Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Drones For Good: Technological Innovations, Social Movements, And The State, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

School of Peace Studies: Faculty Scholarship

The increased use of and attention to drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have led to a widespread debate about their application. Much of this debate has centered on their use by governments, often for the purpose of surveillance and warfare. This focus on the state's use obscures the opportunity for civil society actors, including social movements, to make use of these technologies. This article briefly reviews the technological innovation before proceeding to a typology of civil society uses, ranging from art to digital disruption. This typology emphasizes the dual-use nature of this technology and, in the process, highlights the …

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 …

Contemporary Quaker Attitudes To Science And Technology, Jackie Leach Scully

Quaker Studies

I discuss some data on contemporary Quaker attitudes to science, particularly gene technology, gathered from member of Britain Yearly Meeting. Quakers are often perceived as having a relatively positive attitude towards innovation, including technology, and some confirmation of this can be found in Quaker history, until 30 years ago. The observations described in this paper suggest that, in line with the general trend in the west towards a greater skepticism about the benefits of science, the current attitude of British Friends towards the practice of science is a more ambivalent or even negative one, although attitudes towards the scientific/experimental method …

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 …

Online Information Searching For Cardiovascular Diseases: An Analysis Of Mayo Clinic Search Query Logs, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Since the early 2000’s, Internet usage for health information searching has increased significantly. Studying search queries can help us to understand users “information need” and how do they formulate search queries (“expression of information need”). Although cardiovascular diseases (CVD) affect a large percentage of the population, few studies have investigated how and what users search for CVD. We address this knowledge gap in the community by analyzing a large corpus of 10 million CVD related search queries from MayoClinic.com. Using UMLS MetaMap and UMLS semantic types/concepts, we developed a rule-based approach to categorize the queries into 14 health categories. We …

An Analysis Of Mayo Clinic Search Query Logs For Cardiovascular Diseases, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Amit P. Sheth, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Increasingly, individuals are taking active participation in learning and managing their health by leveraging online resources. Understanding online health information searching behavior can help us to study what health topics users search for and how search queries are formulated. In this work, we analyzed 10 million cardiovascular diseases (CVD) related search queries from MayoClinic.com. We performed semantic analysis on the queries using UMLS MetaMap and analyzed structural and textual properties as well as linguistic characteristics of the queries.

Transforming Wealth Management Through Technology, Vineet Malhotra

Asian Management Insights

Wealth managers can see the potential benefits of rapidly evolving mobile technology and are taking steps to significantly enhance interaction with their clients and transform the way information is presented and shared.

Technology And Power, Michael J. Paulus Jr.

SPU Works

No abstract provided.

Power America's — And Nevada's — Advanced Industries: State By State, Region By Region, Mark Muro

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

With the U.S. economy still flat, economic experts and leaders continue to search for the next source of U.S. and regional growth. One key component of the next era of prosperity can be projected: It is what the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program calls the advanced industry (AI) sector. The nation’s most strategic R&D — and STEM worker intensive industries, AIs like aerospace and IT are prime movers of regional and national prosperity, because they are key sources of technology innovation and generate domestic and international exports. Accordingly, the AI swatch of 50 discrete industries has emerged as an important new …

Measurable Outcomes Of Safety Culture In Aviation - A Meta-Analytic Review, Benjamin J. Goodheart, Maryjo O. Smith

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Though the complimentary concepts of safety culture and safety climate have become increasingly popular over the past three decades, they have only infrequently been central to research designed to examine the empirical relationship between safety culture and safety performance. This tenuous link between culture and safety performance outcomes is especially prevalent in the aviation sector. This study systematically examined the existing literature for empirical evidence and explored the available data via meta-analysis to determine whether safety culture was significantly predictive of safety performance in an aviation operational environment. Although a broad, careful review of the literature was accomplished, the results …

Data Analytics For Power Utility Storm Planning, Lan Lin, Aldo Dagnino, Derek Doran, Swapna S. Gokhale

Kno.e.sis Publications

As the world population grows, recent climatic changes seem to bring powerful storms to populated areas. The impact of these storms on utility services is devastating. Hurricane Sandy is a recent example of the enormous damages that storms can inflict on infrastructure, society, and the economy. Quick response to these emergencies represents a big challenge to electric power utilities. Traditionally utilities develop preparedness plans for storm emergency situations based on the experience of utility experts and with limited use of historical data. With the advent of the Smart Grid, utilities are incorporating automation and sensing technologies in their grids and …

