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Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma Jun 2015

Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Innovations involving information technology (IT) provide potentially valuable investment opportunities for industry and government organizations. Significant uncertainties are associated with decision-making for IT investment though, a problem that senior executives have been concerned about for a long time. The uncertainties include consumer, market and regulatory responses, IT-driven changes in operational and transactional performance, technology standards and competition, and future market conditions. All these things have an impact on organizations’ willingness to adopt. As a result, traditional capital budgeting, investment experience, and intuition have not been very effective in IT investment decision-making. We propose a new option-based stochastic valuation modeling approach …


Will High-Frequency Trading Practices Transform The Financial Markets In The Asia Pacific Region?, Robert John Kauffman, Yuzhou Hu, Dan Ma Jun 2015

Will High-Frequency Trading Practices Transform The Financial Markets In The Asia Pacific Region?, Robert John Kauffman, Yuzhou Hu, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

High-frequency trading (HFT) practices in the global financial markets involve the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), especially the capabilities of high-speed networks, rapid computation, and algorithmic detection of changing information and prices that create opportunities for computers to effect low-latency trades that can be accomplished in milliseconds. HFT practices exist because a variety of new technologies have made them possible, and because financial market infrastructure capabilities have also been changing so rapidly. The U.S. markets, such as the National Association for Securities Dealers Automated Quote (NASDAQ) market and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), have maintained relevance and …


History-Based Controller Design And Optimization For Partially Observable Mdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein Jun 2015

History-Based Controller Design And Optimization For Partially Observable Mdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Partially observable MDPs provide an elegant framework forsequential decision making. Finite-state controllers (FSCs) are often used to represent policies for infinite-horizon problems as they offer a compact representation, simple-to-execute plans, and adjustable tradeoff between computational complexityand policy size. We develop novel connections between optimizing FSCs for POMDPs and the dual linear programfor MDPs. Building on that, we present a dual mixed integer linear program (MIP) for optimizing FSCs. To assign well-defined meaning to FSC nodes as well as aid in policy search, we show how to associate history-based features with each FSC node. Using this representation, we address another challenging …


Probabilistic Inference Techniques For Scalable Multiagent Decision Making, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein, Marc Toussaint Jun 2015

Probabilistic Inference Techniques For Scalable Multiagent Decision Making, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein, Marc Toussaint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for multiagent sequential decision making. However, the complexity of these models---NEXP-Complete even for two agents---has limited their scalability. We present a promising new class of approximation algorithms by developing novel connections between multiagent planning and machine learning. We show how the multiagent planning problem can be reformulated as inference in a mixture of dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs). This planning-as-inference approach paves the way for the application of efficient inference techniques in DBNs to multiagent decision making. To further improve scalability, we identify certain conditions that are sufficient to extend the approach to multiagent systems …


Aarpa: Combining Mobile And Power-Line Sensing For Fine-Grained Appliance Usage And Energy Monitoring, Nirmalya Roy, Nilavra Pathak, Archan Misra Jun 2015

Aarpa: Combining Mobile And Power-Line Sensing For Fine-Grained Appliance Usage And Energy Monitoring, Nirmalya Roy, Nilavra Pathak, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To promote energy-efficient operations in residential and office buildings, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques have been proposed to infer the fine-grained power consumption and usage patterns of appliances from power-line measurement data. Fine-grained monitoring of everyday appliances (such as toasters and coffee makers) can not only promote energy-efficient building operations, but also provide unique insights into the context and activities of individuals. Current building-level NILM techniques are unable to identify the consumption characteristics of relatively low-load appliances, whereas smart-plug based solutions incur significant deployment and maintenance costs. In this paper, we investigate an intermediate architecture, where smart circuit breakers provide …


Keeping Pace With Criminals: Designing Patrol Allocation Against Adaptive Opportunistic Criminals, Chao Zhang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe May 2015

Keeping Pace With Criminals: Designing Patrol Allocation Against Adaptive Opportunistic Criminals, Chao Zhang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Police patrols are used ubiquitously to deter crimes in urban areas. A distinctive feature of urban crimes is that criminals react opportunistically to patrol officers' assignments. Compared to strategic attackers (such as terrorists) with a well-laid out plan, opportunistic criminals are less strategic in planning attacks and more flexible in executing them. In this paper, our goal is to recommend optimal police patrolling strategy against such opportunistic criminals. We first build a game-theoretic model that captures the interaction between officers and opportunistic criminals. However, while different models of adversary behavior have been proposed, their exact form remains uncertain. Rather than …


