Social interactions are conduits for various processes spreading through a population, from rumors and opinions to behaviors and diseases. In the context of the spread of a disease or undesirable behavior, it is important to identify blockers: individuals that are most effective in stopping or slowing down the spread of a process through the population. This problem has so far resisted systemat...

Example-based searching, where user provides an example publication to locate similar publications to, is becoming commonplace in literature digital libraries. Two approaches to estimate similarities between publications are (i) graph based approaches where citation relationships amongst publication are used to compute similarities, and (ii) text-based approaches where observing shared terms be...

This research investigated whether a university ranking system called Eduroute could provide useful information regarding the usability of universities’ websites. A comparison was conducted between the results obtained by Eduroute regarding the ranking of the top three universities in Jordan, and the results obtained by the heuristic evaluation method regarding the usability of the top three un...

There has been considerable work on determining a suitable method to accomplish a satisfactory ordering of a group of objects, when there are multiple evaluation criteria. A weighted index can be used to combine the opinion of all stakeholders to obtain a criterion for ranking the objects. Data from 21 watersheds of the Atlantic Slope Consortium (ASC) has been examined with the goal of determin...

One can use the Leiden Rankings for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not significantly different as a homogeneous set. Such groupings reduce the complexity of the rankings without losing information. We pursue this classification using both statistical significance and effect sizes of differences among 902 universities in 54 countries; we focus on the UK, Ger...

The exchangeability assumption as defined in this paper on ranking functions seems intuitively natural, and indeed, specific ranking functions previously proposed in the literature are all exchangeable. While pointwise ranking functions are vacuously exchangeable, we now discuss two specifically listwise ranking functions previously proposed by [22] and [26] in light of our representation theor...

This paper is a continuation of the study of surprise as a base for constructing qualitative calculi for representing and reasoning about uncertain knowledge. Here, we further elaborate on κ, a qualitative ranking function which we developed in (Ibrahim, Tawfik, and Ngom 2009b) and which constructs qualitative ranks for events by obtaining the order of magnitude abstraction of the degree of sur...

Software effort estimation research shows that there is no universal agreement on the “best” effort estimation approach. This is largely due to the “ranking instability” problem, which is highly contingent on the evaluation criteria and the subset of the data used in the investigation. There are a large number of different method combination exists for software effort estimation, selecting the ...

Due to the ever-increasing computing requirements of modern applications, supercomputers are at centre attraction as a platform for high-performance computing. Although various features and indicators testing evaluating proposed in literature, comprehensive feature set guide designers comparing selecting an appropriate choice is not provided. Here, integrated feature-based taxonomy comprised se...

            The state of access to safe drinking water the population Georgia and prospects for its improvement were studied. According implementation policy, Georgia's place in global regional ranking. It was determined that according indicator assessment environmental moved from 111th among 180 countries world 2022 103rd with 39.1 points....