Photo
of the Week
As part
of a university-wide project to improve signage, the Nguyen
Engineering
Building received a big “name badge.” The large adhesive letters
placed on the
outside windows clearly identify the building as the home of
engineering at
Mason.
Date:
Wed., May 6 Time and Location:
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Engr
Room 2901 Title:
Mining Unstructured Social Data
for Behavioral Computing and User Modeling Speaker:
Hemant Purohit, PhD Candidate,
Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio
Speaker Bio: Hemant
Purohit is an interdisciplinary, computational social science
researcher at the
Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing
(Kno.e.sis), and a PhD
candidate working with Prof. Amit Sheth at Wright State
University, USA. He was
one of the ITU Young Innovator 2014 for UN’s ICT agency, for
winning a global
challenge on Open Source Technologies for Disaster Management, as
well as one
of the eight international fellows of USAID, Google and ICT4Peace
foundation at
an influential humanitarian technology event CrisisMappers
ICCM-2013, UN
Nairobi. He has jointly presented tutorials on crisis computing at
prestigious
conferences, AAAI ICWSM-2013 and SIAM SDM-2014, and also served as
reviewer for
conferences and journals including HICSS, ICWSM, WWW, JCSCW, ACM
TOIT, ACM
TIST, etc. More about Hemant: http://knoesis.wright.edu/researchers/hemant
Abstract: Social
Media or Web 2.0, one source of Big Data, has completely
revolutionized
information consumption, management, and processing. The
opportunity to
understand and exploit such data has given rise to the
interdisciplinary field
of computational social science, which studies an unprecedented
level of human
interaction data—accessible due to an increasing shift from
face-to-face to
online communication. The big data challenges of large-scale
volume, velocity
of content generation, sparsity of data behaviors, variety in
language
complexity and community demographics in this online interaction
data present
an exciting venue for computational science. For instance, mining
social media
data may help disaster response organizations better coordinate
with citizens,
and assist to reduce mounting cost of response, estimated to be
271 billion
dollars annually by 2025.
Hemant
Purohit
presents a novel Web information-processing framework,
Identify-Match-Engage (IME), to interpret, manage, and integrate
unstructured
social media data generated by users (citizen sensors) for
addressing
cooperation between the citizens and formal organizations, with a
disaster
response use-case. His new behavioral computing methods model
latent and
subjective attributes (intent, influence, engagement) of users and
communities
in online social networks. They fuse knowledge from the Web
resources (e.g.,
Wikipedia, Linked Open Data) and theories of behavior (e.g.,
social identity)
into statistical methods of text mining and machine learning.
Unlike
traditional behavioral computing restricted to one of the three
fundamental
dimensions of social networks—user, content, and network, these
techniques
combine all three dimensions to improve the representation of
subjective
context, and compensate for sparsity of features to model latent
behaviors
(e.g., engagement). In the future, this interdisciplinary research
can help
incorporate human behavioral aspects for designing intelligent
cooperative
systems, and also contribute to physical-cyber-social computing.
This work will
impact problems of social good and large-scale online user/group
modeling
ranging from personalization (individual behavior) to abstraction
(group
behavior).
The
Volgenau
website now includes web pages for faculty.There are several ways to get
to them, but
here is a direct link: http://volgenau.gmu.edu/faculty On every
page on the Volgenau website, there are drop-down menus in a green
bar across the top of
the page.You can get to
the web pages from
the “About” menu, the “Faculty and Staff” menu, and the “Research”
menu.For the first two,
click on “Faculty List”;
for the third, click on “Research Interests”.
Faculty
members
who wish to be included under a particular research interest can
do this
via their ePAR accounts.If
you have
questions about how to do this, please contact Mandy Richburg ([log in to unmask]).
Funding
Opportunity:Cybermanufacturing
Systems
(NSF)
Title:Dear Colleague Letter:
Cybermanufacturing
Systems Sponsor:National Science Foundation
With
this
Dear Colleague letter (DCL), the National Science Foundation (NSF)
is
announcing its intention to accept EArly-Concept Grants for
Exploratory
Research (EAGER) proposals in FY 2015 to support researchers who
are pursuing
novel, early-stage, multi-disciplinary, and high-risk/high-reward
research on cybermanufacturing
systems.
This
DCL
strongly encourages collaborative proposals between manufacturing
and computer
and information science and engineering researchers, and joint
review of
proposals among complementary NSF programs will be pursued when
appropriate. It
is anticipated that these collaborations will foster new research
directions at
the intersection of manufacturing and computer and information
science and
engineering, paving the way for larger-scale efforts in the
future.Proposers are also
especially encouraged to
implement, test, and improve the usability of system architectures
in teaching
environments in which students both use and contribute application
software
(apps).
Karla
Hoffman
of the Systems Engineering & Operations Research Department
received $267K from the Office of Naval Research for her project,
“Optimal
Spectrum Allocation to Support Tactical Mobile Ad-hoc Networks.”
Edward Huang, Chun-Hung Chen,
& Jie Xu Receive Funding from NSF
Edward
Huang,
Chun-Hung Chen, and Jie Xu of the Systems Engineering &
Operations
Research Department received $459K from the National Science
Foundation for their
project, “Improving Search Efficiency in Engineering Design by
Integrating
Multiple Models at Different Fidelities.”
Jessica Lin & Huzefa Rangwala
Receive Funding from Strategic Analysis & NRL
Jessica
Lin
and Huzefa Rangwala of the Computer Science Department received
$92K from Strategic
Analysis, Inc., and the Naval Research Laboratory for their
project, “Trajectory
Pattern Mining for Proactive Decision Support.”
Sushil
Jajodia
of the Center for Secure Information Systems received $50K>
from National
Institute of Standards and Technology for his project, “Securing
Cloud Infrastructure
through Improving Network Diversity and Moving Target Defense.”
Burak Tanyu Receives Funding from
Virginia Dept. of Transportation
Burak
Tanyu
of the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental
and
Infrastructure Engineering received $23K from the Virginia
Department of
Transportation for his project, “Equipment Grant to Instrument
Geosynthetic
Reinforced Soil Structure Integrated into VDOT Bridge Abutment in
Staunton, VA.”
--
===============================================================
Stephen G. Nash
Senior Associate Dean
Volgenau School of Engineering
George Mason University
Nguyen Engineering Building, Room 2500
Mailstop 5C8
Fairfax, VA 22030
[log in to unmask]
Phone: (703) 993-1505
Fax: (703) 993-1633
http://volgenau.gmu.edu/web/volgenau/senior-associate-dean