Heuristic Collective Learning For Efficient And Robust Emergence Of Social Norms, Jianye Hao, Jun Sun, Dongping Huang, Yi Cai, Chao Yu May 2015

Heuristic Collective Learning For Efficient And Robust Emergence Of Social Norms, Jianye Hao, Jun Sun, Dongping Huang, Yi Cai, Chao Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In multiagent systems, social norms is a useful technique in regulating agents’ behaviors to achieve coordination or cooperation among agents. One important research question is to investigate how a desirable social norm can be evolved in a bottom-up manner through local interactions. In this paper, we propose two novel learning strategies under the collective learning framework: collective learning EV-l and collective learning EV-g, to efficiently facilitate the emergence of social norms. Experimental results show that both learning strategies can support the emergence of desirable social norms more efficiently in a much broader range of multiagent interaction scenarios than previous work, …


Non-Invasive Detection Of Moving And Stationary Human With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xuefeng Liu, Yunhao Liu, Jiannong Cao May 2015

Non-Invasive Detection Of Moving And Stationary Human With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xuefeng Liu, Yunhao Liu, Jiannong Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted a great deal of research interest and fostered a broad range of innovative applications of localization, gesture recognition, smart health-care, etc., for which a primary primitive is to detect human presence. Previous works have studied the detection of moving humans via signal variations caused by human movements. For stationary people, however, existing approaches often employ a prerequisite scenario-tailored calibration of channel profile in human-free environments. Based on in-depth understanding of human motion induced signal attenuation reflected by PHY layer channel state information (CSI), we propose DeMan, a unified scheme for non-invasive …


Relative Localization Of Rfid Tags Using Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu May 2015

Relative Localization Of Rfid Tags Using Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling (STPP) to RFID based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously …


Self-Organizing Neural Networks Integrating Domain Knowledge And Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Jacek M. Zurada May 2015

Self-Organizing Neural Networks Integrating Domain Knowledge And Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Jacek M. Zurada

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of domain knowledge in learning systems is expected to improve learning efficiency and reduce model complexity. However, due to the incompatibility with knowledge structure of the learning systems and real-time exploratory nature of reinforcement learning (RL), domain knowledge cannot be inserted directly. In this paper, we show how self-organizing neural networks designed for online and incremental adaptation can integrate domain knowledge and RL. Specifically, symbol-based domain knowledge is translated into numeric patterns before inserting into the self-organizing neural networks. To ensure effective use of domain knowledge, we present an analysis of how the inserted knowledge is used by …


Ambient Rendezvous: Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Via Acoustic Sensing, Keyu Wang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni May 2015

Ambient Rendezvous: Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Via Acoustic Sensing, Keyu Wang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continual proliferation of mobile devices has stimulated the development of opportunistic encounter-based networking and has spurred a myriad of proximity-based mobile applications. A primary cornerstone of such applications is to discover neighboring devices effectively and efficiently. Despite extensive protocol optimization, current neighbor discovery modalities mainly rely on radio interfaces, whose energy and wake up delay required to initiate, configure and operate these protocols hamper practical applicability. Unlike conventional schemes that actively emit radio tones, we exploit ubiquitous audio events to discover neighbors passively. The rationale is that spatially adjacent neighbors tend to share similar ambient acoustic environments. We propose …


A Nested Recursive Logit Model For Route Choice Analysis, Tien Mai, Mogens Fosgerau, Emma Frejinger May 2015

A Nested Recursive Logit Model For Route Choice Analysis, Tien Mai, Mogens Fosgerau, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a route choice model that relaxes the independence from irrelevant alternatives property of the logit model by allowing scale parameters to be link specific. Similar to the recursive logit (RL) model proposed by Fosgerau et al. (2013), the choice of path is modeled as a sequence of link choices and the model does not require any sampling of choice sets. Furthermore, the model can be consistently estimated and efficiently used for prediction.A key challenge lies in the computation of the value functions, i.e. the expected maximum utility from any position in the network to a destination. The value …


