Live Social Semantics at ESWC2010

Live Social Semantics goes live once again. Following the successful runs at ESWC 2009 and HyperText 2009, the Live Social Semantics team was invited to relaunch the application at ESWC 2010, Crete. The application was very well received and generated a lot of attention and interest at the conference, where more than 130 people registered on our site to use the service. Credit goes to Wouter van den Broeck, Martin Szomszor, and Ciro Cattuto, for working so hard to get the application up and running on time for the conference.

Job Vacancy

Researcher/Senior Researcher

Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)
£27,319 – £35,646, Ref: 6375
Based in Milton Keynes
Contract until 30 June 2012

KMi has an opening for a Research Assistant/Associate (depending on experience and qualifications) to undertake research on Social Semantic Web and Web Science in the context of the EU-funded project WeGov. WeGov aims at developing a toolset that interacts with common social networking systems (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube) to better track and understand the opinions and behaviour of citizens during governance and policy-making processes. The tools will allow discussions on these social networking systems to be linked, seeded, and stimulated through injection of policy discussion points into relevant communities.

You should have a strong interest and expertise in Social Media and Software, Semantic Web, and Web Science and holds a degree in Computer Science or in other relevant disciplines. You must be able to combine scientific research with practical research and development in the project, and are willing to travel and work with the project’s academic and industrial partners.

For detailed information and how to apply go to here, call the KMi Recruitment Coordinator on +44 (0) 1908 654774 or email quoting the reference number. Closing date: 6th May 2010.

PerCom 2010

Just got back from the 8th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2010) in Mannheim, Germany. Some nice work was presented, but strangely there was almost nothing about semantics. There was quite a bit on social web and pervasive devices. Ciro Cattuto and I gave a talk at the First International Workshop on Communication, Collaboration and Social Networking in Pervasive Computing Environments (PerCol). The paper [1] focuses on the RFID side of our work on Live Social Semantics.

[1] Wouter Van den Broeck, Ciro Cattuto, Alain Barrat, Martin Szomsor, Gianluca Correndo and Harith Alani. The Live Social Semantics application: a platform for integrating face-to-face presence with on-line social networking. Proceedings of the PerCol Workshop, 8th IEEE Int. Conf. Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), Mannheim, Germany, 2010.

Talk went very well and it was the highlight of the conference ;)

EU WeGov project has started

WeGov is a new EC STREP project under the ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling work programme.

The project aims to develop a toolset so full advantage can be taken of well-established social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, etc) when engaging citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policy-making processes. The tools will make it possible to detect, track and mine opinions, behaviour, and discussions on policy oriented topics including their origins, bias and evolution. The tools will allow discussions to be linked, seeded, and stimulated through injection of policy discussion points into relevant communities.

Will link to the WeGov website when it goes live. A job ad for a researcher to work on WeGov will be coming out very soon.