The web of nations In this paper , we report on a large-scale study of structural differences among the national webs . The study is based on a web-scale crawl conducted in the summer 2008 . More specifically , we study two graphs derived from this crawl , the nation graph , with nodes corresponding to nations and edges - to links among nations , and the host graph , with nodes corresponding to hosts and edges - to hyperlinks among pages on the hosts . Contrary to some of the previous work ( 2 ) , our results show that webs of different nations are often very different from each other , both in terms of their internal structure , and in terms of their connectivity with other nations .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Mining cultural differences from a large number of geotagged photos We propose a novel method to detect cultural differences over the world automatically by using a large amount of geotagged images on the photo sharingWeb sites such as Flickr . We employ the state-of-the-art object recognition technique developed in the research community of computer vision to mine representative photos of the given concept for representative local regions from a large-scale unorganized collection of consumer-generated geotagged photos . The results help us understand how objects , scenes or events corresponding to the same given concept are visually different depending on local regions over the world .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

geotag
information search and retrieval
representative images


Communication as information-seeking : the case for mobile social software for developing regions In this paper , we describe several findings from a multi-year , multi-method study of how information and communication technologies have been adopted and adapted in Central Asia . We have found that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption , that access to the Internet is primarily through public access sites carrying with it issues regarding privacy and surveillance , that people rely on their social networks as information sources , that public institutions tend to be fairly weak as citizen resources , and that information seeking and communication are conflated in people 's usage patterns with different technologies . In addition , in the developed world social networking software has grown rapidly and shown itself to have significant potential for mobilizing a population . Based on the collection of findings from Central Asia and observing patterns of technology usage in other parts of the world , our research leads to the conclusion that exploring mobile social software holds significant potential as an ICT that meshes well with preexisting patterns of communication and information seeking and also leverages the most predominant pattern of technology adoption . Many of the findings from this research echo results from studies in other geographic areas , and so we anticipate that much of this research will be relevant to developing regions generally .

O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

central asia
internet
mobile social software
social networks
usage patterns

cell phones
cross-cultural
design ethnography
developing world
emerging markets
icts
international
mobile devices
sms


CC-Buddy : an adaptive framework for maintaining cache coherency using peers In this paper , we propose a framework called CC-Buddy , for maintaining dynamic data coherency in peer-to-peer environment . Working on the basis of peer heterogeneity in data coherency requirement , peers in CC-Buddy cooperate with each other to disseminate the updates by pushing . Simulation results show that our solution not only improves the fidelity in data , but also reduces the workload of servers , therefore achieves high-scalability .

O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Towards context-aware search by learning a very large variable length hidden markov model from search logs Capturing the context of a user 's query from the previous queries and clicks in the same session may help understand the user 's information need . A context-aware approach to document re-ranking , query suggestion , and URL recommendation may improve users ' search experience substantially . In this paper , we propose a general approach to context-aware search . To capture contexts of queries , we learn a variable length Hidden Markov Model ( vlHMM ) from search sessions extracted from log data . Although the mathematical model is intuitive , how to learn a large vlHMM with millions of states from hundreds of millions of search sessions poses a grand challenge . We develop a strategy for parameter initialization in vlHMM learning which can greatly reduce the number of parameters to be estimated in practice . We also devise a method for distributed vlHMM learning under the map-reduce model . We test our approach on a real data set consisting of 1.8 billion queries , 2.6 billion clicks , and 840 million search sessions , and evaluate the effectiveness of the vlHMM learned from the real data on three search applications : document re-ranking , query suggestion , and URL recommendation . The experimental results show that our approach is both effective and efficient .

O O O O O O O O B I I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


An xpath-based discourse analysis module for spoken dialogue systems This paper describes an XPath-based discourse analysis module for Spoken Dialogue Systems that allows the dialogue author to easily manipulate and query both the user input 's semantic representation and the dialogue context using a simple and compact formalism . We show that , in managing the human-machine interaction , the discourse context and the dialogue history are effectively represented as Document Object Model ( DOM ) structures . DOM defines interfaces that dialogue scripts can use to dynamically access and update the content , the structure and the style of the documents . In general , this approach applies also to richer multimedia and multimodal interactions where the interpretation of the user input depends on a combination of input modalitie .

O O B I O O B I I O O O O O B I O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

discourse analysis
spoken dialogue systems


Automated synthesis of executable web service compositions from BPEL4WS processes We propose a technique for the automated synthesis of new composite web services . Given a set of abstract bpel4ws descriptions of component services , and a composition requirement , we automatically generate a concrete bpel4ws process that , when executed , interacts with the components and satisfies the requirement . We implement the proposed approach exploiting efficient representation techniques , and we show its scalability over case studies taken from a real world application and over a parameterized domain .

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

business processes
web service composition


Making RDF presentable : integrated global and local semantic Web browsing This paper discusses generating document structure from annotated media repositories in a domain-independent manner . This approaches the vision of a universal RDF browser . We start by applying the search-and-browse paradigm established for the WWW to RDF presentation . Furthermore , this paper adds to this paradigm the clustering-based derivation of document structure from search returns , providing simple but domain-independent hypermedia generation from RDF stores . While such generated presentations hardly meet the standards of those written by humans , they provide quick access to media repositories when the required document has not yet been written . The resulting system allows a user to specify a topic for which it generates a hypermedia document providing guided navigation through virtually any RDF repository . The impact for content providers is that as soon as one adds new media items and their annotations to a repository , they become immediately available for automatic integration into subsequently requested presentations .

O B O O O O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

browsing
hypermedia generation
rdf
search
semantic web

knowledge representation formalisms and methods


Communication design for electronic negotiations on the basis of XML schema

application framework
computer-aided software engineering
electronic negotiation
ontology


Detecting spam web pages through content analysis In this paper , we continue our investigations of `` web spam '' : the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines , to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit . This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages , examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms . When combined , our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 ( 86.2 % ) of the 2,364 spam pages ( 13.8 % ) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages , while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages ( 3.1 % ) .

