PAWS Meeting 11/18/2008

Rosta and Dhruba presented some papers from RecSys and InfoVis this year.

RecSys (Rosta)

• Who predicts better? - talks about whether impersonal recommender systems perform as human recommenders
• Crafting initial user experience to achieve community goals - talks about the new user activities of recommender systems, including how many new users they lose, how much users will users do, how can they shape ongoing user behavior, etc. 
• Recommending topics for self descriptions in online user profiles - talks about the user profiles ("about you" entries) in social network sites.

InfoVis (Dhruba)

• VisGets - a temporal + geographic + tag cloud visualization system for blog and news on the Web.
• Rolling the dice - the best paper of InfoVis '08. Showed high dimensional data visualization.
• Who votes for what - an interactive canvas formulating queries (SQL).  Adopts a radial visualization that users can do activities like adding, removing variables, and specifying  values visually.

PAWS group meeting - Nov 11, 2008

Meeting included two presentation by Sharon and Sergey.

First Sharon presented a summary of ICCE 2008 (International Conference on Computer Science Education) that she had attended recently. She focused on papers from the following sub-conferences
AIED/ITS & Adaptive Learning
CSCL & Learning Sciences

She briefly presented 5 papers titled:

1. "Peer Explanation in Primary Mathematics Learning"
2. "The design of scaffolding in online peer assessment system for learning programming adaptive peer assessment design"
3. "Formative Evaluation of the SIETTE collaborative Testing Environment"
4. "Extension of the educational system that can generate explanation of programs - For handling programs in which pointers are used"
5. "Web based learning material development with less experineced staffs' participation"
   

You can check more details about these papers on Sharon's blog.

Second, Sergey presented a paper from recent ICKM'08 conference titled "Peer Production of Structured Knowledge ­- an Empirical Study of Ratings and Incentive Mechanisms".

The paper discusses a rating based incentive mechanism to build large scale ontology trying to address the following problems:

1. Quality of peer-production
2. Motivation to contribute
3. Quality of ratings

paws meeting 11.04.2008

1. guest presenter: Dr.Amir Pourabdollah
Title: Ternary relations model of information management
TRM is a formal description of a technique that establishes bi-directional and dynamic node-link structures in which each link is an ordered triple of some three nodes.
TRM may be used as a tool for the analysis of information models, to elucidate connections and parallels, and as a construction kit to build new paradigms and/or applications in information management.

2. Gustavo Santos
Title: e-Fer - A Web Based Learning Environment for Chronic Wounds

general objective: to develop and train skills for diagnosis and treatment of chronic wounds

so far, focusing on inner loop adaptation. however, it still requires more data(cases) for the adaptation.

could reference to Dr. Crowley's work.