Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Extracting Social Network From Literary Prose, Tarana Tasmin Bipasha

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops an approach to extract social networks from literary prose, namely, Jane Austen’s published novels from eighteenth- and nineteenth- century. Dialogue interaction plays a key role while we derive the networks, thus our technique relies upon our ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our process involves encoding plain literary text into the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) XML format, character name identification, conversation and co-occurrence detection, and social network construction. Previous work in social network construction for literature have focused on drama, specifically manually TEI-encoded Shakespearean plays in which character interactions are much easier to track …

Twenty Years Of Open Source Software: From Skepticism To Mainstream, Gregorio Robles, Igor Steinmacher, Paul Adams, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software (OSS) has conquered the software world. You can see it nearly everywhere, from Internet infrastructure to mobile phones to the desktop. In addition to that, although many OSS practices were viewed with skepticism 20 years ago, several have become mainstream in software engineering today: from development tools such as Git to practices such as modern code reviews.

The Dynamic Impacts Of Online Healthcare Community On Physician Altruism: A Hidden Markov Model, Kai Luo, Qiu-Hong Wang, Hock Hai Teo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Physician altruism is not only a key foundation of modern medical professionalism, but also a critical component in the theoretical health economics study. There is considerable interest in understanding the impacts of contemporary healthcare technology on physician altruism. In this paper, we investigate the dynamic influence of multiple incentive mechanisms developed by an online healthcare community (OHC) on physician altruism. We model physician altruism as the degree of tendency to benefit the patients at the cost of oneself and focus on the incentive mechanisms that give physicians social and economic returns. The dynamics of physician altruism is characterized via a …

Examining The Theoretical Mechanisms Underlying Health Information Exchange Impact On Healthcare Outcomes: A Physician Agency Perspective, Fang Zhou, Qiu-Hong Wang, Hock Hai Teo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Health information exchange (HIE) is presumed to reduce medical costs by facilitating information sharing across healthcare providers. Existing studies focused on different medical costs or one set of costs, and resulted in mixed findings. We examine the effects of patient access to HIE on two of the most important medical costs of a hospitalization episode - test costs and medication costs - through a natural experiment and the discharge data of a hospital. Besides the negative direct effect of access to HIT on tests costs, we also find its positive spillover effect on medication costs, such that more patients having …

Strongly Leakage Resilient Authenticated Key Exchange, Revisited, Guomin Yang, Rongmao Chen, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo, Guo Fuchun, Jie Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocols allow two (or multiple) parties to authenticate each other and agree on a common secret key, which is essential for establishing a secure communication channel over a public network. AKE protocols form a central component in many network security standards such as IPSec, TLS/SSL, and SSH. However, it has been demonstrated that many standardized AKE protocols are vulnerable to side-channel and key leakage attacks. In order to defend against such attacks, leakage resilient (LR-) AKE protocols have been proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, most of the existing LR-AKE protocols only focused on the resistance to …

Objective Sleep Quality As A Predictor Of Mild Cognitive Impairment In Seniors Living Alone, Brian Chen, Hwee-Pink Tan, Irus Rawtaer, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Singapore has the fastest ageing population in the Asia Pacific region, with an estimated 82,000 seniors living with dementia. These figures are projected to increase to more than 130,000 by 2030. The challenge is to identify more community dwelling seniors with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a prodromal state, as it provides an opportunity for evidence-based early intervention to delay the onset of dementia. In this paper, we explore the use of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in detecting MCI symptoms in seniors who are living alone, and accurately grouping them into MCI positive and negative subjects. We present feature extraction …

Salience-Aware Adaptive Resonance Theory For Large-Scale Sparse Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sparse data is known to pose challenges to cluster analysis, as the similarity between data tends to be ill-posed in the high-dimensional Hilbert space. Solutions in the literature typically extend either k-means or spectral clustering with additional steps on representation learning and/or feature weighting. However, adding these usually introduces new parameters and increases computational cost, thus inevitably lowering the robustness of these algorithms when handling massive ill-represented data. To alleviate these issues, this paper presents a class of self-organizing neural networks, called the salience-aware adaptive resonance theory (SA-ART) model. SA-ART extends Fuzzy ART with measures for cluster-wise salient feature modeling. …

Identifying Regional Trends In Avatar Customization, Peter Mawhorter, Sercan Sengun, Haewoon Kwak, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since virtual identities such as social media profiles and avatars have become a common venue for self-expression, it has become important to consider the ways in which existing systems embed the values of their designers. In order to design virtual identity systems that reflect the needs and preferences of diverse users, understanding how the virtual identity construction differs between groups is important. This paper presents a new methodology that leverages deep learning and differential clustering for comparative analysis of profile images, with a case study of almost 100 000 avatars from a large online community using a popular avatar creation …

