The rise of social media in the enterprise has enabled new ways for employees to speak up and communicate openly with colleagues. This rich textual data can potentially be mined to better understand the opinions and sentiment of employees for the benefit of the organization. In this paper, we introduce Enterprise Social Pulse (ESP) � a tool designed to support analysts whose job involves understanding employee chatter. ESP aggregates and analyzes data from internal and external social media sources while respecting employee privacy. It surfaces the data through a user interface that supports organic results and keyword search, data segmentation and filtering, and several analytics and visualization features. An evaluation of ESP was conducted with 19 Human Resources professionals. Results from a survey and interviews with participants revealed the value and willingness to use ESP, but also surfaced challenges around deploying an employee social media listening solution in an organization.

We develop an integrated salesforce analytics application that combines enterprise data from human resources, compensation, and customer relationship management systems, produces predictive data-driven analytics insights to effectively manage organizations with many salespeople, and has an interactive visual interface that allows business users to explore the data and analytics at their own pace and under their control. Named SellerScope, this application addresses many shortcomings of existing salesforce management-related offerings, including the difficulty of use, the lack of interactivity, the lack of timeliness in information reaching stakeholders, and the limited combined analysis of disparate enterprise data. The various data and analytics solutions are described in the paper. The interface is shown through screenshots in the paper, and also in animated form in an accompanying video. The business innovations of the application and the ways in which the visual interface facilitates understanding and trust by the user are discussed.

Research on intelligent systems has emphasized the benefits of providing explanations along with recommendations. But can explanations lead users to make incorrect decisions? We explored this question in a controlled experimental study with 18 professional network security analysts doing an incident classification task using a prototype cybersecurity system. The system provided three recommendations on each trial. The recommendations were displayed with explanations (called "justifications") or without. On half the trials, one of the recommendations was correct; in the other half none of the recommendations was correct. Users were more accurate with correct recommendations. Although there was no benefit overall of explanation, we found that a segment of the analysts were more accurate with explanations when a correct choice was available but were less accurate with explanations in the absence of a correct choice. We discuss implications of these results for the design of intelligent systems.

Analysts engaged in real-time monitoring of cybersecurity incidents must quickly and accurately respond to alerts generated by intrusion detection systems. We investigated two complementary approaches to improving analyst performance on this vigilance task: a graph-based visualization of correlated IDS output and defensible recommendations based on machine learning from historical analyst behavior. We tested our approach with 18 professional cybersecurity analysts using a prototype environment in which we compared the visualization with a conventional tabular display, and the defensible recommendations with limited or no recommendations. Quantitative results showed improved analyst accuracy with the visual display and the defensible recommendations. Additional qualitative data from a "talk aloud" protocol illustrated the role of displays and recommendations in analysts' decision-making process. Implications for the design of future online analysis environments are discussed.

We motivate the need for new environments for collaborative reasoning and describe the foundations of our approach, namely collaboration, semantics, and adaptability. We describe the CRAFT collaborative reasoning interface and infrastructure that we are developing to explore this approach.

We present CRAFT (Collaborative Reasoning and Analysis Framework and Toolkit), a tool for collaborative investigation, reasoning, and analysis. Analysts use CRAFT to represent their collective knowledge and reasoning via interconnected graphical models built upon a shared evolving ontology. These semantic models help connect analysts to digital information sources and to each other, and the aggregated knowledge and findings of many analysts may be analyzed and visualized. We also summarize the results of a preliminary user study of collaborative, implicit ontology evolution using this tool.

The Empowering Minds Learning Network is a webbased environment that supports discussion and reflection on classroom activities. The environment collects and organizes multimedia files and documents from participating students and teachers, allowing them to share their work with each other, with their communities, and with the world. The environment also gathers extensive data on teachers' usage of the service, providing a means for study and personal reflection on each teacher's emergent interests and pedagogical development. The application is currently being used to support Constructionist learning with new digital technologies in Irish primary schools.

A computer-based method and system for just-in-time semantic information retrieval is disclosed. A user interface detects user interaction with a displayed semantic entity. In response, a search member uses semantic information about the displayed entity and automatically searches for information about the subject entity. The search employs system and/or external knowledge bases and returns highly relevant results and information with increased specificity due to the semantic basis. A sidebar unobtrusively displays to the user the search results initially obtained without user request or demand, i.e., on the user's behalf. The sidebar enables the user to dismiss the search results and to effectively copy or export the search results as desired.

