Abstract

Cool roofs, cool pavements, and urban vegetation reduce cooling energy use in buildings, lower local air pollution, and decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from urban areas. To promote widespread and large-scale implementation of cool roofs to moderate urban heat-island phenomenon, more awareness and understanding of cool roof benefits at the local level is needed. As part of an investigation of strategies to mitigate urban heat-island effects, field data gathered from a monitoring project on cool roofs in India were reviewed. An innovative field-based analytical method was developed to quantify cooling energy savings resulting from the installation of cool roofs on commercial buildings. For buildings monitored in the Metropolitan Hyderabad region, the measured annual energy savings from roof-whitening of previously black roofs ranged from 20 to 22 kWh/m2 of roof area, corresponding to a cooling …

Abstract

A model of crop specific virtual labs is proposed to improve practical agricultural education by considering the agricultural educa-tion system in India. In agricultural education, the theoretical concepts are being imparted through class room lectures and laboratory skills are imparted in the dedicated laboratories. Further, practical agricultural education is being imparted by exposing the students to the field prob-lems through Rural Agricultural Work Experience Program (RAWEP),experiential learning and internships. In spite of these efforts, there isa feeling that the level of practical skills exposed to the students is not up to the desired level. So we have to devise the new ways and means to enhance the practical knowledge and skills of agricultural students to understand the real-time crop problems and provide the corrective stepsat the field level. Recent developments in ICTs, thus, provide an oppor-tunity to improve practical education by developing virtual crop labs.The virtual crop labs contain a well organized, indexed and summarized digital data (text, photograph, and video). The digital data corresponds to farm situations reflecting life cycles of several farms of different crops cultivated under diverse farming conditions. The practical knowledge of the students could be improved, if we systematically expose them to virtual crop labs along with course teaching. We can employ cloud com-puting platform to store huge amounts of data and render to students and other stakeholders in an online manner

Abstract

We propose a model of coverage patterns and a methodology to ex-tract coverage patterns from transactional databases. We have discussed how thecoverage patterns are useful by considering the problem of banner advertisementsplacement in e-commerce web sites. Normally, advertiser expects that the banneradvertisement should be displayed to a certain percentage of web site visitors. Onthe other hand, to generate more revenue for a given web site, the publisher has tomeet the coverage demands of several advertisers by providing appropriate setsof web pages. Given web pages of a web site, a coverage pattern is a set of pagesvisited by a certain percentage of visitors. The coverage patterns discovered fromclick-stream data could help the publisher in meeting the demands of several ad-vertisers. The efficiency and advantages of the proposed approach is shown byconducting experiments on real world click-stream data sets.

Abstract

Summarization has emerged as an increasingly useful approach to tackle the problem of information overload. Extracting information from online conversations can be of very good commercial and educational value. But majority of this information is present as noisy unstructured text making traditional document summarization techniques difficult to apply. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the problem of conversation summarization. We develop an automatic text summarizer which extracts sentences from the conversation to form a summary. Our approach consists of three phases. In the first phase, we prepare the dataset for usage by correcting spellings and segmenting the text. In the second phase, we represent each sentence by a set of predefined features. These features capture the statistical, linguistic and sentimental aspects along with the dialogue structure of the conversation. Finally, in the third phase we use a machine learning algorithm to train the summarizer on the set of feature vectors. Experiments performed on conversations taken from the technical domain show that our system significantly outperforms the baselines on ROUGE F-scores.

Abstract

Microblogs such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ present a nice opportunity for advertising on these blogs that are contextually related to the microblog content. The challenge with advertising on such microblog platforms is that there is very little content to classify the tweet as suitable for advertising, which makes it a very hard classification problem. Despite the importance of this area, little formal published research exists. In this work, we try to address the problem of identifying the microblogs that could be targeted for advertisements. We describe a system that learns to classify which microblogs are suitable for targeted advertising. The experiments are conducted on Twitter data. The system user features derived from the user data, the tweet content and uses external resources such as query logs and term frequency from previous twitter data.

Abstract

With the growth of web 2.0, people are using it as a medium to express their opinion and thoughts. With the explosion of blogs, journal like user-generated content on the web, companies, celebrities and politicians are concerned about mining and analyzing the discussions about them or their products. In this paper, we present a method to perform opinion mining and summarize opinions at entity level for English blogs. We first identify various objects (named entities) which are talked about by the blogger, then we identify the modifiers which modify the orientation towards these objects. Finally, we generate object centric opinionated summary from blogs. We perform experiments like named entity identification, entity-modifier relationship extraction and modifier orientation estimation. Experiments and Results presented in this paper are cross verified with the judgment of human annotators.

Abstract

Focused crawling has wide number of applications in the area of Information Retrieval. It is a crucial part in building domain specific search engines, personalized search tools and extending digital libraries. Be it Google Scholar to search for scholarly articles or Google news to search for news articles, domain specific search is the most widely acclaimed application of focused crawling. Unfortunately, there are very few domain specific search engines available for Indian languages.

Abstract

This paper details the approach to identify Named Entities (NEs) from a large non-English corpus and associate them with appropriate tags, requiring minimal human intervention and no linguistic expertise. The main objective in this paper is to focus on Indian languages like Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, etc., which are considered to be resource-poor languages when compared to English. The inherent structure of Wikipedia was exploited in developing an efficient co-occurrence frequency based NE identification algorithm for Indian Languages. We describe the methods by which English Wikipedia data can be used to bootstrap the identification of NEs in other languages which generates a list of NE's. Later, the paper focuses on utilizing this NE list to improve multilingual Entity Filling which showed promising results. On a dataset of 2,622 Marathi Wikipedia articles, with around 10,000 NEs manually tagged, an F-Measure of 81.25% was achieved by our system without availing language expertise. Similarly, an F-measure of 80.42% was achieved on around 12,000 NEs tagged within 2,935 Hindi Wikipedia articles.

Abstract

Identifying and extracting subjective information from News, Blogs and other user generated content has lot of applications. Most of the earlier work concentrated on English data. But, recently subjectivity related research at sentence-level in other languages has increased. In this paper, we achieve sentence-level subjectivity classification using language independent feature weighing and selection methods which are consistent across languages. Experiments performed on 5 different languages including English and South Asian language Hindi show that Entropy based category coverage difference criterion (ECCD) feature selection method with language independent feature weighing methods outperforms other approaches for subjective classification.

Abstract

Human moods continuously change over time. Tracking moods can provide important information about psychological and health behavior of an individual. Also, history of mood information can be used to predict the future moods of individuals. In this paper, we try to predict the mood transition of a Twitter user by regression analysis on the tweets posted over twitter time line. Initially, user tweets are automatically labeled with mood labels from time 0 to t-1. It is then used to predict user mood transition information at time t. Experiments show that SVM regression attained less root-mean-square error compared to other regression approaches for mood transition prediction.