Integrating information from global systems : dealing with the "on- and off-ramps" of the information superhighway

Includes bibliographical references (p. 16-17).Supported by the MIT International Financial Services Research Center, the MIT Center for Coordination Science and the MIT Industrial Performance Center. Supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and USAF/Rome Laboratory under a USAF contract. F30602-93-C-0160Stuart E. Madnick

From VLDB to VMLDB (Very MANY Large Data Bases)

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 16).Stuart E. Madnick

A universal ontology-based approach to data integration

One of the main problems in building data integration systems is that of semantic integration. It has been acknowledged that the problem would not exist if all systems were developed using the same global schema, but so far, such global schema has been considered unfeasible in practice. However, in our previous work, we have argued that given the current state-of-the-art, a global schema may be feasible now, and we have put forward a vision of a Universal Ontology (UO) that may be desirable, feasible, and viable. One of the reasons why the UO may be desirable is that it might solve the semantic integration problem. The objective of this paper is to show that indeed the UO could solve, or at least greatly alleviate, the semantic integration problem. We do so by presenting an approach to semantic integration based on the UO that requires much less effort than other approaches.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Comprehensive Security Framework for Global Threats Analysis

Cyber criminality activities are changing and becoming more and more professional. With the growth of financial flows through the Internet and the Information System (IS), new kinds of thread arise involving complex scenarios spread within multiple IS components. The IS information modeling and Behavioral Analysis are becoming new solutions to normalize the IS information and counter these new threads. This paper presents a framework which details the principal and necessary steps for monitoring an IS. We present the architecture of the framework, i.e. an ontology of activities carried out within an IS to model security information and User Behavioral analysis. The results of the performed experiments on real data show that the modeling is effective to reduce the amount of events by 91%. The User Behavioral Analysis on uniform modeled data is also effective, detecting more than 80% of legitimate actions of attack scenarios

Cirrus, A Digtially Responsible Global FIlesystem

Cirrus is a distributed filesystem that uses an overlay network that extends the service domain of file servers to global scale without diminishing the quality of service. Cirrus, developed over many years, is operational today and is ready for testing and bench marking. Cirrus’ distributed shared memory implementation provides a fast and secure method of transporting all network traffic within the overlay network

Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st

The Obama Administration and digital content : a case study of Healthcare.gov

The United States government has made enormous strides to adapt and evolve with the digital era in the 21st century. Initially the Clinton Administration in the 1990s showed a sense of acceptance and willingness to work with the changing times in regards to technology. The subsequent administrations also continued to support platforms that utilized digital programs such as the Internet. This Master’s Report will examine government websites under the Obama Administration, in particular Healthcare.gov, however through the perspective of information professionals. The report will describe and analyze the information pertinent to users to accessing health needs for insurance plans. The report will discuss and apply frameworks from information studies, including metadata, digital libraries and community informatics Lastly, the report will provide critiques, suggestions, and ways to research this topic in the future.Informatio

Bio-communication of Plants

Plants communicate with a great variety of symbiotic partners, above and below ground. Constant monitoring of signals of biotic origin as well as abiotic environmental influences allows plants to generate appropriate response behavior. These communication processes are primarily sign-mediated interactions and not simply an exchange of information. They involve active coordination and active organization of a great variety of different behavioural patterns – mediated by signs

Taking North American White Supremacist groups seriously: The scope and the challenge of hate speech on the internet

This article aims to address two questions: how does hate speech manifest on North American white supremacist websites; and is there a connection between online hate speech and hate crime? Firstly, hate speech is defined and the research methodology upon which the article is based is explained. The ways that ‘hate’ groups utilise the Internet and their purposes in doing so are then analysed, with the content and the functions of their websites as well as their agenda examined. Finally, the article explores the connection between hate speech and hate crime. I argue that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that speech can and does inspire crime. The article is based in the main on primary sources: a study of many ‘hate’ websites; and interviews and discussions with experts in the field

A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks