Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Rumor Detection On Twitter With Tree-Structured Recursive Neural Networks, Jing Ma, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment expression in microblog posts can be affected by user’s personal character, opinion bias, political stance and so on. Most of existing personalized microblog sentiment classification methods suffer from the insufficiency of discriminative tweets for personalization learning. We observed that microblog users have consistent individuality and opinion bias in different languages. Based on this observation, in this paper we propose a novel user-attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with adversarial cross-lingual learning framework. The user attention mechanism is leveraged in CNN model to capture user’s language-specific individuality from the posts. Then the attention-based CNN model is incorporated into a novel …

Analysis Of Public Transportation Patterns In A Densely Populated City With Station-Based Shared Bikes, Di Wang, Evan Wu, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Densely populated cities face great challenges of high transportation demand and limited physical space. Thus, in these cities, the public transportation system is heavily relied on. Conventional public transportation modes such as bus, taxi and subway have been globally deployed over the past century. In the last decade, a new type of public transportation mode, shared bike, emerged in many cities. These shared bikes are deployed by either government-regulated or profit-driven companies and are either station-based or station-less. Nonetheless, all of them are designed to better solve the last-mile problem in densely populated cities as complements to the conventional public …

Detecting Personal Intake Of Medicine From Twitter, Debanjan Mahata, Jasper Friedrichs, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mining social media messages such as tweets, blogs, and Facebook posts for health and drug related information has received significant interest in pharmacovigilance research. Social media sites (e.g., Twitter), have been used for monitoring drug abuse, adverse reactions to drug usage, and analyzing expression of sentiments related to drugs. Most of these studies are based on aggregated results from a large population rather than specific sets of individuals. In order to conduct studies at an individual level or specific groups of people, identifying posts mentioning intake of medicine by the user is necessary. Toward this objective we develop a classifier …

Knowledge-Aware Attentive Neural Network For Ranking Question Answer Pairs, Ying Shen, Yang Deng, Min Yang, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Kai Lei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranking question answer pairs has attracted increasing attention recently due to its broad applications such as information retrieval and question answering (QA). Significant progresses have been made by deep neural networks. However, background information and hidden relations beyond the context, which play crucial roles in human text comprehension, have received little attention in recent deep neural networks that achieve the state of the art in ranking QA pairs. In the paper, we propose KABLSTM, a Knowledge-aware Attentive Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, which leverages external knowledge from knowledge graphs (KG) to enrich the representational learning of QA sentences. Specifically, we develop …

Effect Of Gamification On Intrinsic Motivation, Edna Chan, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Qizhang Liu, Zhiwei Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gamification has been increasing in popularity in a variety of online context, including online learning. However, its impact on intrinsic motivation is still unclear. In this research, we carried out an experiment to assess the impact of providing two gamification features in an online learning system – point and leaderboard – on intrinsic motivation.

An Effectual Approach For The Development Of Novel Applications On Digital Platforms, Onkar Shamrao Malgonde

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The development of novel software applications on digital platforms differs from traditional software development and provides unique challenges to the software development manager and team. Application producers must achieve application-platform match, application-market match, value propositions exceeding platform’s core value propositions, and novelty. These desired properties support a new vision of the software development team as entrepreneurs with a goal of developing novel applications on digital platforms. Digital platforms are characterized by an uncertain, risky, and resource-constrained environment, where existing approaches—plan-driven, ad-hoc, and controlled-flexible—have limited applicability. Building on the theoretical basis of the theory of effectuation from the entrepreneurship domain, this …

Querying Large Databases, Nathan Beneke

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates two approaches to improving query times on large relational databases. The first technique capitalizes on the knowledge of a database's structures and properties one typically has. This technique can execute some queries exactly in a constant, bounded amount of time. When this technique cannot be used to exactly execute a query we show how it can still be used to drastically lower the run-time on the query while getting a good approximation of the exact result. We also discuss the complexity of deciding whether a query is evaluable in this way, both theoretically and practically. The second …

Tanzanian Adolescents In The Digital Age Of Cell Phones And The Internet: Access, Use And Risks, Hezron Zacharia Onditi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This study explored cell phones and internet access, use, and potential risks among Tanzanian secondary school adolescents. A total of 778 students aged 14-18 in Form I to Form IV responded to a self-report questionnaire, and a subset of 20 participants participated in semi-structured interviews. Results revealed a remarkable uptake of cell phones and internet technologies among Tanzanian adolescents. In particular, whereas about 50% of the students reported to own cell phones (nearly 60% own simcards), 76% admitted using cell phones at home, and 86% reported to connect to the Internet. Results showed that male and older adolescents seem to …

