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Publications

Publications by Mariana Curado Malta

2023

A coalition formation framework of smallholder farmers in an agricultural cooperative

Authors
Sarkar, S; Biswas, T; Malta, MC; Meira, D; Dutta, A;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Agricultural cooperatives remain a significant component of the food and agriculture industry to help the stakeholders to provide services and have opportunities for themselves. One of the aims of an agricultural cooperative is to answer to the needs within the communities of the farmers. Agricultural cooperatives enable individual farmers to increase productivity and maximise their social welfare. Together the farmer members of an agricultural cooperative can buy input supplies cheaper and sell more of their products in larger markets at higher prices, which is not possible for an individual smallholder farmer otherwise. Some studies have shown that farmers who were members of cooperatives have gained higher revenue for their products and spent less on input. However, organising the hundreds of farmers into smaller groups to perform collective farming and marketing is crucial to strengthening their position in the food and agriculture industry. Thereby, in our work, we consider an agricultural cooperative of smallholder farmers as a multi-agent based coalitional model, where coalitions are formed based on the similarity among the smallholder farmers. In this paper, we propose a model and implement a heuristic-based algorithm to find the disjoint partition of the agents set. We evaluate the model and the algorithm based on the following criteria: (i) individual gain, (ii) runtime analysis, (iii) solution quality, and (iv) scalability. We theoretically prove that our coalitional model of an agricultural cooperative has conciseness, expressiveness and efficiency properties. Experimental results confirm that our algorithm is time efficient and scalable. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that our algorithm generates a solution within a bound of the optimal solution. We also show that our coalition model generates positive revenue for the smallholder farmers and the payoff division rule is individual rational. In addition, we generate a new dataset in the context of an agricultural cooperative to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed coalitional model of the cooperative.

2021

Identifying and ranking super spreaders in real world complex networks without influence overlap

Authors
Maji, G; Dutta, A; Malta, MC; Sen, S;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
In the present-days complex networks modeled on real-world data contain millions of nodes and billions of links. Identifying super spreaders in such an extensive network is a challenging task. Super spreaders are the most important or influential nodes in the network that play the central role during an infection spreading or information diffusion process. Depending on the application, either the most influential node needs to be identified, or a set of initial seed nodes are identified that can maximize the collective influence or the total spread in the network. Many centrality measures have been proposed to rank nodes in a complex network such as 'degree', 'closeness', 'betweenness', 'coreness' or 'k-shell' centrality, among others. All have some kind of inherent limitations. Mixed degree decomposition or m-shell is an improvement over k-shell that yields better ranking. Many researchers have employed single node identification heuristics to select multiple seed nodes by considering top-k nodes from the ranked list. This approach does not results in the optimal seed nodeset due to the considerable overlap in total spreading influence. Influence overlap occurs when multiple nodes from the seed nodeset influence a specific node, and it is counted multiple times during total collective influence computation. In this paper, we exploit the 'node degree', 'closeness' and 'coreness' among the nodes and propose novel heuristic template to rank the super spreaders in a network. We employ k-shell and m-shell as a coreness measure in two variants for a comparative evaluation. We use a geodesic-based constraint (enforcing a minimum distance between seed nodes) to select an initial seed nodeset from that ranked nodes for influence maximization instead of selecting the top-k nodes naively. All models and metrics are updated to avoid overlapping influence during total spread computation. Experimental simulation with the SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered) spreading model and an evaluation with performance metrics like spreadability, monotonicity of ranking, Kendall's rank correlation on some benchmark real-world networks establish the superiority of the proposed methods and the improved seed node selection technique.

2020

Influential spreaders identification in complex networks with improved k-shell hybrid method

Authors
Maji, G; Namtirtha, A; Dutta, A; Malta, MC;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Identifying influential spreaders in a complex network has practical and theoretical significance. In applications such as disease spreading, virus infection in computer networks, viral marketing, immunization, rumor containment, among others, the main strategy is to identify the influential nodes in the network. Hence many different centrality measures evolved to identify central nodes in a complex network. The degree centrality is the most simple and easy to compute whereas closeness and betweenness centrality are complex and more time-consuming. The k-shell centrality has the problem of placing too many nodes in a single shell. Over the time many improvements over k-shell have been proposed with pros and cons. The k-shell hybrid (ksh) method has been recently proposed with promising results but with a free parameter that is set empirically which may cause some constraints to the performance of the method. This paper presents an improvement of the ksh method by providing a mathematical model for the free parameter based on standard network parameters. Experiments on real and artificially generated networks show that the proposed method outperforms the ksh method and most of the state-of-the-art node indexing methods. It has a better performance in terms of ranking performance as measured by the Kendall's rank correlation, and in terms of ranking efficiency as measured by the monotonicity value. Due to the absence of any empirically set free parameter, no time-consuming preprocessing is required for optimal parameter value selection prior to actual ranking of nodes in a large network.

2017

Towards Interoperability in the European Poetry Community: The Standardization of Philological Concepts

Authors
Bermúdez-Sabel, H; Malta, MC; Gonzalez-Blanco, E;

Publication
LANGUAGE, DATA, AND KNOWLEDGE, LDK 2017

Abstract
This paper stems from the Poetry Standardization and Linked Open Data project (POSTDATA). As its name reveals, one of the main aims of POSTDATA is to provide a means to publish European poetry (EP) data as Linked Open Data (LOD). Thus, developing a metadata application profile (MAP) as a common semantic model to be used by the EP community is a crucial step of this project. This MAP will enhance interoperability among the community members in particular, and among the EP community and other contexts in general (e.g. bibliographic records). This paper presents the methodology followed in the process of defining the concepts of the domain model of this MAP, as well as some issues that arise when labeling philological terms.

2013

A method for the development of Dublin core application profiles (me4dcap v0.2): Detailed description

Authors
Malta, MC; Baptista, AA;

Publication
Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications

Abstract
Our research in progress project aims the design of a method for the development of Dublin Core Application Profiles (Me4DCAP). This paper describes Me4DCAP V0.2, an early version of a method for the development of DCAP. The development of Me4DCAP was based on a Design Science Research methodological approach and has as starting points the Singapore framework for DCAP and the Rational Unified Process; integrates knowledge from: (i) the practices of the metadata community concerning DCAP development, and (ii) software development processes and techniques, focusing on the early stages of the processes that deal with data modeling. Me4DCAP establishes a way for the development of a DCAP. It establishes which are the activities, when they should take place, how they interconnect, and which deliverables they will bring about; it also suggests which techniques should be used to build these deliverables. © DCMI 2013.

2014

Social and solidarity economy web information systems: State of the art and an interoperability framework

Authors
Malta, MC; Baptista, AA; Parente, C;

Publication
Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations

Abstract
This paper presents the state of the art on interoperability developments for the social and solidarity economy (SSE) community web based information systems (WIS); it also presents a framework of interoperability for the SSE' WIS and the developments made in a research-in-progress PhD project in the last 3 years. A search on the bibliographic databases showed that so far there are no papers on interoperability initiatives on the SSE, so it was necessary to have other sources of information: a preliminary analysis of the WIS that support SSE activities; and interviews with the representatives of some of the world's most important SSE organisations. The study showed that the WIS are still not interoperable yet. In order to become interoperable a group of the SSE community has been developing a Dublin Corre Application Profile to be used by the SSE community as reference and binding to describe their resources. This paper also describes this on-going process. Copyright © 2014, IGI Global.

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