Semester's Final Remarks

As the end of the semester approaches, I would like to summarize what I've learnt over the past semester. The main focus of my research at the Tetherless World Constellation was about an initiative that I started to explore with the intention explore how/why/what/where presenting information about oneself in a social context. My ideas are put together in this ppt.

The process of the Who am I (wAi) project, as I called it, began from an idea, which developed into researching the intricacies of building an application of this magnitude, to attending my first hackathon (sponsored by Facebook). This was the perfect opportunity to explore in depth Facebook's platform and its Graph API, and how the objects could be accessed for wAi. In addition, I wrote several queries using FQL , a SQL-style interface to query the data exposed by the Graph API. Unfortunately, that night due to some technical problems on Facebook's platform I could not check whether they worked in-situ. In brief, I became more knowledgeable about the table names, and object names, and how they're normally implemented in most systems.

In any case, this served me to simplify the scope of the project, at least in terms of my self-understanding. And helped me to define more exactly, and clear what and where I could go with wAi. So, I created a set of flowcharts that helped me visualize these ideas. Furthermore, this lead me to begin creating a Database model/diagram. Looking at the big picture within TWC Lab, all my intention was to represent this project in the best manner, so that in the long run when I understood how semantic technologies are applied, I could easily convert it....

Unfortunately, this great idea started to become a bit ambitious to be accomplished without

devoting much more time than the one I had in my hands. Also, given the remaining time frame, the scenario began to look even more daunting, since I really was the only one on board for my new project...

But in any case, thanks to Patrick, Tim, and John I could redirect my lab research at TWC into a somewhat similar field: online activism. Had I have more time, I now know what I would truly like to research on. And I think this is the most important lesson I get from TWC, where my interests lie if I ever want to research on a more full-time basis. Therefore, next time someone in the lab asks me whether I'm more of a synthetic person, or analytical; I'm clearly into the analytical aspect.

As a final note, I would like to also mention the discovery of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at RPI, which I discovered during the Social Media Forum. Their research closely relates to social media analysis.