Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

From Retweet To Believability: Utilizing Trust To Identify Rumor Spreaders On Twitter, Bhavtosh Rath, Wei Gao, Jing Ma, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ubiquitous use of social media such as microblogging platforms brings about ample opportunities for the false information to diffuse online. It is very important not just to determine the veracity of information but also the authenticity of the users who spread the information, especially in time-critical situations like real-world emergencies, where urgent measures have to be taken for stopping the spread of fake information. In this work, we propose a novel machine learning based approach for automatic identification of the users spreading rumorous information by leveraging the concept of believability, i.e., the extent to which the propagated information is likely …

A Case Study For Ecampus Spatial: Business Data Exploration, James Carswell, Thanh Thao Pham Ti, Andrea Ballatore, Junjun Yin, Linh Truong-Hong

Books/Book chapters

Location based querying is the core interaction paradigm between mobile citizens and the Internet of Things, so providing users with intelligent web-services that interact efficiently with web and wireless devices to recommend personalised services is a key goal. With today's popular Web Map Services, users can ask for general information at a specific location, but not detailed information such as related functionality or environments. This shortcoming comes from a lack of connection between non-spatial “business” data and spatial “map” data. This chapter presents a novel approach for location-based querying in web and wireless environments, in which non-spatial business data is …

Database Management System For Byuh Jonathan Napela Center, Olivia K. F. Moleni

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to build a database management system (DBMS) for the Jonathan Napela Center department. The Napela Center is a department for students who are majoring or minoring in Hawaiian Studies and/or Pacific Island Studies. Currently the Napela Center uses Microsoft Excel as their DBMS to store and track both current and past student information. Unfortunately, this system hasn’t been working well for them due to unreliable information, limited user access and sometime can get too complex with too much data. So the director of the department decided to seek for another system.

This paper will …

Don’T Bury Your Head In Warnings: A Game-Theoretic Approach For Intelligent Allocation Of Cyber-Security Alerts, Aaron Schlenker, Haifeng Xu, Mina Guirguis, Christopher Kiekintveld, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe, Solomon Sonya, Darryl Balderas, Noah Dunstatter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, there have been a number of successful cyber attacks on enterprise networks by malicious actors which have caused severe damage. These networks have Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems in place to protect them, but they are notorious for producing a high volume of alerts. These alerts must be investigated by cyber analysts to determine whether they are an attack or benign. Unfortunately, there are magnitude more alerts generated than there are cyber analysts to investigate them. This trend is expected to continue into the future creating a need for tools which find optimal assignments of the incoming …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Cis 3367 (Spreadsheet Applications In Business), Soniya Dsouza

Open Educational Resources

The primary focus of this course is to learn how to construct and use powerful spreadsheets for effective managerial decision-making. This course is mostly project- oriented with a dual focus on spreadsheet engineering and quantitative modeling of financial applications. Students will learn to develop powerful spreadsheet models and perform data analysis using Pivot Tables, VLookUp, Data Validation techniques and Sub Total functions. Students will also learn how to enhance spreadsheets by creating dashboards on financial data. The Visual Basic (macro) concepts will also be introduced to students. With the knowledge and hands-on experience of these concepts, students will be prepared …

Ged: Moving Into The Electronic Age, Kateri Montileaux

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to find a direction as the Community Continuing Education/General Education Diploma (CCE/GED) department goes into the electronic age. Not only has the General Education Diploma test become computer based, the process of studying, preparing and communicating has also required one to use desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones, email, and webinars daily. The goal is to promote the department and its services to the younger generation (18-25 years old) who are completely comfortable using electronic devices, and to the older generation (40+years) who may know a little bit of electronic communicating but who are …

Dynamic Adversarial Mining - Effectively Applying Machine Learning In Adversarial Non-Stationary Environments., Tegjyot Singh Sethi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While understanding of machine learning and data mining is still in its budding stages, the engineering applications of the same has found immense acceptance and success. Cybersecurity applications such as intrusion detection systems, spam filtering, and CAPTCHA authentication, have all begun adopting machine learning as a viable technique to deal with large scale adversarial activity. However, the naive usage of machine learning in an adversarial setting is prone to reverse engineering and evasion attacks, as most of these techniques were designed primarily for a static setting. The security domain is a dynamic landscape, with an ongoing never ending arms race …

