Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

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.

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.

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 …

Gendered Jobs And The New Gender Gap, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jon Ross

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This presentation discusses how to address 21st Century employment challenges by dismantling gender-specific barriers to entry. We take an interdisciplinary approach by focusing on areas such as education, public policy, culture, and media (among others).

Balconies, Joe Guimera

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Recent developments in theoretical physics suggest the possibility of parallel universes. What if we could see two or more universes at the same time? In effect, superimpose a scene from one universe; say a street corner, over the image of the same scene from a second universe? The photograph “Balconies” imagines the possibilities.

Predicting Parkinson's Disease Progression With Smartphone Data, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Vahid Taslimi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Most of the existing approaches for detecting diseases/risk score form observations (sensor and textual) ignore the presence of any prior knowledge of the disease. In this work, we start top-down by enumerating the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease (PD) and map the symptoms to its possible manifestations in sensor observations (bottom-up). We show such manifestations and further use these manifestations as features to build classifiers to differentiate between the PD patients and the control group.

Sloane’S Gap: Do Mathematical And Social Factors Explain The Distribution Of Numbers In The Oeis?, Nicolas J.-P. Gauvrit, Jean-Paul Delahaye, Hector Zenil

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) is a catalog of integer sequences. We are particularly interested in the number of occurrences of N(n) of an integer n in the database. This number N(n) marks the importance of n and it varies noticeably from one number to another, and from one number to the next in a series. “Importance” can be mathematically objective (2^10 is an example of an “important” number in this sense) or as the result of a shared mathematical culture (10^9 is more important than 9^10 because we use a decimal notation). The concept of algorithmic complexity …

What Kind Of #Conversation Is Twitter? Mining #Psycholinguistic Cues For Emergency Coordination, Hemant Purohit, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John M. Flach, Shreyansh Bhatt

Kno.e.sis Publications

The information overload created by social media messages in emergency situations challenges response organizations to find targeted content and users. We aim to select useful messages by detecting the presence of conversation as an indicator of coordinated citizen action. Using simple linguistic indicators associated with conversation analysis in social science, we model the presence of conversation in the communication landscape of Twitter in a large corpus of 1.5M tweets for various disaster and non-disaster events spanning different periods, lengths of time and varied social significance. Within Replies, Retweets and tweets that mention other Twitter users, we found that domain-independent, linguistic …

Google And The World Brain, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Google and the World Brain (2013) directed by Ben Lewis.

A Hybrid Approach To Finding Relevant Social Media Content For Complex Domain Specific Information Needs, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth, Nishita Jaykumar, Gaurish Anand, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Gary Alan Smith

Kno.e.sis Publications

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex, domain specific information needs. Some complex search situations require knowledge of both ontological concepts as well as 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. Intelligible constructs convey essential information, which may be important to the holistic information needs of information seekers. Such constructs may include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage, emotion, sentiment, equivalence, synonymy, negation, parts-of-speech, etc. However, few search systems utilize both structured background knowledge (ontologies) and the aforementioned knowledge for query interpretation in domain specific searches. Instead, there is …

Traffic Analytics Using Probabilistic Graphical Models Enhanced With Knowledge Bases, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Graphical models have been successfully used to deal with uncertainty, incompleteness, and dynamism within many domains. These models built from data often ignore preexisting declarative knowledge about the domain in the form of ontologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) that is increasingly available on the web. In this paper, we present an approach to leverage such 'top-down' domain knowledge to enhance 'bottom-up' building of graphical models. Specifically, we propose three operations on the graphical model structure to enrich it with nodes, edges, and edge directions. We illustrate the enrichment process using traffic data from 511.org and declarative knowledge from ConceptNet. …

Advancing Data Reuse In Phyloinformatics Using An Ontology-Driven Semantic Web Approach, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Rutger Vos, Jim Leebens-Mack

Kno.e.sis Publications

Phylogenetic analyses can resolve historical relationships among genes, organisms or higher taxa. Understanding such relationships can elucidate a wide range of biological phenomena, including, for example, the importance of gene and genome duplications in the evolution of gene function, the role of adaptation as a driver of diversification, or the evolutionary consequences of biogeographic shifts. Phyloinformaticists are developing data standards, databases and communication protocols (e.g. Application Programming Interfaces, APIs) to extend the accessibility of gene trees, species trees, and the metadata necessary to interpret these trees, thus enabling researchers across the life sciences to reuse phylogenetic knowledge. Specifically, Semantic Web …

Twitris: Socially Influenced Browsing, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Wenbo Wang, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Vinh Nguyen, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we present Twitris, a semantic Web application that facilitates browsing for news and information, using social perceptions as the fulcrum. In doing so we address challenges in large scale crawling, processing of real time information, and preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties central to observations pertaining to real time events. We extract metadata about events from Twitter and bring related news and Wikipedia articles to the user. In developing Twitris, we have used the DBPedia ontology.

