technology-with-sense

How long do communities live?

2011-10-02T22:02:00.001+02:00

The question I'm solving in my dissertation is "Do any signs exist that indicate that community will die or will continue to exist successfully?". I don't mean any Shaman signs and i'm not trying to read coffee fortune. it is pure science.

I'm following the life of communities and community knowledge. A community is impossible to survive without users thus first of all the users need to be analyzed. I'm examining what are users behaviors, where a behavior is a broad term in Internet world.

One of the examples of such an examination was done in the paper Activity Span. The researchers analyzed survival patterns of users in web community. They were considering Yahoo Answers, Baidu Knows (Chinese) and Naver Knowledge-IN (Korean) knowledge sharing systems. The outcomes the researchers come to: for all three communities the users need to be trained to ask questions otherwise the questions remain without answers. As it was expected, people don't leave community if they got answers to their questions. The experts of communities stay longer there if their answers were awarded (best answers).

The users lifespan implies the lifespan of their community. Surely if there are clear indications of users that are going to finish their life in a community, it can be used as a sign that community will die. Let say if there are questions that nobody answers and answers nobody thanks for produce an alarm for community managers that something have to be done about their community or it disappear.

Things about communities are not so simple to figure out. A community consists not only of askers, answerers. Other types of users exist. Their behaviors are dependent on the activity in posting answers and questions, in participating in discussions, in sentiments they use in posts, in their intents. I state here that it is a complex task to describe a community as it has many participants with different behaviors, i.e different patterns. Thus it makes hard to imagine what happens with the community afterwards: is it die or survive?

Identity is not important for some communities?!

2011-09-21T18:50:00.000+02:00

I've just watched very interesting talk by Michael S. Bernstein about 4chan and /b/ discussion boards where more than 90% of users are anonymous. The threads in the boards are not archived but deleted after sometime (~3,9 minutes). Although the anonymity of users and very short life of threads, communities have their culture and policies.For example, if somebody posted without using a settled slang, he gets a "Lurk further" reply.

Such kind of communities haven't been researched a lot. It is interesting that in communities like 4chan nobody looks for a reputation of a user. Even so some posts have "long" life (~ 39 minutes) when other users reply. In the boards it is going only about posted content and not about who has posted.

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Science as well as analysis of Science: both require accuracy. #ectel11

2011-09-20T19:29:00.000+02:00

Because of pleasant personal reasons i can't attend the EC-TEL this year. Nevertheless i'm following what is happening in Palermo this year. Regretfully it is not easy. The WiFi seems to be very weak for enormous number of TEL researchers that are usually hanging in the Internet days and nights like Internet junkies.

I would like to sum here minor things that EC-TEL participants manage to post on 19 and 20 of September. Thanks for the tweets!

The EC-TEL seems to extremely interesting domain for Science 2.0 approaches. At least two posters at the conference are investigating the previous publications at the EC-TEL. I'm embedding both of them later here. It is interesting to see how differently the researchers explore and present the same topic of the posters. The most interesting question is to know who is the most important member in the community. In the "author-community" poster the list of key community members is presented in the table. In the "analyzing EC-TEL" poster there is no remark about key community members. However the poster includes the co-author network that highlights some of the EC-TEL participants. It is weird that a lot of names mentioned in the list of the first poster can't be seen in the second poster. Moreover, the co-authorship network of the first poster doesn't look like the co-authorship network of the second poster. In the first case the network has less disconnected clusters and the biggest cluster looks for me as it has more than 75 authors as it is presented in the second case. There are some more differences which i propose the readers to find.

i can imagine that the posters provoke a lot of discussions at the EC-TEL

Update: Thankfully to the discussion with Michael Derntl the difference is clarified. The first poster uses all papers from proceeding and workshops. The second poster uses only proceedings papers.
The EC-TEL Author-Community

Analyzing EC-TEL 2006-2010

Evaluation of recommender technology using multi agent simulation

2011-04-04T12:58:00.001+02:00

Recently i was invited to CELSTEC to make a talk about my ongoing research. I appreciated this opportunity and get some valuable feedback. Some people (Rory Sie and Howard Spoelstra) are working under team formation questions in CELSTEC as well.

