The following posters will be presented during the BOV Research Showcase:

1. LBS (k,T) Anonymity – A Spatio Temporal Approach for Location-Based Service Users

Amirreza Masoumzadeh, James Joshi, and Hassan Karimi

Location-Based Services (LBSs) can continuously collect large amounts of spatio-temporal data related to users' positions and movements, among other privacy sensitive attributes in user queries. Since, like other business services, LBSs are not necessarily trusted, there is a high chance that such privacy-sensitive data would be analyzed for purposes other than the intended service itself as well as for malicious purposes. Hence, it is desirable to anonymize location-based queries before they are submitted to an LBS. We propose a location-based query anonymization technique, LBS (k,T)-anonymization, that ensures anonymity of user's query in a specific time window against what we call known user attack. We distinguish between our technique and related work on k-anonymity for LBSs by showing that they target different privacy inference attacks. Also, we analyze the inconsistency of the existing predominant approach with the original definition of k-anonymity and its implications on the anonymization. Finally, we present an evaluation framework that assesses the applicability and performance of the proposed technique using an evaluation framework.

2. Enhanced One-Pass IP Multimedia Subsystem Authentication Protocol for UMTS

Xuelian Long and James Joshi
Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) can support IP Multimedia services by including the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as part of its core network. To use IMS services, the user equipment needs to first authenticate itself with the UMTS and then with the IMS. However, these two authentication protocols share many similar operations. Recent research efforts have highlighted this issue; hence, researchers have proposed one-pass authentication protocols to reduce the number of such overlapping steps and to address security vulnerabilities in the original IMS protocol.

3. A Collaborative K-anonymity Approach for Location Privacy

Hassan Takabi, James Joshi, and Hassan Karimi 
Considering the growth of wireless communication and mobile positioning technologies, location-based services (LBSs) have been generating increasing research interest in recent years. One of the critical issues for the deployment of LBS applications is how to reconcile their quality of service with privacy concerns. Location privacy based on k-anonymity is a very common way to hide the real locations of the users from the LBS provider. Several k-anonymity approaches have been proposed in the literature, each with some drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a cooperative approach that provides k-anonymity in a distributed manner and needs neither a trusted third party nor users (or providers) trust each other. Furthermore, our approach integrates well with existing communication infrastructure. By using cryptographic schemas, user with the help of location providers determines whether the k-anonymity property is satisfied in a queryarea or not. We start with a simple scenario where user and location providers are honest but-curious and then we extend our protocol to deal with scenarios where entities may collude with each other. Moreover, we analyze possible threats and discuss how our proposed approach defends against such threats.

4. ONALIN: Ontology and Algorithm for Indoor Routing

Patrick Dudas, Mahsa Ghafourian, Dr. Hassan Karimi
For outdoor routing, there are a wide variety of factors to be considered in computing routes such as: travel time, distance, traffic, or even accidents. For computing indoor routes, factors affecting those routes are very limited.  In most cases, shortest distance
Indoor navigation can be a daunting task because of a variety of factors including public buildings with complex architectures; Individuals with a permanent or temporary disability; or special or emergency situations.  In this poster, we provide guidelines on how disabilities could be ultimately accommodated by using ADA (American Disability Act) standards to compute optimal routes via an ontology and algorithm called ONALIN.

5. A Social Navigation Network (SoNavNet) for Collecting Pedestrian Network Data

Piyawan Kasemsuppakorn, Duangduen Roongpiboonsopit
Advisor: Hassan A. Karimi
Current navigation systems are based on computation and current social networks are designed for sharing a variety of information except for navigation information. In this research, we have developed a framework for the Social Navigation Networking (SoNavNet), where members of such a network can request and recommend points of interest (e.g., libraries) and routes between pairs of origin/destination locations. We are developing and testing new ideas and techniques for SoNavNet through a prototype, where members can request and recommend navigation information through emerging
SmartPhones. Using Smart Phones is extremely helpful as they are becoming more and more popular.   Therefore, this application will have great impact on the general public.