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

Kno.e.sis Publications

The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.
These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …

Logical Linked Data Compression, Amit Krishna Joshi, Pascal Hitzler, Guozhu Dong

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Linked data has experienced accelerated growth in recent years. With the continuing proliferation of structured data, demand for RDF compression is becoming increasingly important. In this study, we introduce a novel lossless compression technique for RDF datasets, called Rule Based Compression (RB Compression) that compresses datasets by generating a set of new logical rules from the dataset and removing triples that can be inferred from these rules. Unlike other compression techniques, our approach not only takes advantage of syntactic verbosity and data redundancy but also utilizes semantic associations present in the RDF graph. Depending on the nature of the dataset, …

The Critical Role Of Mechanism-Based Models For Understanding And Predicting Liposomal Drug Loading, Binding And Release Kinetics, Sweta Modi

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

Liposomal delivery systems hold considerable promise for improvement of cancer therapy provided that critical formulation design criteria can be met. The main objective of the current project was to enable quality by design in the formulation of liposomal delivery systems by developing comprehensive, mechanism-based mathematical models of drug loading, binding and release kinetics that take into account not only the therapeutic requirement but the physicochemical properties of the drug, the bilayer membrane, and the intraliposomal microenvironment.

Membrane binding of the drug affects both drug loading and release from liposomes. The influence of bilayer composition and phase structure on the partitioning …

Biodiversity Heritage Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Deanna Marcum

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created in 2006, is the result of a collaboration of ten natural history museum and botanical garden libraries seeking to digitize core taxonomic literature and to make it free and openly available throughout the world. Today, the BHL includes fifteen member institutions whose efforts have shaped a collection of over 60,000 titles. It is supported through a combination of membership dues, in-kind support from member institutions, contributions from the user community, and direct support from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and it reaches tens of thousands of users each year. While managing the complex partnership has …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The All Power Labs Power Pallet As A Training Tool For Biomass Gasification Education, Christopher Che Frederick

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to provide a better understanding of classroom training with regard to renewable energies. A lecture series and survey were developed by the principle researcher and presented to students in the Alternative and Renewable Energy Systems class and Machine Design class at Eastern Illinois University. The lecture series introduced students to biomass gasification and its application at Eastern Illinois University. The survey analyzed participant's level of knowledge of gasification technologies. The survey's pre and post test scores were used to validate the effectiveness of the training.

The All Power Labs Power Pallet was utilized as …

User Taglines: Alternative Presentations Of Expertise And Interest In Social Media, Hemant Purohit, Alex Dow, Omar Alonso, Lei Duan, Kevin Haas

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, an attempt to show relevancy - why they are being shown. For example, Twitter search for a topical keyword shows expert twitterers on the side for 'whom to follow'. Google+ and Facebook also recommend users to follow or add to friend circle. Popular Internet newspaper- The Huffington Post shows Twitter influencers/ experts on the side of an article for authoritative relevant tweets. The state of the art shows user profile bios as summary for Twitter experts, but it has issues with length constraint imposed by user …

Are Twitter Users Equal In Predicting Elections? A Study Of User Groups In Predicting 2012 U.S. Republican Primaries, Lu Chen, Wenbo Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Existing studies on predicting election results are under the assumption that all the users should be treated equally. However, recent work [14] shows that social media users from different groups (e.g., “silent majority” vs. “vocal minority”) have significant differences in the generated content and tweeting behavior. The effect of these differences on predicting election results has not been exploited yet. In this paper, we study the spectrum of Twitter users who participate in the on-line discussion of 2012 U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries, and examine the predictive power of different user groups (e.g., highly engaged users vs. lowly engaged users, right-leaning …

The Ssn Ontology Of The W3c Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group, Michael Compton, Payam Barnaghi, Luis Bermudez, Raul Garcia-Castro, Oscar Corcho, Simon Cox, John Graybeal, Manfred Hauswirth, Cory Andrew Henson, Arthur Herzog, Vincent Huang, Krzysztof Janowicz, W. David Kelsey, Danh Le Phuoc, Laurent Lefort, Myriam Leggieri, Holger Neuhaus, Andriy Nikolov, Kevin Page, Alexandre Passant, Amit P. Sheth, Kerry Taylor

Kno.e.sis Publications

The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations — the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.

Demonstration: Dynamic Sensor Registration And Semantic Processing For Ad-Hoc Mobile Environments (Semmob), Pramod Anantharam, Gary Alan Smith, Josh Pschorr, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

SemMOB enables dynamic registration of sensors via mobile devices, search, and near real-time inference over sensor observations in ad-hoc mobile environments (e.g., fire fighting). We demonstrate SemMOB in the context of an emergency response use case that requires automatic and dynamic registrations of sensor devices and annotation of sensor observations, decoding of latitude-longitude information in terms of human sensible names, fusion and abstraction of sensor values using background knowledge, and their visualization using mash-up.

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 …

Apps And Apple Devices: Productive Icloud Uses, Cyrus Ford Zarganj

Library Faculty Presentations

This program introduces useful apps for librarians who have two or more Apple devices such as an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. You can learn how to use the iCloud, sync devices together, and about other useful apps for librarians to work on their projects from different places with different Apple devices without carrying files.

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.