Gms: Grid-Based Motion Statistics For Fast, Ultra-Robust Feature Correspondence, Jia-Wang Bian, Wen-Yan Lin, Yun Liu, Le Zhang, Sai-Kit Yeung, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ian Reid

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Feature matching aims at generating correspondences across images, which is widely used in many computer vision tasks. Although considerable progress has been made on feature descriptors and fast matching for initial correspondence hypotheses, selecting good ones from them is still challenging and critical to the overall performance. More importantly, existing methods often take a long computational time, limiting their use in real-time applications. This paper attempts to separate true correspondences from false ones at high speed. We term the proposed method (GMS) grid-based motion Statistics, which incorporates the smoothness constraint into a statistic framework for separation and uses a grid-based …

Quantum Consensus, Jorden Seet, Paul Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism utilizing the quantum properties of qubits. This move from classical computing to quantum computing is shown to theoretically enhance the scalability and speed of distributed consensus as well as improve security and be a potential solution for the problem of blockchain interoperability. Using this method may circumvent the common problem known as the Blockchain Trilemma, enhancing scalability and speed without sacrificing de-centralization or byzantine fault tolerance. Consensus speed and scalability is shown by removing the need for multicast responses and exploiting quantum properties to ensure that only a single multicast is …

Influence, Information And Team Outcomes In Large Scale Software Development, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is widely perceived that the egalitarian ecosystems of large scale open source software development foster effective team outcomes. In this study, we question this conventional wisdom by examining whether and how the centralization of information and influence in a software development team relate to the quality of the team's work products. Analyzing data from more than a hundred real world projects that include development activities over close to a decade, involving 2000+ developers, who collectively resolve more than two hundred thousand defects through discussions covering more than six hundred thousand comments, we arrive at statistically significant evidence indicating that …

Clustering Models For Topic Analysis In Graduate Discussion Forums, Mallika Gokarn Nitin, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discussion forums provide the base content for creating a knowledge repository. It contains discussion threads related to key course topics that are debated by the students. In order to better understand the student learning experience, the instructor needs to analyse these discussion threads. This paper proposes the use of clustering models and interactive visualizations to conduct a qualitative analysis of graduate discussion forums. Our goal is to identify the sub-topics and topic evolutions in the discussion forums by applying text mining techniques. Our approach generates insights into the topic analysis in the forums and discovers the students’ cognitive understanding within …

Study Group Travel Behaviour Patterns From Large-Scale Smart Card Data, Xiancai Tian, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we aim at studying the group travel behaviour (GTB) patterns from large-scale auto fare collection (AFC) data. GTB is defined as two or more commuters intentionally and regularly traveling together from an origin to a destination. We propose a method to identify GTB accurately and efficiently and apply our method to the Singapore AFC dataset to reveal the GTB patterns of Singapore commuters. The case study proves that our method is able to identify GTB patterns more accurately and efficiently than the state-of-the-art.

Improved Generalisation Bounds For Deep Learning Through L∞ Covering Numbers, Antoine Ledent, Yunwen Lei, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using proof techniques involving L∞ covering numbers, we show generalisation error bounds for deep learning with two main improvements over the state of the art. First, our bounds have no explicit dependence on the number of classes except for logarithmic factors. This holds even when formulating the bounds in terms of the L 2 norm of the weight matrices, while previous bounds exhibit at least a square-root dependence on the number of classes in this case. Second, we adapt the Rademacher analysis of DNNs to incorporate weight sharing—a task of fundamental theoretical importance which was previously attempted only under very …

A Unified Variance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient Method For Convex Optimization, Guanghui Lan, Zhize Li, Yi Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a novel randomized incremental gradient algorithm, namely, VAriance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient (Varag), for finite-sum optimization. Equipped with a unified step-size policy that adjusts itself to the value of the conditional number, Varag exhibits the unified optimal rates of convergence for solving smooth convex finite-sum problems directly regardless of their strong convexity. Moreover, Varag is the first accelerated randomized incremental gradient method that benefits from the strong convexity of the data-fidelity term to achieve the optimal linear convergence. It also establishes an optimal linear rate of convergence for solving a wide class of problems only satisfying a certain error bound …

Ssrgd: Simple Stochastic Recursive Gradient Descent For Escaping Saddle Points, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad unstable saddle points. We show that a simple perturbed version of stochastic recursive gradient descent algorithm (called SSRGD) can find an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-second-order stationary point with $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{n}/\epsilon^2 + \sqrt{n}/\delta^4 + n/\delta^3)$ stochastic gradient complexity for nonconvex finite-sum problems. As a by-product, SSRGD finds an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point with $O(n+\sqrt{n}/\epsilon^2)$ stochastic gradients. These results are almost optimal since Fang et al. [2018] provided a lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{n}/\epsilon^2)$ for finding …

@Houstonpolice: An Exploratory Case Of Twitter During Hurricane Harvey, Seungwon Yang, Brenton Stewart

Faculty Publications

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public engagement efforts using Twitter during Hurricane Harvey, which was a large-scale urban crisis event.

