National Science Foundation Awards $250K to SC&I's Mor Naaman
When a person goes online to look for footage from a concert, press conference, or even a wedding or family reunion, they find a fragmented experience – a minute-long video here, five minutes there.
Researchers at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information (SC&I) and Columbia University are developing technology to seam together that content so that users might one day find a more relevant, engaging experience when viewing events on the Web.
The National Science Foundation has awarded nearly $250,000 to Mor Naaman, assistant professor of library and information science, with Nicholas Diakopoulos, a postdoctoral fellow at SC&I, and their fellow researchers, to make this happen. The project, titled “Detection and Presentation of Community and Global Event Content from Social Media Sources,” will lead to technology that will assist researchers, produce richer archival materials, and perhaps be adopted in viable commercially products as well, Naaman said.
“There is a lot of social media content captured and posted around every-day events large and small, from a wedding to a baby shower to a Bob Dylan concert to a presidential inauguration,” Naaman said. “Content from an event can be posted on Facebook walls, in Twitter messages, on YouTube – it’s not easy to find and it’s definitely hard to organize, and therefore difficult to consume and enjoy.”
Naaman and Diakopoulos are collaborating with Columbia computer science researchers Luis Gravano and Hila Becker. The Columbia researchers have received an additional $250,000 from the NSF.
The three-year project will focus on finding new ways to present event and experience content culled from the Web. So far, the research team at SC&I has built two systems – Vox Civitas, which monitors Twitter and collects all the “tweets” related to a single event, and The Multiplayer, which uses audio signals to synchronize videos from YouTube and present a seamless experience from numerous fragments.
“The idea is to eventually bring these content items all together,” Naaman said. The NSF grant will help fund graduate and undergraduate students over the period of the project. “We are looking for fantastic students to take the lead – students with strong technical backgrounds and a passion for understanding the social aspects of new technology.”
Naaman has already received $25,000 from Nokia to study the social behaviors and practices that people display when seeking and consuming Web content. “This understanding will enable us to do better things with the technology,” he said.
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http://twitter.com/rutgerscomminfo Ashanti M. Martin
Director of Public Communications
School of Communication and Information
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
732-932-7500, ext. 8012
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