Interactive context-aware user-driven metadata correction in digital libraries

Personal name variants are a common problem in digital libraries, reducing the precision of searches and complicating browsing-based interaction. The book-centric approach of name authority control has not scaled to match the growth and diversity of digital repositories. In this paper, we present a novel system for user-driven integration of name variants when interacting with web-based information??in particular digital library??systems. We approach these issues via a client-side JavaScript browser extension that can reorganize web content and also integrate remote data sources. Designed to be agnostic towards the web sites it is applied to, we illustrate the developed proof-of-concept system through worked examples using three different digital libraries. We discuss the extensibility of the approach in the context of other user-driven information systems and the growth of the Semantic Web.     

Intelligent video surveillance system: 3-tier context-aware surveillance system with metadata

This paper presents an intelligent video surveillance system with the metadata rule for the exchange of analyzed information. We define the metadata rule for the exchange of analyzed information between intelligent video surveillance systems that automatically analyzes video data acquired from cameras. The metadata rule is to effectively index very large video surveillance databases and to unify searches and management between distributed or heterogeneous surveillance systems more efficiently. The system consists of low-level context-aware, high-level context-aware and intelligent services to generate metadata for the surveillance systems. Various contexts are acquired from physical sensors in monitoring areas for the low-level context-aware system. The situation is recognized in the high-level context-aware system by analyzing the context data collected in the low-level system. The system provides intelligent services to track moving objects in Fields Of View (FOVs) and to recognize human activities. Furthermore, the system supports real-time moving objects tracking with Panning, Tilting and Zooming (PTZ) cameras in overlapping and non-overlapping FOVs.     

Learning to embed music and metadata for context-aware music recommendation

Contextual factors greatly influence users’ musical preferences, so they are beneficial remarkably to music recommendation and retrieval tasks. However, it still needs to be studied how to obtain and utilize the contextual information. In this paper, we propose a context-aware music recommendation approach, which can recommend music pieces appropriate for users’ contextual preferences for music. In analogy to matrix factorization methods for collaborative filtering, the proposed approach does not require music pieces to be represented by features ahead, but it can learn the representations from users’ historical listening records. Specifically, the proposed approach first learns music pieces’ embeddings (feature vectors in low-dimension continuous space) from music listening records and corresponding metadata. Then it infers and models users’ global and contextual preferences for music from their listening records with the learned embeddings. Finally, it recommends appropriate music pieces according to the target user’s preferences to satisfy her/his real-time requirements. Experimental evaluations on a real-world dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods in terms of precision, recall, F1 score, and hitrate. Especially, our approach has better performance on sparse datasets.     

A context-aware middleware for real-time semantic enrichment of distributed multimedia metadata

This paper investigates the problem of the real-time integration and processing of multimedia metadata collected by a distributed sensor network. The discussed practical problem is the efficiency of the technologies used in creating a Knowledge Base in real-time. Specifically, an approach is proposed for the real-time, rule-based semantic enrichment of lower level context features with higher-level semantics. The distinguishing characteristic is the provision of an intelligent middleware-based architecture on which low level components such as sensors, feature extraction algorithms, data sources, and high level components such as application-specific ontologies can be plugged. Throughout the paper, Priamos, a middleware architecture based on Semantic Web technologies is presented, together with a stress-test of the system’s operation under two test case scenarios: A smart security surveillance application and a smart meeting room application. Performance measurements are conducted and corresponding results are exposed.     

Modular framework support for context-aware mobile cinema

In this paper we describe a novel approach for interactive cinema based on context-aware narration using handheld computers. The paper describes both the artistic approach and the ubiquitous computing framework developed to realize the scenario. This framework has been used in various projects, including the described video production course at the ISNM, where five interactive cinema concepts have been developed and shown during a public demonstration. In our approach, a new type of user experience has been established by placing the viewer inside the movie’s physical locations during playback. Moreover, the developed ubiquitous computing framework provides a foundation for future work in the area of ad-hoc, service-oriented Ubicomp scenarios.     

On context-aware distributed event dissemination

In pervasive environments, the Pub/Sub paradigm is regarded as an important means of information sharing and event dissemination. In this paper, we first analyze different context in Pub/Sub systems that has remarkable impacts upon user’s satisfaction to event dissemination and then give corresponding strategies by exploiting time context and event-preference context so as to provide personalized event dissemination. That is, by leveraging time context, we provide the extended matching against long-standing events, and by leveraging event-preference context, we present the recommendation algorithm which is based on hidden Markov process. Performance analysis and experiment evaluation show that both strategies can improve user’s experiences of event dissemination.     

