Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Networks - I: Pre-Coordination Mechanism For Self Configuration Of Neighborhood Cells In Mobile Wi-Max, Abdul Qadeer, Khalid Khan

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

WiMax broadband services successfully providing triple play (Voice, Video and Data) support with combating the challenges of better quality and interoperability. Support for smooth mobility in real time with no wired infrastructure and being surrounded by GSM waves demanding a comprehensive and powerful network. Covering large areas through number of base stations which not only require time to configure but also need resources for implementation with a recurring cost of functionality. Automation is everywhere and to provide novel wireless services it is necessary to come up with some distinct features like intelligent base stations which have the capability of doing …

User Choice Between Traditional And Computerized Methods: An Activity Perspective, Jun Sun

Information Systems Faculty Publications

Numerous computerized methods emerge to replace traditional methods in people’s personal, work and social lives, but many are hesitant to make the transition. This study examines the factors that influence human choice between different methods. According to Activity Theory, traditional and computerized methods are both tools that a person uses for a certain task. The situated experiences with various methods shape people’s attitude toward using them later in terms of tool readiness. The understanding leads to hypothesized relationships between user-, method- and task-specific factors and the dependent variable. The results from an empirical study support that method experiences have strong …

A Study Of Correlations Between The Definition And Application Of The Gene Ontology, Yuji Mo

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When using the Gene Ontology (GO), nucleotide and amino acid sequences are annotated by terms in a structured and controlled vocabulary organized into relational graphs. The usage of the vocabulary (GO terms) in the annotation of these sequences may diverge from the relations defined in the ontology. We measure the consistency of the use of GO terms by comparing GO's defined structure to the terms' application. To do this, we first use synthetic data with different characteristics to understand how these characteristics influence the correlation values determined by various similarity measures. Using these results as a baseline, we found that …

Overview Of Contrast Data Mining As A Field And Preview Of An Upcoming Book, Guozhu Dong, James Bailey

Kno.e.sis Publications

This report provides an overview of the field of contrast data mining and its applications, and offers a preview of an upcoming book on the topic. The importance of contrasting is discussed and a brief survey is given covering the following topics: general definitions and terminology for contrast patterns, representative contrast pattern mining algorithms, applications of contrast mining for fundamental data mining tasks such as classification and clustering, applications of contrast mining in bioinformatics, medicine, blog analysis, image analysis and subgroup mining, results on contrast based dataset similarity measure, and on analyzing item interaction in contrast patterns, and open research …

Computing Inconsistency Measure Based On Paraconsistent Semantics, Pascal Hitzler, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Measuring inconsistency in knowledge bases has been recognized as an important problem in several research areas. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem and a main class of them is based on some kind of paraconsistent semantics. However, existing methods suffer from two limitations: (i) they are mostly restricted to propositional knowledge bases; (ii) very few of them discuss computational aspects of computing inconsistency measures. In this article, we try to solve these two limitations by exploring algorithms for computing an inconsistency measure of first-order knowledge bases. After introducing a four-valued semantics for first-order logic, we define an …

Quantifying Computer Network Security, Ian Burchett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Simplifying network security data to the point that it is readily accessible and usable by a wider audience is increasingly becoming important, as networks become larger and security conditions and threats become more dynamic and complex, requiring a broader and more varied security staff makeup. With the need for a simple metric to quantify the security level on a network, this thesis proposes: simplify a network’s security risk level into a simple metric. Methods for this simplification of an entire network’s security level are conducted on several characteristic networks. Identification of computer network port vulnerabilities from NIST’s Network Vulnerability Database …

Vireo@Trecvid 2011: Instance Search, Semantic Indexing, Multimedia Event Detection And Known-Item Search, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shi-Ai Zhu, Wei Zhang, Chun-Chet Tan, Ting Yao, Lei Pang, Hung-Khoon Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The vireo group participated in four tasks: instance search, semantic indexing, multimedia event detection and known-item search. In this paper,we will present our approaches and discuss the evaluation results.

