Social Computation of Emergent Networks on User-Generated Content
While the system properties and functions in the first generation Web-based information systems used to be system attributes within full control of system designers, certain attributes of social computation systems are beyond the control of software designers. To give some examples:
- The navigational structures and properties of social tagging systems are the result of emerging tagging behaviour among a large number of users rather than the result of deliberate design decisions of a single software designer.
- The utility of the product recommender system at Amazon is the degree to which the system maximizes usefulness of its functions for users, i.e. how easy is for users to find relevant products - this property is strongly mediated by the aggregate behavior of users.
- The profit of the recommender system at Amazon, i.e. the extent to which functions can be monetized arises out of the complex and dynamic interactions among people and computers.
In this talk, we will provide a short introduction of social computation systems and discuss some of the most prominent examples. In the second part of the talk we will show how social computation processes can be influenced by process and data analysis, as well as design of new algorithms.
As an illustrative example we will discuss the navigability of social tagging systems. To that end, we present a model of tagging systems as a bipartite graph of tags and resources and analyze network-theoretic properties of such graphs to assess the navigability of three tagging datasets with regard to different user interface restrictions imposed by tag clouds. Finally, we present a new set of algorithms for tag cloud construction that strongly influences the navigability property.
Short CV:
Denis Helic is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Knowledge Management (KMI), Faculty of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology, in Austria. Currently, he is also Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science.
He has a M.Sc. (Dipl. Ing.) in Computer Technics from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Zagreb, Croatia, Ph.D. in Computer Science (with honours) from Graz University of Technology, and the post-doctoral lecture thesis (venia docendi) for the field “Applied Computer Science” at the Graz University of Technology.
His research interests include network science, social network analysis, large information networks, multimedia and hypermedia information systems, the Web, semantic modelling on the Web, and E-Learning systems. He published more than 50 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences and won a number of conference best-paper awards. He is a member of the editorial board of several international journals and a member of programing committees of numerous internationally recognized computer science conferences.
He participated in a number of national and international projects such as CORONET (IST-1999-11634), EPHRAS, and EuropeMMM, SPRICHWORT, Austria-Forum.
Područje interesa Odjela za menadžment u tehnologiji i inženjerstvu (TEMS) obuhvaća znanosti i prakse menadžmenta potrebne za definiranje, primjenu i upravljanje inženjerstvom i tehnologijom. Specifične teme od interesa uključuju: razvoj, procjenu i prijenos tehnološke politike; istraživanje; dizajn i razvoj proizvoda; proizvodne postupke; inovacije i poduzetništvo; upravljanje programima i projektima; strategiju; obrazovanje i osposobljavanje; organizacijski razvoj i ljudsko ponašanje; promjene u menadžmentu; te socioekonomski utjecaj upravljanja inženjerstvom i tehnologijom.
