Dennerlein Sebastian, Rella Matthias, Tomberg Vladimir, Theiler Dieter, Treasure-Jones Tamsin, Kerr Micky, Ley Tobias, Al-Smadi Mohammad, Trattner Christoph
2015
Sensemaking at the workplace and in educational contexts has beenextensively studied for decades. Interestingly, making sense out of the own wealthof learning experiences at the workplace has been widely ignored. To tackle thisissue, we have implemented a novel sensemaking interface for healthcare professionalsto support learning at the workplace. The proposed prototype supportsremembering of informal experiences from episodic memory followed by sensemakingin semantic memory. Results from an initial study conducted as part ofan iterative co-design process reveal the prototype is being perceived as usefuland supportive for informal sensemaking by study participants from the healthcaredomain. Furthermore, we find first evidence that re-evaluation of collectedinformation is a potentially necessary process that needs further exploration tofully understand and support sensemaking of informal learning experiences.
Parra Denis, Gomez M., Hutardo D., Wen X., Lin Yu-Ru, Trattner Christoph
2015
Twitter is often referred to as a backchannel for conferences. While the main conference takes place in a physicalsetting, on-site and off-site attendees socialize, introduce new ideas or broadcast information by microblogging on Twitter.In this paper we analyze scholars’ Twitter usage in 16 Computer Science conferences over a timespan of five years. Ourprimary finding is that over the years there are differences with respect to the uses of Twitter, with an increase ofinformational activity (retweets and URLs), and a decrease of conversational usage (replies and mentions), which alsoimpacts the network structure – meaning the amount of connected components – of the informational and conversationalnetworks. We also applied topic modeling over the tweets’ content and found that when clustering conferences accordingto their topics the resulting dendrogram clearly reveals the similarities and differences of the actual research interests ofthose events. Furthermore, we also analyzed the sentiment of tweets and found persistent differences among conferences.It also shows that some communities consistently express messages with higher levels of emotions while others do it in amore neutral manner. Finally, we investigated some features that can help predict future user participation in the onlineTwitter conference activity. By casting the problem as a classification task, we created a model that identifies factors thatcontribute to the continuing user participation. Our results have implications for research communities to implementstrategies for continuous and active participation among members. Moreover, our work reveals the potential for the useof information shared on Twitter in order to facilitate communication and cooperation among research communities, byproviding visibility to new resources or researchers from relevant but often little known research communities.
Trattner Christoph, Parra Denis, Brusilovsky Peter, Marinho Leandro
2015
The use of contexts –side information associated to information tasks– has been one ofthe most important dimensions for the improvement of Information Retrieval tasks, helpingto clarify the information needs of the users which usually start from a few keywords in atext box. Particularly, the social context has been leveraged in search and personalizationsince the inception of the Social Web, but even today we find new scenarios of informationfiltering, search, recommendation and personalization where the use of social signals canproduce a steep improvement. In addition, the action of searching has become a social processon the Web, making traditional assumptions of relevance obsolete and requiring newparadigms for matching the most useful resources that solve information needs. This escenariohas motivated us for organizing the Social Personalization and Search (SPS) workshop,a forum aimed at sharing and discussing research that leverage social data for improvingclassic personalization models for information access and to revisiting search from individualphenomena to a collaborative process.
Cook John, Ley Tobias, Maier Ronald, Mor Yishay, Santos Patricia, Lex Elisabeth, Dennerlein Sebastian, Trattner Christoph, Holley Debbie
2015
In this paper we define the notion of the Hybrid Social Learning Network. We propose mechanisms for interlinking and enhancing both the practice of professional learning and theories on informal learning. Our approach shows how we employ empirical and design work and a participatory pattern workshop to move from (kernel) theories via Design Principles and prototypes to social machines articulating the notion of a HSLN. We illustrate this approach with the example of Help Seeking for healthcare professionals.
Trattner Christoph, Balby Marinho Leandro, Parra Denis
2015
Large scale virtual worlds such as massive multiplayer online gamesor 3D worlds gained tremendous popularity over the past few years.With the large and ever increasing amount of content available, virtualworld users face the information overload problem. To tacklethis issue, game-designers usually deploy recommendation serviceswith the aim of making the virtual world a more joyful environmentto be connected at. In this context, we present in this paper the resultsof a project that aims at understanding the mobility patternsof virtual world users in order to derive place recommenders forhelping them to explore content more efficiently. Our study focuson the virtual world SecondLife, one of the largest and mostprominent in recent years. Since SecondLife is comparable to realworldLocation-based Social Networks (LBSNs), i.e., users canboth check-in and share visited virtual places, a natural approach isto assume that place recommenders that are known to work well onreal-world LBSNs will also work well on SecondLife. We have putthis assumption to the test and found out that (i) while collaborativefiltering algorithms have compatible performances in both environments,(ii) existing place recommenders based on geographicmetadata are not useful in SecondLife.
