Top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> temporal keyword search over social media data

Social media services have already become main sources for monitoring emerging topics and sensing real-life events. A social media platform manages social stream consisting of a huge volume of timestamped user generated data, including original data and repost data. However, previous research on keyword search over social media data mainly emphasizes on the recency of information. In this paper, we first propose a problem of top-k most significant temporal keyword query to enable more complex query analysis. It returns top-k most popular social items that contain the keywords in the given query time window. Then, we design a temporal inverted index with two-tiers posting list to index social time series and a segment store to compute the exact social significance of social items. Next, we implement a basic query algorithm based on our proposed index structure and give a detailed performance analysis on the query algorithm. From the analysis result, we further refine our query algorithm with a piecewise maximum approximation (PMA) sketch. Finally, extensive empirical studies on a real-life microblog dataset demonstrate the combination of two-tiers posting list and PMA sketch achieves remarkable performance improvement under different query settings.     

Discovery of probabilistic nearest neighbors in traffic-aware spatial networks

Travel planning and recommendation have received significant attention in recent years. In this light, we study a novel problem of discovering probabilistic nearest neighbors and planning the corresponding travel routes in traffic-aware spatial networks (TANN queries) to avoid potential time delay/traffic congestions. We propose and study four novel probabilistic TANN queries. Thereinto two queries target at minimizing the travel time, including a congestion-probability threshold query, and a time-delay threshold query, while another two travel-time threshold queries target at minimizing the potential time delay/traffic congestion. We believe that TANN queries are useful in many real applications, such as discovering nearby points of interest and planning convenient travel routes for users, and location based services in general. The TANN queries are challenged by two difficulties: (1) how to define probabilistic metrics for nearest neighbor queries in traffic-aware spatial networks, and (2) how to process these TANN queries efficiently under different query settings. To overcome these challenges, we define a series of new probabilistic metrics and develop four efficient algorithms to compute the TANN queries. The performances of TANN queries are verified by extensive experiments on real and synthetic spatial data.     

Efficient schemes for similarity-aware refinement of aggregation queries

Interactive data exploration platforms in Web, business and scientific domains are becoming increasingly popular. Typically, users without prior knowledge of data interact with these platforms in an exploratory manner hoping they might retrieve the results they are looking for. One way to explore large-volume data is by posing aggregate queries which group values of multiple rows by an aggregate operator to form a single value: an aggregated value. Though, when a query fails, i.e., returns undesired aggregated value, users will have to undertake a frustrating trial-and-error process to refine their queries, until a desired result is attained. This data exploration process, however, is growing rather difficult as the underlying data is typically of large-volume and high-dimensionality. While heuristic-based techniques are fairly successful in generating refined queries that meet specified requirements on the aggregated values, they are rather oblivious to the (dis)similarity between the input query and its corresponding refined version. Meanwhile, enforcing a similarity-aware query refinement is rather a non-trivial challenge, as it requires a careful examination of the query space while maintaining a low processing cost. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative scheme for efficient Similarity-Aware Refinement of Aggregation Queries called (EAGER) which aims to balance the tradeoff between satisfying the aggregate and similarity constraints imposed on the refined query to maximize its overall benefit to the user. To achieve that goal, EAGER implements efficient strategies to minimize the costs incurred in exploring the available search space by utilizing similarity-based and monotonic-based pruning techniques to bound the search space and quickly find a refined query that meets users’ expectations. Our extensive experiments show the scalability exhibited by EAGER under various workload settings, and the significant benefits it provides.     

Hashtag-based topic evolution in social media

The rise of online social media has led to an explosion of metadata-containing user generated content. The tracking of metadata distribution is essential to understand social media. This paper presents two statistical models that detect interpretable topics over time along with their hashtags distribution. A topic is represented by a cluster of words that frequently occur together, and a context is represented by a cluster of hashtags, i.e., the hashtag distribution. The models combine a context with a related topic by jointly modeling words with hashtags and time. Experiments with real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed models discover topics over time with related contexts effectively.     

Application placement in computer clustering in software as a service (SaaS) networks

One major service provided by cloud computing is Software as a Service (SaaS). As competition in the SaaS market intensifies, it becomes imperative for a SaaS provider to design and configure its computing system properly. This paper studies the application placement problem encountered in computer clustering in SaaS networks. This problem involves deciding which software applications to install on each computer cluster of the provider and how to assign customers to the clusters in order to minimize total cost. Given the complexity of the problem, we propose two algorithms to solve it. The first one is a probabilistic greedy algorithm which includes randomization and perturbation features to avoid getting trapped in a local optimum. The second algorithm is based on a reformulation of the problem where each cluster is to be assigned an application configuration from a properly generated subset of configurations. We conducted an extensive computational study using large data sets with up to 300 customers and 50 applications. The results show that both algorithms outperform a standard branch-and-bound procedure for problem instances with large sizes. The probabilistic greedy algorithm is shown to be the most efficient in solving the problem.     

