Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Using Social Influence To Predict Subscriber Churn, Derek Doran, Veena Mendiratta, Chitra Phadke, Dan Kushnir, Huseyin Uzunalioglu

Kno.e.sis Publications

The saturation of mobile phone markets has resulted in rising costs for operators to obtain new customers. These operators thus focus their energies on identifying users that will churn so they can be targeted for retention campaigns. Typical churn prediction algorithms identify churners based on service usage metrics, network performance indicators, and demographic information. Social and peer-influence to churn, however, is usually not considered. In this paper, we describe a new churn prediction algorithm that incorporates the influence churners spread to their social peers. Using data from a major service provider, we show that social influence improves churn prediction and …

Understanding User Triads On Facebook, Derek Doran, Alberta De La Rosa Algarin, Swapna S. Gokhale

Kno.e.sis Publications

Contemporary approaches that analyze user behavior on online social networks only consider interactions among dyads, which are pairs of directly connected users. A large body of sociological work, however, suggests that mutual connections among users can influence their activities, leading to differences between two- and three-way interactions. This paper explores the dynamics of triads among Facebook users based on the wall posts from the New Orleans regional network. Initially, each connection is categorized as a close friendship or an acquiantance, contingent on the number of wall posts exchanged. Subsequently, the impact of different types of connections comprising triads is examined …

How I Would Like Semantic Web To Be, For My Children., Raghava Mutharaju

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic Web, since its inception, has gone through lot of developments in its relatively nascent existence; right from people's perception, to the standards and to its adoption by the industry and more importantly by the scientific community. This impressive growth only seems to increase. In this paper, we project this growth to the next 10 years and highlight some of the facets on which Semantic Web could have a major impact on. We also present the challenges that Semantic Web and its community has to deal with in order to get there.

An Efficient Bit Vector Approach To Semantics-Based Machine Perception In Resource-Constrained Devices, Cory Andrew Henson, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The primary challenge of machine perception is to define efficient computational methods to derive high-level knowledge from low-level sensor observation data. Emerging solutions are using ontologies for expressive representation of concepts in the domain of sensing and perception, which enable advanced integration and interpretation of heterogeneous sensor data. The computational complexity of OWL, however, seriously limits its applicability and use within resource-constrained environments, such as mobile devices. To overcome this issue, we employ OWL to formally define the inference tasks needed for machine perception – explanation and discrimination – and then provide efficient algorithms for these tasks, using bit-vector encodings …

Iexplore: Interactive Browsing And Exploring Biomedical Knowledge, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Jagannathan Srinivasan, Todd Minning, Thomas Rindflesch, Bastien Rance, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Himi Yalamanchili, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present iExplore, a Semantic Web based application that helps biomedical researchers study and explore biomedical knowledge interactively. iExplore uses the Biomedical Knowledge Repository (BKR), which integrates knowledge from various sources ranging from information extracted from biomedical literature (from PubMed) to many structured vocabularies in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The current version of BKR provides a unified provenance representation for 12 million semantic predications (triples with a predicate connecting a subject and an object) derived from 87 vocabulary families in the UMLS and 14 million predications extracted from 21 million PubMed abstracts. To engage the domain experts in …

Computing Perception From Sensor Data, Payam Barnaghi, Frieder Ganz, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper describes a framework for perception creation from sensor data. We propose using data abstraction techniques, in particular Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX), to analyse and create patterns from sensor data. The created patterns are then linked to semantic descriptions that define thematic, spatial and temporal features, providing highly granular abstract representation of the raw sensor data. This helps to reduce the size of the data that needs to be communicated from the sensor nodes to the gateways or highlevel processing components. We then discuss a method that uses abstract patterns created by SAX method and occurrences of different observations …

Privacy Preserving Boosting In The Cloud With Secure Half-Space Queries, Shumin Guo, Keke Chen

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a preliminary study on the PerturBoost approach that aims to provide efficient and secure classifier learning in the cloud with both data and model privacy preserved.

Wikis: The Perfect Platform For Library Policies And Procedures, Melanie J. Dunn

The Southeastern Librarian

The term wiki, derived from the Hawaiian adjective “wiki wiki” meaning quick or fast, was coined by Ward Cunningham who created the original WikiWikiWeb for the Portland Pattern Repository (Leuf, 2001, 15). Touted by Cunningham as “the simplest online database that could possibly work” (Cunningham, 2002, June 27) “ wiki” is alternately used to refer to both a wiki website and the software used to create and maintain it and was designed to allow multiple users to collaborate in its development (Klobas 2006, 3). Wikipedia is perhaps one of the best examples, as well as the most recognized, of wikis. …

Content Contribution For Revenue Sharing And Reputation: A Dynamic Structural Model, Qian Tang, Bin Gu, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study examines the incentives for content contribution in social media. We propose that exposure and reputation are the major incentives for contributors. Besides, as more and more social media Web sites offer advertising-revenue sharing with some of their contributors, shared revenue provides an extra incentive for contributors who have joined revenue-sharing programs. We develop a dynamic structural model to identify a contributor's underlying utility function from observed contribution behavior. We recognize the dynamic nature of the content-contribution decision-that contributors are forward-looking, anticipating how their decisions affect future rewards. Using data collected from YouTube, we show that content contribution is …

