conference – Australian Science

Science Expo: Enrich, Empower, Explore

Jessie — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:03:21 +0000

Students interact with enrichment exhibitors at Science Expo 2013: Derive and Integrate.

The Science Expo Youth Empowerment Group (SEYEG) is a student run, non-profit organization which aims to connect youth to innovators and enrichment opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). SEYEG was founded by five students who met at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in 2009. In 2010, the first Science Expo, a 2-hour conference held in Guelph, Ontario, brought together over 200 students, teachers and parents. Today, SEYEG includes a student and teacher outreach program, an alumni mentorship program (EXPOtential) and a creative competition (meriSTEM) in addition to an annual conference.
Science Expo 2013: Derive and Integrate, Science Expo’s fourth annual conference, took place this past Saturday at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Canada. The conference brought together over one hundred high-achieving students from across the province interested in pursuing STEM enrichment opportunities. With guest speakers, networking workshops and STEM challenges, the day was a huge success and the delegates returned home with a renewed passion for discovery.
The morning began with a delightful science magic show, where Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Oslinger showed off their impressive comedic and chemistry skills. A literal ice breaker followed, in which delegates were challenged to melt a bag of ice as fast as they could without using body heat. Students were even seen holding ice to light bulbs in the ceiling!
During lunch, delegates were given the chance to interact with exhibitors from various STEM programs. Youth Science Canada, Shad Valley, the University Ontario Institute of Technology, Engineers Without Borders and Australian Science are a few of the organizations with which students could get involved.
Guest speakers this year included:
• Dr. Steve Mann, the father of wearable computing
• Dr. Brad Brass, co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
• Paul Nazareth, business advisor
• Laura Suen, Canada’s Smartest Person, runner-up
Each presentation was inspirational and insightful, demonstrating important life lessons to attendees. Dr. Mann touched on the importance of thinking outside of the box when approaching a scientific concept, while Paul Nazareth and Dr. Bass illustrated the power of networking. Laura Suen mentioned the concept of happy accidents through the presentation of her past successes.

Delegates at Science Expo 2013 play with the Hydraulophone, a liquid instrument invented by Dr. Steve Mann.

The day also included presentations from the finalists of the meriSTEM competition. In its foundational year, meriSTEM is a competition that allows participants to create anything which captures an interesting aspect of STEM. Five finalists presented these creative projects, with the winner receiving a $500 scholarship.
For more information on Science Expo’s initiatives and how you can get involved, please send an e-mail to info@science-expo.org or check out their website at www.science-expo.org .

Cite this article:
MacAlpine J (2013-03-04 00:03:21). Science Expo: Enrich, Empower, Explore. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/news/science-expo-enrich-empower-explore/

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Call for Participation – PLNOG 2012 conference

Editorial Board — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:23:09 +0000

This year in Krakow, a real Polish Golden Autumn will accompany the next meeting of all operators, deployment companies, content providers and network administrators at the 9th edition of the PLNOG conference. In response to the expectations and suggestions of attendees of previous editions, lectures again will be divided into four independent paths with an even greater number of foreign speakers and a big emphasis on the educational level. In addition, there will be panels, unique workshops, peering session and lots of attractions.

PLNOG Conference is a unique conference dedicated to issues of maintaining and developing of ICT networks. This is an incredible opportunity to exchange experiences, broaden knowledge, attempt to solve common problems in networking industry and to meet fantastic people with similar interests. The participation of many outstanding professionals, two days of exciting lectures and fun during the evening event make the PLNOG conference a truly unique.

In addition, in September, EuroNOG Meeting will be held – the international meeting of experts responsible for the construction, maintenance and development of ICT networks, which is an extension of the initiative PLNOG to the European market. Subsequent meetings will be held each year in various cities in Europe. Our main goal is to build a platform to exchange experience between the operators, ISPs and companies responsible for deployment.

More about PLNOG, and the Call For Papers can be found at: http://plnog.pl/spotkanie-8-pazdziernik/call-for-papers/

Photo source

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Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012

Danica Radovanovic — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:09:06 +0000

This is the Part II from the highlights of the World Wide Web 2012 (#WWW2012) conference and here are some notes of mine but this time focusing on people, attendants who have been actively participating in the web professionals meeting and their impressions of the conference.

Beside numerous tracks, sessions, workshops, and tutorials – the #WWW2012 offered interesting keynotes by the leading and prominent professionals in Web industry, research, and policy. The main keynote speakers were Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of Web, Bernard Stiegler – a director of IRI (Innovation and Research Institute) at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy, Chris Welty – a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, and Neelie Kroes, a Vice President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner.

I asked some of the many colleagues, peers, and presenters about their preferred event on the World Wide Web 2012 conference, and what presentation/session/keynote/workshop made the best impression on them, and why. Here are some interesting thoughts.

New software paradigm, and Social Media in Response to a Crisis

I’ll start with volunteers at the conference since they had a great job to do and many of them are web researchers, students, and professors.

