Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Recent Advances In Integrating Owl And Rules, Matthias Knorr, David Carral Martinez, Pascal Hitzler, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Frederick Maier, Cong Wang

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

As part of the quest for a unifying logic for the Semantic Web Technology Stack, a central issue is finding suitable ways of integrating description logics based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) with rule-based approaches based on logic programming. Such integration is difficult since naive approaches typically result in the violation of one or more desirable design principles. For example, while both OWL 2 DL and RIF Core (a dialect of the Rule Interchange Format RIF) are decidable, their naive union is not, unless carefully chosen syntactic restrictions are applied.

We report on recent advances and ongoing work by …

A Tableau Algorithm For Description Logics With Nominal Schema, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a tableau algorithm for the description logic ALCOV. This description logic is obtained by extending the description logic ALCO with the expressive nominal schema construct that enables DL-safe datalog with predicates of arbitrary arity to be covered within the description logic framework. The tableau algorithm provides a basis to implement a delayed grounding strategy which was not facilitated by earlier versions of decision procedures for satisfiability in expressive description logics with nominal schemas.

Cofeel: Using Emotions For Social Interaction In Group Recommender Systems, Yu Chen, Pearl Pu

Faculty Publications, Information Systems & Technology

Group and social recommender systems aim to suggest items of interest to a group or a community of people. One important issue in such environment is to understand each individual’s preference and attitude within the group. Social and behavioral scientist have evidenced the role of emotions in group work and social communication. This paper aims to examine the role of emotion for social interaction in group recommenders. We implemented CoFeel, an interface that aims to provide emotional input in group recommenders. We further apply CoFeel in a GroupFun, a mobile group music recommender system. Results of an in-depth field study …

An Empirical Examination Of The Associations Between Social Tags And Web Queries, Kwan Yi, Chan Yun Yoo

Journalism and Media Faculty Publications

Introduction. We aim to discover the associations between social tags for a Web page and Web queries that would retrieve the same Webpage in three major search engines.

Method. 4,827 query terms were submitted to the three major search engines to acquire search engine results pages. A series of Perl scripts were written to read search engine results pages and to identify, analyse, and extract organic links

Analysis. Web pages from the organic links in search engine results pages were examined to see whether and how they had been tagged in Delicious. Only the Webpages tagged by …

Digital Games For Language Learning: From Hype To Insight?, Frederik Cornillie, Steven L. Thorne, Piet Desmet

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Special issue of ReCall topics the concept of ludic engagement as a form of developmentally productive activity specifically digital game-based second or foreign language learning (DGBLL).

Facebook As An Instructional Tool In The Secondary Classroom: A Case Study, Stephanie Hunter-Brown

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study is to describe how social media networks impact secondary students when utilized as an instructional tool . The problem this study seeks to address is exploring the roles that social media play in the lives of high school students and the experiences they encounter by utilizing these networks academically and socially. A case study approach was utilized to evaluate the impact of technology integration via social media networks in a secondary English classroom. The focus of the study was to determine the academic and social impact the social media network, more specifically Facebook, has on …

Testing News Trustworthiness In An Online Public Sphere: A Case Study Of The Economist's News Report Covering The Riots In Xinjiang, China, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

This paper explores the news trustworthiness and media credibility of The Economist’s news report on 9 July 2009, and the communicative roles of 846 readers’ responses. Theoretically guided by news translation and cultural resistance and the online public sphere, we applied online field observation and discourse analysis and achieved two main findings: First, although the news report covered the Xinjiang riots with comprehensive and attractive details, it violated the core journalism value of media credibility and journalistic objectivity by providing misleading pictures and significant unreliable and biased coverage. Second, the major communicative roles of the online readers’ responses generally match …

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …

Automatic Classification Of Software Related Microblogs, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, David Lo, Achananuparp Palakorn, Yuan Tian, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

The Development Of The Web And Its Impact On Libraries And Scholarly Communications, Michael B. Binder Dean Emeritus, University Libraries

DLPS Faculty Publications

In 2011 when I was given the opportunity of taking a research leave to explore a topic of my choice, I immediately thought of the changes in which we find information today both in our work and home lives. This was a natural reaction for me because ever since I had initiated my studies of librarianship and information science, I had been most interested in technology and its impact on libraries. This started with Professor Susan Artandi at Rutgers when I first learned of systems analysis and library automation and reached greater fruition under Professor Leon Montgomery's instruction on programming …

Free Telecollaboration 2.0 Tools And Activities For Enhancing Intercultural Communicative Competence, Khoi Nguyen Thi Bui

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the effectiveness and relevance of some free telecollaboration 2.0 tools and the IT-HELPS activities to the participants’ enhancement of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in reference to Byram’s (1997) ICC definition and its five principles. In-depth qualitative data were collected from six semistructured interviews with students and teachers of the eight-week online intercultural exchange between a Second Language Acquisition class at Eastern Michigan University in the United States and an English as a Second Language class at Tan Tao University in Vietnam. Despite the failed communication in some collaborative tasks due to some deficiencies in motivating, facilitating, and …

Reconciling Owl And Non-Monotonic Rules For The Semantic Web, Matthias Knorr, Pascal Hitzler, Frederick Maier

