Browse by Tags: wais seminar

Harnessing the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship is gaining popularity in the digital humanities. This talk describes a number of projects utilising Linked Data ranging from musicology and library metadata, to the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions.

Bay 9 are hoping to pioneer a way to encourage postgrads and staff in the lab to get over the fear of presenting their work to the group. The members of the bay will each give a 6m40s Pecha Kucha explaining their current research work through pictures. The topics of the pecha kuchas are: - Citizen Participation in News: An analysis of the landscape of online journalism (Jonny) - Argumentation on the Social Web (Tom) - From Narrative Systems to Ubiquitous Computing for Psychology - and everything in between (Charlie) - Is it worth sharing user model data? (Rikki)

Abstract: The talk will provide a review of the digital landscape, along with an outline of the affordances of digital technologies. It will focus on networking and open practices and will argue that practitioners need new digital literacies to harness the potential of digital technologies. It will argue that the teachers role is central and that they need a range of Continuing Professional Practice. It will describe a new project at DCU, #OpenTeach, which will develop a course for our 90 part-time tutors to help them design and facilitate online courses. It will argue that new approaches to Learning Design are needed and will describe a number of recent frameworks. It will conclude with a set of final reflections drawing on a recent EU-commissioned report. Bio: Gráinne Conole is a professor and Head of Open Education in the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. She has worked at the Universities of Bath Spa, Bristol, Leicester, OU and Southampton. Her research interests are on the use of technologies for learning, including Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), new approaches to designing for learning, e-pedagogies, and social media. She has an HEA National Teaching Fellowship and fellow of EDEN and ASCILITE. She has published and presented over 1000 talks, workshops and articles. See http://e4innovation.co.uk for more details.

Abstract: Over the past couple of years, there has been increasing interest in applying the latest advances in machine learning to creative projects in art and design. From DeepDream and style transfer to a GAN-generated painting selling for $430,000 at auction, AI art has moved beyond the world of research and academia and become a trend in its own right. Meanwhile, the contemporary art world's fascination with the social impact of facial recognition, recommendation systems and deep fakes has encouraged artists to explore AI critically as subject matter. This talk will give an overview of how artists and technologists are using and thinking about machine learning, its creative potential and societal impact. Bio: Luba Elliott is a curator and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries. She is currently working to educate and engage the broader public about the latest developments in AI art through talks, workshops and exhibitions at venues across the art and technology spectrum including The Photographers’ Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Seoul MediaCity Biennale, Impakt Festival, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, NeurIPS and ECCV. Her Creative AI London meetup community includes 2,300+ members. She has advised organisations including The World Economic Forum, Google and City University on the topic and was featured on the BBC, Forbes and The Guardian. She is a member of the AI council at the British Interactive Media Association. Previously, she worked in startups and venture capital and has a degree in Modern Languages from Cambridge University.

Speaker: Dr Kieron O'Hara Organiser: Time: 04/02/2015 11:00-11:45 Location: B32/3077 Abstract In order to reap the potential societal benefits of big and broad data, it is essential to share and link personal data. However, privacy and data protection considerations mean that, to be shared, personal data must be anonymised, so that the data subject cannot be identified from the data. Anonymisation is therefore a vital tool for data sharing, but deanonymisation, or reidentification, is always possible given sufficient auxiliary information (and as the amount of data grows, both in terms of creation, and in terms of availability in the public domain, the probability of finding such auxiliary information grows). This creates issues for the management of anonymisation, which are exacerbated not only by uncertainties about the future, but also by misunderstandings about the process(es) of anonymisation. This talk discusses these issues in relation to privacy, risk management and security, reports on recent theoretical tools created by the UKAN network of statistics professionals (on which the author is one of the leads), and asks how long anonymisation can remain a useful tool, and what might replace it.

Abstract: Travel surveys are used to estimate the percentage of citizen using certain mode(s) of transport, and are the basic building block towards data-driven transport policies. Traditionally, travel surveys are done on paper or with telephone assistance, a costly and cumbersome approach that limits the number of times the survey can be applied. The advent of ubiquitous Smartphones opened the door for the implementation of travel surveys as a mobile app that (i) collects relevant sensor data (ii) uses Machine Learning models to detect the transportation mode, and (iii) interface with the user to verify the machine's prediction, correcting it if necessary. In this talk I will present a general framework for mobile travel surveys, review the associated challenges and research questions associated to each phase, and present some of the advances we have made in the context of the H2020 QROWD project. Speaker information: Luis-Daniel Ibáñez is a research fellow in the Web and Internet Science group of the University of Southampton, UK His research activity comprises the domains of the Web, Linked Open Data and Crowdsourcing. He holds a Ph.D in Informatics from the University of Nantes. He is currently the technical director of the H2020 QROWD project, and also participates in two further EU funded initiatives: the European Data Portal, where he contributes to the analysis of its effectivity, and the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum. Previously, he was deputy coordinator of the Open Data Incubator for Europe, an EU funded incubation program for SMEs innovating around Open Data.

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: Big Data has been characterised as a great economic opportunity and a massive threat to privacy. Both may be correct: the same technology can indeed be used in ways that are highly beneficial and those that are ethically intolerable, maybe even simultaneously. Using examples of how Big Data might be used in education - normally referred to as "learning analytics" - the seminar will discuss possible ethical and legal frameworks for Big Data, and how these might guide the development of technologies, processes and policies that can deliver the benefits of Big Data without the nightmares. Speaker Biography: Andrew Cormack is Chief Regulatory Adviser, Jisc Technologies. He joined the company in 1999 as head of the JANET-CERT and EuroCERT incident response teams. In his current role he concentrates on the security, policy and regulatory issues around the network and services that Janet provides to its customer universities and colleges. Previously he worked for Cardiff University running web and email services, and for NERC's Shipboard Computer Group. He has degrees in Mathematics, Humanities and Law.

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 LifeGuide research programme is a multidisciplinary initiative led by Professor Lucy Yardley (Psychology) and Dr Mark Weal (Computer Science) at the University of Southampton. We have developed a unique set of open source software tools, that allows intervention designers with no experience of programming to create interactive web-based interventions to support healthy behaviour. In this talk I will give a brief overview of digital behavioural change interventions, describe the LifeGuide platform that has been developed at the University of Southampton, and through a number of exemplar projects discuss some of the lessons learnt from this interdisciplinary collaboration.

We're not a particularly healthy culture. Our "normal" practices are not optimised for our wellbeing. From the morning commute to the number of hours we believe we need to put in to complete a task that may itself be unreasonable, to the choices we make about time to prepare food to fit into these constraints - all these operations tend to make us feel forced into treating ourselves as secondary to our jobs. How can data help improve our quality of life? FitBits and AppleWatches highlight the strengths and limits of Things that Count, not the least of which is the rather low uptake of things like FITBITS and apple watches. So once we ask the question about how data might improve quality of life, we may need to add the caveat: pervasively, ubiquitously, in the rich variety of contexts that isn't all about Counting. And once we think about such all seeing all knowing environments, we then need to think about privacy and anonymity. That is: does everything have to be connected to the internet to deliver on a vision of improved quality of life through data? And if there is a Big Ubiquity - should we think about inverting new norms, like how to make personal clouds and personal data stores far more easy to manage - rather than outsourcing so much data and computation? In this short talk, I'd like to consider three scenarios about Going where too few humans have gone before to help others The challenges of qualitative data Supporting privacy and content to motivate thinking about data capture, re-use and re-presentation, and opportunities across ECS for machine learning, AI, infoviz and hci.

