2,996 research outputs found
Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier
As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and
hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways
that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic
freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data
collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers
must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or
publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data'
about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning,
services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are
blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities
associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey,
fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities
are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation,
strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are
besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to
mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access
practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and
curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values
inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on
the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information
security, data governance, and cyber risk.Comment: Final published version, Sept 30, 201
Text Data Mining from the Author's Perspective: Whose Text, Whose Mining, and to Whose Benefit?
Given the many technical, social, and policy shifts in access to scholarly
content since the early days of text data mining, it is time to expand the
conversation about text data mining from concerns of the researcher wishing to
mine data to include concerns of researcher-authors about how their data are
mined, by whom, for what purposes, and to whose benefits.Comment: Forum Statement: Data Mining with Limited Access Text: National
Forum. April 5-6, 2018. https://publish.illinois.edu/limitedaccess-tdm
Research Data: Who will share what, with whom, when, and why?
The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.
Prudent Intesting? The Credit Crisis of August 2007 Mainsail II Siv-Lite, and the State Cash Investment Pool
This paper reviews the period leading up to and including the credit disruption of August 2007 and then examines one failed structured finance issue and one investor in that issue. The investor was a financially conservative U.S. state treasury and the issue, Mainsail II, a little-known esoteric structure known as a SIV-Lite. The pairing of these two entities is part of the story of the financial crisis and tells us much about the excesses of the markets at that time and the lack of investment discipline. The paper explains the structure of a SIVLite as well as a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), a structured investment vehicle (SIV), and an asset-backed commercial paper conduit. It explores the role of the broker and rating agencies in the investment decision.financial crisis, SIV-Lite, asset-backed commercial paper, investment decision, cash investment pool
Considering Evaluation: Thoughts for Social Change and Movement-Building Groups
The aim of this guide is to present an easy-to-use resource for evaluation and assessments of social justice, social change and movement building work. It is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to evaluation, but rather goal is to share some of our tools, resources, and lessons learned in this area. This booklet is intended for practitioners working to build organizations, organize networks, alliances and movement building projects
From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web
In the process of scientific research, many information objects are
generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts
such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little
value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each
other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle
that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging
practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do
they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage
scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives
Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these
requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to
represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications
in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between
publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to
obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can
facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is
framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary,
multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for
Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology (JASIST
User Models for Information Systems: Prospects and Problems
Expert systems attempt to model multiple aspects of human-computer
interaction, including the reasoning of the human expert, the knowledge
base, and characteristics and goals of the user. This paper focuses on
models of the human user that are held by the system and utilized in
interaction, with particular attention to information retrieval
applications. User models may be classified along several dimensions,
including static vs. dynamic, stated vs. inferred, and short-term vs. longterm
models. The choice of the type of model will depend on a number
of factors, including frequency of use, the relationship between the user
and the system, the scope of the system, and the diversity of the user
population. User models are most effective for well-defined tasks,
domains, and user characteristics and goals. These user-system aspects
tend not to be well defined in most information retrieval applications.published or submitted for publicatio
Virtual Reference for Video Collections: System Infrastructure, User Interface and Pilot User Study
A new video-based Virtual Reference (VR) tool called VideoHelp was designed and developed to support video
navigation escorting, a function that enables librarians to co-navigate a digital video with patrons in the web-based
environment. A client/server infrastructure was adopted for the VideoHelp system and timestamps were used to achieve
the video synchronization between the librarians and patrons. A pilot usability study of using VideoHelp prototype in video seeking was conducted and the preliminary results demonstrated that the system is easy to learn and use, and real-time assistance from virtual librarians in video navigation is desirable on a conditional basis
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