Web Science Doctoral Summer School 2011
I will be attending and speaking at the upcoming 2011 Web Science Trust Graduate Summer School tobe held at DERI, NUI Galway Ireland from July 6th to July 13th, 2011. I will speak about social media network analysis and run a workshop on using NodeXL. There is a packed schedule featuring a great group of researchers who are gathering at the event, including:
* Prof. Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.
* Prof. Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
* Prof. Stefan Decker is a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
* Dr. Harith Alani is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute, where he is heading a group specialising in Social Semantics.
* Dr. Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He specializes in novel methods for online data capture and analysis, especially via social media.
* Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick has a background in physics (AB Princeton, PhD Harvard) and 15 years of developing new technologies at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center before coming to the Hebrew University in 2000.
* Prof. Enric Plaza holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and is Research Professor of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
* Prof. Steffen Staab is the director of Institute WeST – Web Science and Technologies and of the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
* Dr. Derek Greene is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin. As part of the Clique Research Cluster, his focus is on network analysis and community finding, with a particular emphasis on dynamic mobile and social media networks.
* Dr. Michael Hausenblas is a Research Fellow at DERI, NUI Galway, where he leads the Linked Data Research Centre.
* Dr. Daniele Quercia is Horizon researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). he is interested in computational social science, web science, and social computing.
* Dr. Markus Strohmaier is an Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute, Faculty of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology.
The event is focused on the methods and theories needed to grasp the nature of the social implications of the rapid changes in the technologies of communication and computation:
“The Web is the largest technological artefact in existence, comprising a global network of information sites and services. It is a social machine, delivering information between people and communities, embedded in almost all processes of human society: education, medicine, science and technology, commerce, entertainment and social activity. It is often simply supposed that the Web is a neutral technology, a stable computing platform for the delivery of information and services. What is overlooked is that the Web is changing constantly in response to the demands of human society. Incremental innovations leads to changes in how people use the Web and in turn how Web technology responds to changed human interaction. Small technological decisions influence how individuals use the Web and ripple out to have unanticipated macro-effects. Sometimes these effects are beneficial such as the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Other technologies such as the rise of spam bots or ‘blackhat’ search engine optimisation techniques clutter the Web with irrelevant, distracting information. While influential corporations such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft generate huge revenues from the Web, the Web itself is owned by everyone and no-one. We need to fully understand the demands placed on the Web by human society, so that its fate does not lead to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but to a sustainable technological resource for the future.”