Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Prediction Of Topic Volume On Twitter, Yiye Ruan, Hemant Purohit, David Fuhry, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We discuss an approach for predicting microscopic (individual) and macroscopic (collective) user behavioral patterns with respect to specific trending topics on Twitter. Going beyond previous efforts that have analyzed driving factors in whether and when a user will publish topic-relevant tweets, here we seek to predict the strength of content generation which allows more accurate understanding of Twitter users' behavior and more effective utilization of the online social network for diffusing information. Unlike traditional approaches, we consider multiple dimensions into one regression-based prediction framework covering network structure, user interaction, content characteristics and past activity. Experimental results on three large Twitter …

A Web-Based Study Of Self-Treatment Of Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms With Loperamide, Raminta Daniulaityte, Robert G. Carlson, Russel S. Falck, Delroy H. Cameron, Sujan Udayanaga, Lu Chen, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Aims: Many websites provide a medium for individuals to freely share their experiences and knowledge about different drugs. Such user-generated content can be used as a rich data source to study emerging drug use practices and trends. The study aims to examine web-based reports of loperamide use practices among non-medical opioid users. Loperamide, a piperidine derivative, is an opioid agonist approved for the control of diarrhea symptoms. Because of its general inability to cross the blood-brain barrier, it is considered to have no abuse potential and is available without a prescription. Methods: A website that allows free discussion of illicit …

When A Friend In Twitter Is A Friend In Life, Wei Xie, Cheng Li, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim, Xueqing Gong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a fast-growing online social network service (SNS) where users can "follow" any other user to receive his or her mini-blogs which are called "tweets". In this paper, we study the problem of identifying a user's off-line real-life social community, which we call the user'sTwitter off-line community, purely from examining Twitter network structure. Based on observations from our user-verified Twitter data and results from previous works, we propose three principles about Twitter off-line communities. Incorporating these principles, we develop a novel algorithm to iteratively discover the Twitter off-line community based on a new way of measuring user closeness. According …

Visualizing Media Bias Through Twitter, Jisun An, Meeyoung Cha, Gummadi, Krishna, Jon Crowcroft, Daniele Queria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Therefore, tracking bias in everyday news and building a platform where people can receive balanced news information is important. We propose a model that maps the news media sources along a dimensional dichotomous political spectrum using the co-subscriptions relationships inferred by Twitter links. By analyzing 7 million follow links, we show that the political dichotomy naturally arises on Twitter when we only consider direct media subscription. Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-time Twitter-based application …

Integrating Owl And Rules: A Syntax Proposal For Nominal Schemas, David Carral Martinez, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an addition to OWL 2 syntax to incorporate nominal schemas, which is a new description-logic style extension of OWL 2 which was recently proposed, and which makes is possible to express "variable nominal classes" within axioms in an OWL 2 ontology. Nominal schemas make it possible to express DL-safe rules of arbitrary arity within the extended OWL paradigm, hence covering the well-known DL-safe SWRL language. To express this feature, we extend OWL 2 syntax to include necessary and minimal modifications to both Functional and Manchester syntax grammars and mappings from these two syntaxes to Turtle/RDF. We also …

Semantic Aspects Of Earthcube, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Gary Berg-Cross, Leo Obrst, Amit P. Sheth, Timothy Finin, Isabel F. Cruz

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this document, we give a high-level overview of selected Semantic (Web) technologies, methods, and other important considerations, that are relevant for the success of EarthCube. The goal of this initial document is to provide entry points and references for discussions between the Semantic Technologies experts and the domain experts within EarthCube. The selected topics are intended to ground the EarthCube roadmap in the state of the art in semantics research and ontology engineering.

We anticipate that this document will evolve as EarthCube progresses. Indeed, all EarthCube parties are asked to provide topics of importance that should be treated in …

Trust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as collaborative systems, e-commerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, semantic sensor web, etc. As collaborating agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. There is a need to find online substitutes for traditional (direct or face-to-face) cues to derive measures of trust, and create efficient and secure system for managing trust, to support decision-making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics …

Extending Description Logic Rules, David Carral Martinez, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Description Logics – the logics underpinning the Web Ontology Language OWL – and rules are currently the most prominent paradigms used for modeling knowledge for the Semantic Web. While both of these approaches are based on classical logic, the paradigms also differ significantly, so that naive combinations result in undesirable properties such as undecidability. Recent work has shown that many rules can in fact be expressed in OWL. In this paper we extend this work to include some types of rules previously excluded. We formally define a set of first order logic rules, C-Rules, which can be expressed within OWL …

