How much information do natural systems store and process? In this work we attempt to answer this question in multiple ways. We first establish a mathematical framework where natural systems are represented by a canonical form of edge-labeled hidden fc models called e-machines. Then, utilizing this framework, a variety of measures are defined and…

The information visualization pipeline serves as a lossy communication channel for presentation of data on a screen-space of limited resolution. The lossy communication is not just a machine-only phenomenon due to information loss caused by translation of data, but also a reflection of the degree to which the human user can comprehend visual…

1.2 billion users in Facebook, 17 million articles in Wikipedia, and 190 million tweets per day have demanded significant increase of information processing through Internet in recent years. Similarly life sciences and bioinformatics also have faced issues of processing Big data due to the explosion of publicly available genomic information…

Smart spaces, or smart environments, represent the next evolutionary development in buildings, banking, homes, hospitals, transportation systems, industries, cities, and government automation. By riding the tide of sensor and event processing technologies, the smart environment captures and processes information about its surroundings as well as…

This research thesis sheds lights on different aspects of the transition toward information societies. It consists of a collection of interrelated studies that analyze in more rigorous terms three main and complementary aspects of the transition (see Figure below). After and "introductory" CHAPTER ONE, the consecutive CHAPTER TWO of this…

Recommender systems aim to support users in their decision-making process while interacting with large information spaces and recommend items of interest to users based on preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly. Recommender systems are increasingly used with product and service selection over the Internet. Although…

Leveraging the knowledge of an organization is an ongoing challenge that has given rise to the field of knowledge management. Yet, despite spending enormous sums of organizational resources on Information Technology (IT) systems, executives recognize there is much more knowledge to harvest. Prediction markets are emerging as one tool to help…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…