Landauer’s principle is applied to information in the universe. Once stars began forming there was a constant information energy density as the increasing proportion of matter at high stellar temperatures exactly compensated for the expanding universe. The information equation of state was close to the dark energy value, w = -1, for a wide range of redshifts, 10> z >0.8, over one half of cosmic...

A conditional key is a key constraint that is valid in only a part of the data. In this paper, we show how such keys can be mined automatically on large knowledge bases (KBs). For this, we combine techniques from key mining with techniques from rule mining. We show that our method can scale to KBs of millions of facts. We also show that the conditional keys we mine can improve the quality of en...

This article describes the system used by the UGent-IBCN team for participating in the Text Analysis Conference (TAC) 2013 English Entity-Linking task. We kept the overall rule-based workflow of our last year’s submission, but significantly altered individual components. Most importantly, these changes include improved document pre-processing, new ways of candidate selection, and completely red...

We examine the relationship between resource abundance and several indicators of human welfare. Consistent with the existing literature on the relationship between resource abundance and economic growth, we find that resource-abundant countries tend to suffer low levels of human development. While we find no support for a direct link between resources and welfare, there is an indirect link that...

We present a novel feedback technique for tooth brushing. Brushing sounds were manipulated and were found to alter the user’s impression. In our experiment, brushing sounds recorded by a microphone in the toothbrush are manipulated and presented to the users in real-time. We demonstrate that frequency manipulation affects feelings of comfort and accomplishment when sound levels are amplified. W...

An English entity linking (EL) workflow is presented, which combines the annotations of five public open source EL services. The annotations are combined through a weighted voting scheme inspired by the ROVER method, which had not been previously tested on EL outputs. The combined results improved over each individual system’s results, as evaluated on four different golden sets.

While ethics is usually seen as a possible research subject and ethical standards have to be observed when doing IS research, there does not seem to be any direct link between ethics and specific research approaches. This paper argues that this perception is wrong and that the interpretive paradigm of IS research is directly and necessarily linked with ethics. The paper uses the theories of Pau...