Contributions published at Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems (Abraham Bernstein)

Value differences across cultures or social groups are usually framed in terms of different emphases a particular group puts on specific values. For example, Western cultures typically prioritize values like autonomy and freedom, whereas East-Asian cultures put more emphasis on harmony and community. We present an alternative approach for investigating such cultural differences based on thesaurus databases that reflect the use of value terms in everyday language. We present a methodology that integrates empirical value research with linguistics and novel computer visualization tools to map and visualize value spaces. The maps outline variations in the semantic neighborhood of value terms. Based on 460 value terms both for US-English and German, we created for each language a map of 78 value classes that were further validated in two surveys. The use of such maps could inform research in three ways: first, by allowing for a controlled variability in the usage of value terms when generating vignettes; second, by indicating potential difficulties when translating value terms that display considerable differences in their semantic neighborhood; and third, as heuristics for better understanding value plurality.

Research integrating the perspectives of different disciplines, or interdisciplinary research, has become increasingly common in academia and is considered important for its ability to address complex questions and problems. This mode of research aims to leverage differences among disciplines in generating a more complex understanding of the research landscape. To interact successfully with other disciplines, researchers must appreciate their differences, and this requires recognizing how the research landscape looks from the perspective of other disciplines. One central aspect of these disciplinary perspectives involves values, and more specifically, the roles that values do, may, and should play in research practice. It is reasonable to think that disciplines differ in part because of the different views that their practitioners have on these roles. This paper represents a step in the direction of evaluating this thought. Operating at the level of academic branches, which comprise relevantly similar disciplines (e.g. social and behavioral sciences), this paper uses quantitative techniques to investigate whether academic branches differ in terms of views on the impact of values on research. Somewhat surprisingly, we find very little relation between differences in these views and differences in academic branch. We discuss these findings from a philosophical perspective to conclude the paper.

Research in neuroscience traditionally relies on rather small groups that deal with different questions on all levels of neuronal organization. Recent funding initiatives—notably the European “Human Brain Project” (HBP)—aim to promote Big Neuroscience for integrating research and unifying knowledge. This approach is characterized by two aspects: first, by many interacting researchers from various disciplines that deal with heterogeneous data and are accountable to a large public funding source; and second, by a decisive role of information and communication technology (ICT) as an instrument not only to perform but also to structure and guide scientific activities, for example, through simulations in the case of the HBP. We argue that Big Neuroscience comes along with specific ethical challenges. By examining the justification of Big Neuroscience and the role and effects of ICT on social interaction of researchers and knowledge production, we provide suggestions to address these challenges.

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Both researchers and industry are confronted with the need to process increasingly large amounts of data, much of which has a natural graph representation. Some use MapReduce for scalable processing, but this abstraction is not designed for graphs and has shortcomings when it comes to both iterative and asynchronous processing, which are particularly important for graph algorithms. This paper presents the Signal/Collect programming model for scalable synchronous and asynchronous graph processing. We show that this abstraction can capture the essence of many algorithms on graphs in a concise and elegant way by giving Signal/Collect adaptations of algorithms that solve tasks as varied as clustering, inferencing, ranking, classification, constraint optimisation, and even query processing. Furthermore, we built and evaluated a parallel and distributed framework that executes algorithms in our programming model. We empirically show that our framework efficiently and scalably parallelises and distributes algorithms that are expressed in the programming model. We also show that asynchronicity can speed up execution times. Our framework can compute a PageRank on a large (>1.4 billion vertices, >6.6 billion edges) real-world graph in 112 seconds on eight machines, which is competitive with other graph processing approaches.

Scalable means for the search of relevant web services are essential for the development of intelligent service-based applications in the future Internet. Key idea of semantic web services is to enable such applications to perform a high-precision search and automated composition of services based on formal ontology-based representations of service semantics. In this paper, we briefly survey the state of the art of semantic web service search.

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The availability of data is growing faster than the availability of experts with the relevant skill set needed to interpret it. Finding competent experts for data analysis tasks is becoming increasingly challenging due to the variety of required skills. It is well known that data preparation and filtering steps take a considerable amount of processing time in ML problems [Kotsiantis et al., 2006]. Business and academic settings assume analysts to be proficient not only in the domain of their interest, but also in core analysis disciplines such as statistics, computing, software engineering, and algorithms. Data analysis routines in these domains span over multiple disciplines and individuals involved in their accomplishment are subject to many biases due to their personal traits/background, which may cause errors. This paper proposes a collaborative data analysis framework based on Jupyter Notebook, allowing structured data analysis tasks to be distributed as a collaborative process to a group of people with a diverse set of abilities and knowledge. Our evaluations showed that data analysis tasks, especially the pre-processing part, can be distributed to nonexpert workers, where it is assumed that every member possesses a tiny fragment of the required knowledge and, taken together, they can use their collective intelligence for successful data analytics. Specifically, the goal of this paper is to contribute to this field by discussing and implementing a framework to structure data analysis as a collaborative and distributed process accessible to a public with a diverse set of skills.

