Why Won’t Aliens Talk to Us? Content and Community Dynamics in Online Citizen Science

A paper by Markus Luczak-Roesch, Ramine Tinati, Elena Simperl, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt and Robert Simpson describing research into 10 “Citizen Science” projects, in which members of the public are involved in scientific research. The study examined the factors that affect user engagement, the discussions between the citizen scientists and the transference of scientific expertise, with over 50 million activities of 250, 000 users being analysed.

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/363523/1/document.pdf

Wendy Hall named as a founding member of International Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

The new International Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (iCAIR) will provide advice on robotics and artificial intelligence.

The Council will also draw up a global action plan, create educational materials and run an awards scheme.

It is being set up by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and will be managed by the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Improving on Popularity as a Proxy for Generality When Building Tag Hierarchies from Folksonomies

Designing and building taxonomies (structures for the identification, classification and description of items) for the Web is time consuming and costly. “Folksonomies”, which are created by the website users themselves, have emerged, however, they can be ambiguous and can have an inconsistent structure. This research paper by Fahad Almoqhim, David E. Millard and Nigel Shadbolt, suggests an improved method (based on the Heymann-Benz algorithm).

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/372077/1/Improving%20on%20Popularity%20as%20a%20Proxy%20for%20Generality%20When%20Building%20Tag%20Hierarchies%20from%20Folksonomies.pdf

Motivations of Citizen Scientists – A Quantitative Investigation of Forum Participation

A research paper by Ramine Tinati, Markus Luczak-Roesch, Elena Simperl and Nigel Shadbolt, describing an analysis of the citizen science discussion forum Galaxy Zoo. Citizen
science is a term which describes the enabling of citizens to participate in research using their own personal equipment. The study investigates the characteristics of people who participate in citizen science and the factors that affect participation.

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/366339/1/web108.pdf