O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data mining
hypertext/hypermedia
miscellaneous
web characterization


Learning block importance models for web pages Previous work shows that a web page can be partitioned into multiple segments or blocks , and often the importance of those blocks in a page is not equivalent . Also , it has been proven that differentiating noisy or unimportant blocks from pages can facilitate web mining , search and accessibility . However , no uniform approach and model has been presented to measure the importance of different segments in web pages . Through a user study , we found that people do have a consistent view about the importance of blocks in web pages . In this paper , we investigate how to find a model to automatically assign importance values to blocks in a web page . We define the block importance estimation as a learning problem . First , we use a vision-based page segmentation algorithm to partition a web page into semantic blocks with a hierarchical structure . Then spatial features ( such as position and size ) and content features ( such as the number of images and links ) are extracted to construct a feature vector for each block . Based on these features , learning algorithms are used to train a model to assign importance to different segments in the web page . In our experiments , the best model can achieve the performance with Micro-F1 79 % and Micro-Accuracy 85.9 % , which is quite close to a person 's view .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

block importance model
classification
miscellaneous


SPARQ2L : towards support for subgraph extraction queries in rdf databases Many applications in analytical domains often have the need to `` connect the dots '' i.e. , query about the structure of data . In bioinformatics for example , it is typical to want to query about interactions between proteins . The aim of such queries is to `` extract '' relationships between entities i.e. paths from a data graph . Often , such queries will specify certain constraints that qualifying results must satisfy e.g. paths involving a set of mandatory nodes . Unfortunately , most present day Semantic Web query languages including the current draft of the anticipated recommendation SPARQL , lack the ability to express queries about arbitrary path structures in data . In addition , many systems that support some limited form of path queries rely on main memory graph algorithms limiting their applicability to very large scale graphs . In this paper , we present an approach for supporting Path Extraction queries . Our proposal comprises ( i ) a query language SPARQ2L which extends SPARQL with path variables and path variable constraint expressions , and ( ii ) a novel query evaluation framework based on efficient algebraic techniques for solving path problems which allows for path queries to be efficiently evaluated on disk resident RDF graphs . The effectiveness of our proposal is demonstrated by a performance evaluation of our approach on both real world based and synthetic dataset .

O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

querying semantic web databases
sparql extensions


Automatically refining the wikipedia infobox ontology The combined efforts of human volunteers have recently extracted numerous facts from Wikipedia , storing them as machine-harvestable object-attribute-value triples in Wikipedia infoboxes . Machine learning systems , such as Kylin , use these infoboxes as training data , accurately extracting even more semantic knowledge from natural language text . But in order to realize the full power of this information , it must be situated in a cleanly-structured ontology . This paper introduces KOG , an autonomous system for refining Wikipedia 's infobox-class ontology towards this end . We cast the problem of ontology refinement as a machine learning problem and solve it using both SVMs and a more powerful joint-inference approach expressed in Markov Logic Networks . We present experiments demonstrating the superiority of the joint-inference approach and evaluating other aspects of our system . Using these techniques , we build a rich ontology , integrating Wikipedia 's infobox-class schemata with WordNet . We demonstrate how the resulting ontology may be used to enhance Wikipedia with improved query processing and other features .

O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O O O

markov logic networks
ontology
wikipedia

content analysis and indexing
semantic web


Semi-automated adaptation of service interactions In today 's Web , many functionality-wise similar Web services are offered through heterogeneous interfaces ( operation definitions ) and business protocols ( ordering constraints defined on legal operation invocation sequences ) . The typical approach to enable interoperation in such a heterogeneous setting is through developing adapters . There have been approaches for classifying possible mismatches between service interfaces and business protocols to facilitate adapter development . However , the hard job is that of identifying , given two service specifications , the actual mismatches between their interfaces and business protocols . In this paper we present novel techniques and a tool that provides semi-automated support for identifying and resolution of mismatches between service interfaces and protocols , and for generating adapter specification . We make the following main contributions : ( i ) we identify mismatches between service interfaces , which leads to finding mismatches of type of signature , merge\/split , and extra\/missing messages ; ( ii ) we identify all ordering mismatches between service protocols and generate a tree , called mismatch tree , for mismatches that require developers ' input for their resolution . In addition , we provide semi-automated support in analyzing the mismatch tree to help in resolving such mismatches . We have implemented the approach in a tool inside IBM WID ( WebSphere Integration Developer ) . Our experiments with some real-world case studies show the viability of the proposed approach . The methods and tool are significant in that they considerably simplify the problem of adapting services so that interoperation is possible .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

service adaptation
service interface matching
service protocol adaptation


Scaling personalized web search Recent web search techniques augment traditional text matching with a global notion of `` importance '' based on the linkage structure of the web , such as in Google 's PageRank algorithm . For more refined searches , this global notion of importance can be specialized to create personalized views of importance -- for example , importance scores can be biased according to a user-specified set of initially-interesting pages . Computing and storing all possible personalized views in advance is impractical , as is computing personalized views at query time , since the computation of each view requires an iterative computation over the web graph . We present new graph-theoretical results , and a new technique based on these results , that encode personalized views as partial vectors . Partial vectors are shared across multiple personalized views , and their computation and storage costs scale well with the number of views . Our approach enables incremental computation , so that the construction of personalized views from partial vectors is practical at query time . We present efficient dynamic programming algorithms for computing partial vectors , an algorithm for constructing personalized views from partial vectors , and experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of our techniques .

O O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Meaning and the semantic web The meaning of names ( URI references ) is a contentious issue in the Semantic Web . Numerous proposals have been given for how to provide meaning for names in the Semantic Web , ranging from a strict localized model-theoretic semantics to proposals for a unified single meaning . We argue that a slight expansion of the standard model-theoretic semantics for names is sufficient for the present , and can easily be augmented where necessary to allow communities of interest to strengthen this spartan theory of meaning .

B O O B I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O


A high-performance interpretive approach to schema-directed parsing XML delivers key advantages in interoperability due to its flexibility , expressiveness , and platform-neutrality . As XML has become a performance-critical aspect of the next generation of business computing infrastructure , however , it has become increasingly clear that XML parsing often carries a heavy performance penalty , and that current , widely-used parsing technologies are unable to meet the performance demands of an XML-based computing infrastructure . Several efforts have been made to address this performance gap through the use of grammar-based parser generation . While the performance of generated parsers has been significantly improved , adoption of the technology has been hindered by the complexity of compiling and deploying the generated parsers . Through careful analysis of the operations required for parsing and validation , we have devised a set of specialized byte codes , designed for the task of XML parsing and validation . These byte codes are designed to engender the benefits of fine-grained composition of parsing and validation that make existing compiled parsers fast , while being coarse-grained enough to minimize interpreter overhead . This technique of using an interpretive , validating parser balances the need for performance against the requirements of simple tooling and robust scalable infrastructure . Our approach is demonstrated with a specialized schema compiler , used to generate byte codes which in turn drive an interpretive parser . With almost as little tooling and deployment complexity as a traditional interpretive parser , the byte code-driven parser usually demonstrates performance within 20 % of the fastest fully compiled solutions .

