Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Computing Immutable Regions For Subspace Top-K Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Given a high-dimensional dataset, a top-k query can be used to shortlist the k tuples that best match the user’s preferences. Typically, these preferences regard a subset of the available dimensions (i.e., attributes) whose relative significance is expressed by user-specified weights. Along with the query result, we propose to compute for each involved dimension the maximal deviation to the corresponding weight for which the query result remains valid. The derived weight ranges, called immutable regions, are useful for performing sensitivity analysis, for finetuning the query weights, etc. In this paper, we focus on top-k queries with linear preference functions over …

Tteleconsultation Technology And Its Benefits: In The Case Of Public Hospitals In Malaysia, Nurazean Maarop, Sukdershan Hazara Singh, Khin Than Win

Dr Khin Win

The ultimate objectives of this study are to describe teleconsultation activities and explore the benefits of teleconsultation technology in the context of public health care environment in Malaysia. The materials of this study were based on an exploratory mixed method studies involving semi-structured interviews with key informants and questionnaires survey of health care providers to obtain information about existing teleconsultation activities as well as to uncover the benefits of teleconsultation technology. The notable benefits from teleconsultation implementation were further discussed. The findings confirmed that teleconsultation service has improved health care delivery in the underserved areas to consult with specialist. One …

Application Of Web Mashup Technology To Oyster Information Services, Christian Chuindja Ngniah

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Web mashup is a lightweight technology used to integrate data from remote sources without direct access to their databases. As a data consumer, a Web mashup application creates new contents by retrieving data through the Web application programming interface (API) provided by the external sources. As a data provider, the service program publishes its Web API and implements the specified functions.

In the project reported by this thesis, we have implemented two Web mashup applications to enhance the Web site oystersentinel.org: the Perkinsus marinus model and the Oil Spill model. Each model overlay geospatial data from a local database …

Application Of Digital Forensic Science To Electronic Discovery In Civil Litigation, Brian Roux

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Following changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2006 dealing with the role of Electronically Stored Information, digital forensics is becoming necessary to the discovery process in civil litigation. The development of case law interpreting the rule changes since their enactment defines how digital forensics can be applied to the discovery process, the scope of discovery, and the duties imposed on parties. Herein, pertinent cases are examined to determine what trends exist and how they effect the field. These observations buttress case studies involving discovery failures in large corporate contexts along with insights on the technical reasons those …

Investigating Volatility Trends Of Silver Through An Analysis Of Stock Options Prices, Dylan Houston

Honors Theses

Volatility is a statistical measure that describes the amount of fluctuation in prices for a given investment; generally, the higher the volatility for an investment, the riskier it is perceived to be. Traders study volatility history so that they can make informed decisions on how to invest capital. The purpose of this article is to analyze implied volatility values, which are derived from the investment's price and are considered the market's estimate of the investment's actual volatility, for silver electronically traded fund (ETF) options in periods of both high and low price movement. In doing so, we desired to see …

Data Curation Is For Everyone! The Case For Master's And Baccalaureate Institutional Engagement With Data Curation, Yasmeen Shorish

Yasmeen Shorish

This article describes the fundamental challenges to data curation, how these challenges may be compounded for smaller institutions, and how data management is an essential and manageable component of data curation. Data curation is often discussed within the confines of large, research universities. As a result, master’s and baccalaureate institutions may be left with the impression that they cannot engage with data curation. However, by proactively engaging with faculty, libraries of all sizes can build closer relationships and help educate faculty on data documentation and organization best practices. Experiences from one master’s comprehensive institution as it engages with data management …

P2cp: A New Cloud Storage Model To Enhance Performance Of Cloud Services, Zhe Sun, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun

Associate Professor Ghassan Beydoun

This paper presents a storage model named Peer to Cloud and Peer (P2CP). Assuming that the P2CP model follows the Poisson process or Little’s law, we prove that the speed and availability of P2CP is generally better than that of the pure Peer to Peer (P2P) model, the Peer to Server, Peer (P2SP) model or the cloud model. A key feature of our P2CP is that it has three data transmission tunnels: the cloud-user data transmission tunnel, the clients’ data transmission tunnel, and the common data transmission tunnel. P2CP uses the cloud storage system as a common storage system. When …

Diseñando Colisiones De Satélites En La Guerra Cibernética Encubierta, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

