Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Automated Isolation Of Translational Efficiency Bias That Resists The Confounding Effect Of Gc(At)-Content, Douglas W. Raiford, Dan E. Krane, Travis E. Doom, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Genomic sequencing projects are an abundant source of information for biological studies ranging from the molecular to the ecological in scale; however, much of the information present may yet be hidden from casual analysis. One such information domain, trends in codon usage, can provide a wealth of information about an organism's genes and their expression. Degeneracy in the genetic code allows more than one triplet codon to code for the same amino acid, and usage of these codons is often biased such that one or more of these synonymous codons is preferred. Detection of this bias is an important tool …

Linked Open Social Signals, Pablo N. Mendes, Alexandre Passant, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we discuss the collection, semantic annotation and analysis of real-time social signals from micro-blogging data. We focus on users interested in analyzing social signals collectively for sensemaking. Our proposal enables flexibility in selecting subsets for analysis, alleviating information overload. We define an architecture that is based on state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies and a distributed publish subscribe protocol for real time communication. In addition, we discuss our method and application in a scenario related to the health care reform in the United States.

Continuous Semantics To Analyze Real-Time Data, Amit P. Sheth, Christopher Thomas, Pankaj Mehra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Increasingly we are presented with dynamic domains involved in social, mobile, and sensor webs. Such domains are spontaneous (arising suddenly), follow a period of rapid evolution, involving real-time or near real-time data, involve many distributed participants and diverse viewpoints involving topical or contentious subjects, and involve feature context colored by local knowledge and sociocultural backgrounds. This article present continuous semantics can help us model such dynamic domains and analyze the related real-time data. Capabilities include crating dynamic domain model by mining social data, and using dynamic models for semantic analysis of real-time data.

Investigating The “Why” In Whypox: Explorations Of A Virtual Epidemic, Yasmin B. Kafai, Maria Quintero, David F. Feldon

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Learning scientists have created and used virtual worlds to support players’ historical, scientific, and ecological inquiries. Much less explored has been the impact of community events on players’ investigations in virtual worlds. The authors present here the case of a community event Whypox, a virtual epidemic whose annual outbreak in Whyville affects players’ communication and appearance. The authors analyze the different levels of participation ranging from casual to systematic in which players searched out more information about the Whypox, participated in online discussions about its causes and investigated different scenarios with simulations. The discussion examines ethical concerns, the contributions of …

Wind Power In Nevada, Hamedah Dhalai

Brookings Mountain West Publications

This bibliography compiles scholarly information and new reports on the topic of wind power in Nevada. As a senior at UNLV majoring in both Economics and French, I began this project in June 2010 in consultation with William E. Brown, Jr., director of planning and communications at Brookings Mountain West. This research topic interests me greatly, and I believe that expanded research and commercial development of alternative energy, including wind power, is essential to the growth and development of Nevada. My service as a Student Ambassador in the College of Business, a position that allows me to represent UNLV to …

Advocates, Agendas, And Nay-Sayers: Science And Technology In The Public Arena, Arthur Greenberg

The University Dialogue

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator And The Dispositional Resistance To Change Scale, Thomas A. Rausch

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of relationship between resistance to change and personality preference types. A survey was developed and administered to graduate students in the School of Technology at Eastern Illinois University. A total of 33 students responded. The surveys compared levels of resistance to organizational change to Myers Briggs Type Indicator preference types on each indices of personality. Results of this study indicated that the level of resistance to change based upon personality preference types is not significant. Recommendations for practice and recommendations for further research are discussed.

Research In Semantic Web And Information Retrieval: Trust, Sensors, And Search, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Sparql Query Re-Writing For Spatial Datasets Using Partonomy Based Transformation Rules, Prateek Jain, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth, Peter Z. Yeh, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Often the information present in a spatial knowledge base is represented at a different level of granularity and abstraction than the query constraints. For querying ontology’s containing spatial information, the precise relationships between spatial entities has to be specified in the basic graph pattern of SPARQL query which can result in long and complex queries. We present a novel approach to help users intuitively write SPARQL queries to query spatial data, rather than relying on knowledge of the ontology structure. Our framework re-writes queries, using transformation rules to exploit part-whole relations between geographical entities to address the mismatches between query …

A Local Qualitative Approach To Referral And Functional Trust, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Dharan Althuru, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust and confidence are becoming key issues in diverse applications such as ecommerce, social networks, semantic sensor web, semantic web information retrieval systems, etc. Both humans and machines use some form of trust to make informed and reliable decisions before acting. In this work, we briefly review existing work on trust networks, pointing out some of its drawbacks. We then propose a local framework to explore two different kinds of trust among agents called referral trust and functional trust, that are modelled using local partial orders, to enable qualitative trust personalization. The proposed approach formalizes reasoning with trust, distinguishing between …

Towards Reasoning Pragmatics, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which force us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches.

