Emre Sevinç

The Solar Monitoring Observatory, or in short SOLAR, was among the first Columbus payloads switched on after Columbus installation in February 2008, and continues to perform science until today. The Belgian User Support and Operations Centre (B.USOC, Brussels), responsible for the support of the SOLAR operations, uses, like every mission control centre, heterogeneous sources of information, including structured and unstructured data, for decision making and information tracking. Very large… Show more

The Solar Monitoring Observatory, or in short SOLAR, was among the first Columbus payloads switched on after Columbus installation in February 2008, and continues to perform science until today. The Belgian User Support and Operations Centre (B.USOC, Brussels), responsible for the support of the SOLAR operations, uses, like every mission control centre, heterogeneous sources of information, including structured and unstructured data, for decision making and information tracking. Very large volumes of data are obtained, especially with the SOLAR telemetry data which are generated every second over long periods of time.Today, during real-time operations, the SOLAR operator constructs a mental model of the current operational status. Unfortunately, no software can provide a bird’s eye view of the operations, nor combine in a unified application the most important operational information. In an anomalous situation, the first actions consist of bringing all the data together, such as experiment telemetry, user and operations manuals, console logs, configuration status, experiment execution planning, etc. Thus, a lot of time and effort is spent on the retrieval of data for real-time and post-analysis information, prior to the actual analysis. The Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) project envisions combining the two worlds of Business Intelligence (BI) and Semantic Technologies. The objective of CUBIST is to aggregate various information sources available to operators in mission control rooms using technologies based on semantic web standards. Aggregated data, ready for the BI processing, are expected to provide online support - via an online, web based unified interface - for making better decisions, reveal hitherto undiscovered information and provide supportive evidence in debriefing and decision making processes related to the organisation of space control centre operations. Show less

Today, in space control centre operations, much time is spent on transferring, discussing, reviewing, and copying information between the operations partners. The search and replay of operational data for the correct analysis of the on-board situation is also time-consuming. This problem is especially emphasized by the fact that many of the data stores are distributed and have different user interfaces. The current operations show an increasing need for a system providing the operator with a… Show more

Today, in space control centre operations, much time is spent on transferring, discussing, reviewing, and copying information between the operations partners. The search and replay of operational data for the correct analysis of the on-board situation is also time-consuming. This problem is especially emphasized by the fact that many of the data stores are distributed and have different user interfaces. The current operations show an increasing need for a system providing the operator with a unified interface for fast access to information and analytics, especially during anomalous situations where time constraints are stronger. The FP7 project for Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) led by SAP AG, envisions combining Business Intelligence and Semantic technologies to aggregate various sources available to the operators, providing support in analysis and decision making on console. The CUBIST concept will be applied on the data resources of the SOLAR payload, a long-term ESA mission on the International Space Station. CUBIST allows to quickly analyze complex data patterns and to extract essential and relevant information, which is crucial in real-time space operations. Show less

This study investigated the effects of stimulus modality, standard duration, sex, and laterality in duration discrimination by musicians and nonmusicians. Seventeen musicians (M age = 24.1 yr.) and 22 nonmusicians (M age = 26.8 yr.) participated. Auditory (1,000 Hz) and tactile (250 Hz) sinusoidal suprathreshold stimuli with varying durations were used. The standard durations tested were 0.5 and 3.0 sec. Participants discriminated comparison stimuli which had durations slightly longer and… Show more

This study investigated the effects of stimulus modality, standard duration, sex, and laterality in duration discrimination by musicians and nonmusicians. Seventeen musicians (M age = 24.1 yr.) and 22 nonmusicians (M age = 26.8 yr.) participated. Auditory (1,000 Hz) and tactile (250 Hz) sinusoidal suprathreshold stimuli with varying durations were used. The standard durations tested were 0.5 and 3.0 sec. Participants discriminated comparison stimuli which had durations slightly longer and shorter than the standard durations. Difference limens were found by the method of limits and converted to Weber fractions based on the standard durations. Musicians had lower, i.e., better, Weber fractions than nonmusicians in the auditory modality, but there was no significant difference between musicians and nonmusicians in the tactile modality. Auditory discrimination was better than tactile discrimination. Discrimination improved when the standard duration was increased both for musicians and nonmusicians. These results support previous findings of superior auditory processing by musicians. Significant differences between discrimination in the millisecond and second ranges may be due to a deviation from Weber's law and the discontinuity of timing in different duration ranges reported in the literature. Show less

