More! A Social Discovery Tool for Researchers


Gonzalo Parra, Erik Duval
Dept. Computer Science
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium
{gonzalo.parra, erik.duval}@cs.kuleuven.be



Abstract: Science 2.0 is the result of Web 2.0 tools and trends influencing the research area. In
this paper, we focus on a scenario where a researcher is interested in the topic and speaker at a
conference: finding more information about them is far from instantaneous. Thus, we identified a
need to not only find speaker and paper information during the presentation, but also to subscribe
to feeds that keep the attendee informed about ongoing work from the speaker. This work presents
the development of a mobile application that groups all the relevant information of a speaker in a
way that can be easily exposed and integrated in the normal workflow of the audience. The result
is a frictionless blending of the face-to-face event that a conference or workshop presentation
represents with the rich interaction and alerting services that a web2.0 environment provides.


Introduction

One of the initial goals of early Internet development was to enable information sharing between researchers. This
original aim is now again the focus with much activity around it: “Science 2.0” is the result of “Web 2.0” tools and
trends influencing how we carry out research (Shneiderman 2008; Codina 2009; O’Reilly, T. 2005). The effects are
visible on how researchers experiment, get feedback on their work, and interact with their community (Waldrop
2008; Reinhardt et al. 2009). Researchers are starting to embrace different types of social tools, in order to pose
questions, provide answers, share knowledge, initiate debates, etc. The hope is that the communication and
collaboration possibilities offered by these tools can accelerate and improve the way science is being done.
There are several types of social tools actively used by researchers. These can be categorized as follows (Cabezas-
Clavijo et al. 2008): scientific blogs, magazines 2.0, reference managers, social taggers, mashups, social networks
and sharing. In this paper, we focus on the scenario where a researcher is attending a conference presentation and is
interested in the topic and the speaker: finding more information about them is currently done in an ad hoc way;
where the researcher either talks to the speaker or uses a search engine to find information about him and his paper,
his home page, blog, publications list, etc. A big drawback is that this process is far from instantaneous: the attendee
may search during the conference session, or write down that he wants to follow up later on, or make a mental note
that he should talk to the presenter and inform his team afterwards. Oftentimes, this follow-up doesn’t happen. And
even if it does, it may no longer be as useful as the attendee may no longer be at the conference and it may be
difficult to find the relevant information to begin with.
Thus, we identified a need to easily find speaker information during the presentation, and to subscribe to feeds from
social tools that keep the attendee informed about ongoing work from the speaker. We have addressed this need
through a mobile application, called “More!”. The structure of this paper is as follows: we first present related work
that has been done in this area. In the following section, the design and implementation of our tool is covered. An
evaluation of the usability and functionality of the tool is presented and its results are analyzed. Finally, we include
conclusions and opportunities for further work.


Related Work

Communication and collaboration between researchers is a key activity in the way we do science. Before researchers
can start collaborating, an initial process of discovery must take place. There are several ways on which this
discovery process can take place: reading a paper or assisting to a conference and later use a search engine to find
more information about his author, or research colleagues can introduce other researchers. Tools like (Noovo 2009;
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Mendeley 2009; ResearchGATE 2009; Academia.edu 2009) help a researcher to find people with similar research
interests.
On the other hand, as researchers also become more active on web2.0 tools, there are several approaches to
consolidate or aggregate the outcome from different social tools. Applications like (FriendFeed 2009) and
(Socialthing! 2009) create one checkpoint for updates or trends by aggregating all the activities of colleagues or
friends on a variety of web2.0 platforms. In addition to aggregation, it is possible to power social recommendation
from web2.0 services (Drachsler et al. 2009).
Some science2.0 tools focus more on the sharing of data sets (Infochimps 2009 ; Myexperiment 2009),
bibliographical data (Mendeley 2009 ; AcaWiki 2009 ; BibSonomy 2009 ; Citeulike 2009) or data mashups and
visualizations (AuthorMapper 2009 ; Glasser et al. 2009).
Other tools focus on enhancing the experience of participating in scientific gatherings, assisting people with
planning the sessions they will attend (PAWS 2009), recording the sessions and making them accessible for later or
remote viewing (VideoLectures.net 2009). And some mobile applications tools that can be used at a conference
workshop or seminar (Chen 2009 ; Arbogast 2009).
An outstanding example of a discovery process from a different domain is the Shazam music identification service.
This mobile application allows identifying a song by just capturing a small sample of it (music fingerprint). If the
identification process is successful, the application provides information about the song (artist, title, album) and
relevant links to other applications like YouTube and iTunes. Inspired by this application, we have developed
“More!” in order to provide a new approach to facilitate discovery and connection among researchers participating
in an event.


The More! Application

We have developed an application that group relevant information on a speaker in a way that can be easily exposed
and integrated in the normal workflow of the audience. In this context, it is important that the application is mobile,
as the intent is that researchers would use it while attending a conference. The design and implementation of the
application takes into account software quality attributes (Bass et al. 2003), like extensibility, configurability and
portability.
The application is called “More!”, as it provides more information about the speaker. In order to provide the desired
portability, which means the ability to run on multiple hardware and software configurations; we decided to create
“More!” as a web application. Although it is optimized for viewing on a mobile device, the application can also be
used from a regular computer with a web browser.
It is important to consider that the application relies on referring Web2.0 tools, and this kind of tools will keep
appearing. That is the reason why the application design considers the extensibility feature for future growth. The
social tools will be presented in a list that can increase or be adapted over time, without changing the user interface.
The configurability relates to both extensibility and reusability, as it refers to modifications or configuration changes
of components after the deployment. The “More!” application was designed to be a dynamic web application. The
data of the speaker and its referred social tools are not a part of the main code of the application and will be linked to
an external storage technology (e.g. a database).
Shazam records a fragment of a song in order to create a music fingerprint that identifies a song. The equivalent
approach in the “More!” application is Quick Response (QR) codes to represent the speaker fingerprint (ISO/IEC
2006). These codes provide a high capacity for encoding data and readability from any direction in 360o (omni-
directional). The QR code encodes a URL that resolves to the speaker page on the More! web application. A full
interaction diagram is presented in (Fig. 1).
Finally, we expose the following information for each speaker:
• speaker: full name, photo, e-mail, affiliation and publication list;
• current presentation: slides and paper;
• social tools: Twitter, SlideShare, blog, Delicious and Facebook.
This selection was done considering the provision of the regular information that a researcher expects from a
speaker, but also including data about his current work and social tools referring and to his previous, current and
future work. The selected social tools include technologies that cover different ways to collaborate and share among
researchers. While Twitter and blog exposes the speaker’s thoughts on different levels, SlideShare presents a
collection of his previous presentations. Delicious allows the sharing web site interests and Facebook provides a
different channel of communication between researchers.
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