Tag Archives: Tracking

Location Tracking

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Chronicle of Higher Ed reported about a computer application called, Locaccino, that made use of GPS (such as the ones found in new cellphones) to track anyone’s whereabouts. In the clip below, the reporters tracked down an RA using the application made by Prof Norman Sadeh (Cylab, Carnegie Mellon).

I am not entirely sure if Dr. Sadeh in the clip is the original “inventor” of such technology, because my cell phone company offered me the same service (for a price, of course) last December. Since the cellphone was for a minor, they gently suggested that I could keep track of my “loved one’s” whereabouts if I want to.

Even though I can see the similarity in terms of research direction, I really don’t want to promote this “act” in real life. (Oh, well. It dawned on me that the School of Hogwarts already possessed the technology/magic of it.)

Survival analysis

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After considerable search and thinking session, (and of course, conversation with Mike Young always help), it become increasingly clear to me that survival analysis may be even more appropriate than data mining. In some circle, data mining may be construde as fishing for data, and is always suspect. A more direct data analysis method would of course be desirable, but which one?

I have already come across various time-stamping methods, and the most closely “sounding” one may be time-series analysis. However, after considerable search into the method, it turned out to be closer to financial analysis (as in moving averages) than what I am hoping for. No go…

Then, I came across some literature on time-to-event analysis… (as in this BMJ article). I think I have found the right thing. (Mike seemed to think so, too.)

Twitter Streamgraphs

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WebMonkey has a short write-up about Twitter’s StreamGraph. This is a new text-mining product by Twitter (after it acquired Summize. It visually maps the latest 200 tweets containing a particular given word/phrase. One can also mine a user’s Twitter contribution using the “@user” search function call.

StreamGraph for "Serious Games"

StreamGraph for"Serious Ganes"

“The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.”

drupal information

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I have been using Drupal for some time now. In Drupal 6, I now found two modules which is of interest to my research: the charting function, and the click heatmap. While I am not surprised at all by these addition, I am curious if “everyone” else is moving to click heatmap as a way for usability testing.

Well, time will tell as we will see how long these modules survive.

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Campaign Trail and Network Theory

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To better understand the process,a nd what it means about the campaign trail (trails?), I went on an information hunt. Well, I learned about The Presidential Election Process and the Campaign Trail.  (The trail is typically singular, because it really referred to a single trail (tour). I learned from my discussion with Seb Pense that most American understood the Campaign Trail as a route that a presidential candidate went on, to “tour” the country to rally for support. (Hence, it is similar to the Oregon Trail). The trail is a forward looking “tour” that the presidential candidate embarked upon, and is certainly in flux to my initial understanding. I have always thought of the trail as a “historical trace” of the presidential candidates’ speeches, and media events (words and actions). No doubt, this mis-understanding has much to do with my own trails research.

I also came across The Impact of Social Media on the Campaign Trail:

From fund raising to media coverage, the Internet continues to exert a growing and dramatic effect on politics, the media, and the presidential campaign. In addition to providing platforms that allows people to connect and develop deep, diverse relationships, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter aggregate a tremendous amount of information. Social media allows us to chart our social graph, engage in a vast and noisy dialog, and discover niche-specific content.

The mention of a social graph in the above TRANS’ article also caused me to look up on Social Graph API on Google. Apparently, there is a group of Foo (Friends of O’reilly) who met yearly at a Social Graph Foo Camp (Feb 2008), too. So if I am interested about Social Graph, I should go there to network. However, the Social GRAPH thing did not appear to have much to do with “graphing”… (so it is not immediately useful at this moment).

The search led me to finding Social Network, Network Theory, and Social Network Analysis Software on Wikipedia.

A Social Network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency. The resulting structures are often very complex.

In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

Based on the mentions of NODES on the Social Network, I find Network Theory and Analysis Software sound rather promising at this moment. Not to mention that Arnond and Joe have already mentioned network theory in one of our exploration sessions before.