Evaluation of recommender technology using multi agent simulation

View more presentations from petrushyna.

from senior researchers to young researchers

2010-11-29T14:51:00.000+01:00

"It would be great to know everything what my father knows. Just to be born with it. Or push a button and load all data in my head. No, no! The God had a different solution. We have to learn everything by ourselves." - Me

Anyway we may get a support from more experienced to less experienced peers. Such a knowledge transfer between seniors researchers and PhDs took place at Doctoral Consortium at EC-TEL 2010.

Young and senior researchers were divided into two groups. I was in the group with Mike Sharples, Ralf Klamma, Urlicke Cress, Christian Glahn, Tomaž Klobučar, Peter Scott, Ronald Klemke who shared their experience of PhD procedures with us. Here is the list fo questions and answers, I would like to share with you.

Q: How to write a paper/a thesis?

A: Write an abstract of a thesis and several sentences for each chapter. Show the abstract to other people. Contact experts in your research area. Some of them will be happy to answer you as they were PhD students earlier as well.

A: Read abstracts and PhD theses of others to understand the thesis structure.

A: Before writing get a clear idea what is already done, what is needed to be done and what can't be done.

Q: How to motivate myself to write a paper/a thesis?

A: In Open University young researchers have to report annually about their progress. The reports are presented not only for internal but as well for external reviewers.

A: After 6 weeks of your research write two pages about your plans in the future, the next report should be prepared in a year and the next again in a year. Start writing already at the beginning of the PhD.

A: Plan your papers. Plan a paper that you will write in a year, in two and three and follow the plan.

Q: How can i know that my research question is important?

A: Remember, there is no secret labs that are exploring exactly your question . If they were any, you would be already there.

A: What does important work means? There are only 3 people in the world that are doing their research about the structure of Jewish middeaval poetry and they find that their reseach is important.

A: It is important that your research is valuable for your advisor. Otherwise you have a problem.

Some other phrases the PhDs should not forget:

"PhD is a project but not the deal of a life. "

"You are not a scientist but you are training to be a scientist"

My presentation at the doctoral consortium of EC-TEL 2010

2010-10-06T10:58:00.003+02:00

Self-modeling and self-reflection of E-learning communities

View more presentations from petrushyna.

I would like to thank for the feedback i got from EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium participants. It helps me to narrow the domain of my research.

Collaborative filtering depending on time

2010-04-30T17:30:00.004+02:00

Here i would like just to report about very interesting paper i read this weak. Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamic shows the approach to catch the changes about customer preferences and items over a time in order to do appropriate suggestions about future preferences. Here are my thoughts how the approach can be adopted for learning environments where customers are learners and items are learner objects or other environment actors.

Firstly i would like to mention what I've learnt from the paper

concept drifting - temporal changes in user behaviour or item behaviour. In the scope of learning communities learners changes their preferences, ways of knowledge, favorite activities within a time. Not only learners, but learning objects may change: a lectures notes are rewritten, the collaboration environment is changed.
three approaches that solves the concept drift problem exist:

instance selection - don't pay attention to irrelevant data. In this case the data considered in a particular time-frame.
instance weighting instances get weights according to its relevance.
ensemble learning - the list of predictors exists and the more successful predictors get higher weights

In the paper the ideas of two last approaches are utilized but some other biases as well are considered.

Even, according to instance weighting the past events loose their influences, the preferences of users still dependent on their past. The parts of learners profiles are changing every day but there are some points that are stable on each of us: liking to read, understanding the information presented by video better then by audio, preferences to avoid formulas.

In ensemble learning only a fraction of behaviour is considered, e.g. preferences during preparing for an exam or collaborating with student colleagues. For each user a set of fractions is needed to be considered. Considering a huge number of learners such a generation of the sets is a complicated task.

Yehuda Koren proposed the solution that considers item bias, user bias, global average and user interaction. Afterwards, the time components was added.

How it can be applied in learning? - To be continued

Reflection to SNA workshop on JTEL Summer School

2009-07-07T00:40:00.000+02:00

From 30th of May till 5th of June i was happy to be one of the students, one of the lectures and one of the organizers of Joint European Summer School in Technology Enhanced Learning.

