Speaker : Dr.Nishanth Sastry
Title : Curing Discontent in Online Content Acquisition
Abstract:
The glut of information online has led to a scarcity of attention; users need effective means to acquire and consume content. One simple content acquisition mechanism is pull support (users get to access what they want from a catalogue). A second method is the automatic highlighting of popular content by websites. A third mode is social publish-subscribe networks such as Twitter. A fourth, recently emerged trend is explicit manual curation of interesting content.
This talk will be a data- and user-study-driven exploration of these content acquisition models, identifying advantages and drawbacks, and proposing potential fixes and improvements. In particular, we will argue that broadcast-based push can sometimes be more efficient than pull, that social networks can help highlight less popular niche-interest content which is often ignored otherwise, that efficient near real-time re-ranking is necessary (and feasible) for high volume publish-subscribe networks, and that curation, especially structured curation, by users with diverse interests and regular updates, can usefully complement other methods such as search.
This is based on work published in AAAI ICWSM 2012, IEEE/ASE Social Informatics 2012, WWW 2013, and AAAI ICWSM 2013.
Date: 1st May, 2013.
Time: 14.00-15.00 hrs
Venue: QMUL Maths:1.03