LSAT practicum: an application of human based computation

Human-based computation can be applied to solve problems too hard for a single computer. Crowdsourcing can be applied to ethical modeling by splitting ethical situations among humans. In this senior research project, the crowdsourcing method is applied to produce an ethical model for what web crawlers are allowed to do on websites. By evaluating questions about terms of use on a website, users provide context for the robots. An obstacle to this project is getting the right crowd to participate in the problem. The crowd of potential law students was selected as students typically answer questions to study for a major entrance test into law school. This tool can allow these students to practice legal analysis while letting them build to ethical web knowledge, which is in turn generated into robot-readable code in the form of the Robot Exclusion Protocol. The results were limited by the size of the crowd in this project

LSAT practicum: an application of human based computation

Human-based computation can be applied to solve problems too hard for a single computer. Crowdsourcing can be applied to ethical modeling by splitting ethical situations among humans. In this senior research project, the crowdsourcing method is applied to produce an ethical model for what web crawlers are allowed to do on websites. By evaluating questions about terms of use on a website, users provide context for the robots. An obstacle to this project is getting the right crowd to participate in the problem. The crowd of potential law students was selected as students typically answer questions to study for a major entrance test into law school. This tool can allow these students to practice legal analysis while letting them build to ethical web knowledge, which is in turn generated into robot-readable code in the form of the Robot Exclusion Protocol. The results were limited by the size of the crowd in this project

Browse-to-search

This demonstration presents a novel interactive online shopping application based on visual search technologies. When users want to buy something on a shopping site, they usually have the requirement of looking for related information from other web sites. Therefore users need to switch between the web page being browsed and other websites that provide search results. The proposed application enables users to naturally search products of interest when they browse a web page, and make their even causal purchase intent easily satisfied. The interactive shopping experience is characterized by: 1) in session - it allows users to specify the purchase intent in the browsing session, instead of leaving the current page and navigating to other websites; 2) in context - -the browsed web page provides implicit context information which helps infer user purchase preferences; 3) in focus - users easily specify their search interest using gesture on touch devices and do not need to formulate queries in search box; 4) natural-gesture inputs and visual-based search provides users a natural shopping experience. The system is evaluated against a data set consisting of several millions commercial product images. © 2012 Authors

Building and exploiting context on the web

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Teaching Synthesis

Students will learn how to synthesize information from sources.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/teaching_all/1020/thumbnail.jp

The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote

Gerard Salton is often credited with developing the vector space model (VSM) for information retrieval (IR). Citations to Salton give the impression that the VSM must have been articulated as an IR model sometime between 1970 and 1975. However, the VSM as it is understood today evolved over a longer time period than is usually acknowledged, and an articulation of the model and its assumptions did not appear in print until several years after those assumptions had been criticized and alternative models proposed. An often cited overview paper titled ???A Vector Space Model for Information Retrieval??? (alleged to have been published in 1975) does not exist, and citations to it represent a confusion of two 1975 articles, neither of which were overviews of the VSM as a model of information retrieval. Until the late 1970s, Salton did not present vector spaces as models of IR generally but rather as models of specifi c computations. Citations to the phantom paper refl ect an apparently widely held misconception that the operational features and explanatory devices now associated with the VSM must have been introduced at the same time it was fi rst proposed as an IR model.published or submitted for publicatio