Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks - Call for Book Chapters

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS

Book Title: Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

A book edited by Jie Wu, and Yunsheng Wang

Temple University, USA 

To be published by CRC Press

Chapter Proposal Submission
Deadline: 15 February 2013
Full Chapter Submission
Deadline: 1 June 2013

Introduction:
Recent rapid advances in mobile cellular networks and telecommunications
have introduced Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks as an interesting topic
to the research community, one that has started to receive much attention
from practitioners, scholars, and the general public. An opportunistic
mobile social network can be described as a platform that provides services
via hand-held and wireless devices, mainly for the purpose of fostering and
maintaining social interactions and connections. Therefore, an opportunistic
mobile social network can be considered a form of social network where
services are provided with mobility as an added value. Thanks to mobility,
many emergent applications related to social networking are now available
for individuals, business enterprises, and governments.

Objective:
The main goal of this book is to collect the recent development on
theoretical and algorithmic aspects of the opportunistic mobile social
networks. This book will be of particular value to academics, researchers,
practitioners, government officials, business organizations (e.g.,
executives, marketing professionals, resource managers, etc.), and even
customers -- working, participating, or those interested in fields related
to social networks. The content of the book will be especially useful for
students in areas like social networks, informatics, wireless networks, data
mining, and administrative sciences and management, but also applies to
students of education, economy, or law, who would benefit from the
information, cases, and examples therein.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
* Part I: Social Networks and Complex Networks
* Part II: Opportunistic Networks
* Part III: Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks
* Part IV: Applications

Submission Procedure:
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on February 15, 2013, a
2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his
or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by
March 1, 2013 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter
guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by June 1, 2013. All
submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.
Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Publisher:
This book is scheduled to be published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
The Work will be published initially under the imprint of Taylor & Francis,
a CRC Press book, or such other imprint as the Publisher deems suitable for
the Work. For additional information regarding the publisher, please
visit?www.crcpress.com. This book is anticipated to be released in 2014.

Important Dates:
Proposal Submission Deadline: 15 February 2013 (about 2-3 pages ¨C 1000
words) Notification of Acceptance: 1 March 2013 Full Chapter Submission: 1
June 2013 Review Results Returned: 1 August 2013 Final Chapter Submission:15
September 2013

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word/PDF
document) or by email to:
Dr. Jie Wu
Temple University, USA
jiewu@temple.edu
Yunsheng Wang
Temple University, USA
yunsheng.wang@temple.edu

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Teacher networks - Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession

Riina has uploaded the final publication of our TELLNET project to slideshare. We will have the final event of the project in Brussels soon. Our role in the network was to develop a social network analysis methodology for the eTwinning network. We came out with a learning analytics method for big data in real-world data sets. We learned a lot about clearing data sets for analysis. We learned a lot about keeping them anonymous and respecting the privacy of teachers and schools. We learned a lot about data management, efficient computation of time series and visualization challenges. Altogether, it was a great learning experience for us, too. We published nine papers to share our experiences. Some older entries are listed below:

• Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres
• Social Learning Analytics to study Teachers' Large-scale Professional Networks (eTwinning)
• Learning Analytics - Social Network Analysis for Learning Communities
• Learning Analytics in a Teachers' Social Network - The Paper

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New Book on the Frontiers of Multimedia Information Retrieval

This is the new book of my colleague Horst Eidenberger. I collaborated with him in several workshops of our multimedia metadata group. It is on the frontiers of machine intelligence for multimedia understanding.


Frontiers of Media Understanding: The Common Methods of Audio Retrieval, Biosignal Processing, Content-Based Image Retrieval, Face Recognition, Music Classification, Speech Recognition, Text Retrieval and Video Surveillance


Author
Horst Eidenberger
Vienna University of Technology
http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/hme/


Abstract

Media understanding is the science/art of identifying semantic structures in digital media objects such as audio, biosignals, images, text and videos. This volume ends the work started in "Fundamental Media Understanding" and continued in "Professional Media Understanding" (atpress, 2011/12). It investigates the scientific frontiers of multimedia information retrieval. Soft frontier areas such as the influence of media theory and psychophysical research are considered as well as core topics such as semantic template matching, Kalman filtering, the limits of learning, dynamic aspects of categorization, human-like similarity perception and developing a neural view on the machine learning problem. In contrast to related publications, this book does not focus on one type of media but considers all the above-named as well as a few others. The author endeavors to identify similarities between the methods employed in audio retrieval, image understanding, text summarization and many other research domains. It turns out that a number of significant parallels do exist. Structuring the methods along common criteria and discussing their similarities and differences breaks the ground for a new research discipline: true computational understanding of multimedia content.

Link
http://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Media-Understanding-Horst-Eidenberger/dp/3848210924/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350041726&sr=8-1&keywords=horst+eidenberger


Table of Contents

1 Reflection of Professional Methods
1.1 Conclusions from Advanced Methods
1.2 Building Blocks of Categorization
1.3 Which Methods When?
1.4 Overview Over Scientific Frontiers

2 Media Philosophies
2.1 The Image in Philosophy
2.2 Media Theories
2.3 Semiotics
2.4 Media and Information

3 Perception and Psychophysics
3.1 Human Perception and Cognition
3.2 Perceptual and Cognitive Errors
3.3 Psychophysical Theory
3.4 Psychoacoustics and Psychophysics of Vision

4 Description by Templates
4.1 Convolution Everywhere
4.2 Templates for One-Dimensional Media
4.3 Static Visual Templates
4.4 Dynamic Template Adaptation Models

5 Semantic Descriptions and Applications
5.1 The Semantic Scale
5.2 Semantic Feature Transformations
5.3 Semantics in Audio, Biosignals and Text
5.4 Visual Semantic Applications

