Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a …

Personal Informatics In Chronic Illness Management, Haley Macleod, Anthony Tang, Sheelagh Carpendale

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many people with chronic illness suffer from debilitating symptoms or episodes that inhibit normal day-to-day function. Pervasive tools offer the possibility to help manage these conditions, particularly by helping people understand their conditions. But, it is unclear how to design these tools, as prior designs have focused on effortful tracking and many see those tools as a burden to use. We report here on an interview study with 12 individuals with chronic illnesses who collect personal data. We learn that these people are motivated through self-discovery and curiosity. We explore how these concepts may support the design of tools that …

Behind The Magical Numbers: Hierarchical Chunking And The Human Working Memory Capacity, Guoqi Li, Ning Ning, Kiruthika Ramanathan, Wei He, Li Pan, Luping Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To explore the influence of chunking on the capacity limits of working memory, a model for chunking in sequential working memory is proposed, using hierarchical bidirectional inhibition-connected neural networks with winnerless competition. With the assumption of the existence of an upper bound to the inhibitory weights in neurobiological networks, it is shown that chunking increases the number of memorized items in working memory from the "magical number 7" to 16 items. The optimal number of chunks and the number of the memorized items in each chunk are the "magical number 4".

Enabling Generative, Emergent Artificial Culture, Jaroslaw Kochanowicz, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daniel Thalmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the demand for culturally placed agent models, an adequate simulation approach to the relationship between group-cultural and individual-psychological qualities, including culture emergence, is just appearing. It could be argued that we are at the beginning of a domain forming process, a dawn of generative, emergent artificial culture. In this context we discuss current limitations and argue e.g. that too far reaching agent simplicity within Agent Based Modeling limits the emergence of realistic cultural-conventional level and we advocate psychologically rich models of culture forming mechanisms. We propose an approach to cultural phenomena modeling based on the interaction of habitual, affective …

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 …

Development Of A Comprehensive Database System For A Highway Safety Engineering And Management, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Indira Khanal, Kenny Moupita, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In simple words, the objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive database system to provide a data for highway safety engineering and management.

Development Of A Smart Application For Police Crash Reports, Sebastien Bonnet, Victor Molano, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the GPS Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the bar code scan technology
• Application for MC 75 mobile technology

A Visualization Tool For A Highway Safety Management System, Indira Khanal, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• With lot of research, Federal Highway Administration
  has released a highway Safety management System
  software called as SafetyAnalyst (SA)
• SA has a suite of analytical tools to identify and
  manage system-wide safety improvements:
  Network Screening
  Diagnosis and Countermeasure Selection
  Economic Analyses and priority Ranking
  Countermeasure Evaluation
• SA provides a very rudimentary approach to display
  results just in tabular and textual format
• This study proposes a visualization tool that expands
  the output capabilities provided by SafetyAnalyst

Strong Location Privacy: A Case Study On Shortest Path Queries [Invited Paper], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The last few years have witnessed an increasing availability of location-based services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such services raise serious privacy concerns. For example, exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's position may reveal personal information, such as social habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. There is a large body of work on protecting the location privacy of the clients. In this paper, we focus on shortest path queries, describe a framework based on private information retrieval (PIR), and conclude with open questions about the practicality of PIR and other location privacy approaches.

Applying Information Technology In The Identification Of Areas Of Conservation Importance: Rare Carnivores In Westchester County, New York, Melissa M. Grigione, Dan Farkas

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Enabling An Integrated Rate-Temporal Learning Scheme On Memristor, Wei He, Kejie Huang, Ning Ning, Kiruthika Ramanathan, Guoqi Li, Yu Jiang, Jiayin Sze, Luping Shi, Rong Zhao, Jing Pei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning scheme is the key to the utilization of spike-based computation and the emulation of neural/synaptic behaviors toward realization of cognition. The biological observations reveal an integrated spike time- and spike rate-dependent plasticity as a function of presynaptic firing frequency. However, this integrated rate-temporal learning scheme has not been realized on any nano devices. In this paper, such scheme is successfully demonstrated on a memristor. Great robustness against the spiking rate fluctuation is achieved by waveform engineering with the aid of good analog properties exhibited by the iron oxide-based memristor. The spike-time-dependence plasticity (STDP) occurs at moderate presynaptic firing frequencies …

Integrating Strategic And Tactical Rolling Stock Models With Cyclical Demand, Michael F. Gorman

MIS/OM/DS Faculty Publications

In the transportation industry, companies position rolling stock where it is likely to be needed in the face of a pronounced weekly cyclical demand pattern in orders.

