Stephan Doerfel

Enhancing Social Interactions at Conferences

Abstract Conferator is a novel social conference system that provides the management of social interactions and context information in ubiquitous and social environments. Using RFID and social networking technology, Conferator provides the means for effective management of personal contacts and according conference information before, during and after a conference. We describe the system in detail, before we analyze and discuss results of a typical application of the Conferator system. Zusammenfassung Als ein neuartiges soziales Konferenzmanagementsystem ermöglicht der Conferator die einfache Verwaltung sozialer Beziehungen und Interaktionen sowie das Management von konferenzspezifischen Informationen sowohl vor, während als auch nach einer Konferenz. Basierend auf RFID Technik gekoppelt mit sozialen Netzen bietet der Conferator die Möglichkeit, einfach und effektiv persönliche Kontakte und Informationen wie etwa den Konferenzplan zu verwalten. Wir beschreiben das System und präsentieren Analyseergebnisse in einem typischen Konferenz-Anwendungsszenario.

Face-to-face contacts at a conference: dynamics of communities and roles

This paper focuses on the community analysis of conference participants using their face-to-face contacts, visited talks, and tracks in a social and ubiquitous conferencing scenario. We consider human face-to-face contacts and perform a dynamic analysis of the number of contacts and their lengths. On these dimensions, we specifically investigate user-interaction and community structure according to different special interest groups during a conference. Additionally, using the community information, we examine different roles and their characteristic elements. The analysis is grounded using real-world conference data capturing community information about participants and their face-to-face contacts. The analysis results indicate, that the face-to-face contacts show inherent community structure grounded using the special interest groups. Furthermore, we provide individual and community-level properties, traces of different behavioral patterns, and characteristic (role) profiles.

Ubicon and its applications for ubiquitous social computing

The combination of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which integrates different but complementary methods, techniques, and tools. In this paper, we focus on the Ubicon platform, its applications, and a large spectrum of analysis results. Ubicon provides an extensible framework for building and hosting applications targeting both ubiquitous and social environments. We summarize the architecture and exemplify its implementation using four real-world applications built on top of Ubicon. In addition, we discuss several scientific experiments in the context of these applications in order to give a better picture of the potential of the framework, and discuss analysis results using several real-world data sets collected utilizing Ubicon.

An analysis of tag-recommender evaluation procedures

Since the rise of collaborative tagging systems on the web, the tag recommendation task -- suggesting suitable tags to users of such systems while they add resources to their collection -- has been tackled. However, the (offline) evaluation of tag recommendation algorithms usually suffers from difficulties like the sparseness of the data or the cold start problem for new resources or users. Previous studies therefore often used so-called post-cores (specific subsets of the original datasets) for their experiments. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale experiment in which we analyze different tag recommendation algorithms on different cores of three real-world datasets. We show, that a recommenders performance depends on the particular core and explore correlations between performances on different cores.

Resource-aware on-line RFID localization using proximity data

This paper focuses on resource-aware and cost-effective indoor-localization at room-level using RFID technology. In addition to the tracking information of people wearing active RFID tags, we also include information about their proximity contacts. We present an evaluation using real-world data collected during a conference: We complement state-of-the-art machine learning approaches with strategies utilizing the proximity data in order to improve a core localization technique further.

Ubicon: Observing Physical and Social Activities

The connection of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which is combining two prominent areas of computer science. In this paper, we tackle this topic from different angles: We describe data mining methods for ubiquitous and social data, specifically focusing on physical and social activities, and provide exemplary analysis results. Furthermore, we give an overview on the Ubicon platform which provides a framework for the creation and hosting of ubiquitous and social applications for diverse tasks and projects. Ubicon features the collection and analysis of both physical and social activities of users for enabling inter-connected applications in ubiquitous and social contexts. We summarize three real-world systems built on top of Ubicon, and exemplarily discuss the according mining and analysis aspects.

The Role of Cores in Recommender Benchmarking for Social Bookmarking Systems

Social bookmarking systems have established themselves as an important part in today’s Web. In such systems, tag recommender systems support users during the posting of a resource by suggesting suitable tags. Tag recommender algorithms have often been evaluated in offline benchmarking experiments. Yet, the particular setup of such experiments has rarely been analyzed. In particular, since the recommendation quality usually suffers from difficulties such as the sparsity of the data or the cold-start problem for new resources or users, datasets have often been pruned to so-called cores (specific subsets of the original datasets), without much consideration of the implications on the benchmarking results. In this article, we generalize the notion of a core by introducing the new notion of a set-core, which is independent of any graph structure, to overcome a structural drawback in the previous constructions of cores on tagging data. We show that problems caused by some types of cores can be eliminated using set-cores. Further, we present a thorough analysis of tag recommender benchmarking setups using cores. To that end, we conduct a large-scale experiment on four real-world datasets, in which we analyze the influence of different cores on the evaluation of recommendation algorithms. We can show that the results of the comparison of different recommendation approaches depends on the selection of core type and level. For the benchmarking of tag recommender algorithms, our results suggest that the evaluation must be set up more carefully and should not be based on one arbitrarily chosen core type and level.

Leveraging publication metadata and social data into FolkRank for scientific publication recommendation

The ever-growing flood of new scientific articles requires novel retrieval mechanisms. One means for mitigating this instance of the information overload phenomenon are collaborative tagging systems, that allow users to select, share and annotate references to publications. These systems employ recommendation algorithms to present to their users personalized lists of interesting and relevant publications. In this paper we analyze different ways to incorporate social data and metadata from collaborative tagging systems into the graph-based ranking algorithm FolkRank to utilize it for recommending scientific articles to users of the social bookmarking system BibSonomy. We compare the results to those of Collaborative Filtering, which has previously been applied for resource recommendation.

What Users Actually Do in a Social Tagging System: A Study of User Behavior in BibSonomy

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today’s Web and have attracted the interest of our research community in a variety of investigations. Henceforth, several aspects of social tagging systems have been discussed and assumptions have emerged on which our community builds their work. Yet, testing such assumptions has been difficult due to the absence of suitable usage data in the past. In this work, we thoroughly investigate and evaluate four aspects about tagging systems, covering social interaction, retrieval of posted resources, the importance of the three different types of entities, users, resources, and tags, as well as connections between these entities’ popularity in posted and in requested content. For that purpose, we examine live server log data gathered from the real-world, public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our empirical results paint a mixed picture about the four aspects. Although typical assumptions hold to a certain extent for some, other aspects need to be reflected in a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the understanding of social tagging systems and the way they are used on the Web. We make the dataset used in this work available to other researchers.

How social is social tagging

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in todays web and have attracted the interest of our research community in a variety of investigations. This has led to several assumptions about tagging, such as that tagging systems exhibit a social component. In this work we overcome the previous absence of data for testing such an assumption. We thoroughly study social interaction, leveraging for the first time live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system \bibs. Our results indicate that sharing of resources constitutes an important and indeed social aspect of tagging.