Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Session 1 - Rationalizing The Home Front: The Cold War, The Nevada Test Site, And Radiation Exposure, Leisl A. Carr

International Symposium on Technology and Society

Beginning in 1953, radiation exposure and its effects became a hotly contested issue between the government, members of communities surrounding the Nevada Test Site (NTS), and researchers within the national scientific community. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), concerned about maintaining a continental testing facility and aware that atomic testing would impact communities surrounding the NTS, sent representatives to areas potentially affected by fallout to instruct and reassure the affected public. How government officials perceived neighboring communities and how these communities perceived these representatives of the government often determined public responses to the atomic testing program. The story of radiation monitors …

Responses To Weight Loss Treatment Among Obese Individuals With And Without Bed: A Matched-Study Meta-Analysis, Bruce E. Blaine, J. Rodman

Statistics Faculty/Staff Publications

The moderating influence of binge eating status on obese individuals’ responses to weight loss treatment was evaluated with a meta-analysis of 36 tests of weight loss treatment (n=792) that were matched to control key background variables. After controlling for pre-treatment weight, treatment produced more weight loss in samples of obese non- BED compared with obese BED participants. Weight loss treatment produced large posttreatment reductions in depression in both obese BED and non-BED samples. The results indicate that BED status moderated post-treatment weight loss among people in weight treatment programs. Obese BED (average weight loss= 1.3 kg) samples lost negligible weight …

Eesi Newsletter, No. 1, June 2007, Energy & Environmental Security Initiative (University Of Colorado Boulder)

EESI: The Energy & Environmental Security Initiative [Newsletter] (2007)

No abstract provided.

Runtime Support Of Speculative Optimization For Offline Escape Analysis, Kevin Cleereman, Michelle Cheatham, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Escape analysis can improve the speed and memory efficiency of garbage collected languages by allocating objects to the call stack, but an offline analysis will potentially interfere with dynamic class loading and an online analysis must sacrifice precision for speed. We describe a technique that permits the safe use of aggressive, speculative offline escape analysis in programs potentially loading classes that violate the analysis results.

Paraconsistent Resolution For Four-Valued Description Logics, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Li

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose an approach to translating any ALC ontology (possible inconsistent) into a logically consistent set of disjunctive datalog rules. We achieve this in two steps: First we give a simple way to make any ALC based ontology 4-valued satisfiable, and then we study a sound and complete paraconsistent ordered-resolution decision procedure for our 4-valued ALC. Our approach can be viewed as a paraconsistent version of KAON2 algorithm.

Measuring Inconsistency For Description Logics Based On Paraconsistent Semantics, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose an approach for measuring inconsistency in inconsistent ontologies. We first define the degree of inconsistency of an inconsistent ontology using a four-valued semantics for the description logic ALC. Then an ordering over inconsistent ontologies is given by considering their inconsistency degrees. Our measure of inconsistency can provide important information for inconsistency handling.

Foundations Of Refinement Operators For Description Logics, Jens Lehmann, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In order to leverage techniques from Inductive Logic Programming for the learning in description logics (DLs), which are the foundation of ontology languages in the Semantic Web, it is important to acquire a thorough understanding of the theoretical potential and limitations of using refinement operators within the description logic paradigm. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study which analyses desirable properties such operators should have. In particular, we show that ideal refinement operators in general do not exist, which is indicative of the hardness inherent in learning in DLs. We also show which combinations of desirable properties are theoretically …

A Refinement Operator Based Learning Algorithm For The Alc Description Logic, Jens Lehmann, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With the advent of the Semantic Web, description logics have become one of the most prominent paradigms for knowledge representation and reasoning. Progress in research and applications, however, faces a bottleneck due to the lack of available knowledge bases, and it is paramount that suitable automated methods for their acquisition will be developed. In this paper, we provide the first learning algorithm based on refinement operators for the most fundamental description logic ALC. We develop the algorithm from thorough theoretical foundations and report on a prototype implementation.

Selecting Labels For News Document Clusters, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni, Mastan Vali Shaik

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work deals with determination of meaningful and terse cluster labels for News document clusters. We analyze a number of alternatives for selecting headlines and/or sentences of document in a document cluster (obtained as a result of an entity-event-duration query), and formalize an approach to extracting a short phrase from well-supported headlines/sentences of the cluster that can serve as the cluster label. Our technique maps a sentence into a set of significant stems to approximate its semantics, for comparison. Eventually a cluster label is extracted from a selected headline/sentence as a contiguous sequence of words, resuscitating word sequencing information lost …

Factors Affecting Website Reconstruction From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown, Norou Diawara, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

