******** Apologies for multiple postings ***********
Please forward to interested parties and relevant listservs
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Dear Colleagues
We welcome your participation to the WWW2011 DiversiWeb Workshop. Kindly see below for details.
Best Regards
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Devika Madalli, DRTC/ISIBC
Co-Chair, DiversiWeb 2011
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******** Call for Participation for DiversiWeb 2011 ***********
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First International Workshop on Knowledge Diversity on the Web
Workshop at WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India, March 28 or 29 (TBD), 2011
Supported by the EU FP7 projects RENDER and Living Knowledge
== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Devika P. Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India *
Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Website:
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http://render-project.eu/diversiweb-2011/
Almost 20 years after its introduction, the Web provides a platform for the publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions, viewpoints, mindsets and backgrounds. The success of the Web can be attributed to several factors, most notably to its principled scalable design, but also to a number of subsequent ICT developments such as smart user-generated content, mobile devices, and most recently cloud computing.
The first two of these have dramatically lowered the last barriers of entry when it comes to producing and consuming information online, leading to an unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. They are responsible for hundreds of millions of users all over the globe creating high-quality encyclopedias, publishing Terabytes of multimedia content, contributing to world-class software, and lively taking part in defining the agenda of many aspects of our society by raising their voices, and publicly expressing and sharing their ideas, viewpoints, and resources.
The other side of the coin in this unique success story is, nevertheless, the great challenges associated with managing the sheer amounts of information continuously being published online, whilst allowing for purposeful use, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through global-scale collaboration. In this context, diversity includes different opinions, sentiments, preferences, or worldviews that are reflected in the way information is expressed on the Web. These challenges are still to be solved at many levels, from the infrastructure to store and access the information, through the methods and techniques to make sense out of it, to the paradigms underlying the processes of Web-based information provision and consumption.
As an example, when searching for blog posts, state-of-the-art technology – be that popularity-based algorithms, recommendation engines or collaborative filters – tends to return either the most popular posts, or those which correspond with a personal profile and therefore with the known opinions and tastes of the reader. Alternative points of view, and new unexpected content, are not taken into account as they are not highly ranked, and posts expressing different opinions are sometimes even discarded.
This behavior has particularly negative consequences when dealing with information that is expected and intended to be subject to diverse opinion – as is the case with news reports, ratings of products or media content, customer reviews, or any other type of subjective assessment. The same negative effects apply in a community-driven environment that is designed for collaboration – the most obvious example here being Wikipedia and the blogosphere. The information diversity exposed in such an environment, impressive both with respect to scale and the richness of opinions and viewpoints expressed, cannot be handled without adequate computer support in an economically feasible manner. In the long run, maintaining the current state-of-affairs will change the ways and the extent to which people are informed (or not) on a particular topic, tremendously influencing how they look into that topic, what they find about it and what they think about it.
On top of all this, it is meanwhile acknowledged that the current state of
affairs hampers true collaboration. Wikipedia is a tremendous success, but
it is also a largely meritocratic system with a decreasing number of
active contributors, whereas the blogosphere has to deal with the limited
attention of the blog authors. What is needed are novel concepts, methods
and tools that allow humans and machines to leverage the huge amounts of
information created by a community, based on interaction models that
support expressing, communicating and reasoning about divergent models
simultaneously. This would not only enhance true collaboration, but would
also significantly improve various aspects of the information management
life cycle, thus addressing information overload in sectors which rely on
opinions-driven information sources and mass participation – news,
ratings, reviews, and social and information sharing portals of any kind.
== Goal of the workshop ==
The overall aim of this workshop is to provide an interdisciplinary forum
for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss their ideas
related to the challenges posed by diversity on the Web. We aim to address
a wide array of interdisciplinary questions, which need to be tackled in
order to preserve the fragile balance between a world that is continually
converging and growing together, the rich diversity of the global society,
and the dangers of fragmentation and splintering. This includes but is not
limited to questions such as ‘How to model diversity?’, ‘How to discover
bias and opinion in blog posts, tweets, forum items, wiki edits, etc.?’,
‘How to rank, aggregate, summarize, and exploit information in a
diversity-aware manner?’, ‘What are the applications of diversity-rich
information sources?’, ‘How can we use diversity as an asset instead of
regarding it as a barrier?’.
Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
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* Risks and advantages of diversity and diversification on the Web
* Facets of knowledge diversity and conceptual and formal models for
representing and understanding diversity
* Discovery and mining of corpora for diversity-related information
* Use of Natural Language Processing techniques for diversity mining
* Classifying Web 2.0 content items such as blog posts, videos, tweets,
and wiki-edits by their biases
* Usage and benefits of diversity in the corporate context, e.g. in order
to understand feedback and communication with the customer
* Enabling or improving communication and collaboration over barriers
induced by diversity
* Extensions to Web applications taking diversity into account
* Exposing and explaining diversity to end users
* User experiences avoiding the radicalization of groups by exposing them
to alternatives
* User interfaces allowing the explicit annotation of content with
diversity markers
* Studies on the acceptance by end-users of diversified applications.
== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Devika P. Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India *
Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Contact us at