Is a war for easily-sharing-your-stuff-with-your-friends coming?

Lately, I have been running into more and more Slashdot entries about newly released products to support sharing in one form or another. Just two of the latest one that surfaced: I Like (music-based) and Tubes (share anything from any device).

Jan 16, 2007 · 1 min · 41 words · Xavier Llorà

The new DISCUS site is up

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. ...

Nov 29, 2006 · 1 min · 157 words · Xavier Llorà

Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg (in press, 2007). To apper in the Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference.Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006023. Link to the PDF. Abstract Blogging has become a new and disruptive communication medium. Blogs have changed the way people and organizations express, interact, and—quite unforeseen—exercise influence. The digital nature of the blog media provides access to an always-expanding corpus of information. It would take more than a lifetime to read all the available blogs necessary to answer questions such as what were the more relevant plots suggested or what key concepts were managed by bloggers in their ideas. However, human-centered analysis and visualization techniques may help users navigate such enormous corpus. This paper presents human-centered analysis and visualization techniques for supporting innovation and creativity can help to identify relevant post portions and to visualize concept relations in the blogosphere. ...

Nov 29, 2006 · 1 min · 150 words · Xavier Llorà

Innovation and creativity support via chance discovery, genetic algorithms, and data mining

by Xavier Llorà and David E. Goldberg, Yukio Ohsawa, Naohiro Matsumura, Yuichi Washida, Hiroshi Tamura, Masataka Yoshikawa, Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil, Duane Searshmith, Kei Ohnishi, and Chen-Ju Chao (2006). New Mathematics and Natural Computation, World Scientific, pp. 2(1):85–100. Link to the Journal publication. Abstract Creativity protocols and methodologies tend to be time consuming if applied manually. This paper presents how information technologies can support innovation and creativity for collaborative scenario creation and discussion. The fusion of change discovery, genetics algorithms, and computer-supported collaborative tools provide computational models of innovation and creativity. The proposed technology allows groups of participants in a creative processes to have pervasive access to the analysis of the current scenario in real time. This paper introduces such innovation technologies gathered in the DISCUS project, and summarizes initial successful usages of DISCUS on marketing research workshops. ...

Mar 1, 2006 · 1 min · 138 words · Xavier Llorà