When a website is suddenly lost without a backup, it may be reconstituted by probing web archives and search engine caches for missing content. In this paper we describe an experiment where we crawled and reconstructed 300 randomly selected websites on a weekly basis for 14 weeks. The reconstructions were performed using our web-repository crawler named Warrick which recovers missing resources from the Web Infrastructure (WI), the collective preservation effort of web archives and search engine caches. We examine several characteristics of the websites over time including birth rate, decay and age of resources. We evaluate the reconstructions when compared …

Acquisition Of Owl Dl Axioms From Lexical Resources, Johanna Volker, Pascal Hitzler, Philipp Cimiano

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

State-of-the-art research on automated learning of ontologies from text currently focuses on inexpressive ontologies. The acquisition of complex axioms involving logical connectives, role restrictions, and other expressive features of the Web Ontology Language OWL remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a method and implementation for enriching inexpressive OWL ontologies with expressive axioms which is based on a deep syntactic analysis of natural language definitions. We argue that it can serve as a core for a semi-automatic ontology engineering process supported by a methodology that integrates methods for both ontology learning and evaluation. The feasibility of our approach is …

Algorithms For Paraconsistent Reasoning With Owl, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In an open, constantly changing and collaborative environment like the forthcoming Semantic Web, it is reasonable to expect that knowledge sources will contain noise and inaccuracies. Practical reasoning techniques for ontologies therefore will have to be tolerant to this kind of data, including the ability to handle inconsistencies in a meaningful way. For this purpose, we employ paraconsistent reasoning based on four-valued logic, which is a classical method for dealing with inconsistencies in knowledge bases. Its transfer to OWL DL, however, necessitates the making of fundamental design choices in dealing with class inclusion, which has resulted in differing proposals for …

A Well-Founded Semantics For Hybrid Mknf Knowledge Bases, Matthias Knorr, Jose Julio Alferes, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In [10], hybrid MKNF knowledge bases have been proposed for combining open and closed world reasoning within the logics of minimal knowledge and negation as failure ([8]). For this powerful framework, we define a three-valued semantics and provide an alternating fixpoint construction for nondisjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases. We thus provide a well-founded semantics which is a sound approximation of the cautious MKNF model semantics, and which also features improved computational properties. We also show that whenever the DL knowledge base part is empty, then the alternating fixpoint coincides with the classical well-founded model.

Efficient Owl Reasoning With Logic Programs - Evaluations, Sebastian Rudolph, Markus Krotzsch, Pascal Hitzler, Michael Sintek, Denny Vrandecic

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We report on efficiency evaluations concerning two different approaches to using logic programming for OWL [1] reasoning and show, how the two approaches can be combined.

Automatic Composition Of Semantic Web Services Using Process Mediation, Zixin Wu, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web service composition has quickly become a key area of research in the services oriented architecture community. One of the challenges in composition is the existence of heterogeneities across independently created and autonomously managed Web service requesters and Web service providers. Previous work in this area either involved significant human effort or in cases of the efforts seeking to provide largely automated approaches, overlooked the problem of data heterogeneities, resulting in partial solutions that would not support executable workflow for real-world problems. In this paper, we present a planning-based approach to solve both the process heterogeneity and data heterogeneity problems. …

Teaching "Global Project Management" With Distributed Team Projects, Randy Weinberg, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The education of rising professionals must keep pace with changing forces of globalization and the realities of distributed work. Students who understand the basics of global project management, teamwork and collaboration are likely to find themselves at a competitive advantage over those who do not. This article describes the experiences in an undergraduate course called Global Project Management offered concurrently at two universities, one in the U.S. and one in Singapore, and incorporating collaborative student projects.

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: June 2007, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2007

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates from June 8 and 22, 2006.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Lsuhsc Facilities Daily Update: June 2007, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates: 2007

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates from June 2007.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Cooperative Conservation: Increasing Capacity Through Community Partnerships Interagency Volunteer Program: Final Project Report, May 31 2007, Margaret N. Rees

Get Outdoors Nevada

• Was recognized with two consecutive National Take Pride in America Awards (2005 and 2006) in the Federal Program category.
• Created a central clearinghouse created for Southern Nevada public lands volunteers, including:─ an online volunteer data‐management application (Volgistics) adopted and customized for the program and populated with 2,866 active and 974 prospective volunteer records ─ a community outreach Web site that currently averages 57,930 hits per month and has aided in the recruitment of 1,211 volunteers ─ branding development and marketing and outreach tool creation
• Developed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for all areas of Interagency Volunteer Program Management—recruitment, training, recognition, retention …

Using Sawsdl For Semantic Service Interoperability, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Presentation To Senior Leadership The Center For Academic Enrichment And Outreach, Public Lands Institute

Presentations (PLI)

• Strengthen the national fabric in support of public lands.
• Provide people of all ages with opportunities to participate in the enjoyment, protection, and responsible use of our public lands.
• Engage and inspire people to actively participate in the enjoyment, protection and responsible use of our public lands.
• Create high-quality, relevant, up-to-date knowledge to solve problems and make effective decisions about public lands.

