Information Systems Department Seminar

Subjectivity and Social Role Recognition in Meetings

Theresa A. Wilson
Human Language Technology Center of Excellence
Johns Hopkins University

12 noon-1pm, Tue. 20 Nov. 2012, ITE459

Opinions, sentiments and other types of subjective content are an important part of any meeting. Meeting participants express pros and cons about ideas, they support or oppose decisions, and they make suggestions that may or may not be adopted. In this talk, I will present an annotation scheme for labeling subjective content in meetings, as well as experiments for recognizing subjective utterances and their polarity. Our experiments show that even very shallow linguistic features, such as n-grams of characters, can be effective for this task, and that the combination of classifiers using word, character, and phoneme n-grams yields the best result for subjective utterance recognition. Finally, I will discuss the application of subjectivity recognition to social role recognition in meetings.

Theresa Wilson is a research scientist working on opinion and sentiment analysis at the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). Before coming to Johns Hopkins, she completed her post-doctoral research as part of the AMIDA Project (www.amiproject.org) at the University of Edinburgh Human Communication Research Centre. She received her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.

CLIMB UP Summer 2013 will be held from early June 2012 through Friday August 2, 2013 (Monday-Friday 8:30-5PM).

Highlights include...

• Orientation and Laboratory Safety Training Course
• Individualized Research
• Weekly Breakfast Workshops: Friday Mornings
• Visits to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus
• Learning about fellowship/scholarship opportunities
• The “Buffalo Wing Social”
• Field Trips to Niagara Falls and other Western New York attractions!!
• Lasting friendships and mentoring relationships
• CLIMB UP Final Research Presentations
• Summer Research Day with other UB summer programs: Friday August 2, 2013.

You will spend your days in the laboratory of your research mentor, whom you will be paired with based on your research interests. We will train you in various areas necessary to safely and efficiently perform your research and related activities

Our combination of research, academic, and social activities make for an exciting and worthwhile summer experience!

I have enjoyed learning 3D modeling and how to use a 3D printer, preparing materials for a focus group with older adults on rapid prototyping and helping run a focus group. I have also enjoyed the assistance and direction of my supervisor Dr. Hurst and other students and working as a team. One of my favorite quotes is “Never let the hands that hold you, hold you down”. I am also a member of the African Student Association and planning on joining the pre-physical therapy club.

Read more about Uvonne's research by visiting the link below...

UPDATE: 2013 applications are now available!
Priority application deadline: Dec. 17th, 2012 
Final application deadline: Dec. 31st, 2012

The Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) program at CBU provides international research training opportunities to qualified undergraduate, graduate, and medical students from socially or economically disadvantaged groups who have been historically underrepresented in biomedical and behavioral research careers.

• This program offers research sites in Brazil and Uganda. Students spend 10 weeks during the summer at their designated international research site. CBU has partnered with leading scientists and universities in these countries who serve as research mentors for MHIRT students.
• MHIRT students engage in research related to: biomedical science, behavioral science, environmental science, carnivore conservation, and/or public health.
• MHIRT is a paid internship. All expenses relative to travel, room and board, preparation, and workshops are paid.  In addition, students receive a monthly stipend.
• This program has been continuously funded since 2000 by the Fogarty International Center and the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.
• The Mid-South Coalition For Minority International Research consists of the lead institution, Christian Brothers University, and the following participating universities: LeMoyne Owen College, Rhodes College, Tennessee State University, and  University of Memphis.
• Preference is given to students from participating schools within the Coalition and from the Mid-South Region; however, any US citizen or permanent resident may apply.

All applications materials must be e-mailed to Julia Hanebrink (jhanebri@cbu.edu).

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Data Intensive Scientific Compute Model for Multicore Clusters

Phuong Nguyen

10:00am 21 November 2012, ITE 325B

Data intensive computing holds the promise of major scientific breakthroughs and discoveries from the exploration and mining of the massive data sets becoming available to the science community. This expectation has led to tremendous increases in data intensive scientific applications. However, data intensive scientific applications still face severe challenges in accessing, managing and analyzing petabytes of data. In particular, workflow systems to support such scientific applications are not as efficient when dealing with thousands and even more of complex tasks within jobs that operate across high performance large multicore clusters with very large amounts of streaming data. Scheduling, it turns out, is an integral workflow component in the execution often of thousands or more tasks within a data intensive scientific application as well as in managing  the access and flow of many jobs to the available resource environment. Recently, MapReduce systems such as Hadoop, have proven successful for many business data intensive problems. However, there are still many limitations in the use of MapReduce systems for data-intensive scientific problems mainly because they do not support the characteristics of science such as data formats, specialized data analytic tools (e.g. math libraries), accuracies, and interfaces with non MapReduce components.

This thesis addresses some of these limitations by proposing a MapReduce workflow model and its runtime system using Hadoop for orchestrating MapReduce jobs for data intensive scientific workflows. Novel heuristic based scheduling algorithm is proposed in the workflow system to manage the parallel execution of data intensive scientific applications. This thesis has developed a hybrid MapReduce scheduling algorithm based on dynamic priorities, proportional resource sharing techniques that reduce delays for variable length concurrent tasks, and takes advantage of data locality. As a result, a new scheduling policy, Balanced Closer to Finish First (BCFF), is proposed as solutions for some problems of scheduling in MapReduce environment. The scheduling algorithm is implemented in Hadoop 1.0.1 framework and is available as a new Hadoop plug-in Scheduler. The evaluations of the workflow system on the climate data processing and analysis application (several TB dataset) show that it is feasible and significantly improved compared to traditional parallel processing method. The scientific results of the application provide new source of monitoring global climate changes for the near decade 2002-2011.

Thesis Committee:

• Prof. Milton Halem (Chair)
• Prof. Yelena Yesha (Co-Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yaacov Yesha
• Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi at George Washington University

The Point Foundation has announced that its scholarship application process will open online November 1, 2012.

Point Scholarships are designed to help promising LGBTQ students achieve their full academic and leadership potential despite obstacles. Scholars must demonstrate academic excellence, leadership skills, community involvement, and financial need. Attention also will be paid to students who have lost the financial and social support of their families and/or communities as a result of revealing their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Point Scholars must agree to maintain a high level of academic performance and to give back to the LGBTQ community through the completion of an individual community service project each year. Some Point Scholars also benefit from internship opportunities related to their fields of study.

Scholarships provide approximately $25,000 per scholar, per year. Each scholar is paired with a mentor and participates in leadership development training with fellow Point Scholars, including an annual leadership conference. After graduating, Point Scholars become part of Point's growing alumni network. Point Scholarships are awarded on a "last provider" basis, providing funding to supplement other scholarships, grants, loans, work/study programs, etc. Point Scholars must secure as much outside funding as possible.

Students who will be enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs for the 2013-14 school year are eligible to apply for the multiyear scholarships. Applications will be reviewed by a team of forty-five trained educators, school counselors, and foundation staff and board members. The selection process concludes with face-to-face interviews with Point's staff and Board of Regents during May 2013. The 2013 Point Scholar Class will be announced in June 2013.

Individuals may nominate a student online and download an application information flyer. Applicants will have until 11:59 p.m. PST on January 14, 2013, to submit Part I of the application. Qualifying applicants will be invited to then submit Part II of the application. Part II will made available November 2, 2012, and remain open until 11:59 p.m. PST, January 28, 2013. Applications are only accepted online.

Visit the Point Foundation Web site for complete program information and the online nomination and application forms.