15293705
Design and evaluation of a multi-agent collaborative Web mining system
Most existing Web search tools work only with individual users and do not help a user benefit from previous search experiences of others. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Spider, a multi-agent system designed to provide post-retrieval analysis and enable across-user collaboration in Web search and mining. This system allows the user to annotate search sessions and share them with other users. We also report a user study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of this system. Our experimental findings show that subjects' search performance was degraded, compared to individual search scenarios in which users had no access to previous searches, when they had access to a limited number (e.g., 1 or 2) of earlier search sessions done by other users. However, search performance improved significantly when subjects had access to more search sessions. This indicates that gain from collaboration through collaborative Web searching and analysis does not outweigh the overhead of browsing and comprehending other users' past searches until a certain number of shared sessions have been reached. In this paper, we also catalog and analyze several different types of user collaboration behavior observed in the context of Web mining.
35410760
Collaborative Workflow Management for Interagency Crime Analysis
To strengthen homeland security, there is a critical need for new tools that can facilitate real time collaboration among various law enforcement agencies. Through a field study, we find that law enforcement work is knowledge intensive and involves complex collaborative processes interrelating a large number of disparate units in a loosely defined virtual organization. To support knowledge intensive collaboration, we propose a new workflow centric framework to seamlessly integrate previously separate techniques from the fields of information retrieval and workflow management. Specifically, we develop a collaborative workflow management framework for interagency crime analysis. The key contribution of our research is that by integrating various state-of-the-art techniques innovatively, the proposed system can support real time collaboration processes in a virtual organization that evolves dynamically.
19452291
Cross-Jurisdictional Activity Networks to Support Criminal Investigations
Border and transportation security is a critical part of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) national strategy. DHS strategy calls for the creation of "smart borders" where information from local, state, federal, and international sources can be combined to support risk-based management tools for border-management agencies. Sharing cross-jurisdictional law enforcement data is important because criminals take advantage of the fact that information sharing between law enforcement jurisdictions is very limited. Challenges to information integration in this important domain include policy and privacy concerns, data security requirements, semantic or schema-level matching of legacy system data, and identity matching. The BorderSafe project leverages the skills and experiences of a diverse group of researchers, law enforcement officials, and government agencies to address data sharing needs in the Southwest United States. Our demo presents a framework for combining law enforcement data across jurisdictions to support criminal investigation and describes how that framework was used in combining three large, overlapping datasets to produce an integrated system for visualizing criminal activity networks.
40127439
Authorship Analysis in Cybercrime Investigation
Criminals have been using the Internet to distribute a wide range of illegal materials globally in an anonymous manner, making criminal identity tracing difficult in the cybercrime investigation process. In this study we propose to adopt the authorship analysis framework to automatically trace identities of cyber criminals through messages they post on the Internet. Under this framework, three types of message features, including style markers, structural features, and content-specific features, are extracted and inductive learning algorithms are used to build feature-based models to identify authorship of illegal messages. To evaluate the effectiveness of this framework, we conducted an experimental study on data sets of English and Chinese email and online newsgroup messages. We experimented with all three types of message features and three inductive learning algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed approach can discover real identities of authors of both English and Chinese Internet messages with relatively high accuracies.
38977435
Sharing and Visualizing Infectious Disease Datasets Using the WNV-BOT Portal System
Infectious disease outbreaks are critical threats to public health and national security. Information systems play a central role in developing an effective comprehensive approach to prevent, detect, respond to, and manage infectious disease outbreaks of plants, animals, and humans.
21266732
User Misconceptions of Information Retrieval Systems
In this paper, we report results of an investigation where thirty subjects were observedperforming subject-based search in an online catalog system. The observationshave revealed a range of misconceptions users have when performing subject-basedsearch. We have developed a taxonomy that characterizes these misconceptions andhypotheses about the causes of the misconceptions. Directions for improving searchperformance are also suggested.
8713624
Intelligent agents meet semantic web in a smart meeting room
We describe a new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting that explores the use of FIPA agent technologies, Semantic Web ontologies, logic reasoning, and security and privacy policies. Building on a pervasive computing system that we have developed previously, EasyMeeting can provide relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. Our system exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users. We also describe the use of CoBrA ontologies, logic reasoning, and privacy protection mechanisms, and evaluate our initial user experience studies.
18742334
Arithmetic Constant-Depth Circuit Complexity Classes
The boolean circuit complexity classes AC 0 ⊆ AC 0[m] ⊆ TC 0 ⊆ NC 1 have been studied intensely. Other than NC 1, they are defined by constant-depth circuits of polynomial size and unbounded fan-in over some set of allowed gates. One reason for interest in these classes is that they contain the boundary marking the limits of current lower bound technology: such technology exists for AC 0 and some of the classes AC 0[m], while the other classes AC 0[m] as well as TC 0 lack such technology.
1165445
Physical planning of on-chip interconnect architectures
Interconnect architecture plays an important role in determining the throughput of meshed communication structures. We assume a mesh structure with uniform communication demand for communication. A multi-commodity flow (MCF) model is proposed to find the throughput for several different routing architectures. The experimental results reveal several trends: 1. The throughput is limited by the capacity of the middle row and column in the mesh, simply enlarging the congested channel cannot produce better throughput. A flexible chip shape provides around 30% throughput improvement over a square chip of equal area. 2. A 45-degree mesh allows 17% throughput improvement over 90-degree mesh and a 90-degree and 45-degree mixed mesh provides 30% throughput improvement. 3. To achieve maximum throughput on a mixed Manhattan and diagonal interconnect architecture, the best ratio of the capacity for diagonal routing layers and the capacity for Manhattan routing layers is 5.6. 4. Incorporating a simplified via model, interleaving diagonal routing layers and Manhattan routing layer is the best way to organize the wiring directions on different layers.
15665012
Progressive auction based resource allocation in service-oriented architecture
The emerging paradigm of distributed Web services has promised seamless business integration across the Internet that shares not only computing power but also applications. One major challenge is resource allocation to each end user in an economically efficient and low latency manner. A common solution is proportional sharing where each user gets his resource in proportion to the predetermined weight. However, this does not allow users to differentiate the value of their services and to dynamically adjust the weights. A resource reservation mechanism may improve the information and service sharing but usually introduces a high latency. In this paper, we propose a progressive auction based market mechanism for resource allocation that allows user differentiation of the service value and ensures the resource acquisition latency to be limited only to the communication delay in service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. We present a service sharing prototype for selecting services for further business process composition or solution creation and show experimental results on the formation of reliable user ranking in resource sharing through the progressive auction.
34160766
Capacity competition of make-to-order firms
Two make-to-order firms, each modelled as a single-server queue, compete for a common stream of (potential) customers by setting their service capacities (rates) and service prices. Each customer maximizes her expected return by getting service from a firm or by balking. We completely characterize the Nash equilibrium of the competition.