A Contrast Pattern Based Clustering Quality Index For Categorical Data, Qingbao Liu, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

Since clustering is unsupervised and highly explorative, clustering validation (i.e. assessing the quality of clustering solutions) has been an important and long standing research problem. Existing validity measures have significant shortcomings. This paper proposes a novel contrast pattern based clustering quality index (CPCQ) for categorical data, by utilizing the quality and diversity of the contrast patterns (CPs) which contrast the clusters in clusterings. High quality CPs can characterize clusters and discriminate them against each other. Experiments show that the CPCQ index (1) can recognize that expert-determined classes are the best clusters for many datasets from the UCI repository; (2) does …

Sustainability In Packaging: A Study Of Trends, Ideas, And Perceptions Of Sustainability As It Relates To Packaging, Leslie Herrmann

Graphic Communication

The consumer packaging world has two key players, the consumer and the packaging manufacturer. And with the outside perspective of an expert on sustainability there creates the chemistry currently operating the sustainable packaging movement. But what does sustainability mean? The quick, dirty, and official definition is something which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (www.sustainability-ed.org).

This study focused on what the consumer perceived as being sustainable as well as tested some consumer knowledge of what sustainability is. This was then contrasted with what some award winning packaging manufacturers …

Ontology-Driven Provenance Management In Escience: An Application In Parasite Research, Satya S. Sahoo, D. Brent Weatherly, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance, from the French word “provenir”, describes the lineage or history of a data entity. Provenance is critical information in scientific applications to verify experiment process, validate data quality and associate trust values with scientific results. Current industrial scale eScience projects require an end-to-end provenance management infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be underpinned by formal semantics to enable analysis of large scale provenance information by software applications. Further, effective analysis of provenance information requires well-defined query mechanisms to support complex queries over large datasets. This paper introduces an ontology-driven provenance management infrastructure for biology experiment data, as part …

An Anytime Algorithm For Computing Inconsistency Measurement, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi, Guohui Xiao, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Measuring inconsistency degrees of inconsistent knowledge bases is an important problem as it provides context information for facilitating inconsistency handling. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem and a main class of them is based on some kind of paraconsistent semantics. In this paper, we consider the computational aspects of inconsistency degrees of propositional knowledge bases under 4-valued semantics. We first analyze its computational complexity. As it turns out that computing the exact inconsistency degree is intractable, we then propose an anytime algorithm that provides tractable approximation of the inconsistency degree from above and below. We show that …

State Of The U.S. Ocean And Coastal Economies 2009, Judith T. Kildow, Charles S. Colgan, Jason D. Scorse

Publications

This nation’s coasts and oceans contribute much to the United States economy. For the past ten years, the National Ocean Economics Program (NOEP) has compiled time-series data that track economic activities,demographics, natural resource production, non-market values, and federal expenditures in the U.S. coastal zone both on land and in the water. On the website www.oceaneconomics.org, the public—government officials,academics, industry, and advocacy groups—have had interactive access to this information and used it widely for many different purposes. This report features highlights from this collection to heighten appreciation for the value of the ocean and this nation’s coasts among an even …

A Survey Of The Semantic Specification Of Sensors, Michael Compton, Cory Andrew Henson, Laurent Lefort, Holger Neuhaus, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic sensor networks use declarative descriptions of sensors promote reuse and integration, and to help solve the difficulties of installing, querying and maintaining complex, heterogeneous sensor networks. This paper reviews the state of the art for the semantic specification of sensors, one of the fundamental technologies in the semantic sensor network vision. Twelve sensor ontologies are reviewed and analysed for the range and expressive power of their concepts. The reasoning and search technology developed in conjunction with these ontologies is also reviewed, as is technology for annotating OGC standards with links to ontologies. Sensor concepts that cannot be expressed accurately …

Provenir Ontology: Towards A Framework For Escience Provenance Management, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance metadata describes the 'lineage' or history of an entity and necessary information to verify the quality of data, validate experiment protocols, and associate trust value with scientific results. eScience projects generate data and the associated provenance metadata in a distributed environment (such as myGrid) and on a very large scale that often precludes manual analysis. Given this scenario, provenance information should be, (a) interoperable across projects, research groups, and application domains, and (b) support analysis over large datasets using reasoning to discover implicit information. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-driven framework for eScience provenance management underpinned by an …

Library Services For Mobile Devices, Toby Greenwalt, Jacob Hill, Colin Koteles

Library Scholarship

This presentation outlines and discusses the issues, challenges, and technologies involved in offering library services on mobile devices.

Suggestions For Owl 3, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With OWL 2 about to be completed, it is the right time to start discussions on possible future modifications of OWL. We present here a number of suggestions in order to discuss them with the OWL user community. They encompass expressive extensions on polynomial OWL 2 profiles, a suggestion for an OWL Rules language, and expressive extensions for OWL DL.

