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Tech Report kmi-99-04 Abstract


Discovering Dynamics using Bayesian Clustering
Techreport ID: kmi-99-04
Date: 1999
Author(s): Paola Sebastiani, Marco Ramoni, Paul Cohen, John Warwick and James Davis
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This paper introduces a Bayesian method for clustering dynamic processes and applies it to the characterization of the dynamics of a military scenario. The method models dynamics as Markov chains and then applies an agglomerative clustering procedure to discover the most probable set of clusters capturing the different dynamics. To increase efficiency, the method uses an entropy-based heuristic search strategy. 1. Department of  Statistics, The Open University. 2. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. 3. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.