With ever increasing data volumes, large compute clusters that process data in a distributed manner have become prevalent in industry. For distributed stream processing platforms (such as Storm) the question of how to distribute workload to available machines, has important implications for the overall performance of the system. We present a workload scheduling strategy that is based on a graph partitioning algorithm. The scheduler is application agnostic: it collects the communication behavior of running applications and creates the schedules by partitioning the resulting communication graph using the METIS graph partitioning software. As we build upon graph partitioning algorithms that have been shown to scale to very large graphs, our approach can cope with topologies with millions of tasks. While the experiments in this paper assume static data loads, our approach could also be used in a dynamic setting. We implemented our proposed algorithm for the Storm stream processing system and evaluated it on a commodity cluster with up to 80 machines. The evaluation was conducted on four different use cases – three using synthetic data loads and one application that processes real data. We compared our algorithm against two state-of-the-art scheduler implementations and show that our approach offers significant improvements in terms of resource utilization, enabling higher throughput at reduced network loads. We show that these improvements can be achieved while maintaining a balanced workload in terms of CPU usage and bandwidth consumption across the cluster. We also found that the performance advantage increases with message size, providing an important insight for stream-processing approaches based on micro-batching.

The enormous increase in numbers of scientific publications in the last decades requires quantitative methods for obtaining a better understanding of topics and developments in various fields. In this exploratory study, we investigate the emergence, trends, and connections of topics within the whole text corpus of the deep brain stimulation (DBS) literature based on more than 7000 papers (title and abstracts) published between 1991 to 2014 using a network approach. Taking the co-occurrence of basic terms that represent important topics within DBS as starting point, we outline the statistics of interconnections between DBS indications, anatomical targets, positive, and negative effects, as well as methodological, technological, and economic issues. This quantitative approach confirms known trends within the literature (e.g., regarding the emergence of psychiatric indications). The data also reflect an increased discussion about complex issues such as personality connected tightly to the ethical context, as well as an apparent focus on depression as important DBS indication, where the co-occurrence of terms related to negative effects is low both for the indication as well as the related anatomical targets. We also discuss consequences of the analysis from a bioethical perspective, i.e., how such a quantitative analysis could uncover hidden subject matters that have ethical relevance. For example, we find that hardware-related issues in DBS are far more robustly connected to an ethical context compared to impulsivity, concrete side-effects or death/suicide. Our contribution also outlines the methodology of quantitative text analysis that combines statistical approaches with expert knowledge. It thus serves as an example how innovative quantitative tools can be made useful for gaining a better understanding in the field of DBS.

Processing streams of linked data has gained increased importance over the past years. In many cases the streams contain events generated by sensors such as traffic control systems or news releases. As a reaction to this increased need, a number of languages and systems were developed that are aimed at processing linked data streams. These systems/languages follow one of two pertinent traditions: either they perform complex event processing or stream reasoning. However, both kinds of systems only support simulating system states as a sequence of events. This paper proposes to model a new kind of data – Facts. Facts are temporal states stored in systems that combine events. Essentially, they trade space complexity for time complexity and reduce the intermediate variable bindings compared to other approaches. They also have the advantage of keeping queries relatively simple. In our evaluation, we compile queries for typical sensor-based use-cases in TEF-SPARQL, our SPARQL extension supporting Facts, C-SPARQL, and EP-SPARQL to the well-established Event Processing Language (EPL) running on the Esper complex event processing engine. Compared to simulate Facts, we show that modeling Facts directly only creates less than 1% of intermediate bindings and improves the throughput by up to 4 times.

In recent years, search engines have started presenting se- mantically relevant entity information together with document search results. Entity ranking systems are used to compute recommendations for related entities that a user might also be interested to explore. Typically, this is done by ranking relationships between entities in a semantic knowledge graph using signals found in a data source as well as type annotations on the nodes and links of the graph. However, the process of producing these rankings can take a substantial amount of time. As a result, entity ranking systems typically lag behind real-world events and present relevant entities with outdated relationships to the search term or even outdated entities that should be replaced with more recent relations or entities. This paper presents a study using a real-world stream-processing based implementation of an entity ranking system, to understand the effect of data timeliness on entity rankings. We describe the system and the data it processes in detail. Using a longitudinal case-study, we demonstrate (i) that low-latency, large-scale entity relationship ranking is feasible using moderate resources and (ii) that stream-based entity ranking improves the freshness of related entities while maintaining relevance.

Micro-texts emerging from social media platforms have become an important source for research. Automatized classification and interpretation of such micro-texts is challenging. The problem is exaggerated if the number of texts is at a medium level, making it too small for effective machine learning, but too big to be efficiently analyzed solely by humans. We present a semi-supervised learning system for micro-text classification that combines machine learning techniques with the unmatched human ability for making demanding, i.e. nonlinear decisions based on sparse data. We compare our system with human performance and a predefined optimal classifier using a validated benchmark data-set.

Recommender systems have become an important tool to help conquer the immense flood of Internet information. In recent years, focus has shifted from just increasing accuracy to improving user satisfaction by producing more diverse recommendations. This thesis seeks deeper knowledge about diversity and how a user approaches it. Users are assigned to two different groups: a diversity-seeking and non-diversity-seeking group; this paper explains different ways to separate the groups. In a second part, alterations to graph-based recommender systems, i.e. applying the tf-idf scheme and employing users' neighborhood relations are discussed. Separation of users into different groups and recommender system variations are evaluated; a useful combination to optimize the results according to a user's preferences is proposed. These new variations of recommender systems succeed in providing more accurate and at the same time more diverse recommendations for certain groups of users compared to state-of-the-art recommender systems.

This paper is focused on the "Blackhole Chaser", a crowdsourcing platform prototype which helps to find new recoil black holes. First this paper shows a general overview over the topic of crowdsourcing and other related research fields. Then it explains how the "Blackhole Chaser" was built and how the architecture was planned. After that, it describes how different users (paid crowd workers, it-specialists and professionals) act on this platform and if there is a coincidence in their classification on it, based on their individual cognitive skills, that have been tested prior to using the platform with the renowned ETS testing framework. This paper closes with a conclusion and a listing of future tasks.