La guerra concentrada en la red depende de la red de información global para capacidades de combate conjuntas.3 La capa fundamental crea la capacidad de combate global como la columna vertebral espacial de la red de información donde los haberes espaciales son el elemento decisivo. EE.UU. depende de las capacidades espaciales para su éxito y la seguridad nacional de EE.UU. se basa hoy en día en un número limitado de satélites muy utilizados. Estos satélites son cruciales para la disuasión estratégica, la vigilancia, la recopilación de inteligencia y las comunicaciones militares. Si la disuasión estratégica falla, los satélites forman parte …

P2cp: A New Cloud Storage Model To Enhance Performance Of Cloud Services, Zhe Sun, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun

Dr Jun Shen

This paper presents a storage model named Peer to Cloud and Peer (P2CP). Assuming that the P2CP model follows the Poisson process or Little’s law, we prove that the speed and availability of P2CP is generally better than that of the pure Peer to Peer (P2P) model, the Peer to Server, Peer (P2SP) model or the cloud model. A key feature of our P2CP is that it has three data transmission tunnels: the cloud-user data transmission tunnel, the clients’ data transmission tunnel, and the common data transmission tunnel. P2CP uses the cloud storage system as a common storage system. When …

Health Care Informatics Support Of A Simulated Study, Zeinab Salari Far

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this project is to assess the value of REDCap (Harris, 2009) by conducting a simulated breast cancer clinical trial and demonstration. REDCap is a free, secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies. To assess REDCap's value, we conducted a simulation of a clinical trial study designed to compare the use of two new technologies for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment with current best practice breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. We call the trial, "Real-Time Operating Room BC Diagnostic Treatment (RORBCDT)". The RORBCDT clinical trial is designed to assess the value of a new …

A Service Oriented Architecture For Spatial And Business Data Applications: An Ecampus Case Study, James Carswell, Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Linh Truong- Hong, Junjun Yin

Conference papers

Location-dependent queries of geospatial data are indispensable for users in today's era of "Smart" environments. At general scales, Google Maps and Google Earth with satellite and street views have provided some utilities for users to query specific locations. However, at local scales, where detailed 3D geometries and linked business data are needed, there is a general lack of related information for in depth exploration of an area. For instance, the following kinds of questions cannot be answered when interacting with Google Maps/Earth on a typical university campus: what classes are scheduled in that room over there? Whose office window is …

Synergy And Its Limits In Managing Information Technology Professionals, Thomas W. Ferratt, Jayesh Prasad, Harvey Enns

MIS/OM/DS Faculty Publications

We examine the effects of human resource management (HRM) practices (e.g., career development, social support, compensation, and security) on IT professionals‟ job search behavior. Job search is a relatively novel dependent variable in studies of voluntary withdrawal behavior, in general, and for IT professionals, in particular. From a universalistic perspective, HRM practices individually and in combination exhibit independently additive effects on job search behavior. Our study contrasts this perspective with configurational theory, hypothesizing that proposed idealtype configurations of HRM practices have synergistic effects on job search behavior. We contribute to the IT and broader HRM literature by theoretically explicating and …

Data Mining Of Pancreatic Cancer Protein Databases, Peter Revesz, Christopher Assi

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Data mining of protein databases poses special challenges because many protein databases are non- relational whereas most data mining and machine learning algorithms assume the input data to be a type of rela- tional database that is also representable as an ARFF file. We developed a method to restructure protein databases so that they become amenable for various data mining and machine learning tools. Our restructuring method en- abled us to apply both decision tree and support vector machine classifiers to a pancreatic protein database. The SVM classifier that used both GO term and PFAM families to characterize proteins gave …

User Taglines: Alternative Presentations Of Expertise And Interest In Social Media, Hemant Purohit, Alex Dow, Omar Alonso, Lei Duan, Kevin Haas

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, an attempt to show relevancy - why they are being shown. For example, Twitter search for a topical keyword shows expert twitterers on the side for 'whom to follow'. Google+ and Facebook also recommend users to follow or add to friend circle. Popular Internet newspaper- The Huffington Post shows Twitter influencers/ experts on the side of an article for authoritative relevant tweets. The state of the art shows user profile bios as summary for Twitter experts, but it has issues with length constraint imposed by user …

Are Twitter Users Equal In Predicting Elections? A Study Of User Groups In Predicting 2012 U.S. Republican Primaries, Lu Chen, Wenbo Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Existing studies on predicting election results are under the assumption that all the users should be treated equally. However, recent work [14] shows that social media users from different groups (e.g., “silent majority” vs. “vocal minority”) have significant differences in the generated content and tweeting behavior. The effect of these differences on predicting election results has not been exploited yet. In this paper, we study the spectrum of Twitter users who participate in the on-line discussion of 2012 U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries, and examine the predictive power of different user groups (e.g., highly engaged users vs. lowly engaged users, right-leaning …

