IAP Poster Competition Winners for Spring 2009

The spring 2009 IAP Meeting was a great success in part due to our IAP Poster contest. Over 25 posters were submitted for this event. 1st place was awarded to Chiao-Fang Hsu, who presented a poster entitled "Analyzing Community Preference of Digg Comments" which addressed current issues regarding social media. This is a collaborative work with CSE PhD student Elham Khabiri, who is primary author of the research. Ms. Hsu's advisor is Dr. James Caverlee.

According to Ms. Hsu, "Large-scale socially-generated metadata is one of the key features driving the growth and success of the emerging Social Web. Recently there have been many research efforts to study the quality of this metadata; like user-contributed tags, comments, and ratings; and its potential impact on new opportunities for intelligent information access. However, much existing research relies on quality assessments made by human experts external to a Social Web community.” She continues by saying that "we are interested in studying how an online community itself perceives the relative quality of its own user-contributed content, which has important implications for the successful self-regulation and growth of the Social Web in the presence of increasing spam and a flood of Social Web metadata. To this end, we study the community preference for user-contributed comments on the social news aggregator Digg. In our analysis, we study several factors impacting community preference, including the contributor's reputation and community activity level and the complexity and richness of the comment."

As a result of this study, the authors propose a learning-based approach for predicting the community's preference rating of unseen comments, which can be used to promote high-quality comments and filter out low-quality comments based on the community's expressed preferences.

"Basically, the relationship between the features is modeled by fitting a linear equation to the Digg score of the comments. Each feature will receive a weight based on the influence it shows on the training data. We apply the learned weight to predict the score for the test samples."

Also placing in the contest was Josiah Manson who won 2nd Place for his poster "Hierarchical Least Squares Mesh Editing." Josiah's advisor is Dr. Scott Schaefer. Receiving the award for 3rd place, John Freeman presented the poster entitled "Never Write another GUI Event Handler"; he is advised by Dr. Jaakko Jarvi.