84,683 research outputs found

    Live Social Semantics

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    Social interactions are one of the key factors to the success of conferences and similar community gatherings. This paper describes a novel application that integrates data from the semantic web, online social networks, and a real-world contact sensing platform. This application was successfully deployed at ESWC09, and actively used by 139 people. Personal profiles of the participants were automatically generated using several Web~2.0 systems and semantic academic data sources, and integrated in real-time with face-to-face contact networks derived from wearable sensors. Integration of all these heterogeneous data layers made it possible to offer various services to conference attendees to enhance their social experience such as visualisation of contact data, and a site to explore and connect with other participants. This paper describes the architecture of the application, the services we provided, and the results we achieved in this deployment

    Semantics, sensors, and the social web: The live social semantics experiments

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    The Live Social Semantics is an innovative application that encourages and guides social networking between researchers at conferences and similar events. The application integrates data and technologies from the Semantic Web, online social networks, and a face-to-face contact sensing platform. It helps researchers to find like-minded and influential researchers, to identify and meet people in their community of practice, and to capture and later retrace their real-world networking activities at conferences. The application was successfully deployed at two international conferences, attracting more than 300 users in total. This paper describes this application, and discusses and evaluates the results of its two deployment

    Social dynamics in conferences: analyses of data from the Live Social Semantics application

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    Popularity and spread of online social networking in recent years has given a great momentum to the study of dynamics and patterns of social interactions. However, these studies have often been confined to the online world, neglecting its interdependencies with the offline world. This is mainly due to the lack of real data that spans across this divide. The Live Social Semantics application is a novel platform that dissolves this divide, by collecting and integrating data about people from (a) their online social networks and tagging activities from popular social networking sites, (b) their publications and co-authorship networks from semantic repositories, and (c) their real-world face-to-face contacts with other attendees collected via a network of wearable active sensors. This paper investigates the data collected by this application during its deployment at three major conferences, where it was used by more than 400 people. Our analyses show the robustness of the patterns of contacts at various conferences, and the influence of various personal properties (e.g. seniority, conference attendance) on social networking patterns

    The live social semantics application: A platform for integrating face-to-face presence with on-line social networking

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    We describe a novel application that integrates real-world data on the face-to-face proximity of individuals with their identities and contacts in on-line social networks. This application was successfully deployed at two conference gatherings, ESWC09 and HT2009, and actively used by hundreds of people. Personal profiles of the participants were automatically generated using several Web 2.0 systems and semantic data sources, and integrated in real-time with face-to-face proximity relations detected using RFID-enabled badges. The integration of these heterogeneous data sources enables various services that enhance the experience of conference attendees, allowing them to explore their social neighbourhood and to connect with other participants. This paper describes the architecture of the application, the services we provided, and the results we achieved in these deployments

    Providing enhanced social interaction services for industry exhibitors at large medical conferences

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    Large medical conferences offer opportunities for participants to find industry exhibitors that offer products and services relevant to their professional interests. Companies often invest significant effort in promotions that encourage participants to spend time at their stand (e.g. providing free gifts, leaflets, running competitions) and register some contact details. Attendees will use the conference to find others who also share similar professional interests, as well as keep up to date with developments on products such has pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. From both perspectives, a number of improvements can be made to enhance the overall experience by using existing active RFID technology: Vendors would be able to more closely monitor the success of their promotions with statistics on the stand's visitors, as well as find more potential customers by using real-time visualizations; Participants would be able to log their social interactions, keeping an electronic history of the people they have met. The SocioPatterns project and Live Social Semantics experiments have recently demonstrated a scalable and robust infrastructure that would support these kinds of improvements. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure that provides enhanced social interaction services for vendors and participants by using small active RFID badges worn by attendees and attached to fixed location

    Immigrants and body modifications in the consumer society

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    This article presents the results of the research project “Identity process, immigration and plastic surgeries”. The investigation took place from 2013 to 2014 in Portugal and Spain. The general objective was to search for clues to think more consistently of the interest and the practice of body modifications in the context of immigration. Indepth interviews were carried out with Latin American, Asian and African immigrants. To analyze the interviews, we used the literature about consumer society, social production of body and ethnic plastic surgeries. We propose in this article that immigrants are included in the context of consumer society and the fact that most immigrants live in precarious conditions but this is not an obstacle to think and to practice body modifications makes the issue even more interesting. This does not mean that in the consumer society there are not social and economic inequalities. Instead, we propose that there are new and more subtle forms of domination and of power relations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Specification and Verification of Commitment-Regulated Data-Aware Multiagent Systems

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    In this paper we investigate multi agent systems whose agent interaction is based on social commitments that evolve over time, in presence of (possibly incomplete) data. In particular, we are interested in modeling and verifying how data maintained by the agents impact on the dynamics of such systems, and on the evolution of their commitments. This requires to lift the commitment-related conditions studied in the literature, which are typically based on propositional logics, to a first-order setting. To this purpose, we propose a rich framework for modeling data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems. In this framework, we study verification of rich temporal properties, establishing its decidability under the condition of “state-boundedness”, i.e., data items come from an infinite domain but, at every time point, each agent can store only a bounded number of them

    KEYNOTE ADDRESS: On the Binding Biases of Time

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    Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a Past President of the New York State Communication Association, and a recipient of NYSCA\u27s John F. Wilson Award. He is a founder and Past President of the Media Ecology Association, and author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study. This is the text of his Keynote Address presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the New York State Communication Association, Ellenville, NY, October 23-25, 2009

    Religion for Naturalists and the Meaning of Belief

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    This article relates the philosophical discussion on naturalistic religious practice to Tim Crane’s The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View, in which he claims that atheists can derive no genuine solace from religion. I argue that Crane’s claim is a little too strong. There is a sense in which atheists can derive solace from religion and that fact is worth acknowledging
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