October 2008 Archives

Let techies rule the world!

By KANG ZHAO on October 30, 2008 3:14 PM | No Comments
Hey presidential candidates, be nice to techies. Give them tax breaks and spend the $700b package on Silicon Valley. Otherwise, who knows what will happen to your votes:)

Suggested reading for political figures who are campaigning:
The IEEE Spectrum article "Want to Hack an E-Voting Machine in 7 Minutes?" (Full article).

Data mining with human factors?

By KANG ZHAO on October 27, 2008 2:33 PM | No Comments
A few interesting sentences from "Mining for data" from CBC Canada (Full article):
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Business writer Stephen Baker says in an interview that our casual disclosure of personal data in our daily lives provides grist for computer scientists, mathematicians, programmers, and others who are mining the data to make sense of it. These people, which Baker dubs the Numerati, are modeling and predicting our behavior, and the applications borne from their efforts are dramatically influencing our lives. Baker argues, for instance, that the Numerati are to a certain degree accountable for the global financial crisis because banks' investment decisions are based on algorithms that the Numerati designed according to their understanding of risks, or lack thereof. "It's important to understand that you can have the best math in the world, but if you don't understand human behavior, then you cannot calculate risk when it comes to market behavior," Baker asserts.
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Maybe it is promising to integrate human factors into the math-heavy data mining of nowadays.

Twitter for terrorists?

By KANG ZHAO on October 26, 2008 8:13 PM | No Comments
From CNET.com

The U.S. intelligence community is concerned that terrorists might use micro-blogging tool Twitter to coordinate attacks, according to a purported draft Army intelligence report posted on the Web.
(Full article)


Publication outlets

By KANG ZHAO on October 24, 2008 6:54 PM | No Comments
I have listed many publication outlets in my previous blog introducing research communities. Here, I picked a few that I am currently aiming at or particularly interested in:

1.  AAMAS conference: the top conference dedicated to intelligent agent research. This annual conference was first held in 1997 as the Autonomous Agent Conference. Almost all renowned agent researchers go to this conference. The recent acceptance rate is about 23%.

2. AAAI conference: one of the top AI conferences in the U.S. The acceptance rates span from 17% to 30% in its 29 years of history.

3. IJCAI conference: one of the top international AI conferences. It is held every two years starting from 1969. The 2009 conference will be at Pasadena, Calif. and the submission deadline is Jan 7, 2009.

4. The ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation: it was first published in 1991 and has four issues per year. Each issue has 3-5 papers.

5. The Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory journal: this is an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer. It started in 1995 and publishes 12-20 papers every year.

Research communities that I am targeting

By KANG ZHAO on October 17, 2008 2:52 PM | No Comments
Due to the interdisciplinary nature of my current research, it is difficult to find a single research community that defines my interest. Actually, I may have to adjust the focus of my research to suit a research community.

At this moment, the following two research communities draw my attention:

First, the community of computer science researchers focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), especially intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. Most researchers in this community are associated with ACM and IEEE. AAAI is the leading organization for American AI researchers.

For AI and intelligent agent researchers, there are two types of publication venues: one type is dedicated AI venues, such as AAAI's annual conference, IJCAI, AAMAS, the International Journal of Intelligent Systems and the Artificial Intelligent Journal; the other type is not dedicated to AI but often has publications that apply AI techniques to specific problems. For example, AI researchers have been active in    ACM E-commerce conference (EC), Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (KDD), International Semantic Web Conference, ACM Transaction on Modeling and Computer Simulation, etc.

Second, the community of scientists who use agent-based computational approach to study social, organizational, business, epidemiologic or geographical problems. Research in this community can be found in venues such as the World Congress of Social Simulations, the NAACSOS conference, Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, Advances in Complex Systems, etc. As the computational part is often considered as a research method, researchers also tend to publish papers in outlets that focus on their own research domain, such as Organization Science, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, American sociological review, International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, etc.

