Correcting Knowledge Base Assertions

The usefulness and usability of knowledge bases (KBs) is often limited by quality issues. One common issue is the presence of erroneous assertions, often caused by lexical or semantic confusion. We study the problem of correcting such assertions, and present a general correction framework which combines lexical matching, semantic embedding, soft constraint mining and semantic consistency checking. The framework is evaluated using DBpedia and an enterprise medical KB

Meaningful UDDI web services description

There is a lack of meaningful description of Web Services in UDDI, however, it is necessary for automatic services discovery. In this paper, a language is proposed for semantics description of Web Services which complements the UDDI standards to derive relationships among Web Services. The semantics description can be used to automatically derive relationships among Web Services. We describe how the semantics description of Web Services, based on the proposed language, can be integrated with UDDI.<br /

Material-informed topology optimization for Wire-and-Arc Additive Manufacturing

Wire-and-Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) is a metal 3d printing technique that allows fabricating elements ranging from simple geometry to extremely complex shapes. “Layer-by-layer” manufacturing produces a printed material with significant elastic anisotropy, whereas “dot-by-dot” printing may be used to fabricate funicular geometries in which the mechanical properties of the single bars are affected by the printing process. The design of WAAM components is addressed by formulating problems of structural optimizations that account for the peculiar features of the printed alloy. Topology optimization by distribution of anisotropic material is exploited to find optimal shapes in layer-by-layer manufacturing. Two-dimensional specimens are addressed along with I-beams. In the latter case it is assumed that a web plate and two flanges are printed and subsequently welded to assemble the structural component. A constrained force density method is proposed for the design of grid shells in dot-by-dot printing, formulating local enforcements to govern the magnitude of the axial force in each branch of the network. In both formulations, the arising multi-constrained problem is efficiently tackled through methods of sequential convex programming. Lightweight solutions for layer-by-layer and dot-by-dot manufacturing are found for given printing directions. Extensions of the proposed numerical tools are highlighted to endow the optimization problems with additional set of materialrelated constraints

Commonsense Knowledge in Sentiment Analysis of Ordinance Reactions for Smart Governance

Smart Governance is an emerging research area which has attracted scientific as well as policy interests, and aims to improve collaboration between government and citizens, as well as other stakeholders. Our project aims to enable lawmakers to incorporate data driven decision making in enacting ordinances. Our first objective is to create a mechanism for mapping ordinances (local laws) and tweets to Smart City Characteristics (SCC). The use of SCC has allowed us to create a mapping between a huge number of ordinances and tweets, and the use of Commonsense Knowledge (CSK) has allowed us to utilize human judgment in mapping. We have then enhanced the mapping technique to link multiple tweets to SCC. In order to promote transparency in government through increased public participation, we have conducted sentiment analysis of tweets in order to evaluate the opinion of the public with respect to ordinances passed in a particular region. Our final objective is to develop a mapping algorithm in order to directly relate ordinances to tweets. In order to fulfill this objective, we have developed a mapping technique known as TOLCS (Tweets Ordinance Linkage by Commonsense and Semantics). This technique uses pragmatic aspects in Commonsense Knowledge as well as semantic aspects by domain knowledge. By reducing the sample space of big data to be processed, this method represents an efficient way to accomplish this task. The ultimate goal of the project is to see how closely a given region is heading towards the concept of Smart City

Dynamic poverty heat map

Data management and analysis can become an overwhelming task when having to deal with large amounts of data. Fundación Paraguaya (FP), an organization that aims at reducing poverty in Paraguay, currently has been facing this data readability issue. The data from electronic surveys conducted by FP to measure poverty levels in different areas of Paraguay are currently presented in a complex and overwhelming manner via Excel spreadsheet. This method of data representation increases the risk of committing errors, as well as slows down the process of efficiently locating the areas of greatest needs and allocating the resources to these areas. Our Dynamic Poverty Heat Map web application proposes to eliminate that issue for Fundación Paraguaya by visually representing same amount of data gathered with a heat map. Through this senior thesis describes the methodology for the development of a heat map as our solution for better data representation and readability, as well as all the implementation that it underwent. We will also discuss our test plan and collaboration with Fundación Paraguaya and HP in Ireland in working to develop a product specific for a client. Our web application helped facilitate the process of narrowing down the data to certain departments and survey questions for the means of easy analysis and comparison. Ultimately, the Dynamic Poverty Heat Map increases the speed with which Fundación Paraguaya can locate and distribute resources of greatest need

Responsive and Personalized Web Layouts with Integer Programming

Over the past decade, responsive web design (RWD) has become the de facto standard for adapting web pages to a wide range of devices used for browsing. While RWD has improved the usability of web pages, it is not without drawbacks and limitations: designers and developers must manually design the web layouts for multiple screen sizes and implement associated adaptation rules, and its "one responsive design fits all"approach lacks support for personalization. This paper presents a novel approach for automated generation of responsive and personalized web layouts. Given an existing web page design and preferences related to design objectives, our integer programming -based optimizer generates a consistent set of web designs. Where relevant data is available, these can be further automatically personalized for the user and browsing device. The paper includes presentation of techniques for runtime adaptation of the designs generated into a fully responsive grid layout for web browsing. Results from our ratings-based online studies with end users (N = 86) and designers (N = 64) show that the proposed approach can automatically create high-quality responsive web layouts for a variety of real-world websites.Peer reviewe

Mining Social Media and Structured Data in Urban Environmental Management to Develop Smart Cities

This research presented the deployment of data mining on social media and structured data in urban studies. We analyzed urban relocation, air quality and traffic parameters on multicity data as early work. We applied the data mining techniques of association rules, clustering and classification on urban legislative history. Results showed that data mining could produce meaningful knowledge to support urban management. We treated ordinances (local laws) and the tweets about them as indicators to assess urban policy and public opinion. Hence, we conducted ordinance and tweet mining including sentiment analysis of tweets. This part of the study focused on NYC with a goal of assessing how well it heads towards a smart city. We built domain-specific knowledge bases according to widely accepted smart city characteristics, incorporating commonsense knowledge sources for ordinance-tweet mapping. We developed decision support tools on multiple platforms using the knowledge discovered to guide urban management. Our research is a concrete step in harnessing the power of data mining in urban studies to enhance smart city development

A programming system for process coordination in virtual organisations

PhD thesisDistributed business applications are increasingly being constructed by composing them from services provided by various online businesses. Typically, this leads to trading partners coming together to form virtual organizations (VOs). Each member of a VO maintains their autonomy, except with respect to their agreed goals. The structure of the Virtual Organisation may contain one dominant organisation who dictates the method of achieving the goals or the members may be considered peers of equal importance. The goals of VOs can be defined by the shared global business processes they contain. To be able to execute these business processes, VOs require a flexible enactment model as there may be no single ‘owner’ of the business process and therefore no natural place to enact the business processes. One solution is centralised enactment using a trusted third party, but in some cases this may not be acceptable (for instance because of security reasons). This thesis will present a programming system that allows centralised as well as distributed enactment where each organisation enacts part of the business process. To achieve distributed enactment we must address the problem of specifying the business process in a manner that is amenable to distribution. The first contribution of this thesis is the presentation of the Task Model, a set of languages and notations for describing workflows that can be enacted in a centralised or decentralised manner. The business processes that we specify will coordinate the services that each organisation owns. The second contribution of this thesis is the presentation of a method of describing the observable behaviour of these services. The language we present, SSDL, provides a flexible and extensible way of describing the messaging behaviour of Web Services. We present a method for checking that a set of services described in SSDL are compatible with each other and also that a workflow interacts with a service in the desired manner. The final contribution of this thesis is the presentation of an abstract architecture and prototype implementation of a decentralised workflow engine. The prototype is able to enact workflows described in the Task Model notation in either a centralised or decentralised scenario