6. American Library Instruction to non-Native English Speaking International Students in the United States

Elisabeth Rodriguez, PhD Student
The population of international students in higher education in the United States has risen 31% since 2005 (IIE: Institute of International Education, 2008). In response to this increase, academic libraries need to shift their focus toward outreach services and resources that will help international students achieve academic success. However, even as the numbers of international students increase, there are few studies that might help guide practice in libraries today, most of the research having been published more than a decade ago. Therefore, current research on this subject area is needed. In order to support international student academic success, inclusive library instruction and services must be developed that integrates their special needs. The following problem was identified: How can librarians/libraries provide culturally relevant library instruction to international students?

7. Investigation of Methods for Structural Comparison of Graphs

Martijn de Jongh and Marek Druzdzel
We investigate methods for comparing the graph structures used in (Causal) Bayesian networks. With the results of our work, we want to figure out which method is "best" for comparing graph structures. One application of this work is to benchmark algorithms used for graph structure learning. We would then compare the structure of a predetermined network with structures learned with the algorithms we want to test.

8. An Initial Evaluation of Approaches  to Building Entry for Large Robot Teams

Zheng Ma, Peiju Lee, Mike Lewis
Teams of robots for search and rescue in dangerous building environments are emerging as a potential approach to reducing risk to rescuers and improving rescue rate. However, one aspect of the use of such teams that is often overlooked is the initial entry of the robots into the building. If many robots enter the building from the same entrance, it will often be the case that the robots interfere with each other and dramatically slow down the initial phase of the exploration. In this paper, we evaluate several different approaches to overcoming this initial congestion and identify heuristics that allow the robots to most quickly clear the entry area and begin their actual mission.

9. On Limited-Range Strategic/Random Jamming Attacks in Wireless Ad hoc Networks
   Korporn Panyim, Thaier Hayajneh, Prashant Krishnamurthy, David Tipper

Jamming attacks are difficult to prevent and sometimes hard to detect. In this poster, we consider the impact of the placement and range of limited-range jammers on ad hoc networks. The attacker can locate his jammer(s) randomly in the network. Alternatively, jammers can be placed at strategic locations. For instance, intuitively, these can be nodes with the highest traffic inputs/outputs. Results using OPNET based simulations show how significant such strategically placed attacks can be compared to random placement of limited-range jammers on both TCP and UDP traffic.  In this work, we consider the impact of the placement and range of limited-range jammers on ad hoc networks.

10. ARCHIVAL STUDIES & i-SCHOOLS: LIS DOCTORAL STUDENT PUBLICATIONS

Allen C. Benson; Joel A. Blanco-Rivera; Janet Ceja;  Richard J. Cox; Robert B. Riter; and Tim Schlak
Some worry that the iSchool movement represents another shift away from the valued traditions of library schools.  Predating the iSchool movement, however, were other programmatic shifts such as those that led to the formalization of graduate archival education. Such developments are essential to our future, as iSchools tackle the increasingly complex issues confronting a digital society.  The description of publications by doctoral students on archival topics suggests our School is demonstrating new possibilities for archival research within an iSchool environment.
This poster features doctoral students’ publications starting as papers for archival studies courses in our School.  Also, these papers reflect the possibilities described in Richard J. Cox and Ronald L. Larsen, “iSchools and Archival Studies,” Archival Science, forthcoming.

11. CiteEval for Evaluating Personalized Social Web Search
    Zhen Yue, Daqing He, Jonathan Grady, Yiling Lin, Jon Walker

The technologies and the ideas of Web 2.0 have significantly changed users in thinking and using Web information in their work and other aspects of daily life. More and more Web users, from sophisticated to naïve, are willing to share online their own ideas, readings, documents, and many other materials. As a result, there is much more potential relevant information in social Web setting for users to search upon. We have created CiteEval, a new dataset for benchmark evaluations of personalized search performance that will be made publicly accessible. CiteEval is a collection of academic articles extracted from CiteULike and CiteSeer repositories, with rich feature sets such as authors, author-affiliations, topic labels, social tags and citation information. We further supplement it with personalized queries and relevance judgments which were obtained from volunteer users.

