Digital Commons Network^™

Fully Secure Cipertext-Policy Hiding Cp-Abe, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In ciphertext-policy attributed-based encryption (CP-ABE), each ciphertext is labeled by the encryptor with an access structure (also called ciphertext policy) and each private key is associated with a set of attributes. A user should be able to decrypt a ciphertext if and only if his private key attributes satisfy the access structure.The traditional security property of CP-ABE is plaintext privacy, which ciphertexts reveal no information about the underlying plaintext. At ACNS’08, Nishide, Yoneyama and Ohta introduced the notion of ciphertext-policy hiding CP-ABE. In addition to protecting the privacy of plaintexts, ciphertext-policy hiding CP-ABE also protects the description of the access …

A Quality Metric For Sustainable Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sustainability has become a major concern for nations and firms especially since the Kyoto Protocol was defined in 1997. While there have been several studies on benchmarks for national innovation systems and effectiveness of innovation management within firms there is as yet no reasonable metric for determining the quality of an innovation much less its quality relating to sustainability? Similarly, there have been several studies on sustainability but that such research groups have also not focused on developing a metric for denoting the quality of sustainable innovations. This paper offers a metric that defines the quality of an innovation, especially …

Effects Of Appearance And Functions On Likability And Perceived Occupational Suitability Of Robots, Sau-Lai Lee, Ivy Yee-Man Lau, Ying-Yi Hong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reports three experiments that examined the association between (a) appearances and perceived capabilities of robots, (b) appearance and capabilities of robots and liking for the robots, and (c) perceived capabilities of robots and judgments concerning their suitability for different occupations. In Experiment 1, the authors found that participants perceived human- and animal-like robots to have relatively more warmth-related (e.g., emotion) capabilities than machinelike robots have. In Experiment 2, the authors found that liking for robots was not affected by their human likeness or their having warmth or competence capabilities. In Experiment 3, participants generally thought that robots should …

Getting To Know Social Media Analytics, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the last five years, the unprecedented development and use of social mediating technologies such as blog, wiki, Facebook, and Tweeter have engendered radically new ways of working, playing, and creating meaning, leaving an indelible mark on nearly every domain imaginable. Despite the growing ubiquity of social mediating technologies, their potential has hardly been tapped. Effectively using data collected from social mediating technologies by the business community is far from trivial. This is mainly due to the general lack of awareness on Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and technologies among the business analysts and practitioners. This presentation aims to provide …

Oral History Interview With Tony Tan Keng Yam: Conceptualising Smu, Tony Keng Yam Tan

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: higher education landscape, setting up SMU, naming a new university, different university, admission criteria, student interaction, first graduation ceremony, future of university education.

Biography:

Patron, SMU, 2011–present
Visionary and architect of SMU

Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam steered the development of university education in Singapore and was instrumental in the creation of Singapore Management University. Involved in higher education in Singapore for over three decades, he served as education minister (1980–1981 and 1985–1991), vice-chancellor of the National University of Singapore (1980–1981), and was appointed deputy prime minister of Singapore (1995–2005). He is credited with restructuring Singapore’s educational …

Sandcanvas: New Expressions In Sand Animation, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Kien-Chuan Chua, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Christopher Davis, Kok-Lim Low

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. This video demonstrates the creative possibilities of SandCanvas, a new multi-touch digital artistic medium inspired by sand animation that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas’s color and texture features enable faster, more dramatic transitions, while its mixed media and gesture recording features make it possible to create entirely new experiences. Session recording and frame capture complement these capabilities by simplifying post-production of sand animation performances.

For Faster And Better Decisions, A Biased And Less-Informed Mind, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Can a biased mind, with fewer inputs, make faster and better decisions? Apparently, this premise, flying in the face of conventional logical thinking, is possible, and there were real life examples indicating so. At a recently held Behavioural Sciences Forum at Singapore Management University, Gerd Gigerenzer of Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, explained how heuristics, which directs focus to areas that matter and blocks off non-essential noise, factors in the decision-making process.

Back To Basics: The Little Book That Still Beats The Market, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Investment theories and principles can be complex and befuddling for many. Yet, one man has devised a formula so simple that it could speak to novices and children. In The Little Book That Still Beats the Market, Columbia University lecturer Joel Greenblatt explains, in large fonts, how he derived what has been termed "the magic formula" and provides some examples as proof of its wizardry. As for weather-beaten investors with no latitude left for "magic", Greenblatt offers a humorous revision of the fundamentals.

A Simple Curious Agent To Help People Be Curious, Han Yu, Zhiqi Shen, Chunyan Miao, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Curiosity is an innately rewarding state of mind that, over the millennia, has driven the human race to explore and discover. Many researches in pedagogical science have confirmed the importance of being curious to the students' cognitive development. However, in the newly popular virtual world-based learning environments (VLEs), there is currently a lack of attention being paid to enhancing the learning experience by stimulating the learners' curiosity. In this paper, we propose a simple model for curious agents (CAs) which can be used to stimulate learners' curiosity in VLEs. Potential future research directions will be discussed.

