Aggregating social media for enhancing conference experiences

Abstract

A scientific conference is a type of event where attendees have a tremendous activity on social media platforms. Participants tweet or post longer status messages, engage in discussions with comments, share slides and other media captured during the conference. This information can be used to generate informative reports of what is happening, where (which specific room) and when (which time slot), and who are the active participants. However, this information is locked in different data silos and platforms forcing the user to monitor many different channels at the same time to fully benefit from the event. In this paper, we propose a framework named Confomaton that aggregates in real-time social media shared by conference attendees and aligns it with event descriptions. Developed with Semantic Web technologies, this framework enables to relive past events and to follow live conferences. A demonstrator is available at http://eventmedia.eurecom.fr/confomaton. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.