The shape of online meetings

Live videoconferencing has become an integral part of international virtual learning and working with professionals, educators and students using online meetings to enhance their collaboration from different parts of the world. This paper explores the visualization of a set of different online meetings produced by the FlashMeeting' videoconferencing system. Our polar area visualization analysis reveals interesting patterns in participant dominance in online meetings: seminars, interviews, moderated project meetings, peer-to-peer meetings, web-casts and video lectures. Visualizing patterns in the use of foreground and background communication channels is a promising way to help us to start to explore individual user roles in different communities and in different meeting types

Innovative collaborative design in international interaction design summer schools

[About the book]: Design is changing, and to educate the next generation of designers, these changes need to be addressed. In light of the growing role research and interdisciplinary collaboration play in contemporary design performance, Design Integrations calls for an innovative shake up in design education. Poggenpohl asserts that design research is developed through a typology within academic and business contexts, and follows different research theories and strategies. Such issues in design collaboration are explored in-depth, with essays on an inter-institutional academic project, cross-cultural learning experiences, and a multi-national healthcare project, demonstrating the importance of shared values, interdisciplinary negotiated process and clear communication for tomorrow’s designers

Clustering Memes in Social Media

The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication. The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content, metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201

Show or tell? Opportunities, problems and methods of the exhibition as a form of research dissemination

There has a been a good deal of debate about the possible use of exhibitions in disseminating research, as an alternative to conventional text papers where artefacts have a significant role in the research The European Academy of Design has been a pioneer in this area but, so far, there has been little documentation of this practice or constructive reflection to support future development. The authors were responsible for the organisation of an exhibition of research work at the 2002 "Common Ground" Conference of the Design Research Society. Their role included mentoring the exhibitors, making the practical arrangements for the exhibition and organising refereeing of exhibits by an international panel of referees. The exhibition demonstrated the potential for new forms of research dissemination but also highlighted a number of problems and issues which must be dealt with if future exhibitions are to provide a robust and appropriate way to present and record research outcomes. The reflections of the organisers, and comments of referees and exhibitors are employed in this paper to develop guidelines for future practice in research exhibitions, paying particular attention to the importance of providing a full narrative within the exhibit and a permanent record, and ways that exhibitions might change the format of conferences to allow more constructive engagement between participants. </p