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Articles 391 - 420 of 1010

Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies

Semantics-Enhanced Geoscience Interoperability, Analytics, And Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth Jun 2014

Semantics-Enhanced Geoscience Interoperability, Analytics, And Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present our research ideas for developing cyberinfrastructure for Geoscience applications developed in the context of the EarthCube initiative, and our NSF-sponsored work on incorporating spatial-temporal-thematic semantics for enhanced querying and feature extraction from sensor data streams.

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Designing Playful Games And Applications To Support Science Centers Learning Activities, Michail N. Giannakos, David Jones, Helen Crompton, Nikos Chrisochoides Jun 2014

Designing Playful Games And Applications To Support Science Centers Learning Activities, Michail N. Giannakos, David Jones, Helen Crompton, Nikos Chrisochoides

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

In recent years there has been a renewed interest on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Following this interest, science centers' staff started providing technology enhanced informal STEM education experiences. The use of well-designed mobile and ubiquitous forms of technology to enrich informal STEM education activities is an essential success factor. The goal of our research is to investigate how technology applications can be better used and developed for taking full advantage of the opportunities and challenges they provide for students learning about STEM concepts. In our approach, we have conducted a series of interviews with experts from science …

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The New York Times Influence On Stem Cell Research, Elizabeth Huntley Hamilton May 2014

The New York Times Influence On Stem Cell Research, Elizabeth Huntley Hamilton

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Stern cells are regarded as holding the secrets to disease eradication and alleviation, longevity, and genetic modification. In the not too distant past, it was considered a futuristic concept meant for the generations to come. Now, in 2014, stern cells are being used in practices for a wide variety of once incurable ailments. The history of stern cells is one of amazing discovery, controversy, and political setbacks. Throughout its exciting journey, print newspapers have provided all the information to its readers, and the potential of stern cells gained popular approval for its research.

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With Whom To Coordinate, Why And How In Ad-Hoc Social Media Communications During Crisis Response, Hemant Purohit, Shreyansh Bhatt, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John M. Flach May 2014

With Whom To Coordinate, Why And How In Ad-Hoc Social Media Communications During Crisis Response, Hemant Purohit, Shreyansh Bhatt, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John M. Flach

Kno.e.sis Publications

During crises affected people, well-wishers, and observers join social media communities to discuss the event. They often share useful information relevant to response coordination, for example, specific resource needs. However, responders face the challenge of massive data overload and lack the time to monitor social media traffic for important information. Analysis shows that only a small number of event related conversations are actionable. Moreover, responders do not know which sources are trustworthy. To address these challenges, response teams may apply manual filtering methods, resulting in limited coverage and quality. We propose a framework and interface for extracting specific resource-related information …

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Mining Contrast Subspaces, Lei Duan, Guanting Tang, Jian Pei, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong, Akiko Campbell, Changjie Tang May 2014

Mining Contrast Subspaces, Lei Duan, Guanting Tang, Jian Pei, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong, Akiko Campbell, Changjie Tang

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we tackle a novel problem of mining contrast subspaces. Given a set of multidimensional objects in two classes C+  and C− and a query object o, we want to find top-k subspaces S that maximize the ratio of likelihood of o in C+  against that in C−. We demonstrate that this problem has important applications, and at the same time, is very challenging. It even does not allow polynomial time approximation. We present CSMiner, a mining method with various pruning techniques. CSMiner is substantially faster than the baseline method. Our …

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Spreading The Char: The Importance Of Local Compatibility In The Diffusion Of Biochar Systems To The Smallholder Agriculture Community Context, Laura C. V. Munoz May 2014

Spreading The Char: The Importance Of Local Compatibility In The Diffusion Of Biochar Systems To The Smallholder Agriculture Community Context, Laura C. V. Munoz

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis enters the context of smallholder agriculture communities in the developing world. It explores the potentials of biochar and what biochar systems could bring to the smallholder communities while simultaneously bringing environmental benefits. It then acknowledges the challenges of diffusion –the spreading of an unfamiliar innovation. It seeks to answer the question of what will make diffusion of biochar systems more successful in the smallholder context, fixating on the characteristic of compatibility as well as the role local community members can play in making a new biochar system more visible to the rest of the communities.