Design/methodology/approach

This study harvested a corpus of over 13,000 tweets using Twitter’s streaming API, across three phases of the Hurricane Harvey event: preparedness, response and recovery. Both text and social network analysis (SNA) techniques were employed including word clouds, n-gram analysis and eigenvector centrality to analyze data.

Findings

Findings indicate that departmental tweets coalesced around topics of protocol, reassurance and community resilience. Twitter accounts of governmental agencies, such as …

Introducing A Mobile Health Care Platform In An Underserved Rural Population: Reducing Assimilations Gaps On Adoption And Use Via Nudges, Joseph Hodges

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rural communities are often overlooked when it comes to offering cutting edge consumer healthcare technologies. Mobile applications usually exclude populations in rural demographics due to the infrastructure requirements and available technology in the region. The population studied is a low income rural health plan in southwest Georgia. They are uniquely considered as they have the highest healthcare costs in the U.S. and are compared to healthcare costs among higher income populations like Vail, Colorado. Innovations, such as mobile healthcare applications, have the capacity to offset some of these costs, but even if adoption occurs, this does not guarantee use will …

Using Customer Service Dialogues For Satisfaction Analysis With Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning, Kaisong Song, Lidong Bing, Wei Gao, Jun Lin, Lujun Zhao, Jiancheng Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Qiong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Customers ask questions and customer service staffs answer their questions, which is the basic service model via multi-turn customer service (CS) dialogues on E-commerce platforms. Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis, namely satisfaction polarity classification (e.g., well satisfied, met and unsatisfied) and sentimental utterance identification (e.g., positive, neutral and negative). In this paper, we conduct a pilot study on the task of service satisfaction analysis (SSA) based on multi-turn CS dialogues. We propose an extensible Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (CAMIL) model to predict the sentiments of all the customer utterances and then aggregate those sentiments into service …

Evaluating Conversation Agent Impact On Student Experience In A Distance Education Course, Grover Walters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We explore the efficacy of conversation agents operating as an instructional aid in a distance education course. Two aspects of efficacy are considered—conversation agent impact on student perceptions of the experience, and how different design features of the agent affect student perceptions of engagement. Evaluation of the agent is accomplished by collecting data from 24 undergraduate participants separated into random groups. We conduct two rounds of mixedmethod evaluation. Between the two rounds, a modification to the agent occurs based on the outcome of the first evaluation. Findings include limitations related to phrasing and data persistence features of the design that …

Automatic Recall Of Software Lessons Learned For Software Project Managers, Tamer Mohamed Abdellatif Mohamed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: Lessons learned (LL) records constitute the software organization memory of successes and failures. LL are recorded within the organization repository for future reference to optimize planning, gain experience, and elevate market competitiveness. However, manually searching this repository is a daunting task, so it is often disregarded. This can lead to the repetition of previous mistakes or even missing potential opportunities. This, in turn, can negatively affect the organization’s profitability and competitiveness.

Objective: We aim to present a novel solution that provides an automatic process to recall relevant LL and to push those LL to project managers. This will dramatically …

Characterizing Instructional Leader Interactions In A Social Learning Management System Using Social Network Analysis, Orven E. Llantos, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Online learning environments are designed with specific users and respective roles in mind. However, for social systems that thrive on the interaction between and among users, important features are developed based on relationships that evolve over time. Typical learning management systems are designed with the teacher and the student as primary users of the system. my.eskwela is a social learning management system that has been designed for use in public schools in the Philippines with the inclusion of an additional user, the school administrator. Although administrators influence on student learning through mediated effects of instructional leadership, pieces of literature are …

Medtruth: A Semi-Supervised Approach To Discovering Knowledge Condition Information From Multi-Source Medical Data, Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Ying Shen, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Min Yang, Kai Lei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge Graph (KG) contains entities and the relations between entities. Due to its representation ability, KG has been successfully applied to support many medical/healthcare tasks. However, in the medical domain, knowledge holds under certain conditions. Such conditions for medical knowledge are crucial for decisionmaking in various medical applications, which is missing in existing medical KGs. In this paper, we aim to discovery medical knowledge conditions from texts to enrich KGs. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are systematized collection of clinical data and contain detailed information about patients, thus EMRs can be a good resource to discover medical knowledge conditions. Unfortunately, the …

