Projecting Yourself On-Line

Discusses the difference between how a student might project themself in social software and on a web page. Also discusses some of the risks of on-line presence.

A Brief History of the Web

The Web is now so ingrained in our lives that it is easy to forget that it is less than twenty years old. But the History of Web goes back much further, to the pioneering technologists who built the first hypertext systems and the men and women before them who imagined great libraries of interconnected information that would augment human intellect and drive civilization forward. In this lecture we will explore the pre-digital origins of the Web, look at how it developed into the mass communication system we have today, and speculate on the next stages of its evolution in the context of Web Science and Social Media.

The New Web Literacy

Web 2.0 is sometimes described as the read/write web, giving everyday users the chance to create and share information as well as to consume information created by others. Social media systems are built on this foundation of participation and sharing, but what is the mindset of these users, and are they quite so everyday as we might suppose? The skills and attitudes held by users can be described as their literacy, and there has been a lot of debate over the last few years about how to describe these literacies, and design for them. One field that has been changed radically by this notion is Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) where a fierce debate has raged about the potential of a new generation of highly literate digital natives, and Edupunks have argued for open and personal systems that challenge traditional models of institutional control. In this session we look at the arguments surrounding digital literacy and examine TEL as an example of how social media can change an application domain.

Power and Influence

Like any form of human interaction and communication it is possible to view Social Media as a means for the powerful to influence and control the less powerful. But what is power on social media, how might we measure or affect it, and does it translate to the real world? In this lecture we will look at the philosophical definitions of power, and explore how it has been analysed in social networks and social media systems. We will also look at the characteristics of social networks that impact on power, including Homophily, Heterophily, CyberBalkanization and Thresholds of Collective Action. Finally we will ask what evidence there is that power in social media can affect what goes on in the real world, and explore some real and fictional examples of protest to see what the consequences of social media actually are on sometimes violent political debate.

The Web 2.0 Development Survival Guide

Building software for Web 2.0 and the Social Media world is non-trivial. It requires understanding how to create infrastructure that will survive at Web scale, meaning that it may have to deal with tens of millions of individual items of data, and cope with hits from hundreds of thousands of users every minute. It also requires you to build tools that will be part of a much larger ecosystem of software and application families. In this lecture we will look at how traditional relational database systems have tried to cope with the scale of Web 2.0, and explore the NoSQL movement that seeks to simplify data-storage and create ultra-swift data systems at the expense of immediate consistency. We will also look at the range of APIs, libraries and interoperability standards that are trying to make sense of the Social Media world, and ask what trends we might be seeing emerge.

Mining Events from Multimedia streams, Jon Hare

peaker(s): Jon Hare Organiser: Time: 25/06/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The aggregation of items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextualise and effectively consume the torrents of information on the social web. This task is challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information being contextualised. In this talk I'll describe some of our recent work on trend and event detection in multimedia data streams. We focus on scalable streaming algorithms that can be applied to multimedia data streams from the web and the social web. The talk will cover two particular aspects of our work: mining Twitter for trending images by detecting near duplicates; and detecting social events in multimedia data with streaming clustering algorithms. I'll will describe in detail our techniques, and explore open questions and areas of potential future work, in both these tasks.

Mendeley: background information

Quick overview of mendeley plus a video of a talk about the startup process from 2010. Interesting from a new business model perspective

Data-Driven Text Generation using Neural Networks & Provenance is Complicated and Boring — Is there a solution?

Title: Data-Driven Text Generation using Neural Networks Speaker: Pavlos Vougiouklis, University of Southampton Abstract: Recent work on neural networks shows their great potential at tackling a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This talk will focus on the Natural Language Generation (NLG) problem and, more specifically, on the extend to which neural network language models could be employed for context-sensitive and data-driven text generation. In addition, a neural network architecture for response generation in social media along with the training methods that enable it to capture contextual information and effectively participate in public conversations will be discussed. Speaker Bio: Pavlos Vougiouklis obtained his 5-year Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2013. He was awarded an MSc degree in Software Engineering from the University of Southampton in 2014. In 2015, he joined the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group of the University of Southampton and he is currently working towards the acquisition of his PhD degree in the field of Neural Network Approaches for Natural Language Processing. Title: Provenance is Complicated and Boring — Is there a solution? Speaker: Darren Richardson, University of Southampton Abstract: Paper trails, auditing, and accountability — arguably not the sexiest terms in computer science. But then you discover that you've possibly been eating horse-meat, and the importance of provenance becomes almost palpable. Having accepted that we should be creating provenance-enabled systems, the challenge of then communicating that provenance to casual users is not trivial: users should not have to have a detailed working knowledge of your system, and they certainly shouldn't be expected to understand the data model. So how, then, do you give users an insight into the provenance, without having to build a bespoke system for each and every different provenance installation? Speaker Bio: Darren is a final year Computer Science PhD student. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering at Southampton in 2012.

What can Flickr photographs tell us about New York City?

In their second year, our undergraduate web scientists undertake a group project module (WEBS2002, led by Jonathon Hare & co-taught by Su White) in which they get to apply what they learnt in the first year to a practical web-science problem, and also learn about team-working. For the project this semester, the students were provided with a large dataset of geolocated images and associated metadata collected from the Flickr website. Using this data, they were tasked with exploring what this data could tell us about New York City. In this seminar the two groups will present the outcomes of their work. Team Alpha (Wil Muskett, Mark Cole & Jiwanjot Guron) will present their work on "An exploration of deprivation in NYC through Flickr". This work aims to explore whether social deprivation can be predicted geo-spatially through the analysis of social media by exploring correlations within the Flickr data against official statistics including poverty indices and crime rates. Team Bravo (Edward Baker, Callum Rooke & Rachel Whalley) will present their work on "Determining the Impact of the Flickr Relaunch on Usage and User Behaviour in New York City". This work explores the effect of the Flickr site relaunch in 2013 and looks at how user demographics and the types of content created by the users changed with the relaunch.