Pivot-Based Metric Indexing, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Christian S. Jensen, Hanyu Yang, Keyu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The general notion of a metric space encompasses a diverse range of data types and accompanying similarity measures. Hence, metric search plays an important role in a wide range of settings, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, and data integration. With the aim of accelerating metric search, a collection of pivot-based indexing techniques for metric data has been proposed, which reduces the number of potentially expensive similarity comparisons by exploiting the triangle inequality for pruning and validation. However, no comprehensive empirical study of those techniques exists. Existing studies each offers only a narrower coverage, and they use different pivot selection strategies …

Large-Scale Online Feature Selection For Ultra-High Dimensional Sparse Data, Yue Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Tao Mei, Nenghai Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Feature selection (FS) is an important technique in machine learning and data mining, especially for large scale high-dimensional data. Most existing studies have been restricted to batch learning, which is often inefficient and poorly scalable when handling big data in real world. As real data may arrive sequentially and continuously, batch learning has to retrain the model for the new coming data, which is very computationally intensive. Online feature selection (OFS) is a promising new paradigm that is more efficient and scalable than batch learning algorithms. However, existing online algorithms usually fall short in their inferior efficacy. In this article, …

Modeling Trajectories With Recurrent Neural Networks, Hao Wu, Ziyang Chen, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling trajectory data is a building block for many smart-mobility initiatives. Existing approaches apply shallow models such as Markov chain and inverse reinforcement learning to model trajectories, which cannot capture the long-term dependencies. On the other hand, deep models such as Recurrent Neura lNetwork (RNN) have demonstrated their strength of modeling variable length sequences. However, directly adopting RNN to model trajectories is not appropriate because of the unique topological constraints faced by trajectories. Motivated by these findings, we design two RNN-based models which can make full advantage of the strength of RNN to capture variable length sequence and meanwhile to …

Deepfacade: A Deep Learning Approach To Facade Parsing, Hantang Liu, Jialiang Zhang, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The parsing of building facades is a key component to the problem of 3D street scenes reconstruction, which is long desired in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based method for segmenting a facade into semantic categories. Man-made structures often present the characteristic of symmetry. Based on this observation, we propose a symmetric regularizer for training the neural network. Our proposed method can make use of both the power of deep neural networks and the structure of man-made architectures. We also propose a method to refine the segmentation results using bounding boxes generated by the Region …

Can Syntax Help? Improving An Lstm-Based Sentence Compression Model For New Domains, Liangguo Wang, Jing Jiang, Hai Leong Chieu, Chen Hui Ong, Dandan Song, Lejian Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study how to improve thedomain adaptability of a deletion-basedLong Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neuralnetwork model for sentence compression.We hypothesize that syntactic informationhelps in making such modelsmore robust across domains. We proposetwo major changes to the model: usingexplicit syntactic features and introducingsyntactic constraints through Integer LinearProgramming (ILP). Our evaluationshows that the proposed model works betterthan the original model as well as a traditionalnon-neural-network-based modelin a cross-domain setting.

Real-Time Influence Maximization On Dynamic Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence maximization (IM), which selects a set of k users(called seeds) to maximize the influence spread over a social network, is a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications such as viral marketing and network monitoring.Existing IM solutions fail to consider the highly dynamic nature of social influence, which results in either poor seed qualities or long processing time when the network evolves.To address this problem, we define a novel IM query named Stream Influence Maximization (SIM) on social streams.Technically, SIM adopts the sliding window model and maintains a set of k seeds with the largest influence value over …

A Research Stream On Sentiment Analysis, B. Yuan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis (SA) is a powerful mining technique to study online reviews and comments (Lee & Siau, 2001; Adeborna & Siau, 2014; Zhao & Siau, 2017). It is an advanced text mining technique and the goal of SA is to recognize and extract meaningful information from data using natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics.SA has been applied to areas such as marketing, online social media, customer service, education, and even energy fields (Yuan & Siau, 2017). For example, SA can be used to identify the attitude of customers according to polarity of the reviews and comments that they left …

Object Detection Meets Knowledge Graphs, Yuan Fang, Kingsley Kuan, Jie Lin, Cheston Tan, Vijay Chandrasekhar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Object detection in images is a crucial task in computer vision, with important applications ranging from security surveillance to autonomous vehicles. Existing state-of-the-art algorithms, including deep neural networks, only focus on utilizing features within an image itself, largely neglecting the vast amount of background knowledge about the real world. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of knowledge-aware object detection, which enables the integration of external knowledge such as knowledge graphs into any object detection algorithm. The framework employs the notion of semantic consistency to quantify and generalize knowledge, which improves object detection through a re-optimization process to achieve …

