8803095
A graph-based recommender system for digital library
Research shows that recommendations comprise a valuable service for users of a digital library [11]. While most existing recommender systems rely either on a content-based approach or a collaborative approach to make recommendations, there is potential to improve recommendation quality by using a combination of both approaches (a hybrid approach). In this paper, we report how we tested the idea of using a graph-based recommender system that naturally combines the content-based and collaborative approaches. Due to the similarity between our problem and a concept retrieval task, a Hopfield net algorithm was used to exploit high-degree book-book, user-user and book-user associations. Sample hold-out testing and preliminary subject testing were conducted to evaluate the system, by which it was found that the system gained improvement with respect to both precision and recall by combining content-based and collaborative approaches. However, no significant improvement was observed by exploiting high-degree associations.
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.
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.
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.
16294852
Interactive volume visualization on a heterogeneous message-passing multicomputer
This paper describes VOL2, an interactive general-purpose volume renderer based on ray casting and implemented on Pixel-Planes 5, a distributed-memory, message-passing multicomputer. VOL2 is a pipelined renderer using image-space task parallelism and object-space data partitioning. We describe the parallelization and load balancing techniques used in order to achieve interactive response and near-real-time frame rates. We also present a number of applications for our system and derive some general conclusions about operation of image-order rendering algorithms on message-passing multicomputers.
7036833
Dynamic Service Discovery for Mobile Computing: Intelligent Agents Meet Jini in the Aether
The emergence of ad-hoc pervasive connectivity for devices based on Bluetooth-like systems provides a new way to create applications for mobile systems. We seek to realize ubiquitous computing systems based on the cooperation of autonomous, dynamic and adaptive components (hardware as well as software) which are located in vicinity of one another. In this paper we present this vision. We also describe a prototype system we have developed that implements parts of this vision – in particular a system that combines agent oriented and service oriented approaches and provides dynamic service discovery. We point out why existing systems such as Jini are not suited for this task, and how our system improves on them.
19376839
The Multilevel Classification Problem and a Monotonicity Hint
We introduce and formalize the multilevel classification problem, in which each category can be subdivided into different levels. We analyze the framework in a Bayesian setting using Normal class conditional densities. Within this framework, a natural monotonicity hint converts the problem into a nonlinear programming task, with non-linear constraints. We present Monte Carlo and gradient based techniques for addressing this task, and show the results of simulations. Incorporation of monotonicity yields a systematic improvement in performance.
5225848
Towards an Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS)
This paper addresses the problem of developing an automated system for postmortem identification using dental records. The Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS) can be used by law enforcement agencies to locate missing persons using databases of dental x-rays. Currently, this search and identification process is carried out manually, which makes it very time-consuming and unreliable. In this paper, we propose architecture for ADIS, we define the functionality of its components, and we briefly describe some of the techniques used in realizing these components.
6332225
Observing a volume rendered fetus within a pregnant patient
Augmented reality systems with see-through headmounted displays have been used primarily for applications that are possible with today's computational capabilities. We explore possibilities for a particular application-in-place, real-time 3D ultrasound visualization-without concern for such limitations. The question is not "How well could we currently visualize the fetus in real time," but "How well could we see the fetus if we had sufficient compute power?" Our video sequence shows a 3D fetus within a pregnant woman's abdomen-the way this would look to a HMD user. Technical problems in making the sequence are discussed. This experience exposed limitations of current augmented reality systems; it may help define the capabilities of future systems needed for applications as demanding as real-time medical visualization.<<ETX>>