From my point of view the event was excellent even there are some things to change, nearly all students desire to participate again. I don't want go deep in details what is summer school and how it was as many bloggers have already done this: Annafant's Notizblog (Anna Lea Dyckhoff), Summer School Fun (Erik Duval's blog) , Pontydysgu (Graham Attwell's blog)

The other thing i want to do is the reflections of our "SNA Workshop" that we have done together with Ralf Klamma. The purpose of it was to introduce TEL people with SNA basics and explain what they can find applying applying SNA analysis for E-Learning communities.

First steps in social network analysis

View more presentations from telss09.

After presentation we asked students to calculate 3 simplest SNA centrality measures: degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. According to reactions of students i changed the tutorial for the workshop. Now it has many examples and easy enough for anybody to understand sometimes tough or weird mathematical stuff.

SNAWorkshop

Some of you asked me about evidences and examples of SNA applications in E-Learning world. One of the examples is excellent work from Ruth Breuer that made SNA analysis of 45000 European schools. The application called EVA and the paper work about it will appear on the EC-TEL'09

The other paper i read recently "Patterns of participation and discourse in elementary students’ computer-supported collaborative learning" from Lasse Lipponen, Marjaana Rahikainen, Jiri Lallimo and Kai Hakkarainen discusses benefits and flaws of high/low density(depends on degree centrality) in learning networks.

Within ROLE project we are analyzing media networks collaborations within learning environments. I think that in next decades there will be a lot of news to report about our achievements.

Wolfram Alpha on its first stage: not a Google-killer but Wikipedia extension based on expert-knowledge.

2009-05-17T11:36:00.009+02:00

Last months "Wolfram Alpha" got a high level of public awareness and became buzz word. Some even talk about danger that Google may confront with new computational engine, e.g. what-is-google-squared-it-is-how-google-will-crush-wolfram-alpha-exclusive-video or Alphram and Google.

May 15, 2009: at night(5PM PDT) Wolfram Alpha should be launched. because of hardware and weather problems the engine was published online some hours later.

The idea of the tool is that it brings expert-level knowledge to everybody. Anyway my first query was quiet obvious - "How to make pancakes?". What i would expect is the recipe that explains how to do pancakes but the engine replies with a complete information about pancake's content

I tried to look for personal learning environments, which are important for my work as well as network analysis. I got nothing as an answer. There are a lot of other unsuccessful request that spoil the impression. I like Eden Shochat comment about cloud computing

Anyway Wolfram Alpha succeeds when i was searching for linear algebra

The tool is from masters for masters. you can do a lot of cool things easily:

computing basic operations on matrixes
finding semantic information about a date
computing how fast the distance between two cities can be reached cologneOdessaLocation cologneOdessaLocation petrushyna
Publish at Scribd or explore others: Science research light

The Wolfram Alpha will play a huge role as a supportive tool for learning, same as Wikipedia, but providing deeper, non-novice knowledge . Though the usefullness of the tool, there is no or minor commercial benefit. Will Wolfram Research devote time to more common problems, e.g. "how to make pan cakes?" or will they focus on virtual services.

Even the engine seems to have a future, one has to spend some time to undestand its logic - so it is neither user-friendly nor enough intuitive. I advice to visit Examples before starting with searching.

Have you found what you search with Wolfram Alpha?

2009-02-28T22:34:00.010+01:00

From 25 February till 27 February i was a participant of Wirtschaftinformatics 2009. The conference take place in German-speaking countries of Europe(Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
I'm not "Wirtschaftinformatiker" hovewer the conference was so big that i found my tracks:COllaborative services and E-Learning.

It is always a competition between Informatics and Wirtschaftinformatics. Researchers from the first area insist on the fact that they are doing "real science" - hardcore, while the others
think that computer scientists doing something that is not always needed, without analysis what the user really require. There were some presentations/papers that i found poor from scientific point of view, e.g.
ideas were not new or the amount of dataset entries was very low. But there were some interesting presentations and interesting people.

I like Matthias Trier presentation of "Content-based Community detection in social corpora".
The ENRON mail dataset was analysed on the existence of clusters. The research was devoted to two types of networks:a network built according to who write mail to whom and a network built based on content similarity.The clusters
were then compared.and... no wonder!the clusters both types were not similar.people who are talking about similar things were not always connected by mails. I had the same impression in the research of E-learning mailing lists. Now it
is a challenge to find how structures of mail networks are dependent from the content the network members create.What input do actions of the network members have? does it important what roles, experience do the nodes have?

"Mine, yours, ...ours.Designing for princiipal-agent collaboration in interactive value creation" from Jasminco Novak forced me to rethink how important for users to see the system in its development state. Usually users do not know what they
want. Exactly they do but they can not describe it. And if the users will participate in design process (review the prototypes of software) as much as they can, it might be useful to create an efficient software. It is like you are creating
the design of your house.you can have it in your mind but if you use a software that can present how the room looks like then you can change your mind about the furniture, the color of walls, etc.

Thursday was interesting only because of the keynote speaker, Mark Soley. I admit that he is a great speaker. I don't think that he presented something new, otherwise he talked about state of the art. Anyway it was useful to know that 25 millions
computers are running with Windows 3.1. Surely it was one more event that had to be highlighted - Gala dinner in Vienna Rathaus - gorgeous and luxury. I felt myself like in a tale.

Last day the track E-Learning took place. "Der Einsatz von Online-Peer-Reviews als kollaborative Lernform" from WUW (Christine Bauer and Kathrin Figl) was about peer reviews that were done by students to analyse the papers that they read. We have
proseminar now for our bachelors and it may be efficient to ask students review papers of others. And surely it save the working time of assitents ;-)

My summary of the year

2008-12-25T23:19:00.032+01:00

I decided not to wait till 31st of December and write down the summary of this year today.

I started to work as a research assistant at Information Systems and Databases Chair in RWTH Aachen University from March, 2008. That is my first working position after i finish my master thesis. I'm happy to have helpful and positive colleagues. You can find some of them in blogosphere -Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Amine Chatti, and most in Facebook:)

My work starts with supporting my colleagues in writing EU ICT proposals. By the way, new calls are opened, if you are interested.

I'm working as well in CUELC project. It is EU Tempus project together with Cairo University(CU) and INT Sud Paris. We have managed to organize the visitation of Egyptians to European colleagues and vice versa. The first one was organized in Aachen as a workshop "Challenges for intercultural virtual campus systems" together with Forschungskolleg in Cologne. The main topic of discussion were E-Learning systems of universities(RWTH Aachen and Open University(we visited Heerlen OU - thanks Sebastian Kelle)) and intercultural communications.

Next visitation was organized by CU in Egypt where Katherine Maillet and me participated in ICT Learn conference. We got an actual status of PLEs and other E-Learning systems in Middle East.

Last day we had the productive discussion with Magda Fayek and Ahmed Hefny about next CUELC programming competition(the first one was finished recently - the happy winners

got there iPods Shuffles). I want to thank again colleagues Professor Samir, Professor Nevin, and Dr. Magda Fayek for great organization of our meeting in Cairo.

Some of my colleagues and i participated in annual PROLEARN Summer School. Numerous interesting contacts and lectures made the event very useful for many of PhD students and their future works. Our research group was presented by "Mobile and Contextualised Learning" workshop, done by Anna, Dominik, Ralf and me. Firstly we organised the set of Flashmeetings

Flashmeeting from 09.06

Flashmeeting from 10.06

Flashmeeting from 11.06

and after that we had the real presentation in Summer School. Truly, it was challengeable to organize all the staff, but a good lesson for us. Anyway, summer school left very bright memories. Great thanks to organization comitee: Katherine Maillet, Klime Poposki, Liliane Esnault, Ralf Klamma, Tomaz Klobucar, Ambjörn Naeve, Margit Hofer and many others.

I'm a member of International Recruiting Team of RWTH Aachen, organized within Excellence Initiative. The idea of the group is to promote our institution between students all over the world. In the frames of this activity colleagues from International Office and i was in the business trip in Sankt-Petersburg and Kiev. The trip was organized by DAAD and had all types of bustles - usual for post-soviet countries. I got acquainted with representatives of many German universities and colleges as well as with their institution marketing that is useful for us. I hope that next year we will manage to make more in so called "online brand management". I think that we should focus on different social network sites as well as social network services to inform and consult potential students and their forces(people who influence on choice of university) about RWTH Aachen.

