CHI2013 29th April – 2nd May

CHI was co-located with Web Science.

CHI (human factors in computer systems) has (among the numerous concurrent tracks) a large amount of what we’d consider to be Web Science, both topically and methodologically.  As well as more traditional HCI topics (such as pointing and clicking) there were sessions about social media, activism, creativity and privacy – Including ethnographic and qualitative work that draws on ideas from the social sciences.

If CHI’s interdisciplinary were in doubt, the closing keynote was delivered by Bruno Latour.

Highlights of CHI:

-        An alt.chi presentation about “animal computer interaction”: Humans are not the only ones using computers, as devices become more pervasive they impact upon the wellbeing of our n-legged friends/victims, too.  From self-service milking stations for dairy cows, to appliances that can be operated by guide dogs, there is a growing need to understand the interactions that non-human actors have with computer systems.  Even more excitingly, striving to understand the experiences of users that don’t talk uncovers new research methodologies that may improve our understanding of human users, too.

-        Youngsil Lee demonstrated, during the interactions exhibition, a dress equipped with spikes that raise when another person comes too close.

-        The “Consent and Privacy” session was particularly relevant to my PhD research.  It covered a number of issues including, for instance, how the reading age of legal agreements can impact upon the informed-ness of the consent that users give, and how tools can be provided not just for the users but for the agreement authors themselves.

WebScience 2013 2nd-5th May

My main purpose for attending WS13 was as a co-organiser of the “Web for Wellbeing” workshop.  We aimed to stimulate discussion around the impact that web has on individual wellbeing and human performance.  Attendance was disappointing because the workshop was unfortunately scheduled on the day after the conference. Nonetheless, we had some fruitful discussions about how the web and wellbeing are linked, including a presentation by Paul Smart about how the web can act as an extension of the mind.

Future plans are to establish a web for wellbeing wiki and to arrange follow-up activities with participants from the workshop, many of whom were from Southampton.

During the conference I solicited an article from one of the Web Science presenters for an upcoming edition of XRDS magazine (“privacy and anonymity”), in my role as a feature editor.

Attending my first WWW conference was just as interesting and challenging as I had hoped it would be. Somewhat outside the sphere of my usual experiences, it was a fantastic opportunity to view topics from the perspective of technological know-how and development, one very complementary to my so-far very Humanities-based angle on Digital Humanities. The conference organisers had provided a great number of diversity and richness in terms of topics, papers, poster, workshops and various tracks. I particularly enjoyed the freedom of being able to attend papers in various workshops in the course of one day. Various resources such as a printed booklet, up-dated website, screens outside of lecture halls and vast numbers of helpful and multilingual volunteers helped me and other participants to navigate the maze of the conference site. Unfortunately, overlaps of interesting topics were of course inevitable.

WWW2013 was also a great opportunity for networking, meeting colleagues and exchanging ideas. Some of my highlights included a one-on-one lunch with Cathy Marshall (Microsoft) and meeting other WSTnet students who I had gotten to know at the Web Sci 2013 conference in Paris just a few weeks earlier, as well as having in-depth conversations with other Southampton students, triggered by ideas and opportunities unearthed at the conference. Not only had I thus been able to network internally within the Southampton Web Science cohort, but also across the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories and even with representatives of external partners and potential future employers.

Although generally-speaking somewhat different in its tone to WebSci2013, some talks at WWW2013 were clearly delivered with a much less technologically-orientated audience in mind – especially the keynote on ReCaptcha and Duolingo by Luis von Ahn. I was particularly interested in the details of lessons-learnt from Duolingo (an online tool for learning modern languages), including how guilt (rather than reward) works best in enticing participants to return, how  to allocate task based on levels of ability, how different languages required different methodologies and how their development was based on a data-driven approach. These considerations are likely to have a clear and direct implication on the citizen science project and pedagogical tools for ancient languages that I am currently working on alongside my PhD research. Workshops and discussions with WSTnet and Southampton colleagues with similar specialisms have in turn helped spur on research directly relevant to my PhD, making WWW2013 an incredibly useful and beneficial experience all-round.

I attended the Web Science conference having submitted a full paper that subsequently got accepted as a pecha-kucha style presentation. On the first day of the conference I presented my paper “Rethinking Measurements Of Social Media Use By Charities: A Mixed Methods Approach”, in 20 slides, with 20 seconds for each which presented a new challenge compared to a normal presentation but it all seemed to go well and I received positive feedback about it afterwards. Therefore the biggest thing that I got out of the conference was the opportunity to talk about my work but in a new and challenging format, which I think is an important skill to develop during a PhD.

I attended the ‘Harnessing the power of social theory for web science’ workshop, run by other students of the DTC, and was really impressed with the organisation and content on show. I think it was a great success, and should be considered a vital part of future Web Sci conferences. The topics presented were all very interesting, and if anything it was a shame that there wasn’t more content such as this in the main conference program.