Discovering The Rise And Fall Of Software Engineering Ideas From Scholarly Publication Data, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar May 2015

Discovering The Rise And Fall Of Software Engineering Ideas From Scholarly Publication Data, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For researchers and practitioners of a relatively young discipline like software engineering, an enduring concern is to identify the acorns that will grow into oaks -- ideas remaining most current in the long run. Additionally, it is interesting to know how the ideas have risen in importance, and fallen, perhaps to rise again. We analyzed a corpus of 19,000+ papers written by 21,000+ authors across 16 software engineering publication venues from 1975 to 2010, to empirically determine the half-life of software engineering research topics. We adapted existing measures of half-life as well as defined a specific measure based on publication …


Active Semi-Supervised Defect Categorization, Ferdian Thung, Xuan-Bach D. Le, David Lo May 2015

Active Semi-Supervised Defect Categorization, Ferdian Thung, Xuan-Bach D. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defects are inseparable part of software development and evolution. To better comprehend problems affecting a software system, developers often store historical defects and these defects can be categorized into families. IBM proposes Orthogonal Defect Categorization (ODC) which include various classifications of defects based on a number of orthogonal dimensions (e.g., symptoms and semantics of defects, root causes of defects, etc.). To help developers categorize defects, several approaches that employ machine learning have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, these approaches often require developers to manually label a large number of defect examples. In practice, manually labelling a large number of …


Advances In Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining Part Ii, Tru Cao, Ee Peng Lim, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Tu-Bao Ho, David Wai-Lok Cheung, Hiroshi Motoda May 2015

Advances In Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining Part Ii, Tru Cao, Ee Peng Lim, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Tu-Bao Ho, David Wai-Lok Cheung, Hiroshi Motoda

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Advances In Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining: 19th Pacific-Asia Conference, Pakdd 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 19-22, 2015, Proceedings, Part I, Tru Cao, Ee-Peng Lim, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Tu-Bao Ho, David Wai-Lok Cheung, Hiroshi Motoda May 2015

Advances In Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining: 19th Pacific-Asia Conference, Pakdd 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 19-22, 2015, Proceedings, Part I, Tru Cao, Ee-Peng Lim, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Tu-Bao Ho, David Wai-Lok Cheung, Hiroshi Motoda

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Solving Multi-Vehicle Profitable Tour Problem Via Knowledge Adoption In Evolutionary Bi-Level Programming, Stephanus Daniel Handoko, Abhishek Gupta, Chen Kim Heng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Yew Soon Ong, Puay Siew Tan May 2015

Solving Multi-Vehicle Profitable Tour Problem Via Knowledge Adoption In Evolutionary Bi-Level Programming, Stephanus Daniel Handoko, Abhishek Gupta, Chen Kim Heng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Yew Soon Ong, Puay Siew Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Profitable tour problem (PTP) belongs to the class of vehicle routing problem (VRP) with profits seeking to maximize the difference between the total collected profit and the total cost incurred. Traditionally, PTP involves single vehicle. In this paper, we consider PTP with multiple vehicles. Unlike the classical VRP that seeks to serve all customers, PTP involves the strategic-level customer selection so as to maximize the total collected profit and the operational-level route optimization to minimize the total cost incurred. Therefore, PTP is essentially the knapsack problem at the strategic level with VRP at the operational level. That means the evolutionary …


Measuring Centralities For Transportation Networks Beyond Structures, Yew-Yih Cheng, Lee Ka Wei, Roy, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu May 2015

Measuring Centralities For Transportation Networks Beyond Structures, Yew-Yih Cheng, Lee Ka Wei, Roy, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In an urban city, its transportation network supports efficient flow of people between different parts of the city. Failures in the network can cause major disruptions to commuter and business activities which can result in both significant economic and time losses. In this paper, we investigate the use of centrality measures to determine critical nodes in a transportation network so as to improve the design of the network as well as to devise plans for coping with the network failures. Most centrality measures in social network analysis research unfortunately consider only topological structure of the network and are oblivious of …


Flutcha: Using Fluency To Distinguish Humans From Computers, Kotaro Hara, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Benjamin B. Benderson May 2015

