Upcoming Events

Yanjun Qi
LTI Ph.D Thesis Defense
Learning of Protein Interaction Networks

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
11:00am
Newell-Simon Hall 3002

Jae Dong Kim
LTI Ph.D Thesis Proposal
Chunk Alignment for Corpus-Based Machine Translation

Thursday, May 15, 2008
9:00am
Newell-Simon Hall 3002

Shekar Sivasubramanian
(Self-Defined LTI Ph.D Student )
Knowledge Management for Software Reuse in Global Development

Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wean Hall 4623 3:00pm

Abstract: The late 1990's have seen the emergence of global software develoopment (GDC's) located in different parts of the world to serve the software development needs of companies in the United States and Europe. A GDC forms a large-scale, economic model for the remote development of software driven by cost benefits offered by the workforce in these locations. As the nature of work in these locations has changed from maintenance and migration related work to core development, GDC's can provide an aggregation of technical talent which offers a significant opportunity for software reuse, thus improving the productivity and quality of delivered software solutions (Basili: 1994). Since effective reuse involves both socio-economic and technical challenges (Griss: 1991), software reuse may require a change in software development practices within the GDC.

Software reuse in GDC requires the availability of appropriate knowledge at the correct time across project teams, geographies, domains, technologies, and time. The application of knowledge related practices requires the software development process to be aware of the knowledge resources that are consumed and enriched during software development activities. This talk proposes the use of a formal and defined knowledge management framework that includes key knowledge management practices and associated tool that can be integrated into the software development practices in a GDC enviromnent. The tool is supported by a formal specification and an ontology that will be encoded for use. The talk concludes with the definition of an experiment to be carried out using the proposed tools and practices to validate a set of hypotheses associated with the utility of knowledge management practices for software development.

IR Discussion Series

Hui (Grace) Yang
Ontology Learning by Supervised Hierarchical Clustering

Friday, May 16, 2008
Newell-Simon Hall 3002
12:00pm

LTI Seminar Series

2008 Commencement!

Doctorate Hooding Ceremony
SCS Ceremony & Reception

Research Highlights

Language and Politics

William Cohen, Noah Smith, and Tae Yano

Most approaches to automatic text analysis and processing treat text as a stream of words or sentences. A typical underlying assumption is that the use of language in the data is literal and that the data represent facts. Many genres, however, do not have these features.

We are exploring automatic methods for analyzing text in the political domain, specifically blog posts on topics pertinent to the 2008 United States Presidential Elections. Political text is often indirect, sarcastic, repetitive, hyperbolic, emotional, biased, manipulative, and riddled with unstated assumptions. Our aim is to automatically separate useful, thoughtful information from redundant "spin," using statistical natural language processing techniques and a data-driven methodology that makes use of the insights of political scientists.

The broader impact of this work will consist of a renewed emphasis exploiting domain knowledge together with text data for more powerful natural language understanding technology, as well as software tools that will promote more informed decision-making among American voters.

In the News

CMU and LTI First To Use Yahoo!'s New Supercomputing Center

Yahoo! Inc is assisting research at the LTI by providing access to a 4,000-processor supercomputer running open-source distributed computing software such as Hadoop and the Pig parallel programming language. The initial group of researchers using the system include Jamie Callan (information retrieval), Noah Smith (natural language processing), and Stephan Vogel (machine translation). "We are excited about collaborating with Yahoo! on systems software research, helping to advance the state-of-the-art, and creating new research possibilities in this critical area," said Randall E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. For more information, see the Yahoo! press release.

Social Networking Project Emphasizes Compatible Minds

Incoming CMU freshmen will have the chance to try a new social networking site called Mindkin, developed by four SCS graduate students: Ulas Bardak, Betty Cheng, and Vasco Pedro of the LTI. and Jahanzeb Sherwani of the Computer Science Department. Bardak says he and the other students began working on Mindkin two years ago because existing sites seemed superficial, particularly in the emphasis given to photos.

Mindkin’s central feature is “Thought Stream,” a screen on which ideas submitted by users scroll by. A system of credits forces users to be selective in identifying ideas they like or dislike,which makes it impossible for someone to simply “like” all of the ideas scrolling through Thought Stream. If a user likes enough ideas from the same author, that author’s identity is eventually revealed so direct contact can be made.

The Mindkin braintrust has received a provisional patent on the concept and is looking for ways to commercialize it.

The Olympus Project has adopted it as a PROBE and will feature the social networking site at its next “Show and Tell” for venture capitalists on Sept. 25 in the Collaborative Innovation Center.

News contributed by Byron Spice

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