Recent Advances In Integrating Owl And Rules, Matthias Knorr, David Carral Martinez, Pascal Hitzler, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Frederick Maier, Cong Wang

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

As part of the quest for a unifying logic for the Semantic Web Technology Stack, a central issue is finding suitable ways of integrating description logics based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) with rule-based approaches based on logic programming. Such integration is difficult since naive approaches typically result in the violation of one or more desirable design principles. For example, while both OWL 2 DL and RIF Core (a dialect of the Rule Interchange Format RIF) are decidable, their naive union is not, unless carefully chosen syntactic restrictions are applied.

We report on recent advances and ongoing work by …

A Tableau Algorithm For Description Logics With Nominal Schema, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a tableau algorithm for the description logic ALCOV. This description logic is obtained by extending the description logic ALCO with the expressive nominal schema construct that enables DL-safe datalog with predicates of arbitrary arity to be covered within the description logic framework. The tableau algorithm provides a basis to implement a delayed grounding strategy which was not facilitated by earlier versions of decision procedures for satisfiability in expressive description logics with nominal schemas.

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …

Automatic Classification Of Software Related Microblogs, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, David Lo, Achananuparp Palakorn, Yuan Tian, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

Reconciling Owl And Non-Monotonic Rules For The Semantic Web, Matthias Knorr, Pascal Hitzler, Frederick Maier

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We propose a description logic extending SROIQ (the description logic underlying OWL 2 DL) and at the same time encompassing some of the most prominent monotonic and nonmonotonic rule languages, in particular Datalog extended with the answer set semantics. Our proposal could be considered a substantial contribution towards fulfilling the quest for a unifying logic for the Semantic Web. As a case in point, two non-monotonic extensions of description logics considered to be of distinct expressiveness until now are covered in our proposal. In contrast to earlier such proposals, our language has the 'look and feel' of a description logic …

Using Attribute Behavior Diversity To Build Accurate Decision Tree Committees For Microarray Data, Qian Han, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

DNA microarrays (gene chips), frequently used in biological and medical studies, measure the expressions of thousands of genes per sample. Using microarray data to build accurate classifiers for diseases is an important task. This paper introduces an algorithm, called Committee of Decision Trees by Attribute Behavior Diversity (CABD), to build highly accurate ensembles of decision trees for such data. Since a committee's accuracy is greatly influenced by the diversity among its member classifiers, CABD uses two new ideas to "optimize" that diversity, namely (1) the concept of attribute behavior–based similarity between attributes, and (2) …

Twitris+: Social Media Analytics Platform For Effective Coordination, Gary Alan Smith, Amit P. Sheth, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Hemant Purohit, Lu Chen, Michael Cooney, Pavan Kapanipathi, Pramod Anantharam, Pramod Koneru, Wenbo Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Twitris+ is a Semantic Social Media analytics platform to provide technologies for analyzing large-scale social media streams across Spatio-Temporal-Thematic (STT) and People-Content-Network (PCN) dimensions. It provides holistic situational awareness from one interface and enables organizational actors to engage in well-coordinated ways for desired tasks during emergency response.

Prosody-Based Query-By-Example Spoken Utterance Retrieval, Steven D. Werner, Nigel G. Ward

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Current spoken dialogue retrieval systems are almost entirely lexically based, using automatic transcription by imperfect speech recognition technology. Once audio is reduced to text, little more than existing text search methods are used to retrieve results. However, spoken dialogue contains rich latent prosodic information about dialogue activities - such as agreeing, arguing, deciding, planning, storytelling, showing surprise - and this extra information can often be relevant to the searchers aims. Searching for similar speech acts rather then similar words enables similar contextual results, returning points where the speaker had the same sentiment during a topic. Previous research yielded 76 dimensions …

The Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present an extension to Jaynes’ maximum entropy principle that incorporates latent variables. The principle of latent maximum entropy we propose is different from both Jaynes’ maximum entropy principle and maximum likelihood estimation, but can yield better estimates in the presence of hidden variables and limited training data. We first show that solving for a latent maximum entropy model poses a hard nonlinear constrained optimization problem in general. However, we then show that feasible solutions to this problem can be obtained efficiently for the special case of log-linear models---which forms the basis for an efficient approximation to the latent maximum …

What Kind Of #Communication Is Twitter? A Psycholinguistic Perspective On Communication In Twitter For The Purpose Of Emergency Coordination, Hemant Purohit, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John Flach

Kno.e.sis Publications

The present research aims to detect coordinated citizen response within social media traffic to assist emergency response. We use domain-independent linguistic properties as the first step in narrowing the candidate set of messages for domain-dependent and computationally intensive analysis.

