News Story

A robust finale to ROBUST

Miriam Fernandez, Thursday 16 Jan 2014

ROBUST glided through its third and final year review in Luxembourg on December 12. The reviewers highlighted the numerous and successful outcomes of this project with more than 100 publications including top conferences and journals, several best-paper awards, concrete developments towards the commercial exploitation of the produced technologies (led by the industrial partners; IBM, SAP, Polecat and Software Mind) and the creation of a book to disseminate the research, its results, and lessons learnt during the project.

This project was a pioneer in several social web research areas, to understand and manage the social and economic objectives and needs of users, providers and hosts of business online communities. The project produced a suite of systems and prototypes, such as community risk assessment dashboards, behaviour analysis services and monitors, and fish tank visualisations of Twitter discussions.

KMi was a core analytical partner in ROBUST, and produced a series of components to analyse different aspects of online communities, including the behaviour of users, their needs, their value, the sentiment they express and the topics they discuss. Multiple KMiers and ex-KMiers were behind the ideas, research and development of these components including: Sofia Angeletou, Matthew Rowe, Yulan He, Hassan Saif, Gregoire Burel, Smitashree Choudhury, Keerthi Thomas, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani. Great efforts were also made by the IT and admin teams of KMi for the successful running and management of this project.

Thanks to all KMiers that were involved! The project was indeed ‘just great’, and shall be missed. Some of the ROBUST work in KMi directly led to a new round of projects; and so the legacy continues.