Computer Sciences Commons^™

Off Topic Memento Toolkit, Shawn M. Jones, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archive collections are created with a particular purpose in mind. A curator selects seeds, or original resources, which are then captured by an archiving system and stored as archived web pages, or mementos. The systems that build web archive collections are often configured to revisit the same original resource multiple times. This is incredibly useful for understanding an unfolding news story or the evolution of an organization. Unfortunately, over time, some of these original resources can go off-topic and no longer suit the purpose for which the collection was originally created. They can go off-topic due to web site …

Detecting Fake News In Social Media Networks, Monther Aldwairi, Ali Alwahedi

All Works

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Fake news and hoaxes have been there since before the advent of the Internet. The widely accepted definition of Internet fake news is: fictitious articles deliberately fabricated to deceive readers'. Social media and news outlets publish fake news to increase readership or as part of psychological warfare. Ingeneral, the goal is profiting through clickbaits. Clickbaits lure users and entice curiosity with flashy headlines or designs to click links to increase advertisements revenues. This exposition analyzes the prevalence of fake news in light of the advances in communication made possible by the emergence …

An Investigation Into Trust And Security In The Mandatory And Imposed Use Of Financial Icts Upon Older People, David Michael Cook

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Care needs to be taken to reduce the number of people who are fearful and mistrustful of using ICT where that usage is forced upon them without choice or alternative. The growing incidence of mandatory and imposed online systems can result in confusion, misuse, fear, and rejection by people with only rudimentary ICT skills. A cohort where a high percentage of such people occur is older people, defined in this study as people over the age of 60 Examples of compulsory ICT interactions include some banks limiting bank statement access through online rather than paper-based options. Other examples include the …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Canines For Disabled Kids, Erin Jerrett, Margarita Mnatsakanyan, Colleen Reynolds, Yin Wang

School of Professional Studies

Canines for Disabled Kids have been working on behalf of children and their families to educate communities and promote service dog partnerships for almost twenty years. Their advocacy with local legislatures, business owners, and community leaders highlighted the difficulties encountered when differentiating service dogs from emotional support/comfort dogs. Service dogs are entitled to access by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), while emotional support/comfort dogs are not protected under the federal statute or to the same rights. Canines for Disabled Kids proposed a study to obtain a current count of licensed service dogs in the Commonwealth and investigate the feasibility …

How To Best Apply Neural Networks In Geosciences: Towards Optimal "Averaging" In Dropout Training, Afshin Gholamy, Justin Parra, Vladik Kreinovich, Olac Fuentes, Elizabeth Y. Anthony

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The main objectives of geosciences is to find the current state of the Earth -- i.e., solve the corresponding inverse problems -- and to use this knowledge for predicting the future events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In both inverse and prediction problems, often, machine learning techniques are very efficient, and at present, the most efficient machine learning technique is deep neural training. To speed up this training, the current learning algorithms use dropout techniques: they train several sub-networks on different portions of data, and then "average" the results. A natural idea is to use arithmetic mean for this …

Enterprise Social Media Use And Impact On Performance: The Role Of Workplace Integration And Positive Emotions, Murad Moqbel, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Information Systems Faculty Publications

Organizations struggle to find ways to improve employees’ performance. To date, little research has empirically examined the relationship between enterprise social media use and knowledge workers’ performance. Using social capital theory and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as our theoretical framework, we investigate the relationship between enterprise social media use and knowledge workers’ performance. We tested our research model by collecting data from employees working for a large information technology firm in the Midwestern United States and analyzing the data using a structural equation modeling approach. The results suggest that enterprise social media use can increase workplace integration, which …

Digital Forensic Readiness In Organizations: Issues And Challenges, Nickson Menza Karie, Simon Maina Karume Dr.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the evolution in digital technologies, organizations have been forced to change the way they plan, develop, and enact their information technology strategies. This is because modern digital technologies do not only present new opportunities to business organizations but also a different set of issues and challenges that need to be resolved. With the rising threats of cybercrimes, for example, which have been accelerated by the emergence of new digital technologies, many organizations as well as law enforcement agencies globally are now erecting proactive measures as a way to increase their ability to respond to security incidents as well as …

Policy Analytics For Environmental Sustainability: Household Hazardous Waste And Water Impacts Of Carbon Pollution Standards, Kustini

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Policy analytics are essential in supporting more informed policy-making in environmental management. This dissertation employs a fusion of machine methods and explanatory empiricism that involves data analytics, math programming, optimization, econometrics, geospatial and spatiotemporal analysis, and other approaches for assessing and evaluating current and future environmental policies.
Essay 1 discusses household informedness and its impact on the collection and recycling of household hazardous waste (HHW). Household informedness is the degree to which households have the necessary information to make utility-maximizing decisions about the handling of their waste. Such informedness seems to be influenced by HHW public education and environmental quality …

Using Data Analytics For Discovering Library Resource Insights: Case From Singapore Management University, Ning Lu, Rui Song, Dina Li Gwek Heng, Swapna Gottipati, Aaron Tay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Library resources are critical in supporting teaching, research and learning processes. Several universities have employed online platforms and infrastructure for enabling the online services to students, faculty and staff. To provide efficient services by understanding and predicting user needs libraries are looking into the area of data analytics. Library analytics in Singapore Management University is the project committed to provide an interface for data-intensive project collaboration, while supporting one of the library’s key pillars on its commitment to collaborate on initiatives with SMU Communities and external groups. In this paper, we study the transaction logs for user behavior analysis that …

Efficient Gate System Operations For A Multipurpose Port Using Simulation Optimization, Ketki Kulkarni, Trong Khiem Tran, Hai Wang, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Port capacity is determined by three major infrastructural resources namely, berths, yards and gates. Theadvertised capacity is constrained by the least of the capacities of the three resources. While a lot ofattention has been paid to optimizing berth and yard capacities, not much attention has been given toanalyzing the gate capacity. The gates are a key node between the land-side and sea-side operations in anocean-to-cities value chain. The gate system under consideration, located at an important port in an Asiancity, is a multi-class parallel queuing system with non-homogeneous Poisson arrivals. It is hard to obtaina closed form analytic approach for …

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis : From Formal To Informal And Scarce Resource Languages, Siaw Ling Lo, Erik Cambria, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to analyse online user-generated content related to sentiments (e.g., thoughts and opinions) on products or policies has become a de-facto skillset for many companies and organisations. Besides the challenge of understanding formal textual content, it is also necessary to take into consideration the informal and mixed linguistic nature of online social media languages, which are often coupled with localised slang as a way to express ‘true’ feelings. Due to the multilingual nature of social media data, analysis based on a single official language may carry the risk of not capturing the overall sentiment of online content. While efforts …

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ …

Using Data To Improve Services For Infants With Hearing Loss: Linking Newborn Hearing Screening Records With Early Intervention Records, Maria Gonzalez, Lori Iarossi, Yan Wu, Ying Huang, Kirsten Siegenthaler

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

The purpose of this study was to match records of infants with permanent hearing loss from the New York Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Information System (NYEHDI-IS) to records of infants with permanent hearing loss receiving early intervention services from the New York State Early Intervention Program (NYSEIP) to identify areas in the state where hearing screening, diagnostic evaluations and referrals to the NYSEIP were not being made or documented in a timely manner. Data from 2014-2016 NYEHDI-IS and NYEIS information systems were matched using The Link King. There were 274 infants documented in NYEIS Information System as receiving early …

A Spatial Collaboration: Building A Multi-Institution Geospatial Data Discovery Portal, Mara Blake, Karen Majewicz, Ryan Mattke, Kathleen W. Weessies

