Know Center Research

Publikationen

Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Kowald Dominik, Helic Denis, Lex Elisabeth
2018
In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building inonline collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other followingtheir common interests and their social proles. Specically, we are interested inhow users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as theinterplay of those two factors inuence the process of consensus dynamics. Forour study, we simulate the diusion of opinions in collaboration systems using thewell-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating aninteraction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. Weconduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web. Ourndings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, theprocess of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. Asuitable increase of inuence of user social status on their actions can in turnfacilitate this process. In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimalconsensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriatebalance between those two factors.
d'Aquin Mathieu , Adamou Alessandro , Dietze Stefan , Fetahu Besnik , Gadiraju Ujwal , Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Holz Peter, Kümmerle Joachim, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth, Lopez Sola Susana, Mataran Ricardo, Sabol Vedran, Troullinou Pinelopi, Veas Eduardo, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
More and more learning activities take place online in a self-directed manner. Therefore, just as the idea of self-tracking activities for fitness purposes has gained momentum in the past few years, tools and methods for awareness and self-reflection on one's own online learning behavior appear as an emerging need for both formal and informal learners. Addressing this need is one of the key objectives of the AFEL (Analytics for Everyday Learning) project. In this paper, we discuss the different aspects of what needs to be put in place in order to enable awareness and self-reflection in online learning. We start by describing a scenario that guides the work done. We then investigate the theoretical, technical and support aspects that are required to enable this scenario, as well as the current state of the research in each aspect within the AFEL project. We conclude with a discussion of the ongoing plans from the project to develop learner-facing tools that enable awareness and self-reflection for online, self-directed learners. We also elucidate the need to establish further research programs on facets of self-tracking for learning that are necessarily going to emerge in the near future, especially regarding privacy and ethics.
Seitlinger Paul, Ley Tobias, Kowald Dominik, Theiler Dieter, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Dennerlein Sebastian, Lex Elisabeth, Albert D.
2017
Creative group work can be supported by collaborative search and annotation of Web resources. In this setting, it is important to help individuals both stay fluent in generating ideas of what to search next (i.e., maintain ideational fluency) and stay consistent in annotating resources (i.e., maintain organization). Based on a model of human memory, we hypothesize that sharing search results with other users, such as through bookmarks and social tags, prompts search processes in memory, which increase ideational fluency, but decrease the consistency of annotations, e.g., the reuse of tags for topically similar resources. To balance this tradeoff, we suggest the tag recommender SoMe, which is designed to simulate search of memory from user-specific tag-topic associations. An experimental field study (N = 18) in a workplace context finds evidence of the expected tradeoff and an advantage of SoMe over a conventional recommender in the collaborative setting. We conclude that sharing search results supports group creativity by increasing the ideational fluency, and that SoMe helps balancing the evidenced fluency-consistency tradeoff.
Görögh Edit, Vignoli Michela, Gauch Stephan, Blümel Clemens, Kraker Peter, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Luzi Daniela , Walker Mappet, Toli Eleni, Sifacaki Electra
2017
The growing dissatisfaction with the traditional scholarly communication process and publishing practices as well as increasing usage and acceptance of ICT and Web 2.0 technologies in research have resulted in the proliferation of alternative review, publishing and bibliometric methods. The EU-funded project OpenUP addresses key aspects and challenges of the currently transforming science landscape and aspires to come up with a cohesive framework for the review-disseminate-assess phases of the research life cycle that is fit to support and promote open science. The objective of this paper is to present first results and conclusions of the landscape scan and analysis of alternative peer review, altmetrics and innovative dissemination methods done during the first project year.
Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Geigl Florian, Pujari Suhbash Chandra, Lex Elisabeth, Helic Denis
2016
In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building in online collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other following their common interests and their social profiles. Specifically, we are interested in how users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as the interplay of those two factors influence the process of consensus dynamics. For our study, we simulate the diffusion of opinions in collaboration systems using the well-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating an interaction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. We conduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web. Our findings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, the process of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. A suitable increase of influence of user social status on their actions can in turn facilitate this process. In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimal consensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriate balance between those two factors.