The Ssn Ontology Of The W3c Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group, Michael Compton, Payam Barnaghi, Luis Bermudez, Raul Garcia-Castro, Oscar Corcho, Simon Cox, John Graybeal, Manfred Hauswirth, Cory Andrew Henson, Arthur Herzog, Vincent Huang, Krzysztof Janowicz, W. David Kelsey, Danh Le Phuoc, Laurent Lefort, Myriam Leggieri, Holger Neuhaus, Andriy Nikolov, Kevin Page, Alexandre Passant, Amit P. Sheth, Kerry Taylor

Kno.e.sis Publications

The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations — the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.

Integrating Expert System And Geographic Information System For Spatial Decision Making, Sriharsha Shesham

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Spatial decision making is a process of providing an effective solution for a problem that encompasses semi-structured spatial data. It is a challenging task which involves various factors to consider. For example, in order to build a new industry, an appropriate site must be selected for which several factors have to be taken into consideration. Some of the factors, which can affect the decision in this particular case, are air pollution, noise pollution, and distance from living areas, which makes the decision difficult. The geographic information systems (GIS) and the expert systems (ES) have many advantages in solving problems in …

Finding Thoughtful Comments From Social Media, Gottipati Swapna, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online user comments contain valuable user opinions. Comments vary greatly in quality and detecting high quality comments is a subtask of opinion mining and summarization research. Finding attentive comments that provide some reasoning is highly valuable in understanding the user’s opinion particularly in sociopolitical opinion mining and aids policy makers, social organizations or government sectors in decision making. In this paper we study the problem of detecting thoughtful comments. We empirically study various textual features, discourse relations and relevance features to predict thoughtful comments. We use logistic regression model and test on the datasets related to sociopolitical content. We found …

Do Hackers Seek Variety? An Empirical Analysis Of Website Defacements, Kok Wei Ooi, Seung-Hyun Kim, Qiu-Hong Wang, Kai Lung Hui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of securing the cyberspace is higher than ever along with the evolution of cyber attacks launched by hackers with malicious intention. However, there has been little research to understand the hackers who are the most important agents determining the landscape of information security. This paper investigates the behaviors of hackers using a longitudinal dataset of defacement attacks. Based on theories of economics of criminal behaviors and variety seeking, we find that hackers seek variety in choosing their victims in terms of region, hacking method, and the type of operating systems; as their prior experience is focused in terms …

Knowledge-Based Exploration For Reinforcement Learning In Self-Organizing Neural Networks, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Exploration is necessary during reinforcement learning to discover new solutions in a given problem space. Most reinforcement learning systems, however, adopt a simple strategy, by randomly selecting an action among all the available actions. This paper proposes a novel exploration strategy, known as Knowledge-based Exploration, for guiding the exploration of a family of self-organizing neural networks in reinforcement learning. Specifically, exploration is directed towards unexplored and favorable action choices while steering away from those negative action choices that are likely to fail. This is achieved by using the learned knowledge of the agent to identify prior action choices leading to …

Agent-Based Virtual Humans In Co-Space: An Evaluative Study, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Co-Space refers to interactive virtual environment modelled after the real world in terms of look-and-feel, functionalities and services. We have developed a 3D virtual world named Nan yang Technological University (NTU) Co-Space populated with virtual human characters. Three key requirements of realistic virtual humans in the virtual world have been identified, namely (1) autonomy: agents can function on their own, (2) interactivity: agents can interact naturally with players, and (3) personality: agents can exhibit human traits and characteristics. Working towards these challenges, we propose a brain-inspired agent architecture that integrates goal-directed autonomy, natural language interaction and human-like personality. We conducted …

On Recommending Hashtags In Twitter Networks, Su Mon Kywe, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter network is currently overwhelmed by massive amount of tweets generated by its users. To effectively organize and search tweets, users have to depend on appropriate hashtags inserted into tweets. We begin our research on hashtags by first analyzing a Twitter dataset generated by more than 150,000 Singapore users over a three-month period. Among several interesting findings about hashtag usage by this user community, we have found a consistent and significant use of new hashtags on a daily basis. This suggests that most hashtags have very short life span. We further propose a novel hashtag recommendation method based on collaborative …