Abstract: The Data Observatory (DO) at the Data Science Institute (DSI) in Imperial College (IC) is the largest interactive visualisation facility in Europe, consisting of 64 monitors arranged to give 313 degree surround vision and engagement Opened in November 2015, the DO provides an opportunity for academics and industry to visualise data in a way that uncovers new insights, and promotes the communication of complex data sets and analysis in an immersive and multi-dimensional environment. Designed, built by, and housed within the DSI, the DO enables decision makers to derive new implications and actions from interrogating data sets in an innovative, unique environment. The talk will provide an overview of the DO capabilities and case studies of its use.

Data Pitch is a €7m EU-funded open innovation project bringing together corporates and public sector organisations that have data, with startups and SMEs working with data. Data can be reused and repurposed in multiple ways to solve specific challenges. Data from organisations has the potential to create huge value for private and public sector organisations but often only a small percentage of this is exploited. There are many SMEs and startups across Europe that are building innovative solutions using data and new technologies. Many of them struggle to get access to data from public and private sector organisations to develop real-case pilot projects. Data Pitch bridges the gap that these two groups face, supporting them throughout the process, reducing risk and providing the necessary expertise and credibility. In this seminar we will outline the approach to innovation with shared data taken by Data Pitch, and describe some of the issues that have arisen in data sharing, especially with regards to personal data and business use-cases, and how we have addressed them.

Abstract: In Wendy Hall's 2017 AI review, the first recommendation was to create data trusts to encourage data access and data sharing. A number of initiatives are exploring these ideas in concrete contexts, including Elena Simperl's Data Pitch project and the Open Data Institute's work on data innovation. This talk will consider the question in more abstraction, to consider data trusts' function, and how this will determine their form. I will argue that a data trust should work within existing law to provide ethical, architectural and governance support for trustworthy data processing, and I will unpack this in terms of how it might create trust, what architectures might help implement data trusts, and how they relate to the existing law of trusts. Biodata: Kieron O'Hara is an associate professor in the WAIS group of ECS. His research interests are in trust, privacy and the nature of digital modernity. He is a lead in the UKAN network of anonymisation experts. His latest book, The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (with Nigel Shadbolt, Dave De Roure and Wendy Hall) will be published by Springer in March.

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.

This thought provoking talk will be given by Bo Ji, Founder of China Start, an inspiring TEDx speaker, a Chinaprenuer, and a game changer in the global startup ecosystem. Bo is currently the Assistant Dean & Chief Representative for Europe at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), a top business school with more than 10,000 chairman/CEO level alumni in China. Bo had an over-20-year successful corporate career in Global Business Development, Innovation, Strategy, Supply Chain Management, M&A, etc and has served at the senior executive level for companies such as Monsanto, Cargill, Pfizer, Wrigley and Mars. After a long corporate life, Bo became a serial entrepreneur and investor and founded “China Start” to bring global startups and scaleups to China. He created a paradigm shift for global startups to expand to China instead of Silicon Valley. Is an innovator born or made? Is it possible to learn the ability of generating innovative ideas? The answer is YES! Our ability to generate innovative ideas is not just a function of our minds, but of our behaviors. There are five “discovery skills” used by innovative leaders that distinguish them from the ordinary: questioning, observation, networking, experimenting, and associational thinking. These skills can be learned and trained. Innovative companies have three components, people, process, and philosophy to support the application of the 5 DNA skills.

Argumentation, debate and discussion are key facets of human communication, shaping the way people form, share and promote ideas, hypotheses and solutions to problems. Argumentation can broadly be broken down into collaborative problem solving or truth-seeking, and quarrelling without hope for a resolution, instead for recreation, catharsis or entertainment. The social web is a growing way in which individuals, social groups and even corporations share content, ideas and information, as well as hold discussions and debates. Current models of argumentation often focus on formal argumentation techniques, in which participants are expected to abide by a stringent set of rules or practices. However, on the social web there is no such code of conduct: antisocial behaviour, which often stems from argumentation, can have a negative impact on online communities, driving away new users and stifling participation. How can we model these types of argumentation, and how does it affect a user's perception of the discussion? Title and abstract to be confirmed

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.

Recent elections, including the 2016 UK Referendum on Brexit and the 2017 US election, have seen a great deal of discussion about fake news. How exactly has the discussion of fake become so central to debates about modern democracy? In this talk, Nick Anstead will examine the difficulty of defining fake news and the evidence that it has political consequences. He will argue that there is too great a tendency to see the problem of fake news as technological, when the reality is that the underlying causes are political, social and economic. This analysis has important ramifications for how societies seek to combat fake news and ensure a knowledgeable and engaged electorate.

This summer I went back to basics to install a glacier movement sensor system Iceland - sponsored by Formula E. This followed on from a very simple GPS tracker we installed on a Greenland Iceberg last year. We chose some accurate dGPS units, the Iridium short messaging service and a micropython based microcontroller. Putting it all together and installing is a whole story in itself however! So this seminar will mainly be a story of design issues, sand in the keyboard, off-road driving, some quadcopter imaging and finally some actual results.

Abstract: Future Worlds is a unique and vibrant startup accelerator at the University of Southampton which helps nurture aspiring entrepreneurs and cutting-edge technologies through one-to-one support and its network of seasoned founders, investors and millionaire entrepreneurs. This talk will be an introduction of Future Worlds to our group and an opportunity to learn about their work and services. Biodata: Ben Clark is a specialist in taking companies from startup to scaleup, most recently with Southampton-based Snowflake Software and as Resident Mentor at Future Worlds. Ben was previously on the leadership team of Hippowaste, raising over £12m in funding and growing from small startup to over £7m turnover in 4 years before moving on to work with venture capital and startups in Africa and a post as Chief Operating Officer at software as a service company, iPresent, bootstrapping to over $2m of annual recurring revenue.

Abstract: As one of the newest art forms available to young people, gaming has become an increasing influence on young people’s education, even if not used in a classroom environment. This talk aims to explore examples of how video games have changed how young people understand and learn about certain subjects, with particular focus on how the indie title Minecraft allows them to learn about the world of Computer Science and how groups are looking to forward the cause of education though games.

Feeling drowsy at work? Despite findings that poor indoor air quality causes cognitive performance decline, the average office-worker has no access to information on the quality of air in the room until it becomes poor enough to cause discomfort. In this talk, I discuss our user-centred research from the REFRESH project, which joins the dots between the individual and social factors that affect perception of IAQ, and the human physiological responses to changes in air quality. This involves (1) physiological measurement such as (EEG) to detect the effect of air quality on drowsiness, (2) qualitative methods to understanding the social factors which influence air quality in offices, and (3) designing ambient technology which visualises CO2 of an office- an indicator of indoor air quality. At the end of the talk you will have some actions for how you can detect- and do something about- the air quality of your office; how easily you can incorporate qualitative methods into your research and use technology to understand your users’ needs.

