AuthorRank

The influence of Web 2.0 technologies has become apparently tremendous during recent years, especially in the democratization of information publishing.  Along with various blogging and social networking platforms, social Web applications like diggs or sphere have helped bringing  information to most relevant communities at a much faster and more extensive level one can ever image.  Though traditional media has gained much benefit from these channels, yet the reliability and impacts of such information channels and have not yet been studied systematically. 

The goal of this Master project is to develop a system to: (1) mine the most relevant information sources from various blogging platforms, social networks, and related Web applications to get profile information of online authors, from which to (2): rank online authors according to their popularity and contributions to various online communities via several criteria, e.g., their influential posts and comments resulting in reliable news sites, page views of their personal home pages or blogs, etc.

(Note: In a simple sense, this can be seen as a more generalized version of the top most cited authors in CiteSeer.Continuity database)

Goals

• Ranking people’s popularity in online environments

Benefits 

• Becoming familiar with cutting-edge research and development challenges in social networks and related emerging topics.
• Practical experience in developing a real world Web applications.
• Working in an interactive research environment.

Prerequisites 

• Good Web programming skill (Java/JavaScript/PHP/Ruby-on-Rails).
• Good problem-solving skills
• Hard working and enthusiastic in learning new technologies and libraries

Further Information

• This project is co-supervised by Prof. Karl Aberer