Design And Performance Analysis Of Mac Schemes For Wireless Sensor Networks Powered By Ambient Energy Harvesting, Zhi Ang Eu, Hwee-Pink Tan, Winston K. G. Seah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy consumption is a perennial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which typically rely on portable sources like batteries for power. Recent advances in ambient energy harvesting technology have made it a potential and promising alternative source of energy for powering WSNs. By using energy harvesters with supercapacitors, WSNs are able to operate perpetually until hardware failure and in places where batteries are hard or impossible to replace. In this paper, we study the performance of different medium access control (MAC) schemes based on CSMA and polling techniques for WSNs which are solely powered by ambient energy …

Leveraging Complex Event Processing For Smart Hospitals Using Rfid, Wen Yao, Chao-Hsien Chu, Zang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

RFID technology has been examined in healthcare to support a variety of applications such as patient identification and monitoring, asset tracking, and patient–drug compliance. However, managing the large volume of RFID data and understanding them in the medical context present new challenges. One effective solution for dealing with these challenges is complex event processing (CEP), which can extract meaningful events for context-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a CEP framework to model surgical events and critical situations in an RFID-enabled hospital. We have implemented a prototype system with the proposed approach for surgical management and conducted performance evaluations to …

Adaptive Decision Support For Structured Organizations: A Case For Orgpomdps, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Nathan Schurr, Alan Carlin, Christopher Amato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In today's world, organizations are faced with increasingly large and complex problems that require decision-making under uncertainty. Current methods for optimizing such decisions fall short of handling the problem scale and time constraints. We argue that this is due to existing methods not exploiting the inherent structure of the organizations which solve these problems. We propose a new model called the OrgPOMDP (Organizational POMDP), which is based on the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). This new model combines two powerful representations for modeling large scale problems: hierarchical modeling and factored representations. In this paper we make three key contributions: …

Sandcanvas: A Multi-Touch Art Medium Inspired By Sand Animation, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Kien-Chuan Chua, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Christopher Davis, Kok-Lim Low

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. Inspired by this medium, we have developed a new multitouch digital artistic medium named SandCanvas that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas also goes beyond traditional sand animation with tools for mixing sand animation with video and replicating recorded free-form hand gestures. In this paper, we analyze common sand animation hand gestures, present SandCanvas’s intuitive UI, and describe implementation challenges we encountered. We also present an evaluation with professional and novice artists that shows the importance and unique affordances of …

Fragile Online Relationship: A First Look At Unfollow Dynamics In Twitter, Haewoon Kwak, Hyunwoo Chun, Sue. Moon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting …

Double Updating Online Learning, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most kernel based online learning algorithms, when an incoming instance is misclassified, it will be added into the pool of support vectors and assigned with a weight, which often remains unchanged during the rest of the learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new support vector is added, we generally expect the weights of the other existing support vectors to be updated in order to reflect the influence of the added support vector. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short, that explicitly addresses this problem. …

Prototyping Video Games With Animation, Richard Christopher Davis

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

This paper outlines a proposed design for PlaySketch, a new video game storyboarding system. PlaySketch borrows ideas from the K-Sketch animation sketching system, which allows short animations to be created in minutes or seconds. We build on K-Sketch in four ways. key frame animation capabilities, a branching timeline view, microphone and web-cam support, and hooks to connect to online game design documents.

Technical Appendix To "Stochastic Capacity Investment And Flexible Vs. Dedicated Technology Choice In Imperfect Capital Markets", Onur Boyabatli

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Technical appendix with proofs for the technical statements in the article: Stochastic capacity investment and flexible vs. dedicated technology choice in imperfect capital markets. (2011). Management Science, 57 (12), 2163 - 2179. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1395

Distributed Model Shaping For Scaling To Decentralized Pomdps With Hundreds Of Agents, Prasanna Velagapudi, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Katia Sycara, Paul Scerri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of distributed POMDPs for cooperative teams has been severely limited by the incredibly large joint policy- space that results from combining the policy-spaces of the individual agents. However, much of the computational cost of exploring the entire joint policy space can be avoided by observing that in many domains important interactions between agents occur in a relatively small set of scenarios, previously defined as coordination locales (CLs) [11]. Moreover, even when numerous interactions might occur, given a set of individual policies there are relatively few actual interactions. Exploiting this observation and building on an existing model shaping algorithm, …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, most research has focused on developing algorithms for solving static DCOPs. In this paper, we model dynamic DCOPs as sequences of (static) DCOPs with changes from one DCOP to the next one in the sequence. We introduce the ReuseBounds procedure, which can be used by any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to find cost-minimal solutions for all DCOPs in the sequence faster than by solving each DCOP individually. This procedure allows those agents that are guaranteed to remain unaffected by a change to reuse their lower and upper …