Abstract: Assessing the degree of semantic relatedness between words is an important task with a variety of semantic applications, such as ontology learning for the Semantic Web, semantic search, recommendation or query expansion. To accomplish this in an automated fashion, many relatedness measures have been proposed. However, most of these metrics only encode information contained in the underlying corpus or in the navigation and thus do not directly model human intuition. In this talk, we show the utilisation of metric learning to improve existing semantic relatedness measures by learning from additional information, such as explicit human feedback. Our approach is based on knowledge that emergent as semantic information in Social Media systems and is embedded in the user's content or its navigational traces. We argue to use word embeddings instead of traditional high-dimensional vector representations in order to leverage their semantic density and to reduce computational cost as a first step to improve the extraction of the hidden semantic. We present results on several domains including tagging data as well as publicly available embeddings based on Wikipedia texts and navigation. Second, human feedback about semantic relatedness for learning and evaluation is extracted from publicly available datasets such as MEN or WS-353. We will show that our method can significantly improve semantic relatedness measures by learning from the additional explicit human feedback. For tagging data, we are the first to generate and study embeddings. Our results are of special interest for researchers and practitioners of Semantic Web and show the power of Machine Learning methods for extracting semantics. Biodata: Andreas Hotho is a professor at the University of Würzburg and the head of the DMIR group. In this context, he is directing the BibSonomy project spanning the L3S Research Center located in Hanover, the KDE group of the University of Kassel and the DMIR group. Prior, he was a senior researcher at the University of Kassel. He started his research at the AIFB Institute at the University of Karlsruhe where he was working on text mining, ontology learning and semantic web related topics. Currently, he is working in the area of data science, data mining, semantic web mining and social media analysis.

Researchers from the Web and Internet Science group have been exploring hypertexts and computational narrative for nearly two decades. In this seminar we present our most recent work on the Leverhulme Trust funded project StoryPlaces (http://storyplaces.soton.ac.uk/) where we have investigated the poetics and technology associated with location aware narratives. Location Aware Narratives are a type of Strange Hypertext (hypertexts that go beyond traditional node-link models) because location aware stories reflects the physical context of the reader - examples include tour guides where the reader is required to be in a particular location to access certain pages, interactive fiction where location is used to set the tone or backdrop to the drama, or dynamic narrative that changes or responds to the user’s wanderings. The StoryPlaces system is driven by a Sculptural Hypertext engine which models narrative as a state machine and delivers a mobile storytelling experience through a location aware web application. StoryPlaces is based on a general model for location aware narrative called "Canyons, Deltas, Plains" that we have shown to support the structures used in a broad sample of location aware storytelling systems. By working with both student and professional writers we have expanded our knowledge of the common patterns and structures used by authors in location aware narrative, and have begun to see how the structures of the narrative and the topology of the locations involved are intrinsically connected, and that the 'poetics of space' are a fundamental part of this medium. As part of the seminar we will demonstrate the StoryPlaces reader, and show how these patterns have begun to inform the design of our authorship tools.

Data is ubiquitous; everyone has it and deals with it. However, just because everyone deals with it, doesn't mean that we naturally handle it well or efficiently. In this talk, Adriane Chapman will introduce herself to the WAIS group and describe her interest in making data useful and usable. She will describe her past work in provenance, and her current work in annotations, provenance and data modelling.

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.

peaker(s): Jon Hare Organiser: Time: 25/06/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The aggregation of items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextualise and effectively consume the torrents of information on the social web. This task is challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information being contextualised. In this talk I'll describe some of our recent work on trend and event detection in multimedia data streams. We focus on scalable streaming algorithms that can be applied to multimedia data streams from the web and the social web. The talk will cover two particular aspects of our work: mining Twitter for trending images by detecting near duplicates; and detecting social events in multimedia data with streaming clustering algorithms. I'll will describe in detail our techniques, and explore open questions and areas of potential future work, in both these tasks.

Speaker: Lynda Hardman Organiser: Time: 04/02/2015 12:30-13:30 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The challenges of addressing gender inequalities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine is widely acknowledged. We currently hold a bronze award and ECS is one of many academic units in the University which has gained Athena Swan Charter status. In this seminar, Professor Lynda Hardman, Chair of the Informatics Europe working group "Women in Informatics Research and Education” will be explaining the causes of issued underlying gender inequality and constructive routes to addressing this important agenda. In undertaking to commit to an action plan which is a prerequisite of gaining charter status, the University or academic department agreed to accept and incorporate the Athena Swan six principles listed below: * To address gender inequalities requires commitment and action from everyone, at all levels of the organisation * To tackle the unequal representation of women in science requires changing cultures and attitudes across the organisation * The absence of diversity at management and policy-making levels has broad implications which the organisation will examine * The high loss rate of women in science is an urgent concern which the organisation will address * The system of short-term contracts has particularly negative consequences for the retention and progression of women in science, which the organisation recognises * There are both personal and structural obstacles to women making the transition from PhD into a sustainable academic career in science, which require the active consideration of the organisation. This seminar is designed to provide an opportunity to explore these issues NOTE: Lynda will be basing here talk on some of the work she directed as chair of the "Women in Informatics Research and Education” working group. The purpose of the working group is to actively participate and promote actions that contribute to improve gender balance in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies. The first concrete result of the working group's activities was the publication of the booklet "More Women in Informatics Research and Education" in 2013. The booklet is a compact source of clear and simple best practices to deans and heads of departments that aim to increase the participation of women as both students and employees in their institutions. Many tips included were also inspired by colleagues already in leading positions who have already implemented actions in their institutions to attract more women and ensure their continued participation in the organization at commensurate ratios with their male colleagues. The booklet is endorsed by the European Commission and features a foreword by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda.

Abstract: Computational science (also scientific computing) involves the development of models and simulations to understand natural systems answering questions that neither theory nor experiment alone are equipped to answer. Despite the increasing importance of so-called in-silico experiments to the scientific discovery process, state-of-the-art software engineering practices are not fully adopted in computational science. However, software engineering is central to any effort to increase computational science’s software productivity. Among the methods and techniques that software engineering can offer to computational science, I’ll present work model-driven software engineering with domain specific languages and on modular software architectures. For good scientific practice, it is important that research results may properly be checked by reviewers, and possibly be repeated and extended by other researchers. This is of particular interest for "digital science" i.e. for in-silico experiments. In this talk, I’ll discuss some efforts on open science in both, computational science and computer science. Reference: A. Johanson, W. Hasselbring: “Software Engineering for Computational Science: Past, Present, Future”, In: Computing in Science & Engineering, pp. 90-109, March/April 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2018.108162940# Biodata: Prof. Dr. Wilhelm (Willi) Hasselbring is professor of Software Engineering and former dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Kiel University, Germany. In the competence cluster Software Systems Engineering (KoSSE), he coordinates technology transfer projects with industry. In the excellence cluster Future Ocean, in the Helmholtz Research School Ocean System Science and Technology (HOSST), and in the new Helmholtz School for Marine Data Science (MarDATA), he collaborates with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

Abstract Passwords are the most common form of authentication, and most of us will have to log in to several accounts every day which require passwords. Unfortunately, passwords often do not do a good job of proving who we are, and come with a host of usability problems. Probably the only reason that passwords still exist is that there often isn't a better alternative, so we are likely to be stuck with them for the foreseeable future. Password cracking has been a problem for years, and becomes more problematic as computer become more powerful and attackers get a better idea of the sort of passwords people use. This presentation will look at two free password cracking tools: Hashcat and John the Ripper, and how even a non-expert on a laptop (i.e. me) can use them effectively. An introduction to some of the research surrounding the economics and usability of passwords will also be discussed. Note that the speaker is not an expert in this area, so it will be a fairly informal since I'm sure you're all tired after a long term.

