Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Managing Media Rich Geo-Spatial Annotations For A Map-Based Mobile Application Using Clustering, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Yin-Leng Theng, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Kalyani Chatterjea, Chew-Hung Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the prevalence of mobile devices that are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, the creation and access of user-generated content are extended to users on the go. Such content are tied to real world objects, in the form of geospatial annotations, and it is only natural that these annotations are visualized using a map-based approach. However, viewing maps that are filled with annotations could hinder the serendipitous discovery of data, especially on the small screens of mobile devices. This calls for a need to manage the annotations. In this paper, we introduce a mobile …

Pagesense: Style-Wise Web Page Advertising, Lusong Li, Tao Mei, Xiang Niu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an innovative style-wise advertising platform for web page. Web page “style” mainly refers to visual effects, such as color and layout. Unlike the most popular ad-network such as Google AdSense which needs publishers to change the original structure of their pages and define the position and style of the embedded ads manually, stylewise page advertising aims to automatically deliver styleconsistent ads at proper positions within the web page, without breaking the layout of the original page. Our system is motivated from the fact that almost 90% web pages contain blank regions without any content. Given a web …

Information Search Patterns In E-Commerce Product Comparison Services, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Weiyin Hong, Liqiang Chen, Hong-Hee Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To facilitate product selection and purchase decisions on e-commerce Web sites, the presentation of product information is very important. In this research, the authors study how disposition styles influence users’ search patterns in product comparison services of e-commerce Web sites. The results show that people use relatively more feature paths and less product paths in vertical disposition style than horizontal disposition style. The findings also indicate that there are relatively more feature paths and less product paths in the first half than second half of the information search paths. This is consistent with Gensch’s two-stage choice model which suggests that …

Tredd—A Database For Tandem Repeats Over The Edit Distance, Dina Sokol, Firat Atagun

Publications and Research

A ‘tandem repeat’ in DNA is a sequence of two or more contiguous, approximate copies of a pattern of nucleotides. Tandem repeats are common in the genomes of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. They are significant markers for human identity testing, disease diagnosis, sequence homology and population studies. In this article, we describe a new database, TRedD, which contains the tandem repeats found in the human genome. The database is publicly available online, and the software for locating the repeats is also freely available. The definition of tandem repeats used by TRedD is a new and innovative definition based upon …

Multi-Objective Constraint Satisfaction For Mobile Robot Area Defense, Kenneth W. Mayo

Theses and Dissertations

In developing multi-robot cooperative systems, there are often competing objectives that need to be met. For example in automating area defense systems, multiple robots must work together to explore the entire area, and maintain consistent communications to alert the other agents and ensure trust in the system. This research presents an algorithm that tasks robots to meet the two specific goals of exploration and communication maintenance in an uncoordinated environment reducing the need for a user to pre-balance the objectives. This multi-objective problem is defined as a constraint satisfaction problem solved using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). Both …

Symphony: A Platform For Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the design of Symphony, a platform that enables non-developers to build and deploy a new class of search-driven applications that combine their data and domain expertise with content from search engines and other web services. The Symphony prototype has been built on top of Microsoft's Bing infrastructure. While Symphony naturally makes use of the customization capabilities exposed by Bing, its distinguishing feature is the capability it provides to the application creator to combine their proprietary data and domain expertise with content obtained from Bing. They can also integrate specialized data obtained from web services to enhance the richness …

Bay Audio Repair Website & Data Management Application, Michael Shelley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to build a website and software application to receive and manage audio equipment repair requests for a small startup company called Bay Audio Repair (BAR). Furthermore, it allowed me to gain experience in web development and software engineering practices, specifically requirements gathering, design and implementation. The website provides an online interface for BAR’s customers to request repairs and the application allows BAR employees to update the progress of a repair. Several technologies were used in the system’s construction: HTML, XML, PHP, and C#.

