Archive for 'Projects' Category
An Overview of the DISCUS project
11 May 2007This presentation covers a general overview of the goals, origins, reasearch and tools currently available for the DISCUS project. For more information please visit the DISCUS project website.
Analyzing Trends in the Blogosphere Using Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools
26 March 2007by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006).
Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Mining (ICWSM 2007). Also as IlliGAL TR. No. 2006026. Link to the PDF.
Delineating Topic and Discussant Transitions in Online Collaborative Environments
13 December 2006by Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Xavier Llorà, and David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006025. Link to the PDF.
Adaptable Extraction of Key Elements from Weblogs
13 December 2006by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006024. Link to the PDF.
The new DISCUS site is up
29 November 2006The new site is here! Besides moving it to Wordpress, we have been working to engineer a site that will allow us to demonstrate some of the human-centered analytic technologies the DISCUS project has created. For each post, now you can analyze it with a single click using the links provided on the left-hand side. The first analytics tool released is based on KeyGraph techniques. Other DISCUS analysis techniques are already on the pipe and will reach the site soon.
We have not stopped at reengineering the DISCUS site. We have also created an extension for Firefox that allow you to analyze the web page you are currently viewing. All DISCUS capabilities integrated in your browser. The DISCUS Firefox extension adds a DISCUS toolbar, some entries on the tools menu and in the right-click contextual menu. Hope you find it useful. Following the site, this toolbar will also grow and incorporate new features and human-centered analytic tools.
Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere
29 November 2006by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg (in press, 2007).
To apper in the Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference.Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006023. Link to the PDF.
Metadata, RDF, and the browsers
28 November 2006Recently I have been playing on implementing some extension for Firefox. When I started working on it, I was not aware on how far they have taken the use of metadata—I blogged before on metadata stores here. Actually, now you can query RDF data sources, which contain information ranging from your browsing history or bookmarks—to mention a few. But what makes it more exiting is that when you are writing extensions you can use java script to get that information stored by the browser using the RDF interface to do something useful. For instance, DISCUS is using it to provide on-the-fly analytics for the current page currently viewing. DISCUS will soon release a demo version of such a toolbar. If you want to read more about it, I would recommend the XULplanet.com.
Evolving emotional prosody
17 September 2006by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006).
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF.
Finally I am back up
17 September 2006Vacations were over quite a while ago, but things kept piling on my desk. Finally I succeeded clearing some big chunks of matters out of it. Enough that I could go to the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM 2006) conference in Philadelphia last Tuesday. The conference is held as part of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC 2006) . Yan Jin invited me to join the panel he organized on Intelligent Systems and Innovation. I had a great time joining the DTM people, very interesting work—if you are interested on innovation and creativity.
Metadata stores
13 March 2006The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata.
The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS.