droga ewakuacyjna

Review of "It’s a Network, Not an Encyclopedia: A Social Network Perspective on Wikipedia Collaboration"

2010-05-18T13:17:00.004+02:00

This paper investigates the relationship between Wikipedia article's centrality (degree and eigenvector centrality) and articles quality, sampling 300 articles (out of 15000) from the Wikiproject Medicine, and studying a 300x1800 two-mode network (articles by editors, where nodes are articles and ties are the number of editors who contributed to each pair of articles).

The dependent variable is article's quality (on a 5-point Likert scale, assigned by the Wikipedia community), and the independent variables are degree centrality and eigenvector centrality; moreover the author considered a set of control variables, related to topic importance, popularity of articles and other measures of direct collaboration.

In general, the results indicate that articles' centrality is positively correlated to articles' quality.

It’s a Network, Not an Encyclopedia

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Semantic Enrichment of Memory Archives: Case Study on Jurka.net

2009-11-26T19:08:00.002+01:00

Sonet Demonstration LiveMemories 26 11 09

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Today I presented the first case study of the LiveMemories project: a joint work with SoNet, Opera Universitaria, Portobeseno, Cooperativa Mercurio, and Studiare a Trento.

In summary, the goal of the case study was to assess which web platforms people in Trentino would use for sharing memories, and how; and to collect memories from the local community and suggest how LiveMemories techniques can enrich them.

Our main activities in the case study were to:

Identify a specific community of people (in this case, localized in a specific district of Trento)
Test different ways in which they might share memories, both

Offline: interviews, events, collection of memories in a photo format
Online: providing web tools (Flickr, Facebook, Jurka.net)

and reported how they used them, and what was most successful
Imagine what kind of web services LM could offer to enrich memory archives

So, we chose to investigate the collection of memories, the fostering of a community, and the potential value of LiveMemories to such communities in a geographically limited case study, where the memories refer to a well defined place:
The district of San Bartolomeo

Enjoy!

Here's the agenda of the whole day:

10.00 Welcome
Andrea Zanotti (FBK – President)
Paolo Traverso (FBK‐ Centre for Information Technology‐irst – Director)

10.15 LiveMemories Demonstration Day
Bernardo Magnini (FBK‐irst)

10.30 Demonstrator 1: Content Extraction and Content Integration on Newspaper Archives (Case Study on L’Adige and Vita Trentina)
Massimo Poesio (Uni. Trento), Luciano Serafini (FBK‐irst) and Paul Lewis (Uni. Southampton)

11.00 Break

11.30 Demonstrator 2: Semantic Enrichment of Memory Archives (Case Study on Jurka.net)
Paolo Massa (FBK‐irst) and Michela Ferron (FBK‐irst)

12.00 Invited Talk: Semantic Search and Different Visualization Models in Media Archives
Waltraud Wiedermann (Austria Press Agentur – CEO), Rüdiger Baumberger (Austria Press Agentur – Technical Director)

12.30 Invited Demonstration: Visual Media Analysis for the General Public
Michael Granitzer and Wolfgang Kienreich (Know Centre – Graz)

13.00 Buffet lunch

14.00 Demonstrator 3: Content Presentation (Case Study on Blog Stories)
Fausto Giunchiglia (UniTN)

14.30 Demonstrator 4: Searching, Navigating and Visualizing Digital Memories: Trento's Municipal Assembly case study
Marco Ronchetti (UniTN)

15.00 Conclusion
Paolo Traverso (FBK‐irst – Director)

Special Guests

Luciano Paris (SIE – CEO)
Marta DeMarchi (RTTR – President)

I hold my breath. Do you?

2009-08-05T15:27:00.002+02:00

I was browsing the Internet looking for more information on continuous partial attention and how Linda Stone defines it, when I found this interesting issue of "email apnea". This post explains better what I am talking about. One day, Linda Stone realized that while checking emails, exploring the messages and thinking what to answer first, what to do next, etc., she was holding her breath.
She wondered if this could have somehow some effect on her (and I wonder it too). So she called Dr. Margaret Chesney at the National Institute of Health (NIH). In brief, Chesney explained that breath-holding and hyperventilating can affect our body's balance of oxygen, CO2, and NO.
NO is Nitric oxide, which is used by our body to fight different kinds of infections, and tumors. It is associated with learning, memory, sleeping, feeling pain, and probably depression, and it also mediates inflammations and rheumatism.

