14792710
Enabling analysts in managed services for CRM analytics
Data analytics tools and frameworks abound, yet rapid deployment of analytics solutions that deliver actionable insights from business data remains a challenge. The primary reason is that on-field practitioners are required to be both technically proficient and knowledgeable about the business. The recent abundance of unstructured business data has thrown up new opportunities for analytics, but has also multiplied the deployment challenge, since interpretation of concepts derived from textual sources require a deep understanding of the business. In such a scenario, a managed service for analytics comes up as the best alternative. A managed analytics service is centered around a business analyst who acts as a liaison between the business and the technology. This calls for new tools that assist the analyst to be efficient in the tasks that she needs to execute. Also, the analytics needs to be repeatable, in that the delivered insights should not depend heavily on the expertise of specific analysts. These factors lead us to identify new areas that open up for KDD research in terms of 'time-to-insight' and repeatability for these analysts. We present our analytics framework in the form of a managed service offering for CRM analytics. We describe different analyst-centric tools using a case study from real-life engagements and demonstrate their effectiveness.
3094106
LIPTUS: associating structured and unstructured information in a banking environment
Growing competition has made today's banks understand the value of knowing their customers better. In this paper, we describe a tool, LIPTUS, that associates the customer interactions (emails and transcribed phone calls) with customer and account profiles stored in an existing data warehouse. The associations discovered by LIPTUS enable analytics spanning the customer and account profiles on one hand and the meta-data associated or derived from the interaction (using text mining techniques) on the other. We illustrate the value derived from this consolidated analysis through specific customer intelligence applications. LIPTUS is today being extensively used in a large bank in India. A highlight of this paper is a discussion of the technical challenges encountered while building LIPTUS and deploying it on real-life customer data.
22023969
Some issues in privacy data management
A method and apparatus is provided for aligning and press-fitting connector terminals into a substrate. The terminals are initially supported together by a bandolier strip, and an alignment tool aligns the terminals with apertures in the substrate to which the terminals will be press-fitted. A pressing tool engages the shanks of the terminals to fold the bandolier away from the terminals and thereafter press the terminals into the apertures.
7664269
Management of Conflicting Obligations in Self-Protecting Policy-Based Systems
Policy-based management of business systems is increasingly becoming the norm for autonomic computing since these systems can adapt to the changing needs and increasing complexity of the underlying organizations or enterprises. One of the vital characteristics of these systems is self-protection, ie., the ability to secure information and resources, by anticipating, detecting, identifying and protecting against any form of unauthorised access and permitting all authorised accesses based on the users' roles and pre-established policies. In this paper, we focus on one aspect of self-protecting autonomous systems, which is, how to automatically enforce privacy policies related to data handling, for compliance and auditing purposes. The automatic management of privacy sensitive information based on enterprise policies that are driven by a combination of user preferences, internal objectives and external regulations is a key aspect to any enterprise to prevent misuse of this information. These policies extend beyond simple authorization rules, and also mandate obligations to be enforced under certain conditions. One issue in the automatic enforcement of obligations is the presence of conflicts among different obligations which mandate different actions on the same resource, based on different conditions in which the resource is accessed. In this paper we propose algorithms for detecting and resolving conflicts among obligations in both static and runtime environments. We then briefly describe our prototype obligation management system with the conflict resolution module that achieves the automated enforcement of obligations for data-handling based on privacy policies
10962942
Towards bringing database management task in the realm of IT non-experts
Internet enabled services have led to an increase in the size and complexity of the database making the database administration task very complex. This necessitates the hiring of skilled personnel for the management of data, which is a bane for industries, especially in developing countries. We at IBM India research Lab, have been developing technologies (i.e. database administration tools), wherein the database administrator, who may be inexperienced person, can define error-free policies for managing and maintaining the distributed information repositories, and can define data access privileges to users at fine as well as at coarse-grained level using natural language like constructs. These policies represent the actions that need to be carried out when specific database/temporal events occur within the system or externally and are notified to the system. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of our policy based database administration and access control system and outline some of the technical challenges in this area.
20290151
Web Page Ranking Based on Events
Search results of web search engines are displayed according to their ranking function, which is a function of the in-links and the out-links of the web page. Users are generally overwhelmed by the thousands of results retrieved by the search engine, few of which are useful. Most of the search engine users are interested in the latest information about the searched keywords. Such pages containing the latest information about an event (or incident) are not always ranked high by the search engines due to the lack of sufficient in-links pointing to these web pages. For example, if a search query “DaWaK” is given to Google, the users are generally interested in the latest information i.e., the home page of DaWaK 2004 conference, which is not ranked in the top 10 results returned by Google. In this paper we address the problem of ranking the web pages based on events (or incidents) related to the searched keywords. We provide a method for finding patterns that constitute events in the search results returned by a conventional search engine and then rank the web pages based on these event patterns. We also describe a mechanism whereby our technique can be used inside the ranking function of a conventional search engine such as Google. We provide experimental results that validate the efficiency and use of our technique in capturing the user intentions.