Semantic Annotations For Wsdl, Amit P. Sheth, Jacek Kopecky

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Estimating The Cardinality Of Rdf Graph Patterns, Angela Maduko, Kemafor Anyanwu, Amit P. Sheth, Paul Schliekelman

Kno.e.sis Publications

Most RDF query languages allow for graph structure search through a conjunction of triples which is typically processed using join operations. A key factor in optimizing joins is determining the join order which depends on the expected cardinality of intermediate results. This work proposes a pattern-based summarization framework for estimating the cardinality of RDF graph patterns. We present experiments on real world and synthetic datasets which confirm the feasibility of our approach.

Altering Document Term Vectors For Classification - Ontologies As Expectations Of Co-Occurrence, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Marcos Aguilera, Kimberly Keeton, Arif Merchant, Mustafa Uysal

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art in utilizing background knowledge for supervised classification by exploiting the semantic relationships between terms explicated in Ontologies. Preliminary evaluations indicate that the new approach generally improves precision and recall, more so for hard to classify cases and reveals patterns indicating the usefulness of such background knowledge.

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2007, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

The senior design competition helps to focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects …

Ordinal Versions Of Coefficients Alpha And Theta For Likert Rating Scales, Bruno D. Zumbo, Anne M. Gadermann, Cornelia Zeisser

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Two new reliability indices, ordinal coefficient alpha and ordinal coefficient theta, are introduced. A simulation study was conducted in order to compare the new ordinal reliability estimates to each other and to coefficient alpha with Likert data. Results indicate that ordinal coefficients alpha and theta are consistently suitable estimates of the theoretical reliability, regardless of the magnitude of the theoretical reliability, the number of scale points, and the skewness of the scale point distributions. In contrast, coefficient alpha is in general a negatively biased estimate of reliability. The use of ordinal coefficients alpha and theta as alternatives to coefficient alpha …

Lq-Moments For Statistical Analysis Of Extreme Events, Ani Shabri, Abdul Aziz Jemain

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Statistical analysis of extremes is conducted for predicting large return periods events. LQ-moments that are based on linear combinations are reviewed for characterizing the upper quantiles of distributions and larger events in data. The LQ-moments method is presented based on a new quick estimator using five points quantiles and the weighted kernel estimator to estimate the parameters of the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. Monte Carlo methods illustrate the performance of LQ-moments in fitting the GEV distribution to both GEV and non-GEV samples. The proposed estimators of the GEV distribution were compared with conventional L-moments and LQ-moments based on linear …

Jmasm 26: Hettmansperger And Mckean Linear Model Aligned Rank Test For The Single Covariate And One-Way Ancova Case (Sas), Paul A. Nakonezny, Robert D. Shull

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A SAS program (SAS 9.1.3 release, SAS Institute, Cary, N.C.) is presented to implement the Hettmansperger and McKean (1983) linear model aligned rank test (nonparametric ANCOVA) for the single covariate and one-way ANCOVA case. As part of this program, SAS code is also provided to derive the residuals from the regression of Y on X (which is step 1 in the Hettmansperger and McKean procedure) using either ordinary least squares regression (proc reg in SAS) or robust regression with MM estimation (proc robustreg in SAS).

Reliability And Statistical Power: How Measurement Fallibility Affects Power And Required Sample Sizes For Several Parametric And Nonparametric Statistics, Gibbs Y. Kanyongo, Gordon P. Brook, Lydia Kyei-Blankson, Gulsah Gocmen

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The relationship between reliability and statistical power is considered, and tables that account for reduced reliability are presented. A series of Monte Carlo experiments were conducted to determine the effect of changes in reliability on parametric and nonparametric statistical methods, including the paired samples dependent t test, pooled-variance independent t test, one-way analysis of variance with three levels, Wilcoxon signed-rank test for paired samples, and Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test for independent groups. Power tables were created that illustrate the reduction in statistical power from decreased reliability for given sample sizes. Sample size tables were created to provide the approximate sample sizes required …

On Flexible Tests Of Independence And Homoscedasticity, Rand R. Wilcox

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Consider the nonparametric regression model Y = m(X) + τ(X)ε , where X and ε are independent random variables, ε has a mean of zero and variance σ², τ is some unknown function used to model heteroscedasticity, and m(X) is an unknown function reflecting some conditional measure of location associated with Y, given X. Detecting dependence, by testing the hypothesis that m(X) does not vary with X, has the potential of being more sensitive to a wider range of associations compared to using Pearson's correlation. This note has two goals. The first is to point …