The boundary of the two communities is obvious most of the time and few researchers are active in both communities. Therefore, I may have to choose one as the major community that I would like to belong to. Depending on the topic on my dissertation, I may have to explore other research communities.

My labmate

By KANG ZHAO on October 10, 2008 2:57 PM | No Comments
For this blog post, I talked to Shizhuo Zhu, who is the most senior student at the Intelligent Agent Lab. He has been at IST since 2004 and is now preparing for the dissertation defense.

His dissertation topic is 'Hypothesis-Driven Story Building: A Framework for Supporting Decision-Making as Partial Information Arrives Over Time'. Basically it is about studying the characteristics and challenges of decision-making when information is incomplete and changing over time, and build a system to support human decision-making in such environments. It will be tested and evaluated with in medical diagnostic decision-making settings.

Based on his interests, he published most of his papers at two types of venues. First, the computer science-oriented AI and agent research community, such as International Journal of Intelligent Systems and the Intelligent Agent Technology conference. Second, medical informatics venues, such as the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and the American Medical Informatics Association conference.

Several examples of his publication include:

Shizhuo Zhu, Joanna Abraham, Sharoda A. Paul, Madhu Reddy, John Yen, Mark Pfaff, and Christopher DeFlitch, "RCAST‐MED: Applying Intelligent Agents to Support Emergency Medical Decision Making Teams". The 11th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'07), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 09‐11, 2007.

P.-C. Chen, X. Fan, S. Zhu, and J. Yen. Boosting-based learning agents for experience classification. In Proceedings of the  2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, p. 385-388, 2006.

Shizhuo Zhu. Story Building and Its Qualitative Identification and Quantitative Measuring of Hypotheses. NESCAI'06, April 28-29, 2006.

Although he is an IST student, he sees himself mainly as a technical person. He would like to build technical systems either theoretically or practically that may change people's life style.

His research is similar to mine in that both of us are using intelligent agent technology. However, his research is more like traditional AI (decision-making with Bayesian networks). If we use the IST jargon, his is on the I-T side. Mine might be more interdisciplinary and lies on the P-T side, although incorporating I is also possible in the future.

Bad news for RFID, or maybe it's good news

By KANG ZHAO on October 6, 2008 10:46 PM | No Comments
From CNET.com

A scientific paper detailing the security flaws in the Mifare Classic wireless smart card chip used in transit systems around the world is being published by the Radboud University Nijmegen. And a researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin has published a full implementation of the algorithm (PDF).

"Combining these two pieces of information, attacks can now be implemented by anyone," RFID researcher Karsten Nohl told CNET News. "All it takes is a $100 (card) reader and a little software."

(Full article) 

Who is my advisor - Part 2

By KANG ZHAO on October 3, 2008 3:37 PM | No Comments

As I failed to get Dr.Yen's CV, this blog post will be based solely on my understanding of his academic career.

He got his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University. He came to the US in the early 1980s and received an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Santa Clara. He then attended the University of California Berkeley and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science.

His Ph.D. advisor, Lofti Zadeh, is famous for the contribution to fuzzy logic. I am not sure about his dissertation topic, but based on his first job after the doctoral research at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), I guess it had something to do with fuzzy logic and knowledge representation, which are parts of the old-school Artificial Intelligence (AI).

He then found a faculty position at Texas A&M, where he started to apply his expertise in knowledge representation and inference on the then-emerging multi-agent systems. After coming to Penn State, he added the Recognition-Prime Decision Making to the agent architecture and applied the architecture in various domains. He is now interested in network analysis, data mining and human-agent trust issues.

Although he now possesses interests in multiple interdisciplinary topics, I would still consider him mainly as a computer scientist/AI researcher. His publication outlets are often journals and conferences supported by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), such as IEEE Intelligent Systems, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference, the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS), the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, etc. Those venues tend to have strong flavors in computer science and AI.

He used to teach a class about intelligent agents at IST several years ago but stopped teaching after getting administration jobs on his shoulder.

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