An expertise locator enables user defined correspondences between experts and respective certain objects. Each object inherits from classes in a hierarchy. Using the correspondences, a locator processor routine finds a candidate expert about a particular subject area. The candidate expert may be in a correspondence with a certain object whose class is a subclass of the particular subject area. Output may display an indication of the candidate expert, relevant expertise per candidate and/or a list of experts per certain object. In the case of the certain objects being topics, the hierarchy is an ontology of the topics.

Computer-readable media having corresponding apparatus embodies instructions executable by a computer to perform a method comprising: receiving, from a user interface, an annotation associated with a background image; adding the annotation to a queue of pending annotations; causing transmission of the annotation to a server; removing the annotation from the queue of pending annotations, and adding the annotation to a list of acknowledged annotations, when an acknowledgment of the annotation is received from the server; and generating a display image comprising the background image, annotations in the list of acknowledged annotations, and annotations in the queue of pending annotations.

A method for a communication system comprising a plurality of communication modules passing an audio stream comprising frames of audio data comprises receiving the audio stream at one of the communication modules; selecting one of the frames; identifying second data; replacing a portion of the audio data in the one of the frames with the second data; and transmitting the audio stream comprising the one of the frames of audio data comprising the second data from the one of the communication modules in the communication system.

Apparatus having corresponding methods and computer-readable media comprise a first input circuit to receive first data describing a first region of an image, the first region identified based on user markups of the image; a second input circuit to receive second data describing at least one of a second region of the image, the second region identified by an analysis of the image, and a third region of the image, the third region identified by an analysis of an environment that produced the image; and a synthesizer to identify a fourth region of the image based on the first data and the second data.

In a method for providing partial layout synchronization in a teleconferencing system, a conference client application enters a presenter participant mode and accepts a layout modification from a local user. The layout modification alters a selection or arrangement of conference components in a user interface. The conference client determines whether the layout modification is a significant layout modification or an insignificant layout modification and transmits a command to a conference server containing a representation of the layout modification only when the layout modification is a significant layout modification.

A graphical user interface (GUI) displaying a viewport includes a panning control region defined within an outer boundary of the viewport within the GUI. The panning control region includes multiple segments, each of the multiple segments corresponding to a panning direction, wherein a panning rate is indicated by a level of translucency of the multiple segments. A panning available region defined along the outer boundary of the viewport within the GUI is included. The panning available region indicates whether a source image extends beyond an edge of the viewport, and the panning available region is a subset of the panning control region. A method for panning an image through a viewport and a computing device are also provided.

Computer system and method automatically generate a social interest network. The social interest network indicates or represents (1) respective relevance between system users and taggers, and (2) respective affinity between users and taggers. A tag-based search engine searches and retrieves tagged contents. The search engine also retrieves semantic information associated with the tagged contents and tagger. Semantic information about the searcher-user is compared to the search retrieved semantic information. A comparator determines respective relevance of taggers to the searcher-user and respective affinity of the searcher-user to the taggers. The social interest network results and enables collaboration between users/taggers and filtering of various search results.

Apparatus having corresponding methods and computer-readable media comprise: one or more plugins each adapted to execute on the computer, wherein each plugin comprises a monitor module adapted to monitor data exchanged between one or more applications executing on the computer and a respective device driver executing on the computer, and a capture module adapted to capture the data.

Many government agencies, hospitals, and other organizations collect personal data of a sensitive nature. Often, these groups would like to release their data for statistical analysis by the scientific community, but do not want to cause the subjects of the data embarrassment or harassment. To resolve this conflict between privacy and progress, data is often deidentified before publication. In short, personally identifying information such as names, home addresses, and social security numbers are stripped from the data. We analyzed one such deidentified dataset containing information about Chicago homicide victims over a span of three decades. By comparing the records in the Chicago data set with records in the Social Security Death Index, we were able to associate names with, or reidentify, 35% of the victims. This study details the reidentification method and results, and includes a legal review of U.S. regulations related to reidentification. Based on the findings of our project, we recommend removal of these databases from their online locations, and the establishment of national deidentification regulations.

Disclosed is a system for semantically annotating a program's inputs, allowing automatic generation of a user interface for easy instantiation of the program.