Study Of Feature Selection Algorithms For Text-Categorization, Kandarp Dave

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis will discuss feature selection algorithms for text-categorization. Feature selection algorithms are very important, as they can make-or-break a categorization engine. The feature selection algorithms that will be discussed in this thesis are Document Frequency, Information Gain, Chi Squared, Mutual Information, NGL (Ng-Goh-Low) coefficient, and GSS (Galavotti-Sebastiani-Simi) coefficient . The general idea of any feature selection algorithm is to determine importance of words using some measure that can keep informative words, and remove non-informative words, which can then help the text-categorization engine categorize a document, D , into some category, C . These feature selection methods are explained, implemented, …

The Valuation Of User-Generated Content: A Structural, Stylistic And Semantic Analysis Of Online Reviews, Noi Sian Koh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The ability and ease for users to create and publish content has provided vast amount of online product reviews. However, the amount of data is overwhelmingly large and unstructured, making information difficult to quantify. This creates challenge in understanding how online reviews affect consumers’ purchase decisions. In my dissertation, I explore the structural, stylistic and semantic content of online reviews. Firstly, I present a measurement that quantifies sentiments with respect to a multi-point scale and conduct a systematic study on the impact of online reviews on product sales. Using the sentiment metrics generated, I estimate the weight that customers place …

Contributions Of Financial Sector Reforms And Credit Supply To Nigerian Agricultural Sector (1978-2009), Anthony O. Onoja, M. E. Onu, S. Ajodo-Ohiemi

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study analyzed the trends and pattern of institutional credit supply to agriculture during pre- and post-financial reforms along with their determinants. It then compared the effects of reform policies on access to institutional credits in Nigerian agricultural sector before and after the reforms (1978 - 1985; and 1986 -2009). Relying mainly on time series data from CBN and NBS, it used ordinary least squares method (linear, semi-log and double log) to model the determinants of banking sector lending to the agricultural sector during the review period. The models were subjected to several econometric tests before accepting one. Chow test …

Determinants Of Foreign Reserves In Nigeria: An Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach, David Irefin, Baba N. Yaaba

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

On global scale, central banks’ holdings of foreign reserves have escalated sharply in recent years. World international reserves holdings have risen significantly from US$1.2 trillion in 1995 to nearly US$10.0 trillion in June 2011. Dominant among these reserves are concentrated in the hands of few countries. Ten major holders of foreign reserves are mostly from Asia. Oil exporting countries in Africa and the Middle East are not left out in this trend. Nigeria’s foreign reserves rose from US$5.5 billion in 1999 to US$62.40 billion in July 2008, making Nigeria the twenty-fourth largest reserves holder in the world. This pace of …

Effects Of Exchange Rate Movements On Economic Growth In Nigeria, Eme O. Akpan, Johnson A. Atan

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study investigates the effect of exchange rate movements on real output growth in Nigeria. Based on quarterly series for the period 1986 to 2010, the paper examines the possible direct and indirect relationship between exchange rates and GDP growth. The relationship is derived in two ways using a simultaneous equations model within a fully specified (but small) macroeconomic model. A Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) technique was explored. The estimation results suggest that there is no evidence of a strong direct relationship between changes in exchange rate and output growth. Rather, Nigeria’s economic growth has been directly affected by …

Exchange Rate Volatility In Nigeria: Consistency, Persistency & Severity Analyses, Babatunde Adeoye, Akinwande A. Atanda

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

The adoption of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1986 resulted in the transition from fixed exchange rate regime to floating exchange rate regime in Nigeria. Ever since, the exchange rate of naira vis-à-vis the U.S dollar has attained varying rates all through different time horizons. On this basis, this study examines the consistency, persistency, and severity (degree) of volatility in exchange rate of Nigerian currency (naira) vis-a-vis the United State dollar using monthly time series data from 1986 to 2008. The standard Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) model was used to analyze the long-run consistency of …

Foreign Private Investment And Economic Growth In Nigeria: A Cointegrated Var And Granger Causality Analysis, F. Z. Abdullahi, S. Ladan, Haruna R. Bakari

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This research uses a cointegration VAR model to study the contemporaneous long-run dynamics of the impact of Foreign Private Investment (FPI), Interest Rate (INR) and Inflation rate (IFR) on Growth Domestic Products (GDP) in Nigeria for the period January 1970 to December 2009. The Unit Root Test suggests that all the variables are integrated of order 1. The VAR model was appropriately identified using AIC information criteria and the VECM model has exactly one cointegration relation. The study further investigates the causal relationship using the Granger causality analysis of VECM which indicates a uni-directional causality relationship between GDP and FDI …

Banking Sector Credit And Economic Growth In Nigeria: An Empirical Investigation, Aniekan O. Akpansung, Sikiru J. Babalola

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

The paper examines the relationship between banking sector credit and economic growth in Nigeria over the period 1970-2008. The causal links between the pairs of variables of interest were established using Granger causality test while a Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimation technique was used for the regression models. The results of Granger causality test show evidence of unidirectional causal relationship from GDP to private sector credit (PSC) and from industrial production index (IND) to GDP. Estimated regression models indicate that private sector credit impacts positively on economic growth over the period of coverage in this study. However, lending (interest) rate …