Deaddrop: Message Passing Without Metadata Leakage, Davis Mike Arndt

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Even when network data is encrypted, observers can make inferences about content based on collected metadata. DeadDrop is an exploratory API designed to protect the metadata of a conversation from both outside observers and the facilitating server. To do so, DeadDrop servers are passed no recipient address, instead relying upon the recipient to check for messages of their own volition. In addition, the recipient downloads a copy of every encrypted message on the server to prevent even the server from knowing to whom each message is intended. To these purposes, DeadDrop is mostly successful. However, it does not obscure all …

Augmented Personalized Health: Using Semantically Integrated Multimodal Data For Patient Empowered Health Management Strategies, Amit P. Sheth, Hong Y. Yip, Utkarshani Jaimini, Dipesh Kadariya, Vaikunth Sridharan, R. Venkataramanan, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Maninder Kalra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Healthcare as we know it is in the process of going through a massive change from:

1. Episodic to continuous

2. Disease-focused to wellness and quality of life focused

3. Clinic-centric to anywhere a patient is

4. Clinician controlled to patient empowered

5. Being driven by limited data to 360-degree, multimodal personal-public-population physical-cyber-social big data-driven URL: https://mhealth.md2k.org/2018-tech-showcase-home

From 2,772 Segments To Five Personas: Summarizing A Diverse Online Audience By Generating Culturally Adapted Personas, Joni Salminen, Sercan Sengun, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyu Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding users in the era of social media is challenging, requiring organizations to adopt novel computation-aided approaches. To exemplify such an approach, we retrieved information on millions of interactions with YouTube video content from a major Middle Eastern media outlet, to automatically generate personas that capture how different audience segments interact with thousands of individual content pieces. Then, we used qualitative data to provide additional insights into the automatically generated persona profiles. Our findings provide insights into social media usage in the Middle East and demonstrate the application of a novel methodology that generates culturally adapted personas of social media …

The Effect Of Endgame Tablebases On Modern Chess Engines, Christopher D. Peterson

Computer Engineering

Modern chess engines have the ability to augment their evaluation by using massive tables containing billions of positions and their memorized solutions. This report examines the importance of these tables to better understand the circumstances under which they should be used. The analysis conducted in this paper empirically examines differences in size and speed of memorized positions and their impacts on engine strength. Using this technique, situations where memorized tables improve play (and situations where they do not) are discovered.

Verifiably Encrypted Cascade-Instantiable Blank Signatures To Secure Progressive Decision Management, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce the notion of verifiably encrypted cascade-instantiable blank signatures (CBS) in a multi-user setting. In CBS, there is a delegation chain that starts with an originator and is followed by a sequence of proxies. The originator creates and signs a template, which may comprise fixed fields and exchangeable fields. Thereafter, each proxy along the delegation chain is able to make an instantiation of the template from the choices passed down from her direct predecessor, before generating a signature for her instantiation. First, we present a non-interactive basic CBS construction that does not rely on any shared …

Libraryguru: Api Recommendation For Android Developers, Weizhao Yuan, Hoang H. Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Yuting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developing modern mobile applications often require the uses of many libraries specific for the mobile platform, which can be overwhelmingly too many for application developers to find what are needed for a functionality and where and how to use them properly. This paper presents a tool, named LibraryGuru, to recommend suitable Android APIs for given functionality descriptions. It not only recommends functional APIs that can be invoked for implementing the functionality, but also recommends event callback APIs that are inherent in the Android framework and need to be overridden in the application. LibraryGuru internally builds correlation databases among various functionality …

An Economic Analysis Of Disintermediation On Crowdfunding Platforms, Jianqing Chen, Ling Ge, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prosocial crowdfunding platforms can work through direct peer-to-peer (P2P) lending or through intermediaries, incurring different costs to borrowers and lenders. This study investigates the incentives of lenders and borrowers’ and how they would choose between the two types of platforms. We model the intermediary as a profit maximizer who filters projects, provides high quality borrowers with access to the platform, and ensures repayment rate to lenders. Our initial findings suggest that the introduction of direct P2P lending platform enables the intermediary to reduce its interest rate and to raise its screening threshold on the intermediated platform. The P2P lending platform …

