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 Information Technology


Discrete Temporal Models of Social Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a family of statistical models for social network evolution over time, which represents an extension of Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs). Many of the methods for ERGMs are readily adapted for these models, including maximum likelihood estimation algorithms. We discuss models of this type and their properties, and give examples, as well as a demonstration of their use for hypothesis testing and classification. We believe our temporal ERG models represent a useful new framework for modeling time-evolving social networks, and rewiring networks from other domains such as gene regulation circuitry, and communication networks.


Node discovery problem for a social network

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Methods to solve a node discovery problem for a social network are presented. Covert nodes refer to the nodes which are not observable directly. They transmit the influence and affect the resulting collaborative activities among the persons in a social network, but do not appear in the surveillance logs which record the participants of the collaborative activities. Discovering the covert nodes is identifying the suspicious logs where the covert nodes would appear if the covert nodes became overt. The performance of the methods is demonstrated with a test dataset generated from computationally synthesized networks and a real organization.


Fact Sheet on Semantic Web

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The report gives an overview about activities on the topic Semantic Web. It has been released as technical report for the project "KTweb -- Connecting Knowledge Technologies Communities" in 2003.


Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques

AAAI Conferences

The use of statistical AI techniques in authorship recognition (or stylometry) has contributed to literary and historical breakthroughs. These successes have led to the use of these techniques in criminal investigations and prosecutions.  However, few have studied adversarial attacks and their devastating effect on the robustness of existing classification methods. This paper presents a framework for adversarial attacks including obfuscation attacks, where a subject attempts to hide their identity imitation attacks, where a subject attempts to frame another subject by imitating their writing style.  The major contribution of this research is that it demonstrates that both attacks work very well.  The obfuscation attack reduces the effectiveness of the techniques to the level of random guessing and the imitation attack succeeds with 68-91% probability depending on the stylometric technique used.  These results are made more significant by the fact that the experimental subjects were unfamiliar with stylometric techniques, without specialized knowledge in linguistics, and spent little time on the attacks. This paper also provides another significant contribution to the field in using human subjects to empirically validate the claim of high accuracy for current techniques (without attacks) by reproducing results for three representative stylometric methods.


Real-time Automatic Price Prediction for eBay Online Trading

AAAI Conferences

We develop a system for attribute-based prediction of final (online) auction pricing, focusing on the eBay laptop category. The system implements a feature-weighted k -NN algorithm, using evolutionary computation to determine feature weights, with prior trades used as training data. The resulting average prediction error is 16%.  Mostly automatic trading using the system greatly reduces the time a reseller needs to spend on trading activities, since the bulk of market research is now done automatically with the help of the learned model.  The result is a 562% increase in trading efficiency (measured as profit/hour).


Enabling Data Quality with Lightweight Ontologies

AAAI Conferences

As the volume and interconnectedness of corporate data grows, data quality is becoming a business competency essential to success. Existing methods for managing data quality do not scale up to large volumes of data in a way that is directly manageable by the owner of the data. For the past two years a new breed of data quality products, built on applied AI techniques, are empowering non-technical users. Over 150 businesses are benefiting from these products including NASDAQ, Visa, Experian, Oracle, Fidelity, Bank of America, Volvo, Dell, Sabic, and Dassault Systems. The applied AI techniques described include lightweight ontologies to efficiently find inexact textual matches in large data sets.


Trading Robustness for Privacy in Decentralized Recommender Systems

AAAI Conferences

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems are very popular and successful in commercial application fields. One end-user concern is the privacy of the personal data required by such systems in order to make personalized recommendations. Recently, peer-to-peer decentralized architectures have been proposed to address this privacy issue. On the other hand system managers must be concerned about system robustness. In particular, it has been shown that recommender systems are vulnerable to profile injection, although model-based CF algorithms show greater stability against malicious attacks that have been studied in the state-of-the-art. In this paper we generalize the generic model for decentralized recommendation and discuss the trade-off between robustness and privacy. In this context, we argue that exposing knowledge of the model parameters allows new, highly effective, model-based attack strategies to be considered. We conclude that the security concerns of privacy and robustness stand in opposition to each other and are difficult to satisfy simultaneously.


Automating Art Print Authentication Using Metric Learning

AAAI Conferences

An important problem in the world of art historians is determining the type of paper on which a photograph is printed.  One way to determine the paper type is to capture a highly magnified image of the paper, then to compare this image to a database of known paper images.  Traditionally, this process is carried out by a human and is generally time-intensive.  Here we propose an automated solution to this problem, using wavelet decomposition techniques from image processing, as well as metric learning from the machine learning area.  We show, on a collection of real-world images of photographic paper, that the use of machine learning techniques produces a much better solution than image processing alone.


Autonomous Driving in Traffic: Boss and the Urban Challenge

AI Magazine

The DARPA Urban Challenge was a competition to develop autonomous vehicles capable of safely, reliably and robustly driving in traffic. In this article we introduce Boss, the autonomous vehicle that won the challenge. Boss is complex artificially intelligent software system embodied in a 2007 Chevy Tahoe. To navigate safely, the vehicle builds a model of the world around it in real time.


Reports of the AAAI 2008 Fall Symposia

AI Magazine

These underpinnings in genetics and fields are vast, variegated, informed by memetics, studying phenomena such disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, as coalition formation in an artificial and interrelated. Other applications provided an updated perspective ethical concerns related to the use of included case-based retrieval of to a previous symposium held in fall eldercare technology to ensure that narratives culturally relevant to a 2005 on the same topic. Some models focused One major theme of the symposium The symposium ended with a more directly on adaptation, from machine-learning was to investigate the use of sensor brainstorming session on possible solutions and game-theoretic networks in the home environment to for two real-life scenarios for perspectives, but discussions suggested provide safety, to monitor activities of ailing elders and their caregivers. The ways in which those adaptations daily living, to assess physical and cognitive exercise was helpful in grounding the might vary from one cultural context function, and to identify participants in the lives of older adults to another. Work was also should address real needs.