Detecting Anomalies In Bipartite Graphs With Mutual Dependency Principles, Hanbo Dai, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bipartite graphs can model many real life applications including users-rating-products in online marketplaces, users-clicking-webpages on the World Wide Web and users referring users in social networks. In these graphs, the anomalousness of nodes in one partite often depends on that of their connected nodes in the other partite. Previous studies have shown that this dependency can be positive (the anomalousness of a node in one partite increases or decreases along with that of its connected nodes in the other partite) or negative (the anomalousness of a node in one partite rises or falls in opposite direction to that of its …

Cross-Lingual Identification Of Ambiguous Discourse Connectives For Resource-Poor Language, Lanjun Zhou, Wei Gao, Binyang Li, Zhongyu Wei, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The lack of annotated corpora brings limitations in research of discourse classification for many languages. In this paper, we present the first effort towards recognizing ambiguities of discourse connectives, which is fundamental to discourse classification for resource-poor language such as Chinese. A language independent framework is proposed utilizing bilingual dictionaries, Penn Discourse Treebank and parallel data between English and Chinese. We start from translating the English connectives to Chinese using a bi-lingual dictionary. Then, the ambiguities in terms of senses a connective may signal are estimated based on the ambiguities of English connectives and word alignment information. Finally, the ambiguity …

Investigating Intelligent Agents In A 3d Virtual World, Yilin Kang, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web 3.0 involves "intelligent" web applications that utilize natural language processing, machine-based learning and reasoning, and intelligent techniques to analyze and understand user behavior. In this research, we empirically assess a specific form of Web 3.0 application in the form of intelligent agents that offer assistance to users in the virtual world. Using media naturalness theory, we hypothesize that the use of intelligent agents in the virtual world can enhance user experience by offering a more natural way of communication and assistance to users. We are interested to test if media naturalness theory holds in the context of intelligent agents …

Cost-Sensitive Online Classification, Jialei Wang, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Both cost-sensitive classification and online learning have been extensively studied in data mining and machine learning communities, respectively. However, very limited study addresses an important intersecting problem, that is, “Cost-Sensitive Online Classification". In this paper, we formally study this problem, and propose a new framework for Cost-Sensitive Online Classification by directly optimizing cost-sensitive measures using online gradient descent techniques. Specifically, we propose two novel cost-sensitive online classification algorithms, which are designed to directly optimize two well-known cost-sensitive measures: (i) maximization of weighted sum of sensitivity and specificity, and (ii) minimization of weighted misclassification cost. We analyze the theoretical bounds of …

Structural And Functional Analysis Of Multi-Interface Domains, Liang Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Limsoon Wong, Tobias Hamp, Jinyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A multi-interface domain is a domain that can shape multiple and distinctive binding sites to contact with many other domains, forming a hub in domain-domain interaction networks. The functions played by the multiple interfaces are usually different, but there is no strict bijection between the functions and interfaces as some subsets of the interfaces play the same function. This work applies graph theory and algorithms to discover fingerprints for the multiple interfaces of a domain and to establish associations between the interfaces and functions, based on a huge set of multi-interface proteins from PDB. We found that about 40% of …

A Survey Of Recommender Systems In Twitter, Su Mon Kywe, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a social information network where short messages or tweets are shared among a large number of users through a very simple messaging mechanism. With a population of more than 100M users generating more than 300M tweets each day, Twitter users can be easily overwhelmed by the massive amount of information available and the huge number of people they can interact with. To overcome the above information overload problem, recommender systems can be introduced to help users make the appropriate selection. Researchers have began to study recommendation problems in Twitter but their works usually address individual recommendation tasks. There …

Extracting And Normalizing Entity-Actions From Users' Comments, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing popularity of opinion-rich resources on the Web, new opportunities and challenges arise and aid people in actively using such information to understand the opinions of others. Opinion mining process currently focuses on extracting the sentiments of the users on products, social, political and economical issues. In many instances, users not only express their sentiments but also contribute their ideas, requests and suggestions through comments. Such comments are useful for domain experts and are referred to as actionable content. Extracting actionable knowledge from online social media has attracted a growing interest from both academia and the industry. We …

B-Cell Epitope Prediction Through A Graph Model, Liang Zhao, Limsoon Wong, Lanyuan Lu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jinyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prediction of B-cell epitopes from antigens is useful to understand the immune basis of antibody-antigen recognition, and is helpful in vaccine design and drug development. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to this long-studied problem, however, existing methods have at least two common limitations. One is that they only favor prediction of those epitopes with protrusive conformations, but show poor performance in dealing with planar epitopes. The other limit is that they predict all of the antigenic residues of an antigen as belonging to one single epitope even when multiple non-overlapping epitopes of an antigen exist.