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21st Century Radicalization: The Role Of The Internet User And Nonuser In Terrorist Outcomes, David Wayne Woodring May 2014

21st Century Radicalization: The Role Of The Internet User And Nonuser In Terrorist Outcomes, David Wayne Woodring

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines differences between users and nonusers of information communication technologies (ICTs) within the pre-incident planning processes for domestic terrorist movements operating within the United States. In addition, this study is the first quantitative exploration of the prevalence, types, and purposes of ICT use within terrorist movements, specifically environmental, far-right, and Islamic extremist movements. Using "officially designated" federal terrorism investigations from the American Terrorism Study (ATS), we analyzed extracted evidence of ICT usage among individuals (n =331) engaged in the pre-incident planning processes as members of terrorist movements between 1995-2011. While we find significant differences in terrorist ICT use …

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Leveraging Social Media And Web Of Data For Crisis Response Coordination, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, Hemant Purohit Apr 2014

Leveraging Social Media And Web Of Data For Crisis Response Coordination, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, Hemant Purohit

Kno.e.sis Publications

There is an ever increasing number of users in social media (1B+ Facebook users, 500M+ Twitter users) and ubiquitous mobile access (6B+ mobile phone subscribers) who share their observations and opinions. In addition, the Web of Data and existing knowledge bases keep on growing at a rapid pace. In this scenario, we have unprecedented opportunities to improve crisis response by extracting social signals, creating spatio-temporal mappings, performing analytics on social and Web of Data, and supporting a variety of applications. Such applications can help provide situational awareness during an emergency, improve preparedness, and assist during the rebuilding/recovery phase of a …

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Hierarchical Interest Graph From Tweets, Pavan Kapanipathi, Prateek Jain, Chitra Venkataramani, Amit P. Sheth Apr 2014

Hierarchical Interest Graph From Tweets, Pavan Kapanipathi, Prateek Jain, Chitra Venkataramani, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Industry and researchers have identified numerous ways to monetize microblogs for personalization and recommendation. A common challenge across these different works is the identification of user interests. Although techniques have been developed to address this challenge, a flexible approach that spans multiple levels of granularity in user interests has not been forthcoming. In this work, we focus on exploiting hierarchical semantics of concepts to infer richer user interests expressed as a Hierarchical Interest Graph. To create such graphs, we utilize users' tweets to first ground potential user interests to structured background knowledge such as Wikipedia Category Graph. We then adapt …

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Does Access To Information Technology Make People Happier? Insights From Well-Being Surveys From Around The World, Carol Graham, Milena Nikolova Feb 2014

Does Access To Information Technology Make People Happier? Insights From Well-Being Surveys From Around The World, Carol Graham, Milena Nikolova

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

This lecture summarizes new research on the relationship between access to cell phones, TV, and the internet and subjective well-being worldwide. Technology access is positive for well-being in general, but with diminishing marginal returns for those who already have much access. It is also associated with increased stress and anger among cohorts for whom access to the technologies is new. The increased financial inclusion in very poor countries that comes with cell phones and mobile banking also has effects on well-being. Well-being levels are higher in the countries with higher levels of access to mobile banking, but so are stress …

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Comparative Trust Management With Applications: Bayesian Approaches Emphasis, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth Feb 2014

Comparative Trust Management With Applications: Bayesian Approaches Emphasis, 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, and semantic sensor web. As agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update becomes 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 robust systems for managing trust in order 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 …

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Cursing In English On Twitter, Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth Feb 2014

Cursing In English On Twitter, Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cursing is not uncommon during conversations in the physical world: 0.5% to 0.7% of all the words we speak are curse words, given that 1% of all the words are first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us, our). On social media, people can instantly chat with friends without face-to-face interaction, usually in a more public fashion and broadly disseminated through highly connected social network. Will these distinctive features of social media lead to a change in people's cursing behavior? In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity on a popular social media platform - Twitter, involving the analysis of …

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What Information About Cardiovascular Diseases Do People Search Online?, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Stephen Wu, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak Jan 2014

What Information About Cardiovascular Diseases Do People Search Online?, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Stephen Wu, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

The objective of this study is to understand the types of health information (health topics) that users search online for Cardiovascular Diseases, by performing categorization of health search queries (from Mayoclinic.com) using UMLS MetaMap based on UMLS concepts and semantic types.

