Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Learning To Find Topic Experts In Twitter Via Different Relations, Wei Wei, Gao Cong, Chunyan Miao, Feida Zhu, Guohui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Expert finding has become a hot topic along with the flourishing of social networks, such as micro-blogging services like Twitter. Finding experts in Twitter is an important problem because tweets from experts are valuable sources that carry rich information (e.g., trends) in various domains. However, previous methods cannot be directly applied to Twitter expert finding problem. Recently, several attempts use the relations among users and Twitter Lists for expert finding. Nevertheless, these approaches only partially utilize such relations. To this end, we develop a probabilistic method to jointly exploit three types of relations (i.e., follower relation, user-list relation and list-list …

Scrum-X: An Interactive And Experiential Learning Platform For Teaching Scrum, Wee Leong Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivating and engaging thecurrent generation of technology-savvy students and improving the quality oflearning is becoming more challenging with traditional instructional methods.Educational games and simulations are gaining more ground, both in formal andinformal learning environments. With experiential learning, learners canenhance their management skills and ability to make decisions by analyzingdifferent scenarios and paths that the project could have taken if specificdecisions were made during the project. This paper presents Scrum-X, acomputer-based simulation game to teach Scrum, an agile project managementmethodology, to graduates and professionals with IT background. In the game,players plan, execute and manage a software development project using Scrummethodology. Players …

A Business Zone Recommender System Based On Facebook And Urban Planning Data, Jovian Lin, Richard Jayadi Oentaryo, Ee Peng Lim, Casey Vu, Adrian Wei Liang Vu, Philips Kokoh And Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present ZoneRec—a zone recommendation system for physical businesses in an urban city,which uses both public business data from Facebook and urban planning data. The systemconsists of machine learning algorithms that take in a business’ metadata and outputs a list ofrecommended zones to establish the business in. We evaluate our system using data of foodbusinesses in Singapore and assess the contribution of different feature groups to therecommendation quality.

Large-Scale Spatial Data Management On Modern Parallel And Distributed Platforms, Simin You

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rapidly growing volume of spatial data has made it desirable to develop efficient techniques for managing large-scale spatial data. Traditional spatial data management techniques cannot meet requirements of efficiency and scalability for large-scale spatial data processing. In this dissertation, we have developed new data-parallel designs for large-scale spatial data management that can better utilize modern inexpensive commodity parallel and distributed platforms, including multi-core CPUs, many-core GPUs and computer clusters, to achieve both efficiency and scalability. After introducing background on spatial data management and modern parallel and distributed systems, we present our parallel designs for spatial indexing and spatial join query …

Mobile App Tagging, Ning Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Shaohua Li, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile app tagging aims to assign a list of keywords indicating core functionalities, main contents, key features or concepts of a mobile app. Mobile app tags can be potentially useful for app ecosystem stakeholders or other parties to improve app search, browsing, categorization, and advertising, etc. However, most mainstream app markets, e.g., Google Play, Apple App Store, etc., currently do not explicitly support such tags for apps. To address this problem, we propose a novel auto mobile app tagging framework for annotating a given mobile app automatically, which is based on a search-based annotation paradigm powered by machine learning techniques. …

Online Advertising, Retail Platform Openness, And Long Tail Sellers, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Negative Factor: Improving Regular-Expression Matching In Strings, Xiaochun Yang, Tao Qiu, Bin Wang, Baihua Zheng, Yaoshu Wang, Chen Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of finding matches of a regular expression (RE) on a string exists in many applications such as text editing, biosequence search, and shell commands. Existing techniques first identify candidates using substrings in the RE, then verify each of them using an automaton. These techniques become inefficient when there are many candidate occurrences that need to be verified. In this paper we propose a novel technique that prunes false negatives by utilizing negative factors, which are substrings that cannot appear in an answer. A main advantage of the technique is that it can be integrated with many existing algorithms …

