an interesting discussion about the previous book

here is a list of projects: preliminary list; editable list;

blog posts 1, 2, 3

Using Facebook after losing a job: Differential benefits of strong and weak ties (ACM pdf)
problem: @grammarnerd presents awesome work pairing surveys with Facebook log data to see what ties predict support & finding new job
results: social support and lowering of stress both increase with strong ties communication. Surprisingly, bridging social capital increases with not only weak-tie communication but also with strong-tie communication (which is not about reading but it’s about talking to them).  talking with strong ties for people who are looking for jobs increases  stress level, while talking with strong ties for people who have  jobs decreases stress level BUT talking more to strong, not weak, ties was twice as likely to lead to a new job.

Trend Makers and Trend Spotters in a Mobile Application (pdf, slides)
questions: WHO creates trends in a mobile sharing app? accidentals or influentials?
answer: influentials DO exist, yet they are not few but many!
application: identify trends early on (recsys paper pdf)

Finger On The Pulse: Identifying Deprivation Using Transit Flow Analysis (pdf, blog,  slides)
problem: can we assess a city’s health by monitoring the flow of people, just like a nurse takes your heart-rate and blood pressure during a health check?
answer: yes! using passenger flow, diversity of passenger geographic connections, and use of transport modality, one can effectively do so!

Ubiquitous Crowd-sourcing into Context (pdf)
problem:  ”investigate what contextual factors correlate with coverage of OSM information in urban settings”
results: ” although there is a direct correlation between population density and information coverage, other socio-economic factors also play an important role. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to the design of urban crowd-sourcing applications.”

Major Life Changes and Behavioral Markers in Social Media: Case of Childbirth (pdf)
very interesting work by @munmun10, looking at linguistic markers pre and post childbirth. also, see great work to be published in chi 2013 on this.

User-Centric Evaluation of a K-Furthest Neighbor Collaborative Filtering Recommender Algorithm (pdf)
problem: instead of using KNN for recommending stuff, they came up with KFN!
KNN: recommend movies that are liked by people similar to you
KFN: recommend movies that are disliked by people dissimilar to you
results: KNN recommends movies that users have seen; KNN and KFN both recommend movies that user likes

also, interesting the keynote talk by ron burt on the serial closure hypothesis (pdf) and the special session dedicated to the
conference’s most cited paper*, where: “The authors will re-present
the original papers using their original slides, and then discuss
developments in the field since then.” The paper is “Grouplens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of net news” (CSCW 1994)

Freedom-loving yellow is the symbol of vastness and openness, is regarded as the color of intellect – who loves yellow, has a great desire for freedom. Harmonious green is the primary color of nature – it symbolizes growth, healing and harmony. Those who love green, are reliable, have a lot of compassion and great social skills. In Islam and Judaism is the color of compassion. Loyal blue corresponds to the element of water and symbolizes peace – people who love blue are often admired: because of their solid charakter and deep loyalty. They often appear very distant and reserved. Powerful red is symbol of love, sex, excitement. People who love red are Power types – always one step ahead of all others. Motto: You can, if you want. In love they buy cheap cialis online are very sensual.

Falling Walls is a German government-led initiative aimed at encouraging breakthrough research in science, industry and politics. Started as a one-off event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Falling Walls Conference brings together the best of the world’s researchers and thinkers for one day, 9 November. One day prior to the conference, 100 outstanding young scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs present their groundbreaking ideas in 3 minutes at the Falling Walls Lab (urbangems.org was one of the 100, and that’s why I attended the conference and the lab). More on both conference and lab …

Conference
It hosted distinguished scientists and policy makers, including Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research), Philip D. Murphy (US Ambassador to Germany), Philip Campbell (Editor-in-Chief of Nature), Helga Nowotny (President of the European Research Council), and Alan I. Leshner (Executive Publisher of Science). The talks included (full program here and speakers here):

Breaking the Wall of Economic Uncertainty. How Online Data Can Help us Understand the Economy. Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google ”…central banks around the world have been looking for new real time economic indicators. Inspired by the work of Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, the Bank of Israel, followed by the Federal Reserve and the central banks of England, Italy, Spain and Chile, have recently started new studies to see if online search volumes track trends in the economies they oversee. .. he demonstrated how data reported on the Google Insights for Search service improved forecasts of auto and home sales and retail spending in the US. No wonder the enthusiasm of the central banks, that usually have to set interest rates based on economic information with weeks of delay. With the web data are available one to three days after users perform searches: a time lapse that could make the difference between a slowdown and a recession.”