Configuring Global Software Teams: A Multi-Company Analysis Of Productivity, Quality, And Profits, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Marcelo Cataldo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, James Herbsleb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we examined the impact of project-level configurational choices of globally distributed software teams on project productivity, quality, and profits. Our analysis used data from 362 projects of four different firms. These projects spanned a wide range of programming languages, application domain, process choices, and development sites spread over 15 countries and 5 continents. Our analysis revealed fundamental tradeoffs in choosing configurational choices that are optimized for productivity, quality, and/or profits. In particular, achieving higher levels of productivity and quality require diametrically opposed configurational choices. In addition, creating imbalances in the expertise and personnel distribution of project teams …

Beespace Navigator: Exploratory Analysis Of Gene Function Using Semantic Indexing Of Biological Literature, Moushumi Sen Sarma, David Arcoleo, Radhika S. Khetani, Brant Chee, Xu Ling, Xin He, Jing Jiang, Qiaozhu Mei, Chengxiang Zhai, Bruce Schatz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid decrease in cost of genome sequencing, the classification of gene function is becoming a primary problem. Such classification has been performed by human curators who read biological literature to extract evidence. BeeSpace Navigator is a prototype software for exploratory analysis of gene function using biological literature. The software supports an automatic analogue of the curator process to extract functions, with a simple interface intended for all biologists. Since extraction is done on selected collections that are semantically indexed into conceptual spaces, the curation can be task specific. Biological literature containing references to gene lists from expression experiments …

Decentralized Decision Support For An Agent Population In Dynamic And Uncertain Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by problems in urban transportation and labor mobility, where the agent flow is dynamic, non-deterministic and on a large scale. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly impact other agents, they have implicit interactions with other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed controlled movements of agents in static environments. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents having involuntary movements in dynamic environments . For instance, in a taxi fleet serving …

Continuous Nearest Neighbor Search In The Presence Of Obstacles, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen, Chun Chen, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the ubiquity of physical obstacles (e.g., buildings, hills, and blindages, etc.) in the real world, most of spatial queries ignore the obstacles. In this article, we study a novel form of continuous nearest-neighbor queries in the presence of obstacles, namely continuous obstructed nearest-neighbor (CONN) search, which considers the impact of obstacles on the distance between objects. Given a data setP, an obstacle set O, and a query line segment q, in a two-dimensional space, a CONN query retrieves the nearest neighbor p ∈ P of each point p′ on q according to the obstructed distance, the shortest path between …

Sandcanvas: New Possibilities In Sand Animation, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Kien-Chuan Chua, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Christopher Davis, Kok-Lim Low

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. This video demonstrates the creative possibilities of SandCanvas, a new multi-touch digital artistic medium inspired by sand animation that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas’s color and texture features enable faster, more dramatic transitions, while its mixed media and gesture recording features make it possible to create entirely new experiences. Session recording and frame capture complement these capabilities by simplifying postproduction of sand animation performances.

How Do Programmers Ask And Answer Questions On The Web? (Nier Track), Christoph Treude, Ohad Barzilay, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers and fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to the body of knowledge in software development. Understanding the role of Q&A websites in the documentation landscape will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies can leverage this knowledge effectively. In this paper, we analyze data from Stack Overflow to categorize the kinds of questions that are asked, and to explore which questions are answered well and which ones remain unanswered. Our preliminary findings indicate that Q&A websites are …

Second International Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering (Web2se 2011), Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Arie Van Deursen, Andrew Begel, Sue Black

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. Some of these technologies have made their way into collaborative software development processes and development platforms. These processes and environments are just scratching …

Measuring Api Documentation On The Web, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% …

Prototyping Video Games With Animation, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper outlines a proposed design for StorySketch, a new video game storyboarding system. StorySketch borrows ideas from the K-Sketch animation sketching system, which allows short animations to be created in minutes or seconds. We build on K-Sketch in four ways. key frame animation capabilities, a branching timeline view, microphone and web-cam support, and hooks to connect to online game design documents.

Message-Passing Algorithms For Large Structured Decentralized Pomdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide a rigorous framework for multi-agent decision-theoretic planning. However, their high complexity has limited scalability. In this work, we present a promising new class of algorithms based on probabilistic inference for infinite-horizon ND-POMDPs---a restricted Dec-POMDP model. We first transform the policy optimization problem to that of likelihood maximization in a mixture of dynamic Bayes nets (DBNs). We then develop the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for maximizing the likelihood in this representation. The EM algorithm for ND-POMDPs lends itself naturally to a simple message-passing paradigm guided by the agent interaction graph. It is thus highly scalable w.r.t. the number of …

Interactivity-Constrained Server Provisioning In Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Thang Nguyen, Suiping Zhou, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Rassul Ayani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintaining interactivity is one of the key challenges in distributed virtual environments (DVE), e.g., online games, distributed simulations, etc., due to the large, heterogeneous Internet latencies; and the fact that clients in a DVE are usually geographically separated. In this paper, we consider a new problem, termed the interactivity-constrained server provisioning problem, whose goal is to minimize the number of distributed servers needed to achieve a pre-determined level of interactivity. We identify and formulate two variants of this new problem and show that they are both NP-hard via reductions to the set covering problem. We then propose several computationally efficient …