dbdump.org

Presentation at TREC legal track: A Social Networking Approach to the Legal Learning Track

2011-11-13T19:08:43Z

A Social Networking Approach to the Legal Learning Track
TREC 2011, Legal Learning Track
Legal Track, Tuesday November 15, 15:45-16:00
Plenary, Thursday November 17, 10:00-10:30

Abstract:

This presentation reports on the University of Waterloo experience with the Legal Learning track where three different methods were used to approach the retrieval task. Two are based on previously used methods and the last is a novel method based on modifying the responsiveness probability using social network analysis.

Attending Linked Open Data Library and Archives Meeting in San Francisco

2011-05-17T19:48:42Z

I'll be attending the #LODLAM meeting in San Francisco this June 2nd and 3rd focusing on using linked open data for archives and museums. The topic is close to some of my own interests, including those of The Muninn Project which has fairly complex modelling requirements.

Presentation at the Waterloo Stratford campus: Do a Billion Documents Change the First World War?

2011-02-01T18:01:31Z

Do a billion documents change the First World War?
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011, 19:00-21:00
Waterloo Stratford Campus Digital Media Series
Presented by Rob Warren and Shelley Hulan

Abstract:

The First World War has come alive for later generations via their close reading of individual works on the war. But this war was the first lengthy international conflict to keep records on hundreds of thousands of displaced people and military personnel as they moved all around the globe, and the documents generated by them provide a rich source of insight into the times, and in the wake of the large-scale digitization of paper-based data from pre-digital periods, First World War records have the potential to touch readers anew.

Where soldiers' journals and longer accounts bring the conflict to light in a very personal way, the digitization of millions of forms and official documents concerning the "war to end all wars" allows for the detection of global patterns of migration, communication, and disease previously impossible to find using manual research methods. Mining Great War data might be feared to rob the war of its power to illuminate the costs of modern conflict, a power that has historically lain in the personal tragedies and triumphs identified with it and the revelations they offer about human suffering and human potential, not the more anonymous and repetitive information on official forms. In a discussion of the patterns and trends detectable by analyzing millions of data mine-able Red Cross files, however, we will suggest that data mining both significantly alters our understanding of the war and yet continues to move us in surprising ways.

Presentation at CASBS 2010: Muninn Project

2010-06-01T20:26:25Z

The Muninn Project
Tracking, Transcribing, and Tagging Government: Building Digital Records for Computational Social Science
Tuesday June 22, 2010, 14:15-15:15
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Abstract:

The Muninn Project is a multidisciplinary,  multinational, academic research project investigating millions of records pertaining to  the First World War in archives around the world.

In this talk I will review some of the methods being used in the Muninn project to  extract information from the scanned documents of historical archives. Previous data  extraction efforts for historical research were done through the human review of  documents, one at a time. We employ an approach where computing power is used to collate  similar document types to extract the information from them.  

The Great War era produced a mix of hand-written and type-written documents that require  processing using computer extraction methods assisted by the manual reviews of specific  cases by human volunteers. I will contrast this with previous methods that have been used  to digitize documents, such as recapchat, and close with some observations about managing  archival data in a high-volume setting.

Paper at MEM2010: Canopener: Recycling Old and New Data

2010-04-16T11:08:10Z

Canopener: Recycling Old and New Data
MEM2010, Monday, April 26th, 2010, 11:00am-11:30am
Presented by Cosmin Basca

Abstract:

The advent of social markup languages and lightweight public data access methods has created an opportunity to share the social, documentary and system information locked in most servers as a mashup. Whereas solutions already exists for creating and managing mashups from network sources, we propose here a mashup framework whose primary information sources are the applications and user files of a server. This enables us to use server legacy data sources that are already maintained as part of basic administration to semantically link user documents and accounts using social web constructs.

Now back at the University of Waterloo

2010-04-02T03:19:16Z

I have taken on a new posting in the Programming Languages Lab in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. I'll be working on IR projects with Professor Charlie Clarke and on the Muninn Project.

You are arriving in NAN minutes...

2010-03-08T12:41:09Z

The ZVV tram had an interesting schedule showing the other day. Looks like the prediction is a little bit off.

Tracking power failures using UPS status pages

2010-01-30T22:32:45Z

Just a short project I am working on - tracking power failiures world wide by crawling UPS status pages on the web.
View Larger Map

Research opportunities and problems in scalable social networking analysis

2009-09-25T08:45:20Z

"Research opportunities and problems in scalable social networking analysis", FW11, Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 14:30-15:30

Abstract:

With the advent of online tools, social networking has become a household world that is taken to allow for little more than communicating the latest you-tube video to friends. Similarly, Milgram's original work on chains of relationships engendered the idea of "six degrees of separation". Social network analysis is a powerful tool that can be used to infer information about a person, their preferences and their behaviours, sometimes with a higher precision than self-reported data.

The use of a network approach allows us not only to recommend preferences, but also verify profile data and predict affinity networks. In this talk I will review some of the work previously done on data-mining social networking data as well as some new research on cross linking networks from other data sets. These approaches are creating new computer science research areas, such as 'The Loading Problem' where the required computation of an answer in disproportionate to cost of handling the information.

Paper at PASSAT 2009: Anonymity properties of stored or transmitted data taken from Bluetooth scans

2009-08-22T15:17:14Z

Anonymity properties of stored or transmitted data taken from Bluetooth scans
PASSAT 2009, Sunday, August 30, 2009, 9:00am-9:30am
Presented by David Evans

Abstract:

Modern consumer wireless devices are increasingly powerful, making them attractive to use as wireless sensor nodes. At the same time, many use protocol suites such as Bluetooth which require devices to reveal data that may make for unique device identifiers. This paper explores this quantitatively through scans covering several thousand devices in different urban locations. In measuring the anonymity afforded by the elements of a Bluetooth device profile, we find that (i) attributes such as the device class are poor for linking sightings of the same device; (ii) the device name can provide a surprising amount of anonymity but when it does not it can be a very effective key to link devices with individuals; and (iii) frequently users exhibit privacy-adverse behavior, such as placing telephone numbers in device names or using nicknames that are statistically rare.

Cultural Adaptivity for User Interfaces: Available diploma and bachelor thesis topics

2009-07-31T13:15:40Z

A thesis for diploma and/or bachelor students at the UZH Institute for Informatics is available working on extracting cultural preferences (CUMO project) from several million blog postings on the WWW. The work is expected to start September 17, you should contact myself or Katharina Reinecke if this interests you.

Muninn Project Webpage now open

2009-07-15T15:31:44Z

The website is now up for a project that I am involved with, focusing on the extraction of information from service of The Great War. The website is at www.muninn-project.org and is expected to handle over 600M pages and over 200TB of raw digital images.

Now at the University of Zurich

2009-06-02T01:28:26Z

I will be taking up a posting at the Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group at the University of Zurich as a Post-Doctoral Fellow this summer.

Another Album: The Military Communications and Electronics Museum

2009-05-05T02:18:29Z

Added a new album with a few shots from the Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston, ON, Canada. Complete with a Pinetree Radar Line console.

Wikipedia: Exploring the relationship between the social network and content

2009-03-17T02:18:28Z

Wikipedia: Exploring the relationship between the social network and content, Carleton University, Herzberg 5131, Thursday March 19, 2009, 3:45-4:30
NICDS Team Workshop on mining Network Data

Abstract: In this talk I will review some background on both Wikipedia and Social Network Analysis and examine how we can predict both the quality and topic of user submissions based on their social network.