This paper introduces the ongoing MyFinder project, which was launched in October 2010. The goals of this project are: (1) to propose an intimate personal genome information environment, MyFinder, which supports the search for our inborn talents and maximizes our potential for a meaningful life; and (2) to contribute to scientific discoveries in the biomedical or psychological research domains through intelligent community computing, or in other words, citizen science. This paper describes our research framework and the ongoing challenges to achieving these two goals. We also discuss the technical and social issues related to possible personal genome applications in non-medical domains.

When market works and when it fails has been an issue long pursued by economists. While to an extreme extent the view, as characterized by the “invisible hand” or “market mechanism”, has been so dominant in economics education and public policy debates, it is generally acceptable that markets are not out there and have to designed properly so as to work (McMillan, 2004). The significance of designs has been further illustrated by experimental economics. As opposed to designs, what, however, has been drawn less attention is the role of traders, their characteristics and behavior. To one extreme, one may consider that a good design is so dominant that there leaves little room for individual traders to play a role. The literature inspired by the zero-intelligence agent (Gode and Sunder, 1993) provides a good background of this issue, and many later studies do cast doubt on the sufficiency of this minimal intelligence and propose different versions of additional intelligence.  

The concept of trust in web services describes the degree of belief that a client or a group of clients have over services functioning satisfactorily and providing the expected results. As services are usually invoked in composition with other services, judging on their trustworthiness gets more complicated, yet computing their trustworthy becomes a desired goal. Existing work only take the trust of each individual service into account, regardless of the context of the composition. They also do not use the data gained from other clients for selecting the most trustful composition and preparing for possible service failures. In our work we first introduce the concept of Combination Reputation, which reflects the commonness and popularity of invoaction of a pair or group of services among other clients. By interpreting the trust and reputation values as subjective probability, we define the Component Trust of the services in the composition, which reflects the degree of belief the client has over components of services performing satisfactorily. We model the web service composition as a Bayesian network and integrate the above trust values into the network and show how to compute the global trust of the composition.

Illegal extraction of forest resources is fought, in many developing countries, by patrols through the forest that seek to deter such activity by decreasing its profitability. With limited resources for performing such patrols, a patrol strategy will seek to distribute the patrols throughout the forest, in space and time, in order to minimize the resulting amount of extraction that occurs or maximize the degree of forest protection, according to one of several potential metrics. We pose this problem as a Stackelberg game. We adopt and extend the simple, geometrically elegant model of (Albers 2010). First, we study optimal allocations of patrol density under generalizations of this model, relaxing several of its assumptions. Second, we pose the problem of generating actual schedules whose site visit frequencies are consistent with the analytically computed optimal patrol densities.

Traditional social science research has been unable to satisfactorily aggregate individual level data to group, organization and systems levels, making it one of social science’s biggest challenges (Giles, 2011). For game and social theory, we believe that the fault can be attributed to the lack of valid distance measures (e.g., the arbitrary ordering of cooperation and competition precludes a Hilbert space distance metric for the ordering of and gradations between these social behaviors, making game theory normative). Alternatively, we offer a theory of social interdependence with countable mathematics based on bistable or multi-stable perspectives and linear algebra. The evidence that is available is supportive. It indicates that meaning is a one-sided, stable, classical interpretation, not only making the correspondence between beliefs and objective reality in social settings incomplete, raising questioning about static theories from earlier eras (i.e., Axelrod’s evolution of cooperation; Simon’s bounded rationality). The result indicates for open systems (democracies) that interpretations evolve naturally to become orthogonal (Nash equilibria), that orthogonal interpretations generate the information to drive social evolution, but that in closed systems (dictatorships), dependent on the enforcement of social cooperation and the suppression of opposing points of view, evolution slows or stops (e.g., China, Iran or Cuba), causing capital and energy to be wasted, misdirected or misallocated as leaders suppress the interpretations that they alone have the authority to label as unethical, immoral, or irreligious. We conclude that a mathematics based on NE is feasible.

We are conducting a project to build a knowledge infrastructure to improve common understandings and knowledge among doctors, patients and researchers. The knowledge infrastructure consists of terms and semantic relationships among them, represented using the hypernetwork model. In order to build a merged knowledge representation, the terms used by the patients and doctors/researchers were analyzed. Less than fifth of terms were common, indicating differences in viewpoints.

This paper proposes a novel telemedicine system for type 2 diabetes patients. The proposed system supports the patient self-management via a set of telemedicine devices, consisting of health sensors and a smart phone. The proposed system covers not only the sensor data but also the diet (food) and exercise data. To capture the food information, we also developed the voice recognition module focusing on the food names. The basic feasibility of the system is practically demonstrated in the preliminary experiment.

Although web-based information extraction systems draw much attention, most of such systems assume that the web directly reflects the real world. For instance, Google flu trend, which is one of the-state-of-the-art influenza surveillance systems, relies on the basic idea that the amount of the influenza related search queries directly correlates with the number of the influenza patients. However, the real patients suffering from influenza symptoms are invisible in the web, because they do not use Internet. Considering this gap, this paper employs an infectious model, assuming that a potential patient utilizes Internet at the first sign of flu. The proposed model improves two types of the state-of-the-art systems, Google based system (from 0.837 correlation to 0.928) and Twitter based system (from 0.898 correlation to 0.918). This study demonstrated that a simple model could easily improve the web-based surveillance.

Texture classification is one of the problems which has been paid much attention on by computer scientists since late 90s. If texture classification is done correctly and accurately, it can be used in many cases such as Pattern recognition, object tracking, and shape recognition. So far, there have been so many methods offered to solve this problem. Near all these methods have tried to extract and define features to separate different labels of textures really well. This article has offered an approach which has an overall process on the images of textures based on Local binary pattern and Gray Level Co-occurrence matrix and then by edge detection, and finally, extracting the statistical features from the images would classify them. Although, this approach is a general one and is could be used in different applications, the method has been tested on the stone texture and the results have been compared with some of the previous approaches to prove the quality of proposed approach.

Most existing distance metric learning methods assume perfect side information that is usually given in pairwise or triplet constraints. Instead, in many real-world applications, the constraints are derived from side information, such as users' implicit feedbacks and citations among articles. As a result, these constraints are usually noisy and contain many mistakes. In this work, we aim to learn a distance metric from noisy constraints by robust optimization in a worst-case scenario, to which we refer as robust metric learning. We formulate the learning task initially as a combinatorial optimization problem, and show that it can be elegantly transformed to a convex programming problem. We present an efficient learning algorithm based on smooth optimization [7]. It has a worst-case convergence rate of O(1/{\surd}{\varepsilon}) for smooth optimization problems, where {\varepsilon} is the desired error of the approximate solution. Finally, our empirical study with UCI data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.