Ibm Altocumulus: A Cross-Cloud Middleware And Platform, E. Michael Maximilien, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Roy Engehausen, Laura Anderson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing has become the new face of computing and promises to offer virtually unlimited, cheap, readily available, "utility type" computing resources. Many vendors have entered this market with different offerings ranging from infrastructure-as-a-service such as Amazon, to fully functional platform services such as Google App Engine. However, as a result of this heterogeneity, deploying applications to a cloud and managing them needs to be done using vendor specific methods. This "lock in" is seen as a major hurdle in adopting cloud technologies to the enterprise. IBM Altocumulus, the cloud middleware platform from IBM Almaden Services Research, aims to solve …

Topscholar®: Creating Opportunities, Connie Foster, Jennifer Wilson

TopSCHOLAR® Presentations and Reports

No abstract provided.

Paraconsistent Reasoning For Owl 2, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A four-valued description logic has been proposed to reason with description logic based inconsistent knowledge bases. This approach has a distinct advantage that it can be implemented by invoking classical reasoners to keep the same complexity as under the classical semantics. However, this approach has so far only been studied for the basid description logic ALC. In this paper, we further study how to extend the four-valued semantics to the more expressive description logic SROIQ which underlies the forthcoming revision of the Web Ontology Language, OWL 2, and also investigate how it fares when adapated to tractable description logics including …

A Preferential Tableaux Calculus For Circumscriptive Alco, Stephan Grimm, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Nonmonotonic extensions of description logics (DLs) allow for default and local closed-world reasoning and are an acknowledged desired feature for applications, e.g. in the Semantic Web. A recent approach to such an extension is based on McCarthy's circumscription, which rests on the principle of minimising the extension of selected predicates to close off dedicated parts of a domain model. While decidability and complexity results have been established in the literature, no practical algorithmisation for circumscriptive DLs has been proposed so far. In this paper, we present a tableaux calculus that can be used as a decision procedure for concept satisfiability …

A Best Practice Model For Cloud Middleware Systems, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, E. Michael Maximilien

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing is the latest trend in computing where the intention is to facilitate cheap, utility type computing resources in a service-oriented manner. However, the cloud landscape is still maturing and there are heterogeneities between the clouds, ranging from the application development paradigms to their service interfaces,and scaling approaches. These differences hinder the adoption of cloud by major enterprises. We believe that a cloud middleware can solve most of these issues to allow cross-cloud inter-operation. Our proposed system is Altocumulus, a cloud middleware that homogenizes the clouds. In order to provide the best use of the cloud resources and make …

Context And Domain Knowledge Enhanced Entity Spotting In Informal Text, Daniel Gruhl, Meena Nagarajan, Jan Pieper, Christine Robson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper explores the application of restricted relationship graphs (RDF) and statistical NLP techniques to improve named entity annotation in challenging Informal English domains. We validate our approach using on-line forums discussing popular music. Named entity annotation is particularly difficult in this domain because it is characterized by a large number of ambiguous entities, such as the Madonna album “Music” or Lilly Allen’s pop hit “Smile”.

We evaluate improvements in annotation accuracy that can be obtained by restricting the set of possible entities using real-world constraints. We find that constrained domain entity extraction raises the annotation accuracy significantly, making an …

Context Is Highly Contextual!, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Robotics, Gps And Gis Technologies To Encourage Stem-Oriented Learning In Youth, Viacheslav I. Adamchuk, Gwen Nugent, Bradley S. Barker, Neal Grandgenett

Teacher Education Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

In our technology rich world, the educational areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) play an increasingly essential role in developing well-prepared specialists for the 21st century workplace. Unfortunately, interest in theses areas has been declining for a few decades. Various innovative educational initiatives in formal and informal learning environments have been undertaken nationally to attempt to encourage STEM-oriented learning. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the particular program described in this paper focuses on middle school youth in non-formal learning environments. The program integrates educational robotics, Global Positioning System (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) technologies to provide …

Your Inbox Is Killing Your Productivity, Focus And Time: Getting To An Empty Inbox Everyday, Keith W. Krieger

SIDLIT Conference Proceedings

An inbox often controls people instead of people controlling their inbox. The result is an overloaded inbox, warnings from Information Services, important messages being missed, and a feeling of being weighed down by too much email. By managing an inbox effectively, faculty and staff can become more productive, accomplish more, and be free of the issues caused by an overflowing inbox. Simple techniques useful to email users will be demonstrated.

“Best K”: Critical Clustering Structures In Categorical Datasets, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

The demand on cluster analysis for categorical data continues to grow over the last decade. A well-known problem in categorical clustering is to determine the best K number of clusters. Although several categorical clustering algorithms have been developed, surprisingly, none has satisfactorily addressed the problem of best K for categorical clustering. Since categorical data does not have an inherent distance function as the similarity measure, traditional cluster validation techniques based on geometric shapes and density distributions are not appropriate for categorical data. In this paper, we study the entropy property between the clustering results of categorical data with different K …