IWIS: Intelligent Web and Information Systems blogs

PhD for Ricardo Lage

Peter Dolog — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 07:54:39 +0000

On September 4, 2013, Ricardo Gomes Lage defended his PhD thesis on Methods for the Automatic Publication of Messages on Social Network Services.

UMAP 2014 hosted by IWIS

Peter Dolog — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 07:51:42 +0000

IWIS proudly announces that it will host the 22nd edition of the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization in collaboration with Visit Aalborg. The conference will be held in Hotel Hvide Hus in Aalborg, Denmark in july 2014. More information can be found at http://um.org/umap2014. We are all looking forward to meet you there.

Dagstughl Seminar

Peter Dolog — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:21:50 +0000

Peter Dolog will participate in one of the prestiguos seminars organized at Dagstuhl Castles. The seminar topic is on customizing service platforms: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=13171. Such seminars are by invitation only where experts on topics of the seminars are participating, working and discussing on advancements in the area.

Master Thesis 2013/2014

Peter Dolog — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:16:31 +0000

Master thesis topics for 2013/2014 starting from september 2013 are:

- hidden communities and relevant content in web social networks

- transactional management in service oriented environment on the web

Bried descriptions for each can be found in attached documents.

ICWE 2013 hosted by IWIS

Peter Dolog — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:13:19 +0000

IWIS proudly announces that it will host the 13th edition of the International Conference on Web Engineering in collaboration with Visit Aalborg. The conference will be held in hotel Hvide Hus in Aalborg, Denmark in july 2013. More information can be found at http://icwe2013.webengineering.org. We are all looking forward to meet you there.

PhD for Frederico Araujo Durao

Peter Dolog — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:21:18 +0000

On February 13, 2012, Frederico Araujo Durao defended his PhD thesis on Exploiting Tag-Based Personalized for Recommendation on Social Web.

Some Highlights of the CIKM 2011 Conference

riclage — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:27:51 +0000

From October 24 to 28, I attended the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), in Glasgow, UK. The conference had a number of good papers in a wide range of topics, including information retrieval, social network analysis and machine learning. The conference also had two keynote speakers that talked about, respectively, improving user interfaces for better management of information, and addressing the challenges that persist in search, storage and analysis of biomedicine data.

I attended the first keynote, where David Karger, a professor from MIT, introduced some of the research outcomes of projects from the Haystack group. Results showed better user experiences in terms of visualization, organization and sharing of information. List.it, the first project presented, is micro-note tool that can be added to Firefox. It focuses on the simplicity of adding simple, free-text notes right inside the browser, where users have the context at hand. In interviews, users highlighted ease/speed of use (35%), simplicity (20%), and “direct replacement for paper post-it” (20%) as the main reasons for using the tool. Usage patterns were also investigated, categorizing users in four main groups according to how they kept their notes.

Other tools, such as nb, were also concerned with keeping the context at hand. nb is a collaborative annotation tool integrated to a PDF reader. Notes can make references to contents of the PDF file and shared among other users of a class or group discussion. Similarly, FeedMe allows users to share in context a web page they are looking at. It also has a personalization component that recommends other users that are more likely to be interested in that information. Other projects, such as Datapress, were also presented with results from experiments. These show better user experiences when the tools kept the context of the user work and provided a personalized experience. More information can be obtained and the slides of the keynote can be downloaded from the official web site.

From the sessions, many good papers were presented. I will highlight three here. “A Probabilistic Method for Inferring Preferences from Clicks” utilizes interleaved comparison methods in click data from links in documents to learn ranking functions online. The Best Paper Award winner “Intent-Aware Query Similarity” by Guo, Cheng, Xu and Zhu besides proposing an interesting new method of computing query similarity, has a comprehensive review of similarity measures. Another good paper from Microsoft Research, “Semi-supervised Learning to Rank with Preference Regularization”, proposes a semi-supervised learning to rank algorithm. It builds on the assumption that similar items have similar preferences in terms of ranking.

