www2012 – Australian Science

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: May 21, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/connected-and-free-world-wide-web-professionals-at-www2012/

test

The post Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012 appeared first on Australian Science.

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: May 21, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/internet-2/global-web-society-and-knowledge-at-www2012/

test

The post Global Web, Society and Knowledge at #WWW2012 appeared first on Australian Science.

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

test

The post The World Wide Web 2012: Making Sense of Microposts appeared first on Australian Science.