Embedding-Based Representation Of Categorical Data By Hierarchical Value Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Longbing Cao, Guansong Pang, Kai Lu, Hang Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning the representation of categorical data with hierarchical value coupling relationships is very challenging but critical for the effective analysis and learning of such data. This paper proposes a novel coupled unsupervised categorical data representation (CURE) framework and its instantiation, i.e., a coupled data embedding (CDE) method, for representing categorical data by hierarchical value-to-value cluster coupling learning. Unlike existing embedding- and similarity-based representation methods which can capture only a part or none of these complex couplings, CDE explicitly incorporates the hierarchical couplings into its embedding representation. CDE first learns two complementary feature value couplings which are then used to cluster …

On Efficiently Finding Reverse K-Nearest Neighbors Over Uncertain Graphs, Yunjun Gao, Xiaoye Miao, Gang Chen, Baihua Zheng, Deng Cai, Huiyong Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reverse k-nearest neighbor (RkNN) query on graphs returns the data objects that take a specified query object q as one of their k-nearest neighbors. It has significant influence in many real-life applications including resource allocation and profile-based marketing. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is little previous work on RkNN search over uncertain graph data, even though many complex networks such as traffic networks and protein–protein interaction networks are often modeled as uncertain graphs. In this paper, we systematically study the problem of reversek-nearest neighbor search on uncertain graphs (UG-RkNN search for short), where graph edges contain uncertainty. …

Basket-Sensitive Personalized Item Recommendation, Duc Trong Le, Hady W. Lauw, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Personalized item recommendation is useful in narrowing down the list of options provided to a user. In this paper, we address the problem scenario where the user is currently holding a basket of items, and the task is to recommend an item to be added to the basket. Here, we assume that items currently in a basket share some association based on an underlying latent need, e.g., ingredients to prepare some dish, spare parts of some device. Thus, it is important that a recommended item is relevant not only to the user, but also to the existing items in the …

Using Cognitive Maps Of Mental Models To Evaluate Learning Challenges: A Case Study, Z. Shen, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mental models are organized knowledge structures that individuals form to make sense of the world around them. Cognitive maps are the externalized portrayals of mental models in graphical format. Mental models and cognitive maps have been used as an instructional design method, an assessment tool, and a learning strategy in college education. In this paper, we propose a novel use of mental models and cognitive maps as a device to elicit students’ challenges in learning course materials. Our case study in an Information Systems class illustrates how cognitive maps are constructed from students’ mental models, how learning challenges are identified …

Semantic Visualization For Short Texts With Word Embeddings, Van Minh Tuan Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic visualization integrates topic modeling and visualization, such that every document is associated with a topic distribution as well as visualization coordinates on a low-dimensional Euclidean space. We address the problem of semantic visualization for short texts. Such documents are increasingly common, including tweets, search snippets, news headlines, or status updates. Due to their short lengths, it is difficult to model semantics as the word co-occurrences in such a corpus are very sparse. Our approach is to incorporate auxiliary information, such as word embeddings from a larger corpus, to supplement the lack of co-occurrences. This requires the development of a …

Integrating Apache Spark And R For Big Data Analytics On Solving Geographic Problems, Mengqi Zhang, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent ofdigital technology and smart devices, a flood of digital data is beinggenerated every day. This huge amount of data not only records the historyactivities but also provides future valuable information for organizations andbusinesses. However, the true values of these data will not be fullyappreciated until they have been processed, analyzed and the analysis resultsbeen communicated to decision makers in a business friendly manner.In view of thisneed, big data has been one of the major research focus in the academicresearch community especially in the field of computer science and the softwarevendor as well as the big data service …

Accelerating Dynamic Graph Analytics On Gpus, Mo Shan, Yuchen Li, Bingsheng He, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As graph analytics often involves compute-intensive operations,GPUs have been extensively used to accelerate the processing. However, in many applications such as social networks, cyber security, and fraud detection, their representative graphs evolve frequently and one has to perform are build of the graph structure on GPUs to incorporate the updates. Hence, rebuilding the graphs becomes the bottleneck of processing high-speed graph streams. In this paper,we propose a GPU-based dynamic graph storage scheme to support existing graph algorithms easily. Furthermore,we propose parallel update algorithms to support efficient stream updates so that the maintained graph is immediately available for high-speed analytic processing …

