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January 2016 - January 2017
July 1998 - present
July 2005 - June 2006
Publications
Publications (128)
We live in a world of big data; organisations collect, store, and analyse large volumes of data for various purposes. The five V's of big data introduce new challenges for developers to handle when performing data processing and analysis. Indeed, data modelling is one of the most challenging and critical aspects of big data because it determines ho...
This article investigates the dynamic ways that people communicate, assess, and respond as a weather threat evolves. It uses social media data, which offer unique records of what people convey about their real-world risk contexts. Twitter narratives from 53 people who were in a mandatory evacuation zone in a New York City neighborhood during Hurric...
Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect...
With the wide spread use of wearable technology, particularly smart watches equipped with multiple sensors, we find that smart watches are mainly geared towards fitness advocates in order to help individuals manage and track their respective athletic performance. What is less understood is the under-utilized data analytics potential of wearable tec...
During the last few decades, scientific capabilities for understanding and predicting weather and climate risks have advanced rapidly. At the same time, technological advances, such as the Internet, mobile devices, and social media, are transforming how people exchange and interact with information. In this modern information environment, risk comm...
Real-time data collection and analytics is a desirable but challenging feature to provide in data-intensive software systems. To provide highly concurrent and efficient real-time analytics on streaming data at interactive speeds requires a well-designed software architecture that makes use of a carefully selected set of software frameworks. In this...
Wearable technology has great potential for helping members of the public monitor their health. We are interested in medical conditions that can be monitored using the sensors on wearable devices like the Apple Watch. We are interested in the insights that can be provided by the monitoring of a person's heart rate. We have conducted interviews with...
Crisis informatics is a multidisciplinary field combining computing and social science knowledge of disasters; its central tenet is that people use personal information and communication technology to respond to disaster in creative ways to cope with uncertainty. We study and develop computational support for collection and sociobehavioral analysis...
When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted about event at the time. However, some of the most affected areas were underrepresented in the social media conversation about Sandy. Here, we examine the hurricane-related experiences and behaviors shared on Twitter by residents of Far Rockaway, a New...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and int...
Web-based data analysis environments are powerful platforms for exploring large data sets. To ensure that these environments meet the needs of analysts, a human-centered perspective is needed. Interfaces to these platforms should provide flexible search, support user-generated content, and enable collaboration. We report on our efforts to design an...
Crisis Informatics is a multidisciplinary research area that examines the socio-technical relationships among people, information, and technology during mass emergency events. One area of crisis informatics examines the on-line behaviors of members of the public making use of social media during a crisis event to make sense of it, to report on it,...
In today’s world of pervasive computing, it is
straightforward for organizations to generate large amounts of
data in support of a variety of business needs. For this reason,
it is important to build tools that allow analysts to manage and
investigate these data sets quickly and efficiently. One feature
needed by these tools is the ability to sort...
Crisis informatics investigates how society's pervasive access to technology is transforming how it responds to mass emergency events. To study this transformation, researchers require access to large sets of data that because of their volume and heterogeneous nature are difficult to collect and analyze. To address this concern, we have designed an...
Human computation and crowd sourcing have become hot topics across several application domains. Indeed, some efforts have been directed toward emergency management to find ways to involve the public in disaster response. However, many tasks in disaster response can put the public in harm's way or introduce problems of liability. Furthermore, some h...
Hurricane Sandy wrought $6 billion in damage, took 162 lives, and displaced 776,000 people after hitting the US Eastern seaboard on October 29, 2012. Because of its massive impact, the hurricane also spurred a flurry of social media activity, both by the population immediately affected and by the globally convergent crowd. In this paper we explore...
Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on...
Engineering reconnaissance following an extreme event is critical in identifying the causes of infrastructure failure and minimizing such consequences in similar future events. Typically, however, much of the data about infrastructure performance and the progression of geological phenomena are lost during the event or soon after as efforts move to...
This ethnographic study of a Facebook Page founded on 28 October 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall reveals how on-line pet advocates--a large but loosely organized social movement--mobilized their ad hoc discretionary activities to more cooperative, organized work to assist numerous displaced pets. The investigation shows how in...
Crisis informatics is a field of research that investigates the use of computer-mediated communication---including social media---by members of the public and other entities during times of mass emergency. Supporting this type of research is challenging because large amounts of ephemeral event data can be generated very quickly and so must then be...