Breaking the Wall of Internet Censorship. How Peer to Peer Wireless Mesh Networks Are Replacing Centralized Connectivity. Aaron Kaplan. Founder of Funkfeuer FREE NET, Vienna. Very interesting use of Mesh Networks (finally!) “On January 28, 2011, the Egyptian government, after three days of massive anti-regime protests, mostly organized through social networks, switched off 93 percent of the nation’s Internet. .. Computer scientist Aaron Kaplan is one of the founders of the FunkFeuer initiative, an Austrian wireless mesh networking project that plants WiFi antennae on rooftops

Breaking the Wall of the Polling Booth. How Electoral Psychology Enlightens Democratic Citizenship. Michael Bruter. LSE. ”What do citizens think about when they stand in the polling booth? ..Bruter, who joined the LSE in 2001, explores the voters’ mind in 15 countries combining surveys, interviews, experiments, and direct observation including innovative techniques such as “election diaries”, “polling station observers” and “emotional” questions buy cialis on favorite animal, colour or drink or how they would rank the seven ‘deadly sins’ or ’10 commandments’ “

Breaking the Wall of Uninformed Cities. How Open Data Makes Urban Life Smarter. Ina Schieferdecker. Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin. ”…the program ICT for Smart Cities, aimed at not only helping local government authorities share information with its citizens, but also businesses and organizations to innovate novel urban processes and develop new services.”

Breaking the Wall Between Earth and Sky. How Art Challenges Gravity and Light in Our Habitat. Tomás Saraceno. Crazy crazy talk. Crazy, in a good way

Breaking the Wall of Tropical Diseases. How the Tropical Laboratory Initiative is Increasing Access to Healthcare in Low Resource Countries. Yanis Ben Amor. Columbia University. ”…he explained the innovative ideas of harnessing mobile phone technologies to provide increased access to laboratory diagnosis for the underserved in resource-constraint settings.”

Breaking the Wall of Convention. How Architecture Can Provoke New Thought. Daniel Libeskind. Inspiring talk by a great man

Breaking the Wall between Science and Society. Daniel Zajfman, Weizmann Institute of Science. ”Zajfman invests much time and effort in community outreach, to the public in general and youth in particular. One of his goals is to broaden interest in and knowledge of the advances taking place on the scientific front.” He encourages Weizmann’s professors to teach science in Tel Aviv bars at night

Lab
Few months ago young researchers around the world submitted more than 600 works to the Falling Lab. Only one hundred were selected for presentation. One hundred participants (including me with UrbanGems.org) spoke about their ideas, research projects and initiatives in under three minutes. It was a great experience which I highly recommend. I got to know 99 brilliant young minds in all fields of science coming from 26 nations. Most of the pitches were in the area of natural science. Here is the full list of pitches, which included:

Breaking the Wall of Classical Music Concerts. Hedwig Pottag. Change the classical concert world based on the needs of the young generations. Create it more active, well-paced, without strict rituals and experiencable.

Breaking the Wall of Ordinary Beauty. Daniele Quercia. UrbanGems.org identifies the visual cues in neighbourhoods that are generally associated with concepts difficult to define such as beauty or happiness.

Breaking the Wall of Pro-Social Behaviour. Regina Kühne. I analyze the role of generalized trust (i.e. attitude towards strangers) for pro-social or altruistic behavior. I therefore use blood donation data for Germany.

Breaking the Wall of Oil Industry Secrecy. Zara Rahman. The culture of secrecy around oil needs to change; first step, providing tools for citizens to understand the industry, and thus hold governments accountable (book here).

Breaking the Wall of Communication Across Borders. Kai P. Kaufmann. Making walls fall may lead to the integration of what stood on both sides of them but requires finding common linguistic ground as the basis of communication.

Breaking the Wall of Volunteering. André de Geus Cervi. Atados is a business that bridges the gap between NGOs and citizens willing to help. The site exhibits in a easy way the volunteering opportunities in Brazil.

Breaking the Wall of Collaborative Transport. Stella Schieffer. Our transport infrastructure is at its limit. Yet 70% of all transport capacities are unused today. PolyPort (twitter + site) matches free transport capacities with delivery needs via a peer-to-peer marketplace.

Breaking the Wall of Immigrants and Host Society. Chun Chen of University of Zurich. Which role do media play in the integration process of migrants in the host society? Different media uses determine various migrant integration strategies. The more immigrants use host society’s media, the better integrated they are. Interesting idea

Workshops

From the Sunday’s workshops, I remember this paper “Dating Sites and the Split-complex Numbers” It uses split-complex numbers to represent dating preferences in an buy cialis online elegant way. It seems promising. I’d be great to connect this work on previous papers on trust and distrust and on structural balance theories… I also heard that two presentations were quite good: 1) Content, Connections, and Context  2) Joseph Konstan talk abt the different decision strategies ppl have in different contexts.

