Building multi-layer social knowledge maps with google maps API

Google Maps is an intuitive online-map service which changes people's way of navigation on Geo-maps. People can explore the maps in a multi-layer fashion in order to avoid information overloading. This paper reports an innovative approach to extend the "power" of Google Maps to adaptive learning. We have designed and implemented a navigator for multi-layer social knowledge maps, namely ProgressiveZoom, with Google Maps API. In our demonstration, the knowledge maps are built from the Interactive System Design (ISD) course at the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. Students can read the textbooks and reflect their individual and social learning progress in a context of pedagogical hierarchical structure

Adaptive Information Gathering via Imitation Learning

In the adaptive information gathering problem, a policy is required to select an informative sensing location using the history of measurements acquired thus far. While there is an extensive amount of prior work investigating effective practical approximations using variants of Shannon's entropy, the efficacy of such policies heavily depends on the geometric distribution of objects in the world. On the other hand, the principled approach of employing online POMDP solvers is rendered impractical by the need to explicitly sample online from a posterior distribution of world maps. We present a novel data-driven imitation learning framework to efficiently train information gathering policies. The policy imitates a clairvoyant oracle - an oracle that at train time has full knowledge about the world map and can compute maximally informative sensing locations. We analyze the learnt policy by showing that offline imitation of a clairvoyant oracle is implicitly equivalent to online oracle execution in conjunction with posterior sampling. This observation allows us to obtain powerful near-optimality guarantees for information gathering problems possessing an adaptive sub-modularity property. As demonstrated on a spectrum of 2D and 3D exploration problems, the trained policies enjoy the best of both worlds - they adapt to different world map distributions while being computationally inexpensive to evaluate.Comment: Robotics Science and Systems, 201

Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Chemistry Research

How does our collective scholarly knowledge grow over time? What major areas of science exist and how are they interlinked? Which areas are major knowledge producers; which ones are consumers? Computational scientometrics – the application of bibliometric/scientometric methods to large-scale scholarly datasets – and the communication of results via maps of science might help us answer these questions. This paper represents the results of a prototype study that aims to map the structure and evolution of chemistry research over a 30 year time frame. Information from the combined Science (SCIE) and Social Science (SSCI) Citations Indexes from 2002 was used to generate a disciplinary map of 7,227 journals and 671 journal clusters. Clusters relevant to study the structure and evolution of chemistry were identified using JCR categories and were further clustered into 14 disciplines. The changing scientific composition of these 14 disciplines and their knowledge exchange via citation linkages was computed. Major changes on the dominance, influence, and role of Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry, and Bioengineering over these 30 years are discussed. The paper concludes with suggestions for future work

Developing ethical science trough education

Is science value-free? Or is it valuable only for the scientists? Does someone have ethical or moral obligations for the knowledge they have? If education is defined as a process of “teaching” knowledge, what kind of knowledge should be taught? What function does education have in regards to science? Does education have a role in determining the direction and shade of science in the future? By using philosophical critical analysis, this study describes the concept map of ethics in science, the procedure of developing ethical science, and the construction of functions and roles of education in the development of science. Science does not only have pragmatic values, but the process should also follow the applicable ethics. Science, through the actors, must be able to consider the ethical values or aspects of the development of science itself. Scientists, including educators, need not only to share scientific facts and information with the society, but also to explain the use-values, impacts, and expectations carried by science

Visualizing the scientific information nowadays: the problems and challenges

In recent years, a comparably fresh research field — information visualization has become commonly available for the researchers of all specialties. Information or knowledge maps play a role of interface for the analysis and intensive study of scientific community and knowledge domains development. The popularity of visualization techniques and interdisciplinary framework has resulted in many problems that have not been solved since the field had emerged. The article introduces the instrumental problems and challenges in this field. Exposing the functions information visualization allows to understand the difficulties and barriers within the whole visualizing process. A particular example of insight into the Polish science map is considered in the context of a new knowledge

Knowledge, Innovation and Agglomeration - regionalized multiple indicators and evidence from Brazil

This paper develops multiple indicators to map the geographical distribution of knowledge and scientific and technological capabilities as proxies of the geographical distribution of Science, Technology & Innovation activities, and applies such indicators to data and information from the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The overall view of the geographical distribution of S,T&I activities in the state is complemented by the analysis of the same activities in the perspective of a local production and innovation system: the case of information and communication technologies in the micro-region of Campinas. The results show a pattern for the regional distributions of S,T&I activities along the main highways of the state, around metropolitan areas such as São Paulo and Campinas, and in regions where educational, science and technology, and R&D institutions are strongly concentrated. Firms tend to agglomerate in these areas and regions, forming local production and innovation systems. The paper produces evidence on the adherence of the geographical distribution of those systems to the geographical distribution of S,T&I activities as shown by the indicators. This confirms the empirical findings of the literature about the relationship between geography and innovation.

Herramientas de análisis de datos bibliográficos y construcción de mapas de conocimiento: Bibexcel y Pajek

Knowledge maps are tools that help visualize information. If they take bibliographical data as the basis for network analysis they become a simple means of getting to the crux of highly specific areas or subjects. This paper focuses on the use of scientific bibliographic information to produce a knowledge map and describes the tools that can do this. Bibexcel is used to analyze the data extracted from Web of Science and Pajek is used to visually represent the results. The paper describes the various steps in the procedure, focusing on what to do when visualization is hampered by too many dat