Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Key Ingredients For Your Next Semantics Elevator Talk, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

2012 brought a major change to the semantics research community. Discussions on the use and benefits of semantic technologies are shifting away from the why to the how. Surprisingly this more in stakeholder interest is not accompanied by a more detailed understanding of what semantics research is about. Instead of blaming others for their (wrong) expectations, we need to learn how to emphasize the paradigm shift proposed by semantics research while abstracting from technical details and advocate the added value in a way that relates to the immediate needs of individual stakeholders without overselling. This paper highlights some of …

Stoking The Research Fire: Three Views, Charles C. Self, Margeretha Geertsema-Sligh

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Most academics are fired up for research right after graduate school, but after a few years on the job, the flame might wane. Perhaps you are over-burdened with service or administration and can't imagine finding time for a research project. Budget cuts may have you feeling overworked or uninspired. Perhaps you've achieved your goal of becoming tenured and you wonder what comes next. The purpose of this collection of essays, presented originally at a 2011 midwinter conference, is to share ways to stoke a passion for research. The perspectives included here represent three stages of academic life: tenure-track assistant professor, …

The Impact Of Online Collaboration Spaces On Virtual Team Outcomes, Anil Ustun, Pilar Pazos

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

With the emergence of information technology, organizational teams often work virtually, relying on different technologies to successfully complete tasks. This paper investigates the influence of online collaboration spaces on team performance and team affective outcomes such as satisfaction with the process. An experiment will be conducted in which teams of 3 participants will work together on a survival decision-making activity (Lost at Sea). Teams will be collaborating in a web-conferencing (Adobe Connecta™) space and a 3D (three-dimensional) virtual space (Second Life). Based on Social Presence Theory, we expect that the avatar-based 3D environment will provide a richer environment for social …

Rights, Principles, And Data Use: An Investigation Of User Knowledge And Opinion Of Facebook's Legal Contract, Nikolas D. Payne

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project investigated the legal contract to which users must agree before creating a Facebook account. Multi-methodological in nature, this research explored user knowledge and perception of the contract as well as how the contract measures up to the principles which Facebook claims serve as its foundation. For the quantitative portion of this analysis, a survey including measures of knowledge and perception was administered to respondents. The qualitative portion critically compared Facebook’s legal contract to the list of principles espoused by the company on their website. These analyses reveal that users rarely read this contract before agreeing to it, tend …

Open And Transparent: The Review Process Of The Semantic Web Journal, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

While open access is established in the world of academic publishing, open reviews are rare. The Semantic Web journal goes further than just open review by implementing an open and transparent review process in which reviews are publicly available, and the assigned editors and reviewers are known by name, and are published together with accepted manuscripts. In this article we introduce the steps to realize such a process from the conceptual design, over the implementation, a overview of the results so far, and up to lessons learned.

Evaluating The Similarity Estimator Component Of The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow …

Libraries Atwitter: Trends In Academic Library Tweeting, Darcy C. Del Bosque, Sam A. Leif, Susie Skarl

Library Faculty Research

Purpose – This paper aims to present an overview of how libraries are using Twitter in an academic setting.

Design/methodology/approach – This study analyzed the current state of 296 Twitter accounts from a random sample of academic libraries. A total of 19 different criteria were explored, with an emphasis on the following three categories: layout and design, content and number of tweets, and account followers.

Findings – Only 34 per cent of libraries in the study had a Twitter account and characteristics varied widely among libraries, however it is evident that it is possible to successfully communicate with patrons via …

Kinect And 3d Gis In Archaeology, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Jim Robersson, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Giorgio Agugiaro, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper explores the potential of using Microsoft's Kinect to create a low-cost and portable system to virtually navigate, through a prototype 3D GIS, the digitally reconstructed ancient Maya city and UNESCO World Heritage Site of Copan in Honduras. The 3D GIS, named QueryArch3D, was developed as part of the MayaArch3D project (http://mayaarch3d.unm.edu), which explores the possibilities of integrating databases and 3D digital tools for research and teaching on ancient architectures and landscapes. The developed system, based on the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), controls in a remote and touchless mode the movements in the 3D environment in …

The Ontology For Parasite Lifecycle (Opl): Towards A Consistent Vocabulary Of Lifecycle Stages In Parasitic Organisms, Priti Parikh, Jie Zheng, Flora J. Logan-Klumpler, Christian J. Stoeckert, Pantelis Topalis, Anna Protasio, Amit P. Sheth, Mark Carrington, Matthew Berriman, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background

Genome sequencing of many eukaryotic pathogens and the volume of data available on public resources have created a clear requirement for a consistent vocabulary to describe the range of developmental forms of parasites. Consistent labeling of experimental data and external data, in databases and the literature, is essential for integration, cross database comparison, and knowledge discovery. The primary objective of this work was to develop a dynamic and controlled vocabulary that can be used for various parasites. The paper describes the Ontology for Parasite Lifecycle (OPL) and discusses its application in parasite research.

