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{{Paper
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|title=Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-675/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-675
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==Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-675/paper2.pdf
Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
Gonzalo Parra1, Erik Duval1
1
Dept. Computerwetenschappen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A,
3001 Heverlee, Belgium
{gonzalo.parra, erik.duval}@cs.kuleuven.be
Abstract. As one of its main goals, the Research 2.0 concept focuses on the
improvement of the connection and collaboration between researchers. Within
this short paper we present More!, a mobile social discovery tool for
researchers. We describe the application itself and present some initial results
obtained by using the tool on small scenarios. Later we describe the current
challenges of the tool and the future developments. Finally, we state open
problems of the field and the application itself.
Keywords: research2.0, web2.0, human computer interaction, mobile devices.
1 Introduction
Research 2.0 is the result of applying Web2.0 tools and approaches on regular
research processes in order to improve practices and increase participation and
collaboration [1,2]. The connection of researchers in order to nurture future
collaboration is one of the key goals of the Research2.0 concept. To support this goal,
social networking approaches used on commercial Web2.0 platforms are being
applied for research purposes. Tools like Scopus, 2collab [3], ResearchGATE [4],
Mendeley [5], Academia.EDU [6] are some examples of supporting tools to achieve
this goal. Taking a closer look, academic communities are also spending some efforts
to create such tools and encouraging participation of researchers. As an example in
the Technology Enhanced Learning community, tools like TELeurope.eu [7] or
Academic Experts [8] are being developed and used.
Due to the availability and heavy use of many Web 2.0 and Research 2.0
platforms, the users have to deal with the problem of keeping and sharing with others
several electronic identities [9]. This digital identity problem is also observed in the
scenario where a researcher is attending a conference presentation and is interested in
finding more information about the topic and the speaker. We have addressed this
need and bootstrap collaboration between researchers through a mobile application,
called “More!” [10].
The structure of this short paper is as follows: we first present the implemented
application and its current outcomes and limits. In the following sections, the
proposed solutions to two different limitations are discussed. Later, we present the
open problems and opportunities for further work. Finally, we include some initial
conclusions of this work in progress.
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Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
2 The More! Application
More! is a mobile web application that groups relevant information about a speaker
in a way that can be easily exposed and integrated in the normal workflow of the
audience of an academic event. The application exposes the following information
from the speaker:
• researcher: full name, photo, e-mail and affiliation;
• work: current paper, slides, and publications list;
• social tools handles from: Twitter, SlideShare, blog, Delicious, LinkedIn, and
Facebook.
In this way, the attendee can access some regular information about the speaker; as
well as the paper and slides of the current presentation; and his previous publications.
Moreover, he can ‘identify’ and ‘follow’ the speaker on some of the more mainstream
Web 2.0 social tools, to get access to previous, current and future work. The
workflow of the application in a conference scenario is as follows:
1. The speaker exposes a QR code [11] (resolvable to an URL link) to the audience.
2. Attendants capture and decode the QR code by using any code reader application
available on their smart phones. After decoding, they are redirected to the “More!”
web application.
3. “More!” presents the data on the client tool.
After evaluating the usability and the functionality of the tool in a real life
scenario, we noticed two big limitations in this workflow [10]. The first limitation is
related to the metadata needed to feed the tool. The More! application requires
research and social tools metadata, and relies heavily on the availability of such data.
The problem encountered was related on how to obtain this metadata.
The second problem encountered is related to: how the QR code is exposed to the
audience, the extra work required by the speaker to make the codes visible to the
audience, and the poor image quality of photos for the QR decoding applications on
mobile devices.
Finally, the backend and the frontend of the More! application required different
approaches to efficiently solve the original problem for which the application was
made.
3 Improving the Back-end: Research.fm
As presented in the previous section, we identified the need to have a common
entry point and a unified metadata sharing approach to feed the application. Currently,
More! is using a local database where this data is stored, but this approach is neither
scalable nor aligned with the Research2.0 concept of open data. For this reason an
initial approach is being developed to expose and share research metadata: the
research.fm API.