Breath-holding seems also to be related to the vagus nerv, which goes from the head to the neck, chest and abdomen, and mediates the autonomic nervous system, which is formed by the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Now, shallow breathing, breath-holding and hyperventilating "activate" our sympathetic nervous system in a "fight or flight" response, which causes the liver to dump glucose and cholesterol into our blood, our heart rate to increase, our sense of satiety to be compromised, and our body to anticipate the physical activity that once was associated with a physical fight or flight response. Quite ironically, when our only physical activity is sitting and responding to email, we're sort of "all dressed up with nowhere to go."

Well, moral of the story: breathe!

Michela @UAB (Barcelona): Theory, methods and applications of social networks. Dynamic Analysis with SIENA

2009-07-07T00:00:00.005+02:00

This was the first day here @UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and I feel like I have learned much more in one day than in one month on my own. Wow...
Anyway, the course is an introduction to the theory and methods of social networks and especially in dynamic analysis of social networks with SIENA, but it also includes some sessions about other software and other kinds of analysis.
Today José Luis Molina introduced social network analysis and the three main kinds of social networks: sociocentric, egocentric and personal network. The major field here at UAB is on ego and personal networks.
In the morning we analysed a sociocentric network with UCINET and visualized it with Netdraw, and in the afternoon we created our own personal network through Egonet, a software that allows you to create and manage questionnaires with different "name generators" and many other characteristics of 'ego' and 'alters'.
Tomorrow, with Jürgen Lerner, we will see Visone, a software for network visualization.
I have already received some useful suggestions concerning the research I am carrying on with my group at FBK, and I am sure I will learn many other things by the end of the week, especially with regard to dynamic network analysis, which will be explained through SIENA by William J. Burk, and which (I discovered) is the field of study of one of the participant to the course, who works with Netlogo.

Memoria tra Passato e Futuro - June 3, 2009

2009-06-01T14:53:00.007+02:00

The workshop "Memoria tra Passato e Futuro" has been organized in the frame of Livememories, and will be held at Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Trento, Via S. Croce 77, on the 3rd of June 2009.
The workshop aims at discussing on the conception of collective memory, its meaning and its social role considering the newest advancement in the Web technologies. An interdisciplinary discussion on these issues will be of a central part of the workshop. More information can be found on livememories.org.

Workshop Programme:

9.00	Welcome speech - Massimo Poesio, Bernardo Magnini
9.30	Kieron O’Hara - Memories for life: individual, social and technological contributions to extended cognition
10.30	Coffee break
11.00	Alessandro Cavalli - The social construction of collective memories
12.00	Maurizio Giangiulio - Le società ricordano? Maurice Halbwachs e dintorni
13.00	Lunch
14.30	Stef Scagliola, Franciska de Jong - Access to content: the after sales of conducting oral theories
15.30	Anna Lisa Tota - Public memory and cultural trauma theories
16.30	Coffee break
17.00	Final discussion

Scientific Committee

Silvia Gherardi - Sociology and social research Department, UniTN
Maurizio Giangiulio - Philosophy, History and Cultural heritage, UniTN
Bernardo Magnini - HLT Research Unit, FBK
Massimo Poesio - Information Engineering and Computer Science Department/CIMEC, UNiTN

Jurka! May, 19th at San Bartolameo (Trento)

2009-05-13T10:57:00.002+02:00

Showcase selection for the LiveMemories project

2009-05-01T13:02:00.002+02:00

Yesterday we presented our joint work on the case study of LiveMemories to the project's partners , and proposed the showcase for the first year.
Here it is!

Showcase selection for LiveMemories

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WereYouThere? A social network for memories

2009-04-10T10:58:00.003+02:00

WereYouThere is a social network which brings people together through shared memories of their life and of other major social events, and gives people a place to browse stories about personal experiences of commonly shared events.