Telme: a personalized, context-aware communication support system

True global communication will require more than just language translation technologies. To fully understand each other, people also need context-specific information. The authors have developed Telme, a support system that gives users real-time information to help bridge the knowledge and experience gap. The authors explain the Telme framework for wearable computers connected to a central knowledge base server. The server controls a background knowledge database and downloads data on user request.     

On modeling context-aware social collaboration processes

Modeling collaboration processes is a challenging task. Existing modeling approaches are not capable of expressing the unpredictable, non-routine nature of human collaboration, which is influenced by the social context of involved collaborators. We propose a modeling approach which considers collaboration processes as the evolution of a network of collaborative documents along with a social network of collaborators. Our modeling approach, accompanied by a graphical notation and formalization, allows to capture the influence of complex social structures formed by collaborators, and therefore facilitates such activities as the discovery of socially coherent teams, social hubs, or unbiased experts. We demonstrate the applicability and expressiveness of our approach and notation, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.     

The DYNAMOS approach to support context-aware service provisioning in mobile environments

To efficiently make use of information and services available in ubiquitous environments, mobile users need novel means for locating relevant content, where relevance has a user-specific definition. In the DYNAMOS project, we have investigated a hybrid approach that enhances context-aware service provisioning with peer-to-peer social functionalities. We have designed and implemented a system platform and application prototype running on smart phones to support this novel conception of service provisioning. To assess the feasibility of our approach in a real-world scenario, we conducted field trials in which the research subject was a community of recreational boaters.     

An adaptive navigation support system for conducting context-aware ubiquitous learning in museums

In context-aware ubiquitous learning, students are guided to learn in the real world with personalized supports from the learning system. As the learning resources are realistic objects in the real world, certain physical constraints, such as the limitation of stream of people who visit the same learning object, the time for moving from one object to another, and the environmental parameters, need to be taken into account. Moreover, the values of these context-dependent parameters are likely to change swiftly during the learning process, which makes it a challenging and important issue to find a navigation support mechanism for suggesting learning paths for individual students in real time. In this paper, the navigation support problem for context-aware ubiquitous learning is formulated and two navigation support algorithms are proposed by taking learning efficacy and navigation efficiency into consideration. From the simulation results of learning in a butterfly museum setting, it is concluded that the innovative approach is helpful to the students to more effectively and efficiently utilize the learning resources and achieve better learning efficacy.     

Penalized nonnegative matrix tri-factorization for co-clustering

Nonnegative matrix factorization has been widely used in co-clustering tasks which group data points and features simultaneously. In recent years, several proposed co-clustering algorithms have shown their superiorities over traditional one-side clustering, especially in text clustering and gene expression. Due to the NP-completeness of the co-clustering problems, most existing methods relaxed the orthogonality constraint as nonnegativity, which often deteriorates performance and robustness as a result. In this paper, penalized nonnegative matrix tri-factorization is proposed for co-clustering problems, where three penalty terms are introduced to guarantee the near orthogonality of the clustering indicator matrices. An iterative updating algorithm is proposed and its convergence is proved. Furthermore, the high-order nonnegative matrix tri-factorization technique is provided for symmetric co-clustering tasks and a corresponding algorithm with proved convergence is also developed. Finally, extensive experiments in six real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the compared state-of-the-art co-clustering methods.     

Programming mobile context-aware applications with TOTAM

In tuple space approaches to context-aware mobile systems, the notion of context is defined by the presence or absence of certain tuples in the tuple space. Existing approaches define such presence either by collocation of devices holding the tuples or by replication of tuples across all devices. We show that both approaches can lead to an erroneous perception of context. Collocation ties the perception of context to network connectivity which does not always yield the expected result. Tuple replication can cause that a certain context is perceived even if the device has left the context a long time ago. We propose a tuple space approach in which tuples themselves carry a predicate that determines whether they are in the right context or not. We present a practical API for our approach and show its use by means of the implementation of various mobile applications. Benchmarks show that our approach can lead to a significant increase in performance compared to other approaches.     

Sleeved co-clustering of lagged data

The paper focuses on mining clusters that are characterized by a lagged relationship between the data objects. We call such clusters lagged co-clusters. A lagged co-cluster of a matrix is a submatrix determined by a subset of rows and their corresponding lag over a subset of columns. Extracting such subsets may reveal an underlying governing regulatory mechanism. Such a regulatory mechanism is quite common in real-life settings. It appears in a variety of fields: meteorology, seismic activity, stock market behavior, neuronal brain activity, river flow, and navigation, but a limited list of examples. Mining such lagged co-clusters not only helps in understanding the relationship between objects in the domain, but assists in forecasting their future behavior. For most interesting variants of this problem, finding an optimal lagged co-cluster is NP-complete problem. We present a polynomial-time Monte-Carlo algorithm for mining lagged co-clusters. We prove that, with fixed probability, the algorithm mines a lagged co-cluster which encompasses the optimal lagged co-cluster by a maximum 2 ratio columns overhead and completely no rows overhead. Moreover, the algorithm handles noise, anti-correlations, missing values, and overlapping patterns. The algorithm is extensively evaluated using both artificial and real-world test environments. The first enable the evaluation of specific, isolated properties of the algorithm. The latter (river flow and topographic data) enable the evaluation of the algorithm to efficiently mine relevant and coherent lagged co-clusters in environments that are temporal, i.e., time reading data and non-temporal.     

