Rosta Farzan and Jill Freyne, ASSIST: Adaptive Social Support for Information Space Traversal

Jill and Rosta presented their effort to integrate multiple social technologies, called ASSIST. The social technologies included in this approach is like social search and social navigation which are to support ultimately social information access.

The ASSIST engine works in two domains, ACM scholarly articles and YouTube videos. The engine interact with the users and builds matrices for storing interaction information with users for searching and browsing modes and make recommendations based on them. The process is achieved solely social based, not content based.

Evaluations are planned with 20 graduate students in real settings for 2 months in order to test two hypotheses, 1) Interaction will be affected by social recommendations 2) Social searching and browsing will add values to the system.

Michael Yudelson, Brainstorming: A "Perfect" Academic Paper System

The group talked briefly about the polling for the new features to be added to CoPE system. Suggested features from the members so far are arranged in http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~paws/perfect_paper_sharing.html. We will think more about it and do the preliminary polling next week.