Reducing healthcare costs and improving quality of outcomes is a challenge even in developed economies. Much information remains in paper form, lack common standards, sharing is uncommon and frequently hampered by the lack of foolproof de-identification for patient privacy. All of these issues impede opportunities for data mining and analysis that would enable better predictive and preventive medicine. These issues are compounded in emerging economies due to geopolitical constraints, transportation and geographic barriers, a much more limited clinical workforce, and infrastructural challenges to delivery. Thus, simple, high-impact deliverable interventions such as universal childhood immunization and maternal childcare are hampered by poor monitoring and reporting systems. This workshop is focused on identifying challenges to be overcome for effectively delivering efficient healthcare and to the masses. Specifically, we will provide a forum to discuss research directions, share experience and insights from both academia and industry. The anticipated outcome of the workshop is an assessment of the state of the art in the area, as well as identification of critical next steps to pursue in this topic.

Scheduling a meeting is a difficult task for people who have overbooked calendars and many constraints. The complexity increases when the meeting is to be scheduled between parties who are situated in geographically distant locations of a city and have varying travel patterns. In this paper, we present a solution that identifies a common meeting point for a group of users who have temporal and spatial locality constraints that vary over time. The problem entails answering an Optimal Meeting Point (OMP) query in spatial databases. Under Euclidean space OMP query solution identification gets reduced to the problem of determining the geometric median of a set of points, a problem for which no exact solution exists. The OMP problem does not consider any constraints as far as availability of users is concerned whereas that is a key constraint in our setting. We therefore focus on finding a solution that uses daily movements information obtained from GPS traces for each user to compute stay points during various times of the day. We then determine interesting locations by analyzing the stay points across multiple users. The novelty of our solution is that the computations are done within the database by using various relational algebra operations in combination with statistical operations on the GPS trajectory data. This makes our solution scalable to larger groups of users and for multiple such requests. Once this list of stay points and interesting locations are obtained, we show that this data can be utilized to construct spatio-temporal graphs for the users that allow us efficiently decide a meeting place. We perform experiments on a real-world dataset and show that our method is effective in finding an optimal meeting point between two users.

Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the number of users of social media sites. As the number of users of these sites continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, the amount of data produced follows in magnitude. With this deluge of social media data, the need for comprehensive tools to analyze user interactions is ever increasing. In this paper, we present a novel tool, Navigating Information Facets on Twitter (NIF-T), which helps users to explore data generated on social media sites. Using the three dimensions or facets: time, location, and topic as an example of the many possible facets, we enable the users to explore large social media datasets. With the help of a large corpus of tweets collected from the Occupy Wall Street movement on the Twitter platform we show how our system can be used to identify important aspects of the event along these facets.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the key driver for retention and growth in retail banking and several techniques have been applied by banks to achieve this. For instance, banks in emerging markets with high footfall in branches have gone beyond the traditional approach of segmenting customers and services to optimizing the wait time for customers visiting the bank's branch. While this approach has significantly improved service quality, it has also added a new dimension in the service quality metric : pro-actively identify and address customer needs for (i) efficient banking experience and (ii) enhancing profit by selling additional services to existing customer. In this paper we present a system that addresses the challenge involved in providing better service to retail banking customer while ensuring that a larger share of customer's wallet comes to the branch. We do this by combining predictive analytics, scheduling and process optimization techniques.

Businesses require the contact center agents to meet pre-specified customer satisfaction levels while keeping the cost of operations low or meeting sales targets, objectives that end up being complementary and difficult to achieve in real-time. In this paper, we describe a speech enabled real-time conversation management system that tracks customer-agent conversations to detect user intent (e.g. gathering information, likely to buy, etc.) that can help agents to then decide the best sequence of actions for that call. We present an entropy based decision support system that parses a text stream generated in real-time during a audio conversation and identifies the first instance at which the intent becomes distinct enough for the agent to then take subsequent actions. We provide evaluation results displaying the efficiency and effectiveness of our system.

The need to analyze structured data for various business intelligence applications such as customer churn analysis, social network analysis, telecom network monitoring etc., is well known. However, the potential size to which such data will scale in future will make solutions that revolve around data warehouses hard to scale. As data sizes grow the movement of data from the warehouse to archives becomes more frequent. Current file based archive models make the archived data unusable for any type of insight extraction. In this paper, we present an active archival solution for data warehouses that makes use of Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) to store the data in an always available and cost-effective manner. We investigate various structured data storage schemes within HDFS and empirical evaluations show that a combination of Universal scheme model and column store is best suited for the active archival solution.

The need to analyze structured data for various business intelligence applications such as customer churn analysis, social network analysis, etc. is well known. However, the potential size to which such data will scale in future will make solutions that revolve around data warehouses hard to scale. We begin by presenting a business case that prompted us to look at building a distributed analytics platform that is leveraging the MapReduce framework pioneered by Google. We present the results of the study and highlight issues with the current structured data access techniques for MapReduce platforms. Finally, we present a distributed and scalable data platform that leverages Apache Hadoop to enable business analysts to seamlessly query archived data along with data stored in the warehouse.