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Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: Defining The Line Between Personal And Professional Context On Social Media, 35 Pace L. Rev. 398 (2014), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney Jan 2014

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: Defining The Line Between Personal And Professional Context On Social Media, 35 Pace L. Rev. 398 (2014), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow individuals and companies to connect directly and regularly with an audience of peers or with the public at large. These websites combine the audience-building platforms of mass media with the personal data and relationships of in-person social networks. Due to a combination of evolving user activity and frequent updates to functionality and user features, social media tools blur the line of whether a speaker is perceived as speaking to a specific and presumed private audience, a public expression of one’s own personal views, or a representative viewpoint of an entire …

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Location Prediction Of Twitter Users Using Wikipedia, Revathy Krishnamurthy, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan Jan 2014

Location Prediction Of Twitter Users Using Wikipedia, Revathy Krishnamurthy, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The mining of user generated content in social media has proven very effective in domains ranging from personalization and recommendation systems to crisis management. The knowledge of online users locations makes their tweets more informative and adds another dimension to their analysis. Existing approaches to predict the location of Twitter users are purely data-driven and require large training data sets of geo-tagged tweets. The collection and modelling process of tweets can be time intensive. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel knowledge based approach that does not require any training data. Our approach uses information in Wikipedia, about cities …

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Alignment And Dataset Identification Of Linked Data In Semantic Web, Kalpa Gunaratna, Sarasi Lalithsena, Amit P. Sheth Jan 2014

Alignment And Dataset Identification Of Linked Data In Semantic Web, Kalpa Gunaratna, Sarasi Lalithsena, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has gained significant attention in the Semantic Web community over the past few years. With rapid expansion in size and diversity, it consists of over 800 interlinked datasets with over 60 billion triples. These datasets encapsulate structured data and knowledge spanning over varied domains such as entertainment, life sciences, publications, geography, and government. Applications can take advantage of this by using the knowledge distributed over the interconnected datasets, which is not realistic to find in a single place elsewhere. However, two of the key obstacles in using the LOD cloud are the limited support …

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Let’S Play: Understanding The Role And Significance Of Digital Gaming In Old Age, Julie A. Skalsky Brown Jan 2014

Let’S Play: Understanding The Role And Significance Of Digital Gaming In Old Age, Julie A. Skalsky Brown

Theses and Dissertations--Gerontology

Despite a marked increase in the use of digital games among older persons, there is insufficient research that provides insight into the gaming experiences of this population. A major demographic shift within the senior gaming market has ushered in a new perspective on the use of digital games as a tool for physical and cognitive health, and improved socialization. It is proposed that individual notions of play, which are developed over the life course, influence digital game play engagement and interaction preferences, and contribute to well-being. This study explored how self-perceptions of play over the course of the senior gamer’s …

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Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis Jan 2014

Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by …

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A Look Into The Industry Of Video Games Past, Present, And Yet To Come, Chad Hadzinsky Jan 2014

A Look Into The Industry Of Video Games Past, Present, And Yet To Come, Chad Hadzinsky

CMC Senior Theses

Since its inception, the video game industry has been both a new medium for art and innovation as well as a major driving force in the advancements of many technologies. The often overlooked video game industry has turned from a hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry in its short, forty year life. People of all ages and genders across the world are playing video games at a higher clip than ever before. With so many new gamers and emerging technologies, it is an exciting time for the industry. The landscape is constantly changing and successful business models of the past …