Having also attended the previous web sci conference in 2012, it was a great opportunity to catch up with other Web Scientists from around the world, and to hear the latest on other projects that are happening in the community. I thought Stephan Bazan’s talk about the Digital Economy centred Web Science course at USJ in Beirut was particularly interesting and it fits as a great example of why Web Science doesn’t need to always be based in Computer Science departments.

Another big take-away for me was that there is still a definite bias towards the more technical topics on show. I enjoyed Clare Hooper’s presentation about the representation of disciplines on show in the previous web sci conferences, and how there was a trend towards topics that the conference was co-located with. It struck me at the time that to rectify the technical bias, could it be possible that web sci co-locates with a social science conference in the future? I tweeted this at the time, and it seemed to get a lot of positive responses from the community. Web sci this year was great because of the enormous community at the venue from other conferences such as CHI and made you feel part of something much bigger – I think it would be brilliant with more social scientists there too, and would build on the positives that the social theory workshop brought this year.

Overall I enjoyed the conference, it was my second web science conference and I think they are a good event to go to and aim to present in. I found the experience of presenting in a new format to be important, as was the networking that built upon contacts that had been made in the previous year. It was good to feel part of the community, and to know that that community is part of something larger.

A more in depth report on the conference from Chris Phethean can be found on his blog.

As this was my second World Wide Web conference now (the first being Lyon, France, 2012), I has some expectations of what WWW13 would be like; in terms of the community, the papers, and the sheer energy of such a large conference. Rather than providing a day-by-day account of the conference and various activities, I’ve decided to highlight the aspects that stood out the most:

• The conference was organised brilliantly – lots of helpers, the registration process was well-thought out, and the use of the afternoons to enable those interested in visiting the local attractions (or sit on the beach) was a brilliant idea. Also, the use of the first two days, with tutorials in the morning and workshop filling the afternoon was great, although a full day of WWW (from 9am till 8pm) was quite long!

• The location of the conference made it very special indeed – Not only was it located in Rio, but the actual venue was brilliant. The Windsor Barra was large enough to accommodate all the WWW community, and offered plenty of large rooms for the running the parallel sessions. I remember last year in Lyon, some of the rooms were overcrowded and not enough chairs were available for participants.

• The variety and attendance of the workshops was great – Presenting at two of the workshops (SOCM and WOW), the community that attended them really provided a good atmosphere and environment for discussions. Rather than feeling like a mini-conference, the schedule, and formats of the workshops acted as a ‘talking-shop’ for new ideas, and developing those that had been presented. The two coffee breaks also supplemented this, providing those attending to go offline and further discuss (or debate, in some cases)! A large thanks needs to be given to the workshop organisers for putting in such a large amount of effort.

• The research tracks offered much variety – travelling with the Web Science DTC cohort from Southampton University (who included a mix set of students from different disciplinary backgrounds), there was a worry that the research might be too technical, however the variety of research topics and the skills of the presenters made the sessions within the research tracks accessible for all.

• The selection of keynote speakers and discussion panels really was a great addition to the already exciting schedule of research panels, demo sessions and poster presentations. Each day the participants were provided with a great opening keynote, and spoke about a variety of different topics and issues relating to not only the development of the WWW, but also the development of technology and science in general.

• Overall, WWW2013 was a great success – excellent research, excellent people, and excellent location. The food was fantastic, and so was the traditional Brazilian dinner (and dance). Great Success! We were also offered a sneak preview of what WWW2014 in Seoul will be like; by the looks of the intro video, I’m sure it will be just as amazing!

As part of my participation at the WWW2013 conference, I presented at two of the workshops, the Social Machines (SOCM) and Web Observatory (WOW) workshop. As these are very close to my PhD research and general areas of interest, I feel like they offered a great opportunity to share current research paradigms, directions and potentially future work and collaboration with the community.

Social Machines Workshop 2013

The first workshop, held on the Monday was SOCM, which was focusing on the growing variety of research surrounding the theory and practise of social machines (a term that received as much positive debate and discussion as the papers presented). The workshop, which was supported by the SOCIAM funding at Southampton University, provided a great forum for the current cutting edge and novel research that was involved in understanding how social machines of the Web (for now, let’s says a socio-technical web-based system) operate, and how we could potentially build and guide them. What was really interesting about the papers that were being presented (included my own) was the diversity of the theories and disciplines being drawn upon; to this point, Professor David De Roure made a great observation that this is potentially an evolution of Computer Science, from just designing systems in terms of the engineering, we are now dealing with a world where the design of the system is inherently human as it is technical, and as a result of this, we need methods, tools, and theory to understand how to better design these systems. However, unlike traditional design paradigms and approaches, we are no longer dealing with developing software or systems, at the micro level, the Web has offered us a platform to create something that is global, and as a result of this has many societal, economic and political implications.

This really brings me back to my research and interests, and the papers that were presented offered a great set of insights and discussion points in terms of what the Web actually is, and how can we understand it in terms of it being socio-technical, and what insights does that provide us (developers, individuals, or the collective ‘society’). There is also the issue of how does one define a social machine; what makes it social, and what makes it a ‘machine’? At the broadest of scales, everything could be considered a social machine, the interaction between a human and a hammer is inherently social and technical, not only in its use, but the societal needs for the hammer to be constructed, the shaping of the hammer because of the tools available, and the use of it (does a hammer have to be used just for nails…?). It is very easy to go down this route of saying everything is a social machine, so I think in the next few months we will be thinking very hard about what the boundaries and scope of this is.

