Communication Commons^™

Resident Identification Using Kinect Depth Image Data And Fuzzy Clustering Techniques, Tanvi Banerjee, James M. Keller, Marjorie Skubic

Kno.e.sis Publications

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out …

Are There Roles For Technical Communicators In Small Community Food Systems?, Brent William Chisholm

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The author explores the viability of incorporating technical communication genres, practices, and theory, into various components of small community food systems. He argues that certain types of food systems and users in those food systems allow technical communicators to participate in ways aligning with genres of conservation writing described by Johnson-Sheehan and Morgan (2009). He also incorporates ideas about authorship, describing that technical communicators can improve food systems by reconciling disparate agricultural technical material, advocacy for action, and the articulation of previously non-existent food systems.

Enabling Learning And Enhancing Education In Ipm In The Midst Of Dwindling Financial Resources: Why Open Access To Resources And Publishing Could Be A Strategic Step To Support Students Today And Tomorrow?, Ousmane Youm

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

When I was invited to join the editorial board of the journal Entomology, Ornithology & Herpetology (EOH), I read carefully the note coming with the invitation and also looked at the content and scope. Then two things came into my mind as I stopped a few minutes to reflect on a couple of issues: (1) how the new journal links and is relevant to Integrated Pest Management—IPM (for those who understand its definition)—and (2) the issue of open access and relevance in the current situation of an ailing global economy, particularly in the vulnerable developing nations.

In the latter, more …

Placing Birds On A Dynamic Evolutionary Map: Using Digital Tools To Update The Evolutionary Metaphor Of The "Tree Of Life", Sonia Stephens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes and presents a new type of interactive visualization for communicating about evolutionary biology, the dynamic evolutionary map. This web-based tool utilizes a novel map-based metaphor to visualize evolution, rather than the traditional "tree of life." The dissertation begins with an analysis of the conceptual affordances of the traditional tree of life as the dominant metaphor for evolution. Next, theories from digital media, visualization, and cognitive science research are synthesized to support the assertion that digital media tools can extend the types of visual metaphors we use in science communication in order to overcome conceptual limitations of traditional …

Visual Communications On The Road In Arkansas: Analysis Of Secondary Students Videos, Stuart Estes, Kristin M. Pennington, Leslie D. Edgar

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

In the summer of 2010, the Visual Communications on the Road in Arkansas: Creative Photo and Video Projects to Promote Agriculture program was initiated. The program consisted of a two-week agricultural communications curriculum that would be taught by agricultural science teachers in Arkansas. The curriculum was composed of lessons about photography, writing, and videography, and the program introduced students to digital photography and videography equipment and the proper uses of equipment. Once the curriculum was taught in secondary schools, a mobile classroom unit—consisting of a travel trailer, photography and videography equipment, and laptop computers equipped with editing software—would visit the …

The Management Of Feral Pig Socio-Ecological Systems In Far North Queensland, Australia, Gabriela Shuster

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The development of management programs for socio-ecological systems that include multiple stakeholders is a complex process and requires careful evaluation and planning. This is particularly a challenge in the presence of intractable conflict. The feral pig (Sus scrofa) in Australia is part of one such socio-ecological system. There is a large and heterogeneous group of stakeholders interested in pig management. Pigs have diverse effects on wildlife and plant ecology, economic, health, and social sectors. This study used the feral pig management system as a vehicle to examine intractable conflict in socio-ecological systems. The purpose of the study was …

Lesson Not Learned: Deepwater Horizon Research And Media Coverage Exposes Gaps In Knowledge And Risky Protocol Within The Oil Industry, Lauren Haller

Honors Theses

An insatiable thirst for oil has led poorly coordinated, risk-prone megasystems deeper into the ocean in search of new oil reserves. Profit-driven agendas at the corporate level have a top-down effect within these megasystems. Cost-cutting and risk-downplaying leaves the field employees unprepared to handle emergencies. A series of costly mistakes led to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which caused extensive damage to an already fragile ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. The wealth and political influence of the oil industry overpowers lax regulatory agencies and legislation-even though media and research has exposed frustrating parallels between the Deepwater Horizon …