Differences In Cultural Perception In Websites, Andrew Allen

Open Access Theses

The goal of this research was to determine what elements of websites are tied to the value of individualism and collectivism when viewed by two different national cultures. The research determined whether two participant groups (United States or Chinese) looked at the same or different website elements when experiencing the website. The Website Experience Analysis protocol was used to create a questionnaire that the students filled out as they experienced the website, allowing the researcher to determine what elements of the website they were experiencing when focusing on a particular cultural or organization-public relation value. This research found that culture …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Documenting Mass Rape: Medical Evidence Collection Techniques As Humanitarian Technology, Jaimie Morse

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Aim: Emerging global networks of human rights activists, doctors, and nurses have advocated for increased collection of medical evidence in conflict-affected countries to corroborate allegations of sexual violence and facilitate prosecution in international and domestic courts. Such initiatives are part of broader shifts in human rights advocacy to document human rights violations using rigorous, standardized methodologies. In this paper, I consider three principal forms of medical evidence to document sexual violence and their use in these settings: the patient medical record, the medical certificate, and the sexual assault medical forensic exam (commonly known as the “rape kit”).

Methods: Combining archival …

Advancing The Microbiome Research Community, Curtis Huttenhower, Rob Knight, C. Titus Brown, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jose C. Clemente, Dirk Gevers, Eric A. Franzosa, Scott T. Kelley, Dan Knights, Ruth E. Ley, Anup Mahurkar, Jacques Ravel, Scientists For Advancement Of Microbiome Research, Owen White, Jacques Izard

Department of Food Science and Technology: Faculty Publications

The human microbiome has become a recognized factor in promoting and maintaining health. We outline opportunities in interdisciplinary research, analytical rigor, standardization, and policy development for this relatively new and rapidly developing field. Advances in these aspects of the research community may in turn advance our understanding of human microbiome biology.

It is now widely recognized that disturbances in our normal microbial populations may be linked to acute infections such as Clostridium difficile and to chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, obesity, and autoimmune disorders. This has prompted substantial interest in the microbiome from both basic and clinical perspectives. …

Digital Wisdom For A Digital Age: Spirituality And Technology In The 21st Century, Michael J. Paulus Jr., Ryan Ingersoll

SPU Works

No abstract provided.

A Keyword Sense Disambiguation Based Approach For Noise Filtering In Twitter, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Bahareh R. Heravi

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we describe an approach to filter out noisy data generated by keywords-based tweet filtering methods by performing Word Sense Disambiguation on those keywords used to collect tweets. We present the noise filtering problem as a binary classification problem and discuss our evaluation strategy which is to be carried out in future.

Rasp-Qs: Efficient And Confidential Query Services In The Cloud, Zohreh S. Alavi, Lu Zhou, James L. Powers, Keke Chen

Kno.e.sis Publications

Hosting data query services in public clouds is an attractive solution for its great scalability and significant cost savings. However, data owners also have concerns on data privacy due to the lost control of the infrastructure. This demonstration shows a prototype for efficient and confidential range/kNN query services built on top of the random space perturbation (RASP) method. The RASP approach provides a privacy guarantee practical to the setting of cloudbased computing, while enabling much faster query processing compared to the encryption-based approach. This demonstration will allow users to more intuitively understand the technical merits of the RASP approach via …

Document Retrieval Using Predication Similarity, Kalpa Gunaratna

Kno.e.sis Publications

Document retrieval has been an important research problem over many years in the information retrieval community. State-of-the-art techniques utilize various methods in matching documents to a given document including keywords, phrases, and annotations. In this paper, we propose a new approach for document retrieval that utilizes predications (subject-predicate-object triples) extracted from the documents. We represent documents as sets of predications. We measure the similarity between predications to compute the similarity between documents. Our approach utilizes the hierarchical information available in ontologies in computing concept-concept similarity, making the approach flexible. Predication-based document similarity is more precise and forms the basis for …

A Novel Web-Based Depth Video Rewind Approach Toward Fall Preventive Interventions In Hospitals, Moein Enayati, Tanvi Banerjee, Mihail Popescu, Marjorie Skubic, Marilyn J. Rantz

