quarta-feira, 7 de julho de 2010

Conversa LSD com Elizeu: "Assessing the Value of Contributions in Tagging Systems"

Nesta sexta-feira, às 14 horas, teremos Conversa LSD com o palestrante Elizeu Santos-Neto. O tema da palestra é "Assessing the Value of Contributions in Tagging Systems". Elizeu é candidato ao título de PhD no NetSysLab (University of British Columbia). Sua área de pesquisa se concentra na caracterização e projeto de sistemas em redes entre-pares (peer-to-peer) e em comunidades de anotação colaborativa (collaborative tagging communities). Outras informações sobre Elizeu podem ser encontradas no seu site pessoal. Segue abaixo o resumo da palestra.

Assessing the Value of Contributions in Tagging Systems
by Elizeu Santos-Neto

Assessing the value of individual user contributions in peer-production systems is paramount to the design of mechanisms that support collaboration and improve users’ experience. For instance, to incentivize contributions, file sharing systems based on the BitTorrent protocol equate value with volume of contributed content and use a prioritization mechanism to reward users who contribute more. This approach and similar techniques used in resource sharing systems rely on the fact that the physical resources shared among users are easily quantifiable.

In contrast, information-sharing systems, like social tagging systems, lack the notion of a physical resource unit (e.g., content size, bandwidth) that facilitates the task of evaluating user contributions. For this reason, the issue of estimating the value of user contributions in information sharing systems remains largely unexplored. In this talk I introduce this problem, present a framework to guide the design of algorithms that estimate the value of user contributions in tagging systems, discuss three complementary success criteria for potential solutions, and outlines the methodological evaluation challenges.