Overview Of Contrast Data Mining As A Field And Preview Of An Upcoming Book, Guozhu Dong, James Bailey

Kno.e.sis Publications

This report provides an overview of the field of contrast data mining and its applications, and offers a preview of an upcoming book on the topic. The importance of contrasting is discussed and a brief survey is given covering the following topics: general definitions and terminology for contrast patterns, representative contrast pattern mining algorithms, applications of contrast mining for fundamental data mining tasks such as classification and clustering, applications of contrast mining in bioinformatics, medicine, blog analysis, image analysis and subgroup mining, results on contrast based dataset similarity measure, and on analyzing item interaction in contrast patterns, and open research …

Computing Inconsistency Measure Based On Paraconsistent Semantics, Pascal Hitzler, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Measuring inconsistency in knowledge bases has been recognized as an important problem in several research areas. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem and a main class of them is based on some kind of paraconsistent semantics. However, existing methods suffer from two limitations: (i) they are mostly restricted to propositional knowledge bases; (ii) very few of them discuss computational aspects of computing inconsistency measures. In this article, we try to solve these two limitations by exploring algorithms for computing an inconsistency measure of first-order knowledge bases. After introducing a four-valued semantics for first-order logic, we define an …

Crisis Communication Needs Assessment: A Delphi Study To Enhance Instruction For Agricultural Communicators And Other Stakeholders, Allyson Ceary Mcguire

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Agricultural communicators and industry stakeholders need to be able to develop, prepare and implement crisis communication plans to help assure the sustainability of the agriculture industry should a crisis event occur. A thorough exploration of possible options and needs for training crisis communicators is a needed study in the agriculture industry. Students learning to prepare for managing crises in real life situations are rarely taught in a hands-on, experiential manner. Students can read and analyze case studies pertaining to crises, but without having an actual crisis; little means exist for preparing students for real world situations. There is a need …

The Knowledge-Driven Exploration Of Integrated Biomedical Knowledge Sources Facilitates The Generation Of New Hypotheses, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Todd Minning, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Knowledge gained from the scientific literature can complement newly obtained experimental data in helping researchers understand the pathological processes underlying diseases. However, unless the scientific literature and experimental data are semantically integrated, it is generally difficult for scientists to exploit the two sources effectively. We argue that, in addition to the semantic integration of heterogeneous knowledge sources, the usability of the integrated resource by scientists is dependent upon the availability of knowledge visualization and exploration tools. Moreover, the integration techniques must be scalable and the exploration interfaces must be easy to use by bench scientists. The end goal of such …

Demonstration: Secure - Semantics Empowered Rescue Environment, Pratikkumar Desai, Cory Andrew Henson, Pramod Anantharam, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper demonstrates a Semantic Web enabled system for collecting and processing sensor data within a rescue environment. The real-time system collects heterogeneous raw sensor data from rescue robots through a wireless sensor network. The raw sensor data is converted to RDF using the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology and further processed to generate abstractions used for event detection in emergency scenarios.

Demonstration: Real-Time Semantic Analysis Of Sensor Streams, Harshal Patni, Cory Andrew Henson, Michael Cooney, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergence of dynamic information sources – including sensor networks – has led to large streams of real-time data on the Web. Research studies suggest, these dynamic networks have created more data in the last three years than in the entire history of civilization, and this trend will only increase in the coming years [1]. With this coming data explosion, real-time analytics software must either adapt or die [2]. This paper focuses on the task of integrating and analyzing multiple heterogeneous streams of sensor data with the goal of creating meaningful abstractions, or features. These features are then temporally aggregated …

Sempush: Privacy-Aware And Scalable Broadcasting For Semantic Microblogging, Pavan Kapanipathi, Julia Anaya, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users of traditional microblogging platforms such as Twitter face drawbacks in terms of (1) Privacy of status updates as a followee - reaching undesired people (2) Information overload as a follower - receiving uninteresting microposts from followees. In this paper we demonstrate distributed and user-controlled dissemination of microposts using SMOB (semantic microblogging framework) and Semantic Hub (privacy-aware implementation of PuSH3 protocol) . The approach leverages users' Social Graph to dynamically create group of followers who are eligible to receive micropost. The restrictions to create the groups are provided by the followee based on the hastags in the micropost. Both SMOB …

