Community Sponsorship System

In spite of the progress everywhere around the world, many children are still unable to have their basic rights of living. Child welfare services are concerned with helping vulnerable children by supporting their families and preventing problems by intervention services and tools that involve various resources. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a powerful capacity to transmit and deliver information besides controlling the communication. Community Sponsorship System for vulnerable children is suggested in this project by employing a Client Information System (CIS) that seeks ways to manipulate data processed by the CIS in order to assure the needs of vulnerable children and available services / resources are relevantly matched

Persistent virtual identity in community networks: Impact to social capital value chains

Community networks are digital infrastructures designed to strengthen bonds and build social capital between members of a community, facilitating accomplishment of goals. As we consider how community network implementations can be improved, we recognize the potential that social translucence and activity notification introduces to other forms of CSCW. We investigate how the underlying notion of persistent virtual identity---established at logon---impacts user perception of community networks and their social capital production process. To approach this question, we introduce a design model that reconciles various computer-mediated communication research contributions with support for typical community network scenarios of use. Using this model, we perform an inspection on existing community network implementations. Based on the insight gained through this analysis, we introduce a generic prototype that allows survey of user reaction to community network design elements under differing conditions of persistent virtual identity implementation and usage motivation---the results frame a value-chain understanding of conceptual tradeoffs

People-search : searching for people sharing similar interests from the web

On the Web, there are limited ways of finding people sharing similar interests or background with a given person. The current methods, such as using regular search engines, are either ineffective or time consuming. In this work, a new approach for searching people sharing similar interests from the Web, called People-Search, is presented. Given a person, to find similar people from the Web, there are two major research issues: person representation and matching persons. In this study, a person representation method which uses a person\u27s website to represent this person\u27s interest and background is proposed. The design of matching process takes person representation into consideration to allow the same representation to be used when composing the query, which is also a personal website. Based on this person representation method, the main proposed algorithm integrates textual content and hyperlink information of all the pages belonging to a personal website to represent a person and match persons. Other algorithms, based on different combinations of content, inlink, and outlink information of an entire personal website or only the main page, are also explored and compared to the main proposed algorithm. Two kinds of evaluations were conducted. In the automatic evaluation, precision, recall, F and Kruskal-Goodman F measures were used to compare these algorithms. In the human evaluation, the effectiveness of the main proposed algorithm and two other important ones were evaluated by human subjects. Results from both evaluations show that the People-Search algorithm integrating content and link information of all pages belonging to a personal website outperformed all other algorithms in finding similar people from the Web

Clustering for Opportunistic Communication

We describe ongoing work on I2I, a system aimed at fostering opportunistic communication among users viewing or manipulating content on the Web and in productivity applications. Unlike previous work in which the URLs of Web resources are used to group users visiting the same resource, we present a more general framework for clustering work contexts to group users together that accounts for dynamic content and distributional properties of Web accesses which can limit the utility URL based systems. In addition, we describe a method for scaffolding asynchronous communication in the context of an ongoing task that takes into account the ephemeral nature of the location of content on the Web. The techniques we describe also nicely cover local files in progress, in addition to publicly available Web content. We present the results of several evaluations that indicate systems that use the techniques we employ may be more useful than systems that are strictly URL based