Jean-Tiare LE BIGOT: “I am currently studying telecommunications in Lyon (France) and attended the www2012 as a Volunteer. In my spare time, I try to create an archive of network status map. As a Volunteer, it has been quite tricky for me to choose and attend the presentations. Nonetheless, I had the luck to see all keynotes in the auditorium. As many of the attendees, I appreciated TBL talk on the values of the Web and also the debate of the following day. But the one I preferred was the one by Chris Welty. He talked about IBM’s Watson project and the steps which enabled Watson to defeat humans in the Jeopardy show. I really enjoyed the humor in his explanations when he showed us the biggest fails :). ”

Watson is an Artificial Intelligence system designed to answer real world questions as in the Jeopardy show or financial/medical world. During his presentation, Chris Welty stressed on point: Machine’s understanding is in no way the same as human’s. This is to illustrate this point that he showed us some failed answer which is obvious for a human being. An example:

Source

Cindy Hui: I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Rutgers University. My research includes modeling and simulation, social networks, social computing, and disaster research. I presented a paper at Social Web for Disaster Management Workshop titled “Information Cascades in Social Media in Response to a Crisis: A Preliminary Model and a Case study.”

“There were so many interesting workshops and sessions at WWW2012 that covered such a variety of topics, but I mostly attended the ones that focused on social networks and social media since those are my areas of interest. In particular, I was very excited about the Social Web for Disaster Management and the Making Sense of Microposts workshops since there’s such a growing focus on how to analyze and make use of these community-driven, collective information from various social media platforms. It really brings together people from computer science, social science and policy practitioners, each contributing important pieces to the overall focus.

Cite this article:
Radovanovic D (2012-04-28 00:09:06). Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/connected-and-free-world-wide-web-professionals-at-www2012/

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Global Web, Society and Knowledge at #WWW2012

Danica Radovanovic — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:02:08 +0000

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.

#www2012, Lyon Convention Center, Cité de Congrès. Photo credit: D. Radovanovic

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

Cite this article:
Radovanovic D (2012-04-26 08:02:08). Global Web, Society and Knowledge at #WWW2012. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/internet-2/global-web-society-and-knowledge-at-www2012/

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The World Wide Web 2012: Making Sense of Microposts

Danica Radovanovic — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:10:36 +0000

The World Wide Web 2012 conference is hosted this year in Lyon, France, from April 16 to 20, and will feature many prominent figures of the Web, internet technologies, and computer science. Earlier this year I wrote about it, both in the role as a PC member at one of the workshops and as an author. Now, I am very pleased to share that my paper I wrote with one of my colleagues for The World Wide Web 2012 #WWW12 conference – got accepted! Proceedings of the paper could be found here.

The paper examines one of the very popular social and communication dynamics on social networks and media, and it will be published for the ACM SIG Proceedings. In the paper I am arguing that the little things you think are pointless and does not have a practical information value – posts on Facebook and Twitter, Flickr comments, fav’s, the likes, the pokes and the tweets about food, weather, the mundane brief status updates – all turn out to have a vital social and communication value that even merits a new phrase – “phatic-posts

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ScienceOnline2012 – The power of the Scientific Community

Danica Radovanovic — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:23:16 +0000

I want to share some of my personal experiences from the past meetings of the Science online unconference as someone who have participated and attended the conference. I have attended Science Online twice: I have held a session on Open access e-resources in the networked world (2009) and held a workshop – Social Media for the Scientists (2010); interacted, being overwhelmed with positive energy, had wonderful conversations with scientists, journalists, educators, bloggers, Web developers, and scholars.

And it all started several years ago, thanks to the initiative and organization of Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, in Bora’s words:

“…upon my return from a bloggercon of some kind, I was enthused by the atmosphere at the event and thought to myself how nice it would be to have something similar but with a focus on science. I posted my thoughts on the blog and received many enthusiastic comments and e-mails. But I did not really have a good concept or ideas how to actually make it happen.

Enter Anton Zuiker. At one of our regular monthly blogger meetups which he organized at the time, Anton took me aside and suggested we work on this project together. It was do-able, he thought, if we did it smart.

Several months later, the first conference became a reality.

And people loved it and made sure we understood that this was not going to be a one-time event, but something we’ll have to organize every year. So we did.

Cite this article:
Radovanovic D (2012-01-13 10:23:16). ScienceOnline2012 – The power of the Scientific Community. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/science-2/scienceonline2012-the-power-of-the-scientific-community/
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WWW12 Conference: Transformation of the Social Web

Danica Radovanovic — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:55:43 +0000

This year the World Wide Web conference (or WWW12) is taking place in Europe (Lyon, France) . It was first conceived as an idea in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva while the first conference of the series was held in 1994. Ever since then World Wide Webn has became an annual event changing location between North America, Europe, and Asia. The official keynote speakers are announced, and we can expect interesting forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on current and emergent Web topics.

The WWW Conference series aims to provide the world a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardisation of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conferences bring together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures – indeed all who are passionate about the Web and what it has to offer; it is stated as the primary mission of the conference. The series provides an open forum in which all opinions can be presented, subject to a strict process of peer review.

What is interesting for WWW12 is that this year the specific focus is the most important topics on a global concern in information-communication and web technologies in our society. The focus is on the social evolution on how web changes our world (World Digital Solidarity), how to reduce digital divide and social inequalities using the web (remember previous discussions of mine on digital divides and what I said). Another is Web Accessibility initiative that aims on “web for all

Cite this article:
Radovanovic D (2012-01-11 07:55:43). WWW12 Conference: Transformation of the Social Web. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/internet-2/www12-conference-transformation-of-the-social-web/

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