CLEF 2017 NewsREEL Overview: Offline and Online Evaluation of Stream-based News Recommender Systems

The CLEF NewsREEL challenge allows researchers to evaluate news recommendation algorithms both online (NewsREEL Live) and offline (News- REEL Replay). Compared with the previous year NewsREEL challenged participants with a higher volume of messages and new news portals. In the 2017 edition of the CLEF NewsREEL challenge a wide variety of new approaches have been implemented ranging from the use of existing machine learning frameworks, to ensemble methods to the use of deep neural networks. This paper gives an overview over the implemented approaches and discusses the evaluation results. In addition, the main results of Living Lab and the Replay task are explained

Continuous evaluation of large-scale information access systems : a case for living labs

A/B testing is currently being increasingly adopted for the evaluation of commercial information access systems with a large user base since it provides the advantage of observing the efficiency and effectiveness of information access systems under real conditions. Unfortunately, unless university-based researchers closely collaborate with industry or develop their own infrastructure or user base, they cannot validate their ideas in live settings with real users. Without online testing opportunities open to the research communities, academic researchers are unable to employ online evaluation on a larger scale. This means that they do not get feedback for their ideas and cannot advance their research further. Businesses, on the other hand, miss the opportunity to have higher customer satisfaction due to improved systems. In addition, users miss the chance to benefit from an improved information access system. In this chapter, we introduce two evaluation initiatives at CLEF, NewsREEL and Living Labs for IR (LL4IR), that aim to address this growing “evaluation gap” between academia and industry. We explain the challenges and discuss the experiences organizing these living labs

Making the Virtual Actual: a research model to understand music of contemporary open-world video games

The global video game industry has in part achieved its ubiquitous cultural influence through the creation of increasingly realistic gameworlds. Of these, contemporary open-world games offer vast internal environments presenting complex narrative constructs and ever-higher production values, including music content. Research into these games has typically ranged from their characteristic technical design and storytelling attributes, to ethnographic studies of their gameworlds, through to commercially based evaluations of the games’ soundtrack content. Breaking new ground by merging these disparate lines of enquiry into a cohesive whole, the purpose of this study is to examine the music of open-world game soundscapes as sociocultural artefacts. This study seeks to offer a foundation for explaining the musical functions causal to the popularity of these games according to a research model that determines and separates the constitutive musical components of a gameworld’s soundscape into diegetic categories. These components are examined according to a tripartite model with a methodological basis in game music design principles, adopting a gameworld as a virtual ethnography fieldsite, and studies of game music in culture. This study takes Grand Theft Auto V as its focus in demonstrating an application of the proposed model. As an open-world game grossing more than any other form of media and featuring more musical content than any previous title of its series, it is shown that the proposed model does greater intellectual justice to the technical, aesthetic, and sociocultural sophistication of this artefact. The development and application of the proposed research model enables a shift of analytical approach in ludomusicology from an outside-in perspective to one of an inside-out nature. In addition to its application to other games, the offered model affords theorists and game designers a valuable analytical and conceptual tool to see the virtual music of a game as anchored in the actual world.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 201

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

1995-1999 Brock News

A compilation of the administration newspaper, Brock News, for the years 1995 through 1999. It had previously been titled Brock Campus News and preceding that, The Blue Badger