Web & Internet Science Seminar Recordings 2018

Abstract: Blockchain, thanks to bitcoin, is in fashion. Nowadays it appears as the magic solution to solve some issues in many areas and Education (whatever face-to-face, blended and online) is one of them. There are some literature exploring potential applications and pointing out topics such as credentials, gamification, students tracking or assessment among others. In this seminar I would like to discuss where and when does it make sense to think of blockchain as a useful technology or just a bluf. We will probably have more questions than answers due to the nature of such a presumably disruptive technology as blockchain may be. Biodata : Miquel Oliver is full professor at the School of Engineering of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His background comes from wireless and mobile communications but he has been shifting towards Internet and its impact upon society. He has been following the MOOCs phenomenon since its starts, as researcher, student and practitioner. More info here: https://www.upf.edu/web/etic/entry/-/-/19279/409/miquel-oliver

The use of music as an aid for improving body and mind has received enormous attention over the last 20 years from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, physical therapy, exercise science, psychological medicine, and pedagogy. It is important to translate insights gained from the scientific study of music, learning, and medicine into real-life applications. Such applications should be delivered widely, effectively, and accurately, harnessing the synergy of sound and music computing (SMC), wearable computing, and cloud computing technologies to promote learning and to facilitate disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in both developed countries and resource-poor developing countries. In this talk, I will highlight our recent projects at NUS Sound and Music Computing Lab that are developed to facilitate joyful learning, and motivate physical Rehabilitation. Speaker information WANG Ye is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS). He established and directed the sound and music computing (SMC) Lab (www.smcnus.org). Before joining NUS he was a member of the technical staff at Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland for 9 years. His research interests include sound analysis and music information retrieval (MIR), mobile computing, and cloud computing, and their applications in music edutainment, e-Learning, and e-Health, as well as determining their effectiveness via subjective and objective evaluations. He has served as the general chair of ISMIR2017 (https://ismir2017.smcnus.org/) and TPC co-chair of ICOT2017 (http://www.colips.org/conferences/icot2017/). His most recent projects involve the design and evaluation of systems to support 1) therapeutic gait training using Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS), 2) auditory training and second language learning.

Abstract : It is a work in progress to unleash the potentials of B2C e-Commerce in Indonesia. This study focuses on the millenials' impulse buying as digital buyers of SME in Indonesia. Potential personalisation dimension have been identified. These need further experiment and evaluation. About the Speaker : Dr Betty Purwandari is an academic staff in the Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia. She is the course leader of MSc Information Technology at Universitas Indonesia. Her research is on Web Science and e-commerce mainly with SME. She also works on e-participation with the Executive Office of the President, Republic of Indonesia. She did her undergraduate at Universitas Indonesia. Then she got her MSc from UCL as the British Chevening awardee. She did her PhD at the University of Southampton. After she came back to Universitas Indonesia, she was appointed as the university’s Information Technology director. Her professional achievements were recognised by the British Council Indonesia in the 2016 UK Alumni Award.

Abstract : The theme of the Web Observatory at IIIT Bangalore is "online social cognition." Our research aims to understand how social media activity molds collective worldview that in turn impacts several areas of human activity, like business, politics or even social harmony. We first categorize the web into three broad regions or realms: called the social, trigger, and inert realms respectively. The social realm forms the participatory areas of the web, where opinions are actively exchanged and molded. Trigger realm refers to elements like news websites or blogs, whose publishing events often trigger activity in the social realm. The inert realm refers to static web content, that gets used as a source of latent knowledge in the social interactions. The social realm itself is modeled as a "marketplace of opinions" -- where different vested interests invest their opinions in order to fetch returns. Opinions that are "compatible" come together to form one or more narratives. In order to characterize this, we first represent an opinion as comprising of two dimensions called: abstraction and expression. Abstraction refers to the opinion-holder's objective perspective on the issue, and expression refers to the communication of the opinion-holder's subjective sentiment about the issue. Cognitive science studies show that abstractions and expressions have vastly different characteristics in they way they diffuse through a population. Hence, the formation of narratives are sometimes catalyzed by abstractions, and sometimes by expressions. In order to represent narratives and their interplay, that constitutes social cognition, we also propose a hermeneutic framework called "Many Worlds on a Frame" (MWF). The framework models the semantic universe of discourse, as comprising of several semantic "worlds" or "narratives" within each of which , other worlds may participate as entities. Interactions between worlds are either facilitated or hampered by their respective worldviews. The set of all interactions between worlds is called the Frame. We argue that the "many worlds" representation is more conducive to modeling social cognition, rather than (say) a convergent multi-author knowledge model like a wiki. The MWF implementation does not impose an overarching ontology, at the same time, it is not completely unstructured either. We propose to use a modified form of the NQuad W3C standard for representing knowledge about online social cognition. About the Speaker : Srinath Srinivasa heads the Web Science lab and is the Dean (R&D) at IIIT Bangalore, India. Srinath holds a Ph.D (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI) Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from IIT-Madras and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore. He works in the area of Web Science, understanding the impact of the web on humanity. Technology for educational outreach and social empowerment has been a primary motivation driving his research. He has participated in several initiatives for technology enhanced education including the VTU Edusat program, The National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and an educational outreach program in collaboration with Upgrad. He is a member of various technical and organizational committees for international conferences like International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), ACM Hypertext, COMAD/CoDS, ODBASE, etc. He is also a life member of the Computer Society of India (CSI). As part of academic community outreach, Srinath has served on the Board of Studies of Goa University and as a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. He has served as a technical reviewer for various journals like the VLDB journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is also the recipient of various national and international grants for his research activities.

Over the past decade a number of research prototypes that record provenance or other forms of rich audit logs at the operating system level. The last few years have seen the increasing use of such systems for security and audit, notably in DARPA's $60m investment in the Transparent Computing program. Yet the foundations for trust in such systems remains unclear; the correct behaviour of a provenance recording system has not yet been clearly specified or proved correct. Therefore, attempts to improve security through auditing provenance records may fail due to missing or inaccurate provenance, or misunderstanding the intentions of the system designers, particularly when integrating provenance records from different systems. Even worse, provenance recording systems are not even straightforward to test, because the expected behaviour is nondeterministic: running the same program at different times or different machines is guaranteed to yield different provenance graphs, and running programs with nontrivial concurrency behaviour typically also yields multiple possible provenance graphs with different structure. We believe that such systems can be formally specified and verified, and should be in order to remove complex provenance recording systems from the trusted computing base. However, formally verifying such a system seems to require first having an accepted formal model of the operating system kernel itself, which is a nontrivial undertaking. In the short term, we propose provenance expressiveness benchmarking, an approach to understanding the current behaviour of a provenance recording system. The key idea (which is simple in principle) is to generate provenance records for individual system calls or short sequences of calls, and for each one generate a provenance graph fragment that shows how the call was recorded in the provenance graph. The challenge is how to automate this process, given that provenance recording tools work in different ways, use different output formats, and generate different (but similar) graphs containing both target activity and background noise. I will present work on this problem so far, focusing on how to automate the NP-complete approximate subgraph isomorphism problems we need to solve to automatically extract benchmark results.

Speaker: Dr Jie Tang ( http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/csen/4623/2010/20101224172643874184753/20101224172643874184753_.html )