O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


On business activity modeling using grammars Web based applications offer a mainstream channel for businesses to manage their activities . We model such business activity in a grammar-based framework . The Backus Naur form notation is used to represent the syntax of a regular grammar corresponding to Web log patterns of interest . Then , a deterministic finite state machine is used to parse Web logs against the grammar . Detected tasks are associated with metadata such as time taken to perform the activity , and aggregated along relevant corporate dimensions .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

data mining
time management
web log analysis


Characterization of a large web site population with implications for content delivery This paper presents a systematic study of the properties of a large number of Web sites hosted by a major ISP . To our knowledge , ours is the first comprehensive study of a large server farm that contains thousands of commercial Web sites . We also perform a simulation analysis to estimate potential performance benefits of content delivery networks ( CDNs ) for these Web sites . We make several interesting observations about the current usage of Web technologies and Web site performance characteristics . First , compared with previous client workload studies , the Web server farm workload contains a much higher degree of uncacheable responses and responses that require mandatory cache validations . A significant reason for this is that cookie use is prevalent among our population , especially among more popular sites . However , we found an indication of wide-spread indiscriminate usage of cookies , which unnecessarily impedes the use of many content delivery optimizations . We also found that most Web sites do not utilize the cache-control features ofthe HTTP 1.1 protocol , resulting in suboptimal performance . Moreover , the implicit expiration time in client caches for responses is constrained by the maximum values allowed in the Squid proxy . Finally , our simulation results indicate that most Web sites benefit from the use of a CDN . The amount of the benefit depends on site popularity , and , somewhat surprisingly , a CDN may increase the peak to average request ratio at the origin server because the CDN can decrease the average request rate more than the peak request rate .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

applications
content distribution
web caching
workload characterization


Layered label propagation : a multiresolution coordinate-free ordering for compressing social networks We continue the line of research on graph compression started with WebGraph , but we move our focus to the compression of social networks in a proper sense ( e.g. , LiveJournal ) : the approaches that have been used for a long time to compress web graphs rely on a specific ordering of the nodes ( lexicographical URL ordering ) whose extension to general social networks is not trivial . In this paper , we propose a solution that mixes clusterings and orders , and devise a new algorithm , called Layered Label Propagation , that builds on previous work on scalable clustering and can be used to reorder very large graphs ( billions of nodes ) . Our implementation uses task decomposition to perform aggressively on multi-core architecture , making it possible to reorder graphs of more than 600 millions nodes in a few hours . Experiments performed on a wide array of web graphs and social networks show that combining the order produced by the proposed algorithm with the WebGraph compression framework provides a major increase in compression with respect to all currently known techniques , both on web graphs and on social networks . These improvements make it possible to analyze in main memory significantly larger graphs .

O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

graph compression
social networks
web graphs


Finding the right facts in the crowd : factoid question answering over social media Community Question Answering has emerged as a popular and effective paradigm for a wide range of information needs . For example , to find out an obscure piece of trivia , it is now possible and even very effective to post a question on a popular community QA site such as Yahoo ! Answers , and to rely on other users to provide answers , often within minutes . The importance of such community QA sites is magnified as they create archives of millions of questions and hundreds of millions of answers , many of which are invaluable for the information needs of other searchers . However , to make this immense body of knowledge accessible , effective answer retrieval is required . In particular , as any user can contribute an answer to a question , the majority of the content reflects personal , often unsubstantiated opinions . A ranking that combines both relevance and quality is required to make such archives usable for factual information retrieval . This task is challenging , as the structure and the contents of community QA archives differ significantly from the web setting . To address this problem we present a general ranking framework for factual information retrieval from social media . Results of a large scale evaluation demonstrate that our method is highly effective at retrieving well-formed , factual answers to questions , as evaluated on a standard factoid QA benchmark . We also show that our learning framework can be tuned with the minimum of manual labeling . Finally , we provide result analysis to gain deeper understanding of which features are significant for social media search and retrieval . Our system can be used as a crucial building block for combining results from a variety of social media content with general web search results , and to better integrate social media content for effective information access .

O O O O O O O O O B I O O O B B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


A method for modeling uncertainty in semantic web taxonomies We present a method for representing and reasoning with uncertainty in RDF ( S ) and OWL ontologies based on Bayesian networks .

O O O O B O B I O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Cataclysm : policing extreme overloads in internet applications In this paper we present the Cataclysm server platform for handling extreme overloads in hosted Internet applications . The primary contribution of our work is to develop a low overhead , highly scalable admission control technique for Internet applications . Cataclysm provides several desirable features , such as guarantees on response time by conducting accurate size-based admission control , revenue maximization at multiple time-scales via preferential admission of important requests and dynamic capacity provisioning , and the ability to be operational even under extreme overloads . Cataclysm can transparently trade-off the accuracy of its decision making with the intensity of the workload allowing it to handle incoming rates of several tens of thousands of requests\/second . We implement a prototype Cataclysm hosting platform on a Linux cluster and demonstrate the benefits of our integrated approach using a variety of workloads .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

internet application
organization and design
overload
sentry


A client-server architecture for state-dependent dynamic visualizations on the web As sophisticated enterprise applications move to the Web , some advanced user experiences become difficult to migrate due to prohibitively high computation , memory , and bandwidth requirements . State-dependent visualizations of large-scale data sets are particularly difficult since a change in the client 's context necessitates a change in the displayed results . This paper describes a Web architecture where clients are served a session-specific image of the data , with this image divided into tiles dynamically generated by the server . This set of tiles is supplemented with a corpus of metadata describing the immediate vicinity of interest ; additional metadata is delivered as needed in a progressive fashion in support and anticipation of the user 's actions . We discuss how the design of this architecture was motivated by the goal of delivering a highly responsive user experience . As an example of a complete application built upon this architecture , we present OrgMaps , an interactive system for navigating hierarchical data , enabling fluid , low-latency navigation of trees of hundreds of thousands of nodes on standard Web browsers using only HTML and JavaScript .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Focused crawling : experiences in a real world project

information retrieval
miscellaneous
thesaurus
topic


Shared lexicon for distributed annotations on the Web The interoperability among distributed and autonomous systems is the ultimate challenge facing the semantic web . Heterogeneity of data representation is the main source of problems . This paper proposes an innovative solution that combines lexical approaches and language games . The benefits for distributed annotation systems on the web are twofold : firstly , it will reduce the complexity of the semantic problem by moving the focus from the full-featured ontology level to the simpler lexicon level ; secondly , it will avoid the drawback of a centralized third party mediator that may become a single point of failure . The main contributions of this work are concerned with : providing a proof of concept that language games can be an effective solution to creating and managing a distributed process of agreement on a shared lexicon , describing a fully distributed service oriented architecture for language games , providing empirical evidence on a real world case study in the domain of ski mountaineering .