Kno.e.sis Publications

Falls in the hospital rooms are considered a huge burden on healthcare costs. They can lead to injuries, extended length of stay, and increase in cost for both the patients and the hospital. It can also lead to emotional trauma for the patients and their families [1]. Having Microsoft Kinects installed in the hospital rooms to capture and process every movement in the room, we deployed our previously developed fall-detection system to detect naturally occurring falls, generate a real-time fall alarm and broadcast it to hospital nurses for immediate intervention. These systems also store a processed and reduced version …

Bridging The Work Of Field Scientists And The Needs Of Data Re-Users, Antonia Rosati, Lynn Yarmey

The International Workshop on Ice Caves

The National Science Foundation requires Principal Investigators to make the data they collect and create publically available. To assist PIs with this requirement, NSF funded the Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS). ACADIS houses data from the Division of Polar Programs (PLR), provides data management assistance to PIs, and advances search and data discovery tools. In short, ACADIS exists for NSF Arctic researchers by providing a safe home for data and encouraging data reuse. ACADIS is a group of specialist organizations comprised to create a repository of Arctic data that encompasses spatial, temporal, and attribute granularity of data …

Assessing The Fit Between Child Welfare Information Systems And Frontline Workers: Development Of A Task-Technology Fit Instrument, Kurt William Heisler

Health Services Research Dissertations

States and the federal government continue to invest heavily in child welfare information systems (CWIS) to improve caseworkers' performance, but the extent to which these systems meet caseworkers' needs is unclear. In the field of child welfare there are no reliable user-evaluation measures states can use to assess the degree to which a CWIS meets caseworkers' needs, and identify which specific features of the CWIS most need improvement. The study developed such a measure based on the task-technology fit (TTF) framework, which posits that users will evaluate the usefulness of a technology based on how well it meets their tasks …

Assisting Coordination During Crisis: A Domain Ontology Based Approach To Infer Resource Needs From Tweets, Shreyansh Bhatt, Hemant Purohit, Andrew J. Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John Flach

Kno.e.sis Publications

Ubiquitous social media during crises provides citizen reports on the situation, needs and supplies. Previous research extracts resource needs directly from the text (e.g. "Power cut to Coney Island and Brighton beach" indicates a power need). This approach assumes that citizens derive and write about specific needs from their observations, properly specified for the emergency response system, an assumption that is not consistent with general conversational behavior. In our study, Twitter messages (tweets) from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 clearly indicate power blackouts, but not their probable implications (e.g. loss of power to hospital life support systems). We use a domain …

Assessment Of Users' Information Security Behavior In Smartphone Networks, Mohammadjafar Esmaeili

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

With the exponential growth of smartphone usage, providing information security has become one of the main challenges that researchers and information-security specialists must consider. In contrast to traditional mobile phones that only enable people to talk and text, smartphone networks give users a variety of convenient functions such as connection to the Internet, online shopping, e-mail and social media, data storage, global positioning systems, and many other applications. Providing security in smartphone networks is critical for the overall information security of individuals and businesses. Smartphone networks could become vulnerable to security breaches if users do not practice safe behaviors such …

Active Learning With Efficient Feature Weighting Methods For Improving Data Quality And Classification Accuracy, Justin Martineau, Lu Chen, Doreen Cheng, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Many machine learning datasets are noisy with a substantial number of mislabeled instances. This noise yields sub-optimal classification performance. In this paper we study a large, low quality annotated dataset, created quickly and cheaply using Amazon Mechanical Turk to crowdsource annotations. We describe computationally cheap feature weighting techniques and a novel non-linear distribution spreading algorithm that can be used to iteratively and interactively correcting mislabeled instances to significantly improve annotation quality at low cost. Eight different emotion extraction experiments on Twitter data demonstrate that our approach is just as effective as more computationally expensive techniques. Our techniques save a considerable …

Semantic Modelling Of Smart City Data, Stefan Bischof, Athanasios Karapantelakis, Cosmin-Septimiu Nechifor, Amit P. Sheth, Alessandra Mileo, Payam Barnaghi

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cities present an opportunity for rendering Web of Things-enabled services. According to the World Health Organization, population in cities will double by the middle of this century, while cities deal with increasingly pressing issues such as environmental sustainability, economic growth and citizen mobility. In this paper, we propose a discussion around the need for common semantic descriptions for smart city data to facilitate future services in "smart cities". We present examples of data that can be collected from cities, discuss issues around this data and put forward some preliminary thoughts for creating a semantic description model to describe and help …

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.