Current Events in DSS

Decision Support Systems
Current Events, Discussions, and Announcements

Final Exams: undergraduate version and graduate version.

Intelligence Users Use Business Intelligence from ComputerWorld.

From ACM's Tech News, May 1, 2009
Google Begins Tracking Swine Flu in Mexico
Computerworld (04/29/09) Gaudin, Sharon

Google is attempting map how the swine flu is spreading through Mexico by compiling information from swine flu-related searches in Mexico. The mapping effort is based on Google Flu Trends, which Google launched last November after researchers noticed a correlation between people searching for flu information and the number of people who got the flu in any given area. "Google Flu Trends may be able to detect influenza outbreaks earlier than other systems because it estimates flu activity in near real time," says Google Flu Trends engineer Jeremy Ginsberg. Ginsberg says the current project may produce relatively faulty data because of the lack of available information from the Mexican government. "While we would prefer to validate this data and improve its accuracy, we decided to release an early version today so that it might help public health officials and concerned individuals get an up-to-date picture of the ongoing swine flu outbreak," Ginsberg says. "Our current estimates of flu activity in the U.S. are still generally low as would be expected given the relatively low confirmed swine flu case count. However, we'll be keeping an eye on the data to look for any spike in activity." View Full Article

Forms

From ACM's Tech News, April 24, 2009
Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
Wired News (04/23/09) Keim, Brandon

University of Washington computer scientists are using artificial intelligence techniques to decipher the ancient Indus script, which only exists as a series of wall carvings made 4,000 years ago in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India. Although archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions, researchers have been unable to translate the language or understand its purpose. University of Washington researchers led by Rajesh Rao used pattern-analyzing software running a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics, and fed the program sequences of four spoken languages. The researchers then gave the program samples of four nonspoken communication systems. The program calculated the level of order present in each of the languages and found nonspoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in extremely well-defined ways, or were chaotic, while spoken languages fell in the middle. When the Indus script was submitted to the program, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement that were moderately ordered like spoken languages. The program did not return any information on the meaning of the script, but Rao says the analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar. "The next step is to create a grammar from the data that we have," he says. "Then we can ask, is this grammar similar to those of the Sanskrit or Indo-European or Dravidian languages? This will give us a language to compare it to." View Full Article

Consider some possible sources for data for automobile comparisons

Data Mining

What is data mining?

Wikipedia's definition of data mining

What does Google keep and share?

Google: Searching for Solutions

Data Warehousing

An example of Data Warehousing

Data Warehousing: Court Data in the State of Tennessee

Data Warehouse Attributes

Data Warehouse Architecture

Data Scrubbing

Data Adjustment

Web harvesting technology

Luhn's 1958 vision of business intelligence can be seen here.

Some Standard Functions

Quick Reference

What is Business Intelligence

From 'BI' to 'Business Analytics,' It's All Fluff

Cold Fusion Manual

BI Video from Oracle

A Long Way from Flip Charts

History of Business Intelligence

Project Descry

Visualization Trends For The Noosphere

From ACM's Tech News, March 23, 2009. Catering to Car Buyers' Desires
ICT Results (03/23/09)

The European Union-funded CATER project aims to develop a better way to present customization options to car buyers online, overcoming the limitations of dealers' catalogs and the vehicle configuration options on car makers' Web sites. The project is using immersive virtual reality and emotional design to ensure that a buyer's actual car compares to the car they experienced online. "By giving people the chance to immerse themselves in the car in [three-dimensional] virtual reality (VR), they can better understand what the options are, how they look, and will feel more confident about making a purchase," says CATER project coordinator Manfred Dangelmaier, from Germany's Fraunhofer IAO. Instead of scrolling through catalogs, shoppers that visit dealerships with CATER's immersive vehicle "configurator" will be able to visualize all of the vehicle options and variations on a high-resolution, three-dimensional wall display, or even in a VR cave, enabling them to more fully experience the car before making a purchase. The Cater system is less expensive than previous VR systems. "In addition, it would save dealers from having to have such large showrooms as you would only need cars for test drives not to show off different finishes," Dangelmaier says. CATER researchers also developed an emotional design tool that enables shoppers to define what they want in a car and the system will provide specific details that fit those definitions. The project also developed a database framework to enable dealers to communicate customers' choices with manufacturers and part suppliers to improve logistics and supply chain management. View Full Article