Extracting information and insights from large databases is a time-consuming activity and has received considerable research attention recently. In this demo, we present DynaCet - a domain independent system that provides effective minimum-effort based dynamic faceted search solutions over enterprise databases. At every step, Dynacet suggests facets depending on the user response in the previous step. Facets are selected based on their ability to rapidly drill down to the most promising tuples, as well as on the ability of the user to provide desired values for them. The benefits provided include faster access to information stored in databases while taking into consideration the variance in user knowledge and preferences.

In this paper, we propose minimum-effort driven navigational techniques for enterprise database systems based on the faceted search paradigm. Our proposed techniques dynamically suggest facets for drilling down into the database such that the cost of navigation is minimized. At every step, the system asks the user a question or a set of questions on different facets and depending on the user response, dynamically fetches the next most promising set of facets, and the process repeats. Facets are selected based on their ability to rapidly drill down to the most promising tuples, as well as on the ability of the user to provide desired values for them. Our facet selection algorithms also work in conjunction with any ranked retrieval model where a ranking function imposes a bias over the user preferences for the selected tuples. Our methods are principled as well as efficient, and our experimental study validates their effectiveness on several application scenarios.

This write-up provides a summary of the International Workshop on Context enabled Source and Service Selection, Integration and Adaptation (CSSSIA 2008), organized in conjunction with WWW 2008, at Beijing, China on April 22nd 2008. We outline the motivation for organizing the workshop, briefly describe the organizational details and program of the workshop, and summarize each of the papers accepted by the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/~csssia08/.

Current approaches for answering queries with imprecise constraints require user-specific distance metrics and importance measures for attributes of interest - metrics that are hard to elicit from lay users. We present AIMQ, a domain and user independent approach for answering imprecise queries over autonomous Web databases. We developed methods for query relaxation that use approximate functional dependencies. We also present an approach to automatically estimate the similarity between values of categorical attributes. Experimental results demonstrating the robustness, efficiency and effectiveness of AIMQ are presented. Results of a preliminary user study demonstrating the high precision of the AIMQ system is also provided.

Recent work in data integration has shown the importance of statistical information about the coverage and overlap of sources for efficient query processing. Despite this recognition, there are no effective approaches for learning the needed statistics. The key challenge in learning such statistics is keeping the number of needed statistics low enough to have the storage and learning costs manageable. In this paper, we present a set of connected techniques that estimate the coverage and overlap statistics, while keeping the needed statistics tightly under control. Our approach uses a hierarchical classification of the queries and threshold-based variants of familiar data mining techniques to dynamically decide the level of resolution at which to learn the statistics. We describe the details of our method, and, present experimental results demonstrating the efficiency of the learning algorithms and the effectiveness of the learned statistics over both controlled data sources and in the context of BibFinder with autonomous online sources.

Current approaches for answering queries with imprecise constraints require users to provide distance metrics and importance measures for attributes of interest. In this paper we focus on providing a domain and end-user independent solution for supporting imprecise queries over Web databases without affecting the underlying database. We propose a query processing framework that integrates techniques from IR and database research to efficiently determine answers for imprecise queries. We mine and use approximate functional dependencies between attributes to create precise queries having tuples relevant to the given imprecise query. An approach to automatically estimate the semantic distances between values of categorical attributes is also proposed. We provide preliminary results showing the utility of our approach.

Recent work in data integration has shown the importance of statistical information about the coverage and overlap of sources for efficient query processing. Despite this recognition there are no effective approaches for learning the needed statistics. The key challenge in learning such statistics is keeping the number of needed statistics low enough to have the storage and learning costs manageable. Naive approaches can become infeasible very quickly. In this paper we present a set of connected techniques that estimate the coverage and overlap statistics while keeping the needed statistics tightly under control. Our approach uses a hierarchical classification of the queries, and threshold based variants of familiar data mining techniques to dynamically decide the level of resolution at which to learn the statistics. We describe the details of our method, and present experimental results demonstrating the efficiency of the learning algorithms and the effectiveness of the learned statistics.

If XML is to play the critical role of the lingua franca for Internet data interchange that many predict, it is necessary to start designing and adopting benchmarks allowing the comparative performance analysis of the tools being developed and proposed. The effectiveness of existing XML query languages has been studied by many, with a focus on the comparison of linguistic features, implicitly reflecting the fact that most XML tools exist only on paper. In this paper, with a focus on efficiency and concreteness, we propose a pragmatic first step toward the systematic benchmarking of XML query processing platforms with an initial focus on the data (versus document) point of view. We propose XOO7, an XML version of the OO7 benchmark. We discuss the applicability of XOO7, its strengths, limitations and the extensions we are considering. We illustrate its use by presenting and discussing the performance comparison against XOO7 of three different query processing platforms for XML.