One of the primary ways researchers have characterized engagement is by an increase in search actions. Another possibility is that instead of experiencing increased engagement, people who click and query frequently are actually frustrated; several studies have shown that frustration is also characterized by increases in clicking and querying behaviors. This research seeks to illuminate the diff...

Clustering is one of the most well known types of unsupervised learning. Evaluating the quality of results and determining the number of clusters in data is an important issue. Most current validity indices only cover a subset of important aspects of clusters. Moreover, these indices are relevant only for data sets containing at least two clusters. In this paper, a new bounded index for cluster...

This paper describes an on-going effort to combine Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE) technologies, to leverage the benefits provided by both approaches to add value for the end-user, as compared with IR or IE in isolation. The main aim of the combined system is to pool together information from multiple sources to improve the quality of results. On one hand, multiple me...

As a first attempt at participation in the TREC competition, we built a system which produced some preliminary results, but was unable to generate the quality of results that we expected. While we were able to submit four base-line runs, bugs were discovered in the final hours before the deadline making it impossible to submit results using our intended implementation. We have since found addit...

Peer-to-peer systems have emerged as a popular way to share huge volumes of data. The usability of these systems depends on effective techniques to find and retrieve data; however, current techniques used in existing P2P systems are often very inefficient. In this paper, we present three techniques for efficient search in P2P systems. We present the design of these techniques, and then evaluate...

The National Immunization Program (NIP) begun in 1962 has considerably reduced the infectious disease burden in Cuba over the years, especially among children. The Ministry of Public Health estimates that some 560,000 children would have contracted these diseases, some with fatal outcomes, had it not been for the aggressive vaccination strategy begun 45 years ago and developed since then.

Privacy preserving record linkage (PPRL) is the process of integrating data across multiple heterogeneous data sources without compromising their privacy. While many techniques have been developed for PPRL, there has not been, up to now, a universally accepted method providing both performance and quality of results in all cases. To this end, we present PRIVATEER, a toolkit which aims at enabli...