Semantic Annotation And Search For Resources In The Next Generation Web With Sa-Rest, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Maryam Panahiazar, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Kno.e.sis Publications

SA-REST, the W3C member submission, can be used for supporting a wide variety of Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) annotation capabilities on any type of Web resource. Kino framework and tools provide support of capabilities to realize SA-RESTs promised value. These tools include (a) a browser-plugin to support annotation of a Web resource (including services) with respect to an ontology, domain model or vocabulary, (b) an annotation aware indexing engine and (c) faceted search and selection of the Web resources. At one end of the spectrum, we present Kino^E (aka Kino for Enterprise) which uses NCBO formal ontologies and …

A Domain Specific Language For Enterprise Grade Cloud-Mobile Hybrid Applications, Ajith H. Ranabahu, E. Michael Maximilien, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing has changed the technology landscape by offering flexible and economical computing resources to the masses. However, vendor lock-in makes the migration of applications and data across clouds an expensive proposition. The lock-in is especially serious when considering the new technology trend of combining cloud with mobile devices.

In this paper, we present a domain specific language (DSL) that is purposely created for generating hybrid applications spanning across mobile devices as well as computing clouds. We propose a model-driven development process that makes use of a DSL to provide sufficient programming abstractions over both cloud and mobile features. We …

Personalized Filtering Of The Twitter Stream, Pavan Kapanipathi, Fabrizio Orlandi, Amit P. Sheth, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid growth in users on social networks, there is a corresponding increase in user-generated content, in turn resulting in information overload. On Twitter, for example, users tend to receive uninterested information due to their non-overlapping interests from the people whom they follow. In this paper we present a Semantic Web approach to filter public tweets matching interests from personalized user profiles. Our approach includes automatic generation of multi-domain and personalized user profiles, filtering Twitter stream based on the generated profiles and delivering them in real-time. Given that users interests and personalization needs change with time, we also discuss …

Semantic Computing In Real-World: Vertical And Horizontal Application Within Enterprise And On The Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Kino: A Generic Document Management System For Biologists Using Sa-Rest And Faceted Search, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Priti Parikh, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Document management has become an important consideration for the scientific community over the last decade. Human knowledge is central to many scientific domains, thus it is not possible to completely automate the document management process. Managing scientific documents require a semi-automatic approach to overcome issues of large volume, yet support the human participation in the process. In this paper we present Kino, a set of tools that streamline the document management process in life science domains. Kino is integrated with National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), providing scientists access to quality domain models. Annotated documents are indexed using a faceted …

Knowledge Exchange: A Two-Way Street, Elise Lequire

Joint Fire Science Program Digests

The best available science is of little use if it gathers dust on the shelves of library stacks or is deeply embedded on an obscure website. A key part of the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) mission is to ensure research on wildland fire science is readily available to practitioners in a useful format so it can help support sound management decisions. The JFSP has made great inroads in this arena on a national level, but managers short on time often have to sift through an overload of information that may not be specific to their region. In the next …

Citizen Sensing: Opportunities And Challenges In Mining Social Signals And Perceptions, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Millions of persons have become 'citizens' of an Internet- or Web-enabled social community. Web 2.0 fostered the open environment and applications for tagging, blogging, wikis, and social networking sites that have made information consumption, production, and sharing so incredibly easy. An interconnected network of people who actively observe, report, collect, analyze, and disseminate information via text, audio, or video messages, increasingly through pervasively connected mobile devices, has led to what we term citizen sensing. In this talk, we review recent progress in supporting collective intelligence through intelligent processing of citizen sensing. Key issues we cover in this talk are: - …

Local Closed World Semantics: Keep It Simple, Stupid!, Adila Krishnadhi, Kunal Sengupta, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A combination of open and closed-world reasoning (usually called local closed world reasoning) is a desirable capability of knowledge representation formalisms for Semantic Web applications. However, none of the proposals made to date for extending description logics with local closed world capabilities has had any significant impact on applications. We believe that one of the key reasons for this is that current proposals fail to provide approaches which are intuitively accessible for application developers at the same time are applicable, as extensions, to expressive description logics as SROIQ, which underlies the Web Ontology Language OWL.

