Global Web, Society and Knowledge at #WWW2012

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The 21st International World Wide Web Conference, (#WWW2012) for web professionals is over. Lyon convention center (Lyon, France) gathered many prominent computer and social science specialists, web and mobile technologies creators, internet researchers and scholars, developers, users and commercial ventures – actively engaging, interacting, writing, and communicating on web, Internet, social media, digital technologies, and emerging applications.

Recently finished #WWW2012 conference offered numerous workshops, sessions, tutorials, interesting  keynotes from 16 – 20 April 2012 in Lyon, France on different topics, and in particular on a global concern in information-communication and web technologies in our society. The main theme of the WWW2012 is Society and Knowledge, and Future direction of the Web , and through numerous sessions and presentations it covered social, technological,  and philosophical issues, which are critical web research subjects at the moment, as well as the actual topic of Internet and democracy, free access to services, freedom of expression, regulation and censorship, control and copyright.

Topics ranging from Web Search (information retrieval, ranking, relevance feedback, interactive search), Web Mining (clustering, classification, and summarization of Web data, predicting trends from web content, Web measurements, Web evolution), Social Networks (user-driven recommender systems, link prediction, social search, social mining, analysis of reputation), Data and Content Management, Semantic Web, Video on Web, as well as the topics on Security, Privacy, Trust and Abuse on the Internet were covered from different perspectives and approaches, but all related to the evolution of the Web.

I am selective here with some presentations, workshops, and papers since it was physically impossible to be present parallel at all events and tracks (see below some stats section on papers being presented). I didn’t count the number of participants at the conference, but I can estimate more than 2,000 participants in total.  These are just some of my thoughts jotted down on workshops, sessions, and presentations as Part I of the #WWW2012 highlights.

Making Sense of Micro posts: Big things come in small packages

As I wrote earlier this year for the second time around I was in the Program Committee for the #MSM12 or Making Sense of Microposts workshop at #WWW2012 that offered up a very interesting pool of presentations and papers.  In particular I would point out the keynote by Greg Ver Steeg – Information Theoretic Tools for Social Media who talked about interesting information theoretic measures for social media and how can we estimate these quantities, e.g., how well one user’s activity can predict another’s.  He also presented techniques for estimating entropies (the case for spatio-temporal events, for textual information, etc.)  You can find Greg’s presentation slides here.

My role at the #WWW2012 was also as a presenter of a research paper Small talk in the Digital Age: Making Sense of Phatic Posts. I was giving a talk on the phatic communication, and phatic posts – why tweets and Facebook updates on weather, food, and other trivia are very useful both for online communities and human relationships, and for the sustainability of the social network systems. I wrote earlier about here, here (The Scientific American), and here. Other interesting papers on microposts, sentiment analysis and semantics, information extraction, visualisation, search and networks – could be here found and downloaded.

The award for best paper went to the authors of the paper: Alleviating Data Sparsity for Twitter Sentiment Analysis. The authors presented the semantic feature set where they extract semantically hidden concepts from tweets and then incorporate them into classi