Abstract Following the success of Bay 9's Pecha Kucha, this week Bay 8 are providing the next instalment of the newly established tradition of Pecha Kucha. In 6m40s and 20 slides, each member of Bay 8 will introduce themselves, explaining their background and research interests, so you can put a name to the face, and chat after the event if you have common interests. These mini talks aim to support the collaborative nature of WAIS by introducing each member to the wider group. This week the bay members and Pecha Kuchas are: - The Public Health Analogy in Web Security (Huw) - Social Networking Features in Digital Behaviour Change Interventions (Roushdat) - Computers, Psychology and a lot of coffee (Anna) - Law, computer science and that annoying thing you have to say you’ve read before you can use a website (Emma)

Abstract: Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities, involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing in the world. Some 10 years after beginning research on the topic of Provenance, I co-chaired the provenance working group at the World Wide Web Consortium. The working group published 4 recommendations and several notes about the PROV standard for provenance in 2013. In this talk, I will present some use cases for provenance, the PROV standard and some flagship examples of adoption. I will then move onto our current research area in exploiting provenance, in the context of the SmartSociety and ORCHID projects. Doing so, I will present some methods, algorithms, and tools that we have developed in Southampton.

Moira McGregor has worked on various projects at the Mobile Life Research Centre including: everyday use of digital maps; the sharing economy; mobile battery maintenance; and speech technology in workplace meetings. What these projects have have in common is a desire to look at the use of mobile technology as it happens in order to understand how users make sense of the technology, and also how users interweave this use with other interactions going on around them at the same time. The above coincides with a general move from studying mobile phone technology in the controlled setting of the lab, to the challenge of devising methods to allow the study of mobile phone use in situ, out ‘in the wild’. This focus on use in situ calls for a focus on working with distributed research methods, including video analysis, interactional and conversational analysis, interviews, and technical probes – all of which have been deployed in Moira’s work in order to give access to moment by moment interaction with mobile technology. The resulting small scale and detailed perspective may be combined to complement the more pervasive approaches of recording mobile phone use by instrumenting technology with sensors and logging use over longer periods, with large cohorts of users. Moira is currently a PhD student at the MobileLife Research Centre in Stockholm. Her work looks at how technology is used in everyday life – from mobile phone use in co-present interaction with others, to how an app like Uber is changing the work practices of taxi drivers. In this seminar, Moira will present some of the research methods used in her studies and some of her preliminary findings.

Information and data integration focuses on providing an integrated view of multiple distributed and heterogeneous sources of information (such as web sites, databases, peer or sensor data etc.). Through information integration all this scattered data can be combined and queried. In this talk we are dealing with the problems of data integration, data exchange/warehousing, and query answering with or without ontologies. We present an algorithm for virtual data integration where data sources are queried in a distributed way and no centralized repository is materialized. Our algorithm processes queries in the presence of thousands of data sources in under a second. We extend this solution to virtual integration settings where domain knowledge is represented using constraints/ontologies (e.g. OWL2-QL). Subsequently, we examine the Chase algorithm which is the main tool to reason with constraints for data warehousing, and develop an optimization that performs orders of magnitude faster. We also examine hybrid solutions to data integration where both materialization/warehousing and virtual data integration are combined in order to optimize query answering. We discuss how these approaches can help set up future research directions and outline important applications to data management and analysis over integrated data.

Real-time geoparsing of social media streams (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare) is providing a new 'virtual sensor' capability to end users such as emergency response agencies (e.g. Tsunami early warning centres, Civil protection authorities) and news agencies (e.g. Deutsche Welle, BBC News). Challenges in this area include scaling up natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) approaches to handle real-time traffic volumes, reducing false positives, creating real-time infographic displays useful for effective decision support and providing support for trust and credibility analysis using geosemantics. I will present in this seminar on-going work by the IT Innovation Centre over the last 4 years (TRIDEC and REVEAL FP7 projects) in building such systems, and highlights our research towards improving trustworthy and credible of crisis map displays and real-time analytics for trending topics and influential social networks during major news worthy events.

Abstract: Many people would like to see new skills, such as managing systems or complex problem solving, introduced into mainstream education. These skills are in high demand in the workplace. However, education is still an assessment-driven environment, and until these skills can be tested fairly, their impact will be minimal. Online games provide a way of evidencing this kind of ability, but games scores do not currently meet requirements of fairness. In high stakes assessment, 'fairness' is a complex concept, but it always has to have a mathematical argument behind it, for ethical and legal reasons. The analysis techniques that assessors use to locate problems in large data sets have been applied to a range of testing scenarios, from multiple choice to human-scored evaluation of complex tasks, but they will not work with game data at the moment. Bayesian analysis appears to be the best approach to deal with the more complex behaviour produced during game play, but few assessors have worked with Bayes probability. This talk will give you an insight into how assessors mathematically model very common human test behaviours, such as cheating, guessing, a rogue examiner or poor question design. It will also outline how key assumptions about testing need to be re-conceptualised for game data, and suggest how existing approaches to identifying bias and error might be incorporated in Bayesian probability-based estimations of ability. Background of Speaker : Clare Walsh is a teacher, and final year PhD student. Before joining the CDT, she authored over 20 course books that are used in secondary schools and further education worldwide, and has worked for over 15 years in international high stakes assessment design.

Abstract This seminar will introduce an initial year of research exploring participation in the development of a bilingual symbol dictionary. Symbols can be a communication and literacy ‘lifeline’ for those unable to communicate through speech or writing. We will discuss how an online system has been built to overcome language, cultural and literacy skill issues for a country where 86% are expatriates but the target clients are Arabic born individuals with speech and language impairments. The symbols in use at present are inappropriate and yet there is no democratic way of providing a ‘user voice’ for making choices, let alone easy mechanisms for adapting and sharing newly developed symbols across the nation or extended Arabic world. This project aims to change this situation. Having sourced a series of symbols that could be adapted to suit user’s needs, the team needed to encourage those users, their carers and therapists to vote on whether the symbols would be appropriate and work with those already in use. The first prototype was developed and piloted during the WAISfest in 2013. The second phase needs further voting on the most suitably adapted symbols for use when communicating with others. There is a requirement to have mechanisms for evaluating the outcome of the votes, where symbols fail to represent accurate meanings, have inappropriate colours, representations and actions etc. There also remains the need to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Not easy in a climate of acceptance of the expert view, a culture where to be critical can be a problem and time is not of the essence.

Web users have changed the Web from a means for publishing and exchanging documents to a means for sharing their feelings, beliefs, and opinions and participating in debates on any conceivable topic. Current web technologies fail to support this change: arguments and opinions are uploaded in purely textual form; as a result, they cannot be easily retrieved, processed and interlinked, and all this information is largely left unexploited. This talk will sketch the vision of Debate Web, which will enable the extraction, discovery, retrieval, interrelation and visualisation of the vast variety of viewpoints that exist online, based on machine-readable representations of arguments and opinions.

A central problem in the analysis of observational data is inferring casual relationships - what are the underlying causes of the observed behaviours? With the recent proliferation of Big Data from online social networks, it has become important to determine to what extent social influence causes certain messages to 'go viral', and to what extent other causes also play a role. In this thesis, we propose a methodological framework for quantitatively measuring and for qualifying the effects of social influence from Web-mediated interactions, while accounting for other relevant causes, on individual and collective outcomes, using 'found' observational digital data. This framework is based on causality theory and is informed by the social sciences, constituting a methodological contribution of the type that is much needed in the emergent interdisciplinary area of computational social science. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically how our framework offers a way for successfully addressing many of the limitations of the popular information diffusion-based paradigm for social influence online, enabling researchers to disentangle, measure and qualify the effects of social influence from online interactions, at the individual and the collective level.