Top-K Aggregation Queries Over Large Networks, Xifeng Yan, Bin He, Feida Zhu, Jiawei Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searching and mining large graphs today is critical to a variety of application domains, ranging from personalized recommendation in social networks, to searches for functional associations in biological pathways. In these domains, there is a need to perform aggregation operations on large-scale networks. Unfortunately the existing implementation of aggregation operations on relational databases does not guarantee superior performance in network space, especially when it involves edge traversals and joins of gigantic tables. In this paper, we investigate the neighborhood aggregation queries: Find nodes that have top-k highest aggregate values over their h-hop neighbors. While these basic queries are common in …

Local Coordination Under Bounded Rationality: Coase Meets Simon, Finds Hayek, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper explores strategic behavior in a network of firms using an agent-based model. The model exhibits a tension between economic efficiency and the stability of the network in the face of incentives to change its configuration. This tension is to be expected because the conditions of the Coase theorem are violated: the boundedly rational firms in the model lack the ability to discover efficient network configurations or achieve them through collective action. In computational experiments, as predicted by theory, firms frequently became locked into inefficient outcomes or endless cycles of mutual frustration. However, simple institutional innovations such as property …

Fuzzy Matching Of Web Queries To Structured Data, Tao Cheng, Hady W. Lauw, Stelios Paparizos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recognizing the alternative ways people use to reference an entity, is important for many Web applications that query structured data. In such applications, there is often a mismatch between how content creators describe entities and how different users try to retrieve them. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining whether a candidate query approximately matches with an entity. We propose an off-line, data-driven, bottom-up approach that mines query logs for instances where Web content creators and Web users apply a variety of strings to refer to the same Web pages. This way, given a set of strings that …

Differentiating Knowledge Processes In Organisational Learning: A Case Of “Two Solitudes”, Siu Loon Hoe, Steven Mcshane

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The fields of organizational behavior (OB)/strategy and marketing have taken different paths over the past two decades to understanding organizational learning. OB/strategy has been pre-occupied with theory development and case study illustrations, whereas marketing has taken a highly quantitative path. Although relying on essentially the same foundation theory, the two disciplines have had minimal crossfertilization. Furthermore, both fields tend to blur or usually ignore the distinction between structural and informal knowledge processes. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the distinction between informal and structural knowledge acquisition and dissemination processes and propose new definitions to differentiate them. Future research …

Creating An Immersive Game World With Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Yundong Cai, Ah-Hwee Tan, Zhiqi Shen, Boyang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasing number of serious games have been developed to enhance the user experiences in education and training. In order to bridge the gap of game experiences in the virtual environment and in the real life, it is crucial to generate believable characters and contexts in real-time. However, the variables to be simulated for a large-scale serious game are numerous. These variables are involved in complex causal relationships and their values change over time. In view that world modeling has not been well addressed with conventional models, this paper uses a computational model Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Map (EFCM) to model …

Information-Quality Aware Routing In Event-Driven Sensor Networks, Hwee Xian Tan, Mun-Choon Chan, Wendong Xiao, Peng-Yong Kong, Chen-Khong Tham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Upon the occurrence of a phenomenon of interest in a wireless sensor network, multiple sensors may be activated, leading to data implosion and redundancy. Data aggregation and/or fusion techniques exploit spatio-temporal correlation among sensory data to reduce traffic load and mitigate congestion. However, this is often at the expense of loss in Information Quality (IQ) of data that is collected at the fusion center. In this work, we address the problem of finding the least-cost routing tree that satisfies a given IQ constraint. We note that the optimal least-cost routing solution is a variation of the classical NP-hard Steiner tree …

Homophily In The Digital World: A Livejournal Case Study, Hady W. Lauw, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Alexandros Ntoulas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Are two users more likely to be friends if they share common interests? Are two users more likely to share common interests if they're friends? The authors study the phenomenon of homophily in the digital world by answering these central questions. Unlike the physical world, the digital world doesn't impose any geographic or organizational constraints on friendships. So, although online friends might share common interests, a priori there's no reason to believe that two users with common interests are more likely to be friends. Using data from LiveJournal, the authors show that the answer to both questions is yes.