On Thursday, we run a workshops on  mobile recommender systems. Francesco Calabrese of IBM Smart Cities gave an interesting invited talk about current projects on transportation systems. Then, we had a set of really good talks & one outdoor activity. What did I learn? Well, most of the existing mobile systems assume that the recommendation process unfolds in one single step – get restaurant recommendations & choose one of them. In reality, recommendations in the built environment should go beyond that. For example,

• To mimic humans, the task of recommending restaurants should at least return 3 different recommendations (or facets): closest restaurant, best restaurant, trade-off between the two.
• One should understand WHY people visit certain places. How did they make those decisions? Which criteria did they employ?
• Recommender systems need to tap into established findings in the area of urban studies. For example, in our RecSys paper “Ads & the City“, we exploited the fact that people are boring – they generally do not travel very far – unless what they are looking for is not readily available where they are.
• Temporal patterns in recommender systems have not been widely studied. They have been studied on Web platforms only recently (and Neal Lathia has done great work on that!) and have been neglected in mobile platforms. That is why we had another paper in the conference titled “Spotting Trends: The Wisdom of the few“
• Finally, and more importantly, we need far more user studies of how these systems are ACTUALLY used! Recommendations do not matter much -the experience counts

And this is just scratching the surface

Conference

I remember only few things from the conference (the industry track was pretty good):

•  Multiple Objective Optimization in Recommendation Systems (linkedin). Nice example of A/B testing
• Towards Personality-Based Personalization (Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research). Nice talk about how easy is to predict personal attributes of Facebook users based on their likes. if you are interested in personality and social media, you should check out our work on Facebook and Twitter (we can predict personality traits of twitter users upon only their number of followers, following, and listed counts)

• Building Industrial-scale Real-world Recommender Systems (Xavier Amatriain of Netflix). Brilliant (& fully packed) tutorial. Check this out for a summary.
• Controlled experiments at Microsoft Bing (very good work): i encourage you to read  2009 guide [pdf] ; 2012 kdd paper; slides of the talk.
• Pareto-efficient hybrization for multi-objective recommender systems (UFMG). Here the question is  how to combine different types of algorithms (hybrization).
• User Effort vs. Accuracy in Rating-based Elicitation (PoliMI). What’s the optimal number of users ratings for movie recommendations? It seems to be between 5 to 20.
•  TasteWeights: A Visual Interactive Hybrid Recommender System (UCSB). Visualization platform for your social media stream
• Learning to rank optimizing MRR for recommendations. Very cool work.  It taps into the less is more concept, which I’m a big fan of
• Thumbs up to real-world stuff: Beyond Lists: Studying the Effect of Different Recommendation Visualizations;  Yokie – Explorations in Curated Real-Time Search & Discovery Using Twitter; A System for Twitter User List Curation; The Demonstration of the Reviewer’s Assistant; CubeThat: News Article Recommender (browser extension for Chrome displays recommended additional news stories related to the same topic as the current news story)
• Challenges in music recommendation (@plamere from @echonest). A couple of interesting insights: “Understanding the specifics of your domain is critical to building a good recommender”; and recommending down-tail is OK, while recommending up-tail (britney to one who likes tom waits) is risky. Might be offensive to one’s music identity. So make your recommendations Hipster-Friendly

Look, no hands. Automotive technology: Driverless cars promise to reduce road accidents, ease congestion and revolutionise transport… Assuming that autonomous vehicles make journeys quicker and use road space more efficiently, how should planners exploit the benefits of automation? On the one hand it would allow cities to get bigger, by reducing the time and stress associated with commuting. On the other, it could allow cities to become denser, by reducing the amount of space buy viagra online that needs to be dedicated to roads and parking. Alternatively, space allocated to roads in city centres could be used for bike lanes or parks.

A knight in digital armour. Chris Soghoian, the most prominent of a new breed of activist technology researchers, delights in exposing security flaws and privacy violations

Personal data. Shameless self-promotion Britain wants to lead the world in exploiting consumer data…. Transactional data helps businesses make money, and the government thinks consumers should profit from it too.

Changing London.  Brixton is now a black shopping destination.

Radio Ga Ga. A small radio station in Sierra Leone offers big lessons for the UN.