21787077
Information Visualization for Collaborative Computing
Information technology continues to generate increasing amounts of data, most of which is useless without scalable methods to collect, analyze, process, and understand it. Visualization is a promising approach to such systemization because it lets users see underlying processes and guide process simulations interactively. However, visualization must be combined with some way to make repositories of text documents more manageable, providing users with a flexible, interactive environment in which to access them. The article describes a prototype tool that addresses these problems for GroupSystems, an electronic meeting system developed at the University of Arizona and installed at more than 1,500 business, government, and university settings. The tool automatically categorizes information, statistically clusters similar documents, and displays the organized document set graphically, providing more at-a-glance information than a typical text based display. Users can thus more easily browse document collections. The tool uses text analysis techniques that aim to identify descriptors and develop an unambiguous internal representation of a document.
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.
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.
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.
36849073
Fluid approximations for a processor-sharing queue
In this paper a fluid approximation, also known as a functional strong law of large numbers (FSLLN) for a GI/G/1 queue under a processor-sharing service discipline is established and its properties are analysed. The fluid limit depends on the arrival rate, the service time distribution of the initial customers, and the service time distribution of the arriving customers. This is in contrast to the known result for the GI/G/1 queue under a FIFO service discipline, where the fluid limit is piecewise linear and depends on the service time distribution only through its mean. The piecewise linear form of the limit can be recovered by an equilibrium type choice of the initial service distribution.
1567676
Bringing order to the Web: automatically categorizing search results
We developed a user interface that organizes Web search results into hierarchical categories. Text classification algorithms were used to automatically classify arbitrary search results into an existing category structure on-the-fly. A user study compared our new category interface with the typical ranked list interface of search results. The study showed that the category interface is superior both in objective and subjective measures. Subjects liked the category interface much better than the list interface, and they were 50% faster at finding information that was organized into categories. Organizing search results allows users to focus on items in categories of interest rather than having to browse through all the results sequentially.
17347401
RDF-based schema mediation for database grid
In presence of grid where a huge amount of databases can be involved in sharing cycle, database tools and middlewares should be well suited for schema mediation and query processing in a semantically meaningful way. Dart is an implemented prototype system whose goal is to provide a semantic solution for database resource sharing capable of deployment in grid settings. This paper particularly concerns the problems of schema mediation in DartGrid. Our approach mainly involves the following notions: a) we use RDF/OWL to define the mediated ontologies for integration, b) we devise a set of rules for automatically converting the relational schema to RDF/OWL description called source data semantic, c) we define the source data semantic (source schema) as the view of shared ontologies (mediated schema), d) query is formulated and posed on the shared ontologies. A set of grid services is developed for the implementation of above functionalities.
14330906
Creating Context-Aware Software Agents
Sharing ontologies, sensing context and reasoning are crucial to the realization of context-aware software agents. This document de- scribes our efforts in using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Prolog Forward Chaining (Pfc) system to provide support for ontology sharing and reasoning in the CoolAgent Recommendation System (CoolAgent RS), a context-aware multi-agent system. We also describes the implementation of the CoolAgent RS document and cuisine recommendation services that provide tailored services by exploiting user's context.
41746629
Quick Buddy-Subcube Compaction in Hypercubes
After repeated subcube allocation and deallocation, the hypercube system tends to become fragmented, which can be taken care of by using subcube compaction. Basic buddy-subcube compaction deals with compacting free buddy-subcubes with the same dimension concurrently. All migration paths are pairwise disjoint and contain no links of active subcubes, so that task migration can be performed without suspending the execution of other jobs. This paper considers quick buddy-subcube compaction in that not only can free subcubes with two adjacent dimensions be compacted concurrently, but two disjoint paths can be established between every pair of source-target nodes. Parallel subcube compaction with two concurrent dimensions apparently speeds up subcube compaction by a factor of two. The use of double disjoint paths between each pair of source-target nodes also speeds up subcube compaction by a factor of nearly two. Thus, our approach can speed up subcube compaction by a factor of nearly four.