"My SocioWorld" : an optimized application for mobile social networking

Being connected with old social contacts and making new social contacts on social networking sites is becoming more essential these days. Mobile social networking is adding value towards socializing world by being connected any day, anywhere, anytime and on the go. Applications providing good user experience and taking full advantage of increasing capabilities of mobile phones are still challenging. The common challenges faced by user while using different social networking sites on mobile phone are; increased level of concentration, limited mobile display and rising cost of mobile communication. Ultimately all these affect users’ engagement in mobile social networking. In this thesis, the focus is to propose an optimize application for mobile social networking by adopting user centred design methodology. It involves integration of users’ favourite social networking sites that would facilitate them in socializing with different social networking services from one common user-interface. Further the involvement of users with proposed application is supported by the changing trends of mobile phones by becoming full-featured mobile computers. Several iterative user-interface designs are represented graphically and interaction with those designs is displayed. The proposed application focuses on different ways user could remain active on this application and be able to create new content easily with the help of integrated mobile tools available within smart phone mobile device. Additionally, a usability test is performed with the potential users to validate proposed application. Based on feedbacks and suggestions from the users who performed usability test, further enhancements are made to improve the end-user experience. Thus, by considering the needs and requirements of the end-users the proposed application has been developed to provide enhanced user usability and satisfaction for today’s mobile social networking

Social impact retrieval: measuring author influence on information retrieval

The increased presence of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 mean the entire process of new media production and dissemination has moved away from an authorcentric approach. Casual web users and browsers are increasingly able to play a more active role in the information creation process. This means that the traditional ways in which information sources may be validated and scored must adapt accordingly. In this thesis we propose a new way in which to look at a user's contributions to the network in which they are present, using these interactions to provide a measure of authority and centrality to the user. This measure is then used to attribute an query-independent interest score to each of the contributions the author makes, enabling us to provide other users with relevant information which has been of greatest interest to a community of like-minded users. This is done through the development of two algorithms; AuthorRank and MessageRank. We present two real-world user experiments which focussed around multimedia annotation and browsing systems that we built; these systems were novel in themselves, bringing together video and text browsing, as well as free-text annotation. Using these systems as examples of real-world applications for our approaches, we then look at a larger-scale experiment based on the author and citation networks of a ten year period of the ACM SIGIR conference on information retrieval between 1997-2007. We use the citation context of SIGIR publications as a proxy for annotations, constructing large social networks between authors. Against these networks we show the effectiveness of incorporating user generated content, or annotations, to improve information retrieval

Mining, Modeling, and Leveraging Multidimensional Web Metrics to Support Scholarly Communities

The significant proliferation of scholarly output and the emergence of multidisciplinary research areas are rendering the research environment increasingly complex. In addition, an increasing number of researchers are using academic social networks to discover and store scholarly content. The spread of scientific discourse and research activities across the web, especially on social media platforms, suggests that far-reaching changes are taking place in scholarly communication and the geography of science. This dissertation provides integrated techniques and methods designed to address the information overload problem facing scholarly environments and to enhance the research process. There are four main contributions in this dissertation. First, this study identifies, quantifies, and analyzes international researchers’ dynamic scholarly information behaviors, activities, and needs, especially after the emergence of social media platforms. The findings based on qualitative and quantitative analysis report new scholarly patterns and reveals differences between researchers according to academic status and discipline. Second, this study mines massive scholarly datasets, models diverse multidimensional non-traditional web-based indicators (altmetrics), and evaluates and predicts scholarly and societal impact at various levels. The results address some of the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics and broaden the understanding and utilization of altmetrics. Third, this study recommends scholarly venues semantically related to researchers’ current interests. The results provide important up-to-the-minute signals that represent a closer reflection of research interests than post-publication usage-based metrics. Finally, this study develops a new scholarly framework by supporting the construction of online scholarly communities and bibliographies through reputation-based social collaboration, through the introduction of a collaborative, self-promoting system for users to advance their participation through analysis of the quality, timeliness and quantity of contributions. The framework improves the precision and quality of social reference management systems. By analyzing and modeling digital footprints, this dissertation provides a basis for tracking and documenting the impact of scholarship using new models that are more akin to reading breaking news than to watching a historical documentary made several years after the events it describes