skip to main content


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Ekanayake, Saliya"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. null (Ed.)
    There is large interest in networked social science experiments for understanding human behavior at-scale. Significant effort is required to perform data analytics on experimental outputs and for computational modeling of custom experiments. Moreover, experiments and modeling are often performed in a cycle, enabling iterative experimental refinement and data modeling to uncover interesting insights and to generate/refute hypotheses about social behaviors. The current practice for social analysts is to develop tailor-made computer programs and analytical scripts for experiments and modeling. This often leads to inefficiencies and duplication of effort. In this work, we propose a pipeline framework to take a significant step towards overcoming these challenges. Our contribution is to describe the design and implementation of a software system to automate many of the steps involved in analyzing social science experimental data, building models to capture the behavior of human subjects, and providing data to test hypotheses. The proposed pipeline framework consists of formal models, formal algorithms, and theoretical models as the basis for the design and implementation. We propose a formal data model, such that if an experiment can be described in terms of this model, then our pipeline software can be used to analyze data efficiently. The merits of the proposed pipeline framework is elaborated by several case studies of networked social science experiments. 
    more » « less
  2. Genomic datasets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous community databases store and share these data with the research community, but some of these genomic data analysis problems require large-scale computational platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on high-end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming support, software libraries and parallel architectural design. For example, they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to shared data structures. We consider several problems in high-performance genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering and assembly for both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common computational patterns or ‘motifs’ that help inform parallelization strategies and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science’. 
    more » « less
  3. Graph scan statistics have become popular for event detection in networks. This methodology involves finding connected subgraphs that maximize a certain anomaly function, but maximizing these functions is computationally hard in general. We develop a novel approach for graph scan statistics with connectivity constraints. Our algorithm Approx-MultilinearScan relies on an algebraic technique called multilinear detection, and it improves over prior methods for large networks. We also develop a Pregel-based parallel version of this algorithm in Giraph, MultilinearScanGiraph, that allows us to solve instances with over 40 million edges, which is more than one order of magnitude larger than existing methods. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Group or collective identity is an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. There are many different contexts in which collective identity operates, and a host of application domains where collective identity is important. Collective identity is studied across myriad academic disciplines. Consequently, there is interest in understanding the collective identity formation process. In laboratory and other settings, collective identity is fostered through priming a group of human subjects. However, there have been no works in developing agent-based models for simulating collective identity formation processes. Our focus is understanding a game that is designed to produce collective identity within a group. To study this process, we build an online game platform; perform and analyze controlled laboratory experiments involving teams; build, exercise, and evaluate network-based agent-based models; and form and evaluate hypotheses about collective identity. We conduct these steps in multiple abductive iterations of experiments and modeling to improve our understanding of collective identity as this looping process unfolds. Our work serves as an exemplar of using abductive looping in the social sciences. Findings on collective identity include the observation that increased team performance in the game, resulting in increased monetary earnings for all players, did not produce a measured increase in collective identity among them. 
    more » « less
  5. Anagram games (i.e., word construction games in which players use letters to form words) have been researched for some 60 years. Games with individual players are the subject of over 20 published investigations. Moreover, there are many popular commercial anagram games such as Scrabble. Recently, cooperative team play of anagram games has been studied experimentally. With all of the experimental work and the popularity of such games, it is somewhat surprising that very little modeling of anagram games has been done to predict player behavior/actions in them. We devise a cooperative group anagram game and develop an agent-based modeling and simulation framework to capture player interactions of sharing letters and forming words. Our primary goals are to understand, quantitatively predict, and explain individual and aggregate group behavior, through simulations, to inform the design of a group anagram game experimental platform. 
    more » « less
  6. null (Ed.)
    In anagram games, players are provided with letters for forming as many words as possible over a specified time duration. Anagram games have been used in controlled experiments to study problems such as collective identity, effects of goal setting, internal-external attributions, test anxiety, and others. The majority of work on anagram games involves individual players. Recently, work has expanded to group anagram games where players cooperate by sharing letters. In this work, we analyze experimental data from online social networked experiments of group anagram games. We develop mechanistic and data driven models of human decision-making to predict detailed game player actions (e.g., what word to form next). With these results, we develop a composite agent-based modeling and simulation platform that incorporates the models from data analysis. We compare model predictions against experimental data, which enables us to provide explanations of human decision-making and behavior. Finally, we provide illustrative case studies using agent-based simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of models to provide insights that are beyond those from experiments alone. 
    more » « less