A Self-Organizing Neural Architecture Integrating Desire, Intention And Reinforcement Learning, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yu-Hong Feng, Yew-Soon Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a self-organizing neural architecture that integrates the features of belief, desire, and intention (BDI) systems with reinforcement learning. Based on fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory (fusion ART), the proposed architecture provides a unified treatment for both intentional and reactive cognitive functionalities. Operating with a sense-act-learn paradigm, the low level reactive module is a fusion ART network that learns action and value policies across the sensory, motor, and feedback channels. During performance, the actions executed by the reactive module are tracked by a high level intention module (also a fusion ART network) that learns to associate sequences of actions …

Preference Queries In Large Multi-Cost Transportation Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Yimin Lin, Man Lung Yiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Research on spatial network databases has so far considered that there is a single cost value associated with each road segment of the network. In most real-world situations, however, there may exist multiple cost types involved in transportation decision making. For example, the different costs of a road segment could be its Euclidean length, the driving time, the walking time, possible toll fee, etc. The relative significance of these cost types may vary from user to user. In this paper we consider such multi-cost transportation networks (MCN), where each edge (road segment) is associated with multiple cost values. We formulate …

Efficient Verification Of Shortest Path Search Via Authenticated Hints, Man Lung Yiu, Yimin Lin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shortest path search in transportation networks is unarguably one of the most important online search services nowadays (e.g., Google Maps, MapQuest, etc), with applications spanning logistics, spatial optimization, or everyday driving decisions. Often times, the owner of the road network data (e.g., a transport authority) provides its database to third-party query services, which are responsible for answering shortest path queries posed by their clients. The issue arising here is that a query service might be returning sub-optimal paths either purposely (in order to serve its own purposes like computational savings or commercial reasons) or because it has been compromised by …

K-Anonymity In The Presence Of External Databases, Dimitris Sacharidis, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The concept of k-anonymity has received considerable attention due to the need of several organizations to release microdata without revealing the identity of individuals. Although all previous k-anonymity techniques assume the existence of a public database (PD) that can be used to breach privacy, none utilizes PD during the anonymization process. Specifically, existing generalization algorithms create anonymous tables using only the microdata table (MT) to be published, independently of the external knowledge available. This omission leads to high information loss. Motivated by this observation we first introduce the concept of k-join-anonymity (KJA), which permits more effective generalization to reduce the …

Survey Of Environmental Data Portals: Features, Characteristics, And Reliability Issues, Shahram Latifi, David Walker

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

24 PowerPoint slides Session 2: Infrastructure Convener: Sergiu Dascalu, UNR Abstract: -What is a Data Portal? -Presents information from diverse sources in a unified way -Enables instant, reliable and secure exchange of information over the Web -The "portal" concept is to offer a single web page that aggregates content from several systems or servers.

Efficient Valid Scope For Location-Dependent Spatial Queries In Mobile Environments, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In mobile environments, mobile clients can access information with respect to their locations by submitting Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Owing to scarce wireless channel bandwidth and limited client battery life, frequent LDSQ submission from clients must be avoided. Observing that LDSQs issued from a client located at nearby positions would likely return the same query results, we explore the idea of valid scope, which represents a spatial area in which a set of LDSQs will retrieve exactly the same set of query results. With a valid scope derived and an LDSQ result cached, a client …

Player Performance Prediction In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (Mmorpgs), Kyong Jin Shim, Richa Sharan, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have seen an ever increasing number of people interacting in the online space. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are personal computer or console-based digital games where thousands of players can simultaneously sign on to the same online, persistent virtual world to interact and collaborate with each other through their in-game characters. In recent years, researchers have found virtual environments to be a sound venue for studying learning, collaboration, social participation, literacy in online space, and learning trajectory at the individual level as well as at the group level. While many games today provide web and GUI-based reports …

Twitterrank: Finding Topic-Sensitive Influential Twitterers, Jianshu Weng, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Qi He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can …

Estimating The Quality Of Postings In The Real-Time Web, Hady W. Lauw, Alexandros Ntoulas, Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of users are posting their status updates, interesting findings, news, ideas and observations in real-time on microblogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk. This real-time Web can be a great resource of valuable timely information. Since the real-time Web is completely open and decentralized and anyone may post information at whim, distinguishing interesting and popular postings from the mundane ones is a challenging task. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the quality (or “interestingness”) of postings in the real-time Web. We identify several important factors that are indicative of the quality of postings, and present …