O O O B I O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed annotations
interoperability
language games


Anti-aliasing on the web It is increasingly common for users to interact with the web using a number of different aliases . This trend is a double-edged sword . On one hand , it is a fundamental building block in approaches to online privacy . On the other hand , there are economic and social consequences to allowing each user an arbitrary number of free aliases . Thus , there is great interest in understanding the fundamental issues in obscuring the identities behind aliases . However , most work in the area has focused on linking aliases through analysis of lower-level properties of interactions such as network routes . We show that aliases that actively post text on the web can be linked together through analysis of that text . We study a large number of users posting on bulletin boards , and develop algorithms to anti-alias those users : we can with a high degree of success identify when two aliases belong to the same individual . Our results show that such techniques are surprisingly effective , leading us to conclude that guaranteeing privacy among aliases that post actively requires mechanisms that do not yet exist .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O

alias detection
clustering
learning
natural language processing
personas
pseudonyms


Optimizing budget allocation among channels and influencers Brands and agencies use marketing as a tool to influence customers . One of the major decisions in a marketing plan deals with the allocation of a given budget among media channels in order to maximize the impact on a set of potential customers . A similar situation occurs in a social network , where a marketing budget needs to be distributed among a set of potential influencers in a way that provides high-impact . We introduce several probabilistic models to capture the above scenarios . The common setting of these models consists of a bipartite graph of source and target nodes . The objective is to allocate a fixed budget among the source nodes to maximize the expected number of influenced target nodes . The concrete way in which source nodes influence target nodes depends on the underlying model . We primarily consider two models : a source-side influence model , in which a source node that is allocated a budget of k makes k independent trials to influence each of its neighboring target nodes , and a target-side influence model , in which a target node becomes influenced according to a specified rule that depends on the overall budget allocated to its neighbors . Our main results are an optimal ( 1-1 \/ e ) - approximation algorithm for the source-side model , and several inapproximability results for the target-side model , establishing that influence maximization in the latter model is provably harder .

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

approximation algorithms
general
influence models


The ScratchPad : sensemaking support for the web The World Wide Web is a powerful platform for a wide range of information tasks . Dramatic advances in technology , such as improved search capabilities and the AJAX application model , have enabled entirely new web-based applications and usage patterns , making many tasks easier to perform than ever before . However , few tools have been developed to assist with sensemaking tasks : complex research behaviors in which users gather and comprehend information from many sources to answer potentially vague , non-procedural questions . Sensemaking tasks are common and include , for example , researching vacation destinations or deciding how to invest . This paper presents the ScratchPad , an extension to the standard browser interface that is designed to capture , organize , and exploit the information discovered while performing a sensemaking task .

O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O

user interfaces
visual snalytics
web browser
www


A flexible generative model for preference aggregation Many areas of study , such as information retrieval , collaborative filtering , and social choice face the preference aggregation problem , in which multiple preferences over objects must be combined into a consensus ranking . Preferences over items can be expressed in a variety of forms , which makes the aggregation problem difficult . In this work we formulate a flexible probabilistic model over pairwise comparisons that can accommodate all these forms . Inference in the model is very fast , making it applicable to problems with hundreds of thousands of preferences . Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance to existing methods

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

collaborative filtering
preference aggregation


A search engine for natural language applications Many modern natural language-processing applications utilize search engines to locate large numbers of Web documents or to compute statistics over the Web corpus . Yet Web search engines are designed and optimized for simple human queries -- they are not well suited to support such applications . As a result , these applications are forced to issue millions of successive queries resulting in unnecessary search engine load and in slow applications with limited scalability . In response , this paper introduces the Bindings Engine ( BE ) , which supports queries containing typed variables and string-processing functions . For example , in response to the query `` powerful ` noun ' '' BE will return all the nouns in its index that immediately follow the word `` powerful '' , sorted by frequency . In response to the query `` Cities such as ProperNoun ( Head ( ` NounPhrase ' ) ) '' , BE will return a list of proper nouns likely to be city names . BE 's novel neighborhood index enables it to do so with O ( k ) random disk seeks and O ( k ) serial disk reads , where k is the number of non-variable terms in its query . As a result , BE can yield several orders of magnitude speedup for large-scale language-processing applications . The main cost is a modest increase in space to store the index . We report on experiments validating these claims , and analyze how BE 's space-time tradeoff scales with the size of its index and the number of variable types . Finally , we describe how a BE-based application extracts thousands of facts from the Web at interactive speeds in response to simple user queries .

O B I O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

corpus
language
query
search engine
variables

content analysis and indexing
indexing
information extraction
information search and retrieval


Community gravity : measuring bidirectional effects by trust and rating on online social networks Several attempts have been made to analyze customer behavior on online E-commerce sites . Some studies particularly emphasize the social networks of customers . Users ' reviews and ratings of a product exert effects on other consumers ' purchasing behavior . Whether a user refers to other users ' ratings depends on the trust accorded by a user to the reviewer . On the other hand , the trust that is felt by a user for another user correlates with the similarity of two users ' ratings . This bidirectional interaction that involves trust and rating is an important aspect of understanding consumer behavior in online communities because it suggests clustering of similar users and the evolution of strong communities . This paper presents a theoretical model along with analyses of an actual online E-commerce site . We analyzed a large community site in Japan : @cosme . The noteworthy characteristics of @cosme are that users can bookmark their trusted users ; in addition , they can post their own ratings of products , which facilitates our analyses of the ratings ' bidirectional effects on trust and ratings . We describe an overview of the data in @cosme , analyses of effects from trust to rating and vice versa , and our proposition of a measure of community gravity , which measures how strongly a user might be attracted to a community . Our study is based on the @cosme dataset in addition to the Epinions dataset . It elucidates important insights and proposes a potentially important measure for mining online social networks .

O O O O O O O B O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O


Using XForms to simplify Web programming The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex . This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications . Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns , and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental : parameter passing . We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies . We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model , which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers . This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers . We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets , including , for example , different client devices .

O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

eclipse
mvc
visual builder
web application
xmlbeans


Speeding up adaptation of web service compositions using expiration times Web processes must often operate in volatile environments where the quality of service parameters of the participating service providers change during the life time of the process . In order to remain optimal , the Web process must adapt to these changes . Adaptation requires knowledge about the parameter changes of each of the service providers and using this knowledge to determine whether the Web process should make a different more optimal decision . Previously , we defined a mechanism called the value of changed information which measures the impact of expected changes in the service parameters on the Web process , thereby offering a way to query and incorporate those changes that are useful and cost-efficient . However , computing the value of changed information incurs a substantial computational overhead . In this paper , we use service expiration times obtained from pre-defined service level agreements to reduce the computational overhead of adaptation . We formalize the intuition that services whose parameters have not expired need not be considered for querying for revised information . Using two realistic scenarios , we illustrate our approach and demonstrate the associated computational savings .