Human experts in many scientific fields routinely employ heuristics that are unproven and possible conclusions that are contradictory. We present a deployed software system for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. This system, which is called ACE ("age calculation engine"), takes as inputs the nuclide den...
'Tweak the Tweet' is an idea for enabling citizen reporting via microblogs during crisis events. It instructs users of Twitter to tag and structure their messages to make them machine-readable using what is known as a microsyntax. This chapter describes efforts to deploy the Tweak the Tweet syntax during several crisis events in 2010. We describe h...
Software systems today seldom reside as isolated systems confined to generating and consuming their own data. Collecting, integrating and storing large amounts of data from disparate sources has become a need for many software engineers, as well as for scientists in research settings. This paper presents the lessons learned when transitioning a
lar...
Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine...
We argue for a methodology and supporting infrastructure that promotes a cross-study investigation of information structure to advance the science of personal information management. Moreover, we observe that the infrastructure to support a methodology of scientific inquiry may have direct application to users as they struggle to manage their infor...
We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams'...
We present the theory behind ACE, an ‘Age Calculation Engine’ for cosmogenic nuclides. ACE is a theoretical development environment for cosmogenic nuclide dating, and contains novel features such as the ability to work with any cosmogenic nuclide, calibrate production rates from user-supplied calibration databases, and examine the sensitivity of co...
Human experts in scientific fields routinely work with evidence that is noisy and untrustworthy, heuristics that are unproven, and possible conclusions that are contradictory. We present a deployed AI system, Calvin, for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. Calvin solves these problems using an argumentat...
The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass emergencies, people assemble information from both official and unofficial sources. As digital access expands, people will increasingly incorporate information from digital sources into decision making and assess it against the local circumstances they...
Crisis informatics is an emerging research area that studies how information and communication technology (ICT) is used in emergency response. An important branch of this area includes investigations of how members of the public make use of ICT to aid them during mass emergencies. Data collection and analytics during crisis events is a critical pre...
People yearn for more integration of their information. But tools meant to help often do the opposite-pulling people and their information in different directions. Fragmentation is potentially worsened as personal information moves onto the Web and into a myriad of special-purpose, mobile-enabled applications. How can tool developers innovate "non-...
Crisis informatics is an emerging research area that studies how information and communication technology (ICT) is used in emergency response. An important branch of this area includes investigations of how members of the public make use of ICT to aid them during mass emergencies. Data collection and analytics during crisis events is a critical pre...
The exchange of information during times of crisis/disaster has traditionally been the purview of public safety, the National Guard and other local, state or federal authorities. However, this model is undergoing a change with the availability of new mobile communications capabilities and the rise of social networking sites. The general public can...
Experts in scientific fields routinely operate under less-than-ideal conditions. We present a deployed data analysis system
for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with difficult automation issues. First, experts must work with a
huge array of possible parameters. Our system ACE handles this issue by pushing the bounds of software f...
We present a vision of the future of emergency management that better supports inclusion of activities and information from members of the public during disasters and mass emergency events. Such a vision relies on integration of multiple subfields of computer science, and a commitment to an understanding of the domain of application. It supports th...
Human experts in scientific fields routinely work with evidence that is noisy and untrustworthy, heuristics that are unproven, and possible conclusions that are contradictory. We present a deployed AI system, Calvin, for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. Calvin solves these problems using an argumentat...
Maintaining large legacy avionics software systems is a complex task. Retaining understanding of a complex system given changes to the system and to its support organization is critical. A significant capability when supporting understanding of these software systems is managing the complex (typically implicit) relationships that exist between thei...
ACE (Age Calculation Engine; previously called iCronus) is a design environment for analyzing data used in cosmogenic dating methods. It is supported by a software architecture designed with flexibility, scalability, security and safety in mind. These properties have allowed us to create an environment that directly supports the tasks that geoscien...
We present a prototype of the AICronus system, an argumentation system that automates a challenging reasoning process used by experts in cosmogenic isotope dating. The architecture of the system is described and preliminary results are discussed.