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We propose a description logic extending SROIQ (the description logic underlying OWL 2 DL) and at the same time encompassing some of the most prominent monotonic and nonmonotonic rule languages, in particular Datalog extended with the answer set semantics. Our proposal could be considered a substantial contribution towards fulfilling the quest for a unifying logic for the Semantic Web. As a case in point, two non-monotonic extensions of description logics considered to be of distinct expressiveness until now are covered in our proposal. In contrast to earlier such proposals, our language has the 'look and feel' of a description logic …

Objections To The Proposed Access Copyright Post-Secondary Tariff And Its Progeny Licenses: A Working Paper, Samuel Trosow, Scott Armstrong, Brent Harasym

FIMS Publications

On March 31, 2010, Access Copyright applied to the Copyright Board to certify a tariff that would govern the relationship between the organization and the members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and the Association of Community Colleges of Canada (ACCC). Previously, the relationship had been governed by a series of license agreements between the organizations which had been periodically renewed. But Access Copyright chose not to seek renewal of the licenses, and applied to the Board to certify a general tariff that would cover all post-secondary institutions for the period of 2011 through 2013.

Access …

Book Review: The Ethics Of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms And New Media Technology, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Discussions of new media and ethics sometimes include the notion that “ethics are ethics”—that doing the right thing is, and has been, a constant over time and across media.

The idea has a certain appeal. But it gets new twists in The Ethics of Emerging Media, by Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German, assistant professors of communication at Miami University. New media create new ethical questions and opportunities to cross ethical lines, as the thirteen contributors to this collection examine.

Using Attribute Behavior Diversity To Build Accurate Decision Tree Committees For Microarray Data, Qian Han, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

DNA microarrays (gene chips), frequently used in biological and medical studies, measure the expressions of thousands of genes per sample. Using microarray data to build accurate classifiers for diseases is an important task. This paper introduces an algorithm, called Committee of Decision Trees by Attribute Behavior Diversity (CABD), to build highly accurate ensembles of decision trees for such data. Since a committee's accuracy is greatly influenced by the diversity among its member classifiers, CABD uses two new ideas to "optimize" that diversity, namely (1) the concept of attribute behavior–based similarity between attributes, and (2) …

College Football Twitter Communities: The Husker Twitter Community During The 2012 Capital One Bowl, Kelly D. Mosier

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Theses

Our increasingly interconnected society has allowed total strangers to share insights in real time with increasing frequency and ease through the use of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. Twitter, a social network based on the cell phone short messaging system, has previously shown an ability to aid in the sharing of information during major events such as presidential debates and breaking news.

Sporting events are also places where large groups of people share a similar experience. Traditionally, information has flowed to average viewers, through professional journalists. Due to social networking sites like Twitter, fans now …

Simulating Real Lives: Promoting Global Empathy And Interest In Learning Through Simulation Games, Christine Bachen, Pedro F. Hernández-Ramos, Chad Raphael

Communication

In response to an increasingly interdependent world, educators are demonstrating a growing interest in educating for global citizenship. Many definitions of the “good global citizen” value empathy as an especially important disposition for understanding others across national borders and cultural divides. Yet it may be difficult for people to achieve empathy with others who are perceived as psychologically and geographically distant. Can computerized simulation games help foster global empathy and interest in global civic learning? This quasiexperimental classroom study of 301 Northern California high school students in three schools examined the effects of playing REAL LIVES, a simulation game that …

Audience Image Preferences Of 1080i And 720p High Definition Video Formats: An Experiment, Michael Thomas Stubben

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The two main kinds of high definition television video formats broadcast in the United States are 1080i and 720p. Both formats are claimed to have advantages and disadvantages relative to the other format. However, there has been little academic research to determine viewer preferences of these formats, and whether the stated claims about each format's strengths and weaknesses are valid. This thesis addresses this lack of research by employing an experiment to determine viewer perceptions and preferences of these two high definition formats.

The two major findings from this study pertain to viewer preferences of 1080i/720p with regard to motion, …

The Use Of Social Media For Academic Practice: A Review Of Literature, Retta Guy

Kentucky Journal of Higher Education Policy and Practice

Social media has become extremely popular among college students. It is estimated that several million students across the globe use these resources for personal interactions on a daily basis. As Web-based technologies are designed to support the social architecture of a community, educators and researchers are exploring the integration of social media in education. As scholars explore these new online communities, it is necessary to examine the use of social media tools by students of color, a segment of the population that has historically experienced inequalities associated with the use of and access to technology. The current literature review reports …

Twitris+: Social Media Analytics Platform For Effective Coordination, Gary Alan Smith, Amit P. Sheth, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Hemant Purohit, Lu Chen, Michael Cooney, Pavan Kapanipathi, Pramod Anantharam, Pramod Koneru, Wenbo Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Twitris+ is a Semantic Social Media analytics platform to provide technologies for analyzing large-scale social media streams across Spatio-Temporal-Thematic (STT) and People-Content-Network (PCN) dimensions. It provides holistic situational awareness from one interface and enables organizational actors to engage in well-coordinated ways for desired tasks during emergency response.