learning paradigm for Boltzmann machines based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes maximum entropy principle and from standard maximum likelihood estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle BY deriving new algorithms for Boltzmann machine parameter estimation, and show how robust and fast new variant of the EM algorithm can be developed. Our experiments show that estimation based on LME generally yields better results than maximum likelihood estimation, particularly when inferring hidden units from small amounts of data.

A Visual Framework Invites Human Into The Clustering Process, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

Clustering is a technique commonly used in scientific research. The task of clustering inevitably involves human participation - the clustering is not finished when the computer/algorithm finishes but the user has evaluated, understood and accepted the patterns. This defines a human involved "clustering-analysis/evaluation" iteration. Instead of neglecting this human involvement, we provide a visual framework (VISTA) with all power of algorithmic approaches (since their result can be visualized), and in addition we allow the user to steer/monitor/refine the clustering process with domain knowledge. The visual-rendering result also provides a precise pattern for fast post-processing.

In Memoriam: Frank F. Clasquin (1915-2002), Connie Foster

DLTS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Alfred Jaeger (1923-2003), Connie Foster

DLTS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Conference Proceedings Of The 2003 Air Transport Research Society (Atrs) World Conference, Volume 1, Brent Bowen, Sveinn Gudmundsson, Tae Hoon Oum, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 03-5

The Conference Proceedings Of The 2003 Air Transport Research Society (Atrs) World Conference, Volume 3, Brent D. Bowen, Sveinn Gudmundsson, Tae Hoon Oum, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 03-7

The Conference Proceedings Of The 2003 Air Transport Research Society (Atrs) World Conference, Volume 5, Brent Bowen, Sveinn Gudmundsson, Tae Hoon Oum, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 03-9

The Conference Proceedings Of The 2003 Air Transport Research Society (Atrs) World Conference, Vol. 2, Brent Bowen, Sveinn Gudmundsson, Tae Hoon Oum, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 03-6

Toward A Comprehensive Supplement For Language Courses, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Stephen P. Carl

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Adding Semantics To Web Services Standards, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth, John Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, discovery of relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. One approach is to develop semantic Web services where by the Web services are annotated based on shared ontologies, and use these annotations for semantics-based discovery of relevant Web services. We discuss one such approach that involves adding semantics to WSDL using DAML+OIL ontologies. Our approach also uses UDDI to store these semantic annotations and search for Web services based on them. We compare our approach with another initiative to add semantics to support Web service discovery, and show how our approach …

The Importance Of Trust And Community In Developing And Maintaining A Community Electronic Network, Alina Oxendine, Eugene Borgida, John Sullivan, Melinda Jackson

Alina Oxendine