From ACM's Tech News, March 18, 2009. New System for Improving Decision Support Systems
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (03/13/09)

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid School of Computing researchers have developed a system designed to improve decision-making processes in complex situations. The system was tested on the restoration of Lake Svyatoye in Belarus, which was contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Professors Antonio Jimenez, Alfonso Mateos, and Sixto Rios, from the Department of Artificial Intelligence's Decision Analysis and Statistics Group, aimed to account for incomplete information and any possible effects those gaps could have on decision making. Multi-Attribute Utility Theory is often used to solve decision-making problems. The theory says that after building a hierarchy of objectives and identifying a set of alternatives and each alternative's value for impact on the objectives, the decision maker's preferences are quantified. The new system uses two approaches to manage incomplete information, which occurs when the impacts of some alternatives and attributes are unknown. The first approach redistributes criteria weights with missing values or impacts throughout the objectives hierarchy and across other criteria, which means the criteria hierarchy and its assigned weights vary when each alternative is analyzed depending on the criteria with missing values. The second approach associates the criterion range, the set of possible values, as the impact for a criterion with missing values, which means the entire range of values are considered possible and equally likely. View Full Article

From ACM's Tech News, March 20, 2009. New Mathematical System Helps to Cut Bus Journey Times
University of Burgos (Spain) (03/17/09)

Researchers from the University of Burgos (UBU) have used heuristic algorithms and the "taboo search" method to improve bus service in Burgos, Spain. The approach enables their system to handle imprecise data and to only look for solutions that have not been developed. "For example, when searching for solutions, if a bus has just left a particular stop, this stop is then marked as 'taboo' and it cannot be included as part of that route again for a certain number of iterations [repetitions]," says Joaquin A. Pacheco, coordinator of UBU's Research Group on Metaheuristic Techniques. Slight modifications to current bus lines can be made as a result of the taboo search. The new system lowers the time spent waiting at Burgos bus stops from 20 to 17 minutes, and reduces bus journey times from 16 to 13.5 minutes. "When we face a problem of this kind, we can use an exact method, which gives us an optimal solution but takes a long time to calculate--or we can use an approximate or heuristic technique, which provides a good solution with less calculation time," Pacheco says. View Full Article

From Knowledge@Wharton, March 18, 2009. Time for a Data Diet? Deciding What Customer Information to Keep -- and What to Toss

Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card processor, may have had up to 100 million records exposed to malicious hackers. Payment processors CheckFree and RBS Worldpay, and employment site Monster .com have all reported data breaches in recent months, as have universities and government agencies. Experts at Wharton say that personal data is increasingly a liability for companies, and suggest that part of the solution may be minimizing the customer information these companies keep. Read the article

More with Many Eyes... Hau Vu's example is available: teen pregnancy and abortion rate by state and teen pregnancy and abortion rate by state using a bubble chart

More about social rationality: View the reporting suggestions of the Global Reporting Initiative.

The midterms for IS 3843 and for IS 6833.

From David Doom ... Many Eyes for generating alternatives:

Word Cloud View of MODOT Blogs

Wordle View of MODOT Blogs

Bubble view of MODOT Bridge Projects Spreadsheet for Analysis of Bridge Projects

How technology might change the business process: watch Microsoft videos.

It is not just on Numb3rs .... Check out the 60 Minutes segments on identifying suspects and on the games our memories play on us.

From ACM's Tech News, March 6, 2009.

