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{ Monthly Archives } May 2009

Sidelines at ICWSM

Last week I presented our first Sidelines paper (with Daniel Zhou and Paul Resnick) at ICWSM in San Jose. Slides (hosted on slideshare) are embedded below, or you can watch a video of most of the talk on VideoLectures.

Opinion and topic diversity in the output sets can provide individual and societal benefits. If news aggregators relying on votes and links to select and subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day simply select the most popular items may not yield as much diversity as is present in the overall pool of votes and links.

To help measure how well any given approach does at achieving these goals, we developed three diversity metrics that address different dimensions of diversity: inclusion/exclusion, nonalienation, and proportional representation (based on KL divergence).

To increase diversity in result sets chosen based on user votes (or things like votes), we developed the sidelines algorithm. This algorithm temporarily suppresses a voter’s preferences after a preferred item has been selected. In comparison to collections of the most popular items, from user votes on Digg.com and links from a panel of political blogs, the Sidelines algorithm increased inclusion while decreasing alienation. For the blog links, a set with known political preferences, we also found that Sidelines improved proportional representation.

Our approach differs and is complementary to work that selects for diversity or identifies bias based on classifying content (e.g. Park et al, NewsCube; ) or by classifying referring blogs or voters (e.g. Gamon et al, BLEWS). While Sidelines requires votes (or something like votes), it doesn’t require any information about content, voters, or long term voting histories. This is particularly useful for emerging topics and opinion groups, as well as for non-textual items.

SI182 Final Projects

A belated congrats to all of the EECS182/SI182 students on finishing the semester. For those not familiar with the course, SI182 is an intro to programming course in the informatics program at UM. Paul Resnick and I taught it this past semester, and arranged the course around pulling data from public feeds, processing this data, and presenting it again, online, in a way that adds value.

Here’s a sampling of the final projects:

Also, a huge thanks to Chuck Severance, who got this course started and gave us early chapters of his book Using Google App Engine, which gave us the confidence to use App Engine in the course and which we were able to rely on for class readings.