Web Observatory Workshop 2012

WOW2013, focused on the efforts of those interested in the Web Observatory – an international WSTNet project which is currently gaining the support of those interested in providing a platform for academics, industry, researchers and government to store, and shares their data. This ties in very well with the research of social machines, as an essential part of being able to understand them and monitor them is to have a platform that can collect the variety and volume of the data that they generate. As with the previous workshop, the papers presented were of great variety, from the techniques and current approaches to creating a platform, the current usages of individual Web Observatories, and the incentives and design considerations of building and using them in a distributed manner.

The one aspect of this workshop which ties into my own research (and the section of the workshop that I was presenting in) was the use of different social machines to track and understand the diffusion of information and viral content on the Web. My research (which was the result of joint collaborative efforts with KAIST, South Korea) looked at how Wikipedia could be used as an indicator of soon-to-trend human activity, with a specific focus on how information is spread across different countries, and the implications of culture on this. The discussion which followed my presentation led to the potential collaboration with L3S, one of the partner WSTNet Labs in Germany. These kinds of outcomes and future collaborative work are only made possible by having these kinds of workshops along with the right community attending.

There was also an interesting discussion to be had with regards to Paul Booth and Paul Gaskell’s paper on looking at the exchange of value for data. At the most simplest level, they proposed the question of why would people want to share their data, what are their incentives and their rewards for doing it. A nice way to look at this is a market place for data; individuals who have datasets partake in this market place, the data – valued by some index and set of metrics – can be traded between individuals, which then creates a data index (like a stock market for data). This raises some questions of commercial vs. non-commercial markets, competition, or even more fundamental than this, how does one value data (especially as this will encounter a cold start problem). The concept of a data index and trading place is a great idea, however, I think we are going to have to think hard about how can a piece of data be valued, especially when it is first introduced into the network. Valuing it solely on the size of it, or the number of records has many issues, therefore the data on the market needs to have some specific meta-data associated with it in order to assign value to it. There is also the issue (and differentiation needed) between uploading a piece of data, downloading it, and actually using it; the latter being the most hard to quantity and track. Take data.gov.uk for instance, government departments can upload their data, then individuals can download it. However being able to track where this information is being used, and for what purpose (i.e. Applications, Website, etc.) is not simple. Their needs to be some technical intervention to enable some form of feedback loop for tracking data use.

There was also a lot of cross over and synergy with the discussions had at the previous day’s workshop on social machines and how the development of a Web Observatory will be an essential addition to understanding how social machines develop, how they evolve over time, etc. What is interesting to me is the ability to not only track these machines in terms of their macro characteristics (i.e. the network structures and the amount of data that they are providing), but also providing some way of understanding them at the micro level as well, in some sense, providing the meta-data around the captured quantitative data in order to add context to what is being observed. This goes back to the discussions regarding understanding these social machines in terms of the human activity, as well as the technological development. In order to understand their evolution (or even just the way they are being used), then we need a way to capture both the macro and micro, simultaneously. There is a lot he issue of how does one capture multiple social machines, and their interactions between them? What are the boundaries that exist between one social machine and other, and when capturing this data, how does one represent it? These are all questions that need a lot of further discussion, and I think it they will be answered not only by theorising, but by practise as well.

The Web Science Doctoral Training Centre has always aimed to have a close relationship with industry, as part of its mission to provide a leadership role in the UK’s Digital Economy. With 63 members of our growing Industry Forum meeting regularly to discuss the future of the Web, we offer many opportunities to transfer knowledge and expertise between academia and our partners.

Switch Concepts, a trail-blazing Hampshire-based IT firm that specialises in digital advertising, claims that its partnership with the DTC contributes to its success. For the past year we have been working closely together with Switch to share understanding of the world of online advertising, swapping knowledge of our world-leading digital research. Switch, and our other DTC partners, work with teams of our students on the challenges and opportunities that the Web raises for their businesses.

Business Solent, which unites business leaders to drive economic prosperity, partnered with the DTC to host an exclusive Directors’ Forum Dinner to share the developments in the study of Web Science with business leaders in the region –  going beyond the theory with an overview of the commercial opportunities being created by leading Solent businesses. At the event we shared the outcomes of the most recent set of Industry Forum Research discussions in Big Data, Social Businesses, Cybercrime, E-health and the Open Data Economy.
We look forward to increasing the size and scope of our Industry Forum, and would be delighted to hear from any businesses who would benefit from the latest research insights into the Web and Digital Economy. 

DTC student Terhi Nurmikko worked with Jacob Dahl, Kirk Martinez and Graeme Earl to produce a poster which they presented at the ACM Web Science Conference. The poster, entitled Web Science for Ancient History: Deciphering Proto-Elamite Online, won best poster, decided through crowd sourcing at the conference.