O O B O O O O O B I O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

adaptation
expiration times
volatile environments


Efficient URL caching for world wide web crawling Crawling the web is deceptively simple : the basic algorithm is ( a ) Fetch a page ( b ) Parse it to extract all linked URLs ( c ) For all the URLs not seen before , repeat ( a ) - ( c ) . However , the size of the web ( estimated at over 4 billion pages ) and its rate of change ( estimated at 7 % per week ) move this plan from a trivial programming exercise to a serious algorithmic and system design challenge . Indeed , these two factors alone imply that for a reasonably fresh and complete crawl of the web , step ( a ) must be executed about a thousand times per second , and thus the membership test ( c ) must be done well over ten thousand times per second against a set too large to store in main memory . This requires a distributed architecture , which further complicates the membership test . A crucial way to speed up the test is to cache , that is , to store in main memory a ( dynamic ) subset of the `` seen '' URLs . The main goal of this paper is to carefully investigate several URL caching techniques for web crawling . We consider both practical algorithms : random replacement , static cache , LRU , and CLOCK , and theoretical limits : clairvoyant caching and infinite cache . We performed about 1,800 simulations using these algorithms with various cache sizes , using actual log data extracted from a massive 33 day web crawl that issued over one billion HTTP requests . Our main conclusion is that caching is very effective - in our setup , a cache of roughly 50,000 entries can achieve a hit rate of almost 80 % . Interestingly , this cache size falls at a critical point : a substantially smaller cache is much less effective while a substantially larger cache brings little additional benefit . We conjecture that such critical points are inherent to our problem and venture an explanation for this phenomenon .

O O B O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed crawlers
url caching
web crawlers
web graph models


eBag : a ubiquitous Web infrastructure for nomadic learning This paper describes the eBag infrastructure , which is a generic infrastructure inspired from work with school children who could benefit from a electronic schoolbag for collaborative handling of their digital material . The eBag infrastructure is utilizing the Context-aware HyCon framework and collaborative web services based on WebDAV . A ubiquitous login and logout mechanism has been built based on BlueTooth sensor networks . The eBag infrastructure has been tried out in field tests with school kids . In this paper we discuss experiences and design issues for ubiquitous Web integration in interactive school environments with multiple interactive whiteboards and workstations . This includes proposals for specialized and adaptive XLink structures for organizing school materials as well as issues in login\/logout based on proximity of different display surfaces .

B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


The web structure of e-government - developing a methodology for quantitative evaluation In this paper we describe preliminary work that examines whether statistical properties of the structure of websites can be an informative measure of their quality . We aim to develop a new method for evaluating e-government . E-government websites are evaluated regularly by consulting companies , international organizations and academic researchers using a variety of subjective measures . We aim to improve on these evaluations using a range of techniques from webmetric and social network analysis . To pilot our methodology , we examine the structure of government audit office sites in Canada , the USA , the UK , New Zealand and the Czech Republic . We report experimental values for a variety of characteristics , including the connected components , the average distance between nodes , the distribution of paths lengths , and the indegree and outdegree . These measures are expected to correlate with ( i ) the navigability of a website and ( ii ) with its `` nodalityö which is a combination of hubness and authority . Comparison of websites based on these characteristics raised a number of issues , related to the proportion of non-hyperlinked content ( e.g. pdf and doc files ) within a site , and both the very significant differences in the size of the websites and their respective national populations . Methods to account for these issues are proposed and discussed . There appears to be some correlation between the values measured and the league tables reported in the literature . However , this multi dimensional analysis provides a richer source of evaluative techniques than previous work . Our analysis indicates that the US and Canada provide better navigability , much better than the UK ; however , the UK site is shown to have the strongest `` nodalityö on the Web .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

e-government
national audit offices
ranking


Geospatial mapping and navigation of the web

browsers
geographic information systems
geospatial information retrieval
interaction styles


Adapting databases and WebDAV protocol The ability of the Web to share data regardless of geographical location raises a new issue called remote authoring . With the Internet and Web browsers being independent of hardware , it becomes possible to build Web-enabled database applications . Many approaches are provided to integrate databases into the Web environment , which use the Web 's protocol i.e. HTTP to transfer the data between clients and servers . However , those methods are affected by the HTTP shortfalls with regard to remote authoring . This paper introduces and discusses a new methodology for remote authoring of databases , which is based on the WebDAV protocol . It is a seamless and effective methodology for accessing and authoring databases , particularly in that it naturally benefits from the WebDAV advantages such as metadata and access control . These features establish a standard way of accessing database metadata , and increase the database security , while speeding up the database connection .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Semantic Wikipedia Wikipedia is the world 's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopaedic knowledge . But in spite of its utility , its contents are barely machine-interpretable . Structural knowledge , e. , g. about how concepts are interrelated , can neither be formally stated nor automatically processed . Also the wealth of numerical data is only available as plain text and thus can not be processed by its actual meaning . We provide an extension to be integrated in Wikipedia , that allows the typing of links between articles and the specification of typed data inside the articles in an easy-to-use manner . Enabling even casual users to participate in the creation of an open semantic knowledge base , Wikipedia has the chance to become a resource of semantic statements , hitherto unknown regarding size , scope , openness , and internationalisation . These semantic enhancements bring to Wikipedia benefits of today 's semantic technologies : more specific ways of searching and browsing . Also , the RDF export , that gives direct access to the formalised knowledge , opens Wikipedia up to a wide range of external applications , that will be able to use it as a background knowledge base . In this paper , we present the design , implementation , and possible uses of this extension .

O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

on-line information services
semantic web
wiki


Towards automating regression test selection for web services This paper reports a safe regression test selection ( RTS ) approach that is designed for verifying Web services in an end-to-end manner . The Safe RTS technique has been integrated into a systematic method that monitors distributed code modifications and automates the RTS and RT processes .

O O B I I O B I O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

automation
control-flow graphs
testing tools


we . b : the web of short urls Short URLs have become ubiquitous . Especially popular within social networking services , short URLs have seen a significant increase in their usage over the past years , mostly due to Twitter 's restriction of message length to 140 characters . In this paper , we provide a first characterization on the usage of short URLs . Specifically , our goal is to examine the content short URLs point to , how they are published , their popularity and activity over time , as well as their potential impact on the performance of the web . Our study is based on traces of short URLs as seen from two different perspectives : i ) collected through a large-scale crawl of URL shortening services , and ii ) collected by crawling Twitter messages . The former provides a general characterization on the usage of short URLs , while the latter provides a more focused view on how certain communities use shortening services . Our analysis highlights that domain and website popularity , as seen from short URLs , significantly differs from the distributions provided by well publicised services such as Alexa . The set of most popular websites pointed to by short URLs appears stable over time , despite the fact that short URLs have a limited high popularity lifetime . Surprisingly short URLs are not ephemeral , as a significant fraction , roughly 50 % , appears active for more than three months . Overall , our study emphasizes the fact that short URLs reflect an `` alternative '' web and , hence , provide an additional view on web usage and content consumption complementing traditional measurement sources . Furthermore , our study reveals the need for alternative shortening architectures that will eliminate the non-negligible performance penalty imposed by today 's shortening services .

O O O O O O O B I B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Automatic web news extraction using tree edit distance The Web poses itself as the largest data repository ever available in the history of humankind . Major efforts have been made in order to provide efficient access to relevant information within this huge repository of data . Although several techniques have been developed to the problem of Web data extraction , their use is still not spread , mostly because of the need for high human intervention and the low quality of the extraction results . In this paper , we present a domain-oriented approach to Web data extraction and discuss its application to automatically extracting news from Web sites . Our approach is based on a highly efficient tree structure analysis that produces very effective results . We have tested our approach with several important Brazilian on-line news sites and achieved very precise results , correctly extracting 87.71 % of the news in a set of 4088 pages distributed among 35 different sites .

O B O O O O B I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B I O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


HPG : a tool for presentation generation in WIS Web Information Systems ( WIS ) support the process of retrieving information from sources on the Web and of presenting them as a hypermedia presentation . Most WIS design methodologies focus on the engineering of the abstract navigation ( hyperlinks ) . The actual presentation generation is less supported . Hera is one of the few WIS methodologies that offer a tool for presentation generation ( HPG ) . The HPG transforms RDF data obtained as the result of a query into a Web presentation suited to the user ( in HTML or WML ) .

O O O O O B I O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

hypermedia
presentation generation
rdf
wis


Inferring private information using social network data On-line social networks , such as Facebook , are increasingly utilized by many users . These networks allow people to publish details about themselves and connect to their friends . Some of the information revealed inside these networks is private and it is possible that corporations could use learning algorithms on the released data to predict undisclosed private information . In this paper , we explore how to launch inference attacks using released social networking data to predict undisclosed private information about individuals . We then explore the effectiveness of possible sanitization techniques that can be used to combat such inference attacks under different scenarios .

O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O


Detecting group review spam It is well-known that many online reviews are not written by genuine users of products , but by spammers who write fake reviews to promote or demote some target products . Although some existing works have been done to detect fake reviews and individual spammers , to our knowledge , no work has been done on detecting spammer groups . This paper focuses on this task and proposes an effective technique to detect such groups .

O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

adversarial data mining
spammer group detection


Integrating the document object model with hyperlinks for enhanced topic distillation and information extraction

document object model
topic distillation

minimum description length principle
segmentation


A search-based method for forecasting ad impression in contextual advertising Contextual advertising ( also called content match ) refers to the placement of small textual ads within the content of a generic web page . It has become a significant source of revenue for publishers ranging from individual bloggers to major newspapers . At the same time it is an important way for advertisers to reach their intended audience . This reach depends on the total number of exposures of the ad ( impressions ) and its click-through-rate ( CTR ) that can be viewed as the probability of an end-user clicking on the ad when shown . These two orthogonal , critical factors are both difficult to estimate and even individually can still be very informative and useful in planning and budgeting advertising campaigns . In this paper , we address the problem of forecasting the number of impressions for new or changed ads in the system . Producing such forecasts , even within large margins of error , is quite challenging : 1 ) ad selection in contextual advertising is a complicated process based on tens or even hundreds of page and ad features ; 2 ) the publishers ' content and traffic vary over time ; and 3 ) the scale of the problem is daunting : over a course of a week it involves billions of impressions , hundreds of millions of distinct pages , hundreds of millions of ads , and varying bids of other competing advertisers . We tackle these complexities by simulating the presence of a given ad with its associated bid over weeks of historical data . We obtain an impression estimate by counting how many times the ad would have been displayed if it were in the system over that period of time . We estimate this count by an efficient two-level search algorithm over the distinct pages in the data set . Experimental results show that our approach can accurately forecast the expected number of impressions of contextual ads in real time . We also show how this method can be used in tools for bid selection and ad evaluation .

O O O O O O O O B I B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

impression forecasting
information search and retrieval
online advertising
wand


Genealogical trees on the web : a search engine user perspective This paper presents an extensive study about the evolution of textual content on the Web , which shows how some new pages are created from scratch while others are created using already existing content . We show that a significant fraction of the Web is a byproduct of the latter case . We introduce the concept of Web genealogical tree , in which every page in a Web snapshot is classified into a component . We study in detail these components , characterizing the copies and identifying the relation between a source of content and a search engine , by comparing page relevance measures , documents returned by real queries performed in the past , and click-through data . We observe that sources of copies are more frequently returned by queries and more clicked than other documents .

O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

content evolution
information search and retrieval
text
web mining


On the high density of leadership nuclei in endorsement social networks In this paper we study the community structure of endorsement networks , i.e. , social networks in which a directed edge u → v is asserting an action of support from user u to user v. Examples include scenarios in which a user u is favoring a photo , liking a post , or following the microblog of user v. Starting from the hypothesis that the footprint of a community in an endorsement network is a bipartite directed clique from a set of followers to a set of leaders , we apply frequent itemset mining techniques to discover such bicliques . Our analysis of real networks discovers that an interesting phenomenon is taking place : the leaders of a community are endorsing each other forming a very dense nucleus .

O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Accelerating instant question search with database techniques Distributed question answering services , like Yahoo Answer and Aardvark , are known to be useful for end users and have also opened up numerous topics ranging in many research fields . In this paper , we propose a user-support tool for composing questions in such services . Our system incrementally recommends similar questions while users are typing their question in a sentence , which gives the users opportunities to know that there are similar questions that have already been solved . A question database is semantically analyzed and searched in the semantic space by boosting the performance of similarity searches with database techniques such as server\/client caching and LSH ( Locality Sensitive Hashing ) . The more text the user enters , the more similar the recommendations will become to the ultimately desired question . This unconscious editing-as-a-sequence-of-searches approach helps users to form their question incrementally through interactive supplementary information . Not only askers nor repliers , but also service providers have advantages such as that the knowledge of the service will be autonomously refined by avoiding for novice users to repeat questions which have been already solved .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Web engineering with the visual software circuit board The Visual Software Circuit Board ( VSCB ) platform supports a component based development methodology towards the development of software systems . The circuit board design techniques and methodologies have evolved for electronic device and component engineering for decades . The circuit board approach , now applied for software systems and applications , makes the component based development process easy to visualize and comprehend . This paper describes the VSCB based design methodology with a specific focus on usage of VSCB for web application engineering .