Assessing The Accuracy Of Four Popular Face Recognition Tools For Inferring Gender, Age, And Race, Soon-Gyu Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate four widely used face detection tools, which are Face++, IBM Bluemix Visual Recognition, AWS Rekognition, and Microsoft Azure Face API, using multiple datasets to determine their accuracy in inferring user attributes, including gender, race, and age. Results show that the tools are generally proficient at determining gender, with accuracy rates greater than 90%, except for IBM Bluemix. Concerning race, only one of the four tools provides this capability, Face++, with an accuracy rate of greater than 90%, although the evaluation was performed on a high-quality dataset. Inferring age appears to be a challenging problem, as …

Column Generation Approach For Feeder Vessel Routing And Synchronization At A Congested Transshipment Port, Jian G. Jin, Qiang Meng, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With increasing container-shipping traffic in major transshipment ports, unsynchronized shipping services at hub ports usually lead to loss of transshipment connections, significant vessel port-stay time, and congestion. This calls for the design of feeder vessel services to pick up from and deliver containers to neighboring local ports, and, at the same time, synchronize them with long-haul services in a manner that enables efficient container transshipment. In this paper, we present a mixed integer linear programming model to optimize the feeder vessel routes and hub port synchronization with an objective to minimize the total operating and connection cost. We exploit the …

On The Fintech Revolution: Interpreting The Forces Of Innovation, Disruption And Transformation In Financial Services, Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, Bruce W. Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Firms in the financial services industry have been faced with the dramatic and relatively recentemergence of new technology innovations, and process disruptions. The industry as a whole, and many newfintech start-ups are looking for new pathways to successful business models, the creation of enhanced customerexperience, and new approaches that result in services transformation. Industry and academic observers believethis to be more of a revolution than a set of less impactful changes, with financial services as a whole due formajor improvements in efficiency, in customer centricity and informedness. The long-standing dominance ofleading firms that are not able to figure out how …

Social Stream Classification With Emerging New Labels, Xin Mu, Feida Zhu, Yue Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an important research topic with well-recognized practical values, classification of social streams has been identified with increasing popularity with social data, such as the tweet stream generated by Twitter users in chronological order. A salient, and perhaps also the most interesting, feature of such user-generated content is its never-failing novelty, which, unfortunately, would challenge most traditional pre-trained classification models as they are built based on fixed label set and would therefore fail to identify new labels as they emerge. In this paper, we study the problem of classification of social streams with emerging new labels, and propose a novel …

A Proposal For A Decentralized Liquidity Savings Mechanism With Side Payments, Adam Fugal, Rodney Garratt, Zhiling Guo, Dave Hudson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most countries, the central bank provides the medium to physically settle the smallest payments (cash) and the means to electronically settle the largest payments, which typically are wholesale payments between banks. For the latter purpose the central bank usually operates a system through which banks can settle payments in central bank money. Historically, interbank payments were settled via (end of day) netting systems, but as volumes and values increased central banks became worried about the risks inherent in deferred net settlement systems, so most central banks opted for the implementation of a Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system. With …

The Wider Impact Of A National Cryptocurrency, Dennis Ng, Paul Griffin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study looks at the impact of a national cryptocurrency on the payment landscape in the midst of the rise of globalpublic cryptocurrencies and interest from central banks in a possible national cryptocurrency. The impacts are analysed for consumers, merchants, banks,payment providers, international money transfer operators and central banks.The study analyses the pros and cons for each player with an overall impactranking. There is a particular emphasis on central banks as they hold key regulatory oversight for economic and financial matters affecting a country.Whilst finding that there is an overall benefit, there are also significant risks. A sandbox approach is …

Applying Spatial Database Techniques To Other Domains: A Case Study On Top-K And Computational Geometric Operators, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this seminar, we will explore how processing rich spatial data is not the only practical (and research-wise promising) application domain for traditional spatial database techniques. An equally promising direction, possibly with low-hanging fruits for research innovation, may be to apply the spatial data management expertise of our community to non-spatial types of queries, and to extend standard, more theoretical operators to large scale datasets with the objective of practical solutions (as opposed to favorable asymptotic complexity alone). As a case study, we will review spatial database work on top-k-related operators (i.e., non-spatial problems) and how it integrates fundamental computational …

Region-Aware Reflection Removal With Unified Content And Gradient Priors, Renjie Wan, Boxin Shi, Ling-Yu Duan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Wen Gao, Alex C. Kot

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Removing the undesired reflections in images taken through the glass is of broad application to various image processing and computer vision tasks. Existing single image-based solutions heavily rely on scene priors such as separable sparse gradients caused by different levels of blur, and they are fragile when such priors are not observed. In this paper, we notice that strong reflections usually dominant a limited region in the whole image, and propose a region-aware reflection removal approach by automatically detecting and heterogeneously processing regions with and without reflections. We integrate content and gradient priors to jointly achieve missing contents restoration, as …