Results

The OPL is based on …

Policy Implications And Rrecommendations: Now What?, Brian O'Neill, Elisabeth Staksrud

Books/Book chapters

The EU Kids Online survey represents the most substantial knowledge base to date about young people’s online experiences in Europe. Chapters in this volume highlight findings that provide new kinds of evidence of significant interest for policy makers. They address questions which range from how to respond to the fact that the internet is now firmly in children’s lives; how to develop appropriate strategies for internet safety while responding to shifting patterns of access and use; how to manage those enduring risks to children’s welfare that appear to be amplified in the online world, and deal with risks that are …

The Vital Non-Action Of Occupation, Offline And Online, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Using an Arendtian framework, I argue that we can understand distinctive and effective elements of the #OWS movements as forms of non-action related to prior strategies of non-violence, the propaganda of the deed, and coalitions of affinity rather than identity. This understanding allows us to see that, while the use of social media in the movement does not provide the same affordances for building and maintaining power as physical occupation, and while online community clearly cannot substitute for physical community in many relevant and consequential ways, Facebook does nonetheless provide a platform well suited to maintaining power through these distinctive …

On The Origins Of The Cute As A Dominant Aesthetic Category In Digital Culture, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In discussions of online culture, nobody has yet given sufficient consideration to the importance of cute animal pictures. While there are perhaps obvious reasons for this aspect of online culture being and remaining understudied, from an objective stance we should consider it both surprising and noteworthy that, once given the means of mass communications and internationally accessible publication, a primary activity that people are interested in and committed to is the sharing of cute and funny pictures, especially of cats. This presumably unforeseeable outcome is made stranger yet by the relative lack of commercial motivation for a communications category that …

Accelerated Culture: Exploring Time And Space In Cinema, Television And New Media In The Digital Age, Thomas J. Connelly

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of speed on the interrelation and the overlapping of the production and consumption of cinematic and televisual texts. It explores the immediacy of digital media and new economic processes, and how they are informing structures of perception, as well as lending themselves to new and different ways of seeing the moving image in the digital age. These visual expressions are evident in the changing perception of the long take; the increasing use of video gaming aesthetics and database narratives; new and variant forms of narrative and visual styles in television; and the speed …

Putting Multimedia Exhibits In The Palm Of Your Hand, Damecia Donahue, Rachael Clark

Library Scholarly Publications

Presentation given by Rachael Clark and Damecia Donahue in November of 2012 at the Michigan Library Association Annual Conference in Detroit, MI. The discussion revolved around topics related to libraries creating exhibits using their own collections and resources; this included the idea of incorporating multimedia tools and web applications to creatively and interactively provide access to library materials.

A Narrative In One Scene, Aliyah C. Anglin

Theses and Dissertations

Filmmakers are visual storytellers, thus it is important to understand basic film theory as well as the elements of a narrative, such as voice, look, and feel. It is just as important for filmmakers to understand how film theory and the elements of a narrative work together to effectively convey stories to the people viewing the film. In this thesis, I researched basic film theory and analyzed three personally influential movies and directors including Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible (2012), and Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954). I chose one technique from each of the …

Towards Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application Generation Using Semantically Enriched Domain Specific Languages, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Ashwin Manjunatha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. Taking advantage of this computing landscape, however, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space as well as the Cloud space.

This research attempts to introduce a disciplined methodology to develop Cloud-mobile hybrid applications by using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) centric approach to generate applications. A Cloud-mobile hybrid is an application that is split between a Cloud based back-end and …

Resident Identification Using Kinect Depth Image Data And Fuzzy Clustering Techniques, Tanvi Banerjee, James M. Keller, Marjorie Skubic

Kno.e.sis Publications

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out …

An Information-Gathering Approach To Copyright Policy, Peter Dicola, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

For over a century and with increasing frequency, major controversies have erupted between large distributors of copyrighted works (song publishers, movie studios, record labels, book publishers, etc.) and makers of new technologies for experiencing those works (player piano manufacturers, VCR manufacturers, the creators of file sharing software, Google Books, etc.). Usually, the copyright owners and the technology firms reach a licensing deal-but not without some form of government intervention. Various institutions within the federal government have become involved in these disputes, using a variety of different mechanisms. This Article is a theoretical investigation of government intervention in these content-technology copyright …

Speaking Ill Of The Dead: Anonymity And Communication About Suicide On Mydeathspace.Com, Lynette G. Leonard, Paige W. Toller

Communication Faculty Publications

From birth to death, many individuals chronicle their lives online through blogs, pictures, games, Web sites, and social networks. Online spaces, created by the living about the dead, provide a glimpse into often invisible or silent grieving practices. To investigate the role computer-mediated communication (CMC) plays in influencing communication surrounding the often private and taboo topic of suicide, we analyzed the comments sections of MyDeathSpace.com. Our results suggest both a breaking down of social taboos (speaking ill of the dead) and a reaffirming of strict social norms (enforcing a narrow range of acceptable presentation of identity and purpose in life), …

Electronic Portfolios As Job Search Tools: Perspectives From Students, Career Counselors, And Human Resource Professionals, Emily Werschay

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Electronic portfolios have traditionally been used by artists as a means of showcasing and organizing projects and accomplishments. Within academia, colleges and universities have implemented electronic portfolios as a way for students to showcase and share their papers, projects, and course work. Universities and colleges typically license e-portfolio software and distribute the platform to students. The eFolioMinnesota software is free for all students and residents in the state through the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System (MnSCU). Unfortunately, little has been researched about the use of e-portfolios in career development or employee recruiting. Never before have e-portfolios integrated with workforce …