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.

Online Activism - Middle East Protests

Given the circumstances of the scope of wAi project, I decided to move towards another field, not too far away from it, but perhaps more on the analytical side of already published works in the field of online activism. Thanks to Tim Lebo and Patrick West at the TWC Lab, I ended up with a deeply interesting piece of work written by past researcher at the lab, Devin Gaffney (link to original pdf.)

In the last decade it has been become a topic of discussion what online activism is, its impact, how we can analyze it, in what context it occurs...etc.

Some of the conclusions that I understand from the analysis made by Devin, which focused on the Iran election, challenged the manual "curation method" for leaning only towards qualitative analysis. In his paper, he uses quantitative analysis instead, which in the case of online activism is fairly new. His method shows very interesting data findings that directly address issues such as whether a "Twitter Revolution" is occurring in the Middle East since 2009 aiding physical revolutions to actually develop. Currently, if you search for "curation method" one sees that it's predominant in the biomedical/bioinformatics arena for most of it.

If you think of it, the fact remains that since the Moldova civil unrest (2009) a series of other protests followed: the Iranian elections (2009-2010), Tunisian revolution (2010-2011), Egyptian revolution (2011). Among all the factors which may explain why these revolts took place and spread across the Middle East, Twitter should be taken into account as, perhaps, the primary medium to coordinate the protests.

Not only these four revolts represent the impact, but also an incredible wave of Middle East demonstrations (see this interactive map for latest news). In addition, similar coverage is given by a wide variety of world newspapers or news channels such as the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC news, NPR, among some of them.

This is real! And therefore, even more interesting is whether thanks to Twitter, these revolts were seen as a victory, inciting so surrounding countries under repressed societies to rise up against their dictators to form a revolution.

Many questions may be answered by showing the evidence of Devin's quantitative analysis methodology, especially in the current context of the Arab World Uprisings.

On the other hand, ethics is another issue to spend time thinking about, and should be considered analyzing if further study wants to be done.

Your Facebook Profile Reflects Who You Are

It seems that Reppler has been putting up together a very nice mashup of the ideas I had in mind.... All those who were following my WAI project milestones, Reppler represents my project ideas....

A pity, but a relief to see that I wasn´t too crazy after all to have thought about it...

WAI Project-Reputation on Facebook

After rethinking where the scope of this project may lead... I decided to simplify my idea, or perhaps reduce it to a manageable extent, at least for now.

So, what this means? I will focus on what the reputation for a person on facebook is. In order to do that, I selected four main factors that could initially determine this reputation of a person ('s contacts).

These are:

1) Diversity of a user's friendlist (i.e. gender, country,),

2) Amount of user's friends,

3) Frequency of contact (i.e. wall posts, comments)

4) User's activity (i.e status updates)

I will formalize (and normalize!) this flowchart implementing it with MySQL Workbench. This is still a very simple, ugly initial draft version. But I just wanted to conceptualize and visualize what WAI should do...

* Also, important to note, I tried using FQL nomenclature so that we assure the possibility of gathering data exists...

In any case,being the only one working on it, my time as a human is also limited, and I would be very happy if someone is interested in joining efforts on the development side of this project (Please, don't hesitate to contact me!)

Basing this work on the following references: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/

Social Media Club @Rensselaer

I would like to announce the starting of a club in the RPI Community that will help to advance social media literacy, as well as encouraging ethical behavior online, learn from media professionals, and share the lessons they have learned, and also advocate for revolutionary new teach methods utilizing social media.

This is going to be a great network not only for students , but also for anyone interested in Social Media!

Start following SMCEDU@Rensselaer on Twitter and Facebook!!

Hackathon at RPI !

I went to the first Hackathon of my life around 8,30pm! This one was supposed to last until 8 am next day. But of course, being my first time to experience a hackathon on a Saturday night. I could not conceive the idea of programming all night long on a Saturday night. So I left around 1 am ...

Nevertheless, despite all my skepticism (frustration perhaps too!), WAI project did move a bit further than before.

Above all, I learnt more about the intricacies of Facebook Graph API, and discovered that my best bet was to use FQL to obtain the information of each user's friends. Thanks to Bharath Santosh, another finding was Facebook's test console to try these queries.

But there seemed to be a problem with this platform because most of the queries fields came out as "null" values. After a bit of research, I found out that other people were having the same problem, and the conclusion is that this issue was a known bug of the test console.

At least, I wrote down and saved all the queries before I started testing them.

In addition, I started digging a bit more in depth and realized that perhaps my intentions to retrieve all friends of a user might need an "access token" for each of those friends....

In any case, like any other optimistic person, I was expecting to get my whole back-end project done in just a few hours... And that the "hackathon strength" was going to allow me to achieve it!! :) But the reality was different, like always, and so this represents the status of where I left.

For those who don't believe that either I attended, or that there even was a hackathon at all, please visit this album:

https://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=1619095961258&id=1352160625&aid=2068218

Courtesy of Mike Pinkowish, facebook representative, RPI grad.

Who am I? wAi Project

This is the idea mentioned on my last post altogether in a draft, small presentation...

And now is time also, to go for the first time to a Hackathon being sponsored by Facebook at RPI.

So, let's see how that goes... ! Hopefully I come up with some results.