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From Wayback Machine to WebLab: Social Computing in the Age of Networks
Michael Macy (Cornell University & Internet Archive)
Social and
information scientists have stores of data on individuals and groups
but relatively little on human interactions, the basis of all social
life. That is likely to change due to the spread of
computer-mediated interactions that leave a digital record. The
flood of available on-line information from corporate web pages to
news groups, wikis, and blogs has the potential to open up new
frontiers in research on the diffusion of innovations and beliefs,
the self-organization of on-line communities, and computer-mediated
collective behavior. The Cornell WebLab project will create a
research laboratory for network science based on the Internet
Archive's 40-billion page Web collection. These snapshots of the Web
have been captured and archived every two months for nearly ten
years. The WebLab project will copy and reconfigure large portions
of this massive collection as a relational database that can be used
for research on social and information networks. The Cornell team,
composed of social, computer, and information scientists, will
develop, test, and refine the necessary tools as part of a series of
testbed research applications that track the diffusion of innovation
on the Web.
About the
Speaker
Prof. Michael
Macy is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cornell. In a series of
studies funded by the National Science Foundation, his research team
used computational models and laboratory experiments with human
subjects to explore how threshold effects in network interactions
might generate familiar but enigmatic social patterns, such as the
success and failure of social protest, the emergence and collapse of
fads, the spread of self-destructive behaviors, and the emergence,
persistence, and absorption of cultural minorities. Macy pioneered
the use of agent based models in sociology to explore the effects of
heterogeneity, bounded rationality, and network structure on the
dynamics and stability of social systems (http://hsd.soc.cornell.edu/Macy.htm).
He now heads a team of social, information, and computer scientists
who are building tools that will make the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/)
accessible for research on social and information networks (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept05
/NSFcybertools.dea.html). He also leads a Cornell initiative to
promote cross-disciplinary collaborative research and teaching on
social and information networks |
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Inventing the Future of Internet
Media
Marc Davis (Yahoo! Inc.)
The challenges of the internet cannot
be solved by technology alone. New methods of research and product
innovation are needed that enable the iterative analysis, design,
and development of "sociotechnical" systems and applications. The
challenges of creating large scale internet services that connect
billions of people, computational devices, and media assets into a
functional network require us to rethink computer science,
information science, social science, media studies, and design. This
talk will discuss new ways of reconceptualizing the objects and
methods of information technology research (especially in the area
of multimedia information systems) as well innovation processes for
corporate and academic research and development designed to address
the challenges and opportunities of inventing the next generation of
internet media systems and applications. We will also demonstrate
projects from Yahoo! Research that are researching and developing
new social media and mobile media technology and applications that
leverage contextual metadata and the power of communities to enable
people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media content
(especially photos, video, and audio) on the global internet.
About the Speaker
Prof. Marc Davis is the Founding Director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Prof. Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.
Prof. Davis' research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production, sharing, and reuse. Garage Cinema Research is researching and developing: Mobile Media Metadata (context-aware mobile media technology and applications that leverage contextual metadata-spatial, temporal and social-to infer media content and support media sharing and reuse); the Social Uses of Personal Media (social science and design research to learn how and why people use digital imaging in order to support the design of next generation mobile media applications); Media Streams Metadata Exchange (media metadata framework for annotating, retrieving, sharing, and remixing media on the Web); Active Capture (interactive cameras that use signal processing and computer-human interaction to capture high quality, reusable, annotated media assets); and Adaptive Media (adaptive media templates and automatic editing functions to mass customize and personalize media).
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Smart Web Access Everywhere
Rainer Malaka (University of Bremen,
Germany)
Ubiquitous Web
access and access to information services for mobile users is not
only a question of connectivity and mobile network protocols. Since
classical interfaces such as large displays, keyboard and mouse are
not available, more intelligent systems are needed for adequate
access to information on the web. Ideally, such systems should adapt
to the user and allow for multimodal access to the Internet. Thus,
information systems for mobile users need additional context
information for delivering services that adapt to the user’s
situation. In simple systems, this additional context is just given
as spatial coordinates. For more complex and intelligent systems,
more detailed models of both the spatial context and user situations
are needed. The Semantic Web is one attempt to enrich IT systems
with semantics and to allow for more intelligent services. This can
be combined with Ubiquitous Computing for building smart assistants
that know about the user's context and can, for instance, answer to
questions like "How big is mount Fuji" with. The talk will present
some present research work of EML and the Digital Media Group at the
University of Bremen on rich semantic services for mobile users. In
these projects various techniques ranging from ontologies, context
models, and semantic analysis of texts to image recognition are
combined in order to allow for ubiquitous knowledge access.
About the Speaker
Prof.
Rainer Malaka is Professor and Chair for Digital Media in the
Computer Science Department of the University of Bremen, Germany.
Until recently he headed the research department of the European
Media Laboratory (EML). Dr. Malaka joined EML in 1997 and continues
to work for EML as a scientific consultant. At EML, he started a
research group that works on projects dealing with mobile assistance
systems, language understanding, geographical information systems,
and computer vision. He managed a number of research projects that
are conducted in cooperation with various national and international
institutes and companies. Before he joined EML, he worked as a
scientist at the University of Karlsruhe on neural networks and did
research on modeling the learning mechanisms in biological brains.
The focus of Dr. Malaka work are intelligent mobile systems.
Together with his research group he works on making information
systems context- and user-aware. In his talk, he will present
results from the SmartWeb-project that aims at bringing the semantic Web to mobile devices and other projects he was involved in. |
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