Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Domain Specific Document Retrieval Framework On Near Real-Time Social Health Data, Swapnil Soni

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the advent of web search and microblogging, the percentage of Online Health Information Seekers (OHIS) using these services to share and seek health information in real-time has increased exponentially. Recently, Twitter has emerged as one of the primary mediums for sharing and seeking of the latest information related to a variety of topics, including health information. Although Twitter is an excellent information source, the identification of useful information from the deluge of tweets is one of the major challenges. Twitter search is limited to keyword-based techniques to retrieve information for a given query and sometimes the results do not …

Analyzing The Social Media Footprint Of Street Gangs, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Derek Doran, Amit P. Sheth, Jack Dustin

Kno.e.sis Publications

Gangs utilize social media as a way to maintain threatening virtual presences, to communicate about their activities, and to intimidate others. Such usage has gained the attention of many justice service agencies that wish to create better crime prevention and judicial services. However, these agencies use analysis methods that are labor intensive and only lead to basic, qualitative data interpretations. This paper presents the architecture of a modern platform to discover the structure, function, and operation of gangs through the lens of social media. Preliminary analysis of social media posts shared in the greater Chicago, IL region demonstrate the platform’s …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Big Data And Smart Cities, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Context-Driven Automatic Subgraph Creation For Literature-Based Discovery, Delroy H. Cameron, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Thomas Rindflesch, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Olivier Bodenreider

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: Literature-based discovery (LBD) is characterized by uncovering hidden associations in non-interacting scientific literature. Prior approaches to LBD include use of: 1) domain expertise and structured background knowledge to manually filter and explore the literature, 2) distributional statistics and graph-theoretic measures to rank interesting connections and 3) heuristics to help eliminate spurious connections. However, manual approaches to LBD are not scalable and purely distributional approaches may not be sufficient to obtain insights into the meaning of poorly understood associations. While several graph-based approaches have the potential to elucidate associations, their effectiveness has not been fully demonstrated. A considerable degree of …

Smart Data - How You And I Will Exploit Big Data For Personalized Digital Health And Many Other Activities, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Virtual Conference And Meeting Systems: Resources For Online Connections, John Gottfried, Laura Delancey, Carol L. Watwood, Amanda Hardin

DLTS Faculty Publications

Librarians have always tried to stretch the limits of applicable technologies to create effective connections among researchers and resources. We thrive on the tools and tactics that help us do this, and we are always on the prowl for newer, better alternatives. This is one of the best ways we have of keeping high service standards in the face of shrinking budgets and skeletal staffing. Fortunately, there have never been so many technologies to choose from, and there have never been so many challenges calling out for technological intervention.

Hosting online instruction sessions is, for example, an excellent opportunity for …

On Using Synthetic Social Media Stimuli In An Emergency Preparedness Functional Exercise, Andrew Hampton, Shreyansh Bhatt, Gary Alan Smith, Jeremy S. Brunn, Hemant Purohit, Valerie L. Shalin, John M. Flach, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper details the creation and use of a massive (over 32,000 messages) artificially constructed 'Twitter' microblog stream for a regional emergency preparedness functional exercise. By combining microblog conversion, manual production, and a control set, we created a web based information stream providing valid, misleading, and irrelevant information to public information officers (PIOs) representing hospitals, fire departments, the local Red Cross, and city and county government officials. PIOs searched, monitored, and (through conventional channels) verified potentially actionable information that could then be redistributed through a personalized screen name. Our case study of a key PIO reveals several capabilities that social …

Gender-Based Violence In 140 Characters Or Fewer: A #Bigdata Case Study Of Twitter, Hemant Purohit, Tanvi Banerjee, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Nayanesh Bhandutia, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Public institutions are increasingly reliant on data from social media sites to measure public attitude and provide timely public engagement. Such reliance includes the exploration of public views on important social issues such as gender-based violence (GBV). In this study, we examine big (social) data consisting of nearly fourteen million tweets collected from Twitter over a period of ten months to analyze public opinion regarding GBV, highlighting the nature of tweeting practices by geographical location and gender. We demonstrate the utility of Computational Social Science to mine insight from the corpus while accounting for the influence of both transient events …

Knowledge Enabled Approach To Predict The Location Of Twitter Users, Revathy Krishnamurthy, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Knowledge bases have been used to improve performance in applications ranging from web search and event detection to entity recognition and disambiguation. More recently, knowledge bases have been used to analyze social data. A key challenge in social data analysis has been the identification of the geographic location of online users in a social network such as Twitter. Existing approaches to predict the location of users, based on their tweets, rely solely on social media features or probabilistic language models. These approaches are supervised and require large training dataset of geo-tagged tweets to build their models. As most Twitter users …

Mining Behavior Of Citizen Sensor Communities To Improve Cooperation With Organizational Actors, Hemant Purohit

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations, such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their response needs. This research addresses questions related to design of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior research by social scientists in a limited offline and online environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative behavior challenges, including ‘ …

Value Oriented Big Data Processing With Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

We discuss the nature of Big Data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing Big Data that arises in the context of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. To handle Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision- making. To handle Variety, we resort to semantic models and annotations of data so that intelligent processing can be done independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle Velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and …

Extracting City Traffic Events From Social Streams, Pramod Anantharam, Payam Barnaghi, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cities are composed of complex systems with physical, cyber, and social components. Current works on extracting and understanding city events mainly rely on technology enabled infrastructure to observe and record events. In this work, we propose an approach to leverage citizen observations of various city systems and services such as traffic, public transport, water supply, weather, sewage, and public safety as a source of city events. We investigate the feasibility of using such textual streams for extracting city events from annotated text. We formalize the problem of annotating social streams such as microblogs as a sequence labeling problem. We present …

Understanding Social Effects In Online Networks, Huda Alhazmi, Swapna S. Gokhale, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

Understanding the motives behind people’s interactions online can offer sound bases to predict how a social network may evolve and also support a host of applications. We hypothesize that three offline social factors, namely, stature, relationship strength, and egocentricity may also play an important role in driving users’ interactions online. Therefore, we study the influence of these three social factors in online interactions by analyzing the transitivity in triads or three-way relationships among users. Analyzing transitivity through the lens of triad census for four popular social networks, namely, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Slashdot, we find that: (i) users’ interactions are …

Semantic Gateway As A Service Architecture For Iot Interoperability, Pratikkumar Desai, Amit P. Sheth, Pramod Anantharam

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a …

From The Desk Of The Editor

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

Knowledge-Driven Personalized Contextual Mhealth Service For Asthma Management In Children, Pramod Anantharam, Tanvi Banerjee, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Surendra Marupudi, Vaikunth Sridharan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Wide adoption of smartphones and availability of low-cost sensors has resulted in seamless and continuous monitoring of physiology, environment, and public health notifications. However, personalized digital health and patient empowerment can become a reality only if the complex multisensory and multimodal data is processed within the patient context. Contextual processing of patient data along with personalized medical knowledge can lead to actionable information for better and timely decisions. We present a system called kHealth capable of aggregating multisensory and multimodal data from sensors (passive sensing) and answers to questionnaire (active sensing) from patients with asthma. We present our preliminary data …

Using Ehrs For Heart Failure Therapy Recommendation Using Multidimensional Patient Similarity Analytics, Maryam Panahiazar, Vahid Taslimitehrani, Naveen L. Pereira, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain a wealth of information about an individual patient’s diagnosis, treatment and health outcomes. This information can be leveraged effectively to identify patients who are similar to each for disease diagnosis and prognosis. In recent years, several machine learning methods 1 have been proposed to assessing patient similarity, although the techniques have primarily focused on the use of patient diagnoses data from EHRs for the learning task. In this study, we develop a multidimensional patient similarity assessment technique that leverages multiple types of information from the EHR and predicts a medication plan for each new patient …

An Analysis Of Tools For Online Anonymity, Stephanie Winkler, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible explanations for the slow adoption and development of online anonymity technology. The ability to remain anonymous while engaging in different activities, online is increasingly sought after by consumers with privacy concerns. Currently, the only way to maintain online anonymity is through the use of technology. This paper reviews and analyzes the tools currently available to consumers to maintain online anonymity. There are only four tools available to consumers to ensure online anonymity: anonymous remailers, rewebbers, The Onion Router (Tor) and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). These tools provide the …

Table Of Contents

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

From The Desk Of The Editor

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

From The Desk Of The Editor

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

From The Desk Of The Editor

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

Anonymized Video Analysis Methods And Systems, Marjorie Skubic, James M. Keller, Fang Wang, Derek T. Anderson, Erik Stone, Robert H. Luke Iii, Tanvi Banerjee, Marilyn J. Rantz

Kno.e.sis Publications

Methods and systems for anonymized video analysis are described. In one embodiment, a first silhouette image of a person in a living unit may be accessed. The first silhouette image may be based on a first video signal recorded by a first video camera. A second silhouette image of the person in the living unit may be accessed. The second silhouette image may be of a different view of the person than the first silhouette image. The second silhouette image may be based on a second video signal recorded by a second video camera. A three-dimensional model of the person …

Protecting Web Servers From Web Robot Traffic, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Triad-Based Role Discovery For Large Social Systems, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

The social role of a participant in a social system conceptualizes the circumstances under which she chooses to interact with others, making their discovery and analysis important for theoretical and practical purposes. In this paper, we propose a methodology to detect such roles by utilizing the conditional triad censuses of ego-networks. These censuses are a promising tool for social role extraction because they capture the degree to which basic social forces push upon a user to interact with others in a system. Clusters of triad censuses, inferred from network samples that preserve local structural properties, define the social roles. The …

Discovering Perceptions In Online Social Media: A Probabilistic Approach, Derek Doran, Swapna S. Gokhale, Aldo Dagnino

Kno.e.sis Publications

People across the world habitually turn to online social media to share their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and opinions as they go about their daily lives. These posts collectively contain a wealth of insights into how masses perceive their surroundings. Therefore, extracting people’s perceptions from social media posts can provide valuable information about pertinent issues such as public transportation, emergency conditions, and even reactions to political actions or other activities. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract such perceptions from a corpus of social media posts originating from a given broad geographical region. The approach divides the broad region into …