Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Joint Search By Social And Spatial Proximity [Extended Abstract], Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jing Li, Yu Tang, Nikos Mamoulis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The diffusion of social networks introduces new challengesand opportunities for advanced services, especially so with their ongoingaddition of location-based features. We show how applications like company andfriend recommendation could significantly benefit from incorporating social andspatial proximity, and study a query type that captures these twofold semantics.We develop highly scalable algorithms for its processing, and use real socialnetwork data to empirically verify their efficiency and efficacy.

Hdidx: High-Dimensional Indexing For Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, Ji Wan, Sheng Tang, Yongdong Zhang, Jintao Li, Pengcheng Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fast Nearest Neighbor (NN) search is a fundamental challenge in large-scale data processing and analytics, particularly for analyzing multimedia contents which are often of high dimensionality. Instead of using exact NN search, extensive research efforts have been focusing on approximate NN search algorithms. In this work, we present "HDIdx", an efficient high-dimensional indexing library for fast approximate NN search, which is open-source and written in Python. It offers a family of state-of-the-art algorithms that convert input high-dimensional vectors into compact binary codes, making them very efficient and scalable for NN search with very low space complexity.

Mining Social Ties Beyond Homophily, Hongwei Liang, Ke Wang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Summarizing patterns of connections or social tiesin a social network, in terms of attributes information on nodesand edges, holds a key to the understanding of how the actorsinteract and form relationships. We formalize this problem asmining top-k group relationships (GRs), which captures strongsocial ties between groups of actors. While existing works focuson patterns that follow from the well known homophily principle,we are interested in social ties that do not follow from homophily,thus, provide new insights. Finding top-k GRs faces new challenges:it requires a novel ranking metric because traditionalmetrics favor patterns that are expected from the homophilyprinciple; it requires an innovative …

Context-Aware Advertisement Recommendation For High-Speed Social News Feeding, Yuchen Li, Dongxiang Zhang, Ziquan Lan, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media advertising is a multi-billion dollar market and has become the major revenue source for Facebook and Twitter. To deliver ads to potentially interested users, these social network platforms learn a prediction model for each user based on their personal interests. However, as user interests often evolve slowly, the user may end up receiving repetitive ads. In this paper, we propose a context-aware advertising framework that takes into account the relatively static personal interests as well as the dynamic news feed from friends to drive growth in the ad click-through rate. To meet the real-time requirement, we first propose …

Modeling Autobiographical Memory In Human-Like Autonomous Agents, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although autobiographical memory is an important part of the human mind, there has been little effort on modeling autobiographical memory in autonomous agents. With the motivation of developing human-like intelligence, in this paper, we delineate our approach to enable an agent to maintain memories of its own and to wander in mind. Our model, named Autobiographical Memory-Adaptive Resonance Theory network (AM-ART), is designed to capture autobiographical memories, comprising pictorial snapshots of one’s life experiences together with the associated context, namely time, location, people, activity, and emotion. In terms of both network structure and dynamics, AM-ART coincides with the autobiographical memory …

#Greysanatomy Vs. #Yankees: Demographics And Hashtag Use On Twitter, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also …

Are You Charlie Or Ahmed? Cultural Pluralism In Charlie Hebdo Response On Twitter, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Yelena Mejova, Sonia Alonso Saenz De Oger, Braulio Gomez Fortes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 7, 2015 on Twitter across the globe. We ask whether the stances on the issue of freedom of speech can be modeled using established sociological theories, including Huntington’s culturalist Clash of Civilizations, and those taking into consideration social context, including Density and Interdependence theories. We find support for Huntington’s culturalist explanation, in that the established traditions and norms of one’s “civilization” predetermine some of one’s opinion. However, at an individual level, we also find social context to play a significant role, with non-Arabs living in Arab countries using #JeSuisAhmed …