Towards Self-Emancipation In Ict For Development Research: Narratives About Respect, Traditional Leadership And Building Networks Of Friendships In Rural South Africa, Kirstin Krauss

The African Journal of Information Systems

In this paper, the author contends that if the outsider-researcher involved in Information and Communication Technology for Development really wants to make a difference and honestly address the emancipatory interests of the developing community, social transformation will have to occur on both sides of the “development divide.” This statement implies both an understanding of the researcher’s own ethnocentrism, prejudice, assumptions and inabilities as well as local concerns, needs, expectations and realities. Using critical social theory as a position of inquiry and learning from the enculturation phases of critical ethnographic fieldwork in a deep rural part of South Africa, the paper …

Structural Analysis In Multi-Relational Social Networks, Bing Tian Dai, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern social networks often consist of multiple relationsamong individuals. Understanding the structureof such multi-relational network is essential. In sociology,one way of structural analysis is to identify differentpositions and roles using blockmodels. In thispaper, we generalize stochastic blockmodels to GeneralizedStochastic Blockmodels (GSBM) for performing positionaland role analysis on multi-relational networks.Our GSBM generalizes many different kinds of MultivariateProbability Distribution Function (MVPDF) tomodel different kinds of multi-relational networks. Inparticular, we propose to use multivariate Poisson distributionfor multi-relational social networks. Our experimentsshow that GSBM is able to identify the structuresfor both synthetic and real world network data.These structures can further be used for predicting …

Localized Deconvolution: Characterizing Nmr-Based Metabolomics Spectroscopic Data Using Localized High-Throughput Deconvolution, Paul E. Anderson, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Deirdre A. Mahle, Nicholas V. Reo, Michael L. Raymer, Amit P. Sheth, Nicholas J. Delraso

Kno.e.sis Publications

The interpretation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experimental results for metabolomics studies requires intensive signal processing and multivariate data analysis techniques. Standard quantification techniques attempt to minimize effects from variations in peak positions caused by sample pH, ionic strength, and composition. These techniques fail to account for adjacent signals which can lead to drastic quantification errors. Attempts at full spectrum deconvolution have been limited in adoption and development due to the computational resources required. Herein, we develop a novel localized deconvolution algorithm for general purpose quantification of NMR-based metabolomics studies. Localized deconvolution decreases average absolute quantification error by 97% and …

Framework For The Analysis Of Coordination In Crisis Response, Hemant Purohit, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John M. Flach

Kno.e.sis Publications

Social Media play a critical role during crisis events, revealing a natural coordination dynamic. We propose a computational framework guided by social science principles to measure, analyze, and understand coordination among the different types of organizations and actors in crisis response. The analysis informs both the scientific account of cooperative behavior and the design of applications and protocols to support crisis management.

The Social Network Of Software Engineering Research, Subhajit Datta, Nishant Kumar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The social network perspective has served as a useful framework for studying scientific research collaboration in different disciplines. Although collaboration in computer science research has received some attention, software engineering research collaboration has remained unexplored to a large extent. In this paper, we examine the collaboration networks based on co-authorship information of papers from ten software engineering publication venues over the 1976-2010 time period. We compare time variations of certain parameters of these networks with corresponding parameters of collaboration networks from other disciplines. We also explore whether software engineering collaboration networks manifest symptoms of the small-world phenomenon, conform to the …

Discovering Fine-Grained Sentiment In Suicide Notes, Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Ming Tan, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents our solution for the i2b2 sentiment classification challenge. Our hybrid system consists of machine learning and rule-based classifiers. For the machine learning classifier, we investigate a variety of lexical, syntactic and knowledge-based features, and show how much these features contribute to the performance of the classifier through experiments. For the rule-based classifier, we propose an algorithm to automatically extract effective syntactic and lexical patterns from training examples. The experimental results show that the rule-based classifier outperforms the baseline machine learning classifier using unigram features. By combining the machine learning classifier and the rule-based classifier, the hybrid system …

