An embodied conversational agent for intelligent web interaction on pandemic crisis communication

In times of crisis, an effective communication mechanism is paramount in providing accurate and timely information to the community. In this paper we study the use of an intelligent embodied conversational agent (EGA) as the front end interface with the public for a Crisis Communication Network Portal (CCNet). The proposed system, CCNet, is an integration of the intelligent conversation agent, AINI, and an Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA). AKEA retrieves first hand information from relevant sources such as government departments and news channels. In this paper, we compare the interaction of AINI against two popular search engines, two question answering systems and two conversational systems

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Institutional Repositories: Features, Architecture, Design and Implementation Technologies

Europe is the leading continent in terms of active adoption and use of Digital Libraries – particularly Institutional Repositories (IRs). Africa has not done poorly in this area with a steady increase from 19 repositories in 2008 to 46 in January, 2011 but there is need to raise awareness and channel efforts towards making IRs easily accessible to Africans through ubiquitous channels such as hand-helds and mobile devices. This paper reviews the features, architecture, design and implementation technologies of IRs. In addition, it highlights viable research areas that can be pursued by African researchers in the field of Digital Libraries. It also encourages research efforts to focus on areas that will be beneficial to Africa

Optimal web-scale tiering as a flow problem

We present a fast online solver for large scale parametric max-flow problems as they occur in portfolio optimization, inventory management, computer vision, and logistics. Our algorithm solves an integer linear program in an online fashion. It exploits total unimodularity of the constraint matrix and a Lagrangian relaxation to solve the problem as a convex online game. The algorithm generates approximate solutions of max-flow problems by performing stochastic gradient descent on a set of flows. We apply the algorithm to optimize tier arrangement of over 84 million web pages on a layered set of caches to serve an incoming query stream optimally