Abstract: The UN sustainable development goals, an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, were launched last year. These include ending poverty and malnutrition, improving health and education, and building resilience to natural disasters and climate change. A particular focus across the goals and targets is achievement 'everywhere', ensuring that no one gets left behind and that progress is monitored at subnational levels to avoid national-level statistics masking local heterogeneities. How will this subnational monitoring of progress towards meeting the goals be undertaken when many countries will undertake just a single census in the 2015-2030 monitoring period? Professor Tatem will present an overview of the work of the two organizations he directs; WorldPop ( www.worldpop.org ) and Flowminder ( www.flowminder.org ); in meeting the challenges of constructing consistent, comparable and regularly updated metrics to measure a! nd map progress towards the sustainable development goals in low and middle income countries, and where the integration of traditional and new forms of data, including those derived from satellite imagery, GPS and mobile phones, can play a role.

In this talk, I will discuss the unexpected uses of social machines, and how individual and collective behaviour on platforms such as Twitter, Wikipedia, and the Zooniverse contribute to their development, success, and failure. Based on these observations, we will explore how we can take advantage of the emergent features and interpretive flexibility of social machines, in order to support current global challenges.

Machines recognition of continuous speech became commercially available in 1998 creating the possibility of automatically transcribing what a lecturer was saying in class to change approaches to notetaking as well as benefitting disabled students and international students. In spite of continuous improvements in speech recognition accuracy, universities haven’t been providing their students with automatically transcribed lectures and so our spin out company Synote was set up to help turn the possibility into reality. This seminar reviews the past 20 years of research into enhancing learning from lectures and recordings using speech recognition transcription that has involved researchers, universities and organisations worldwide as well as student projects and grant funded projects in ECS.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event summarization using publicly accessible data made available through social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. People use these outlets to communicate with others, express their opinion and commentate on a wide variety of real-world events, such as disasters and public disorder. Due to the heterogeneity, the sheer volume of text and the fact that some messages are more informative than others, automatic summarization is a very challenging task. This paper presents three techniques for summarizing microblog documents by selecting the most representative posts for real-world events (clusters). In particular, we tackle the task of multilingual summarization in Twitter. We evaluate the generated summaries by comparing them to both human produced summaries and to the summarization results of similar leading summarization systems. Our results show that our proposed Temporal TF-IDF method outperforms all the other summarization systems for both the English and non-English corpora as they lead to informative summaries.

Abstract: In my talk I will discuss the way in which the ideas of the Data Science, Web and Semantic Web, Open Science contribute to new methods and approaches to data driven chemistry and chemical informatics. A key aspect of the discussion will be how to facilitate the improved acquisition and integration and analysis of chemical data in context. I will refer to lesions learnt in the e-Science and Digital Economy (particularly the IT as a Utility Network) programmes and the EDISON H2020 project. Jeremy G. Frey Jeremy Frey obtained his DPhil on experimental and theoretical aspects of van der Waals complexes, in Oxford, followed by a fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with Yuan Lee. In 1984 he joined the University of Southampton, where he is now Professor of Physical Chemistry and head of the Computational Systems Chemistry Group. His experimental research probes molecular organization from single molecules to liquid interfaces using laser spectroscopy from the IR to soft X-rays. In parallel he investigates how e-Science infrastructure supports intelligent access to scientific data. He is strongly committed to collaborative inter and multi-disciplinary research and is skilled in facilitating communication between diverse disciplines speaking different languages. He has successfully lead several large interdisciplinary collaborative RUCK research grants, from Basic Technology (Coherent Soft X-Ray imaging), e-Science (CombeChem) and most recently the Digital Economy Challenge area of IT as a Utility Network+, where he has successfully created a unique platform to facilitate collaboration across the social, science, engineering and design domains, working with all the research, commercial, third and governmental sectors.

Mr. Rew is a Consultant Surgeon at the University Hospital of Southampton. He has been leading work within NHS on data visualisation systems for the electronic patient record across the UHS Clinical Data Estate.

Title: The Paradigm of Crowdsourced Systems Abstract: High acceptance rates of truly personal, portable devices such as smartphones and smart gadgets, along with the successful introduction of DIY computer platforms, like Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's, have lead to an unprecedented abundance of well-connected and well-equipped devices. Crowdsourced Systems is a new system paradigm that seeks to exploit the high availability of such devices and thus change the way data is generated, processed and consumed. In this talk, we will discuss this new paradigm, the challenges and opportunities it poses, review real-world use-cases and present relative on-going standardization efforts. Short CV: Dr. Constantinos Marios Angelopoulos is Lecturer in Computing at Bournemouth University (U.K.) specializing in future and emerging paradigms of computer networks and distributed systems. He is also the Lead Editor of the ITU-T Work Item on Crowdsourced Systems; co-author of the ITU-T Technical Report on “Artificial Intelligence in IoT” and the Vocabulary Co-rapporteur for ITU-T SG20. In the past, he has worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Geneva (CH) under the prestigious Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Researchers.

Abstract: Circular Economy is a paradigm for sustainable growth that envisions the transformation of how modern societies design, produce and consume goods and services towards a regenerative economic cycle. Future and emerging technologies, such as 5G, the blockchain, and crowdsourced sensing systems, along with innovative models and paradigms, such as the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and community networks, will play an important role in the transition to Circular Economy by enabling and facilitating, among others, digitization (efficient asset management, open data, etc.) and collaboration (co-innovation, shared value creation, etc.). In this talk we will introduce the paradigm of Smart (i.e. data-driven) Circular Economy, we will review corresponding technological enablers and will present data-driven circular business models. Biodata: Dr. Marios Angelopoulos is Principal Academic in Computing at Bournemouth University (UK), specialising in future and emerging paradigms of computer networks and distributed systems. Previously, he was with University of Geneva (CH) under the prestigious Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Researchers. At BU, he has established and leads the Open Innovation Lab (OIL) and is a founding member of the Future & Complex Networks (FlexNet) Research Group. He is also the founding Programme Leader of three master courses in the area of Internet of Things. Marios is also active in international standardisation bodies. Since 2018, he serves at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) as Associate Rapporteur of Question 5 "Research and emerging technologies, terminology and definitions" in Study Group 20: Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities and Communities (SC&C). He is also the Liaison co-Rapporteur of Study Group 20 to the Standardization Committee for Vocabulary (SCV). His research on Crowdsourced Systems has greatly contributed to the ITU-T work item on "Requirements and Functional Architecture of IoT-related Crowdsourced Systems". Finally, he has published in and served in the committees of several highly-esteemed international Journals and Conferences in his area of expertise (such as IEEE ToN, Elsevier's ComNet, ComCom, Ad-Hoc Nets, IEEE ICDCS, DCOSS, ICC, ACM MSWiM, etc).