2140816
Toward Comprehensive Real-Time Bidder Support in Iterative Combinatorial Auctions
Many auctions involve selling several distinct items simultaneously, where bidders can bid on the whole or any part of the lot. Such auctions are referred to as combinatorial auctions. Examples of such auctions include truck delivery routes, industrial procurement, and FCC spectrum. Determining winners in such auctions is an NP-hard problem, and significant research is being conducted in this area. However, multiple-round (iterative) combinatorial auctions present significant challenges in bid formulations as well. Because the combinatorial dynamics in iterative auctions can make a given bid part of a winning and nonwinning set of bids without any changes in the bid, bidders are usually not able to evaluate whether they should revise their bid at a given point in time or not. Therefore, in this paper we address various computational problems that are relevant from the bidder's perspective. In particular, we introduce two bid evaluation metrics that can be used by bidders to determine whether any given bid can be a part of the winning allocation and explore their theoretical properties. Based on these metrics, we also develop efficient data structures and algorithms that provide comprehensive information about the current state of the auction atany time, which can help bidders in evaluating their bids and bidding strategies. Our approach uses exponential memory storage but provides fast incremental update for new bids, thereby facilitating bidder support for real-time iterative combinatorial auctions.
6426062
Understanding Patterns of Technology Evolution: An Ecosystem Perspective
Understanding the dynamics of technology evolution — whether for the purposes of forecasting new product or technology infrastructure developments, or identifying the basis for future digital convergence in the global market— is a key challenge for innovators, senior managers, and policymakers. This research provides an overview of a new ecosystem model of technology evolution, the purpose of which is to structure these kinds of assessments and suggest reusable analysis structures to ensure that total environment of technological innovation is considered. We use examples from the end-user computing context and the electronics industry to identify five patterns of technology evolution that commonly occur. We also develop a state diagram-based approach to demonstrate the cyclical nature of technology evolution. Finally, we illustrate our findings using a case study on digital music technologies.
33156757
Technology roles and paths of influence in an ecosystem model of technology evolution
We propose a new conceptual model for understanding technology evolution that highlights dynamic and highly interdependent relationships among multiple technologies. We argue that, instead of considering technologies in isolation, technology evolution is best viewed as a dynamic system or ecosystem that includes a variety of interrelated technologies. By considering the interdependent nature of technology evolution, we identify three roles that technologies play within a technology ecosystem. These roles are components, products and applications, and support and infrastructure. Technologies within an ecosystem interact through these roles and impact each others’ evolution. We also classify types of interactions between technology roles, which we term paths of influence. We demonstrate the use of our proposed model through examples of wireless networking (Wi-Fi) technologies and a business mini-case on the digital music industry.
6190398
Time Representation in Prolog Circuit Modelling
This paper is an examination of some issues in domain ontology and of various knowledge representation techniques for the temporal modelling of digital electronic circuits in Prolog. It should serve as an example of the advantages of such analysis, an area of relative neglect within the logic programming community.
14465668
The economics of network management
Why are pricing issues the key to infrastructure investment and future growth of the Internet? The Economics of network management I t is not surprising that researchers in network technology are utilizing ideas from the field of economics since it provides the conceptual understanding of underlying constructs such as usage and resource allocation. Proper resource allocation plays a key role in improving network performance. There are two primary approaches to economic resource allocation: quantity limits, and pricing. The former has the advantage of low accounting costs. However, it requires central administration and, for network users wishing to purchase more quantity than allocated, a pricing schedule has to be developed. The pricing approach does not enforce any quantity limits. Instead, users self-select the quantity they are willing to purchase at prevailing prices. The pricing approach decentralizes the resource allocation problem but has higher accounting costs since usage needs to be monitored and billed. The role of pricing as a resource allocation mechanism will be examined here, since central administration of quotas would be difficult in a global network. Furthermore, a pricing mechanism may still be needed to meet user demands in e-commerce. While the short-term role of economic pricing is to manage the network resources more efficiently, in the long run it could play an important role in the design of new network protocols. For example, new technological developments with priority classes in the IPv6 Internet protocol [3] will present the challenge of defining an economic basis for priority allocation. The Internet traffic-pricing problem for e-commerce subsumes traditional telecommuni-cation pricing policies and is much more complex. Traditional telecommunication systems offer a single quality level for their services on a given type of network, for example, the ability to carry voice data at a desired rate on a telephone network. However, in e-commerce there is a rich collection of services that require different levels of service quality over the same data communication network. For example, during a telnet session a user requires a high-speed and low-volume data transfer for real-time interaction with a server. On the other hand, a video conference needs clarity and coordination in picture and sound, necessitating a much more complex set of service quality attributes, such as synchronization of information sent via different interoperable applications (video, audio, and text). In addition, audio and video applications require high-volume and high-speed transfers with low variability in data transfer rates. These …