Modeling Human-Like Non-Rationality For Social Agents, Jaroslaw Kochanowicz, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daniel Thalmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Humans are not rational beings. Deviations from rationality in human thinking are currently well documented [25] as non-reducible to rational pursuit of egoistic benefit or its occasional distortion with temporary emotional excitation, as it is often assumed. This occurs not only outside conceptual reasoning or rational goal realization but also subconsciously and often in certainty that they did not and could not take place ‘in my case’. Non-rationality can no longer be perceived as a rare affective abnormality in otherwise rational thinking, but as a systemic, permanent quality, ’a design feature’ of human cognition. While social psychology has systematically addressed …

An Autonomous Agent For Learning Spatiotemporal Models Of Human Daily Activities, Shan Gao, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) refer to activities performed by individuals on a daily basis. As ADLs are indicatives of a person’s habits, lifestyle, and well being, learning the knowledge of people’s ADL routine has great values in the healthcare and consumer domains. In this paper, we propose an autonomous agent, named Agent for Spatia-Temporal Activity Pattern Modeling (ASTAPM), being able to learn spatial and temporal patterns of human ADLs. ASTAPM utilises a self-organizing neural network model named Spatiotemporal - Adaptive Resonance Theory (ST-ART). ST-ART is capable of integrating multimodal contextual information, involving the time and space, wherein the ADL …

A Study Of Android Malware Detection Techniques And Machine Learning, Balaji Baskaran, Anca Ralescu

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

Android OS is one of the widely used mobile Operating Systems. The number of malicious applications and adwares are increasing constantly on par with the number of mobile devices. A great number of commercial signature based tools are available on the market which prevent to an extent the penetration and distribution of malicious applications. Numerous researches have been conducted which claims that traditional signature based detection system work well up to certain level and malware authors use numerous techniques to evade these tools. So given this state of affairs, there is an increasing need for an alternative, really tough malware …

Extended Pixel Representation For Image Segmentation, Deeptha Girish, Vineeta Singh, Anca Ralescu

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

We explore the use of extended pixel representation for color based image segmentation using the K-means clustering algorithm. Various extended pixel representations have been implemented in this paper and their results have been compared. By extending the representation of pixels an image is mapped to a higher dimensional space. Unlike other approaches, where data is mapped into an implicit features space of higher dimension (kernel methods), in the approach considered here, the higher dimensions are defined explicitly. Preliminary experimental results which illustrate the proposed approach are promising.

An Autonomic Computing System Based On A Rule-Based Policy Engine And Artificial Immune Systems, Rahmira Rufus, William Nick, Joseph Shelton, Albert Esterline

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

Autonomic computing systems arose from the notion that complex computing systems should have properties like those of the autonomic nervous system, which coordinates bodily functions and allows attention to be directed to more pressing needs. An autonomic system allows the system administrator to specify high-level policies, which the system maintains without administrator assistance. Policy enforcement can be done with a rule based system such as Jess (a java expert system shell). An autonomic system must be able to monitor itself, and this is often a limiting factor. We are developing an automatic system that has a policy engine and uses …

Towards The Development Of A Cyber Analysis & Advisement Tool (Caat) For Mitigating De-Anonymization Attacks, Siobahn Day, Henry Williams, Joseph Shelton, Gerry Dozier

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

We are seeing a rise in the number of Anonymous Social Networks (ASN) that claim to provide a sense of user anonymity. However, what many users of ASNs do not know that a person can be identified by their writing style.

In this paper, we provide an overview of a number of author concealment techniques, their impact on the semantic meaning of an author's original text, and introduce AuthorCAAT, an application for mitigating de-anonymization attacks. Our results show that iterative paraphrasing performs the best in terms of author concealment and performs well with respect to Latent Semantic Analysis.

