Session details: Doctoral Consortium Abstracts

Abstract

The Hypertext 2015 Doctorial Consortium session is held the first day of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. It offers Ph.D. students an opportunity to present their ongoing research towards obtaining a Ph.D. degree in the disciplines related to the conference, mostly in Computer and Information Sciences but not limited to them. The themes of the submissions are strongly connected to the research tracks of this year's conference: Digital Connectivity, Data Connectivity and Digital Humanities. The Digital Connectivity track targets developing insights into the mechanisms of information generation and dissemination, characterization of evolutionary processes on online social networks, and studies of models and systems that support these processes. The second track, Data Connectivity, deals with the methods, techniques and technologies that can be used to make data available on the Web, with a special focus on how heterogeneous data sources can be connected to each other. Finally, the track of Digital Humanities seeks to attract work from an interdisciplinary perspective, on the intersection between computer science on one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. During the DC session, students receive constructive feedback from their peers and from a panel of mentors to support them in envisioning added-value contributions to the state-of-the-art research in Hypertext and Social Media. The consortium session is open to all doctorial students by application. Each submission was reviewed by three senior researchers in the topics the students made their submissions. The DC session is aimed in particular at students who have defined a dissertation topic but are still more than one year from graduating at the time of application in order to obtain benefits from feedback. This year, the committee has accepted three contributions to be presented during the Doctorial Consortium session: Automated Methods for Identity Resolution in Heterogeneous Social Platforms by Paridhi Jahin. In this work, connected to the digital and data connectivity tracks of the conference, the author proposes novel methods to search and link user identities scattered across heterogeneous social networks. The methods consider carefully users' privacy, so they are designed to access only public and historic data. The evaluation is proposed on large datasets over multiple platforms to prove their significance in identity resolution of an online user. Language Innovation and Change in On-line Social Networks by Daniel Kershaw. As a fundamental aspect for human communication, this research focuses on forecasting online language change through the use of predictive and descriptive methodologies. This work is framed within structuration theory which helps the researcher in structuring the analysis of the dynamics of language (re)production - i.e. by the agent (user), the social structure and their interplay. A Framework to Provide Customized Reuse of Open Corpus Content for Adaptive Systems by Mostafa Bayomi. This work deals with issues of reusability of contents on adaptive systems. Adaptive systems tailor content specific to user's needs, but they face two big problems: (a) they use a closed corpus content that has been prepared for them a priori, and (b) the content is tightly coupled with other parts of the system, which hinders its reusability. This work presents a proposal that leverages the semantic web by extending an existing content provision system, Slice-pedia.