34921454
Cognitive process as a basis for intelligent retrieval systems design
Abstract Two studies were conducted to investigate the cognitive processes involved in online document-based information retrieval. These studies led to the development of five computational models of online document retrieval. These models were then incorporated into the design of an “intelligent” document-based retrieval system. Following a discussion of this system, we discuss the broader implications of our research for the design of information retrieval systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1402963
MOPS: an infrastructure for examining security properties of software
We describe a formal approach for finding bugs in security-relevant software and verifying their absence. The idea is as follows: we identify rules of safe programming practice, encode them as safety properties, and verify whether these properties are obeyed. Because manual verification is too expensive, we have built a program analysis tool to automate this process. Our program analysis models the program to be verified as a pushdown automaton, represents the security property as a finite state automaton, and uses model checking techniques to identify whether any state violating the desired security goal is reachable in the program. The major advantages of this approach are that it is sound in verifying the absence of certain classes of vulnerabilities, that it is fully interprocedural, and that it is efficient and scalable. Experience suggests that this approach will be useful in finding a wide range of security vulnerabilities in large programs efficiently.
9863446
ITTALKS: An Application of Agents in the Semantic Web
Effective use of the vast quantity of information now available on the web will require the use of "Semantic Web" markup languages such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML). Such languages will enable the automated gathering and processing of much information that is currently available but insufficiently utilized. Effectively, such languages will facilitate the integration of multi-agent systems with the existing information infrastructure. As part of our exploration of SemanticWeb technology, and DAML in particular, we have constructed ITTALKS, a web-based system for automatic and intelligent notification of information technology talks. In this paper, we describe the ITTALKS system, and discuss the numerous ways in which the use of Semantic Web concepts and DAML extend its ability to provide an intelligent online service to both the human community and the agents assisting them.
16963632
Agents Making Sense of the Semantic Web
Effective use of the vast quantity of available information and services on the Internet will require multi-agent systems to be tightly integrated with existing web infrastructure. This however will be impossible unless the information on the web is presented in a semantic language, such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), which is one aim of the “Semantic Web”. As part of our exploration of Semantic Web technology, and DAML in particular, we have constructed ITTALKS, a web-based system for automatic and intelligent notification of information technology talks. In this paper, we describe the ITTALKS system, and discuss the numerous ways in which the use of Semantic Web concepts and DAML extend its ability to provide an intelligent online service to both the human community and, more interestingly, the agents assisting them.
26582047
Optimal intensity control of a multi-class queue
We study a mixed problem of optimal scheduling and input and output control of a single server queue with multi-classes of customers. The model extends the classical optimal scheduling problem by allowing the general point processes as the arrival and departure processes and the control of the arrival and departure intensities. The objective of our scheduling and control problem is to minimize the expected discounted inventory cost over an infinite horizon, and the problem is formulated as an intensity control. We find the well-knowncμ is the optimal solution to our problem.
10838244
Streaming SMIL Presentations via a Multimedia Semantic Model
The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) allows Web designers to design complicated and vivid multimedia presentations in a declarative manner. In this paper, an abstract semantic model called Multimedia Augmented Transition Network (MATN) is used to model the conceptual structure of SMIL, as well as the temporal relations and synchronization control. The advantages of using the MATN model are its simplicity and ease of modification (scalability). Users can easily generate their favorite multimedia presentations using MATNs and render them using the SMIL players. Since the SMIL specification is quite new to the Internet society, the functionality of the players is limited, i.e., they often acquire proprietary platforms or cannot deal with MPEG or RTP media objects. Another contribution of this paper is to propose a novel architecture based on Java JMF technology for tackling with such constraints.