Personal Research Dashboard:
Making the Social Network Paradigm work for Research
Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk & Dr Athen Ma
The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Social Network Group Dynamics
 Investigation into existing social networking group
structures.
− Relationship between group membership and
friendship.
− Further binders such as topics and interests also
being investigated.
 Other people involved:
− Two undergraduate final year projects
− Nuffield Bursary Summer Student Placement
− Collaboration with Dr Raul Mondragon
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The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Social & Group based Recommendation
 Investigating novel techniques for:
− combining temporal social interaction information
with traditional recommendation, personalised within
a given social context.
− socially driven recommendation to groups.
− using information gathered from social network
analysis into the recommendation process.
 Other people involved:
− Two RAs (via BTG funding and ESD funding)
− 4 undergraduate final year project
− MSc by Research project
3
The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Personalisation in a Mashup Environment
 Techniques for personalising a mashup:
− Design considerations.
− Group sandbox creation for research management.
− User driven mashup content.
 Other people involved:
− RA (BTG funding)
− 2 undergraduate final year projects
− MEng group project
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The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Related PhD Students
 Maryam Fatemi (in collaboration with BT): working
on the detection of relationships from social media
for building service oriented user profiles and the
use of those relationships in recommendation.
 Gabriel Santos: working on visual methods for
exploring research space by exploiting techniques
such as tag clouds and folksonomies.
 Ruijie Dong: Resource recommendation via Social
information.
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The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Outputs: Grant proposals & Collaboration
 First Grant Proposal by Dr Tokarchuk on “Social and
Temporal Recommendation”.
− Incorporates initial work in both recommendation and
complexity.
− Supported by both BT and Last.FM.
 Internal ESD funding for research paper
recommendation.
 Collaboration with the Food, Consumer Behaviour
and Health Research Group at the University of
Surrey.
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The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
 Motivated the formation of
: a special interest
group looking at social and complex networks.
− study group and academic research collaboration.
 Further proposals in the area of complexity,
recommendation and ubiquitous sensors are
currently in preparation.
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The Department
of ELECTRONIC
School
of Electronic
Engineering ENGINEERING
and Computer Science
Dissemination
 Organisation of a Special Session on Social
Networking at NAEC 2009.
 Related publications:
− L Tokarchuk, K Shoop and A Ma. (2009). Using co-presence
communities to enhance social recommendation. Proceedings of the
Sixth International Conference on Wireless on Demand Network
Systems and Services.
− R Dong, A Ma, and L Tokarchuk. (2009). Digging Friendship: Paper
Recommendation in Social Networks. Proceedings of Networking &
Electronic Commerce Research Conference (NAEC 2009), 2009
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