Finally, on the last day of the conference, I attended the Second International Workshop on Web Science and Information Exchange in the Medical Web (MedEX 2011). Presentations focused on works investigating different questions related to web science in medicine and healthcare. In the workshop I presented the paper “Applicability of Recommender Systems to Medical Surveillance Systems” containing preliminary results of applying recommendation techniques to users of health surveillance systems. More details of the workshop and the slides of the presentation can be obtained from the official web site.

KES-2011, Kaiserslautern, Germany

Rong Pan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:12:28 +0000

I attended the "15th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems”, from 12 to 14 September 2011, Kaiserslautern, Germany .

The KES2011 was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Kaiserslautern, in conjunction with KES International.

KES International Conferences in Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Engineering & Information Systems have taken place annually since 1997, first in Australia, then in venues around the world, returning to the UK every three or four years. The KES annual conference regularly attracts several hundred delegates. KES 2011 provides an international scientific forum for the presentation of high-quality research results on a broad range of intelligent systems topics. The conference attracted contributions from 32 countries and 5 continents.

The Conference Scope has:
Generic Topics of Interest
Intelligent Applications
Emergent Intelligent Technologies

I did the presentation for “On Kernel Information Propagation for Tag Clustering in Social Annotation Systems” on 14th Sep, and got some comments for the future research work.

http://kes2011.kesinternational.org/index.php

The Final KiWi Review Meeting

Fred Durao — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:28:19 +0000

The Final KiWi Review Meeting took place in Luxemburg. In the one-day-meeting, KiWi was evaluated by the European Commission about the project achievements.

Sebastian started the meeting making a budget overview of KiWi. In the following, he showed a demo of the system. In a sequence I presented our ongoing work on enhanced tag clouds for content finding in KiWi. Karsten Jan (AAU), Daniel Grolin (Logica) and Peter Reiser (Oracle) presented the KiWi use cases. John Pereira (Salzburg Research) showed the dissemination activities of KiWi in last months. Sebastian closed down the presentations by outlining the main achievements, lessons learned, issues and looking ahead of the project.

After a short-break, the European Commission signalized that KiWi was successfully approved. Personalization was noticed by its improvement since the review.

Congratulations to all involved.

Fred Durao

WISE 2010 conference, Hong Kong

Guandong Xu — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:04:48 +0000

From December 12 to 14, 2010, I have attended 10th International Conference of Web Information System & Engineering (WISE 2010) which was held in the beautiful city of Hong Kong. The conference consists of one-day workshop and two-day main conference along with four keynote talks.

Four invited plenary speakers are both world-class renowned researchers in the areas of database and information science, who are Prof. Beng Chin Ooi from National University of Singapore, Prof. Edward Y. Chang from Google Research, Christian S. Jensen from Arhus University, Denmark and Kyu-Young Wang from KAIST, Korea. Their talks addressed research issues of scalable database services on the cloud, search and social integration, spatial web and ubiquitous DBMS. Among these talks, the topic on search and social integration has impressed me very much since it is very close to my research interest. Prof. Chang reported the latest research results from their team, especially using latent semantic analysis approaches such as LDA. After the talk, we also had more discussion on related issues and agreed in later I might have a chance to visit Google Research China.

My interested papers are mainly allocated in the sessions of social networks, web data mining, recommender systems and web search, which I was attending for listening and discussing. My paper was presented in social networks session, where audiences are particularly interested in using latent semantics analysis for web clustering. The main questions from audiences are the determination of latent semantics features. Interestingly, there are several papers addressing the research issues of social tagging systems from the perspectives of social networks, web data mining and recommender systems, but it seems less attention paid on the topics of tag ambiguity, redundancy and semantics. In addition, I chaired a session on web data mining, which attracted a large amount of interests from conference participants.

This next year conference will be held in Sydney, Australia.