Flutcha: Using Fluency To Distinguish Humans From Computers, Kotaro Hara, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Benjamin B. Benderson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Improvements in image understanding technologies aremaking it possible for computers to pass traditionalCAPTCHA tests with high probability. This suggests theneed for new kinds of tasks that are easy to accomplishfor humans but remain difficult for computers. In thispaper, we introduce Fluency CAPTCHA (FluTCHA), anovel method to distinguish humans from computersusing the fact that humans are better than machines atimproving the fluency of sentences. We propose a wayto let users work on FluTCHA tests and simultaneouslycomplete useful linguistic tasks. Evaluation studiesdemonstrate the feasibility of using FluTCHA todistinguish humans from computers.


Electronic Contract Signing Without Using Trusted Third Party, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng, David Kuo Chuen Lee May 2015

Electronic Contract Signing Without Using Trusted Third Party, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng, David Kuo Chuen Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electronic contract signing allows two potentially dis-trustful parties to digitally sign an electronic document “simultaneously” across a network. Existing solutions for electronic contract signing either require the involvement of a trusted third party (TTP), or are complex and expensive in communication and computation. In this paper we propose an electronic contract signing protocol between two parties with the following advantages over existing solutions: 1) it is practical and scalable due to its simplicity and high efficiency; 2) it does not require any trusted third party as the mediator; and 3) it guarantees fairness between the two signing parties. We achieve …


Direct: A Scalable Approach For Route Guidance In Selfish Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Hala Mostafa, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2015

Direct: A Scalable Approach For Route Guidance In Selfish Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Hala Mostafa, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of crowd congestion at venues like theme parks, museums and world expos by providing route guidance to multiple selfish users (with budget constraints) moving through the venue simultaneously. To represent these settings, we introduce the Selfish Orienteering Problem (SeOP) that combines two well studied problems from literature, namely Orienteering Problem (OP) and Selfish Routing (SR). OP is a single agent routing problem where the goal is to minimize latency (or maximize reward) in traversing a subset of nodes while respecting budget constraints. SR is a game between selfish agents looking for minimum latency routes from source …


Multi-Agent Task Assignment For Mobile Crowdsourcing Under Trajectory Uncertainties, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Archan Misra May 2015

Multi-Agent Task Assignment For Mobile Crowdsourcing Under Trajectory Uncertainties, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we investigate the problem of mobile crowdsourcing, where workers are financially motivated to perform location-based tasks physically. Unlike current industry practice that relies on workers to manually browse and filter tasks to perform, we intend to automatically make task recommendations based on workers' historical trajectories and desired time budgets. However, predicting workers' trajectories is inevitably faced with uncertainties, as no one will take exactly the same route every day; yet such uncertainties are oftentimes abstracted away in the known literature. In this work, we depart from the deterministic modeling and study the stochastic task recommendation problem where …


Moving Average Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Doyen Sahoo, Zhi-Yong Liu May 2015

Moving Average Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Doyen Sahoo, Zhi-Yong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection, a fundamental problem in computational finance, has attracted increasing interest from artificial intelligence and machine learning communities in recent years. Empirical evidence shows that stock's high and low prices are temporary and stock prices are likely to follow the mean reversion phenomenon. While existing mean reversion strategies are shown to achieve good empirical performance on many real datasets, they often make the single-period mean reversion assumption, which is not always satisfied, leading to poor performance in certain real datasets. To overcome this limitation, this article proposes a multiple-period mean reversion, or so-called "Moving Average Reversion" (MAR), and …


Efficient Reverse Top-K Boolean Spatial Keyword Queries On Road Networks, Yunjun Gao, Xu Qin, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen May 2015

Efficient Reverse Top-K Boolean Spatial Keyword Queries On Road Networks, Yunjun Gao, Xu Qin, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reverse k nearest neighbor (RkNN) queries have a broad application base such as decision support, profile-based marketing, and resource allocation. Previous work on RkNN search does not take textual information into consideration or limits to the Euclidean space. In the real world, however, most spatial objects are associated with textual information and lie on road networks. In this paper, we introduce a new type of queries, namely, reverse top-k Boolean spatial keyword (RkBSK) retrieval, which assumes objects are on the road network and considers both spatial and textual information. Given a data set P on a road network and a …


