Your Best Friend

Peritonitis and zoonosis: your best friend sometimes isn't!

Approximately 60% of all households in the United States have a pet, with about 74.8 million owning a dog and 25% having two dogs. There are approximately 88.3 million cat owners in the USA, with 56% of them having more than one cat (1). While the bond with animals for companionship goes back 10 000 – 15000 years, domestic pets are also capable of transmitting diseases and causing injury. Zoono...

Value of a friend, a friend of your friend, and a friend of the friend of your friend: Social discounting in n degrees of separation

Jones and Rachlin (2008) found that the amount of money a person is willing to forgo in order to give $75 to another person decreased as a hyperbolic function of perceived social distance, in the same way as occurs in intertemporal choice. This study aimed to extend this finding to the domain of social networks, in which social distance is defined by degrees of separation. A total of 334 partic...

Talking to a Computer Is Not like Talking to Your Best Friend

When developing natural language interfaces, it is important to know the characteristics of the language used. We have developed a set of tools for conducting human-computer natural language dialogue simulations (Wizard of Oz experiments) and for analyzing the data obtained. We report methods used and results obtained from a series of such experiments. The focus of the study was on occasional u...

Put Your Best

VERTEXICA: Your Relational Friend for Graph Analytics!

In this paper, we present Vertexica, a graph analytics tools on top of a relational database, which is user friendly and yet highly e›cient. Instead of constraining programmers to SQL, Vertexica offers a popular vertex-centric query interface, which is more natural for analysts to express many graph queries. e programmers simply provide their vertex-compute functions and Vertexica takes care of...