An interesting aspect of Were You There is that it focuses not only on larger events, but also on very personal memories like, for example, that of Manvivar, who reminds of the day when he was told John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed: at that time he was in the 3rd grade at elementary school, and when when he got on the school bus to go home, he noticed that the bus drivers was crying.

Indeed, WereYouThere has been built on the premise that everyone has a story to tell, and where there are stories to be told, there are also people who want to hear them.

"The concept grew out of my own passion for storytelling both as a former TIME magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem and Chicago and a bestselling novelist. Over the years I’ve received many letters from readers who were moved to share some of the unforgettable moments in their own lives, hopeful that someone might listen. Because what are stories without an audience? At heart, we are all storytellers, telling and retelling our stories to give structure and meaning to our lives. I started looking online for a place where these memories might come together in a meaningful and organized way, whether from a recent trip or a battlefield long ago, but to my surprise I couldn't find one. So I created WereYouThere."

To begin, at WereYouThere you can join a community, start your own, or simply browse various categories, such as:

Events: John F. Kennedy's assassination, 9/11, Woodstock, Hurricane Katrina, Attack on Pearl Harbor, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Holocaust, ...
Places: Venice, Gettysburg National Military Park, Prague, Somme, The Vietnam Memorial, Ground Zero, The Vatican, Westminster Abbey, ...
People: Elvis Presley, Pope John Paul II, The Beatles, Roger Maris, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Frank Sinatra, ...
Schools: Harvard University, New Canaan High, University of Oregon, New Trier High School, St. Joseph Senior High School, ...
Eras: The Sixties, The Great Depression, Civil Rights Movement, The Cold War, ...
Organizations: 4-H, Boy Scouts of America, The Peace Corps, Greenpeace, Rotary International, Doctors without Borders, ...
Military: Tet Offensive, World War Two, 80th Infantry Division, Navy, Fort Bragg, Army, Veterans of Foreign Wars, ...

At WereYouThere you can also:

Share stories, photos and videos of growing up in your hometown, your old hangouts, high school or college.
Remember the March from Selma, Woodstock or what it was like to live through Katrina.
Reunite with others who served in your combat unit at Omaha Beach, Chosin Reservoir, Da Nang or Takrit.
Relive the sites and sounds of the Summer of Love, your favorite travel spot or the Whisky a Go Go when The Doors took stage.
Share a passion for ‘56 Chevys, Elvis or Coltrane.
Recall the everyday scenes of a time gone by, from the fads and fashion to the cars, the music and the dreams that defined your generation.

You can also have full privacy controls, so you can choose if you prefer to post anounymously, to block others from seeing your profile page, to give access to approved friends, etc.

To me, it seems there can be interesting starting points for reflection even for LiveMemories (Active Digital Memories of Collective Life), a new project started on the 1st of October 2008 and scheduled to run for three years, funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento, and coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler, in collaboration with several departments of University of Trento and of University of Southampton.

How big is your social network?

2009-02-27T17:02:00.009+01:00

Can the cognitive capabilities of our brain set a limit to the maximum number of our acquaintances? Robin Dumbar, an anthropologist working at Oxford University, starting from the study of the social networks and the brain sizes of apes, suggested the size of our human brain should allow stable networks of 148-150 members.

Such quite small groups should allow to reduce bureaucracy, because almost everyone knows everyone elses. But sociologists make a distinction between one's wider network and the smaller "social core". With regard to this, Cameron Marlow, sociologist at Facebook, states that the average number of "friends" in Facebook is 120, even if women tend to have slightly more friends than men.

But, and this is consistent with the "social core" hypothesis, this average man (with 120 connections) generally responds to the postings of seven friends, while the average woman responds to 10. If we consider two-way communication (e-mails and chats), the average man interacts with 4 people, the woman with 6. When it comes to those who have networks of 500 people, the average men leave comments for 17 and communicate with 10 friends, women leave comments for 26 and communicate with 16.

In conclusion, it seems that, even though human beings can advertise themeselves in a more efficient way, they still have smaller circles of intimate friends.

View image's source

Friendship as a Health Factor

2009-02-04T09:45:00.004+01:00

Interesting interview with Jennifer Couzin on how behaviors (like obesity, smoking, and others) "spread" in social networks!

