From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis

Socio-economic data mining has a great potential in terms of gaining a better understanding of problems that our economy and society are facing, such as financial instability, shortages of resources, or conflicts. Without large-scale data mining, progress in these areas seems hard or impossible. Therefore, a suitable, distributed data mining infrastructure and research centers should be built in Europe. It also appears appropriate to build a network of Crisis Observatories. They can be imagined as laboratories devoted to the gathering and processing of enormous volumes of data on both natural systems such as the Earth and its ecosystem, as well as on human techno-socio-economic systems, so as to gain early warnings of impending events. Reality mining provides the chance to adapt more quickly and more accurately to changing situations. Further opportunities arise by individually customized services, which however should be provided in a privacy-respecting way. This requires the development of novel ICT (such as a self- organizing Web), but most likely new legal regulations and suitable institutions as well. As long as such regulations are lacking on a world-wide scale, it is in the public interest that scientists explore what can be done with the huge data available. Big data do have the potential to change or even threaten democratic societies. The same applies to sudden and large-scale failures of ICT systems. Therefore, dealing with data must be done with a large degree of responsibility and care. Self-interests of individuals, companies or institutions have limits, where the public interest is affected, and public interest is not a sufficient justification to violate human rights of individuals. Privacy is a high good, as confidentiality is, and damaging it would have serious side effects for society.Comment: 65 pages, 1 figure, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Reading for Writing as Reciprocal Reinforcement in Vocabulary Acquisition

This paper revisits Swain’s Pushed Output Hypothesis to set a basis for explaining the merits of reading for writing in L2 instruction. Writing assignments are a type of pushed output that help students understand the gap between what they would like to communicate and what they are able to communicate. Although the gap results from lack of linguistic ability in syntax as well as lexis, this paper will focus on how reciprocal reinforcement in reading and writing creates a greater depth of semantic processing that aids in greater retention of newly acquired vocabulary words. Reciprocal reinforcement of vocabulary in reading-for-writing lessons can aid in raising students awareness of their gaps between understanding new vocabulary and being able use those words to create meaningful messages. This conscious-raising function of reciprocal reinforcement triggers cognitive processes such as language learners testing their individual hypotheses of how the target language works

Database Systems - Present and Future

The database systems have nowadays an increasingly important role in the knowledge-based society, in which computers have penetrated all fields of activity and the Internet tends to develop worldwide. In the current informatics context, the development of the applications with databases is the work of the specialists. Using databases, reach a database from various applications, and also some of related concepts, have become accessible to all categories of IT users. This paper aims to summarize the curricular area regarding the fundamental database systems issues, which are necessary in order to train specialists in economic informatics higher education. The database systems integrate and interfere with several informatics technologies and therefore are more difficult to understand and use. Thus, students should know already a set of minimum, mandatory concepts and their practical implementation: computer systems, programming techniques, programming languages, data structures. The article also presents the actual trends in the evolution of the database systems, in the context of economic informatics.database systems - DBS, database management systems – DBMS, database – DB, programming languages, data models, database design, relational database, object-oriented systems, distributed systems, advanced database systems

Developing online parallel corpus-based processing tools for translation research and pedagogy

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2013.Abstract : This study describes the key steps in developing online parallel corpus-based tools for processing COPA-TRAD (copa-trad.ufsc.br), a parallel corpus compiled for translation research and pedagogy. The study draws on Fernandes s (2009) proposal for corpus compilation, which divides the compiling process into three main parts: corpus design, corpus building and corpus processing. This compiling process received contributions from the good development practices of Software Engineering, especially the ones advocated by Pressman (2011). The tools developed can, for example, assist in the investigation of certain types of texts and translational practices related to certain linguistic patterns such as collocations and semantic prosody. As a result of these applications, COPA-TRAD becomes a suitable tool for the investigation of empirical phenomena with a view to translation research and pedagogy.Este estudo descreve as principais etapas no desenvolvimento de ferramentas online com base em corpus para o processamento do COPA-TRAD (Corpus Paralelo de Tradução - www.copa-trad.ufsc.br), um corpus paralelo compilado para a pesquisa e ensino de tradução. Para a compilação do corpus, o estudo utiliza a proposta de Fernandes (2009) que divide o processo de compilação em três etapas principais: desenho do corpus, construção do corpus e processamento do corpus. Este processo de compilação recebeu contribuições das boas práticas de desenvolvimento fornecidas pela Engenharia de Software, especialmente as que foram sugeridas por Pressman (2011). As ferramentas desenvolvidas podem, por exemplo, auxiliar na investigação de certos tipos de textos, bem como em práticas tradutórias relacionadas a certos padrões linguísticos tais como colocações e prosódia semântica. Como resultado dessas aplicações, o COPA-TRAD configura-se em uma ferramenta útil para a investigação empírica de fenômenos tradutórios com vistas à pesquisa e ao ensino de tradução

The Development of an Ontology-Based Model for Manpower Planning

Manpower planning is complex and demanding task, because in establishing the factual insights of an enterprise, one is required to have the in-depth knowledge of forecasting manpower planning and practices, as well as the knowledge of macroeconomics of the particular business involved. Inconsistency information and lack of knowledge during decision-making process could generate to inaccurate decision. In addition, massive amount of information in unstructured forms need to be managed into a systematic manner. The aim of this research is to develop a generic ontology-based architecture for supporting manpower planning and proves the effectiveness of integrating information extraction from diverse source in supporting information for manpower forecasting. Ontology is built to capture and structure domain expert knowledge based on criteria and preferences for selecting manpower forecasting adjustment. Currently, the framework is under implementation as a research prototype