Collaborative Librarianship

As academic education and research increasingly take advantage of geospatial data and methodologies, we see a corresponding exponential growth in the number of available geospatial resources in the form of GIS datasets and scanned historical maps. However, users can experience difficulty finding these resources due to the unconnected multitude of platforms and clearinghouses that host them. Additionally, the resources are not always well described with web semantic metadata that facilitates discovery. In response to this challenge, The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Data Project began in 2015 to provide discoverability, facilitate access, and connect scholars to geospatial resources. Our project …

A Brief Overview Of Intelligent Mobility Management For Future Wireless Mobile Networks, Ilsun You, Yuh-Shyan Chen, Sherali Zeadally, Fei Song

Information Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Integrated Framework For Modeling And Predicting Spatiotemporal Phenomena In Urban Environments, Tuc Viet Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis proposes a general solution framework that integrates methods in machine learning in creative ways to solve a diverse set of problems arising in urban environments. It particularly focuses on modeling spatiotemporal data for the purpose of predicting urban phenomena. Concretely, the framework is applied to solve three specific real-world problems: human mobility prediction, trac speed prediction and incident prediction. For human mobility prediction, I use visitor trajectories collected a large theme park in Singapore as a simplified microcosm of an urban area. A trajectory is an ordered sequence of attraction visits and corresponding timestamps produced by a visitor. …

Modeling Check-In Behavior With Geographical Neighborhood Influence Of Venues, Thanh Nam Doan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With many users adopting location-based social networks (LBSNs) to share their daily activities, LBSNs become a gold mine for researchers to study human check-in behavior. Modeling such behavior can benefit many useful applications such as urban planning and location-aware recommender systems. Unlike previous studies [4,6,12,17] that focus on the effect of distance on users checking in venues, we consider two venue-specific effects of geographical neighborhood influence, namely, spatial homophily and neighborhood competition. The former refers to the fact that venues share more common features with their spatial neighbors, while the latter captures the rivalry of a venue and its nearby …

Text Analysis In R, Kasper Welbers, Wouter Van Atteveldt, Kenneth Benoit

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operations in a computational text analysis project, and demonstrate how each step can be performed using the R statistical software. As a popular open-source platform, R has an extensive user community that develops and …

Tweet Geolocation: Leveraging Location, User And Peer Signals, Wen-Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We referred this as fine-grained geolocation. To solve this problem effectively, we develop novel techniques to exploit each posting user's content history. This is motivated by our finding that most users do not share their visitation history, but have ample content history from tweet posts. We formulate fine-grained geolocation as a ranking problem whereby given a test tweet, we rank candidate venues. We propose several models that leverage on three types of signals from locations, users and peers. Firstly, the location signals are words that are indicative of venues. We propose a location-indicative …

Interactive Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chenghao Liu, Martin Ester

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation has been an active research topic over the last decade, based on the assumption that social information from friendship networks is beneficial for improving recommendation accuracy, especially when dealing with cold-start users who lack sufficient past behavior information for accurate recommendation. However, it is nontrivial to use such information, since some of a person's friends may share similar preferences in certain aspects, but others may be totally irrelevant for recommendations. Thus one challenge is to explore and exploit the extend to which a user trusts his/her friends when utilizing social information to improve recommendations. On the other hand, …

Introducing People With Asd To Crowd Work, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are unemployed at a high rate, in part because the constraints and expectations of traditional employment can be difficult for them. In this paper, we report on our work in introducing people with ASD to remote work on a crowdsourcing platform and a prototype tool we developed by working with participants. We conducted a six-week long user-centered design study with three participants with ASD. The early stage of the study focused on assessing the abilities of our participants to search and work on micro-tasks available on the crowdsourcing market. Based on our preliminary findings, …

Cr/Hacking The (Gendered) System: Breaking Down Barriers To Women’S Empowerment In Stem: A Manifesto, Teresa Pierce