Mobile crowdsensing with mobile agents

We introduce mobile agents for mobile crowdsensing. Crowdsensing campaigns are designed through different roles that are implemented as mobile agents. The role-based tasks of mobile agents include collecting data, analyzing data and sharing data in the campaign. Mobile agents execute and control the campaign autonomously as a multi-agent system and migrate in the opportunistic network of participants’ devices. Mobile agents take into account the available resources in the devices and match participants’ privacy requirements to the campaign requirements. Sharing of task results in real-time facilitates cooperation towards the campaign goal while maintaining a selected global measure, such as energy efficiency. We discuss current challenges in crowdsensing and propose mobile agent based solutions for campaign execution and monitoring, addressing data collection and participant-related issues. We present a software framework for mobile agents-based crowdsensing that is seamlessly integrated into the Web. A set of simulations are conducted to compare mobile agent-based campaigns with existing crowdsensing approaches. We implemented and evaluated a small-scale real-world mobile agent based campaign for pedestrian flock detection. The simulation and evaluation results show that mobile agent based campaigns produce comparable results with less energy consumption when the number of agents is relatively small and enables in-network data processing with sharing of data and task results with insignificant overhead.     

How to trust a few among many

The presence of numerous and disparate information sources available to support decision-making calls for efficient methods of harnessing their potential. Information sources may be unreliable, and misleading reports can affect decisions. Existing trust and reputation mechanisms typically rely on reports from as many sources as possible to mitigate the influence of misleading reports on decisions. In the real world, however, it is often the case that querying information sources can be costly in terms of energy, bandwidth, delay overheads, and other constraints. We present a model of source selection and fusion in resource-constrained environments, where there is uncertainty regarding the trustworthiness of sources. We exploit diversity among sources to stratify them into homogeneous subgroups to both minimise redundant sampling and mitigate the effect of certain biases. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that a diversity-based approach is robust to biases introduced due to dependencies among source reports, performs significantly better than existing approaches when sampling budget is limited and equally as good with an unlimited budget.     

Enhancing comparison shopping agents through ordering and gradual information disclosure

The plethora of comparison shopping agents (CSAs) in today’s markets enables buyers to query more than a single CSA when shopping, thus expanding the list of sellers whose prices they obtain. This potentially decreases the chance of a purchase within any single interaction between a buyer and a CSA, and consequently decreases each CSAs’ expected revenue per-query. Obviously, a CSA can improve its competence in such settings by acquiring more sellers’ prices, potentially resulting in a more attractive “best price”. In this paper we suggest a complementary approach that improves the attractiveness of the best result returned based on intelligently controlling the order according to which they are presented to the user, in a way that utilizes several known cognitive-biases of human buyers. The advantage of this approach is in its ability to affect the buyer’s tendency to terminate her search for a better price, hence avoid querying further CSAs, without spending valuable resources on finding additional prices to present. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated using real data, collected from four CSAs for five products. Our experiments confirm that the suggested method effectively influence people in a way that is highly advantageous to the CSA compared to the common method for presenting the prices. Furthermore, we experimentally show that all of the components of our method are essential to its success.     

The authorship dilemma: alphabetical or contribution?

Scientific communities have adopted different conventions for ordering authors on publications. Are these choices inconsequential, or do they have significant influence on individual authors, the quality of the projects completed, and research communities at large? What are the trade-offs of using one convention over another? In order to investigate these questions, we formulate a basic two-player game theoretic model, which already illustrates interesting phenomena that can occur in more realistic settings. We find that contribution-based ordering leads to a denser collaboration network and a greater number of publications, while alphabetical ordering can improve research quality. Contrary to the assumption that free riding is a weakness of the alphabetical ordering scheme, when there are only two authors, this phenomenon can occur under any contribution scheme, and the worst case occurs under contribution-based ordering. Finally, we show how authors working on multiple projects can cooperate to attain optimal research quality and eliminate free riding given either contribution scheme.     

A little Birdie told me: Social media,organizational legitimacy,and underpricing in initial public offerings

Drawing on the organizational legitimacy literature, we propose and test a set of hypotheses arguing that social media, an artifact of information technology, serves as a mechanism for conferring legitimacy in the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The extant literature identifies third-party authorities, such as traditional media outlets and industry analysts, as a valuable source of organizational legitimacy. Social media and micro-blogging, however, remain outside current classifications of the phenomenon. This study theoretically develops and empirically tests a new mechanism in the legitimation process: the direct interaction with potential investors and society-at-large via social media. Our findings indicate broad support that having a Twitter account, and the extent to which a firm utilizes Twitter, is associated with systematically higher levels of IPO underpricing. Moreover, we find support that social media variables external to the firm, including number of followers and retweets, also impact the level of underpricing in an IPO. In conclusion, we highlight the emerging role of social media in processes of legitimation and invite additional research at the intersection of IS and management.