Projects

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006). Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Mining (ICWSM 2007). Also as IlliGAL TR. No. 2006026. Link to the PDF. Abstract The blogsphere is a valuable source of information. From simple topic analysis in the blogosphere—what’s hot—to harvesting and analyzing valuable market trends—what product and features are suggested—require a tight integration of computer- and human-based analysis capabilities. Computers can easily assist the processing filtering and visualizing relevant and key elements of the blogosphere, but coupling them with human evaluation and reasoning can provide the final steps to connect pieces of relevant information into better description map of the current trends of the blogosphere. An example of the need for such human-centered analysis was David R. Ellis’ film Snakes on a Plane (2006) which failed to properly translate blogosphere discussions into a successful commercial product—as a clear misalignment of both environments the blogsphere and the final targeted market. In this paper, we present some human-centered visualization and analysis tools that can help users to compare and reason synergies and misalignments revolving around a particular topic. ...

by Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Xavier Llorà, and David E. Goldberg (2006). Illinois Technical Report No. 2006025. Link to the PDF. Abstract In this paper, we propose some methodologies for delineating topic and discussant transitions in online collaborative environments, more precisely, focus group discussions for product conceptualization. First, we propose KEE (Key Elements Extraction) algorithm, an algorithm for simultaneously finding key terms and key persons in a discussion. Based on KEE algorithm, we propose approaches for analyzing two important factors of discussions: discussion dynamics and emerging social networks. Examining our approaches using actual network-based discussion data generated by real focus groups in a marketing environment, we report interesting results that demonstrate how our approaches could effectively discover knowledge in the discussions. ...

The new site is here! Besides moving it to Wordpress, we have been working to engineer a site that will allow us to demonstrate some of the human-centered analytic technologies the DISCUS project has created. For each post, now you can analyze it with a single click using the links provided on the left-hand side. The first analytics tool released is based on KeyGraph techniques. Other DISCUS analysis techniques are already on the pipe and will reach the site soon. We have not stopped at reengineering the DISCUS site. We have also created an extension for Firefox that allow you to analyze the web page you are currently viewing. All DISCUS capabilities integrated in your browser. The DISCUS Firefox extension adds a DISCUS toolbar, some entries on the tools menu and in the right-click contextual menu. Hope you find it useful. Following the site, this toolbar will also grow and incorporate new features and human-centered analytic tools. ...

Recently I have been playing on implementing some extension for Firefox. When I started working on it, I was not aware on how far they have taken the use of metadata—I blogged before on metadata stores here. Actually, now you can query RDF data sources, which contain information ranging from your browsing history or bookmarks—to mention a few. But what makes it more exiting is that when you are writing extensions you can use java script to get that information stored by the browser using the RDF interface to do something useful. For instance, DISCUS is using it to provide on-the-fly analytics for the current page currently viewing. DISCUS will soon release a demo version of such a toolbar. If you want to read more about it, I would recommend the XULplanet.com. ...

by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006). Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF. Abstract Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor. ...