Read the article

Listen to the interview

FBK retreat - The future of scientific and technological research

2009-01-26T11:31:00.000+01:00

On Thursday 29 and Friday 30, January 2009 here in FBK there will be the Retreat event “New Directions for Scientific and Technological Research”. Here you can find the programme. You can also connect to the online streaming, starting from the 29th of January. The retreat is organized by the Centers “Materials and Microsystems” and “Information Technology”, and aims to share insights on the future of the Internet and on Nano & Micro Technologies. There will be great invited speakers, such as Peter Seitz (Vice-President Nano-medicine, CSEM SA) - Switzerland, Mark Maybury (Executive Director – MITRE) – USA, Hendrik Berndt (VP & CTO of DoCoMo Eurolabs) – Germany/Japan, Roger Kilian-Kehr (Research Architekt, SAP Research Center CEC Karlsruhe), João da Silva (Director of the Network & Communication DG-INFSO), Malik Ghallab (CEO for Science and Technology – INRIA) - France, Yuichi Matsushima (Vice President of NICT) – Japan, Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Research) – USA, Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO and Scientific Director of DFKI) - Germany, ...and many others!

Cesviamo: a social network for solidarity

2008-12-16T16:31:00.003+01:00

It reminds me of the concept of The Long Tail... that was first coined by Chris Anderson to describe a particular business strategy, such as for example Amazon.com, that consists in selling a large number of unique items, each in relatively small volumes. The main characteristic of these kind of businesses is to realize profit by selling small quantities of (even "hard-to-find") items to many customers, instead of selling large quantities of a small number of more popular items.

Cesviamo exploits a similar idea, but for very different purposes: it is an initiative of Cesvi, an aid agency aimed at transforming the values of “human solidarity and social justice into humanitarian aid and development initiatives for the affirmation of universal human rights”.

What is ingenious in the Cesviamo initiative, is the conceptualization of a humanitarian project not as a single big objective, but rather as the sum of many, small objectives, accessible to all.

For example: Pietro, by eating 20 ants (without bread), is going to fund the project "L'acqua è vita", aimed at providing Sudan with drinkable water; Katia, by committing herself to go to work pyjama and pink slippers (and to upload the video on youtube), is going to help funding the projects "Casa del sorriso", in the frame of the adoption of entire communities of children in India, Zimbabwe, Perù, and Brasile.

Nice initiative!

Want to be happy?

2008-12-10T10:07:00.000+01:00

Happiness is contagious! Surround yourself with happy friends or with friends who have happy friends. A research recently published in the British Medical Journal says happiness can quickly spread in a viral way within one's social network. The study used longitudinal network analysis, analyzing data related to 4739 individuals from 1983 to 2003, and found that when a person was happy, their friends became more happy too.

The researchers studied clusters of happy and unhappy people in the network, and discovered that the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation. In other words, people who are surrounded by many happy friends are more likely to become happy in the future. Moreover, those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy too. Considering that effects decay with time and geographical separation, a significant spread of happiness was found between friends or siblings who live within a mile of distance, coresident spouses, and next door neighbours, but not between co-workers.

Once again, it seems we do are social animals, and thus our happiness is not an individual, but rather a collective phenomenon.

Let's spread happiness!

The slides of my seminar on Social Network Analysis

2008-11-20T17:18:00.007+01:00

A few days after the seminar on Social Network Analysis... here they are.
The slides include the introductory part: some basic concepts on SNA and the most important structural properties.

Fbk Seminar Michela Ferron

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Some ideas for the possible casestudies for the LiveMemories project

2008-11-15T11:08:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we shared with the LiveMemories project's partners some basic ideas for a few possible case studies that could provide us useful insights on which kind of participation we might expect from citizens. Hopefully, these case studies could help us to find a direction for the development of the technical platform of the LiveMemories project.
So here it is...!

Possible Casestudies So Net 14 11 08

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Seminar announcement

2008-11-04T15:16:00.002+01:00

On Tuesday 11th of November I'll be holding a seminar at FBK-Irst on my dissertation thesis... the title is: Introduction to social network analysis and effects of social network based feedback on group mediated communication.

