Recommender systems involve an inherent trade-off between accuracy of recommendations and the extent to which users are willing to release information about their preferences. In this paper, we explore a two-tiered notion of privacy where there is a small set of “public” users who are willing to share their preferences openly, and a large set of “private” users who require privacy guarantees. W...

The topic of search engine enterprise—discussed relentlessly in the business world—has somehow slipped under the radar of librarians, educators, most academics, and the news media (save for the business section). Even as search engines become increasingly reconditioned to serve free enterprise, and now address people as consumers rather than users, the industry has been particularly good at sus...

Despite recent and growing interest in using Twitter to examine human behavior and attitudes, there is still significant room for growth regarding the ability to leverage Twitter data for social science research. In particular, gleaning demographic information about Twitter users-a key component of much social science research-remains a challenge. This article develops an accurate and reliable ...

Gleaning consistent and complete data from multiple sources of unstructured information is often a difficult and time consuming process. In this paper we outline the WEAVE® system which automates the structuring and collating of unstructured data from multiple on-line Websites. WEAVE® is presented in the context of the maintenance, repair, and operations supply chain. The underlying knowledge r...

Gliomas, primary brain cancers, are characterized by remarkable invasiveness and fast growth. While they share many qualities with other solid tumors, gliomas have developed special mechanisms to convert the cramped brain space and other limitations afforded by the privileged central nervous system into pathophysiological advantages. In this review we discuss gliomas and other primary brain can...

Clustering methods need to be robust if they are to be useful in practice. In this paper, we analyze several popular robust clustering methods and show that they have much in common. We also establish a connection between fuzzy set theory and robust statistics and point out the similarities between robust clustering methods and statistical methods such as the weighted least-squares (LS) techniq...

Though not especially media-rich, mailing lists remain in use and retain popularity for their builtin technological controls and their capability to “reply” to a message (“continuing a thread”). The motivation for extracting knowledge fragments from the unstructured text of mailing lists is compelling, though successes doing so may be considered only partial because it requires mental processin...

The many endless rivers of text now available present a serious challenge in the task of gleaning, analyzing and discovering useful information. In this paper, we describe a methodology for visualizing text streams in real-time modeled as a dynamic graph and its derived map. The approach automatically groups similar messages into “countries,” with keyword summaries, using semantic analysis, gra...