Online Cross-Modal Hashing For Web Image Retrieval, Liang Xie, Jialie Shen, Lei Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-modal hashing (CMH) is an efficient technique for the fast retrieval of web image data, and it has gained a lot of attentions recently. However, traditional CMH methods usually apply batch learning for generating hash functions and codes. They are inefficient for the retrieval of web images which usually have streaming fashion. Online learning can be exploited for CMH. But existing online hashing methods still cannot solve two essential problems: Efficient updating of hash codes and analysis of cross-modal correlation. In this paper, we propose Online Cross-modal Hashing (OCMH) which can effectively address the above two problems by learning the …

Copyright Law And The Supply Of Creative Work: Evidence From The Movies, Ivan Paak Liang Png, Qiu-Hong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is almost no empirical evidence on the extent to whichcopyright law works in the sense of increasing the production of creative work.Here, we study the impact of two major changes in copyright law – the extensionof copyright term and the European Rental Directive – on the production ofmovies. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, among which 19 extendedcopyright term at various times between 1991–2005, we found no statisticallyrobust evidence that copyright term extension was associated with higher movie production.In a panel of 17 European countries between 1991–2005, wefound no statistically robust evidence that compliance with the RentalDirective was …

Efficient Collective Spatial Keyword Query Processing On Road Networks, Yunjun Gao, Jingwen Zhao, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The collective spatial keyword query (CSKQ), an important variant of spatial keyword queries, aims to find a set of the objects that collectively cover users' queried keywords, and those objects are close to the query location and have small inter-object distances. Existing works only focus on the CSKQ problem in the Euclidean space, although we observe that, in many real-life applications, the closeness of two spatial objects is measured by their road network distance. Thus, existing methods cannot solve the problem of network-based CSKQ efficiently. In this paper, we study the problem of collective spatial keyword query processing on road …

Exploring Heterogeneous Features For Query-Focused Summarization Of Categorized Community Answers, Wei Wei, Zhaoyan Ming, Liqiang Nie, Guohui Li, Jianjun Li, Feida Zhu, Tianfeng Shang, Changyin Luo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Community-based question answering (cQA) is a popular type of online knowledge-sharing web service where users ask questions and obtain answers contributed by others. To enhance knowledge sharing, cQA also provides users with a retrieval function to access the historical question-answer pairs (QAs). However, it is still ineffective in that the retrieval result is typically a ranking list of potentially relevant QAs, rather than a succinct and informative answer. To alleviate the problem, this paper proposes a three-level scheme, which aims to generate a query-focused summary-style answer in terms of two factors, i.e., novelty and redundancy. Specifically, we first retrieve a …

Online Learning Of Arima For Time Series Prediction, Chenghao Liu, Hoi, Steven C. H., Peilin Zhao, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) is one of the most popular linear models for time series forecasting due to its nice statistical properties and great flexibility. However, its parameters are estimated in a batch manner and its noise terms are often assumed to be strictly bounded, which restricts its applications and makes it inefficient for handling large-scale real data. In this paper, we propose online learning algorithms for estimating ARIMA models under relaxed assumptions on the noise terms, which is suitable to a wider range of applications and enjoys high computational efficiency. The idea of our ARIMA method is to …

Accurate Online Video Tagging Via Probabilistic Hybrid Modeling, Jialie Shen, Meng Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Accurate video tagging has been becoming increasingly crucial for online video management and search. This article documents a novel framework called comprehensive video tagger (CVTagger) to facilitate accurate tag-based video annotation. The system applies both multimodal and temporal properties combined with a novel classification framework with hierarchical structure based on multilayer concept model and regression analysis. The advanced architecture enables effective incorporation of both video concept dependency and temporal dynamics. Using a large-scale test collection containing 50,000 YouTube videos, a set of empirical studies have been carried out and experimental results demonstrate various advantages of CVTagger over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Online Multi-Modal Distance Metric Learning With Application To Image Retrieval, Pengcheng Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Chunyan Miao, Zhi-Yong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distance metric learning (DML) is an important technique to improve similarity search in content-based image retrieval. Despite being studied extensively, most existing DML approaches typically adopt a single-modal learning framework that learns the distance metric on either a single feature type or a combined feature space where multiple types of features are simply concatenated. Such single-modal DML methods suffer from some critical limitations: (i) some type of features may significantly dominate the others in the DML task due to diverse feature representations; and (ii) learning a distance metric on the combined high-dimensional feature space can be extremely time-consuming using the …