September was full of conferences: firstly I-KNOW - together with Anna, Ralf and Yiwey we wrote Getting to "Know" People on the Web 2.0 paper; the second one was EC-TEL, where Ralf and I had a presentation about No Guru, No Method, No Teacher: Self-Oberservation and Self-Modelling of E-Learning Communities; the third was digital social network workshop on the day of GI, where we had the paper about our Media Base - The Troll Under the Bridge: Data Management for Huge Web Science Mediabases. For each of the events i made many of notes - now i understand that i should post it earlier)

In October our students, Christian Hocken and Dominik Renzel, organized annual Developer's Day, that has many interesting presentations. I like discussions.

Except of all these projects and conferences we have teaching tasks and this year i'm one of the supervisors of exciting Hightech Entrepreneurship and New Media practical course. Students of my group work with Localite company and develop a system that will help the company to organize products, contracts and correspondence in a better way(interactive and web2.0 based). I'm looking forward for their results.

Last, but not least was the organization of Christmas celebration in the chair together with other new colleagues: Sandra Geisler, Elisabeth Birk, Khaled A.N. Rashed, Man Cuong Pham, and Vaishak Belle. I hope that was a lot of fun, at least for the organization team.

Happy Holidays for all of readers!!!

Reflective patterns in online communities

2008-11-22T20:46:00.005+01:00

The rate of return (ROI) answers are the money gained or lost. It measures a percentage of the interest to the investment, e.g. you gained 5 € on your 10€ investment - the ROI is 5/10=50%. The ROI can be as well negative.

How can we analyse the interest of the investment in online communities? What events cause positive or negative activities in networks? There are some papers trying to explain the matter of things basing on communities contributions:

In Burke et al. the scholars calculated the probabilities of getting a response in discussion boards. The probabilities highly depends on the type of introduction("i'm lurking here for several months" - group introduction or "working as a professional in this area" - topic introduction) and sometimes on the type of group.

The wiki case is observed in "Wikis as social networks: dynamics and evolution", where the vandalism on a wiki page was detected if the page regulates the information flow within Wikis. Particularly, if the page is a hub between many other pages, the probability of trashing is high.

Anyway, it is more complex to find out the ROI for human interactions as to calculate the finance ROI, where monetary values are used. The investements in human interactions and the interests of these are not uniform and hardly comparable. What you know from the childhood: if you use rude words in the conversation, your listener will reply coarsely as well (in most cases). The rule "if ... then ... " is on the stage. If we have the pattern "rude question", will we get the pattern "rude answer"? Why yes and why now? What are dependencies? Shouldn't the activities/events/actions in communities be modeled? Then will modeling be useful to find the provoked profit?

In the informatics there is a bag of artificial intelligence problems like reasoning, learning, decision making. Those are aware or at least try to be aware of all the inconsistencies and uncertanties human interactions have. Those should be used to find the reflective patterns.

the time of data interoperability is comming

2008-10-24T13:03:00.004+02:00

The Web technologies change incredibily fast and i'm happy about this fact. We are getting a step closer to the idea of Web 4 - one sense, more interpretations.

In our paper "Getting to "Know" People on the Web 2.0" Yiwey Cao, Anna Glukhova, Ralf Klamma and I highlighted the problem of Web2.0 data interoperability and solutions of the issue.

A feed is one of not numerous Web uniform format. Now with Calais Yahoo! Pipes Web Service it is possible to combine feeds that are filtered by concepts defined in Open Calais repository. These are famous persons, companies, general concepts and many others. The number of concepts in repository has been multiplied since the start of the Open Calais project.

So now it is easier to collect the news you want to know about. Open Calais and Yahoo sort it for you. Things, that miss, are impact and attitude. You've never know how highly the feed is ranked and what do authors think about the topic. In our chair we are dealing with these flaws and hopefully will have interesting results to report.

How can our experiences be followed?