Automatically Conceptualizing Social Media Analytics Data Via Personas, Jung S.G., Salminen J., An J., Kwak H., Jansen B.J.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media analytics is insightful but can also be difficult to use within organizations. To address this, we present Automatic Persona Generation (APG), a system and methodology for quantitatively generating personas using large amounts of online social media data. The APG system is operational, deployed in a pilot version with several organizations in multiple industry verticals. APG uses a robust web and stable back-end database framework to process tens of millions of user interactions with thousands of online digital products on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube. APG identifies both distinct and impactful audience segments for an organization …

How Does Developer Interaction Relate To Software Quality? An Examination Of Product Development Data, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Industrial software systems are being increasingly developed by large and distributed teams. Tools like collaborative development environments (CDE) are used to facilitate interaction between members of such teams, with the expectation that social factors around the interaction would facilitate team functioning. In this paper, we first identify typically social characteristics of interaction in a software development team: reachability, connection, association, and clustering. We then examine how these factors relate to the quality of software produced by a team, in terms of the number of defects, through an empirical study of 70+ teams, involving 900+ developers in total, spread across 30+ …

Crrn: Multi-Scale Guided Concurrent Reflection Removal Network, Renjie Wan, Boxin Shi, Ling-Yu Duan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Alex C. Kot

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Removing the undesired reflections from images taken through the glass is of broad application to various computer vision tasks. Non-learning based methods utilize different handcrafted priors such as the separable sparse gradients caused by different levels of blurs, which often fail due to their limited description capability to the properties of real-world reflections. In this paper, we propose the Concurrent Reflection Removal Network (CRRN) to tackle this problem in a unified framework. Our proposed network integrates image appearance information and multi-scale gradient information with human perception inspired loss function, and is trained on a new dataset with 3250 reflection images …

Covariance Pooling For Facial Expression Recognition, D. Acharya, Zhiwu Huang, D. Paudel, Gool L. Van

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying facial expressions into different categories requires capturing regional distortions of facial landmarks. We believe that second-order statistics such as covariance is better able to capture such distortions in regional facial features. In this work, we explore the benefits of using a manifold network structure for covariance pooling to improve facial expression recognition. In particular, we first employ such kind of manifold networks in conjunction with traditional convolutional networks for spatial pooling within individual image feature maps in an end-to-end deep learning manner. By doing so, we are able to achieve a recognition accuracy of 58.14% on the validation set …

Virtual Smarts - Optimizing The Coalescing Of People For Collective Action Within Urban Communities, Stephen Thomas Ricken

Dissertations

Despite the importance of individuals coming together for social group-activities (e.g., pick-up volleyball), the process by which such groups coalesce is poorly understood, and as a consequence is poorly supported by technology. This is despite the emergence of Event-Based Social Network (EBSN) technologies that are specifically designed to assist group coalescing for social activities. Existing theories focus on group development in terms of norms and types, rather than the processes involved in initial group coalescence. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature through four studies focusing on understanding the coalescing process for interest-based group activities within urban environments and …

Recta: Regulon Identification Based On Comparative Genomics And Transcriptomics Analysis, Xin Chen, Anjun Ma, Adam Mcdermaid, Hanyuan Zhang, Chao Liu, Huansheng Cao, Qin Ma

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Regulons, which serve as co-regulated gene groups contributing to the transcriptional regulation of microbial genomes, have the potential to aid in understanding of underlying regulatory mechanisms. In this study, we designed a novel computational pipeline, regulon identification based on comparative genomics and transcriptomics analysis (RECTA), for regulon prediction related to the gene regulatory network under certain conditions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this tool, we implemented RECTA on Lactococcus lactis MG1363 data to elucidate acid-response regulons. A total of 51 regulons were identified, 14 of which have computational-verified significance. Among these 14 regulons, five of them were computationally predicted to …

Semantic Data Storage In Information Systems, Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu, Raoul Kwuimi

The African Journal of Information Systems

The storage and retrieval of information are important functions of information systems (IS). These IS functions have been realized for decades, due to the maturity of the relational database technology. In recent years, the concept of Semantic Information System (SIS) has emerged as IS in which information is represented with explicit semantic based on its meaning rather than its syntax to enable its automatic and intelligent processing by computers. At present, there is a shortage of discussions on the topic of semantic data storage in IS as compared to the relational database storage counterpart. This study uses a combination of …