Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research

NaN had a strong presence at Hypertext 2009 in Torino:

• Mark’s paper What’s in a session: tracking individual behavior on the web was nominated for the Best Paper Award.
• Heather presented the demo Incentives for social annotation about the prototype Firefox extension for GiveALink.org, and the tagging game. (Heather is also demoing at SIGIR’09 in Boston.)
• I presented the demo Sixearch.org 2.0 peer application for collaborative web search about the latest release of Sixearch.
• Ben presented his poster on A scalable, collaborative similarity measure for social annotation systems.

This sabbatical is providing wonderful opportunities for me to present our work and establish/strengthen collaborations with several groups in Italy. Recently I have given invited seminars on social search at the Department of Informatics at the University of Torino (hosts Matteo Sereno and Mino Anglano) and on Web traffic at the Department of Math at the University of Padova (host Massimo Marchiori). In the next few weeks I will give a talk on social search at the Department of Informatics and Information Science at the University of Genova (host Marina Ribaudo) and one on search engine bias and Web modeling at my old stomping ground, the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council in Rome (host my undergraduate advisor and mentor Domenico Parisi).

Mark Meiss presented our work on Web click traffic analysis at the First International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2008) on the beautiful Stanford campus. His talk was very well received, as reported in Greg Linden’s blog. The quality of the conference itself was very good, with several excellent presentations. Those I found most interesting were Qiaozhu Mei’s talk on search log entropy, Nick Craswell on click position bias, Carlos Castillo on social media, and Paul Heymann on social bookmarks. I think future WSDM conferences should have an award for the best-delivered talk. This year I would have voted for Carlos Castillo. The next WSDM will be in Barcelona.

I just got back from a visit to Yahoo! Research Silicon Valley. I gave two talks presenting our work on social search and web traffic analysis, and met lots of interesting people. They have an amazing group and of course mountains of data to lust after. Hopefully this will lead to collaborations in the future, given the many intersecting research interests.

Our paper “Ranking Web Sites with Real User Traffic” (by Mark, Fil, Santo, Sandro & Alex) was one of 24 accepted by the First Web Search and Data Mining Conference. WSDM (pronounced “wisdom”) is a brand new ACM conference  intended to be complementary to the World Wide Web Conference tracks in search and data mining.  With 151 submissions, the acceptance rate was 16%. WSDM 2008 will be held in Stanford, February 2008.

1. Web click traffic network (by Fil) at Complex Networks: Dynamics and Topology Interplay
2. GiveALink (by Ben) at Enhancing Social Interaction: Recommendation Systems, Reputation, P2P, Trust and Social Networks
3. 6S (by Fil) at Enhancing Social Interaction: Recommendation Systems, Reputation, P2P, Trust and Social Networks
4. •Social Search (by Fil) at Social Websites – Complex Dynamics and Structure