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

This manifesto re-envisions Alice Rossi’s (1964) “immodest proposal” to reignite the spark of suffrage and connect it to a revolution that breaks down the barriers to women’s empowerment in STEM-related careers. This is a decisive moment in time and transformation is within reach because there are two generations of women and minorities working in STEM-related fields, and the technology culture is changing the image of the hacker from the lone male to collaborating women. My goal is to motivate these cr/hackers to push beyond pipeline initiatives, and acknowledge that we are also a powerful institution. We will revolutionize STEM culture …

Wrangle Your Data Like A Pro With The Data Processing Power Of Python, Geoffrey P. Timms, Jeremy M. Brown

Charleston Library Conference

Management, delivery, and marketing of library resources and collections necessitate interaction with a plethora of data from many sources and in many forms. Accessing and transforming data into meaningful information or different formats used in library automation can be time consuming, but a working knowledge of a programming language can improve efficiency in many facets of librarianship. From processing lists to creating extensible markup language (XML), from editing machine-readable cataloging (MARC) records before upload to automating statistical reports, the Python programming language and third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used to accomplish both behind-the-scenes tasks and end-user facing projects. …

Single Versus Concurrent Systems: Nominal Classification In Mian, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Raphael Finkel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Papuan language Mian allows us to refine the typology of nominal classification. Mian has two candidate classification systems, differing completely in their formal realization but overlapping considerably in their semantics. To determine whether to analyse Mian as a single system or concurrent systems we adopt a canonical approach. Our criteria – orthogonality of the systems (we give a precise measure), semantic compositionality, morphosyntactic alignment, distribution across parts of speech, exponence, and interaction with other features – point mainly to an analysis as concurrent systems. We thus improve our analysis of Mian and make progress with the typology of nominal …

Critical Digital Literacies Across Scales And Beneath The Screen, Noah Asher Golden

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Digital technologies and education scholarship tend to focus on either individual creative design or analysis of the political economy. To better understand how ideologies travel across networks, critical digital literacies must focus on enactments beneath the screen, as the linguistic constructs known as software can enact interests across scales of activity to “disembed” local actions and meaning. Investigations of these mobilities and disembedding effects challenge popular notions of digital technologies as neutral, rendering overt the ways that algorithms can naturalize manifestations of power and social arrangements. Such a framework allows for descriptive analyses of the ways hegemonic discourses are enacted …

Cloud‐Based Text Analytics Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

No abstract provided.

Cloud-Based Text Analytics: Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

Does management language cohesion in earnings conference calls matter to the capital market? As a part of the research on the above question, and taking advantage of the modern IT technologies, this project:

• harvested 115,882 earnings conference call transcripts from SeekingAlpha.com
• parsed and structured 89,988 transcripts using regular expressions in Stata
• analyzed 179,976 text files using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which
• saved almost 2 years (675 days) of the project time

Using Tablet Technologies To Engage And Motivate Urban High School Students, Nicol R. Howard, Keith Howard

Education Faculty Articles and Research

In this two-year study, researchers examined the impact of using tablet technologies across content areas in an urban high school setting. Class observations provided notable examples of how student motivation and learning appeared to be enhanced by use of the iPads in conjunction with opportunities to collaborate and be creative in the context of their learning. Interviews from a set of teachers with a range of classroom teaching experience provided multiple perspectives of the program’s impact. The opportunity for teachers and students to have the flexibility to select the apps they believe achieve curricular and/or learning goals supports the shift …

A Framework For Recommendation Of Highly Popular News Lacking Social Feedback, Nuno Moniz, Luís Torgo, Magdalini Eirinaki, Paula Branco

Faculty Publications

Social media is rapidly becoming the main source of news consumption for users, raising significant challenges to news aggregation and recommendation tasks. One of these challenges concerns the recommendation of very recent news. To tackle this problem, approaches to the prediction of news popularity have been proposed. In this paper, we study the task of predicting news popularity upon their publication, when social feedback is unavailable or scarce, and to use such predictions to produce news rankings. Unlike previous work, we focus on accurately predicting highly popular news. Such cases are rare, causing known issues for standard prediction models and …