The First Virtual Reality Technology to Let You See, Hear, Smell, Taste and Touch
Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (03/04/09) Stern, Dan

Scientists at the University of Warwick and York University are developing virtual reality devices that are capable of stimulating all five senses with a high degree of realism. The research is part of the Towards Real Virtuality project, which is creating a fully immersive virtual reality experience in which users are unable to tell whether it is real or not. Teams from York and Warwick are working with experts from the universities of Bangor, Bradford, and Brighton to develop a Virtual Cocoon, a virtual reality device that will simulate all of the senses more realistically than any other device. The Virtual Cocoon will be a headset that incorporates specially developed electronics and computing capabilities. The researchers say the device could be used to unlock the full potential of Real Virtuality in a variety of fields. A mock-up of the Virtual Cocoon is on display at the Pioneers 09 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council showcase event in London. "Virtual reality projects have typically only focused on one or two of the five senses--usually sight and hearing," says York professor David Howard, the project's lead scientist. "We're not aware of any other research group anywhere else in the world doing what we plan to do." Howard says smell will be generated using a new technique from researchers at Warwick that will deliver a pre-determined smell on demand, and because taste and smell are so closely related, providing a texture sensation related to something being smelled will create the sensation of taste. A key goal of the project is to optimize the way all five senses interact. View Full Article

A New World Record in Go Established by PRACE Prototype and French Software
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (03/02/09)

The Dutch national supercomputer Huygens defeated two human Go professionals in an official match at the recent Taiwan Open 2009 tournament. The Huygens supercomputer was running the MoGo TITAN application, which was developed by the INRIA research organization in France and Maastricht University. Go has replaced chess as a test bed for artificial intelligence (AI) research because it is one of the last board games in which humans are still better players than computers. However, since 2006, after a new algorithm called Monte-Carlo Tree Search was developed, the level of Go programs has rapidly improved. The Huygens supercomputer running MoGo TITAN achieved its first victory in August 2008 at the 24th Annual Congress of the Go competition, when it defeated a professional Go player in an official match. At the Taiwan Open in February, MoGo TITAN set a world record by winning two matches against professional players. "This new milestone in AI research once again clearly demonstrates the great potential of Huygens in many nontraditional areas of usage of supercomputing," says Anwar Osseyran, managing director of SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, where the Huygens supercomputer is located. View Full Article

Researchers Mine Millions of Metaphors Through Computer-Based Techniques
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (02/28/09) Krieger, Lisa M.

A digital humanities project that started at Stanford University is teaching computers how to analyze text and extract metaphors to build a searchable database, which will enable users to browse historic patterns of word uses. "As a tool, it provides a really powerful way of thinking about a lot of literature at once," says University of Virginia English literature professor Brad Pasanek, who is working on the project with computer scientist D. Sculley. The project is making tangible what the German linguist Herald Weinrich called the "metaphoric field." Digitized libraries have made a wide range of books available online, including obscure and rare books. Researchers can use data-mining techniques to search the millions of words in those books to study subtle changes in how the words have been used throughout history. "The nature of metaphor is such that it does not lend itself to easy detection by the usual sorts of pattern-matching algorithms," says Stanford computer scientist Matt Jockers, who created the digital database used for the project. Pasanek provided the computer with examples of metaphors and trained the software to recognize metaphors, using proximity searches between words likely to be metaphoric. Sculley says a similar technique is used in spam-detection software. "Pasanek's database is the first metaphoric field that we can actually see and use," says Stanford professor Franco Moretti. "It provides empirical proof for a daring but never wholly solid concept." View Full Article

THESEUS--Tool for Internet Services
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (03/09)

The Fraunhofer Institute's THESEUS Project aims to improve the use and exploitation of digital knowledge through the use of semantic technologies that will be able to recognize the meaning of information content. "The society of the future will be even more knowledge-based than the present one," says the Fraunhofer Institute's Hans-Joachim Grallert. "For that reason it is not only necessary to create the appropriate infrastructure, but also to ensure that existing knowledge is suitably prepared and made recognizable." Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems are working on the digitalization of media types, including text, images, and sound recordings, and to make automatic semantic connections for this data. The Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) is developing technologies that will enable the best possible digitalization results, including algorithms for the restoration of text and video data. Searching video and photo archives has generally been a time-consuming process. In the future, metadata for multimedia content will automatically be generated, making searches far easier. Researchers are developing image-recognition systems that use colors or structures in an image to create metadata on the image's content and enable computers to identify what is in an image, leading to more accurate searches. Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics researchers are working on a sub-project called Medico that will develop software and tools for the automatic statistic evaluation of medical image data, such as computed tomography images, which will enable the matching of image characteristics to the symptoms of disease and allow images from one patient to be compared to a database of images. View Full Article

A sign of the times ....