406 research outputs found
Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account: exploring the cultural space of the Net from the inside
The research project The Internet as a space for interaction, which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the Net’s organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project’s final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards. --
Gibbs Max-margin Topic Models with Data Augmentation
Max-margin learning is a powerful approach to building classifiers and
structured output predictors. Recent work on max-margin supervised topic models
has successfully integrated it with Bayesian topic models to discover
discriminative latent semantic structures and make accurate predictions for
unseen testing data. However, the resulting learning problems are usually hard
to solve because of the non-smoothness of the margin loss. Existing approaches
to building max-margin supervised topic models rely on an iterative procedure
to solve multiple latent SVM subproblems with additional mean-field assumptions
on the desired posterior distributions. This paper presents an alternative
approach by defining a new max-margin loss. Namely, we present Gibbs max-margin
supervised topic models, a latent variable Gibbs classifier to discover hidden
topic representations for various tasks, including classification, regression
and multi-task learning. Gibbs max-margin supervised topic models minimize an
expected margin loss, which is an upper bound of the existing margin loss
derived from an expected prediction rule. By introducing augmented variables
and integrating out the Dirichlet variables analytically by conjugacy, we
develop simple Gibbs sampling algorithms with no restricting assumptions and no
need to solve SVM subproblems. Furthermore, each step of the
"augment-and-collapse" Gibbs sampling algorithms has an analytical conditional
distribution, from which samples can be easily drawn. Experimental results
demonstrate significant improvements on time efficiency. The classification
performance is also significantly improved over competitors on binary,
multi-class and multi-label classification tasks.Comment: 35 page
A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software
Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software
engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large
number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS
projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans
or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and
collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as
email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS). All the characteristics
above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous
components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people
with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information
spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to
understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this
distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional
methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS
development is simply too "fibrous" to lend itself well to analysis under a
single methodological lens. In this paper, we describe the methodological
framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source
world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components
of a project's hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and
socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS
development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider
the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe
our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on
distributed collective practices
CPA\u27s guide to information security
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1963/thumbnail.jp
NewsView: A Recommender System for Usenet based on FAST Data Search
This thesis combines aspects from two approaches to information
access, information filtering and information retrieval, in an effort
to improve the signal to noise ratio in interfaces to conversational
data. These two ideas are blended into one system by augmenting a
search engine indexing Usenet messages with concepts and ideas from
recommender systems theory. My aim is to achieve a situation where
the overall result relevance is improved by exploiting the qualities
of both approaches. Important issues in this context are obtaining
ratings, evaluating relevance rankings and the application of useful
user profiles.
An architecture called NewsView has been designed as part of the work
on this thesis. NewsView describes a framework for interfaces to
Usenet with information retrieval and information filtering concepts
built into it, as well as extensive navigational possibilities within
the data. My aim with this framework is to provide a testbed for user
interface, information filtering and information retrieval issues,
and, most importantly, combinations of the three
Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of “Superparticipants”
Empirical studies of online debate almost universally observe a “dominant” minority of posters. Informed by theories of deliberative democracy, these are typically framed negatively—yet research into their impact on debate is scant. To address this, a typology of what we call super-participation (super-posters, agenda-setters and facilitators) is developed and applied to the http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ forum. Focusing on the first of these, we found 2,052 superposters (0.4%) contributing 47% of 25m+ posts. While superposters were quantitatively dominant, qualitative content analysis of the discursive practices of 25 superposters (n=40,044) found that most did not attempt to stop other users from posting (curbing) or attack them (flaming). In fact, in contradiction to the received wisdom, super-posters discursively performed a range of positive roles
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