Abstract:

Social Network Analysis is widely used in social and behavioural sciences, in economics, marketing and engineering. The social network perspective focuses on relationships among interactive units, identifying the unit of analysis not in the individual, but rather in a collection of social entities and the linkages among them.
The main Social Network Analysis indexes will be introduced with a particular focus on their social meaning.
Secondly, an experimental research will be presented that exploited some individual and group social network analysis indexes to provide feedbacks on some aspects of the communication structure in groups of people involved in a multiplayer online role-playing game.

Where:

Sala CS, first floor
FBK-Irst, via Sommarive 18 – POVO (TN)

I'm in a state...!

Graduation!

2008-10-27T09:34:00.003+01:00

I graduated on the 24th of October in Social, Work and Communication Psychology at the University of Padua. My dissertation thesis was Effects of individual and group social network based feedback on group mediated communication.

LiveMemories public kickoff meeting

2008-10-20T16:44:00.001+02:00

Wednesday October 22th 2008, there will be the public kickoff meeting for the LiveMemories project. Location: Trento, Liceo Scientifico G. Galilei. Check the program of the workshop, and visit the website and the blog La Memoria al Tempo di Internet!

At the workshop there will be Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, speaking about the Impact of Social Networks; Simon Delafond (Web producer at the BBC, UK), speaking about “BBC Memoryshare initiative”, and various other presentations by the project partners. In the afternoon there will be a round table on “Quale modello per la libera circolazione della Memoria?”

LiveMemories project

2008-10-15T16:28:00.001+02:00

LiveMemories (Active Digital Memories of Collective Life) is a new project started on the 1st of October 2008 and scheduled to run for three years, funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento, and coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler, in collaboration with several departments of University of Trento and of University of Southampton.

From the LiveMemories' website:

In the digital age, our records of past and present are growing at an unprecedented pace. Huge efforts are under way in order to digitize data now on analogical support; at the same time, low-cost devices to create records in the form of e.g. images, videos, and text are now widespread, such as digital cameras or mobile phones.

This wealth of data, when combined with new technologies for sharing data through platforms such as Flickr, Facebook, or the blogs, open up completely new, huge opportunities of access to memory and of communal participation to its experience.

From a scientific / technical perspective, LiveMemories aims at scaling up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources, setting the scene for a Content Management Platform for Trentino; using this information to support new ways of linking, summarizing and classifying data in a new generation of digital memories which are `alive’ and user-centered; and to turn the creation of such memories into a communal web activity. Achieving these objectives will make Trento a key player in the new Web Science Initiative, digital memories, and Web 2.0, thanks also to the involvement of Southampton. But LiveMemories is also intended to have a social and cultural impact besides the scientific one: through the collection, analysis and preservation of digital memories of Trentino; by facilitating and encouraging the preservation of such community memories; and the fostering of new forms of community, and enrichment of our cultural and social heritage.

Michela in SoNet!

2008-10-15T15:51:00.002+02:00

That's it!
Since the 15th of October I've been in the SoNet (Social Networking) exploratory project, aimed at exploring the Web2.0 through both theoretical and applied research. The project is carried out within FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler), a research organization of the Autonomous Province of Trento that promotes research in the areas of science, technology, and humanities.
So, the SoNet projects is aimed at studying characteristics of the networks (both online and offline), taking advantage of an interdisciplinary approach through the collaboration of psychologists, sociologists and computer scientists. Among the purposes of SoNet, bringing groundbreaking contributes to the characterization of social networks and their evolution in time, and provinding new advanced services to the users, are of a key relevance.
One of the first objective will be the development of a real social networking system involving FBK researchers, to improve new way of researching and knowledge sharing. The keywords within this framework are therefore "aggregation", "sharing", "collaboration", "dissemination". The strategies to achieve this are that of "eat your own dog food", "controlled viral spreading", and "always in beta". This approach will be employed to develop a social networking platform (a web based internal portal), and, in the meantime, to collect data for theoretical research.

Let's go!

droga ewakuacyjna

2006-03-22T10:07:00.002+01:00

droga ewakuacyjna:
in polish "emergency exit", in italian "strada di evacuazione".