Modeling Social Strength In Social Media Community Via Kernel-Based Learning, Jinfeng Zhuang, Tao Mei, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling continuous social strength rather than conventional binary social ties in the social network can lead to a more precise and informative description of social relationship among people. In this paper, we study the problem of social strength modeling (SSM) for the users in a social media community, who are typically associated with diverse form of data. In particular, we take Flickr---the most popular online photo sharing community---as an example, in which users are sharing their experiences through substantial amounts of multimodal contents (e.g., photos, tags, geo-locations, friend lists) and social behaviors (e.g., commenting and joining interest groups). Such heterogeneous …

Understanding And Protecting Privacy: Formal Semantics And Principled Audit Mechanisms, Anupam Datta, Jeremiah Blocki, Nicolas Christin, Henry Deyoung, Deepak Garg, Limin Jia, Dilsun Kaynar, Arunesh Sinha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy has become a significant concern in modern society as personal information about individuals is increasingly collected, used, and shared, often using digital technologies, by a wide range of organizations. Certain information handling practices of organizations that monitor individuals’ activities on the Web, data aggregation companies that compile massive databases of personal information, cell phone companies that collect and use location data about individuals, online social networks and search engines—while enabling useful services—have aroused much indignation and protest in the name of privacy. Similarly, as healthcare organizations are embracing electronic health record systems and patient portals to enable patients, employees, …

Context-Based Friend Suggestion In Online Photo-Sharing Community, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of social media, web users tend to spend more time than before for sharing their experience and interest in online photo-sharing sites. The wide variety of sharing behaviors generate different metadata which pose new opportunities for the discovery of communities. We propose a new approach, named context-based friend suggestion, to leverage the diverse form of contextual cues for more effective friend suggestion in the social media community. Different from existing approaches, we consider both visual and geographical cues, and develop two user-based similarity measurements, i.e., visual similarity and geo similarity for characterizing user relationship. The problem of …

Determination Of Sin2Θeff W Using Jet Charge Measurements In Hadronic Z Decays, D. Buskulic, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The electroweak mixing angle is determined with high precision from measurements of the mean dierence between forward and backward hemisphere charges in hadronic decays of the Z. A data sample of 2:5 million hadronic Z decays recorded over the period 1990 to 1994 in the ALEPH detector at LEP is used. The mean charge separation between event hemispheres containing the original quark and antiquark is measured for b b and cc events in subsamples selected by their long lifetimes or using fast D 's. The corresponding average charge separation for light quarks is measured in an inclusive sample from the …

Parallel Machines Scheduling With Applications To Internet Ad-Slot Placement, Shaista Lubna

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider a class of problems of scheduling independent jobs on identical, uniform and unrelated parallel machines with an objective of achieving an optimal schedule. The primary focus is on the minimization of the maximum completion time of the jobs, commonly referred to as Makespan (C _max ). We survey and present examples of uniform machines and its applications to the single slot and multiple slots based on bids and budgets.

The Internet is an important advertising medium attracting large number of advertisers and users. When a user searches for a query, a search engine returns a set of results …

Sire: A Social Image Retrieval Engine, Steven C. H. Hoi, Pengcheng Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the explosive growth of social media applications on the internet, billions of social images have been made available in many social media web sites nowadays. This has presented an open challenge of web-scale social image search. Unlike existing commercial web search engines that often adopt text based retrieval, in this demo, we present a novel web-based multimodal paradigm for large-scale social image retrieval, termed "Social Image Retrieval Engine" (SIRE), which effectively exploits both textual and visual contents to narrow down the semantic gap between high-level concepts and low-level visual features. A relevance feedback mechanism is also equipped to learn …

Modeling 3d Articulated Motions With Conformal Geometry Videos (Cgvs), Dao T. P. Quynh, Ying He, Xiaoming Chen, Jiazhi Xia, Qian Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

3D articulated motions are widely used in entertainment, sports, military, and medical applications. Among various techniques for modeling 3D motions, geometry videos (GVs) are a compact representation in that each frame is parameterized to a 2D domain, which captures the 3D geometry (x, y, z) to a pixel (r, g, b) in the image domain. As a result, the widely studied image/video processing techniques can be directly borrowed for 3D motion. This paper presents conformal geometry videos (CGVs), a novel extension of the traditional geometry videos by taking into the consideration of the isometric nature of 3D articulated motions. We …