Current recommendation systems such as Last.FM, Pandora, Amazon.com, etc. use a limited amount of meta-data and collaborative filtering in order to recommend new items to their users within a single domain, be it music albums, books or movies. There is also progress in the field of combining semantic web technologies such as FOAF and music ontologies to create better and more useful recommendation systems. We think it is possible to go beyond these approaches and create a broad cultural… Show more

Current recommendation systems such as Last.FM, Pandora, Amazon.com, etc. use a limited amount of meta-data and collaborative filtering in order to recommend new items to their users within a single domain, be it music albums, books or movies. There is also progress in the field of combining semantic web technologies such as FOAF and music ontologies to create better and more useful recommendation systems. We think it is possible to go beyond these approaches and create a broad cultural recommendation system. For example, in the domain of music, by taking album and track based meta-data, using RDF and OWL to describe them and then using semantic reasoning techniques, a much more sophisticated and interesting cultural recommendation system can be designed. Such a system will not only recommend new musical items but also related cultural items such as books and movies. In addition to the final result of recommending an item, the system will also provide a justification, showing the meaningful links between those cultural items. The system will also be adaptive, it will be able to adapt itself according to every user with the help of the users (explicitly) or using inductive logic programming methods (implicitly). In our paper we provide justification for our system and summary of how such a cultural recommendation system can be built using Common Lisp, existing semantic web and logical reasoning technologies. In our live demo we will also give examples using the prototype based on the mentioned ideas. Show less

We develop a morphosyntax-based natural language watermarking scheme. In this scheme, a text is first transformed into a syntactic tree diagram where the hierarchies and the functional dependencies are made explicit. The watermarking software then operates on the sentences in syntax tree format and executes binary changes under control of Wordnet and Dictionary to avoid semantic drops. A certain level of security is provided via key-controlled randomization of morphosyntactic tools and the… Show more

We develop a morphosyntax-based natural language watermarking scheme. In this scheme, a text is first transformed into a syntactic tree diagram where the hierarchies and the functional dependencies are made explicit. The watermarking software then operates on the sentences in syntax tree format and executes binary changes under control of Wordnet and Dictionary to avoid semantic drops. A certain level of security is provided via key-controlled randomization of morphosyntactic tools and the insertion of void watermark. The security aspects and payload aspects are evaluated statistically while the imperceptibility is measured using edit-hit counts based on human judgments. It is observed that agglutinative languages are somewhat more amenable to morphosyntax-based natural language watermarking and the free word order property of a language, like Turkish, is an extra bonus. Show less

In this paper we present a case study from Turkey, a social responsibility project named "Çocuklara Bilgisayar Projesi” (Computers for Kids Project) which incorporates the dissemination of free and open source software as well as
helping children and youngsters from low socio-economical sectors to have a digital experience using GNU/Linux running computers.

Diploidy and allele dominance are two mechanisms whereby natural organisms preserve genetic variability, in the form of unexpressed genes, from the conservative sway of natural selection. These may profoundly affect evolution, for it is variability upon which natural selection operates. Many multi-agent systems rely on evolutionary processes and sexual reproduction. However, sex in artificial agents often ignores diploidy and dominance. An agent-oriented modelling platform was used to compare… Show more

Diploidy and allele dominance are two mechanisms whereby natural organisms preserve genetic variability, in the form of unexpressed genes, from the conservative sway of natural selection. These may profoundly affect evolution, for it is variability upon which natural selection operates. Many multi-agent systems rely on evolutionary processes and sexual reproduction. However, sex in artificial agents often ignores diploidy and dominance. An agent-oriented modelling platform was used to compare the evolution of populations of sexual agents under four models: haploid genetic transmission versus diploid; and with either complete allele dominance versus none. Diploidy fulfils its promise of preserving variability, whereas haploidy quickly commits its possessors to the current niche. Allele dominance too preserves variability, and without sacrificing adaptivity. These results echo consistent findings in classical population genetics. Since both these factors strongly affect evolution, their inclusion in a model may improve both accuracy, and efficacy, according to the modeller's motives. Show less