Jay Ramanathan

Towards building large-scale distributed systems for twitter sentiment analysis

In recent years, social networks have become very popular. Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is estimated to have about 200 million registered users and these users create approximately 65 million tweets a day. Twitter users usually show their opinion about topics of their interest. The challenge is that each tweet is limited in 140 characters, and is hence very short. It may contain slang and misspelled words. Thus, it is difficult to apply traditional NLP techniques which are designed for working with formal languages, into Twitter domain. Another challenge is that the total volume of tweets is extremely high, and it takes a long time to process. In this paper, we describe a large-scale distributed system for real-time Twitter sentiment analysis. Our system consists of two components: a lexicon builder and a sentiment classifier. These two components are capable of running on a large-scale distributed system since they are implemented using a MapReduce framework and a distributed database model. Thus, our lexicon builder and sentiment classifier are scalable with the number of machines and the size of data. The experiments also show that our lexicon has a good quality in opinion extraction, and the accuracy of the sentiment classifier can be improved by combining the lexicon with a machine learning technique.

Enterprise Interaction Ontology for Change Impact Analysis of Complex Systems

Reasoning about the impact of change is critical throughout the information technology (IT) architecture lifecycle management processes and this is especially challenging because installed architectures are complex, evolve constantly, and most changes have some global impact. We present an enterprise-interaction ontology for integrated query, analysis, and monitoring that supports features to allow architects and engineers pin-point the impact of change to the installed architecture before implementation. The ontology represents select associations between the enterprisepsilas business processes, services and infrastructure so that significant consequences of a change are propagated to affected areas based on underlying rules. Thus, interdependencies and relationships that are not obvious are identified and the impact is quantified. This allows the architect to know the complete scope of modifications required in order to accomplish a change in a manner consistent with best practices (like ITIL version 3). We illustrate - 1) the rules and taxonomy relationships that give us the ability to propagate changes and determine the impact, and 2) how actual questions and decision-making during the architecture management processes can be better supported using a more precise and factual understanding. Not only does the interaction methodology help analyze the potential impact of adding a new component, a change due to an incident, or the deletion of an existing component from the architecture, it also supports business-IT alignment processes like chargeback, capacity management and disaster recovery.

Participatory design of public sector services

This paper describes a methodology for the participatory design of services in the public sector. The stakeholders participating in the design include three major players, the public which uses the service, the government body which sponsors and finances the service, and the organization (government or third party) that delivers the service. We propose a method for a) gathering the - possibly conflicting - requirements for a service from the three stakeholders, b) representing the design alternatives and their levels of requirement satisfaction, and c) generating a simulation model of the service delivery process for the different design alternatives. The method is illustrated by a practical example based on a real government service.

A generic iconic tool for viewing databases

Many software-development environments capture and structure all project information in one or more databases. As these data-gathering techniques become more effective, they make it increasingly difficult to locate relevant information from a vast store. Adapt is a display tool that can depict both the structure and content of databases graphically. The architecture of Adapt and the augmented graph representation it uses for database objects are described. As an example, the use of Adapt with the Triad database, which has 400 objects of 24 types, ranging from management (personnel information, project objectives, reviews, and walkthroughs) to coding (components and modules), is considered. Two kinds of graph operation, display and adaptive, that an Adapt user can perform on the augmented graph are discussed.<<ETX>>

Geospatial Human‐environment Simulation through Integration of Massive Multiplayer Online Games and Geographic Information Systems

This article reports on the initial development of a generic framework for integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with Massive Multi-player Online Gaming (MMOG) technology to support the integrated modeling of human-environment resource management and decision-making. We review Web 2.0 concepts, online maps, and games as key technologies to realize a participatory construction of spatial simulation and decision making practices. Through a design-based research approach we develop a prototype framework, “GeoGame”, that allows users to play board-game-style simulations on top of an online map. Through several iterations we demonstrate the implementation of a range of design artifacts including: real-time, multi-user editing of online maps, web services, game lobby, user-modifiable rules and scenarios building, chat, discussion, and market transactions. Based on observational, analytical, experimental and functional evaluations of design artifacts as well as a literature review, we argue that a MMO GeoGame-framework offers a viable approach to address the complex dynamics of human-environmental systems that require a simultaneous reconciliation of both top-down and bottom-up decision making where stakeholders are an integral part of a modeling environment. Further research will offer additional insight into the development of social-environmental models using stakeholder input and the use of such models to explore properties of complex dynamic systems.