Retrieval-Based Face Annotation By Weak Label Regularized Local Coordinate Coding, Dayong Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Ying He, Jianke Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Retrieval-based face annotation is a promising paradigm in mining massive web facial images for automated face annotation. Such an annotation paradigm usually encounters two key challenges. The first challenge is how to efficiently retrieve a short list of most similar facial images from facial image databases, and the second challenge is how to effectively perform annotation by exploiting these similar facial images and their weak labels which are often noisy and incomplete. In this paper, we mainly focus on tackling the second challenge of the retrieval-based face annotation paradigm. In particular, we propose an effective Weak Label Regularized Local Coordinate …

Four-Jet Final State Production In E+E- Collisions At Centre-Of-Mass Energies Of 130 And 136 Gev, D. Buskulic, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The four-jet final state is analyzed to search for hadronic decays of pair-produced heavy particles. The analysis uses the ALEPH data collected at LEP in November 1995 at centre-of-mass energies of 130 and 136 GeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 5.7 pb1 . An excess of four-jet events is observed with respect to the standard model predictions. In addition, these events exhibit an enhancement in the sum of the two di-jet masses around 105 GeV/c 2 . The properties of these events are studied and compared to the expectations from standard processes and to pair production hypotheses

Wsm 2011: Third Acm Workshop On Social Media, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michal Jacovi, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Jiebo Luo, Konstantinos Tserpes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Third Workshop on Social Media (WSM2011) continues the series of Workshops on Social Media in 2009 and 2010 and has been established as a platform for the presentation and discussion of the latest, key research issues in social media analysis, exploration, search, mining, and emerging new social media applications. It is held in conjunction with the ACM International Multimedia Conference (MM'11) at Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011 and has attracted contributions on various aspects of social media including data mining from social media, content organization, geo-localization, personalization, recommendation systems, user experience, machine learning and social media approaches and architectures for …

Gender Differences In Virtual Collaboration On A Creative Design Task, Shu Schiller, Fiona Nah, Brian Mennecke, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is an important activity in every organization because it fundamentally affects work processes and organizational outcomes. Diversity adds complexity to the mechanism of virtual teams because teams routinely operate virtually by spanning temporal, geographic, national, and cultural boundaries. One important way to decode such complexity is to understand gender differences and their impacts on virtual modes of collaboration. In this research, we examine gender differences and how they influence outcomes and attitudes on virtual collaboration in the context of team gender composition. Phase one of our study involved male-male dyads and female-female dyads that collaborated virtually in Second Life. …

Validation Of A Model Of Information Systems User Competency, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

IS user competency, or the ability to realize the fullest potential and the greatest performance from IS use, is important for IS users. However, which factors contribute to IS user competency is unclear. Based on the findings of previous research, a model of IS user competency was developed that focuses on IS-specific characteristics: (i) domain knowledge of and skills in IS, (ii) willingness to try and to explore IS, and (iii) capability of perceiving IS value. The model was validated using the survey approach and the findings suggest that all three factors are pivotal to IS user competency, with willingness …

An Effective Approach For Topicspecific Opinion Summarization, Binyang Li, Lanjun Zhou, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Zhongyu Wei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic-specific opinion summarization (TOS) plays an important role in helping users digest online opinions, which targets to extract a summary of opinion expressions specified by a query, i.e. topic-specific opinionated information (TOI). A fundamental problem in TOS is how to effectively represent the TOI of an opinion so that salient opinions can be summarized to meet user’s preference. Existing approaches for TOS are either limited by the mismatch between topic-specific information and its corresponding opinionated information or lack of ability to measure opinionated information associated with different topics, which in turn affect the performance seriously. In this paper, we represent …

Tag-Based Social Image Search With Visual-Text Joint Hypergraph Learning, Yue Gao, Meng Wang, Huanboo Luan, Jialie Shen, Shuicheng Yan, Dacheng Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tag-based social image search has attracted great interest and how to order the search results based on relevance level is a research problem. Visual content of images and tags have both been investigated. However, existing methods usually employ tags and visual content separately or sequentially to learn the image relevance. This paper proposes a tag-based image search with visual-text joint hypergraph learning. We simultaneously investigate the bag-of-words and bag-of-visual-words representations of images and accomplish the relevance estimation with a hypergraph learning approach. Each textual or visual word generates a hyperedge in the constructed hypergraph. We conduct experiments with a real-world …

Processj: A Process-Oriented Programming Language, Matthew Sowders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Java is a general purpose object-oriented programming language that has been widely adopted. Because of its high adoption rate and its lineage as a C-style language, its syntax is familiar to many programmers. The downside is that Java is not natively concurrent. Volumes have been written about concurrent programming in Java; however, concurrent programming is difficult to reason about within an object-oriented paradigm and so is difficult to get right.

occam -π is a general purpose process-oriented programming language. Concurrency is part of the theoretical underpinnings of the language. Concurrency is simple to reason about within an occam -π application …