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative …

Recommendation Vs Sentiment Analysis: A Text-Driven Latent Factor Model For Rating Prediction With Cold-Start Awareness, Kaisong Song, Wei Gao, Shi Feng Feng, Daling Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Chengqi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Review rating prediction is an important research topic. The problem was approached from either the perspective of recommender systems (RS) or that of sentiment analysis (SA). Recent SA research using deep neural networks (DNNs) has realized the importance of user and product interaction for better interpreting the sentiment of reviews. However, the complexity of DNN models in terms of the scale of parameters is very high, and the performance is not always satisfying especially when user-product interaction is sparse. In this paper, we propose a simple, extensible RS-based model, called Text-driven Latent Factor Model (TLFM), to capture the semantics of …

Indexing Metric Uncertain Data For Range Queries And Range Joins, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Aoxiao Zhong, Christian S. Jensen, Gang Chen, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Range queries and range joins in metric spaces have applications in many areas, including GIS, computational biology, and data integration, where metric uncertain data exist in different forms, resulting from circumstances such as equipment limitations, high-throughput sequencing technologies, and privacy preservation. We represent metric uncertain data by using an object-level model and a bi-level model, respectively. Two novel indexes, the uncertain pivot B+-tree (UPB-tree) and the uncertain pivot B+-forest (UPB-forest), are proposed in order to support probabilistic range queries and range joins for a wide range of uncertain data types and similarity metrics. Both index structures use a small set …

Time-Aware Conversion Prediction, Wendi Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of product recommendation has been well recognized as a central task in business intelligence for e-commerce websites. Interestingly, what has been less aware of is the fact that different products take different time periods for conversion. The “conversion” here refers to actually a more general set of pre-defined actions, including for example purchases or registrations in recommendation and advertising systems. The mismatch between the product’s actual conversion period and the application’s target conversion period has been the subtle culprit compromising many existing recommendation algorithms.The challenging question: what products should be recommended for a given time period to maximize …

Geometric Approaches For Top-K Queries [Tutorial], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Top-k processing is a well-studied problem with numerous applications that is becoming increasingly relevant with the growing availability of recommendation systems and decision-making software. The objective of this tutorial is twofold. First, we will delve into the geometric aspects of top-k processing. Second, we will cover complementary features to top-k queries, with strong practical relevance and important applications, that have a computational geometric nature. The tutorial will close with insights in the effect of dimensionality on the meaningfulness of top-k queries, and interesting similarities to nearest neighbor search.

Smartphone Sensing Meets Transport Data: A Collaborative Framework For Transportation Service Analytics, Yu Lu, Archan Misra, Wen Sun, Huayu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for and introduce TRANSense, a framework for urban transportation service analytics that combines participatory smartphone sensing data with city-scale transportation-related transactional data (taxis, trains etc.). Our work is driven by the observed limitations of using each data type in isolation: (a) commonly-used anonymous city-scale datasets (such as taxi bookings and GPS trajectories) provide insights into the aggregate behavior of transport infrastructure, but fail to reveal individual-specific transport experiences (e.g., wait times in taxi queues); while (b) mobile sensing data can capture individual-specific commuting-related activities, but suffers from accuracy and energy overhead challenges due to usage artefacts and lack …

Secure Encrypted Data Deduplication With Ownership Proof And User Revocation, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud storage as one of the most important cloud services enables cloud users to save more data without enlarging its own storage. In order to eliminate repeated data and improve the utilization of storage, deduplication is employed to cloud storage. Due to the concern about data security and user privacy, encryption is introduced, but incurs new challenge to cloud data deduplication. Existing work cannot achieve flexible access control and user revocation. Moreover, few of them can support efficient ownership proof, especially public verifiability of ownership. In this paper, we propose a secure encrypted data deduplication scheme with effective ownership proof …

Sparse Online Learning Of Image Similarity, Xingyu Gao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Yongdong Zhang, Jianshe Zhou, Ji Wan, Zhenyu Chen, Jintao Li, Jianke Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning image similarity plays a critical role in real-world multimedia information retrieval applications, especially in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) tasks, in which an accurate retrieval of visually similar objects largely relies on an effective image similarity function. Crafting a good similarity function is very challenging because visual contents of images are often represented as feature vectors in high-dimensional spaces, for example, via bag-of-words (BoW) representations, and traditional rigid similarity functions, for example, cosine similarity, are often suboptimal for CBIR tasks. In this article, we address this fundamental problem, that is, learning to optimize image similarity with sparse and high-dimensional representations …