Cynthia Chang

Parallel Identities for Managing Open Government Data

Data consumers must be able to trust the datas provenance. A descriptive model enables consumers to make informed choices about data sources.

Towards explanation of scientific and technological emergence

Analysts who are interested in quickly identifying new and emerging scientific advancements have numerous challenges as the breadth, depth, and volume of scientific literature increases. Network analysis and mining is key to the success in this task. The ARBITER system seeks to identify indicators of emergence and provide a system that is capable of analyzing corpora of full text and metadata to identify emerging science topics and explain its reasoning and conclusions. In this paper, we describe a network-modeling framework that is used in the ARBITER system, and describe our novel hybrid approach using probabilistic foundations in combination with semantic technology and introduce our explanation infrastructure. We include a discussion of some challenges and opportunities related to explaining hybrid approaches to indicator-based analysis and emergence detection.

Explaining Scientific and Technical Emergence Forecasting

In decision support systems such as those designed to predict scientific and technical emergence based on analysis of collections of data the presentation of provenance lineage records in the form of a human-readable explanation has been shown to be an effective strategy for assisting users in the interpretation of results. This work focuses on the development of a novel infrastructure for enabling the explanation of hybrid intelligence systems including probabilistic models—in the form of Bayes nets—and the presentation of corresponding evidence. Our design leverages Semantic Web technologies—including a family of ontologies—for representing and explaining emergence forecasting for entity prominence. Our infrastructure design has been driven by two goals: first, to provide technology to support transparency into indicator-based forecasting systems; second, to provide analyst users context-aware mechanisms to drill down into evidence underlying presented indicators. The driving use case for our explanation infrastructure has been a specific analysis system designed to automate the forecasting of trends in science and technology based on collections of published patents and scientific journal articles.