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

component based development
web engineering

circuit based software development
computer-aided software engineering
patterns
rapid application development
visual programming
web application development


Engineering server-driven consistency for large scale dynamic Web services

dynamic content
network protocols
scalability
volume lease
web cache consistency


Rank aggregation methods for the Web

metasearch
multi-word queries
ranking functions
spam


Knowledge modeling and its application in life sciences : a tale of two ontologies High throughput glycoproteomics , similar to genomics and proteomics , involves extremely large volumes of distributed , heterogeneous data as a basis for identification and quantification of a structurally diverse collection of biomolecules . The ability to share , compare , query for and most critically correlate datasets using the native biological relationships are some of the challenges being faced by glycobiology researchers . As a solution for these challenges , we are building a semantic structure , using a suite of ontologies , which supports management of data and information at each step of the experimental lifecycle . This framework will enable researchers to leverage the large scale of glycoproteomics data to their benefit . In this paper , we focus on the design of these biological ontology schemas with an emphasis on relationships between biological concepts , on the use of novel approaches to populate these complex ontologies including integrating extremely large datasets ( 500MB ) as part of the instance base and on the evaluation of ontologies using OntoQA ( 38 ) metrics . The application of these ontologies in providing informatics solutions , for high throughput glycoproteomics experimental domain , is also discussed . We present our experience as a use case of developing two ontologies in one domain , to be part of a set of use cases , which are used in the development of an emergent framework for building and deploying biological ontologies .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

bioinformatics ontology
biological ontology development
glyco
information search and retrieval
miscellaneous
ontology population
ontology structural metrics
propreo
semantic bioinformatics


A large-scale study of web password habits We report the results of a large scale study of password use andpassword re-use habits . The study involved half a million users over athree month period . A client component on users ' machines recorded a variety of password strength , usage and frequency metrics . This allows us to measure or estimate such quantities as the average number of passwords and average number of accounts each user has , how many passwords she types per day , how often passwords are shared among sites , and how often they are forgotten . We get extremely detailed data on password strength , the types and lengths of passwords chosen , and how they vary by site . The data is the first large scale study of its kind , and yields numerous other insights into the role the passwords play in users ' online experience .

O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Life is sharable : mechanisms to support and sustain blogging life experience Recent trend in the development of mobile devices , wireless communications , sensor technologies , weblogs , and peer-to-peer communications have prompted a new design opportunity for enhancing social interactions . This paper introduces our preliminary experiences in designing a prototype utilizing the aforementioned technologies to share life experience . Users equipped with camera phones coupled with short-range communication technology , such as RFID , can capture life experience and share it as weblogs to other people . However , in reality , this is easier said than done . The success of weblogs relies on the active participation and willingness of people to contribute . To encourage active participations , a ranking system , AgreeRank , is specifically developed to get them motivated .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

collaborative system
interaction styles
mobile phone
peer-to-peer communication
weblog
wireless networking


Huskysim : a simulation toolkit for application scheduling in computational grids Grid computing -- the assemblage of heterogeneous distributed clusters of computers viewed as a single virtual machine -- promises to serve as the next major paradigm in distributed computing . Since Grids are assemblages of ( usually ) autonomous systems ( autonomous clusters , supercomputers , or even single workstations ) scheduling can become a complex affair which must take into consideration not just the requirements ( and scheduling decisions ) made at the point of the job 's origin , but also the scheduling requirements ( and decisions ) made at remote points on the fabric , and in particular scheduling decisions made by a remote autonomous system onto which the local job has been scheduled . The current existing scheduling models range from static , where each of the programs is assigned once to a processor before execution of the program commences , to dynamic , where a program may be reassigned to different processors , or a hybrid approach , which combines characteristics of both techniques ( 1,4,5 ) . To address this issue , we have developed a JAVA based discrete event Grid simulator toolkit called HuskySim . The HuskySim toolkit provides core functionalities ( e.g. , compute objects , network objects , and scheduling objects ) that can be used to simulate a distributed computing environment . Furthermore , it can be used to predict the performance of various classes of Grid scheduling algorithms including : Static scheduling algorithms , Dynamic scheduling , Adaptive Scheduling . In our design , we adopted an object-oriented design , which allows an easy mapping and integration of simulation objects into the simulation program . This approach simplifies the simulation of multitasking , and distributed data processing model . Our model of multitasking processing is based on an interrupt driven mechanism . As shown in Figure 1 , the simulator works by relaying messages between the core engine and the simulation modules through the message handling sub-system . Once the architecture , the load distribution , and the scheduling algorithms are defined , the object registration subsystem sends a NEW OBJECT REQUEST MESSAGE to the object class libraries and builds a skeleton for the requested simulation experiment . Workloads traces can be generated using probabilistic models . The currently supported distributions are : Uniform , Poisson , Exponential , Normal , Erlang , and Power Tailed . It is also possible to use real world load traces . Moreover , we augmented the Simulator with a statistical module . Using the statistical module provided with the HuskySim , the core simulation engine can send messages to perform various type of analysis on the performance data including : variance reduction , regression , time series analysis , clustering , and data mining . In order to quantify the system performance , the simulator provides various performance metrics including : CPU utilization , disk utilization , application turnaround time , latency , make span , host to host bandwidth , jammed bandwidth , and TCP\/IP traffic data . These measurements are handled through the measurement sub-system . Furthermore , the HuskySim can be used to simulate the classes of algorithmic and parametric adaptive Grid schedulers . In which , the scheduling algorithm may not be fixed in advance . Simply , the scheduling algorithm is selected at run time based on the current workload on the Grid fabric in order to operate at near optimal level .

O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

discrete event simulation
performance prediction


Exploiting content redundancy for web information extraction We propose a novel extraction approach that exploits content redundancy on the web to extract structured data from template-based web sites . We start by populating a seed database with records extracted from a few initial sites . We then identify values within the pages of each new site that match attribute values contained in the seed set of records . To filter out noisy attribute value matches , we exploit the fact that attribute values occur at fixed positions within template-based sites . We develop an efficient Apriori-style algorithm to systematically enumerate attribute position configurations with sufficient matching values across pages . Finally , we conduct an extensive experimental study with real-life web data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our extraction approach .

O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

content redundancy
information extraction


Protecting browser state from web privacy attacks Through a variety of means , including a range of browser cache methods and inspecting the color of a visited hyperlink , client-side browser state can be exploited to track users against their wishes . This tracking is possible because persistent , client-side browser state is not properly partitioned on per-site basis in current browsers . We address this problem by refining the general notion of a `` same-origin '' policy and implementing two browser extensions that enforce this policy on the browser cache and visited links . We also analyze various degrees of cooperation between sites to track users , and show that even if long-term browser state is properly partitioned , it is still possible for sites to use modern web features to bounce users between sites and invisibly engage in cross-domain tracking of their visitors . Cooperative privacy attacks are an unavoidable consequence of all persistent browser state that affects the behavior of the browser , and disabling or frequently expiring this state is the only way to achieve true privacy against colluding parties .

O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O

phishing
unauthorized access
web browser design
web spoofing


Super-peer-based routing and clustering strategies for RDF-based peer-to-peer networks RDF-based P2P networks have a number of advantages compared with simpler P2P networks such as Napster , Gnutella or with approaches based on distributed indices such as CAN and CHORD . RDF-based P2P networks allow complex and extendable descriptions of resources instead of fixed and limited ones , and they provide complex query facilities against these metadata instead of simple keyword-based searches . In previous papers , we have described the Edutella infrastructure and different kinds of Edutella peers implementing such an RDF-based P2P network . In this paper we will discuss these RDF-based P2P networks as a specific example of a new type of P2P networks , schema-based P2P networks , and describe the use of super-peer based topologies for these networks . Super-peer based networks can provide better scalability than broadcast based networks , and do provide perfect support for inhomogeneous schema-based networks , which support different metadata schemas and ontologies ( crucial for the Semantic Web ) . Furthermore , as we will show in this paper , they are able to support sophisticated routing and clustering strategies based on the metadata schemas , attributes and ontologies used . Especially helpful in this context is the RDF functionality to uniquely identify schemas , attributes and ontologies . The resulting routing indices can be built using dynamic frequency counting algorithms and support local mediation and transformation rules , and we will sketch some first ideas for implementing these advanced functionalities as well .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed rdf repositories
peer-to-peer
schema-based routing


Learning to rank with multiple objective functions We investigate the problem of learning to rank with document retrieval from the perspective of learning for multiple objective functions . We present solutions to two open problems in learning to rank : first , we show how multiple measures can be combined into a single graded measure that can be learned . This solves the problem of learning from a ` scorecard ' of measures by making such scorecards comparable , and we show results where a standard web relevance measure ( NDCG ) is used for the top-tier measure , and a relevance measure derived from click data is used for the second-tier measure ; the second-tier measure is shown to significantly improve while leaving the top-tier measure largely unchanged . Second , we note that the learning-to-rank problem can itself be viewed as changing as the ranking model learns : for example , early in learning , adjusting the rank of all documents can be advantageous , but later during training , it becomes more desirable to concentrate on correcting the top few documents for each query . We show how an analysis of these problems leads to an improved , iteration-dependent cost function that interpolates between a cost function that is more appropriate for early learning , with one that is more appropriate for late-stage learning . The approach results in a significant improvement in accuracy with the same size models . We investigate these ideas using LambdaMART , a state-of-the-art ranking algorithm .

B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

learning to rank
relevance measures
web search


Privacy wizards for social networking sites Privacy is an enormous problem in online social networking sites . While sites such as Facebook allow users fine-grained control over who can see their profiles , it is difficult for average users to specify this kind of detailed policy . In this paper , we propose a template for the design of a social networking privacy wizard . The intuition for the design comes from the observation that real users conceive their privacy preferences ( which friends should be able to see which information ) based on an implicit set of rules . Thus , with a limited amount of user input , it is usually possible to build a machine learning model that concisely describes a particular user 's preferences , and then use this model to configure the user 's privacy settings automatically . As an instance of this general framework , we have built a wizard based on an active learning paradigm called uncertainty sampling . The wizard iteratively asks the user to assign privacy `` labels '' to selected ( `` informative '' ) friends , and it uses this input to construct a classifier , which can in turn be used to automatically assign privileges to the rest of the user 's ( unlabeled ) friends . To evaluate our approach , we collected detailed privacy preference data from 45 real Facebook users . Our study revealed two important things . First , real users tend to conceive their privacy preferences in terms of communities , which can easily be extracted from a social network graph using existing techniques . Second , our active learning wizard , using communities as features , is able to recommend high-accuracy privacy settings using less user input than existing policy-specification tools .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Network bucket testing Bucket testing , also known as A\/B testing , is a practice that is widely used by on-line sites with large audiences : in a simple version of the methodology , one evaluates a new feature on the site by exposing it to a very small fraction of the total user population and measuring its effect on this exposed group . For traditional uses of this technique , uniform independent sampling of the population is often enough to produce an exposed group that can serve as a statistical proxy for the full population . In on-line social network applications , however , one often wishes to perform a more complex test : evaluating a new social feature that will only produce an effect if a user and some number of his or her friends are exposed to it . In this case , independent uniform draws from the population will be unlikely to produce groups that contains users together with their friends , and so the construction of the sample must take the network structure into account . This leads quickly to challenging combinatorial problems , since there is an inherent tension between producing enough correlation to select users and their friends , but also enough uniformity and independence that the selected group is a reasonable sample of the full population . Here we develop an algorithmic framework for bucket testing in a network that addresses these challenges . First we describe a novel walk-based sampling method for producing samples of nodes that are internally well-connected but also approximately uniform over the population . Then we show how a collection of multiple independent subgraphs constructed this way can yield reasonable samples for testing . We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms through computational experiments on large portions of the Facebook network .

O B I B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

a/b testing
miscellaneous
random walks
social networks


How much is your personal recommendation worth ? Suppose you buy a new laptop and , simply because you like it so much , you recommend it to friends , encouraging them to purchase it as well . What would be an adequate price for the vendor of the laptop to pay for your recommendation ? Personal recommendations like this are of considerable commercial interest , but unlike in sponsored search auctions there can be no truthful prices . Despite this `` lack of truthfulness '' the vendor of the product might still decide to pay you for recommendation e.g. because she wants to ( i ) provide you with an additional incentive to actually recommend her or to ( ii ) increase your satisfaction and\/or brand loyalty . This leads us to investigate a pricing scheme based on the Shapley value ( 5 ) that satisfies certain `` axioms of fairness '' . We find that it is vulnerable to manipulations and show how to overcome these difficulties using the anonymity-proof Shapley value of ( 4 ) .

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O


Globetp : template-based database replication for scalable web applications Generic database replication algorithms do not scale linearly in throughput as all update , deletion and insertion ( UDI ) queries must be applied to every database replica . The throughput is therefore limited to the point where the number of UDI queries alone is sufficient to overload one server . In such scenarios , partial replication of a database can help , as UDI queries are executed only by a subset of all servers . In this paper we propose GlobeTP , a system that employs partial replication to improve database throughput . GlobeTP exploits the fact that a Web application 's query workload is composed of a small set of read and write templates . Using knowledge of these templates and their respective execution costs , GlobeTP provides database table placements that produce significant improvements in database throughput . We demonstrate the efficiency of this technique using two different industry standard benchmarks . In our experiments , GlobeTP increases the throughput by 57 % to 150 % compared to full replication , while using identical hardware configuration . Furthermore , adding a single query cache improves the throughput by another 30 % to 60 % .

O O O B I O O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

database replication
partial replication
web applications