Structural computing has evolved from Work on open hypermedia to aid in the construction of domain-specific software infrastructure and tools. Part of the premise of structural computing has been that by focusing on the abstraction of structure rather than on a concrete data layer, it should make it easier for developers to use appropriate levels o...
iCronus is a freely available tool to estimate landform ages using
cosmogenic nuclide techniques. It is a Web application built on top of a
platform independent scripting language, allowing it to be hosted on a
wide range of computing platforms and accessed by users using
standards-compliant Web browsers. The iCronus project intends to create
a pub...
This paper presents a new definition of context for context-aware computing based on a model that relies on dynamic queries over structured objects. This new model enables developers to flexibly specify the relationship between context and context data for their context-aware applications. We discuss a framework, HyConSC, that implements this model...
Since 1997 a significant amount of research has been conducted on the topic of structural computing, leading to the creation of several structural computing systems. Unfortunately, many of these systems require a considerable amount of infrastructure making it difficult for these systems to be used by anyone except their original developers. This s...
Collections are implemented in many ways, depending on the purpose they serve and their implementation environment. We approach collections as entity containers and, from principles discovered through our structural computing work, we propose a metainformatical view of generalized collections, and a theoretical framework for discussing collection v...
The Materials Digital Library project, as part of the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library program, researches efficient creation and dissemination of materials information using a multifaceted approach: collection of materials content, with an emphasis on soft matter; construction of authoring tools for improved delivery,...
Structural computing evolved from work on open hypermedia to aid in the creation of software infrastructure. Open hypermedia had produced software that provided applications with access to hypermedia structures and services. The question was asked if these results could be generalized to create similar tools for other domains. Initial work focused...
The National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Program is a premier collective portal of authoritative scientific resources supporting education and research. With funding from NSF, the Materials Digital Library (MatDL) is a collaborative project being developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Mate...
Structural computing provides techniques and tools to ease the task of developing application infrastructure; infrastructure that provides common services such as persistence, naming, distribution, navigational hypermedia, etc., over a set of application-specific or domain-specific structures. Within structural computing, "structure" refers to a co...
Traceability helps stakeholders to understand the relationships that exist between software artifacts created during a software development project. For example, the evolution of the relationships between requirements and the components to which they are allocated can provide insight into the maintainability of a system. Unfortunately, due to the h...
The field of structural computing is working to produce techniques and tools to ease the task of developing application infrastructure. This paper describes the Themis structural computing environment. Themis provides developers with a generic structure server and two key extension mechanisms that enable the rapid creation of tools for a variety of...
The Metis project is developing workflow technology designed for use in digital libraries by avoiding the assumptions made by traditional workflow systems. In particular, digital libraries have highly distributed sets of stakeholders who nevertheless must work together to perform shared activities. Hence, traditional assumptions that all members of...
The Metis project is developing workflow technology designed for use in digital libraries by avoiding the assumptions made by traditional workflow systems. In particular, digital libraries have highly distributed sets of stakeholders who nevertheless must work together to perform shared activities. Hence, traditional assumptions that all members of...
Traceability helps stakeholders to understand the rela- tionships that exist between software artifacts created dur- ing a software development project. For example, the evolu- tion of the relationships between requirements and the com- ponents to which they are allocated can provide insight into the maintainability of a system. Unfortunately, due...
We present DemeterCop – a system for finding violations of the Law of Demeter in Java TM code while investigating the correlation between these violations and software maintain-ability. We compare how fixing these violations affects the Maintainability Index – hence the software maintainability – and look into new ways of fixing these violations.
The Open Hypermedia Protocol is a proposed standard for enabling the interoperability of client applications with open hypermedia systems. This paper presents the protocol at a high-level of detail, performs an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, and makes specific recommendations for improvements to the protocol. In addition, the paper recor...
While a large fraction of application code is devoted to graphical user interface (GUI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has largely been confined to the creation of GUI toolkits ("widgets"). We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse and flexible system composition. Moreover, the style supports desi...
Reconfiguration is the process of applying planned changes to the communication, interconnection, componentization, or functionality of a deployed system. It is a powerful tool for achieving a variety of desirable properties of large-scale, distributed systems, including evolvability, adaptability, survivability, and continuous availability. Curren...
We view software development as a collaborative activity that is typically supported by a software development environment. Since these environments can significantly influence the collaborative nature of a software development project, it is important to analyze and evaluate their capabilities with respect to collaboration. In this paper, we prese...