Multiagent-Based Route Guidance For Increasing The Chance Of Arrival On Time, Zhiguang Cao, Hongliang Guo, Jie Zhang, Ulrich Fastenrath

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transportation and mobility are central to sustainable urban development, where multiagent-based route guidance is widely applied. Traditional multiagent-based route guidance always seeks LET (least expected travel time) paths. However, drivers usually have specific expectations, i.e., tight or loose deadlines, which may not be all met by LET paths. We thus adopt and extend the probability tail model that aims to maximize the probability of reaching destinations before deadlines. Specifically, we propose a decentralized multiagent approach, where infrastructure agents locally collect intentions of concerned vehicle agents and formulate route guidance as a route assignment problem, to guarantee their arrival on time. …

Task-Based User Profiling For Query Refinement (Toque), Chao Xu

Dissertations

The information needs of search engine users vary in complexity. Some simple needs can be satisfied by using a single query, while complicated ones require a series of queries spanning a period of time. A search task, consisting of a sequence of search queries serving the same information need, can be treated as an atomic unit for modeling user’s search preferences and has been applied in improving the accuracy of search results. However, existing studies on user search tasks mainly focus on applying user’s interests in re-ranking search results. Only few studies have examined the effects of utilizing search tasks …

The Global Rock-Art Database Project Towards Machine Learning: Building A Collaborative Open Source Platform For Heritage Management From Information Structure To Information Visualization Using Australian Heritage Examples, Robert Haubt

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This guest talk, presented at Lava Lab at the University of Hawaiʻi, explores the intersection of collaboration, data ontology, and information visualization in advancing machine learning within the Global Rock Art Database project. Drawing on insights from the project’s first four years, the talk emphasizes the critical need for cultural heritage preservation by systematically recording and structuring global rock art data in accessible and sustainable ways. This effort not only supports public education on rock art but also facilitates scholarly research.

Key discussions include advancements in data ontology using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) for semantic data management …

Software Interoperability And The Pods Openhds System, Benjamin S. Heasly Ms

All Student Scholarship

This work addressed challenges of software system interoperability faced by the Open Health and Demographics Surveillance System (OpenHDS). OpenHDS is a distributed application for demographic data collection which was used during a public health intervention in Equatorial Guinea. Specific challenges faced during this intervention included offline data collection and synchronization, changing data collection and software requirements, data size and system performance, and correction of software and data collection errors. This work produced in a new system, the PODS OpenHDS System, which applied four design themes in order to address these challenges: Polymorphism, developer Operations, Declarative style, and Self-description.

Creating A Better World With Information And Communication Technologies: Health Equity, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

When news broke on 23rd July 2014, that a case of the deadly virus Ebola had been confirmed in Lagos, home to about 21 million people and a major transportation hub, the World held its breath. If not contained, this virus could spread quickly killing a multitude of people around the World. By 15th October, cases of Ebola had been recorded around the World: Liberia reported 4249 cases with 2458 deaths, Sierra Leone reported 3252 cases with 1183 deaths, Guinea 1472 cases with 843 deaths, Nigeria reported 20 cases with 8 deaths, the USA reported 3 cases and 1 death, …

Watertight And 2-Manifold Surface Meshes Using Dual Contouring With Tetrahedral Decomposition Of Grid Cubes, Tanweer Rashid, Sharmin Sultana, Michel A. Audette

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Dual Contouring algorithm (DC) is a grid-based process used to generate surface meshes from volumetric data. The advantage of DC is that it can reproduce sharp features by inserting vertices anywhere inside the grid cube, as opposed to the Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm that can insert vertices only on the grid edges. However, DC is unable to guarantee 2-manifold and watertight meshes due to the fact that it produces only one vertex for each grid cube. We present a modified Dual Contouring algorithm that is capable of overcoming this limitation. Our method decomposes an ambiguous grid cube into a …