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KMi Seminars
Improving Web Search using Trust and Social Networks
This event took place on Wednesday 25 October 2006 at 11:30

 
Tom Heath KMi, The Open University

Conventional search engines treat all users the same. Relevance is seen as a relationship between a query and a resource, ignoring aspects of the user's information need that are not explicit in the query. This contrasts with offline information seeking, where people frequently use social networks of known individuals as a source of information and as a basis for assessing its relevance. In this presentation I will outline our approach to personalised information seeking, based on computing trust relationships between the user and members of their social networks as a means to rank and filter resources. Results of an empirical study underlying this approach will be presented, followed by a demonstration of parts of the infrastructure through which our approach will be realised.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities