31,039 research outputs found
A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess usersā preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoplesā willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users
Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)
The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017
Automatically Generating a Large, Culture-Specific Blocklist for China
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or
"block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these
lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of
topics, leaving other types of sites and services untested. To increase and
diversify the set of sites on existing block lists, we use natural language
processing and search engines to automatically discover a much wider range of
websites that are censored in China. Using these techniques, we create a list
of 1125 websites outside the Alexa Top 1,000 that cover Chinese politics,
minority human rights organizations, oppressed religions, and more.
Importantly, . The list that we develop not only vastly expands the set
of sites that current Internet measurement tools can test, but it also deepens
our understanding of the nature of content that is censored in China. We have
released both this new block list and the code for generating it
Visual Information Retrieval in Endoscopic Video Archives
In endoscopic procedures, surgeons work with live video streams from the
inside of their subjects. A main source for documentation of procedures are
still frames from the video, identified and taken during the surgery. However,
with growing demands and technical means, the streams are saved to storage
servers and the surgeons need to retrieve parts of the videos on demand. In
this submission we present a demo application allowing for video retrieval
based on visual features and late fusion, which allows surgeons to re-find
shots taken during the procedure.Comment: Paper accepted at the IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on
Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) in Prague (Czech Republic) between
10 and 12 June 201
Issues in Evaluating Health Department Web-Based Data Query Systems: Working Papers
Compiles papers on conceptual and methodological topics to consider in evaluating state health department systems that provide aggregate data online, such as taxonomy, logic models, indicators, and design. Includes surveys and examples of evaluations
Learning to Address Health Inequality in the United States with a Bayesian Decision Network
Life-expectancy is a complex outcome driven by genetic, socio-demographic,
environmental and geographic factors. Increasing socio-economic and health
disparities in the United States are propagating the longevity-gap, making it a
cause for concern. Earlier studies have probed individual factors but an
integrated picture to reveal quantifiable actions has been missing. There is a
growing concern about a further widening of healthcare inequality caused by
Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to differential access to AI-driven services.
Hence, it is imperative to explore and exploit the potential of AI for
illuminating biases and enabling transparent policy decisions for positive
social and health impact. In this work, we reveal actionable interventions for
decreasing the longevity-gap in the United States by analyzing a County-level
data resource containing healthcare, socio-economic, behavioral, education and
demographic features. We learn an ensemble-averaged structure, draw inferences
using the joint probability distribution and extend it to a Bayesian Decision
Network for identifying policy actions. We draw quantitative estimates for the
impact of diversity, preventive-care quality and stable-families within the
unified framework of our decision network. Finally, we make this analysis and
dashboard available as an interactive web-application for enabling users and
policy-makers to validate our reported findings and to explore the impact of
ones beyond reported in this work.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table (excluding the supplementary material),
accepted for publication in AAAI 201
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