Vici Competition – Shortlist submissions

The Vici Competition runs from May 2014 to November 2014. In the final competition on linked and open data for educational purposes, people were invited to design and build advanced prototypes and tools that are driven by linked and/or open data. The tool should be mature and stable, and they should be used or have been used by a fair amount of users on a realistic scale (http://linkedup-challenge.org/vici/).

Our work, “Visualizing Research Works in the Water Resources Industry” was included in the shortlist of submissions. That means we are running for the big prize and for the people’s choice award!

Vote for us here: https://www.wishpond.com/vc/341881?vote_option_id=72664

Website: http://www.l3s.de/~kawase/vici/

author: Ricardo Kawase, Ujwal Gadiraju and Patrick Siehndel

 

Technology Enhancing Learning: Past, Present and Future

Every year the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL) gathers state-of-the-art research in the TEL field. Eight years have passed since the first edition of this conference, resulting in over 500 research papers published and more than 1000 researchers involved. However, bringing together two different fields of study (Technology and Learning), does not necessarily imply interdisciplinary research. To inspect ECTEL’s interdisciplinarity and related facts, we dedicate this paper to study the evolution of the conference over time. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the evolution of papers, authors and topics explored over the years. Our analysis provides an understanding of the origin of the conference and the direction that future research in TEL is moving towards. In addition to this, we built interactive online interfaces to enable researches to explore all the information pertaining to past ECTEL research. These interfaces enable users to easily browse through ECTEL papers, authors, knowledge and connections, possibly leveraging the discovery of related work and future collaborations.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel and Ujwal Gadiraju

PDF: kawase-ectel2014

Slides: kawase-ectel2014

Visualizing Research Works in the Water Resources Industry

With the increasing practice of making data openly available, nowadays there is a growing amount of information easily available pertaining to water resources and ecology. Scientific works by researchers across the world contribute to the abundance in such data. Major challenges that emerge due to the volume of data include the discovery of useful and relevant content, as well as learning and interpretation of the various disparate content. In this work, we aim to aid researchers and interested stakeholders in understanding the vast landscape of scientific research in the water resources industry. We integrate different sources of data from the Web; journals from Elsevier, tweets from Twitter, and wikipedia annotations. We use interactive visualizations in order to engage the users and satisfy their information needs.

Online prototype: http://www.l3s.de/~kawase/vici/

Web History Repository

Since 2011, I’ve been maintaining the Web History Repository (WHR).  The goal of this little personal project is to to create a public repository of web usage data in order to support research communities. It consists of a Firefox Web Browser add-on that has one simple feature: once it is installed the user has the option to anonymously upload her data to our servers. This provide us with a repository of client side click data that enables researchers to perform several analysis on user browsing behavior. It’s amazing that the project still attracts attention and contributors. Up to date we have 535 contributors that contributed to to over 5.2 million page visits to our data set and more than 100 researchers have requested access to the data.

WRH Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Web-History-Repository/151753538176929

WRH  Firefox Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-history-repository/

WRH Blog and download page: http://webhistoryproject.blogspot.de/

Exploiting the Wisdom of the Crowds for Characterizing and Connecting Heterogeneous Resources

Ricardo Kawase presenting @HT2014 in Santiago, Chile (picture taken by Christoph Trattner)

Heterogeneous content is an inherent problem for cross-system search, recommendation and personalization. In this paper we investigate differences in topic coverage and the impact of topics in different kinds of Web services. We use entity extraction and categorization to create fingerprints that allow for meaningful comparison. As a basis taxonomy, we use the 23 main categories of Wikipedia Category Graph, which has been assembled over the years by the wisdom of the crowds. Following a proof of concept of our approach, we analyze differences in topic coverage and topic impact. The results show many differences between Web services like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious, which reflect users’ behavior and the usage of each system. The paper concludes with a user study that demonstrates the benefits of fingerprints over traditional textual methods for recommendations of heterogeneous resources.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-ht2014

Online Prototype: http://twikime.l3s.uni-hannover.de

 

A Taxonomy of Microtasks on the Web

Nowadays, a substantial number of people are turning to crowdsourcing, in order to solve tasks that require human intervention. Despite a considerable amount of research done in the field of crowdsourcing, existing works fall short when it comes to classifying typically crowdsourced tasks. Understanding the dynamics of the tasks that are crowdsourced and the behaviour of workers, plays a vital role in efficient task-design. In this paper, we propose a two-level categorization scheme for tasks, based on an extensive study of 1000 workers on CrowdFlower. In addition, we present insights into certain aspects of crowd behavior; the task affinity of workers, effort exerted by workers to complete tasks of various types, and their satisfaction with the monetary incentives.

Authors: Ujwal , Ricardo Kawase and Stefan Dietze

PDF: gadiraju-ht2014