An Online Wideband Acoustic Immittance (Wai) Database Andcorresponding Website: Resource Review, Susan E. Voss

Engineering: Faculty Publications

Wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) measures, which include absorbance, power reflectance, impedance, and other related quantities, offer an objective, noninvasive diagnostic tool for some middle-ear pathologies. An online database for normative adult WAI measures has been designed and implemented in MySQL, with the goal of enabling researchers to share and analyze data across studies.

Access database through ScholarWorks here: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/dds_data/6

Or directly here: http://www.science.smith.edu/wai-database/

Traceable Dynamic Public Auditing With Identity Privacy Preserving For Cloud Storage, Yinghui Zhang, Tiantian Zhang, Rui Guo, Shengmin Xu, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In cloud computing era, an increasing number of resource-constrained users outsource their data to cloud servers. Due to the untrustworthiness of cloud servers, it is important to ensure the integrity of outsourced data. However, most of existing solutions still have challenging issues needing to be addressed, such as the identity privacy protection of users, the traceability of users, the supporting of dynamic user operations, and the publicity of auditing. In order to tackle these issues simultaneously, in this paper, we propose a traceable dynamic public auditing scheme with identity privacy preserving for cloud storage. In the proposed scheme, a single …

Estimating Glycemic Impact Of Cooking Recipes Via Online Crowdsourcing And Machine Learning, Helena Lee, Palakorn Achananuparp, Yue Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Lav R. Varshney

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consumption of diets with low glycemic impact is highly recommended for diabetics and pre-diabetics as it helps maintain their blood glucose levels. However, laboratory analysis of dietary glycemic potency is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we explore a data-driven approach utilizing online crowdsourcing and machine learning to estimate the glycemic impact of cooking recipes. We show that a commonly used healthiness metric may not always be effective in determining recipes suitable for diabetics, thus emphasizing the importance of the glycemic-impact estimation task. Our best classification model, trained on nutritional and crowdsourced data obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), can …

Automated Theme Search In Ico Whitepapers, Chuanjie Fu, Andrew Koh, Paul Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The authors explore how topic modeling can be used to automate the categorization of initial coin offerings (ICOs) into different topics (e.g., finance, media, information, professional services, health and social, natural resources) based solely on the content within the whitepapers. This tool has been developed by fitting a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to the text extracted from the ICO whitepapers. After evaluating the automated categorization of whitepapers using statistical and human judgment methods, it is determined that there is enough evidence to conclude that the LDA model appropriately categorizes the ICO whitepapers. The results from a two-population proportion test …

Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned With Weakly Labeled Data, Yixin Cao, Zikun Hu, Tat-Seng Chua, Zhiyuan Liu, Heng Ji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Name tagging in low-resource languages or domains suffers from inadequate training data. Existing work heavily relies on additional information, while leaving those noisy annotations unexplored that extensively exist on the web. In this paper, we propose a novel neural model for name tagging solely based on weakly labeled (WL) data, so that it can be applied in any low-resource settings. To take the best advantage of all WL sentences, we split them into high-quality and noisy portions for two modules, respectively: (1) a classification module focusing on the large portion of noisy data can efficiently and robustly pretrain the tag …

Automatic Generation Of Pull Request Descriptions, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, Christoph Treude, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Enabled by the pull-based development model, developers can easily contribute to a project through pull requests (PRs). When creating a PR, developers can add a free-form description to describe what changes are made in this PR and/or why. Such a description is helpful for reviewers and other developers to gain a quick understanding of the PR without touching the details and may reduce the possibility of the PR being ignored or rejected. However, developers sometimes neglect to write descriptions for PRs. For example, in our collected dataset with over 333K PRs, more than 34% of the PR descriptions are empty. …

Ridesourcing Systems: A Framework And Review, Hai Wang, Hai Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile and wireless communication technologies, ridesourcing companies have been able to leverage internet-based platforms to operate e-hailing services in many cities around the world. These companies connect passengers and drivers in real time and are disruptively changing the transportation indus- try. As pioneers in a general sharing economy context, ridesourcing shared transportation platforms consist of a typical two-sided market. On the demand side, passengers are sensi- tive to the price and quality of the service. On the supply side, drivers, as freelancers, make working decisions flexibly based on their income from the platform …