35,068 research outputs found
Optimizing search user interfaces and interactions within professional social networks
Professional social networks (PSNs) play the key role in the online social media ecosystem, generate hundreds of terabytes of new data per day, and connect millions of people. To help users cope with the scale and influx of new information, PSNs provide search functionality. However, most of the search engines within PSNs today still provide only keyword queries, basic faceted search capabilities, and uninformative query-biased snippets overlooking the structured and interlinked nature of PSN entities. This results in siloed information, inefficient results presentation, and suboptimal search user experience (UX). In this thesis, we reconsider and comprehensively study input, control, and presentation elements of the search user interface (SUI) to enable more effective and efficient search within PSNs. Specifically, we demonstrate that: (1) named entity queries (NEQs) and structured queries (SQs) complement each other helping PSN users search for people and explore the PSN social graph beyond the first degree; (2) relevance-aware filtering saves users' efforts when they sort jobs, status updates, and people by an attribute value rather than by relevance; (3) extended informative structured snippets increase job search effectiveness and efficiency by leveraging human intelligence and exposing the most critical information about jobs right on a search engine result page (SERP); and (4) non-redundant delta snippets, which different from traditional query-biased snippets show on a SERP information relevant but complementary to the query, are more favored by users performing entity (e.g. people) search, lead to faster task completion times and better search outcomes. Thus, by modeling the structured and interlinked nature of PSN entities, we can optimize the query-refine-view interaction loop, facilitate serendipitous network exploration, and increase search utility. We believe that the insights, algorithms, and recommendations presented in this thesis will serve the next generation designers of SUIs within and beyond PSNs and shape the (structured) search landscape of the future
How the internet changed career: framing the relationship between career development and online technologies
This article examines the inter-relationship between the internet and career development. It asks three inter-linked questions: How does the internet reshape the context within which individuals pursue their career? What skills and knowledge do people need in order to pursue their careers effectively using the internet? How can careers workers use the internet as a medium for the delivery of career support? The article develops conceptual architecture for answering these questions and in particular highlights the importance of the concept of digital career literacy
Classification of Message Spreading in a Heterogeneous Social Network
Nowadays, social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn become
increasingly popular. In fact, they introduced new habits, new ways of
communication and they collect every day several information that have
different sources. Most existing research works fo-cus on the analysis of
homogeneous social networks, i.e. we have a single type of node and link in the
network. However, in the real world, social networks offer several types of
nodes and links. Hence, with a view to preserve as much information as
possible, it is important to consider so-cial networks as heterogeneous and
uncertain. The goal of our paper is to classify the social message based on its
spreading in the network and the theory of belief functions. The proposed
classifier interprets the spread of messages on the network, crossed paths and
types of links. We tested our classifier on a real word network that we
collected from Twitter, and our experiments show the performance of our belief
classifier
Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)
We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the
first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds
(VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs
technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate
and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself
is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive
VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research
directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments
in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual
Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST
Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full
resolution color figures is available at
http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication
The anatomy of urban social networks and its implications in the searchability problem
The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently
increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical
space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial
clustering of network communities, have not yet been systematically tested at
different scales. In this work we analyze the social network structure of over
25 million phone users from three countries at three different scales: country,
provinces and cities. We consistently find that this last urban scenario
presents significant differences to common knowledge about social networks.
First, the emergence of a giant component in the network seems to be controlled
by whether or not the network spans over the entire urban border, almost
independently of the population or geographic extension of the city. Second,
urban communities are much less geographically clustered than expected. These
two findings shed new light on the widely-studied searchability in
self-organized networks. By exhaustive simulation of decentralized search
strategies we conclude that urban networks are searchable not through
geographical proximity as their country-wide counterparts, but through an
homophily-driven community structure
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