16,068 research outputs found
Why We Read Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users
relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although
it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to
meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal
of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers
with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user
surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions,
capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they
are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting
Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a
large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000
responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to
Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal
curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey
responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs,
enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use
cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across
topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using
Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on
topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader
motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers
aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to
their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing
access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as
recommendation engines.Comment: Published in WWW'17; v2 fixes caption of Table
Big-Data-Driven Materials Science and its FAIR Data Infrastructure
This chapter addresses the forth paradigm of materials research -- big-data
driven materials science. Its concepts and state-of-the-art are described, and
its challenges and chances are discussed. For furthering the field, Open Data
and an all-embracing sharing, an efficient data infrastructure, and the rich
ecosystem of computer codes used in the community are of critical importance.
For shaping this forth paradigm and contributing to the development or
discovery of improved and novel materials, data must be what is now called FAIR
-- Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-purposable/Re-usable. This sets
the stage for advances of methods from artificial intelligence that operate on
large data sets to find trends and patterns that cannot be obtained from
individual calculations and not even directly from high-throughput studies.
Recent progress is reviewed and demonstrated, and the chapter is concluded by a
forward-looking perspective, addressing important not yet solved challenges.Comment: submitted to the Handbook of Materials Modeling (eds. S. Yip and W.
Andreoni), Springer 2018/201
“Pilot implementation of an interdisciplinary course on climate solutions”
A pilot implementation of an experimental interdisciplinary course on climate solutions was undertaken at San Jose´ State University in the fall semester of 2008. The course, co-taught by seven faculty members from six colleges, was approved for a general education requirement and was open to upperclass students campus-wide. A course with such a breadth of topics and range of student backgrounds was the first of its kind here. The lessons learned from the pilot effort were assessed from student, faculty, and administrative perspectives. The educational benefits to students from the interdisciplinary format were found to be substantial, in addition to faculty development. However, challenges associated with team-teaching were also encountered and must be overcome for the long-term viability of the course. The experimental course was approved as a permanent course starting in the fall semester of 2009 based on the pilot effort, and plays a role in the College of Engineering’s recent initiatives in sustainability in addition to campus-wide general educatio
A New Approach to Time Domain Classification of Broadband Noise in Gravitational Wave Data
Broadband noise in gravitational wave (GW) detectors, also known as triggers,
can often be a deterrant to the efficiency with which astrophysical search
pipelines detect sources. It is important to understand their instrumental or
environmental origin so that they could be eliminated or accounted for in the
data. Since the number of triggers is large, data mining approaches such as
clustering and classification are useful tools for this task. Classification of
triggers based on a handful of discrete properties has been done in the past. A
rich information content is available in the waveform or 'shape' of the
triggers that has had a rather restricted exploration so far. This paper
presents a new way to classify triggers deriving information from both trigger
waveforms as well as their discrete physical properties using a sequential
combination of the Longest Common Sub-Sequence (LCSS) and LCSS coupled with
Fast Time Series Evaluation (FTSE) for waveform classification and the
multidimensional hierarchical classification (MHC) analysis for the grouping
based on physical properties. A generalized k-means algorithm is used with the
LCSS (and LCSS+FTSE) for clustering the triggers using a validity measure to
determine the correct number of clusters in absence of any prior knowledge. The
results have been demonstrated by simulations and by application to a segment
of real LIGO data from the sixth science run.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figure
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