A Semantic Problem Solving Environment For Integrative Parasite Research: Identification Of Intervention Targets For Trypanosoma Cruzi, Priti Parikh, Todd Minning, Vinh Nguyen, Sarasi Lalithsena, Amir H. Asiaee, Satya S. Sahoo, Prashant Doshi, Rick L. Tarleton, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: Research on the biology of parasites requires a sophisticated and integrated computational platform to query and analyze large volumes of data, representing both unpublished (internal) and public (external) data sources. Effective analysis of an integrated data resource using knowledge discovery tools would significantly aid biologists in conducting their research, for example, through identifying various intervention targets in parasites, and in deciding the future direction of ongoing as well as planned projects. A key challenge in achieving this objective is the heterogeneity between the internal lab data, usually stored as flat files, Excel spreadsheets or custom-built databases, and the external …

Cognitive Approaches For The Semantic Web, Dedre Gentner, Frank Van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Kai-Uwe Kuhnberger

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A major focus in the design of Semantic Web ontology languages used to be on finding a suitable balance between the expressivity of the language and the tractability of reasoning services defined over this language. This focus mirrors the original vision of a Web composed of machine readable and understandable data. Similarly to the classical Web a few years ago, the attention is recently shifting towards a user-centric vision of the Semantic Web. Essentially, the information stored on the Web is from and for humans. This new focus is not only reflected in the fast growing Linked Data Web but …

Semantics Of Perception: Towards A Semantic Web Approach To Machine Perception, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The acts of observation and perception provide the building blocks for all human knowledge (Locke, 1690); they are the processes from which all ideas are born; and the sole bond connecting ourselves to the world around us. Now, with the advent of sensor networks capable of observation, this world may be directly accessible to machines. Missing from this vision, however, is the ability of machines to glean semantics from observation; to apprehend entities from detected qualities; to perceive. The systematic automation of this ability is the focus of machine perception -- the ability of computing machines to sense and interpret …

A Scalable Distributed Syntactic, Semantic And Lexical Language Model, Ming Tan, Wenli Zhou, Lei Zheng, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents an attempt at building a large scale distributed composite language model that is formed by seamlessly integrating an n-gram model, a structured language model, and probabilistic latent semantic analysis under a directed Markov random field paradigm to simultaneously account for local word lexical information, mid-range sentence syntactic structure, and long-span document semantic content. The composite language model has been trained by performing a convergent N-best list approximate EM algorithm and a follow-up EM algorithm to improve word prediction power on corpora with up to a billion tokens and stored on a supercomputer. The large scale distributed composite …

Alignment-Based Querying Of Linked Open Data, Amit Krishna Joshi, Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Peter Z. Yeh, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth, Mariana Damova

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud is rapidly becoming the largest interconnected source of structured data on diverse domains. The potential of the LOD cloud is enormous, ranging from solving challenging AI issues such as open domain question answering to automated knowledge discovery. However, due to an inherent distributed nature of LOD and a growing number of ontologies and vocabularies used in LOD datasets, querying over multiple datasets and retrieving LOD data remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to querying linked data by using alignments for processing queries whose constituent data come from heterogeneous …

Extracting Diverse Sentiment Expressions With Target-Dependent Polarity From Twitter, Lu Chen, Wenbo Wang, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This study focuses on automatic extraction of sentiment expressions associated with given targets from Twitter. It addresses one of the key challenges in this work: Wide diversity and informal nature of sentiment expressions that cannot be trivially enumerated or captured using predefined lexical patterns.

On The Role Of Social Identity And Cohesion In Characterizing Online Social Communities, Hemant Purohit, Yiye Ruan, David Fuhry, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual interpersonal attraction as they share common characteristics. These characteristics can range from common interests to kinship ties and from social values to ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, the social identity approach posits that an individual is likely to join a group based on an intrinsic self-evaluation at a cognitive or perceptual level. In other words group members typically share an awareness of a common category membership. In this work …

Role Of Semantic Web In Health Informatics, Satya S. Sahoo, Guo-Qiang Zhang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This tutorial weaves together three themes and the associated topics: [1] The role of biomedical ontologies [2] Key Semantic Web technologies with focus on Semantic provenance and integration [3] In-practice tools and real world use cases built to serve the needs of sleep medicine researchers, cardiologists involved in clinical practice, and work on vaccine development for human pathogens.