Privacy-Preserving Similarity-Based Text Retrieval, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jialie Shen, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users of online services are increasingly wary that their activities could disclose confidential information on their business or personal activities. It would be desirable for an online document service to perform text retrieval for users, while protecting the privacy of their activities. In this article, we introduce a privacy-preserving, similarity-based text retrieval scheme that (a) prevents the server from accurately reconstructing the term composition of queries and documents, and (b) anonymizes the search results from unauthorized observers. At the same time, our scheme preserves the relevance-ranking of the search server, and enables accounting of the number of documents that each …

Understanding Cognitive Differences In Processing Competing Visualizations Of Complex Systems, Madhavi Mukul Chakrabarty

Dissertations

Node-link diagrams are used represent systems having different elements and relationships among the elements. Representing the systems using visualizations like node-link diagrams provides cognitive aid to individuals in understanding the system and effectively managing these systems. Using appropriate visual tools aids in task completion by reducing the cognitive load of individuals in understanding the problems and solving them. However, the visualizations that are currently developed lack any cognitive processing based evaluation. Most of the evaluations (if any) are based on the result of tasks performed using these visualizations. Therefore, the evaluations do not provide any perspective from the point of …

Job Seeking And Job Application In Social Networking Sites : Predicting Job Seekers' Behavioral Intentions, Maria Marcella Plummer

Dissertations

Social networking sites (SNSs) are revolutionizing the way in which employers and job seekers connect and interact with each other. Despite the reported benefits of SNSs with respect to finding a job, there are issues such as privacy concerns that might be deterring job seekers from using these sites in their attempts to secure a job. It is therefore important to understand the factors that are salient in predicting job seekers' use of SNSs in applying for jobs.

In this research, a theoretical model was developed to explicate job seekers' intentions to use SNSs to apply for jobs. Two aspects …

Virtual World Commerce Adoption (Vwca) : A Case Study Of Second Life Investigating The Impacts Of Perceived Affordances, Trust, And Need Satisfaction, Kamolbhan Olapiriyakul

Dissertations

Virtual worlds are computer-simulated worlds in which multi-players can simultaneously interact in a rich graphical environment. The development of virtual worlds, along with the massive growth of users, creates opportunities for business organizations. This dissertation involves many studies regarding virtual world adoption in business by virtual consumers.

Most of the research in Information Systems (IS) was conducted investigating factors influencing technology adoption, such as ease of use and usefulness, subjective norms and behavioral controls, self-efficacy, performance and effort expectancy, flow, etc. However, most of these research studies focused neither on design aspects related to affordances nor users' goal-oriented behaviors, such …

Skos And The Semantic Web: Knowledge Organization, Metadata, And Interoperability, Eric A. Robinson

Other Topics

The Simplified Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a Semantic Web framework, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for thesauri, classification schemes and simple ontologies. It allows for machine-actionable description of the structure of these knowledge organization systems (KOS) and provides an excellent tool for addressing interoperability and vocabulary control problems inherent to the rapidly expanding information environment of the Web. This paper discusses the foundations of the SKOS framework and reviews the literature on a variety of SKOS implementations. The limitations of SKOS that have been revealed through its broad application are addressed with brief attention to the proposed …

Understanding Events Through Analysis Of Social Media, Amit P. Sheth, Hemant Purohit, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Pavan Kapanipathi, Lu Chen

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users are sharing vast amounts of social data through social networking platforms accessible by Web and increasingly via mobile devices. This opens an exciting opportunity to extract social perceptions as well as obtain insights relevant to events around us. We discuss the significant need and opportunity for analyzing event-centric user generated content on social networks, present some of the technical challenges and our approach to address them. This includes aggregating social data related to events of interest, along with Web resources (news, Wikipedia pages, multimedia) related to an event of interest, and supporting analysis along spatial, temporal, thematic, and sentiment …

Mobicloud - Making Clouds Reachable: A Toolkit For Easy And Efficient Development Of Customized Cloud Mobile Hybrid Applications, Ashwin Manjunatha, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, 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. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space, as well as the Cloud space. Our research attempts to exploit the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by introducing MobiCloud, an online toolkit to efficiently develop Cloud-mobile hybrid (CMH) applications. We define a CMH …