Temporal knowledge completion with context-aware embeddings

World Wide Web - Temporal knowledge graph embedding can be used to improve the coverage of temporal KGs via link predictions. Most existing works only concentrate on the target facts themselves,...     

Twitter n-gram corpus with demographic metadata

Social media is a natural laboratory for linguistic and sociological purposes. In micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, people share hundreds of millions of short messages about their lives and experiences on a daily basis. These messages, coupled with metadata about their authors, provide an opportunity to understand a wide variety of phenomena ranging from political polarization to geographic and demographic lexical variation. Lack of publicly available micro-blogging datasets has been a hindrance to replicable research. In this paper, I introduce Rovereto Twitter n-gram corpus, a publicly available n-gram dataset of Twitter messages, which contains gender-of-the-author and time-of-posting tags associated with the n-grams. I compare this dataset to a more traditional web-based corpus and present a case study which shows the potential of combining an n-gram corpus with demographic metadata.     

Semi-supervised fuzzy co-clustering algorithm for document categorization

In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised fuzzy co-clustering algorithm called SS-FCC for categorization of large web documents. In this new approach, the clustering process is carried out by incorporating some prior domain knowledge of a dataset in the form of pairwise constraints provided by users into the fuzzy co-clustering framework. With the help of those constraints, the clustering problem is formulated as the problem of maximizing a competitive agglomeration cost function with fuzzy terms, taking into account the provided domain knowledge. The constraint specifies whether a pair of objects “must” or “cannot” be clustered together. The update rules for fuzzy memberships are derived, and an iterative algorithm is designed for the soft co-clustering process. Our experimental studies show that the quality of clustering results can be improved significantly with the proposed approach. Simulations on 10 large benchmark datasets demonstrate the strength and potentials of SS-FCC in terms of performance evaluation criteria, stability and operating time, compared with some of the existing semi-supervised algorithms.     

Collaborative filtering based on information-theoretic co-clustering

Collaborative filtering is one of the most popular recommendation techniques, which provides personalised recommendations based on users’ tastes. In spite of its huge success, it suffers from a range of problems, the most fundamental being that of data sparsity. Sparsity in ratings makes the formation of inaccurate neighbourhood, thereby resulting in poor recommendations. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a novel collaborative filtering approach based on information-theoretic co-clustering. The proposed approach computes two types of similarities: cluster preference and rating, and combines them. Based on the combined similarity, the user-based and item-based approaches are adopted, respectively, to obtain individual predictions for an unknown target rating. Finally, the proposed approach fuses these resultant predictions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is superior to existing alternatives.     

Parameter-less co-clustering for star-structured heterogeneous data

The availability of data represented with multiple features coming from heterogeneous domains is getting more and more common in real world applications. Such data represent objects of a certain type, connected to other types of data, the features, so that the overall data schema forms a star structure of inter-relationships. Co-clustering these data involves the specification of many parameters, such as the number of clusters for the object dimension and for all the features domains. In this paper we present a novel co-clustering algorithm for heterogeneous star-structured data that is parameter-less. This means that it does not require either the number of row clusters or the number of column clusters for the given feature spaces. Our approach optimizes the Goodman–Kruskal’s τ, a measure for cross-association in contingency tables that evaluates the strength of the relationship between two categorical variables. We extend τ to evaluate co-clustering solutions and in particular we apply it in a higher dimensional setting. We propose the algorithm CoStar which optimizes τ by a local search approach. We assess the performance of CoStar on publicly available datasets from the textual and image domains using objective external criteria. The results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for the co-clustering of heterogeneous data, while it remains computationally efficient.     

Using metadata

I occasionally come across people who describe their programming tasks as tedious, which is often the sign of a design problem. One common source of tedium is pulling data from an external source. You almost always do the same thing with the data, but because the data differs each time, it's difficult to reduce such tedious programming. This Is when you should consider using metadata. To illustrate the approach, consider a simple design problem: build a module that will read data out of a simple file format into memory. One example of this file is a tab-delimited format with the first line containing the names of the fields.