Strategic policies based on assumptions of repetition of cyclical weekly patterns set rolling stock targets; during tactical execution, a myriad dynamic influences cause deviations from strategically set targets. We find that optimal strategic plans do not agree with results of tactical modeling; strategic results are in fact suboptimal in many tactical situations. We discuss managerial implications of this finding and how the two modeling paradigms can be reconciled.

Virtualized Educational Lab Setup Project Plan And Supporting Project Documentation, Aaron Napierala

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The current infrastructure being used for IT courses at the University of Northwestern Ohio is not adequate for students. In addition, hands-on components of courses are difficult to test over, faculty administration of class resources was minimal, and students did not have access to enterprise level systems. The solution was to implement a lab environment to accomplish all of these concerns. This project closely mirrors how a real world project would function using the knowledge acquired during coursework completed at DSU. Documentation submitted for coursework at DSU was used as templates during this project. Not only was this project designed …

Vistruclizer: A Structural Visualizer For Multi-Dimensional Social Networks, Bingtian Dai, Agus Trisnajaya Kwee, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of Web 2.0 sites, social networks today increasingly involve different kinds of relationships among different types of users in a single network. Such social networks are said to be multi-dimensional. Analyzing multi-dimensional networks is a challenging research task that requires intelligent visualization techniques. In this paper, we therefore propose a visual analytics tool called ViStruclizer to analyze structures embedded in a multi-dimensional social network. ViStruclizer incorporates structure analyzers that summarize social networks into both node clusters each representing a set of users, and edge clusters representing relationships between users in the node clusters. ViStruclizer supports user interactions …

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: A Research Framework, Yuan Long, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Terrance Schoonover

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) research framework. Design/methodology/approach - The framework was developed from a review and synthesis of the literature. More specifically, gaps in the literature were identified and a general framework for future CSCL research was proposed. Findings - This paper proposes a research framework that identifies a fit profile between learning objectives, learning tasks, and technology in CSCL. The fit profile, in turn, is expected to influence users' learning processes and outcomes. Research limitations/ implications - This framework can serve as a foundation for future research in …

Twicube: A Real-Time Twitter Online Community Analysis Tool, Juan Du, Wei Xie, Cheng Li, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a micro-blogging service, Twitter differs from other social network services in two ways: 1) the absence of mutual consent in establishing follow links and 2) being a mixture of news media and social network. A key question to ask in better understanding Twitter user behavior is which part of a user’s Twitter network reflects one’s real-life social network. TwiCube is an online tool that employs a novel algorithm capable of identifying a user’s real-life social community, which we call the user’s off-line community, purely from examining the link structure among the user’s followers and followees. Based on the identified …

Beta Atomic Contacts: Identifying Critical Specific Contacts In Protein Binding Interfaces, Qian Lu, Chee Keong Kwoh, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specific binding between proteins plays a crucial role in molecular functions and biological processes. Protein binding interfaces and their atomic contacts are typically defined by simple criteria, such as distance-based definitions that only use some threshold of spatial distance in previous studies. These definitions neglect the nearby atomic organization of contact atoms, and thus detect predominant contacts which are interrupted by other atoms. It is questionable whether such kinds of interrupted contacts are as important as other contacts in protein binding. To tackle this challenge, we propose a new definition called beta (β) atomic contacts. Our definition, founded on the …

Roundtriprank: Graph-Based Proximity With Importance And Specificity, Yuan Fang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph-based proximity has many applications with different ranking needs. However, most previous works only stress the sense of importance by finding "popular” results for a query. Often times important results are overly general without being well-tailored to the query, lacking a sense of specificity— which only emerges recently. Even then, the two senses are treated independently, and only combined empirically. In this paper, we generalize the well-studied importance-based random walk into a round trip and develop RoundTripRank, seamlessly integrating specificity and importance in one coherent process. We also recognize the need for a flexible trade-off between the two senses, and …

Dynamic Label Propagation In Social Networks, Juan Du, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Label propagation has been studied for many years, starting from a set of nodes with labels and then propagating to those without labels. In social networks, building complete user profiles like interests and affiliations contributes to the systems like link prediction, personalized feeding, etc. Since the labels for each user are mostly not filled, we often employ some people to label these users. And therefore, the cost of human labeling is high if the data set is large. To reduce the expense, we need to select the optimal data set for labeling, which produces the best propagation result. In this …

Finding The Optimal Social Trust Path For The Selection Of Trustworthy Service Providers In Complex Social Networks, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Mehmet A. Orgun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social networks have provided the infrastructure for a number of emerging applications in recent years, e.g., for the recommendation of service providers or the recommendation of files as services. In these applications, trust is one of the most important factors in decision making by a service consumer, requiring the evaluation of the trustworthiness of a service provider along the social trust paths from a service consumer to the service provider. However, there are usually many social trust paths between two participants who are unknown to one another. In addition, some social information, such as social relationships between participants and …