Larrain Santiago, Parra Denis, Graells-Garrido Eduardo, Nørvåg Kjetil, Trattner Christoph
2015
In this paper, we present work-in-progress of a recently startedproject that aims at studying the effect of time in recommendersystems in the context of social tagging. Despite the existence ofprevious work in this area, no research has yet made an extensiveevaluation and comparison of time-aware recommendation methods.With this motivation, this paper presents results of a studywhere we focused on understanding (i) “when” to use the temporalinformation into traditional collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms,and (ii) “how” to weight the similarity between users and itemsby exploring the effect of different time-decay functions. As theresults of our extensive evaluation conducted over five social taggingsystems (Delicious, BibSonomy, CiteULike, MovieLens, andLast.fm) suggest, the step (when) in which time is incorporated inthe CF algorithm has substantial effect on accuracy, and the typeof time-decay function (how) plays a role on accuracy and coveragemostly under pre-filtering on user-based CF, while item-basedshows stronger stability over the experimental conditions.
Trattner Christoph, Steurer Michael
2015
Existing approaches to identify the tie strength between users involve typically only one type of network. To date, no studies exist that investigate the intensity of social relations and in particular partnership between users across social networks. To fill this gap in the literature, we studied over 50 social proximity features to detect the tie strength of users defined as partnership in two different types of networks: location-based and online social networks. We compared user pairs in terms of partners and non-partners and found significant differences between those users. Following these observations, we evaluated the social proximity of users via supervised and unsupervised learning approaches and establish that location-based social networks have a great potential for the identification of a partner relationship. In particular, we established that location-based social networks and correspondingly induced features based on events attended by users could identify partnership with 0.922 AUC, while online social network data had a classification power of 0.892 AUC. When utilizing data from both types of networks, a partnership could be identified to a great extent with 0.946 AUC. This article is relevant for engineers, researchers and teachers who are interested in social network analysis and mining.
Lin Yi-ling, Trattner Christoph, Brusilovsky Peter , He Daqing
2015
Crowdsourcing has been emerging to harvest social wisdom from thousands of volunteers to perform series of tasks online. However, little research has been devoted to exploring the impact of various factors such as the content of a resource or crowdsourcing interface design to user tagging behavior. While images’ titles and descriptions are frequently available in image digital libraries, it is not clear whether they should be displayed to crowdworkers engaged in tagging. This paper focuses on offering an insight to the curators of digital image libraries who face this dilemma by examining (i) how descriptions influence the user in his/her tagging behavior and (ii) how this relates to the (a) nature of the tags, (b) the emergent folksonomy, and (c) the findability of the images in the tagging system. We compared two different methods for collecting image tags from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s crowdworkers – with and without image descriptions. Several properties of generated tags were examined from different perspectives: diversity, specificity, reusability, quality, similarity, descriptiveness, etc. In addition, the study was carried out to examine the impact of image description on supporting users’ information seeking with a tag cloud interface. The results showed that the properties of tags are affected by the crowdsourcing approach. Tags from the “with description” condition are more diverse and more specific than tags from the “without description” condition, while the latter has a higher tag reuse rate. A user study also revealed that different tag sets provided different support for search. Tags produced “with description” shortened the path to the target results, while tags produced without description increased user success in the search task
Trattner Christoph, Parra Denis , Brusilovsky Peter, , Marinho Leandro
2015
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph, Sabol Vedran
2015
isualizations have a distinctive advantage when dealing with the information overload problem: being grounded in basic visual cognition, many people understand visualizations. However, when it comes to creating them, it requires specific expertise of the domain and underlying data to determine the right representation. Although there are rules that help generate them, the results are too broad as these methods hardly account for varying user preferences. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel recommender system that suggests visualizations based on (i) a set of visual cognition rules and (ii) user preferences collected in Amazon-Mechanical Turk. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction and the evaluation of a novel approach called VizRec that is able suggest an optimal list of top-n visualizations for heterogeneous data sources in a personalized manner.
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph, Sabol Vedran
2015
Identifying and using the information from distributed and heterogeneous information sources is a challenging task in many application fields. Even with services that offer welldefined structured content, such as digital libraries, it becomes increasingly difficult for a user to find the desired information. To cope with an overloaded information space, we propose a novel approach – VizRec– combining recommender systems (RS) and visualizations. VizRec suggests personalized visual representations for recommended data. One important aspect of our contribution and a prerequisite for VizRec are user preferences that build a personalization model. We present a crowd based evaluation and show how such a model of preferences can be elicited.