12. Web Resource Categorization by End-users Using Social Tags as Metadata

Sue Yeon Syn (Adviser, Michael B. Spring)
With the increasing popularity of social annotation systems, the potential for using social annotation as a source of metadata is being explored. Social annotation systems can simplify the involvement of a large number of users and improve the metadata generation process, especially for semantic metadata. By using social annotations as a type of metadata, this research aims to find a method to categorize web resources. In this research, social annotation systems are considered as a means to allow non-professional catalogers’ to participate in metadata generation. Social annotations are considered as a type of metadata on web resources. The question arises as to whether tools mining social annotations can enable less skilled classifiers to generate quality metadata. Because social annotations are not controlled vocabulary, there are still problems in finding quality terms to represent the content of a resource. This research examines ways to deal with those problems to gain a better set of annotations representing the resource from the tags provided by users by finding a proper set of tags with weighting methods.

13. Collaborative Management of Talks: A Social System for Research Communities
    Chirayu Wongchokprasitti

This poster describes the goals and results of the creation and implementation of CoMeT, a system that collects and disseminates information about academic colloquia and lectures. Here at the University of Pittsburgh, there are thousands of colloquia and lectures held each year.  By using the CoMeT system, groups of people with similar interests can share event information with one another.  Individual users can organize talks and series; create groups; browse talks by series, calendar, user tags, or entities (hosts); extract named entities from the content of a talk; and use RSS feeds to disseminate information about the lectures. The system was created as an outreach of an NSF-sponsored project. It will be also used as a platform for exploring a range of personalization approaches.

14. How do Bloggers Comment

Tingting Jiang

The blog is one of the most familiar social media to Web users. Its social nature suggests that blogging is not only about writing and publishing bloggers’ experience and thoughts, but also about establishing social relationships and networks with others through various links including citations, blog rolls, comments, and trackbacks. We have a particular interest in comments, and have developed a commenting model that considers both unidirectional and bidirectional commenting relationships. This poster presents a whole network analysis of the commenting network of the CSDN blogging community, the largest Chinese language IT blogging community in China. According to our analysis, this is a sparse network, and the most noticeable nodes in it are a few central bloggers who possess a lot of incoming relationships. Each of them is surrounded by a number of ordinary bloggers who recognize the central blogger as their exclusive information source in a star topology. This finding can be utilized in blogger rating and discovery of hot topics.  Our continuing study will focus on these central bloggers and examine their influences on the information diffusion in CSDN blogging community at the semantic level.

15. Identifying the Critical Points and Improving the Topological Resilience of MANETs and Sensor Networks   

Tae-Hoon Kim, David Tipper, and Prashant Krishnamurthy
Recent literature approximates (asymptotically), the well-known k-connectivity resilience approach in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and unstructured sensor networks. This asymptotic approximation breaks down and we show that this is largely due to the existence of critical connectivity points in the topology. We also propose a new algorithm based on results from algebraic graph theory and study the behavior of critical points. Then, we propose three localized topological control schemes to improve the network connectivity around critical points to lessen their importance and improve the network resilience.

16. Teams for Teams: Performance in Multi-Human/Multi-Robot Teams

Michael Lewis, Huadong Wang, and Shih-Yi Chien  -- Pitt
Paul Scerri,  Prasanna Velagapudi,  Katia Sycara, and Breelyn Kane – CMU
We are developing an architecture for controlling robot teams based on considering how control difficulty for different tasks grows with increases in team size. Our analysis suggests that assignments of persons to commander (single commands to entire robot team), operator (commands to individual robots), and coordinator (control of interdependent robots) roles can lead to the most efficient organization. The ability to assign tasks within or between operators makes scheduling these interactions an important factor in team performance. Two possible ways to organize operators are through Individual Assignments of robots or as a Call Center in which operators service robots from the population as needed. In recent experiments we have found that participants performing an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) foraging task using waypoint control were at or over their limits when controlling 12 robots. The present study uses the same robots, environment, and level of autonomy but with teams of two operators assigned to control 24 robots. These operators controlled teams of 12 robots in the Individual Assignment condition. In the Call Center condition operators shared control of the 24 robots. For this task and level of robot autonomy Individual Assignment participants performed marginally better searching larger regions but without finding more victims.