Ontology for Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise modeling has a history of related research that has advanced high-level concepts that do not map well to implementation-oriented models like UML. Here acknowledging that the enterprise and business context impacts implementation requirements for adaptive services, we introduce the notation for representing the Adaptive Complex Enterprises through the Requirements-Execution-Delivery interaction or primitive. This simple primitive allows complex models to be developed that treats business processes at all levels and underlying data processing systems as well as human processing systems in a holistic fashion. In this paper we introduce the ontology underlying the Requirements-Execution-Delivery interactions, thus allowing Requirements-Execution-Delivery to be precisely specified as a single primitive for modeling, execution, and monitoring the behavior of Adaptive Complex Enterprises. We show how this takes the concepts developed in artificial intelligence and applies it into business activity monitoring.

Integrating goal modeling and execution in adaptive complex enterprises

Complex Enterprises consistently struggle with successfully gaining benefits from Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiatives for a variety of reasons, one of them being an end-to-end integration between enterprise goals and operations that links goals to the dynamic operations of the organization. In this paper we describe (a) our conceptualization of the Adaptive Complex Enterprise (b) our integrative notation and semantics for goal modeling and linking for such organizations and their operations and (c) an example drawn from an embedded industry project.

Sense-respond cloud mediator architecture for services evolution

In many dynamic externally-driven enterprises, like the Government, citizens participation in the design and evolution of services is critical and essential for satisfaction. Web 2.0 features are changing the way citizens interact and participate. Here we leverage this with a sense-respond architecture between two clouds: a) a front-end social networks of communities and citizens, and b) back-end enterprise application services. We introduce an Adaptive Complex Environment (ACE) ontology and mediator architecture for complex service-intensive organizations. This mediator architecture is illustrated using Web 2.0 (e.g. Facebook services) to make tacit service requirements of user communities explicit, leading to the adaptation in the use of back-end services. We also present a specific eGovernment application scenario where the services are identified, designed, delivered and evolved by employing ACE. We thus motivate research in management environments in which stakeholder participation, development, and operational aspects are integrated so that services can be co-engineered (i.e. collaboratively, continuously and concurrently).

Teaching object-oriented software design within the context of software frameworks

Object-oriented software design and programming is an essential part of a computer science curriculum. We have observed that novice software developers, such as fresh college graduates who have been taught object-oriented design, are able to apply good design principles in theory. However, this rarely extends into their professional practice, when they are asked to design software intended to run inside a software framework. In fact, we observe that even advanced software developers abandon good design practices when developing software while using a framework, and focus on simply “making it work.” This paper presents and discusses a methodology developed for designing software in the context of frameworks to overcome these issues. We show how design patterns can serve as the bridge between the paradigms imposed by the framework and the ideal, unconstrained design of the system. We also suggest an evaluation method for observing the results of using this methodology when used by the students.

Using ontology-based methods for implementing role-based access control in cooperative systems

The issue of security of data becomes very critical due to the federated databases that cooperative systems integrate. In this paper, we describe a role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism that can be applied to collaborative project organizations, and which uses ontology-based methods for its implementation. This eases the process of making modifications. It also brings about standardization, which is cornerstone for portability. We test and evaluate this approach in an implementation of a data-management system for proteomic experiment data. The primary aim of this study is, firstly, to make use of an upcoming and potentially standard technology and apply it to the domain of database security. Our second aim is to validate the hypothesis that such a method can be effectively used in a real-world cooperative system.