Computer Sciences Commons^™

Development Of A Simulation Tool For Analysis Of Freeway Crashes Due To Cell Phone Usage, Sourabh Sriom

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research shows that drivers are susceptible to numerous distractions while driving which can be held responsible as the reason of a crash. Usage of cell phones, i.e. talking or texting while driving is considered one of the prominent distractions which causes a crash. This dissertation aims to study the number of crashes occurring on the freeways and their relation with the drivers of these cars using cell phones while they are driving. Since crashes occur relatively less frequently, the study of crashes is done using what is called the "rare event" theory. Java based simulations are done to model a …

A Representation Of Selected Nonmanual Signals In American Sign Language, Jerry C. Schnepp

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but believable by members of the Deaf community. Animation poses several challenges stemming from the massive amounts of data necessary to specify the movement of three-dimensional geometry, and there is no current system that facilitates the synthesis of nonmanual signals. However, the linguistics of ASL can aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing the data.

This work presents a first method for representing ASL linguistic and extralinguistic processes that involve the face. Any such representation must …

Library Impact Statement For Csc 523 Advanced Intrusion Detection And Defense, Amanda Izenstark

Library Impact Statements

Library Impact Statement for CSC 523 Advanced Intrusion Detection and Defense. No new library resources are required to support this course.

Coping With Distance: An Empirical Study Of Communication On The Jazz Platform, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform -- a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 …

Exploring Tweets Normalization And Query Time Sensitivity For Twitter Search, Zhongyu Wei, Wei Gao, Lanjun Zhou, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents our work for the Realtime Adhoc Task of TREC 2011 Microblog Track. Microblog texts like tweets are generally characterized by the inclusion of a large proportion of irregular expressions, such as ill-formed words, which can lead to significant mismatch between query terms and tweets. In addition, Twitter queries are distinguished from Web queries with many unique characteristics, one of which reflects the clearly distinct temporal aspects of Twitter search behavior. In this study, we deal with the first problem by normalizing tweet texts and the second by capturing the temporal characteristics of topic. We divided topics into …

A Pomdp Model For Guiding Taxi Cruising In A Congested Urban City, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model for improving a taxi agent cruising decision in a congested urban city. Using real-world data provided by a large taxi company in Singapore as a guide, we derive the state transition function of the POMDP. Specifically, we model the cruising behavior of the drivers as continuous-time Markov chains. We then apply dynamic programming algorithm for finding the optimal policy of the driver agent. Using a simulation, we show that this policy is significantly better than a greedy policy in congested road network.

The Knowledge-Driven Exploration Of Integrated Biomedical Knowledge Sources Facilitates The Generation Of New Hypotheses, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Todd Minning, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Knowledge gained from the scientific literature can complement newly obtained experimental data in helping researchers understand the pathological processes underlying diseases. However, unless the scientific literature and experimental data are semantically integrated, it is generally difficult for scientists to exploit the two sources effectively. We argue that, in addition to the semantic integration of heterogeneous knowledge sources, the usability of the integrated resource by scientists is dependent upon the availability of knowledge visualization and exploration tools. Moreover, the integration techniques must be scalable and the exploration interfaces must be easy to use by bench scientists. The end goal of such …

Demonstration: Secure - Semantics Empowered Rescue Environment, Pratikkumar Desai, Cory Andrew Henson, Pramod Anantharam, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper demonstrates a Semantic Web enabled system for collecting and processing sensor data within a rescue environment. The real-time system collects heterogeneous raw sensor data from rescue robots through a wireless sensor network. The raw sensor data is converted to RDF using the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology and further processed to generate abstractions used for event detection in emergency scenarios.

Demonstration: Real-Time Semantic Analysis Of Sensor Streams, Harshal Patni, Cory Andrew Henson, Michael Cooney, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergence of dynamic information sources – including sensor networks – has led to large streams of real-time data on the Web. Research studies suggest, these dynamic networks have created more data in the last three years than in the entire history of civilization, and this trend will only increase in the coming years [1]. With this coming data explosion, real-time analytics software must either adapt or die [2]. This paper focuses on the task of integrating and analyzing multiple heterogeneous streams of sensor data with the goal of creating meaningful abstractions, or features. These features are then temporally aggregated …

Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker

Business Faculty Articles and Research

The recent availability of massive amounts of networked data generated by email, instant messaging, mobile phone communications, micro blogs, and online social networks is enabling studies of population-level human interaction on scales orders of magnitude greater than what was previously possible.1'2 One important goal of applying statistical inference techniques to large networked datasets is to understand how behavioral contagions spread in human social networks. More precisely, understanding how people influence or are influenced by their peers can help us understand the ebb and flow of market trends, product adoption and diffusion, the spread of health behaviors such as smoking and …

Designing Low-Cost Mobile Websites For Libraries, Tiffini Travis, Chee Hsien Aaron (Zheng Zhixian) Tay

Research Collection Library

As smartphone ownership rises, usage patterns are expanding. Libraries face an increasing demand for online content delivered in a mobile compatible format while being constrained by financial and staffing limitations. Solutions are readily available through free and low-cost products to create mobile web pages and existing design models from which to draw inspiration. Platform-specific apps can easily support the kinds of content most commonly delivered on library mobile pages: basic contact information and outbound links to the catalog, databases, and other resources. Two software platforms for creating simple pages were tested, the free software from WordPress with mobile detection formatting …

Sempush: Privacy-Aware And Scalable Broadcasting For Semantic Microblogging, Pavan Kapanipathi, Julia Anaya, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users of traditional microblogging platforms such as Twitter face drawbacks in terms of (1) Privacy of status updates as a followee - reaching undesired people (2) Information overload as a follower - receiving uninteresting microposts from followees. In this paper we demonstrate distributed and user-controlled dissemination of microposts using SMOB (semantic microblogging framework) and Semantic Hub (privacy-aware implementation of PuSH3 protocol) . The approach leverages users' Social Graph to dynamically create group of followers who are eligible to receive micropost. The restrictions to create the groups are provided by the followee based on the hastags in the micropost. Both SMOB …

Semantic Annotation And Search For Resources In The Next Generation Web With Sa-Rest, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Maryam Panahiazar, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Kno.e.sis Publications

SA-REST, the W3C member submission, can be used for supporting a wide variety of Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) annotation capabilities on any type of Web resource. Kino framework and tools provide support of capabilities to realize SA-RESTs promised value. These tools include (a) a browser-plugin to support annotation of a Web resource (including services) with respect to an ontology, domain model or vocabulary, (b) an annotation aware indexing engine and (c) faceted search and selection of the Web resources. At one end of the spectrum, we present Kino^E (aka Kino for Enterprise) which uses NCBO formal ontologies and …

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Olga Fursova

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Drew Mihalik

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Tung Lee

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Kaitlynn Cornell

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Cathryn Salamone

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

Personal Reflections From Eportfolio: Ahrc New York City, Elisa Malojer

Community Action Forum: Seidenberg School

No abstract provided.

A Domain Specific Language For Enterprise Grade Cloud-Mobile Hybrid Applications, Ajith H. Ranabahu, E. Michael Maximilien, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing has changed the technology landscape by offering flexible and economical computing resources to the masses. However, vendor lock-in makes the migration of applications and data across clouds an expensive proposition. The lock-in is especially serious when considering the new technology trend of combining cloud with mobile devices.

In this paper, we present a domain specific language (DSL) that is purposely created for generating hybrid applications spanning across mobile devices as well as computing clouds. We propose a model-driven development process that makes use of a DSL to provide sufficient programming abstractions over both cloud and mobile features. We …

Personalized Filtering Of The Twitter Stream, Pavan Kapanipathi, Fabrizio Orlandi, Amit P. Sheth, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid growth in users on social networks, there is a corresponding increase in user-generated content, in turn resulting in information overload. On Twitter, for example, users tend to receive uninterested information due to their non-overlapping interests from the people whom they follow. In this paper we present a Semantic Web approach to filter public tweets matching interests from personalized user profiles. Our approach includes automatic generation of multi-domain and personalized user profiles, filtering Twitter stream based on the generated profiles and delivering them in real-time. Given that users interests and personalization needs change with time, we also discuss …

Chatbots In The Library: Is It Time?, Deeann Allison

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This paper describes a pilot at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources. The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program-O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content was created by “mining” library websites for information, and analyzing chat logs.