Abstract: In this seminar we will present three PhD research projects currently underway in WAIS in the area of transmedia and interactive narrative. All three have been accepted as papers to the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS’18) that takes place in Dublin next month. The three projects are: 1) Multiplayer Interactive Narrative Experiences (MINEs): A type of multiplayer interactive storytelling, in which each player may experience their own distinct narrative. Here, we explain what these narratives are, describe the design of a system to support them and explore some brief examples of the stories that are possible. 2) Authoring Interactive Digital Narratives: An experiment performed using one story across three different type interactive writing tools. This was done to explore the impact a tool has in shaping a story and to observe how each affected the authorial task. 3) Models of Alternative Reality Games (ARGs): Transmedia Storytelling involves telling stories across multiple media channels. This method presents problems for researchers in that it is difficult to understand the structure of a transmedia story and how the story unfolds over time. We present a way of describing such stories using examples of several ARGs and explore the affordances of this technique. Biodata: Callum Spawforth is a PHD student in the Web and Internet Science group at the University of Southampton, UK. His main area of research is Multiplayer Interactive Storytelling, exploring the possibilities for interactive fiction featuring multiple participants. His research has also touched on understanding interactions in multiplayer games and authoring systems for sculptural hypertext. Callum did his undergraduate degree in Computer Science here at the University of Southampton, and is one of the organisers for the Southampton Game Jam. Sofia Kitromili is a Web Science PhD student at the University of Southampton looking into authoring digital storytelling and how the practise is reformed through different platforms. She is currently looking to investigate the notion of storytelling through an authorial perspective with a locative literature tool using cultural heritage collections as a case study. Ryan Javanshir is a Web Science CDT PhD student. His research lies in the area of transmedia storytelling, looking at how we can better understand how narrative unfolds across media. He is also interested in game design and the surrounding ideas that can be transferred over and applied to transmedia design.

Over the last decade, social media has become a hot topic for researchers of collaborative technologies (e.g., CSCW). The pervasive use of social media in our everyday lives provides a ready source of naturalistic data for researchers to empirically examine the complexities of the social world. In this talk I outline a different perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) - an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in everyday life, and how its social organisation is achieved by users of social media. Outlining a possible programme of research, I draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research can be generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair. In doing so, I also raise questions about existing studies of social media use and the way they characterise interactional phenomena.

Unions and collective negotiation are essential in maintaining good working conditions for all staff, in particular those who are on Fixed Term Contracts (FTC) and are often starting out in their academic/research careers. The FTC group is particularly vulnerable to discrimination and the pressure to produce outputs and bring in funding to secure more secure employment. The very nature of being on a FTC greatly reduces the amount of funding sources that can be applied to.This talk provides an overview of the University and College Union (UCU), how it operates, what the benefits are, what we have achieved nationally and at a local level. Joe Viana, a FTC research er at the University, and the FTC rep of the Southampton UCU branch, will be on hand to answer questions and to provide feedback on local and national level activities.The talk should be of interest to all FTC staff, their supervisors and any postgrads considering a research career in higher education.

Abstract: A common issue among European municipalities is the lack of information of mobility infrastructure Points of Interest (PoIs). This information is valuable both for powering services to citizens and as a mean to audit the urban health and environment of the city. Currently, municipalities need to send their employees to the field to do the counting, an expensive and error-prone approach that does not scale in the size of the area to be covered. Alternatively, one can rely on Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) systems to crowdsource the data, but at the expense of having no control over data updates. We propose a faster and cheaper solution to tackle the problem by taking advantage of virtual imagery to use paid crowdworkers who can perform the item locating task remotely with no need of to be physically in place and without having any prior local knowledge of the area for which the exploration is required. We implemented a standalone crowdsourcing system named Virtual City Explorer (VCE) which allows collecting locations and images of PoIs on virtual spaces with paid crowdworkers. Our system takes as input a virtual space (e.g. a Google Street View instance), a type of PoI and an area of interest (defined as a geo-spatial polygon) and returns coordinates of instances of the target PoI type inside the area of interest discovered by a fixed, configurable, number of crowdworkers. Each crowdworker is asked to explore the area of interest finding a (configurable) number of PoIs, being rewarded upon completion. Our first experiments resulted in being very encouraging, showing how the VCE can effectively be used to find and collect locations of PoIs, in a cheaper and faster way. Speaker information Eddy Maddalena is a research fellow in the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) group of the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Eddy got a PhD in Computer Science in 2017 at the University of Udine, Italy. During his PhD, Eddy mainly focused on Information Retrieval (IR) and crowdsourcing to create human annotated test collection of documents to be used to evaluate the effectiveness of IR systems. After holding his PhD, Eddy moved to the University of Southampton where he is the leader of the Crowdsourcing Work Package for the H2020 QROWD Project, and designs and develops crowdsourcing based solutions to improve mobility and reduce transportation issues for smart cities, which aim to include “human in the loop” participation in the Big Data Value Chain information flow.

This is a research discussion about the Hampshire Hub - see http://protohub.net/. The aim is to find out more about the project, and discuss future collaboration and sharing of ideas. Mark Braggins (Hampshire Hub Partnership) will introduce the Hampshire Hub programme, setting out its main objectives, work done to-date, next steps including the Hampshire data store (which will use the PublishMyData linked data platform), and opportunities for University of Southampton to engage with the programme , including the forthcoming Hampshire Hackathons Bill Roberts (Swirrl) will give an overview of the PublishMyData platform, and how it will help deliver the objectives of the Hampshire Hub. He will detail some of the new functionality being added to the platform Steve Peters (DCLG Open Data Communities) will focus on developing a web of data that blends and combines local and national data sources around localities, and common topics/themes. This will include observations on the potential employing emerging new, big data sources to help deliver more effective, better targeted public services. Steve will illustrate this with practical examples of DCLG’s work to publish its own data in a SPARQL end-point, so that it can be used over the web alongside related 3rd party sources. He will share examples of some of the practical challenges, particularly around querying and re-using geographic LinkedData in a federated world of SPARQL end-point.

Abstract In this talk, I'll focus on the work we've been doing on evaluating the cognitive side of dealing with information resources and increasingly complex user interfaces. While we can build increasingly powerful user interfaces, they often come at the cost of simple design and ease of use. I'll describe two specific studies: 1) work on the ORCHID project focused on measuring mental workload during tasks using fNIRS (a blood-oxygen-based brain scanner), and 2) a evaluation metric for measuring how much people learn during tasks. Together these provide advances towards understanding the cognitive side of information interaction, in working towards building better tools for users.

Title: Let’s SoFWIReD! Time: Wed, 21 May 2014 11:00-11:50 Location: Building 32, Room 3077 Speaker: Dr Sepi Chakaveh Abstract The information age as we know it has its roots in several enabling technologies – most of all the World Wide Web – for the provision of truly global connectivity. The emergence of a Web of Big Data in terms of the publication and analysis of Open Data provides new insights about the impact of the Web in our society. The second most important technology in this regard has been the emergence of streaming processes based on new and innovative compression methods such as MP3 so that audio and video content becomes accessible to everyone on the Web. The SoFWIReD team is developing comprehensive, interoperable platforms for data and knowledge driven processing of Open Data and will investigate aspects of collective intelligence. Insights generated in the project will form the basis for supporting companies through consulting, organisational development, and software solutions so that they can master the collective intelligence transition. The seminar will present how the project addresses the research topics of web observatory, dynamic media objects, crowd-sourced open data and Internet services. At the end of a talk a number of demos will be shown in the context of SoFWIReD’s Dynamic Media Object.

Abstract Broadcast video can be augmented with links to information related to the topics in the video and to other related entities. Viewers are sufficiently digitally literate that they can carry out their own searches during or after a broadcast. We investigate what types of information viewers would actually like to see while being engaged in watching a news broadcast. On the base of this we have designed user interfaces for passive and active uses of a second screen to accompany a news broadcast. A next step is to understand the specific types of information users would like to consult and investigate whether these can be automatically generated.