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Automatic Domain Identification For Linked Open Data, Sarasi Lalithsena, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth, Prateek Jain Nov 2013

Automatic Domain Identification For Linked Open Data, Sarasi Lalithsena, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth, Prateek Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Linked Open Data (LOD) has emerged as one of the largest collections of interlinked structured datasets on the Web. Although the adoption of such datasets for applications is increasing, identifying relevant datasets for a specific task or topic is still challenging. As an initial step to make such identification easier, we provide an approach to automatically identify the topic domains of given datasets. Our method utilizes existing knowledge sources, more specifically Freebase, and we present an evaluation which validates the topic domains we can identify with our system. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of identified topic domains for the purpose …

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Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing With Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth Nov 2013

Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing With Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

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. We organize our research around the Five Vs of Big Data, where four of the Vs are harnessed to produce the fifth V - value. To handle the challenge of Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision-making. To handle the challenge of Variety, we resort to the use of semantic models and annotations of data so that much of the intelligent processing …

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City Notifications As A Data Source For Traffic Management, Pramod Anantharam, Biplav Srivastava Oct 2013

City Notifications As A Data Source For Traffic Management, Pramod Anantharam, Biplav Srivastava

Kno.e.sis Publications

A common problem for cities of developing countries like India in managing traffic is the lack of basic automated instrumentation to track road conditions or vehicle locations. Still, to help their citizens make informed travel decisions based on changing city dynamics; many cities have an authorized, city-initiated, notification service in place to alert subscribing commuters about road conditions. Here, alternative means may be used to create informal textual notifications e.g., inputs from field personnel, citizen updates, and pre-authorized events from city calendar. In this paper, we show that collections of such notifications, when processed with information extraction techniques, can turn …

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A Statistical And Schema Independent Approach To Identify Equivalent Properties On Linked Data, Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Prateek Jain, Amit P. Sheth, Sanjaya Wijeratne Sep 2013

A Statistical And Schema Independent Approach To Identify Equivalent Properties On Linked Data, Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Prateek Jain, Amit P. Sheth, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Kno.e.sis Publications

Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has gained significant attention in the Semantic Web community recently. Currently it consists of approximately 295 interlinked datasets with over 50 billion triples including 500 million links, and continues to expand in size. This vast source of structured information has the potential to have a significant impact on knowledge-based applications. However, a key impediment to the use of LOD cloud is limited support for data integration tasks over concepts, instances, and properties. Efforts to address this limitation over properties have focused on matching data-type properties across datasets; however, matching of object-type properties has not received …

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Mining Effective Multi-Segment Sliding Window For Pathogen Incidence Rate Prediction, Lei Duan, Changjie Tang, Xiasong Li, Guozhu Dong, Xianming Wang, Jie Zuo, Min Jiang, Zhongqi Li, Yongqing Zhang Sep 2013

Mining Effective Multi-Segment Sliding Window For Pathogen Incidence Rate Prediction, Lei Duan, Changjie Tang, Xiasong Li, Guozhu Dong, Xianming Wang, Jie Zuo, Min Jiang, Zhongqi Li, Yongqing Zhang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Pathogen incidence rate prediction, which can be considered as time series modeling, is an important task for infectious disease incidence rate prediction and for public health. This paper investigates the application of a genetic computation technique, namely GEP, for pathogen incidence rate prediction. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional sliding windows in GEP-based time series modeling, the paper introduces the problem of mining effective sliding window, for discovering optimal sliding windows for building accurate prediction models. To utilize the periodical characteristic of pathogen incidence rates, a multi-segment sliding window consisting of several segments from different periodical intervals is proposed and …

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Types Of Property Pairs And Alignment On Linked Datasets - A Preliminary Analysis, Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth Sep 2013

Types Of Property Pairs And Alignment On Linked Datasets - A Preliminary Analysis, Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Dataset publication on the Web has been greatly influenced by the Linked Open Data (LOD) project. Many interlinked datasets have become freely available on the Web creating a structured and distributed knowledge representation. Analysis and aligning of concepts and instances in these interconnected datasets have received a lot of attention in the recent past compared to properties. We identify three different categories of property pairs found in the alignment process and study their relative distribution among well known LOD datasets. We also provide comparative analysis of state-of-the-art techniques with regard to different categories, highlighting their capabilities. This could lead to …