Situations And Evidence For Identity Using Dempster-Shafer Theory, William Nick, Yenny Dominguez, Albert Esterline

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

We present a computational framework for identity based on Barwise and Devlin’s situation theory. We present an example with constellations of situations identifying an individual to create what we call id-situations, where id-actions are performed, along with supporting situations. We use Semantic Web standards to represent and reason about the situations in our example. We show how to represent the strength of the evidence, within the situations, as a measure of the support for judgments reached in the id-situation. To measure evidence of an identity from the supporting situations, we use the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. We enhance Dempster- Shafer …

Student Understanding And Engagement In A Class Employing Comps Computer Mediated Problem Solving: A First Look, Jung Hee Kim, Michael Glass, Taehee Kim, Kelvin Bryant, Angelica Willis, Ebonie Mcneil, Zachery Thomas

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

COMPS computer-mediated group discussion exercises are being added to a second-semester computer programming class. The class is a gateway for computer science and computer engineering students, where many students have difficulty succeeding well enough to proceed in their major. This paper reports on first results of surveys on student experience with the exercises. It also reports on the affective states observed in the discussions that are candidates for analysis of group functioning. As a step toward computer monitoring of the discussions, an experiment in using dialogue features to identify the gender of the participants is described.

A Tool For Staging Mixed-Initiative Dialogs, Joshua W. Buck, Saverio Perugini

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

We discuss and demonstrate a tool for prototyping dialog-based systems that, given a high-level specification of a human-computer dialog, stages the dialog for interactive use. The tool enables a dialog designer to evaluate a variety of dialogs without having to program each individual dialog, and serves as a proof-of-concept for our approach to mixed-initiative dialog modeling and implementation from a programming language-based perspective.

Keynote Talk 2: Social And Perceptual Fidelity Of Avatars And Autonomous Agents In Virtual Reality, Benjamin Kunz

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

Advances in display, computing and sensor technologies have led to a revival of interest and excitement surrounding immersive virtual reality. Here, on the cusp of the arrival of practical and affordable virtual reality technology, are open questions regarding the factors that contribute to compelling and immersive virtual worlds.

In order for virtual reality to be useful as a tool for use in training, education, communication, research, content-creation and entertainment, we must understand the degree to which the perception of the virtual environment and virtual characters resembles perception of the real world.

Relatedly, virtual reality's utility in these contexts demands evidence …

Exploring Web-Based Visual Interfaces For Searching Research Articles On Digital Library Systems, Maxwell Fowler, Chris Bellis, Chris Perry, Beomjin Kim

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

Previous studies that present information archived in digital libraries have used either document meta-data or document content. The current search mechanisms commonly return text-based results that were compiled from the meta-data without reflecting the underlying content. Visual analytics is a possible solution for improving searches by presenting a large amount of information, including document content alongside meta-data, in a limited screen space. This paper introduces a multi-tiered visual interface for searching research articles stored in Digital Library systems. The goals of this system are to allow users to find research papers about their interests in a large work space, to …

Fuzzy Algorithms: Applying Fuzzy Logic To The Golden Ratio Search To Find Solutions Faster, Stephany Coffman-Wolph

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

Applying the concept of fuzzy logic (an abstract version of Boolean logic) to well-known algorithms generates an abstract version (i.e., fuzzy algorithm) that often results in computational improvements. Precision may be reduced but counteracted by gaining computational efficiency. The trade-offs (e.g., small increase in space, loss of precision) for a variety of applications are deemed acceptable. The fuzzification of an algorithm can be accomplished using a simple three-step framework. Creating a new fuzzy algorithm goes beyond simply converting the data from raw data into fuzzy data by additionally converting the operators and concepts into their abstract equivalents. This paper demonstrates: …

The Webid Protocol Enhanced With Group Access, Biometrics, And Access Policies, Cory Sabol, William Nick, Maya Earl, Joseph Shelton, Albert Esterline

MAICS: The Modern Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference

The WebID protocol solves the challenge of remembering usernames and passwords. We enhance this protocol in three ways. First, we give it the ability to manage groups of agents and control their access to resources on the Web. Second, we add support for biometric access control to enhance security. Finally, we add support for OWL-based policies that may be federated and result in flexible access control.