Speaker(s): Prof. Steffen Staab Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 23/05/2014 10:30-11:30 Location: B53/4025 Abstract The Web is constructed based on our experiences in a multitude of modalities: text, networks, images, physical locations are some examples. Understanding the Web requires from us that we can model these modalities as they appear on the Web. In this talk I will show some examples of how we model text, hyperlink networks and physical-social systems in order to improve our understanding and our use of the Web.

Speaker(s): Prof. David Evans Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 22/05/2014 10:45-11:45 Location: B53/4025 Abstract Secure multi-party computation enables two (or more) participants to reliably compute a function that depends on both of their inputs, without revealing those inputs to the other party or needing to trust any other party. It could enable two people who meet at a conference to learn who they known in common without revealing any of their other contacts, or allow a pharmaceutical company to determine the correct dosage of a medication based on a patient’s genome without compromising the privacy of the patient. A general solution to this problem has been known since Yao's pioneering work in the 1980s, but only recently has it become conceivable to use this approach in practice. Over the past few years, my research group has worked towards making secure computation practical for real applications. In this talk, I'll provide a brief introduction to secure computation protocols, describe the techniques we have developed to design scalable and efficient protocols, and share some recent results on improving efficiency and how secure computing applications are developed.

The purpose of this seminar session is to share with you some of my experience with publishing in top quality journals. The session will be structured as follows: - Publish or Perish - The CS Debate (conferences vs journals) - Top journals - Multidiciplinary work - The Process

Abstract This seminar is a research discussion around a very interesting problem, which may be a good basis for a WAISfest theme. A little over a year ago Professor Alan Dix came to tell us of his plans for a magnificent adventure:to walk all of the way round Wales - 1000 miles 'Alan Walks Wales'. The walk was a personal journey, but also a technological and community one, exploring the needs of the walker and the people along the way. Whilst walking he recorded his thoughts in an audio diary, took lots of photos, wrote a blog and collected data from the tech instruments he was wearing. As a result Alan has extensive quantitative data (bio-sensing and location) and qualitative data (text, images and some audio). There are challenges in analysing individual kinds of data, including merging similar data streams, entity identification, time-series and textual data mining, dealing with provenance, ontologies for paths, and journeys. There are also challenges for author and third-party annotation, linking the data-sets and visualising the merged narrative or facets of it.

Wednesday 23rd April 2014 Speaker(s): Willi Hasselbring Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 23/04/2014 14:00-15:00 Location: B32/3077 File size: 802Mb Abstract The internal behavior of large-scale software systems cannot be determined on the basis of static (e.g., source code) analysis alone. Kieker provides complementary dynamic analysis capabilities, i.e., monitoring/profiling and analyzing a software system's runtime behavior. Application Performance Monitoring is concerned with continuously observing a software system's performance-specific runtime behavior, including analyses like assessing service level compliance or detecting and diagnosing performance problems. Architecture Discovery is concerned with extracting architectural information from an existing software system, including both structural and behavioral aspects like identifying architectural entities (e.g., components and classes) and their interactions (e.g., local or remote procedure calls). In addition to the Architecture Discovery of Java systems, Kieker supports Architecture Discovery for other platforms, including legacy systems, for instance, inplemented in C#, C++, Visual Basic 6, COBOL or Perl. Thanks to Kieker's extensible architecture it is easy to implement and use custom extensions and plugins. Kieker was designed for continuous monitoring in production systems inducing only a very low overhead, which has been evaluated in extensive benchmark experiments. Please, refer to http://kieker-monitoring.net/ for more information.

Tuesday 22nd April 2014 Speaker(s): Sue Sentance Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 22/04/2014 15:00-16:00 Location: B32/3077 File size: 698 Mb Abstract Until recently, "computing" education in English schools mainly focused on developing general Digital Literacy and Microsoft Office skills. As of this September, a new curriculum comes into effect that provides a strong emphasis on computation and programming. This change has generated some controversy in the news media (4-year-olds being forced to learn coding! boss of the government’s coding education initiative cannot code shock horror!!!!) and also some concern in the teaching profession (how can we possibly teach programming when none of the teachers know how to program)? Dr Sue Sentance will explain the work of Computing At School, a part of the BCS Academy, in galvanising universities to help teachers learn programming and other computing skills. Come along and find out about the new English Computing Revolution - How will your children and your schools be affected? - How will our University intake change? How will our degrees have to change? - What is happening to the national perception of Computer Science?

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Speaker(s): Guus Schreiber Time: 09/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 546Mb Abstract In this talk I will discuss linked data for museums, archives and libraries. This area is known for its knowledge-rich and heterogeneous data landscape. The objects in this field range from old manuscripts to recent TV programs. Challenges in this field include common metadata schema's, inter-linking of the omnipresent vocabularies, cross-collection search strategies, user-generated annotations and object-centric versus event-centric views of data. This work can be seen as part of the rapidly evolving field of digital humanities. Speaker Biography Guus Schreiber Guus is a professor of Intelligent Information Systems at the Department of Computer Science at VU University Amsterdam. Guus’ research interests are mainly in knowledge and ontology engineering with a special interest for applications in the field of cultural heritage. He was one of the key developers of the CommonKADS methodology. Guus acts as chair of W3C groups for Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL, SKOS and REFa. His research group is involved in a wide range of national and international research projects. He is now project coordinator of the EU Integrated project No Tube concerned with integration of Web and TV data with the help of semantics and was previously Scientific Director of the EU Network of Excellence “Knowledge Web”.

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Speaker(s): Stefan Decker Time: 02/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B2/1083 File size: 897 Mb Abstract Ontologies have been promoted and used for knowledge sharing. Several models for representing ontologies have been developed in the Knowledge Representation field, in particular associated with the Semantic Web. In my talk I will summarise developments so far, and will argue that the currently advocated approaches miss certain basic properties of current distributed information sharing infrastructures (read: the Web and the Internet). I will sketch an alternative model aiming to support knowledge sharing and re-use on a global basis.

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Speaker(s): Dr Trung Dong Huynh Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 26/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 349Mb Abstract Understanding the dynamics of a crowdsourcing application and controlling the quality of the data it generates is challenging, partly due to the lack of tools to do so. Provenance is a domain-independent means to represent what happened in an application, which can help verify data and infer their quality. It can also reveal the processes that led to a data item and the interactions of contributors with it. Provenance patterns can manifest real-world phenomena such as a significant interest in a piece of content, providing an indication of its quality, or even issues such as undesirable interactions within a group of contributors. In this talk, I will present an application-independent methodology for analysing provenance graphs, constructed from provenance records, to learn about such patterns and to use them for assessing some key properties of crowdsourced data, such as their quality, in an automated manner. I will also talk about CollabMap (www.collabmap.org), an online crowdsourcing mapping application, and show how we applied the approach above to the trust classification of data generated by the crowd, achieving an accuracy over 95%.