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From Questions To Effective Answers: On The Utility Of Knowledge-Driven Querying Systems For Life Sciences Data, Amir H. Asiaee, Prashant Doshi, Todd Minning, Satya S. Sahoo, Priti Parikh, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton Jul 2013

From Questions To Effective Answers: On The Utility Of Knowledge-Driven Querying Systems For Life Sciences Data, Amir H. Asiaee, Prashant Doshi, Todd Minning, Satya S. Sahoo, Priti Parikh, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

We compare two distinct approaches for querying data in the context of the life sciences. The first approach utilizes conventional databases to store the data and provides intuitive form-based interfaces to facilitate querying of the data, commonly used by the life science researchers that we study. The second approach utilizes a large OWL ontology and the same datasets associated as RDF instances of the ontology. Both approaches are being used in parallel by a team of cell biologists in their daily research activities, with the objective of gradually replacing the conventional approach with the knowledge-driven one. We describe several benefits …

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Crisis Response Coordination In Online Communities, Hemant Purohit Jun 2013

Crisis Response Coordination In Online Communities, Hemant Purohit

Kno.e.sis Publications

During recent crises, citizens (sensors) are increasingly using social media to share variety of information- situation on the ground, emerging needs, donation offers, damage, etc. In such an evolving ad-hoc community, how can we extract actionable nuggets from the social media streams to aid relief efforts? This doctoral consortium presentation summarizes a framework to analyze social data and manage information to assist coordination by focusing on three important questions to answer: Whom to coordinate with, Why to coordinate and How to coordinate, with exemplary insights for needs and availability from the recent disaster events.

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Demo: Approximate Semantic Matching In The Collider Event Processing Engine, Souleiman Hasan, Kalpa Gunaratna, Yongrui Qin, Edward Curry Jun 2013

Demo: Approximate Semantic Matching In The Collider Event Processing Engine, Souleiman Hasan, Kalpa Gunaratna, Yongrui Qin, Edward Curry

Kno.e.sis Publications

This demo presents a use case from the energy management domain. It builds upon previous work on approximate semantic matching of heterogeneous events and compares two semantic matching scenarios: exact and approximate. It illustrates how a large number of exact matching event subscriptions are needed to match heterogeneous power consumption events. It then demonstrates how a small number of approximate semantic matching subscriptions are needed but possibly with a lower true positives/negatives performance. The demo is delivered via the COLLIDER approximate event processing engine currently under development in DERI.

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A Semantic Situation Awareness Framework For Indoor Cyber-Physical Systems, Pratikkumar Desai Apr 2013

A Semantic Situation Awareness Framework For Indoor Cyber-Physical Systems, Pratikkumar Desai

Kno.e.sis Publications

Recently, the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) has emerged as a successor to the traditional embedded systems and the wireless sensor networks. The relatively new cyber-physical domain offers tight integration of control, communication and computation components to develop advanced web based application in various heterogeneous domains such as health care, disaster management, automation and environment monitoring. The applications of indoor CPSs include remote patient monitoring, smart home, etc. with focus on situation awareness via event identification from context information. The principal challenges associated with the development of situation awareness applications include uncertainty in contextual data, incomplete domain knowledge, interoperability between …

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Data Mining The Harness Track And Predicting Outcomes, Robert P. Schumaker Apr 2013

Data Mining The Harness Track And Predicting Outcomes, Robert P. Schumaker

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper presented the S&C Racing system that uses Support Vector Regression (SVR) to predict harness race finishes and analyzed it on fifteen months of data from Northfield Park. We found that our system outperforms the most common betting strategies of wagering on the favorites and the mathematical arbitrage Dr. Z system in five of the seven wager types tested. This work would suggest that an informational inequality exists within the harness racing market that is not apparent to domain experts.

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