Stanisavljevic Darko, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Lex Elisabeth, Strohmaier M., Helic Denis
2016
In this paper we assess the semantic stability of Wikipedia by investigat-ing the dynamics of Wikipedia articles’ revisions over time. In a semantically stablesystem, articles are infrequently edited, whereas in unstable systems, article contentchanges more frequently. In other words, in a stable system, the Wikipedia com-munity has reached consensus on the majority of articles. In our work, we measuresemantic stability using the Rank Biased Overlap method. To that end, we prepro-cess Wikipedia dumps to obtain a sequence of plain-text article revisions, whereaseach revision is represented as a TF-IDF vector. To measure the similarity betweenconsequent article revisions, we calculate Rank Biased Overlap on subsequent termvectors. We evaluate our approach on 10 Wikipedia language editions includingthe five largest language editions as well as five randomly selected small languageeditions. Our experimental results reveal that even in policy driven collaborationnetworks such as Wikipedia, semantic stability can be achieved. However, there aredifferences on the velocity of the semantic stability process between small and largeWikipedia editions. Small editions exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than large ones. In particular, in large Wikipedia editions, a higher number of successiverevisions is needed in order to reach a certain semantic stability level, whereas, insmall Wikipedia editions, the number of needed successive revisions is much lowerfor the same level of semantic stability.
Kopeinik Simone, Kowald Dominik, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Lex Elisabeth
2016
Classic resource recommenders like Collaborative Filteringtreat users as just another entity, thereby neglecting non-linear user-resource dynamics that shape attention and in-terpretation. SUSTAIN, as an unsupervised human cate-gory learning model, captures these dynamics. It aims tomimic a learner’s categorization behavior. In this paper, weuse three social bookmarking datasets gathered from Bib-Sonomy, CiteULike and Delicious to investigate SUSTAINas a user modeling approach to re-rank and enrich Collab-orative Filtering following a hybrid recommender strategy.Evaluations against baseline algorithms in terms of recom-mender accuracy and computational complexity reveal en-couraging results. Our approach substantially improves Col-laborative Filtering and, depending on the dataset, success-fully competes with a computationally much more expen-sive Matrix Factorization variant. In a further step, we ex-plore SUSTAIN’s dynamics in our specific learning task andshow that both memorization of a user’s history and clus-tering, contribute to the algorithm’s performance. Finally,we observe that the users’ attentional foci determined bySUSTAIN correlate with the users’ level of curiosity, iden-tified by the SPEAR algorithm. Overall, the results ofour study show that SUSTAIN can be used to efficientlymodel attention-interpretation dynamics of users and canhelp improve Collaborative Filtering for resource recommen-dations.
Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Geigl Florian, Pujari Subhash Chandra, Lex Elisabeth, Helic Denis
2015
In this paper, we analyze the influence of socialstatus on opinion dynamics and consensus building in collaborationnetworks. To that end, we simulate the diffusion of opinionsin empirical collaboration networks by taking into account boththe network structure and the individual differences of peoplereflected through their social status. For our simulations, weadapt a well-known Naming Game model and extend it withthe Probabilistic Meeting Rule to account for the social statusof individuals participating in a meeting. This mechanism issufficiently flexible and allows us to model various situations incollaboration networks, such as the emergence or disappearanceof social classes. In this work, we concentrate on studyingthree well-known forms of class society: egalitarian, ranked andstratified. In particular, we are interested in the way these societyforms facilitate opinion diffusion. Our experimental findingsreveal that (i) opinion dynamics in collaboration networks isindeed affected by the individuals’ social status and (ii) thiseffect is intricate and non-obvious. In particular, although thesocial status favors consensus building, relying on it too stronglycan slow down the opinion diffusion, indicating that there is aspecific setting for each collaboration network in which socialstatus optimally benefits the consensus building process.
Seitlinger Paul, Kowald Dominik, Kopeinik Simone, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Ley Tobias, Lex Elisabeth
2015
Classic resource recommenders like Collaborative Filtering(CF) treat users as being just another entity, neglecting non-linear user-resource dynamics shaping attention and inter-pretation. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid rec-ommendation strategy that re nes CF by capturing thesedynamics. The evaluation results reveal that our approachsubstantially improves CF and, depending on the dataset,successfully competes with a computationally much moreexpensive Matrix Factorization variant.