The research.fm is a RESTful API that will give access to social networks and
publications data of scientific authors in a standardized way. This service exposes
common data requirements for applications by following the Cool URI approach in
order to provide readable, logic and persistent endpoints. On the other hand, the
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Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
metadata will be exposed in a standardized results format, in order to be interoperable.
Table 1 shows some URIs example calls to retrieve author, publication and social
tools metadata.
Table 1. URI examples to retrieve research metadata.
Social Tool //social_tools
/
Author //publications
//lastpublication
The URIs provide us a logic and readable URL to obtain different kind of metadata
elements from a researcher, such as: list of publications, current publication, and
social tools handles. Currently, there are some discussions about how to correctly
identify the authors among different platforms and how to link his digital identities.
On the other hand, we are also discussing which is the way to represent the metadata
and the output format for the API, in order to provide the desired interoperability. For
this purpose, we are revising some publications and online community ontologies
such as: SWRC [13] and SIOC [14]; together with social network approaches to share
data as: OpenSocial [12] and FOAF [15].
Fig. 1. Architecture where Research.fm is used.
Figure 1 presents the intended architecture to support the desired data sharing
approach. Different publication sources, like publications archives and social media
repositories will be included in a central repository where the metadata will be
exposed through the research.fm API to different Research 2.0 tools like More! and
others.
4 Improving the Front-end: Image Recognition rather than QR-
Codes
The QR codes and its resolution to the More! application is crucial in order to
engage the audience to use the application. As explained previously, the QR codes
20
Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
became a small barrier between the researchers and the solution offered by our
application. Nowadays, with the large amount of open data authored and shared by
users over the Internet, new possibilities are available in order to apply different
approaches for the required initial fingerprint of the speaker. To be more precise, the
voluntarily shared photos and tags of users in social networks, such as Facebook; can
be used to apply face recognition algorithms to identify a person [16].
In order to provide the face recognition capabilities to the More! application, an
external facial recognition system will be tested. Face.com provides a face recognition
service that allows the analysis of facial information from photos, and identify faces
from a known set of users [17]. The site provides a REST API for detection,
recognition and tagging of faces in photos. The system’s algorithm can be connected
to a Facebook account in order to obtain the training set of photos from predefined
users.
Currently we are experimenting with the different requirements to make this a
successful approach. We need to find out in average how many images an author
makes available in Facebook, or how many images are necessary to be able to train
the face recognition algorithm. Also, we need to find the maximum distance where a
smart phone camera can provide a good quality picture that can be used to detect
faces. Figure 2 presents initial results of applying the face recognition algorithm to a
photo captured by a mobile device.
Fig. 2. Architecture where Research.fm is used.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
The More! web application is a working prototype that is currently on its second
development cycle, where the improvements described on the previous sections are
being implemented and tested. On the other hand, we need to understand how tools
like More! can increase the awareness about related work, or even collaboration
between researchers. Does it help the research community to perform in a more
effective and efficient way? To answer these questions, we are currently planning a
second evaluation in practice of More! to find answers from measurable
characteristics.
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Filling the Gaps to Know More! About a Researcher
Currently, there is still some work needed from the Research 2.0 community
regarding automatic gathering of information from the scientific publications and
researchers Web 2.0 footprints and identities. Regarding scientific publications
approaches like the Stellar Scientific Portal [18], DBLP [19], Mendeley are important
to the scientific community in order to obtain structured and clean publication
metadata. On the other hand, there are some approaches to identify and make
searchable users over the Internet, like: 123people [22], Yasni [23], zoominfo.com
[24], and ArnetMiner [25]. Even though there are some efforts to solve these
problems, there is still much room for improvement and a long way for a sustainable
solution
Acknowledgements. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the STELLAR
Network of Excellence on Technology-Enhanced Learning
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