Semantics And Ontologies For Earthcube, Gary Berg-Cross, Isabel F. Cruz, Michael Dean, Timothy Finin, Mark Gahegan, Pascal Hitzler, Hook Hau, Krzysztof Janowicz, Naicong Li, Philip Murphy, Bryce Nordgren, Leo Obrst, Mark Schildhauer, Amit P. Sheth, Krishna Sinha, Anne Thessen, Nancy Wiegand, Ilya Zaslavasky

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic technologies and ontologies play an increasing role in scientific workflow systems and knowledge infrastructures. While ontologies are mostly used for the semantic annotation of metadata, semantic technologies enable searching metadata catalogs beyond simple keywords, with some early evidence of semantics used for data translation. However, the next generation of distributed and interdisciplinary knowledge infrastructures will require capabilities beyond simple subsumption reasoning over subclass relations. In this work, we report from the EarthCube Semantics Community by highlighting which role semantics and ontologies should play in the EarthCube knowledge infrastructure. We target the interested domain scientist and, thus, introduce the value …

Key Ingredients For Your Next Semantics Elevator Talk, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

2012 brought a major change to the semantics research community. Discussions on the use and benefits of semantic technologies are shifting away from the why to the how. Surprisingly this more in stakeholder interest is not accompanied by a more detailed understanding of what semantics research is about. Instead of blaming others for their (wrong) expectations, we need to learn how to emphasize the paradigm shift proposed by semantics research while abstracting from technical details and advocate the added value in a way that relates to the immediate needs of individual stakeholders without overselling. This paper highlights some of …

Open And Transparent: The Review Process Of The Semantic Web Journal, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

While open access is established in the world of academic publishing, open reviews are rare. The Semantic Web journal goes further than just open review by implementing an open and transparent review process in which reviews are publicly available, and the assigned editors and reviewers are known by name, and are published together with accepted manuscripts. In this article we introduce the steps to realize such a process from the conceptual design, over the implementation, a overview of the results so far, and up to lessons learned.

The Ontology For Parasite Lifecycle (Opl): Towards A Consistent Vocabulary Of Lifecycle Stages In Parasitic Organisms, Priti Parikh, Jie Zheng, Flora J. Logan-Klumpler, Christian J. Stoeckert, Pantelis Topalis, Anna Protasio, Amit P. Sheth, Mark Carrington, Matthew Berriman, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background

Genome sequencing of many eukaryotic pathogens and the volume of data available on public resources have created a clear requirement for a consistent vocabulary to describe the range of developmental forms of parasites. Consistent labeling of experimental data and external data, in databases and the literature, is essential for integration, cross database comparison, and knowledge discovery. The primary objective of this work was to develop a dynamic and controlled vocabulary that can be used for various parasites. The paper describes the Ontology for Parasite Lifecycle (OPL) and discusses its application in parasite research.

Results

The OPL is based on …

Towards Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application Generation Using Semantically Enriched Domain Specific Languages, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Ashwin Manjunatha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. Taking advantage of this computing landscape, however, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space as well as the Cloud space.

This research attempts to introduce a disciplined methodology to develop Cloud-mobile hybrid applications by using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) centric approach to generate applications. A Cloud-mobile hybrid is an application that is split between a Cloud based back-end and …

Resident Identification Using Kinect Depth Image Data And Fuzzy Clustering Techniques, Tanvi Banerjee, James M. Keller, Marjorie Skubic

Kno.e.sis Publications

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out …

Predictive Modeling For Navigating Social Media, Meiqun Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social media changes the way people use the Web. It has transformed ordinary Web users from information consumers to content contributors. One popular form of content contribution is social tagging, in which users assign tags to Web resources. By the collective efforts of the social tagging community, a new information space has been created for information navigation. Navigation allows serendipitous discovery of information by examining the information objects linked to one another in the social tagging space. In this dissertation, we study prediction tasks that facilitate navigation in social tagging systems. For social tagging systems to meet complex navigation needs …

Tweets And Votes: A Study Of The 2011 Singapore General Election, Marko M. Skoric, Nathaniel D. Poor, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study focuses on the uses of Twitter during the elections, examining whether the messages posted online are reflective of the climate of public opinion. Using Twitter data obtained during the official campaign period of the 2011 Singapore General Election, we test the predictive power of tweets in forecasting the election results. In line with some previous studies, we find that during the elections the Twitter sphere represents a rich source of data for gauging public opinion and that the frequency of tweets mentioning names of political parties, political candidates and contested constituencies could be used to make predictions about …