SIP Recap - Thursday

Here is a recap from the Social Information Processing Symposium:

1. Brian Skyrms (UCI), Signaling Games: Some Dynamics of Evolution and Learning
2. John Nicholson (USU), The Blind Leading the Blind: Toward Collaborative Online Route Information
3. Cosma Shalizi (CMU), Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind
4. Gustavo Glusman (Systems Biologist), Users, photos, groups, words: Analyzing mixed networks on Flickr
   
5. Luc Steels (Vrije U), Social tagging in community memories
6. Aram Galstyan (USC/ISI), Influence Propagation in Modular Networks
7. Adam Anthony (UMBC), Generative Models for Clustering: The Next Generation
8. Peter Pirolli (PARC), A Probabilistic Model of Semantics in Social Information Foraging
9. Hak-Lae Kim (DERI), int.ere.st: Building a Tag Sharing Service with the SCOT Ontology
10. Yu Zhang (Zhejiang U), Mining Target Marketing Groups From Users' Web of Trust on Epinions
11. Andrei Broder (Yahoo), Reviewing the Reviewers: Characerizing Biases and Competencies using Socially Meaningful Attributes (see Sihem Amer-Yahia)
    

The Wednesday talks were excellent. In particular, I really enjoyed:

• The subtleties of the blind leading the blind (see 2 above)
  
• Gustavo's unique way of analyzing Flickr relationships (see 4)
• Adam Anthony's overview of generative models that can be used in clustering (see 7)
• Pirolli's analysis of Lostpedia using LDA (see 8)
  
• Hak-Lae Kim's tag aggregator application (see 9)
• The use of socially meaningful attributes as presented by Yahoo's Andrei Broder (see 11)
  

SIP Recap - Wednesday

I'm here in Palo Alto, California attending the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford. So far, the Social Information Processing Symposium has been very interesting and exciting. So far, I've met some people doing some neat research. Today's presentations were the following (I've added links to those I could find online):

1. Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs), Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web
2. Ed Chi (PARC), Augmented Social Cognition
3. Tad Hogg (HP Labs), Solving the organizational free riding problem with social networks
4. Riley Crane (ETH), Viral, Quality, and Junk Videos on YouTube: Separating Content From Noise in an Information-Rich Environment
5. Yi-Ching Huang (NTU), You Are What You Tag
6. Julia Stoyanovich (Columbia), Leveraging Tagging to Model User Interests in del.icio.us
7. Steve Whittaker (Sheffield), Temporal Tagging: Implicit Behaviour Identifies Points of Interest in Complex Event
8. Georg Groh, Implicit Social Network Construction and Expert User Determination in Web Portals
   
9. Elizeu Santos-Neto, Content Reuse and Interest Sharing in Tagging Communities
   
10. Matt Smith (BYU), Social Capital in the Blogosphere: A Case Study (this was our presentation, of course)
    

I enjoyed all of the presentations, in particular I liked Bernardo's address which covered a variety of interesting topics, Ed's comments, Riley's trend analysis, Julia's talk analyzing del.icio.us hotlist generation and tag, Steve's flamboyant presentation, Georg's work (as it had some thoughts related to our work on Implicit Affinity Networks).

(Oh, and I lost my cell phone today.)

I'm looking forward to another great day tomorrow!