The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization

Yair Censor and Stavros A. Zenios, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, 539 pp., ISBN 0-19-510062-X, $85.00

Parallel Optimization: Theory, Algorithms and Applications

When working on a large software system, a programmer typically spends an inordinate amount of time sifting through thousands of artifacts to find just the subset of information needed to complete an assigned task. All too often, before completing the task the programmer must switch to working on a different task. These task switches waste time as the programmer must repeatedly find and identify the information relevant to the task-at-hand. In this paper, we present a mechanism that captures, models, and persists the elements and relations relevant to a task. We show how our task context model reduces information overload and focuses a programmer's work by filtering and ranking the information presented by the development environment. A task context is created by monitoring a programmer's activity and extracting the structural relationships of program artifacts. Operations on task contexts integrate with development environment features, such as structure display, search, and change management. We have validated our approach with a longitudinal field study of Mylar, our implementation of task context for the Eclipse development environment. We report a statistically significant improvement in the productivity of 16 industry programmers who voluntarily used Mylar for their daily work.

Using task context to improve programmer productivity

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The TaskTracer system seeks to help multi-tasking users manage the resources that they create and access while carrying out their work activities. It does this by associating with each user-defined activity the set of files, folders, email messages, contacts, and web pages that the user accesses when performing that activity. The initial TaskTracer system relies on the user to notify the system each time the user changes activities. However, this is burdensome, and users often forget to tell TaskTracer what activity they are working on. This paper introduces TaskPredictor, a machine learning system that attempts to predict the user's current activity. TaskPredictor has two components: one for general desktop activity and another specifically for email. TaskPredictor achieves high prediction precision by combining three techniques: (a) feature selection via mutual information, (b) classification based on a confidence threshold, and (c) a hybrid design in which a Naive Bayes classifier estimates the classification confidence but where the actual classification decision is made by a support vector machine. This paper provides experimental results on data collected from TaskTracer users.

/pdf/a-hybrid-learning-system-for-recognizing-user-tasks-from-25ml3aqz8p.pdf

A hybrid learning system for recognizing user tasks from desktop activities and email messages

The annual incidence of insider attacks continues to grow, and there are indications this trend will continue. While there are a number of existing tools that can accurately identify known attacks, these are reactive (as opposed to proactive) in their enforcement, and may be eluded by previously unseen, adversarial behaviors. This paper proposes an approach that combines Structural Anomaly Detection (SA) from social and information networks and Psychological Profiling (PP) of individuals. SA uses technologies including graph analysis, dynamic tracking, and machine learning to detect structural anomalies in large-scale information network data, while PP constructs dynamic psychological profiles from behavioral patterns. Threats are finally identified through a fusion and ranking of outcomes from SA and PP. The proposed approach is illustrated by applying it to a large data set from a massively multi-player online game, World of War craft (WoW). The data set contains behavior traces from over 350,000 characters observed over a period of 6 months. SA is used to predict if and when characters quit their guild (a player association with similarities to a club or workgroup in non-gaming contexts), possibly causing damage to these social groups. PP serves to estimate the five-factor personality model for all characters. Both threads show good results on the gaming data set and thus validate the proposed approach.

/pdf/proactive-insider-threat-detection-through-graph-learning-23hqqti0su.pdf

Proactive Insider Threat Detection through Graph Learning and Psychological Context

A conversation-simulating system facilitates simulating an intelligent conversation with a human user. During operation, the system can receive a user-statement from the user during a simulated conversation, and generates a set of automatic-statements that each responds to the user-statement. The system then determines a set of behavior-characteristics for the user, and computes relevance scores for the automatic-statements based on the behavior-characteristics. Each relevance score indicates an outcome quality that the user is likely to perceive for the automatic-statement as a response to the user-statement. The system selects an automatic-statement that has a highest relevance score from the set of automatic-statements, and provides the selected automatic-statement to the user.

Method and apparatus for customizing conversation agents based on user characteristics

Email is a ubiquitous communication tool and constitutes a significant portion of social interactions. In this paper, we attempt to infer the personality of users based on the content of their emails. Such inference can enable valuable applications such as better personalization, recommendation, and targeted advertising. Considering the private and sensitive nature of email content, we propose a privacy-preserving approach for collecting email and personality data. We then frame personality prediction based on the well-known Big Five personality model and train predictors based on extracted email features. We report prediction performance of 3 generative models with different assumptions. Our results show that personality prediction is feasible, and our email feature set can predict personality with reasonable accuracies.

Understanding Email Writers: Personality Prediction from Email Messages

This paper introduces a Bayesian network model for the motivation and psychology of the malicious insider. First, an initial model was developed based on results in the research literature, highlighting critical variables for the prediction of degree of interest in a potentially malicious insider. Second, a survey was conducted to measure these predictive variables in a common sample of normal participants. Third, a structural equation model was constructed based on the original model, updated based on a split-half sample of the empirical survey data and validated against the other half of the dataset. Fourth, the Bayesian network was adjusted in light of the results of the empirical analysis. Fifth, the updated model was used to develop an upper bound on the quality of model predictions of its own simulated data. When empirical data regarding psychological predictors were input to the model, predictions of counterproductive behavior approached the upper bound of model predictiveness.

/pdf/a-bayesian-network-model-for-predicting-insider-threats-1mf113rlfn.pdf

Jianqiang Shen

Papers

A hybrid learning system for recognizing user tasks from desktop activities and email messages

Proactive Insider Threat Detection through Graph Learning and Psychological Context

Method and apparatus for customizing conversation agents based on user characteristics

Understanding Email Writers: Personality Prediction from Email Messages

A Bayesian Network Model for Predicting Insider Threats