Graduation!

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

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

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!

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!