The chatbot answers questions from a variety of users from around the world. It …

Mining Direct Antagonistic Communities In Explicit Trust Networks, David Lo, Didi Surian, Zhang Kuan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been a recent increase of interest in analyzing trust and friendship networks to gain insights about relationship dynamics among users. Many sites such as Epinions, Facebook, and other social networking sites allow users to declare trusts or friendships between different members of the community. In this work, we are interested in extracting direct antagonistic communities (DACs) within a rich trust network involving trusts and distrusts. Each DAC is formed by two subcommunities with trust relationships among members of each sub-community but distrust relationships across the sub-communities. We develop an efficient algorithm that could analyze large trust networks leveraging …

A Survey Of Information Diffusion Models And Relevant Problems, Minh Duc Luu, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been tremendous interest in diffusion of innovations or information in a social system. Nowadays, social networks (offline as well as online) are considered as important medium for diffusion and large amount of research has been conducted to understand the dynamics of diffusion in social networks. In this work, we review some of the models proposed for diffusion in social networks. We also highlight the major features of these models by dividing the surveyed models into two categories: non-network and network diffusion models. The former refers to user communities without any knowledge about the user relationship network and the …

Virality Modeling And Analysis, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virality is a virus-like behavior that allows a piece of information to widely and quickly diffuse within the network of adopters through word of mouth. It is about how easy users propagate information to their friends and friends of friends by means of diffusion. While virality of information has several interesting applications, there are much research to be conducted on virality. These areas of research include understanding the mechanism of virality, modeling the virality both qualitatively and quantitatively, and applying virality to applications such as marketing, event detection, and others. In this paper, we survey existing works on quantitative models …

Context-Aware Nearest Neighbor Query On Social Networks, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social networking has grown rapidly over the last few years, and social networks contain a huge amount of content. However, it can be not easy to navigate the social networks to find specific information. In this paper, we define a new type of queries, namely context-aware nearest neighbor (CANN) search over social network to retrieve the nearest node to the query node that matches the context specified. CANN considers both the structure of the social network, and the profile information of the nodes. We design ahyper-graph based index structure to support approximated CANN search efficiently.

On Modeling Virality Of Twitter Content, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular microblogging site where users can easily use mobile phones or desktop machines to generate short messages to be shared with others in realtime. Twitter has seen heavy usage in many recent international events including Japan earthquake, Iran election, etc. In such events, many tweets may become viral for different reasons. In this paper, we study the virality of socio-political tweet content in the Singapore’s 2011 general election (GE2011). We collected tweet data generated by about 20K Singapore users from 1 April 2011 till 12 May 2011, and the follow relationships among them. We introduce several quantitative …

A Google Earth-Based Framework For Visualization Of The Chesapeake Bay Operational Forecast System, Gary Lawson

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

For the persons who live near and travel the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the data provided by the Chesapeake Bay Operational Forecast System (CBOFS) is invaluable. The information provided includes measurements and forecasts of surface wind velocity, water current velocity, salinity levels, water level, and temperature. Currently, this information is freely available on the CBQ_FS website hosted by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is offered as Nowcast, measured data, and Forecast data and is visualized using 2D images which describe a subset of the data in an easy to read chart. However, if the data were …

Library Impact Statement For Csc 523 Advanced Intrusion Detection And Defense, Amanda Izenstark

Library Impact Statements

Library Impact Statement in response to new course proposal for CSC 523 Advanced Intrusion Detection and Defense. New course was supported with no need for additional resources.

Library Impact Statement For Csc 424 Live Forensics And Incident Response, Amanda Izenstark

Library Impact Statements

Library Impact Statement in response to new course proposal for CSC 424 Live Forensics and Incident Response. New course was supported with no need for additional resources.