In this paper, we propose …

Web Wisdom: An Essay On How Web 2.0 And Semantic Web Can Foster A Global Knowledge Society, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Admittedly this is a presumptuous title that should never be used when reporting on individual research advances. Wisdom is just not a scientific concept. In this case, though, we are reporting on recent developments on the web that lead us to believe that the web is on the way to providing a platform for not only information acquisition and business transactions but also for large scale knowledge development and decision support. It is likely that by now every web user has participated in some sort of social function or knowledge accumulating function on the web, many times without even being …

Smob: The Best Of Both Worlds, Alexandre Passant, Julia Anaya, Owen Sacco, Pavan Kapanipathi

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents the architecture of SMOB and the way it combines Semantic Web standards (RDF(S) / SPARQL) and new protocols such as PubSubHubbub to enable a Federated and Privacy-Aware Social Web.

Automatic Domain Model Creation Using Pattern-Based Fact Extraction, Christopher Thomas, Pankaj Mehra, Wenbo Wang, Amit P. Sheth, Gerhard Weikum, Victor Chan

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper describes a minimally guided approach to automatic domain model creation. The first step is to carve an area of interest out of the Wikipedia hierarchy based on a simple query or other starting point. The second step is to connect the concepts in this domain hierarchy with named relationships. A starting point is provided by Linked Open Data, such as DBPedia. Based on these community-generated facts we train a pattern-based fact-extraction algorithm to augment a domain hierarchy with previously unknown relationship occurrences. Pattern vectors are learned that represent occurrences of relationships between concepts. The process described can be …

Privacy-By-Design In Federated Social Web Applications, Alexandre Passant, Owen Sacco, Julia Anaya, Pavan Kapanipathi

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Local Closed-World Reasoning With Description Logics Under The Well-Founded Semantics, Matthias Knorr, Jose Julio Alferes, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

An important question for the upcoming Semantic Web is how to best combine open world ontology languages, such as the OWL-based ones, with closed world rule-based languages. One of the most mature proposals for this combination is known as hybrid MKNF knowledge bases (Motik and Rosati, 2010 [52]), and it is based on an adaptation of the Stable Model Semantics to knowledge bases consisting of ontology axioms and rules. In this paper we propose a well-founded semantics for nondisjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases that promises to provide better efficiency of reasoning, and that is compatible with both the OWL-based …

What's Happening In Semantic Web ... And What Fca Could Have To Do With It, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. Driven by over 10 years of focused project funding in the US and the EU, Semantic Web Technologies are now entering application areas in industry, academia, government, and the open Web.

The Semantic Web is based on the idea of describing the meaning - or semantics - of data on the Web using metadata - data that describes other data - in the form of ontologies, which are represented using logic-based knowledge representation languages. Central to the transfer of Semantic Web into practice is the Linked Open Data effort, which has already resulted in …

Trust Networks: Interpersonal, Social, And Sensor, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as ecommerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, sensor web, etc. As agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics or computation in many situations. In this beginner's level tutorial, we motivate the trust problem, explain the relevant concepts, summarize research in modeling trust and gleaning trustworthiness, and discuss challenges confronting us in this process.

Physician Perceptions Of Risk Regarding Mood Disorders And Pharmacological Management During Pregnancy: What Is Current Practice?, Laura G. Hendon

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Mood disorders are the most common form of mental illness and one of the leading causes of morbidity worldwide.  Major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder have a lifetime prevalence of 16.2% and 4.4%, respectively.  Women comprise a substantial proportion of this population, and an estimated 500,000 pregnancies each year involve women with a psychiatric condition.  Management with psychotropic medications is considered standard of care for most patients with mood disorders.  However, many of these medications are known human teratogens.  Because pregnant women with mood disorders face a high risk of relapse if unmanaged, the obstetrician faces a unique challenge in …