This paper presents an approach for providing hypermedia services in this heterogeneous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following: anchors are established with respect to interactive views of objects, rather than the objects themselves; composable, n-ary links can be established between anchors on different views of objects whi...
Software engineers confront many challenges during software development. One challenge is managing the relationships that exist between software artifacts. We refer to this task as information integration, since establishing a relationship between documents typically implies that an engineer must integrate information from each of the documents to...
Software engineers confront many challenges during software development. One challenge is managing the relationships that exist between software artifacts. We refer to this task as information integration, since establishing a relationship between documents typically implies that an engineer must integrate information from each of the documents to...
Software engineers face a dicult task in managing the many dierent types of relationships that exist between the documents of a soft- ware development project. We refer to this task as information integra- tion, since establishing a relationship between two documents typically means that some part of the information in each document is seman- tical...
The task of information integration challenges software engineers on a daily basis. Software artifacts, produced during software development, contain many implicit and explicit relationships whose sheer numbers quickly overwhelm a software team's ability to understand, manipulate, and evolve them. We are developing an information integration enviro...
For a Software Process Improvement (SPI) eort to succeed, its participants must have a sense of ownership. One practical technique for achieving that sense of ownership is to apply a meta-process based on the principals of conguration management (CM) to the SPI eort. This paper provides insight into issues of ownership surrounding actual SPI ef- fo...
Open hypermedia system developers have many choices to make with respect to the extensibility mechanisms they include within their systems. The extensibility mechanisms of the Chimera open hypermedia system are presented to document the set of choices made for it. Chimera’s extensibility mechanisms are based on a general technique that can be appli...
Supporting project awareness in the context of large-scale software development is difficult. One problem is identifying appropriate abstractions and techniques that support the insertion of project awareness mechanisms into a software development environment with minimal impact. An additional problem is scaling project awareness mechanisms to hand...
Emerging software development environments are characterized by heterogeneity: they are composed of diverse object stores, user interfaces, and tools. This paper presents an approach for providing hypermedia services in this heterogeneous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following: anchors are established with respect to interac...
The field of structural computing is a new paradigm of computation based on structure as opposed to data. Initial work in
this area has suggested the need for the transformation of structures, especially when considering the interpretation of a
structure from domain A within domain B. This work examines the need for formal mechanisms to specify bot...
The hypermedia community has engaged in open hypermedia research for well over a decade. Open hypermedia is an approach to
providing hypermedia services to multiple users over heterogeneous information managed by an open set of applications. However,
the conceptual foundations of open hypermedia—its underlying structures and behaviors—have all focu...
XLink is an emerging Internet standard designed to support the linking of XML documents. We present preliminary work on using XLink as an export format for the links of an open hypermedia system. Our work provides insights into XLink's suitability as a vehicle for extending the benefits of open hypermedia to the rapidly evolving world of XML.
ABSTRACT The open hypermedia ,community ,has addressed issues of client integration—providing hypermedia ,services in third- party applications—over the past decade. As a result, a set of models and techniques has emerged ,to guide ,developers in the task of integrating ,hypermedia ,services into their applications. We argue that the logical next s...
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems, OHS-6, and the 2nd International Workshop on Structural Computing, SC-2, held at the 11th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia in San Antonio, Texas, USA in May/June 2000.
The 19 revised full papers presented were caref...
One approach to supporting relationship management in software engineering is open hypermedia. A body of research has developed over the past two decades that has explored the effectiveness of this approach in supporting various software engineering tasks. This paper explores the underlying issues and discusses relevant work in this area. In additi...
Research on open hypermedia systems (OHSs) has been conducted since the late Eighties [Meyrowitz, 1989]. These systems employ a variety of techniques to provide hypermedia services to a diverse range of applications. The World Wide Web is the largest distributed hypermedia system in use and was developed largely independent of the research in OHSs....
Open hypermedia is one approach to managing the relationships that exist in software development projects. A key technical issue in this endeavor is support for scalability. Our experience supporting scalability in open hypermedia has revealed several key insights including the notion of the transitivity of scalability, the need to consider issues...
A Technical Briefing on the OHSWG's interoperability effort.
