May 19, 2009, 6:12 pm
Fil Menczer is one of the organizers of Hypertext 2009, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext an Hypermedia. The conference will be held June 29-July 1 at the Villa Gualino Convention Centre, on the hills overlooking Torino, Italy. Hypertext is the main venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on “linking.” The Web, the Semantic Web, the Web 2.0, and Social Networks are all manifestations of the success of the link. With a 70% increase in submissions, Hypertext 2009 will have a strong and diverse technical program covering all research concerning links: their semantics, their presentation, the applications, as well as the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effects on society. The conference will also feature demos, posters, a student research competition, four workshops, and keynotes by Lada Adamic and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.
April 11, 2009, 6:26 pm
Complex Networks Collaboratory
Cx-Nets is a virtual collaboratory of three research groups that despite their far apart geographical locations pursue the same research agenda in close collaboration. Active research areas include:
- Network theory, structure and models
- Information Networks
- Epidemic modeling
- Social systems
- Infrastructures
- Biological networks
The Cx-Nets website is also intended as an information exchange point with links to conferences, tools and references useful for the network science community.
Alex Vespignani (PI)
Sandro Flammini
Fil Menczer
April 1, 2009, 7:22 pm
Web Dynamics Market
The Web Dynamics group works to build a better understanding of how the Web, the Wikipedia, and similar large information networks, grow and change over their lifetime. Of particular interest is how nodes in these networks gain popularity.
Our preliminary work has painted a picture of the Web as a place in which popularity is very dynamic and unpredictable. Surges in popularity for topics are similar to earthquakes and avalanches in terms of their unpredictability — both in when they will happen and on what scale.
Project Members
Jacob Ratkiewicz
Michael Conover
Fil Menczer
Sandro Flammini
Alex Vespignani
Luis Rocha
Santo Fortunato
March 31, 2009, 4:54 pm
The goal of Sixearch.org is to provide an open-source platform for developing a context aware personalized peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed information retrieval system. The application currently supports collaborative Web search with scalability.
Sixearch uses the idea of modeling neighbor nodes by their content but without assuming the presence of special directory hubs. As shown on the left, each peer is both a (limited) directory hub and a content provider; it has its own topical crawler guided by its user’s information content and local search engine. Peers communication is built on JXTA platform. When a user submits a query, it is first matched against the local engine, and then routed to neighbor peers to obtain more results. Ideally, the peer network should lead to the emergence of a clustered topology by intelligent collaboration between the peers. While traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo provide access to very large document collections, the Sixearch P2P Web search application provides a complementary way for users to actively and collaboratively share their own document collections. However, the Sixearch framework allows traditional search engines to naturally be included as peers; such peers would quickly emerge as reliable, trustworthy, and general authority nodes.
A screenshot of peer interactions
The right figure displays a screenshot of the queries being sent among peers. Peer interactions are visualized by the applet at viz.sixearch.org. The area of each node is proportional to the size of its Web index. The edges represent the queries exchanged between two peers. The connectivity of each peer is an indirect measure of centrality, authority, and/or reliability of the peer as learned by the other peers.
Our work on Sixearch has been published in AAAI Magazine (preprint), and presented at Hyperterxt 2009 (demo), ACM SAC2009 (paper), RIAO2007 (demo), ACM CIKM P2PIR2006 (paper), WTAS2005 (paper), WWW2005 (poster), and WWW2004 (poster). Unfortunately, we have also been the victims of shameless plagiarism.
Visit Sixearch.org to learn more and download the application or contribute to it!
Members & Collaborators
Fil Menczer
Le-Shin Wu
Ruj Akavipat
Namrata Lele
Rossano Schifanella
Ana Maguitman
Support
February 19, 2009, 7:29 pm
Networks & agents Network
NaN is a research group exploring complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).
We have many ongoing collaborations with colleagues in the Complex Networks Lagrange Lab at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation in Torino, Italy.
Active NaN projects
GiveALink
Sixearch
Web Traffic
Network Flow Analysis
Web Security
Web Dynamics
Search Bias
Text & Link Modeling
Archived NaN projects
InfoSpiders
Web Topologies
IntelliShopper
ELSA
LEE
BioNets
ACE
November 13, 2002, 7:27 pm
January 16, 2002, 7:37 pm
Web pages cluster by content type (TRN News)
August 10, 2000, 7:40 pm
InfoSpiders, MySpiders, and intelligent adaptive crawlers have been covered in Wired, Christian Science Monitor, BotSpot, Business 2.0, Bot News, High Technology Careers Magazine, About.com, TechWeb EETimes, @-web, BusinessAtIowa, SearchEngineWatch.com, etc.
