Social network, semantic web and mobile computing

1. In the lecture, we have learnt the semantic web and informations that truly has a pointer and connections with people and other identities. For social network, semantic web is a connection of data where people in social network generate most of them.

Yet still there are questions in my mind that how do people access and use social network and what kind of data do they generate and how can it be connected in the semantic web. With those questions, my vision focuses upon the mobile computing, or mobile internet. I think this may be the place where the answers to those questions may reside.

2. Regarding the mobile internet, a big trend is the user's involvement has changed from desktop. In mobile setting, people are more willing to take initiatives with their handhelds. They can easily take photos or videos and upload them into their twitters and facebook account to share with friends. Their friends are more responsive to their sharing. Thus social contacts and interactions in the mobile internet is much more dynamic. Many social events are facilitated by the mobile contribution.

Because those user generated contents will often be titled with an intention for sharing and spreading, thus its naming and category is more associated with the interest of people and also targeted at the content itself. Thus for a mobile semantic web, the important aspects of related content and indexing can be more easily realized in the mobile internet setting.

In a recent survey done by Nielsen group, 40% of users access their social networks from mobile devices and this trend is increasing.

In a vision, we can see that the future world is a united mobile internet, where social network will embrace the semantic web and links people, content and places of access.

Post 3, SNA practise assignment

1. Describe briefly what is social network analysis (SNA).

Social Network Analysis is a technique to utilize ideas of social science study of social network to investigate the relationship of a large group of social participants. It involves the usage of mathematical matrix and calculations to create a series of metrics as indicators of various social activity level.

In the nowadays, SNA can be used in software method to study the Social Network online platform and analyze the relationship and activities in the virtual world.

2. In a social network below. the SNA analysis would better illustrate its relationship.

(a). Describe the above social network according to your best knowledge.

From the above relation graph, we can see that besides Eva, the other four people are all closely connected. Thus it is a heavy connection relationship between the four people. If Carol and Bob connect, the four people will be fully connected. For Eva, she only connects with David. Thus David is a bridge for her to reach out into the rest of group. Thus in my observation, Eva does not belong to the 4 heavy connected social network. But she can improve her social connection from David. And she should be encouraged to connect through David to the other three people. Also Carol and Bob can both establish connection through Alice and David.

(b). Within this social network, who is the most influential? (What SNA measurements you learned from the lectures can help you to solve this problem? Why you choose those measurements? Show the readers how you identify this person by computing the corresponding indexes.)

David is most influential. I can use Between Centrality to solve this Problem.

I choose it because according the lecture "Between Centrality is a measure of the potential for control as an actor who is high in “betweenness” is able to act as a gatekeeper controlling the flow of resources (information, money, power, e.g.) between the alters that he or she connects" Thus by choosing this measure, I can know who is most influential.

Let's calculate the Between Centrality of this network

For Alice, there are total 7 shortest path for others to inter connect. Alice on 1 path. Thus its BC value is 1/7 = 0.143

For Bob, there are total 6 shortest path for others to inter connect. Bob on 0 path. Thus its BC value is 0

For Carol, there are total 6 shortest path for others to inter connect. Carol on 0 path. Thus its BC value is 0

For David, there are total 7 shortest path for others to inter connect. David on 4 path. Thus its BC value is 4/7 = 0.571

For Eva, there are total 7 shortest path for others to inter connect. Eva on 0 path. Thus its BC value is 0

Therefore, from the calculation, David has the largest value in Betweenness Centrality. He is the most influential person in this network.

(c).Suppose you are conducting a research on the social network of these five students and the above results are obtained, discuss the findings and their implications based on your data.

The finding reveals that David is the most influential in the network, he controls the connection of Eva to the rest of the group. Also Alice is second in influence. She has the influence over the connection of Bob and Carol. For Bob and Carol, if they wants to connect with each other and with Eva, they need to go through Alice and David.

The implication of this analysis is that David can play a better role in helping Eva to connect with the other 3 people. If it is a social network, he can introduce Eva to the other three. Then this network will be much balanced in relationship. Also for Eva she should take a more active role in social interaction and needs to establish further reaches to other students.

some reflection on social multimedia

1. In the lecture of social multimedia computing, I have learnt that the multimedia can facilitate the computing of social networking. This is what I have not known before. I know that people upload their pictures to share with friends. Those pictures must contain some social information. But I have not thought to extract and use those information to construct a social network before. This is something that I have learnt in this lecture.

I also wish to learn further about how we can actively apply this skill in other field of usage such as social networking data mining and marketing.

2. I'd like to talk about the social multimedia search.  Social Multimedia search is a way to first analyze the social multimedia, for example, first analyze a picture or a group of pictures. Then to extract and do processing of those multimedia, for example applying the SIFT algorithms to extract the representitiveness of the pictures. Then to group those with the high representitiveness in common and use it for certain ranking and categorization of the social multimedia.

I think one of the further implementation of this social multimedia search that does not cover in the lecture is to search for images of socially related characteristics. For example, we can search in SNS of friends pictures where we are shown in that pictures. Or we can search pictures of a particular friend. I think this usage will be very interesting. Actually, google has launched its imagery search of social circle that when we search on the web about some pictures, it can return with "Results from your social circle" to indicate that some pictures are from our album or our friends album.  We can know more of this feature from this site: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/search-is-getting-more-social.html#!/2010/01/search-is-getting-more-social.html

In the above link, a blog article is there to talk about this social media search enabled by google. There are also some examples in this article. I think this feature can facilitate people to interact more closely because very often, we do not know exactly what our friends are up to. And I think the social related search can return more accurate result.

Post-1 Reflection of learning on Lecture 3- How to deepen the Epistemic level of learning

1.What I have learnt and thought in the lecture.
In the lecture 3, I have learnt the cognition can be categorized to 3 different levels. Before that, I know that human perceive things and understand ideas in different levels. But I have not thought about what are the features of each level. During the lecture, the most important theory I have learnt is that epistemic level of cognition is the highest and it can create new knowledge by the interaction and discussion. I also wish to know further that how our critical thinking ability is linked with epistemic level and knowledge building. Therefore I would like to discuss it in this post.

2. Further discussion of "knowledge building at epistemic level"
Knowledge building is a socialized activity. An individual cannot and is limited to build new knowledge. However, in a community where people can join and disucss, certain improvements can be made to the existing understandings. For example, in Wikipedia, people can comment on the previous entries and even improve the existing knowledge with the most updated one. This link shows the revision history of the wiki knowledge of Cattle Egret http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cattle_Egret&action=history

The above is what we have learnt in the lecture. Now I would like to talk about my own ideas of knowledge building and epistemic level in the aspect of critical thinking.

By definition, Epistemic congition is to question the knowledge itself and involves with inquiry. But it is not just inquiry about everything. I think in order to learn the subject in a more thorough way, we need to view and investigate the idea in multiple angles. Yet still, personal perspective is limited. Thus in order to complement our own limited view, a socialized effort can help to expand our individual mindset. This is one reason that knowledge building always involves a group people to discuss and improve the existing ideas or challenge it by proposing new ones.

From a personal learning perspective, I have found a particularly interesting site. In the website of INFohio, a learning tool builder in US. The Inquiry and Knowledge Building Process is presented in a model. http://learningcommons.infohio.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=298&Itemid=132

I think this chart and the resources on the website can help one to learn in critical thinking and also in collaboration with others. From an analysis way, I also see that this learning tool is facilitating the epistemic level of cognition. It enhances people's ability to question and connect, as well as update the old knowledge.