Exploring The Impact Of Knowledge And Social Environment On Influenza Prevention And Transmission In Midwestern United States High School Students, William L. Romine, Tanvi Banerjee, William S. Barrow, William R. Folk

Kno.e.sis Publications

We used data from a convenience sample of 410 Midwestern United States students from six secondary schools to develop parsimonious models for explaining and predicting precautions and illness related to influenza. Scores for knowledge and perceptions were obtained using two-parameter Item Response Theory (IRT) models. Relationships between outcome variables and predictors were verified using Pearson and Spearman correlations, and nested [student within school] fixed effects multinomial logistic regression models were specified from these using Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC). Neural network models were then formulated as classifiers using 10-fold cross validation to predict precautions and illness. Perceived barriers against taking precautions …

Iexplore: A Provenance-Based Application For Exploring Biomedical Knowledge, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Thomas Rindflesch, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

W3c Semantic Sensor Networks: Ontologies, Applications, And Future Directions, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Plenary Talk discussing the W3C Semantic Sensor Network, including the ontology, applications, and future directions.

Topical Anomaly Detection From Twitter Streams, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Prediction Of Topic Volume On Twitter, Yiye Ruan, Hemant Purohit, David Fuhry, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We discuss an approach for predicting microscopic (individual) and macroscopic (collective) user behavioral patterns with respect to specific trending topics on Twitter. Going beyond previous efforts that have analyzed driving factors in whether and when a user will publish topic-relevant tweets, here we seek to predict the strength of content generation which allows more accurate understanding of Twitter users' behavior and more effective utilization of the online social network for diffusing information. Unlike traditional approaches, we consider multiple dimensions into one regression-based prediction framework covering network structure, user interaction, content characteristics and past activity. Experimental results on three large Twitter …

A Web-Based Study Of Self-Treatment Of Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms With Loperamide, Raminta Daniulaityte, Robert G. Carlson, Russel S. Falck, Delroy H. Cameron, Sujan Udayanaga, Lu Chen, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Aims: Many websites provide a medium for individuals to freely share their experiences and knowledge about different drugs. Such user-generated content can be used as a rich data source to study emerging drug use practices and trends. The study aims to examine web-based reports of loperamide use practices among non-medical opioid users. Loperamide, a piperidine derivative, is an opioid agonist approved for the control of diarrhea symptoms. Because of its general inability to cross the blood-brain barrier, it is considered to have no abuse potential and is available without a prescription. Methods: A website that allows free discussion of illicit …

What Does Software Engineering Community Microblog About?, Yuan Tian, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ibrahim Nelman Lubis, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging is a new trend to communicate and to disseminate information. One microblog post could potentially reach millions of users. Millions of microblogs are generated on a daily basis on popular sites such as Twitter. The popularity of microblogging among programmers, software engineers, and software users has also led to their use of microblogs to communicate software engineering issues apart from using emails and other traditional communication channels.Understanding how millions of users use microblogs in software engineering related activities would shed light on ways we could leverage the fast evolving microblogging content to aid software development efforts. In this work, …

Integrating Owl And Rules: A Syntax Proposal For Nominal Schemas, David Carral Martinez, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an addition to OWL 2 syntax to incorporate nominal schemas, which is a new description-logic style extension of OWL 2 which was recently proposed, and which makes is possible to express "variable nominal classes" within axioms in an OWL 2 ontology. Nominal schemas make it possible to express DL-safe rules of arbitrary arity within the extended OWL paradigm, hence covering the well-known DL-safe SWRL language. To express this feature, we extend OWL 2 syntax to include necessary and minimal modifications to both Functional and Manchester syntax grammars and mappings from these two syntaxes to Turtle/RDF. We also …

Semantic Aspects Of Earthcube, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Gary Berg-Cross, Leo Obrst, Amit P. Sheth, Timothy Finin, Isabel F. Cruz

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this document, we give a high-level overview of selected Semantic (Web) technologies, methods, and other important considerations, that are relevant for the success of EarthCube. The goal of this initial document is to provide entry points and references for discussions between the Semantic Technologies experts and the domain experts within EarthCube. The selected topics are intended to ground the EarthCube roadmap in the state of the art in semantics research and ontology engineering.

We anticipate that this document will evolve as EarthCube progresses. Indeed, all EarthCube parties are asked to provide topics of importance that should be treated in …

Trust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as collaborative systems, e-commerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, semantic sensor web, etc. As collaborating agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. There is a need to find online substitutes for traditional (direct or face-to-face) cues to derive measures of trust, and create efficient and secure system for managing trust, to support decision-making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics …

Extending Description Logic Rules, David Carral Martinez, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Description Logics – the logics underpinning the Web Ontology Language OWL – and rules are currently the most prominent paradigms used for modeling knowledge for the Semantic Web. While both of these approaches are based on classical logic, the paradigms also differ significantly, so that naive combinations result in undesirable properties such as undecidability. Recent work has shown that many rules can in fact be expressed in OWL. In this paper we extend this work to include some types of rules previously excluded. We formally define a set of first order logic rules, C-Rules, which can be expressed within OWL …