Wednesday 23rd April 2014 Speaker(s): Willi Hasselbring Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 23/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 669 Mb Abstract For good scientific practice, it is important that research results may be properly checked by reviewers and possibly repeated and extended by other researchers. This is of particular interest for "digital science" i.e. for in-silico experiments. In this talk, I'll discuss some issues of how software systems and services may contribute to good scientific practice. Particularly, I'll present our PubFlow approach to automate publication workflows for scientific data. The PubFlow workflow management system is based on established technology. We integrate institutional repository systems (based on EPrints) and world data centers (in marine science). PubFlow collects provenance data automatically via our monitoring framework Kieker. Provenance information describes the origins and the history of scientific data in its life cycle, and the process by which it arrived. Thus, provenance information is highly relevant to repeatability and trustworthiness of scientific results. In our evaluation in marine science, we collaborate with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Speaker(s): Kirk Martinez, Dr Jonathon S Hare and Dr Enrico Costanza Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 19/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 676 Mb Abstract The new WAIS seminar series features classic seminars, research discussions, tutorial-style presentations, and research debates. This seminar takes the form of a research discussion which will focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) research being undertaken in WAIS and other research groups in ECS. IoT is a significant emerging research area, with funding for research available from many channels including new H2020 programmes and the TSB. We have seen examples of IoT devices being built in WAIS and other ECS groups, e.g. in sensor networking, energy monitoring via Zigbee devices, and of course Erica the Rhino (a Big Thing!). The goal of the session is to briefly present such examples of existing Things in our lab with the intent of seeding discussion on open research questions, and therefore future work we could do towards new Things being deployed for experimentation in Building 32 or its environs. The session will discuss what 'things' we have, how they work, what new 'things' might we want to create and deploy, what components we might need to enable this, and how we might interact with these objects.

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Speaker(s): Dr Tim Chown Organiser: Time: 12/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 642 Mb Abstract The WAIS seminar series is designed to be a blend of classic seminars, research discussions, debates and tutorials. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical part of the Internet infrastructure. In this talk we begin by explaining the basic model of operation of the DNS, including how domain names are delegated and how a DNS resolver performs a DNS lookup. We then take a tour of DNS-related topics, including caching, poisoning, governance, the increasing misuse of the DNS in DDoS attacks, and the expansion of the DNS namespace to new top level domains and internationalised domain names. We also present the latest work in the IETF on DNS privacy. The talk will be pitched such that no detailed technical knowledge is required. We hope that attendees will gain some familiarity with how the DNS works, some key issues surrounding DNS operation, and how the DNS might touch on various areas of research within WAIS.

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

Abstract "Storytelling in Mixed Realities: Making Sense of the World 1D Since the early days of civilization, the way we tell and consume stories defines how do we make sense of the world. Every new technology has an impact on our narrative artifacts. Today mobile ubiquitous digital technologies allow us to structure and distribute our narratives in novel and unprecedented ways. During this talk i will presents some old and recent projects developed in collaboration with a vast team of researchers and artists, that exemplify novel approaches to content and context through interactive storytelling and gaming. Bio Valentina Nisi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira and founder and researcher at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI). Her area of investigation revolves around Digital Media Art and HCI. Her research focuses on designing and producing digitally mediated experiences in real spaces, merging culture, context and landscapes. Valentina previously worked with Glorianna Davenport and Mads Haahr at MediaLab Europe, MIT MediaLab European research partner. In 2006 she co-founded Amsterdam based non profit organization FattoriaMediale, together with Ian Oakley and Martine PostHuma de Boer, designing and producing interactive mobile stories for several Amsterdam neighbourhoods. Her work has won several Awards and been published and shown internationally,

In their second year, our undergraduate web scientists undertake a group project module (WEBS2002, taught by Jonathon Hare & Su White) in which they get to apply what they learnt in the first year to a practical web-science problem, and also learn about team-working. For the project this semester, the students were provided with a large dataset of geolocated images and associated metadata collected from the Flickr website. Using this data, they were tasked with exploring what this data could tell us about New York City. In this seminar the two groups will present the outcomes of their work. Team Alpha (Thomas Davidson, Adam Rann, Luke Gibbins & Ryan Dodd) will present their work on “Analysing Flickr Demographics: Identifying Optimal Advertising Locations in New York". This work aims to detect areas of high footfall for varying demographics with the aim of using this information to more accurately target advertising. Team Bravo (Thomas Rowledge, Xavier Voigt-Hill & Chloe Cripps) will present their work on “The Flickr that Never Sleeps: Observing a Changing City Through a Decade of Geotagged Uploads". This work aims to explore the broad breadth of ways in which users' interactions with Flickr captures reactions, geographical trends and the changing picture of a prominent global city.

In their second year, our undergraduate web scientists undertake a group project module (WEBS2002, led by Jonathon Hare & co-taught by Su White) in which they get to apply what they learnt in the first year to a practical web-science problem, and also learn about team-working. For the project this semester, the students were provided with a large dataset of geolocated images and associated metadata collected from the Flickr website. Using this data, they were tasked with exploring what this data could tell us about the world. In this seminar the two groups will present the outcomes of their work. Team Alpha (Ellie Hamilton, Clayton Jones & Alok Acharya) will present their work on "The relationship between Group Photos, Social Integration and Suicide". This work aims to explore whether levels of social integration (which Durkheim posited as a factor in "Egoistic Suicide" rates) can be predicted by measuring the proportion of photos of groups of people to photos of individuals within a geographical region. Team Bravo (Agnieszka Grzesiuk-Szolucha, Thomas Leese & Ammaar Tawil) will present their work on "Sentiment Analysis on Flickr Photo Tags to Classify a Photo as Positive or Negative, In Order to Determine the Happiness of a Country or Region". This work explores whether estimates of sentiment made by applying SentiWordNet to Flickr tags correlate with indices of world happiness and socio-economic well-being.

Abstract: The concept of privacy has divided lawyers, scholars and policymakers for decades, not only in terms of whether it is a good or bad thing, but even what it is. Some say it is a human right, some that it is a prerequisite for democracy; others note that individuals are prone to breaching their own privacy and are remarkably relaxed about it, and have described various privacy paradoxes or other common inconsistencies in attitude; some argue that it is unenforceable; still others argue that it is a blocker to the knowledge economy and the socially-beneficial use of big data; and many more say that whatever its merits it is dead. In this talk, Kieron O'Hara will argue that the reason for this apparently confused disarray is that different privacy discourses are going on simultaneously, talking past each other and cheerfully committing various category errors. He sets out a series of seven types of privacy discussion, which are distinct but relatable to each other, as ! a first step towards clearing up some of the confusion, and argues that privacy itself is strongly implicated at the boundaries between the self and world. Our attitudes towards privacy depend crucially on where we wish those boundaries to be.

Abstract Introduction: This seminar is on the topic of "GamerGate", an international movement, ostensibly about "ethics in video game journalism" but which has become inextricably linked with extreme forms of online misogyny, rape and death threats towards women in the industry. It is of relevance to all Web science researchers, because it raises many issues of free speech, online governance, trolling and (not least) the representation of women in the tech industry. Our guest speaker (Mark Bernstein) is known for his criticism of the movement, and his work was featured in an article in the Guardian last week. He is a longtime collaborator in the field of hypertext and online media research, who co-orgainsed our annual international Web Science conference two years ago. Based in Boston, US, he will be speaking to us via Skype on Wednesday morning, to give us some background on the Gamergate phenomenon and to explain the recent developments regarding Wikipedia.

Speaker: Patrick McSweeney Organiser: Time: 15/10/2014 11:00-11:45 Location: B32/3077 Abstract Having started at Southampton in 2005 I have seen quite a few changes to the way courses are taught and studied. I will reflect on some of the interesting changes I have observed and suggest their causes. As a practical example I will talk about codestrom, a peer feedback tool for learning programming. We have found that this teaching method has improved the student experience and reduced the work load for the module team. Together we will discuss how this and other recent developments can enable other teaching innovations which benefit staff as well as students. Hopefully the new class of PhD students will be able to contribute from the point of view of having recently been undergraduate students here and else where.