2008-07-29T14:26:00.000+02:00

Several days ago i read somewhere that experiences influence our emotions. That is a direct alarm for me to summarize that all operations we are performing in our life, at least virtual one, play roles in emotions we are producing. Therefore I can conclude that those two notions, operations (participatory design methods, media processes, user actions - call them as you want) and emotions are connected notions. One can either follow the actions accompanied with emotions like it was done in Situation Modeling and Smart Context Retrieval with Semantic Web Technology and Conflict Resolution or differentiate between those as different actors of a community system (when presented like an actor network model).

Some scholars follow the experiences through ontologies that help to summarize semantics in an ontology object and highlight connections between different entries. The approach applied in PALADIN: A Pattern Based Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Digital Social Networks uses a pattern approach. One can say that patterns can be like ontology objects when those are defined by the semantics and relationships between patterns are specified. Although a higher level of abstaction(for ontologies are concepts) is lacking, it is a moot point. The hierarchy can be specified by relations. Patterns exceed onlologies by a relatively easy language. So that it is natural for a user to construct a semantic knowledge base for his needs.

Emotional Web Intelligence

2008-07-24T11:11:00.005+02:00

I was always interested how it is possible to analyse non-cognitive side of human interactions. What i have done in my master thesis was the term frequency of categories words for a thread in a mailing list. The categories was kindly presented from James W. Pennebaker. He and his colleagues did a great job on creating the repositiry of the words that are classified according to the emotions/feelings people try to express in their writing. They use the repository now in their text analysis software.

A community of a mailing list was characterized by an emotional vector as well as by a structural vector. I examined all communities vectors in order to find similar communities. The results for clusters based on structure and clusters based on emotional analysis were different.

Analysing all the results i suppose that the situation we can see in a network structure is not correlating with the emotional preferences. Human interactions depend on many other different factors like prestige (created through a network structure), duties (put by a organizational structure) and many others.

We have to communicate to somebody we don't like to. But will such a communication be successful, efficient and enduring?

The human interactions can be perfectly visualized with the help of graphs:

and can be structurally analysed:

In our example the node 25 and the node 60 are not interacting, though they produce and consume the correlating number of words. However, those words possibly are produced by the node 26 who is between those nodes. Concerning to the other nodes, it is no evident correlation in characteristics was discovered. Anyway, if we switch to the node 36 characteristics we can’t find any value that will correlate with the cognitive characteristics of the nodes. The node 36 has no edges with the others and that might be a reason. Nevertheless, according to numerous experiments we could not prove the assumption that the interacting with each other members possess correlating or non-correlating emotional vectors.

Anyway emotions can be used during graph visualization so that it will be clear who is connected with whom non-cognitively(by colors, or by positions in a graph).

I would like to follow the community evolution and its dependency on emotions. Moreover it is useful to focus and discover other dependencies that influences on sucess or failure of communities.

Media operations

2008-07-02T17:44:00.020+02:00

Since i finished my master thesis a lot of questions left opened for me. One of those is the observation of media operations, somebody may call it events, others participatory design methods.

I defined the following table:

according to media centric theory of learning based on the
"The Knowledge-Creating company:How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation" from Nonaka and Takeuchi
and
"Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity" from Wenger.

The theory was utilized in "Do you know a similar project I can learn from?" Self-monitoring of Communities of Practice in the Cultural Sciences by Klamma, Spaniol and Jarke

The engaged actors are those presented on the model:

Today I find very interesting paper in the same direction. The scholars tries to discover communities based on mutual awareness: Blog Community Discovery and Evolution Based on Mutual Awareness Expansion by Lin, Sundaram, Chi, Tatemura and Tseng. I found a minor number of resources to the topic thus each new paper is a treasury.

Cross-Platform Aspects of the Social Web paper

2008-06-30T19:59:00.004+02:00

I'm making now some last corrections to the paper for the special track on Cross-Platform Aspects of the Social Web (CPASW '08) within I-Know conference in Graz:
CPASW

I've done a kind of survey about prevalent SNS (social network sites). After talking with my colleague, David, i decide to write once a full survey of SNS and websites with SNS elements. It might be good cited.