Last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference

I missed the keynote address by Victor Bahl today, so if anyone has blogged about this, please send to me. Today is the last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference and right now, I'm in the first session of the day in the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop, listened to a talk on Expertise Modeling and Recommendation in Online Question and Answer Forums where they used clustering on Yahoo Answers. There is an interesting talk on A Language of Life: Characterizing People Using Cell Phone Tracks by Alexy Khrabrov that is exploring whether can determine actions based on sensor data that is captured by Nokia phones with connection to cell towers. They use the dataset from the Reality Mining group of Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle from MIT, and use N-grams from languagemodelsto model the sensor data as text.

The next session of the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop is starting. First talk is on Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing. I never knew that people would actually offer couches to others to sleep on on Couchsurfing.com! Reciprocity is based on whether the two people offer couches to each other. The second talk is on Virtually There: Exploring Proximity and Homophily in a Virtual World presented by Noshir Contractor. People tend to form social relations with those who are geographically close to them (theory of proximity). The implications of understanding proximity and homophily could be used for finding experts in online social networks. The third talk is on The Altruistic Searcher which talks about collaborative web search, their search engine is HeyStaks. An interesting talk now is on Inferring Unobservable Inter-community Links in Large Social Networks where the motivation is that social networks are reconstructed from partially observable data of social interactions, and the social graph is an approximation of the real social graph.