768 research outputs found
TRULLO - local trust bootstrapping for ubiquitous devices
Handheld devices have become sufficiently powerful
that it is easy to create, disseminate, and access digital content
(e.g., photos, videos) using them. The volume of such content is
growing rapidly and, from the perspective of each user, selecting
relevant content is key. To this end, each user may run a trust
model - a software agent that keeps track of who disseminates
content that its user finds relevant. This agent does so by
assigning an initial trust value to each producer for a specific
category (context); then, whenever it receives new content, the
agent rates the content and accordingly updates its trust value for
the producer in the content category. However, a problem with
such an approach is that, as the number of content categories
increases, so does the number of trust values to be initially set.
This paper focuses on how to effectively set initial trust values.
The most sophisticated of the current solutions employ predefined
context ontologies, using which initial trust in a given
context is set based on that already held in similar contexts.
However, universally accepted (and time invariant) ontologies
are rarely found in practice. For this reason, we propose a
mechanism called TRULLO (TRUst bootstrapping by Latently
Lifting cOntext) that assigns initial trust values based only on
local information (on the ratings of its user’s past experiences)
and that, as such, does not rely on third-party recommendations.
We evaluate the effectiveness of TRULLO by simulating its use
in an informal antique market setting. We also evaluate the
computational cost of a J2ME implementation of TRULLO on
a mobile phone
Nowcasting gentrification using Airbnb data
There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks in some cities, while they have been welcome as generators of new jobs and taxes in others. Census data fails to measure neighborhood change in real-time since it is usually updated every ten years. This work shows that Airbnb data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood changes. Specifically, we consider both structured data (e.g., number of listings, number of reviews, listing information) and unstructured data (e.g., user-generated reviews processed with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms) for three major cities, New York City (US), Los Angeles (US), and Greater London (UK). We find that Airbnb data (especially its unstructured part) appears to nowcast neighborhood gentrification, measured as changes in housing affordability and demographics. Overall, our results suggest that user-generated data from online platforms can be used to create socioeconomic indices to complement traditional measures that are less granular, not in real-time, and more costly to obtain
The Digital Life of Walkable Streets
Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is
why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability
scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from
survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing
to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the
computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social
media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable
streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day,
while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These
results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services,
urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical
implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to
tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web
Conference (WWW 2015
Quantified Canine: Inferring Dog Personality From Wearables
Being able to assess dog personality can be used to, for example, match
shelter dogs with future owners, and personalize dog activities. Such an
assessment typically relies on experts or psychological scales administered to
dog owners, both of which are costly. To tackle that challenge, we built a
device called "Patchkeeper" that can be strapped on the pet's chest and
measures activity through an accelerometer and a gyroscope. In an in-the-wild
deployment involving 12 healthy dogs, we collected 1300 hours of sensor
activity data and dog personality test results from two validated
questionnaires. By matching these two datasets, we trained ten machine-learning
classifiers that predicted dog personality from activity data, achieving AUCs
in [0.63-0.90], suggesting the value of tracking the psychological signals of
pets using wearable technologies.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Changes in the fecal microbiota associated with a broad‐spectrum antimicrobial administration in hospitalized neonatal foals with probiotics supplementation
There is a wide array of evidence across species that exposure to antibiotics is associated with dysbiosis, and due to their widespread use, this also raises concerns also in medicine. The study aimed to determine the changes on the fecal microbiota in hospitalized neonatal foals administered with broad‐spectrum antimicrobials and supplemented probiotics. Fecal samples were collected at hospital admission (Ta), at the end of the antimicrobial treatment (Te) and at discharge (Td). Feces were analysed by next‐generation sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene on Illumina MiSeq. Seven foals treated with IV ampicillin and amikacin/gentamicin were included. The mean age at Ta was 19 h, the mean treatment length was 7 days and the mean time between Te and Td was 4.3 days. Seven phyla were identified: Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Fusobacteria, Proteobacteria, TM7 and Verrucomicrobia. At Ta, Firmicutes (48.19%) and Proteobacteria (31.56%) were dominant. The alpha diversity decreased from Ta to Te, but it was the highest at Td. The beta diversity was higher at Ta than at Te and higher at Td than at Te. An increase in Akkermansia over time was detected. The results suggest that the intestinal microbiota of neonatal foals rapidly returns to a high diversity after treatment. It is possible that in foals, the effect of antimicrobials is strongly influenced or overshadowed by the time‐dependent changes in the developing gut microbiota
Microbial community dynamics in mother's milk and infant's mouth and gut in moderately preterm infants
Mother's own milk represents the optimal source for preterm infant nutrition, as it promotes immune defenses and gastrointestinal function, protects against necrotizing enterocolitis, improves long-term clinical outcome and is hypothesized to drive gut microbiota assembly. Preterm infants at birth usually do not receive their mother's milk directly from the breast, because active suckling and coordination between suckling, swallowing and breathing do not develop until 32-34 weeks gestational age, but actual breastfeeding is usually possible as they grow older. Here, we enrolled moderately preterm infants (gestational age 32-34 weeks) to longitudinally characterize mothers' milk and infants' gut and oral microbiomes, up to more than 200 days after birth, through 16S rRNA sequencing. This peculiar population offers the chance to disentangle the differential contribution of human milk feeding per se vs. actual breastfeeding in the development of infant microbiomes, that have both been acknowledged as crucial contributors to short and long-term infant health status. In this cohort, the milk microbiome composition seemed to change following the infant's latching to the mother's breast, shifting toward a more diverse microbial community dominated by typical oral microbes, i.e., Streptococcus and Rothia. Even if all infants in the present study were fed human milk, features typical of healthy, full term, exclusively breastfed infants, i.e., high percentages of Bifidobacterium and low abundances of Pseudomonas in fecal and oral samples, respectively, were detected in samples taken after actual breastfeeding started. These findings underline the importance of encouraging not only human milk feeding, but also an early start of actual breastfeeding in preterm infants, since the infant's latching to the mother's breast might constitute an independent factor helping the health-promoting assembly of the infant gut microbiome
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