17. The 39 Clues Experience:  Combining Reading and Gaming for 21st Century Literacy

Reham Al-Issa and Rebecca Morris
This poster considers the implications of combining reading and online gaming to develop new ways of reading and learning.  We will consider The 39 Clues, a fiction series of ten chapter books for upper elementary school age children, written by popular, acclaimed writers and published by Scholastic, Inc. In addition to physical books, the series offers several supplemental activities including a Web-based video game, Web site, collectible clue cards and contest.  We consider questions of access and equity, 21st century literacy, and motivation in the presentation of both physical books and virtual accompaniments.  Does this combination entice children to read the series?  Does the book introduce more programming activities for librarians? And does this experience herald a new genre of children’s literature? 

18. A Language Modeling Approach for Retrieving General Entities

Jiepu Jiang, Daqing He
In this poster, we will present an effective way of retrieving general entities from a collection of documents using language modeling approaches. Previous language modeling methods for expert finding (derived from the TREC expert finding task from 2005 to 2008) is proved to be successful in retrieving one specific type of entities (e.g. persons or experts), which shed much light on our method. However, as indicated in recent researches from the INEX entity ranking task, the expert finding models, alone, cannot effectively resolve the problem of retrieving entities of general types, mostly due to their inability to distinguish entities of different types. As a result, in the proposed method, we manage to estimate language models for each entity that capture query terms indicating entity types. On such basis, the estimated entity type language models can be interpolated with expert finding models as a complement to facilitate retrieval of general entities.

19. Collaborative Filtering for Social Tagging Systems: An Experiment with CiteULike

Denis Parra-Santander, Peter Brusilovsky
Motivated by the potential use of collaborative tagging systems to develop new recommender systems, we have developed and compared three variants of user-based collaborative filtering algorithms to provide recommendations of articles on CiteULike. On our first approach, Classic Collaborative filtering (CCF), we use Pearson correlation to calculate similarity between users and a classic adjusted ratings formula to rank the recommendations. Our second approach, Neighbor-weighted Collaborative Filtering (NwCF), incorporates the amount of raters in the ranking formula of the recommendations. A modified version of the Okapi BM25 IR model over users’ tags is implemented on our third approach to form the user neighborhood. Our results suggest that incorporating the number of raters into the algorithms leads to an improvement of precision, and they also support that tags can be considered as an alternative to Pearson correlation to calculate the similarity between users and their neighbors in a collaborative tagging system.

20. Crosslayer Survivability in Overlay-IP-WDM Networks

Peera Pacharintanakul and David Tipper
As the Internet moves towards a three-layer architecture consisting of Overlay networks on top of the IP network layer on top of WDM-based physical networks, incorporating the interaction between and among network layers is crucial for efficient and effective implementation of survivability. This presentation highlights the challenges of providing survivability in three-layer networks and presents a novel crosslayer survivable mapping approach to offer such survivability in an efficient way.

21. USER IMAGE BEHAVIOR IN WEB ENVIRONMENTS:  SELF-CATEGORIZATIONS OF  USER MOTIVATIONS FOR IMAGE RETRIEVAL

Tim Schlak
Relatively little is known about the user of digital images in web environments. Most development in image access and image retrieval is focused on ‘system-driven’ approaches such as Content-Based Image Retrieval, Semantic Image Retrieval, or Image Indexing.  Turning the attention squarely on the user, this poster addresses what is described as the long-ignored yet fundamental question of the user’s interactions with images. Since Library & Information Science research has traditionally been concerned with the retrieval of information, the field has necessarily made the image comport with frameworks developed for text-based information.  Recent research on the image has shown, however, that new perspectives on the image may be needed as users engage with images in ways different from the classic models of Information Seeking Behavior.