Elblocker: Predicting Blocking Bugs With Ensemble Imbalance Learning, Xin Xia, David Lo, Emad Shihab, Xinyu Wang, Xiaohu Yang May 2015

Elblocker: Predicting Blocking Bugs With Ensemble Imbalance Learning, Xin Xia, David Lo, Emad Shihab, Xinyu Wang, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Blocking bugs are bugs that prevent other bugs from being fixed. Previous studies show that blocking bugs take approximately two to three times longer to be fixed compared to non-blocking bugs. Objective: Thus, automatically predicting blocking bugs early on so that developers are aware of them, can help reduce the impact of or avoid blocking bugs. However, a major challenge when predicting blocking bugs is that only a small proportion of bugs are blocking bugs, i.e., there is an unequal distribution between blocking and non-blocking bugs. For example, in Eclipse and OpenOffice, only 2.8% and 3.0% bugs are blocking …


Near-Optimal Decentralized Power Supply Restoration In Smart Grids, Pritee Agrawal, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham May 2015

Near-Optimal Decentralized Power Supply Restoration In Smart Grids, Pritee Agrawal, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Next generation of smart grids face a number of challenges including co-generation from intermittent renewable power sources, a shift away from monolithic control due to increased market deregulation, and robust operation in the face of disasters. Such heterogeneous nature and high operational readiness requirement of smart grids necessitates decentralized control for critical tasks such as power supply restoration (PSR) after line failures. We present a novel multiagent system based approach for PSR using Lagrangian dual decomposition. Our approach works on general graphs, provides provable quality-bounds and requires only local message-passing among different connected sub-regions of a smart grid, enabling decentralized …


Gameon: P2p Gaming On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Meera Radhakrishnan, Rajesh Krishna Balan May 2015

Gameon: P2p Gaming On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Meera Radhakrishnan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile games, and especially multiplayer games are a very popular daily distraction for many users. We hypothesise that commuters travelling on public buses or trains would enjoy being able to play multiplayer games with their fellow commuters to alleviate the commute burden and boredom. We present quantitative data to show that the typical one-way commute time is fairly long (at least 25 minutes on average) as well as survey results indicating that commuters are willing to play multiplayer games with other random commuters. In this paper, we present GameOn, a system that allows commuters to participate in multiplayer games with …


Map: A Computational Model For Adaptive Persuasion, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan May 2015

Map: A Computational Model For Adaptive Persuasion, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While a variety of persuasion agents have been created and applied in different domains such as marketing, military training and health industry, there is a lack of a model which provides a unified framework for different persuasion strategies. Specifically, persuasion is not adaptable to the individuals’ personal states in different situations. Grounded in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this paper presents a computational model called Model for Adaptive Persuasion (MAP) for virtual agents. MAP is a semi-connected network model which enables an agent to adapt its persuasion strategies through feedback. We have implemented and evaluated a MAP-based virtual nurse agent …


Tasknav: Task-Based Navigation Of Software Documentation, Christoph Treude, Mathieu Sicard, Marc Klocke, Martin P. Robillard May 2015

Tasknav: Task-Based Navigation Of Software Documentation, Christoph Treude, Mathieu Sicard, Marc Klocke, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To help developers navigate documentation, we introduce Task Nav, a tool that automatically discovers and indexes task descriptions in software documentation. With Task Nav, we conceptualize tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. Task Nav presents these extracted task descriptions along with concepts, code elements, and section headers in an auto-complete search interface. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that search results identified through extracted task descriptions are more helpful to developers than those found through other means, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opnGYmMGnqY.


Characterizing Silent Users In Social Media Communities, Wei Gong, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu May 2015

Characterizing Silent Users In Social Media Communities, Wei Gong, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Silent users often constitute a significant proportion of an online user-generated content system. In the context of social media such as Twitter, users can opt to be silent all or most of the time. They are often called the invisible participants or lurkers. As lurkers contribute little to the online content, existing analysis often overlooks their presence and voices. However, we argue that understanding lurkers is important in many applications such as recommender systems, targeted advertising, and social sensing. This research therefore seeks to characterize lurkers in social media and propose methods to profile them. We examine 18 weeks of …