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Athens.


Up next at WebSci '09 is Patricia Victor, who begins by noting the growth in recommendation systems, including, for example, the advanced functionality on Amazon and in other e-commerce applications. Some 60% of Netflix users, for example, base their viewing on recommendations, and Netflix has offered a US$10m prize for an algorithm that improves its recommendation system by 10%.

There are two classes of recommendation systems: systems which are content-based and systems which are collaborative filtering-based. The latter focusses on similarities in the rating behaviour of users, and trust-based systems are often based on such algorithms. Epinions offers such a social trust network, and also allows users to evaluate other users by placing them in their network of trust, thereby conferring particular importance on these users' trust ratings. This also alleviates the 'cold start' problem with new users; it provides more reliable and accurate recommendations and leads to a kind of trust propagation through the network.

Athens.


For the first round of paper sessions here at WebSci '09, I've chosen a session on trust and distrust. Having just watched people juggle USB drives for the best part of 15 minutes, we finally start with a presentation by Dave Karpf. His interest is in the Web's impact on collective action for Internet-mediated organisations - and he suggests that the emergent mobile Web wll be of particular importance in this context.

Mobile Web-enabled devices enable new forms of collective action; rating and reputation systems attach track record data to individual participants - when the two meet, this has potentially radical implications for what uses become possible. Reputation in this context refers to complex, context-dependent community assessments; it plays a crucial role in solving collective action problems, and introduces what Axelrod has called a 'Shadow of the Future': they lead people to do well for others as they make visible the contributions of each participant (and introduce possible future repercussions for those who fail to put in). This is visible for example in communities like eBay or Slashdot, which both promote positive and sanction negative contributions through their reputation systems. Even Google's PageRank can be understood as a reputation system: PageRank measures, indirectly, reputation.

Athens.


The first full day here at WebSci '09 begins with a keynote by NIgel Shadbolt, founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). As we're in Athens, he begins by taking the historical approach: he notes that another way to describe Web science is as 'philosophical engineering', which links back ultimately to the founding fathers of philosophy, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Their pure philosophical speculation, indeed, formed the basis not only for modern philosophy, but also for modern science.

Athens.

The second keynote this evening is by Joseph Sifakis, who begins by taking us through a quick tour of the history of informatics - starting with Turing and Gödel in 1936 and moving through information systems, graphic interfaces, the emergence of the Web and the information society, and leading today to the increasing embedding of computing systems into all kinds of technologies. In the future, we'll see further developments in computing power and storage capacities, and this means that computing systems will be literally everywhere. In developed countries, in fact, a person already uses some 250 different processors per day - processors in cars, computing equipment, home entertainment, telecommunication systems, and so on.

Athens.

Tonight I'm at the opening session for WebSci '09, and we're looking forward to a keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the twentieth anniversary of his invention of the World Wide Web. The conference itself is going to be opened in the presence of none other than the president of Greece, though, so the place is swarming with Greek police (unsurprisingly, given the continuing low-level unrest in the country). In fact, there's a couple of secret service agents coming through right now, earpiece and all. His Excellency himself is running fashionably late.

Time to catch up with a few publications - my recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I'm delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We're looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we're including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they'll be affected by the global financial crisis...).