Marcella Wilson will defend her dissertation, The Comparison of Online Social Networks in Terms of Structure and Evolution, at 11:15am May 1st in 325b ITE. Here’s the abstract.

Social network systems on the Internet, such MySpace and LinkedIn, are growing in popularity around the world. The level of such activity is now comparable to that associated with email and blogs. Our research addresses the question of whether people in different demographic groups use these systems in the same way. We also examined the relationship between membership in on-line social networks and face-to-face networks, especially with respect to different age cohorts. Older Americans tend to use email the same way as Americans in general. The usage of blogs, however, is different, with significant differences in the temporal and structural patterns of post and response in blogs being evident in different demographics. Our research has implications for the design of social network software for older Americans, as well as the algorithms used in search engines for such systems.

Remember when finding information on the Web was done by navigation using Gopher or Yahoo’s directory? I worked and we thought it was pretty good, at least until the search engines came along. Then we realized that search was much better than navigation for most tasks, especially as the size of the Web grew.

Recall how we get information from a big organization by phone today — we call customer service and navigate a confusing phone menu over the phone and after 10 minutes, end up being told to dial a different department. Dealing with such IVR (Interactive voice response) systems is part of the cost of living in our modern society. But maybe w can do better…

Fonolo offers a service that uses a search engine on their site to find the right spot on a company’s phone menu and connect you to it by a callback to your phone. You can even bookmark the point on the phone menu.

How do they do this? Here’s an explanation from IVR search: a ‘Google’ for phone menus?, a post on Telco2.0:

“And Fonolo wrote a web spider that visits large companies’ public phone numbers, and iterates through all the options on all the IVR menus from all the numbers, logging everything it finds. Then it’s just a matter of plotting it all on a directed graph, and making the whole thing searchable and available on the Web. And then the bit we like. You click on the bit you want to get through to, and their system uses the map to dial and navigate the IVRs for you, thus “deep dialing” the user directly to the point in the IVR they need. Every time someone dials through Fonolo, they use the interaction to re-validate that path through the IVR. The search terms that users submit tell them which companies they need to go spider.”

Fonolo is in a private beta mode, but you can sign up to be added to it on thei web site. You can see a video presentation of the idea and some ppt slides

Morgan Stanley’s latest Internet Trends report emphasizes social computing. It contains the interesting observation that seven of the top ten Web sites (ranked by Alexa) are social computing sites — YouTube, Live.com, Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Wikipedia, and Orkut. Yahoo, Google and MSN round out the top ten. Of the social seven, only Myspace made the top ten list just three years ago. There’s lots more of interest in the report, which is available as a 72 page pdf presentation and can be viewed online via slideShare. Spotted on Techcrunch by Yang Yu.

Is that a catchy title or what? No, and the story doesn’t involve Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. See The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra Behind Google by Kurt Bryan and Tanya Leise. Here’s the abstract.

“Google’s success derives in large part from its PageRank algorithm, which ranks the importance of webpages according to an eigenvector of a weighted link matrix. Analysis of the PageRank formula provides a wonderful applied topic for a linear algebra course. Instructors may assign this article as a project to more advanced students, or spend one or two lectures presenting the material with assigned homework from the exercises. This material also complements the discussion of Markov chains in matrix algebra. Maple and Mathematica files supporting this material can be found at http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/google.html
“.

These techniques, and the mathematics behind them, are important in modeling many kinds of social phenomena.

If you are are in the greater Baltimore area and interested in social computing technology and its applications you might consider going to the SocialDevCamp East BarCamp that will be held on Saturday May 10. Akshay Java has a good blog post on it. Wikipedia defines BarCamps as

“user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.”

And, of course, this sets them apart from the elite, invitation-only Foo Camp that has been run for a number a years by Tom O’Reilly.

The sixth annual UMBC Computer Mania Day will be held at UMBC on Saturday, May 3, 2008. The event provides a half day of technology-related activities for up to 800 middle school girls and their parents and teachers. Girls are the focus, but boys are welcome. This program is designed to provide a broad-based introduction to the ways in which different careers make use of technology. Several sessions are planned including ones on robotics and on social computing. There is also a separate adult program designed for parents. Computer Mania Day is free, but space is limited and registration is required to hold a place. Free gift bags from Dell will be given to the first 800 students who register and attend!

The Economist has a short article on the Semantic Web, Start making sense that is positive and upbeat.

“Big and small companies are getting into the business of building an intelligent web of linked data

Some new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.

The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.”
…

The article touches on RDF and OWL and a number of companies building on the technology, including Reuters Calais, Twine and Qitera. The last one was new to me.

The prediction markets are bullish on Obama to win the Democratic nomination as their US presidential candidate. On Intrade, Obama is currently at at 86 compared to Clinton’s 12. Al Gore is the only other candidate in the running. The situation is similar over at the Iowa Electronic Markets.

EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.

They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.

If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).

EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.

The appointment of Rod Beckstrom as the new head of the DHS National Cyber Security Center is interesting, if somewhat controversial. See, for example, the article Cybersecurity’s New Guard in BusnessWeek.

“The Bush Administration named Rod Beckström — entrepreneur, author, and decentralization expert — head of the National Cyber Security Center on Mar. 20. … Beckström, 47, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a former derivatives trader, and a champion of conflict resolution in Africa. He’s better known as the founder of business collaboration software provider Twiki.net and as an author specializing in the agility of decentralized organizations than for connections inside the Beltway or expertise in cybersecurity.”

What’s somewhat controversial is his lack of a strong background in security or computer and communication technology — he’s an MBA. What’s interesting is his perspectives on and enthusiasm for decentralized and “leaderless” organizations, as articulated in his 2006 book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, which I’ve not read, btw.

“Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them.”

In this age of decentralized information and communication systems and asymmetric warfare, I think Beckstrom might have a positive impact in his new position.

FAS Research is an Austrian company that specializes in social network analysis. Their site has a nice collections of social network visualizations that are artistic as well as informative.

The call for ISWC 2008 research papers for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference is online. The track is co-chaired by Amit Sheth and Steffen Staab and has nineteen distinguished vice chairs and an program committee of experienced experts. Key dates for the research track are:

• Abstracts due by 9 May 2008
• Submissions due before 16 May 2008
• Rebuttal phase during 14-16 June 2008
• Notification sent by 11 July 2008
• Camera ready due before 15 August 2008