6 Convergent Filtering
6.1 Models of Convergence
6.2 Vector Quantization
6.3 The Kalman Filter
6.4 Associative Memories

7 Frontiers of Learning Machines
7.1 Analysis of Categorization Methods
7.2 Limits of Learning
7.3 Dynamical Systems Theory
7.4 Oscillating Classifiers

8 Human-Like Similarity Perception
8.1 Similarity as Measurement
8.2 Similarity as Counting
8.3 Dual Process Models
8.4 Similarity as Alignment and Transformation

9 Neural Media Understanding
9.1 Neural Foundations
9.2 Artificial Neural Networks
9.3 Neural Description and Filtering
9.4 Neural Networks for Categorization

10 Finale and Future
10.1 Summary
10.2 Essential Findings
10.3 Critical Review
10.4 Outlook: To Do List

Appendix A Mathematical Notation
Appendix B Similarity Models


Description of Chapters

Chapter 1 lists the major findings of the second part, names major potentials of the professional methods, develops a set of categorization building blocks, sketches best combinations of media understanding methods and provides an overview over the third part.

Chapter 2 discusses the relationship of perception and reality, theories of media content and media usage, the semiotic analysis of arbitrary symbol systems and potentials for merging of media theory, semiotics and information theory for the benefit of better media understanding.

Chapter 3 lists fundamental aspects of human perception, shows where perceptual and cognitive insufficiencies of the human brain lie, gives an introduction into the psychophysical model and discusses psychophysical aspects of hearing and vision.

Chapter 4 revisits the fundamental convolution problem, links it to human similarity measurement, lists templates for audio, biosignals and stock data, and introduces static and dynamic models for visual media representation.

Chapter 5 introduces the semantic scale, describes the usage of low-level descriptions for semantic enhancement and semantic applications in the audio and the visual domain.

Chapter 6 develops a model of convergence for iterative filtering processes, discusses learning vector quantization, the Kalman filter for scalar quantization and quantization by associative memories such as the Hopfield network and the Boltzmann machine.

Chapter 7 reviews communalities of categorization methods, presents a system of learning bounds, introduces fundamental methods of dynamical systems and applies these methods on dynamic classifiers.

Chapter 8 explains distance-based similarity, the improvements reached through the usage of predicate-based models, their integration in dual process models and the new perspectives gained from structural alignment and transformational similarity.

Chapter 9 analyzes the building blocks of human cognition, explains how these are imitated in artificial neural networks and discusses practical networks for description, filtering and categorization, including the spike response mode, radial basis function networks and cascade correlation.

Chapter 10 summarizes the findings of the book, emphasizes the most important points, estimates the practical applicability of some important ideas and sketches a vision of future media understanding research.

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New Springer Book (in German) - Kreatives Prozessdesign by Thomas Hermann

This is the new Springer book "Kreatives Prozessdesign" by my colleague Thomas Hermann from the Ruhr-Universtität Bochum in Germany.

Like most other human activities process design gets better if some creativity is involved. As the Germans are undoubted the master of process engineering sometimes a little bit of creativity can add to the innovative power of processes. This book is giving a lot of examples and principle ideas how to connect process modeling and creativity techniques.

 

Kreatives Prozessdesign 

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Edited Volume on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (Springer)

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning: Research Trends & Applications
an Edited Volume to be published by Springer in 2013
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/publications/recsystel/springer/


Important Dates:
--------------------
Manuscript submission: 1 November 2012
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2012
Final manuscript due: 20 December 2012
Tentative publication date: ~Spring 2013


Introduction
--------------

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test
socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance
learning practices of both individuals and organisations.
It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of
technology research & development aiming to support of teaching and
learning activities, and considers meta-cognitive and reflective skills
such as self-management, self-motivation, and effective informal and
self-regulated learning. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity
in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted
increased interest during the past years as it addresses the
information overload problem in TEL scenarios with a low cost approach.

Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting
new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching.
There are plenty of resources available on the Web, both in terms of
digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners,
experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and
learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate
systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance
in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a
potentially overwhelming variety of choices.


Aim & Scope
-------------
Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning: Research Trends & Applications
aims to collect contributions that will range from research papers
to system presentations and that will address the following topics on the application
of recommender systems in the domain of education:

i) user needs, tasks and activities to be supported
ii) requirements for the design and deployment of recommender systems
iii) novel recommendation algorithms and systems
iv) evaluation criteria, methods and studies


Topics of Interest
----------------------
(list indicative and not exclusive)
* User tasks to be supported by recommender systems in TEL
* Explanation and visualizations of recommendations
* Open user models for TEL recommender systems
* Recommendation approaches based on social  (meta) data
* Requirements for the deployment of TEL recommender systems
* Data sets for TEL recommender systems
* Recommendation algorithms and systems for TEL
* Transfer of successful algorithms and systems from other application areas
* Evaluation criteria and methods for TEL recommender systems
* Experiences from actual implementation in teaching, learning and/or community building


Submission Procedure
----------------------------

All submitted manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Contributions should be original
and not simultaneously submitted to other venues. Manuscripts that have been included
in previous workshop/conference proceedings should include at least 30% of new material
in order to be considered for publication.

Detailed manuscript instructions are available from Springer Book Author Guidelines:
http://www.springer.com/authors/book+authors/helpdesk?SGWID=0-1723113-12-971304-0

Submissions will be handled through EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=recsystelspringer2013

The volume is scheduled to be published during 2013 by Springer.


Editors:
---------
Nikos Manouselis, Agro-Know Technologies & ARIADNE Foundation (Greece)
Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederlands (The Netherlands)
Olga C. Santos, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)


Enquiries
------------
For any questions, please contact the editors at recsystelspringer2013@easychair.org

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