Lacic Emanuel, Kowald Dominik, Eberhard Lukas, Trattner Christoph, Parra Denis, Marinho Leandro
2015
Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for recommendations. To contribute to this sparse field of research, in this paper we exploit users’ interactions along three data sources (marketplace, social network and location-based) to assess their performance in a barely studied domain: recommending products and domains of interests (i.e., product categories) to people in an online marketplace environment. To that end we defined sets of content- and network-based user similarity features for each data source and studied them isolated using an user-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) approach and in combination via a hybrid recommender algorithm, to assess which one provides the best recommendation performance. Interestingly, in our experiments conducted on a rich dataset collected from SecondLife, a popular online virtual world, we found that recommenders relying on user similarity features obtained from the social network data clearly yielded the best results in terms of accuracy in case of predicting products, whereas the features obtained from the marketplace and location-based data sources also obtained very good results in case of predicting categories. This finding indicates that all three types of data sources are important and should be taken into account depending on the level of specialization of the recommendation task.
Kowald Dominik, Seitlinger Paul, Kopeinik Simone, Ley Tobias, Trattner Christoph
2015
We assume that recommender systems are more successful,when they are based on a thorough understanding of how people processinformation. In the current paper we test this assumption in the contextof social tagging systems. Cognitive research on how people assign tagshas shown that they draw on two interconnected levels of knowledge intheir memory: on a conceptual level of semantic fields or LDA topics,and on a lexical level that turns patterns on the semantic level intowords. Another strand of tagging research reveals a strong impact oftime-dependent forgetting on users' tag choices, such that recently usedtags have a higher probability being reused than "older" tags. In thispaper, we align both strands by implementing a computational theory ofhuman memory that integrates the two-level conception and the processof forgetting in form of a tag recommender. Furthermore, we test theapproach in three large-scale social tagging datasets that are drawn fromBibSonomy, CiteULike and Flickr.As expected, our results reveal a selective effect of time: forgetting ismuch more pronounced on the lexical level of tags. Second, an extensiveevaluation based on this observation shows that a tag recommender interconnectingthe semantic and lexical level based on a theory of humancategorization and integrating time-dependent forgetting on the lexicallevel results in high accuracy predictions and outperforms other wellestablishedalgorithms, such as Collaborative Filtering, Pairwise InteractionTensor Factorization, FolkRank and two alternative time-dependentapproaches. We conclude that tag recommenders will benefit from goingbeyond the manifest level of word co-occurrences, and from includingforgetting processes on the lexical level.
Kowald Dominik, Kopeinik S., Seitlinger Paul, Trattner Christoph, Ley Tobias
2015
In this paper, we introduce a tag recommendation algorithmthat mimics the way humans draw on items in their long-term memory.Based on a theory of human memory, the approach estimates a tag'sprobability being applied by a particular user as a function of usagefrequency and recency of the tag in the user's past. This probability isfurther refined by considering the inuence of the current semantic contextof the user's tagging situation. Using three real-world folksonomiesgathered from bookmarks in BibSonomy, CiteULike and Flickr, we showhow refining frequency-based estimates by considering usage recency andcontextual inuence outperforms conventional "most popular tags" approachesand another existing and very effective but less theory-driven,time-dependent recommendation mechanism.By combining our approach with a simple resource-specific frequencyanalysis, our algorithm outperforms other well-established algorithms,such as FolkRank, Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization and CollaborativeFiltering. We conclude that our approach provides an accurateand computationally efficient model of a user's temporal tagging behavior.We demonstrate how effective principles of recommender systemscan be designed and implemented if human memory processes are takeninto account.
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph
2015
Visualizations have a distinctive advantage when dealing with the information overload problem: since theyare grounded in basic visual cognition, many people understand them. However, creating the appropriaterepresentation requires specific expertise of the domain and underlying data. Our quest in this paper is tostudy methods to suggest appropriate visualizations autonomously. To be appropriate, a visualization hasto follow studied guidelines to find and distinguish patterns visually, and encode data therein. Thus, a visu-alization tells a story of the underlying data; yet, to be appropriate, it has to clearly represent those aspectsof the data the viewer is interested in. Which aspects of a visualization are important to the viewer? Canwe capture and use those aspects to recommend visualizations? This paper investigates strategies to recom-mend visualizations considering different aspects of user preferences. A multi-dimensional scale is used toestimate aspects of quality for charts for collaborative filtering. Alternatively, tag vectors describing chartsare used to recommend potentially interesting charts based on content. Finally, a hybrid approach combinesinformation on what a chart is about (tags) and how good it is (ratings). We present the design principlesbehindVizRec, our visual recommender. We describe its architecture, the data acquisition approach with acrowd sourced study, and the analysis of strategies for visualization recommendation