Scott Sharkey: Often called a dead genre, interactive fiction continues to flourish long after reaching the end of its commercial lifespan. In the decades since whiz-bang graphics drew away the attention of the masses, hundreds of games have continued to evolve the genre — to the point where it can be a little intimidating to…
John Kleinberg This year’s conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking. A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections). (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005) Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a…
Chair: Ethan Munson (University of Wisconsin) Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly…
Inside Higher Ed: Understandably, professors frustrated with large class sizes turn to technology such as clickers in an attempt to engage students. Often, the technology become the handmaiden of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and…
Because I’m unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter’s explanation. A couple times I had to tell the eager presenter to give me a minute to take in all the information before…
I don’t attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me. The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction — it’s a research paper bared down to the bones. Flash scholarship? 60-second-scholarship? About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined…
Today’s keynote: Brughel painting showing the social dynamics of a village festival. Grounded the talk with a presentation of statistics on user-generated content (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), noting that whether those users are interacting with one another is another question. Noted that his research is observational rather than experimental, and that he won’t be able to…