Warm congratulations to Erik Cambria, who has just had his research paper “ Crowd Validation of the UK National Health Service” accepted for the prestigious international WebSci10 conference to be held on 26-27th April 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Erik is an EPSRC funded PhD student doing his research project with Sitekit Labs and Stirling University.
In simple terms, the paper is about how “Sentic Computing”, a novel technique to perform opinion mining and sentiment analysis (http://cs.stir.ac.uk/~eca/sentics ), can be applied to effectively mine, analyze and merge Patient Opinion data and meta-data with the information provided by NHS Choices web site and by local NHS trust sites, and hence make a comprehensive and dynamic evaluation of UK NHS services.
This project is in collaboration with PatientOpinion.org (www.patientopinion.org.uk ) an independent, not-for-profit social enterprise set up to help improve NHS services. Codenamed “Crowd Validation”, the aim is to develop a useful tool for NHS Trusts to help them to meet the World Class Commissioning (WCC) competencies required by the UK government.
The proceedings of the conference will be made available online in the Web Science repository (http://journal.webscience.org ).
About WebSci 2010 Conference: (http://www.websci10.org )
The inaugural WebSci conference took place in 2009 in Athens. Both Sitekit Labs' research director Chris Eckl and Research Student Erik Bambria Cambria attended where Erik presented a poster entitled “Application of Common Sense Computing to enable the development of next-generation Semantic Web Applications”. Both Chris and Erik had the added bonus of meeting Sir Tim Berners Lee, the renowned inventor of the World Wide Web.
The Web Science Conference is an academic conference which is collocated with WWW2010 - which is a more technical conference.
Academic papers submitted to WebSci10 seek to demonstrate the development, scope, and relevance of the emerging field of Web Science. Web Science is concerned with the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web, and is thus inherently interdisciplinary. It is based on the notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organizations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. As such Web Science, and thus this conference, integrates computer and information sciences, sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology. This conference is unique in the manner in which it brings these disciplines together in creative and critical dialogue and papers are submitted from all these disciplines and those which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Topics for submissions to WebSci10 include:
• On-line lives: individuals and organizations shopping, dating, learning, networking
• Trust and privacy
• Evolving technologies – new search technologies, linked data, new Web languages and/or protocols, and emerging application areas
• The pro-human web in an unequal world: access, inequalities and agendas for change
• Web futures: possibilities critiques and challenges
• The web and the state: nationalism, politics. democracy
• Governance control and power
• Knowledge, education, and scholarship – the potential and effects of crowdsourcing and long tails
• Intellectual property and the Commons
• The dark side of the Web – such as cybercrime and terrorism
About WWW2010 Conference (http://www2010.org )
Keynote Speakers at WWW2010 include Vint Cerf, widely known as a “Father of the Internet,” Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. He is currently vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company.
The World Wide Web Conference is a yearly international conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. It began in 1994 at CERN and is organized by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2). The Conference aims to provide the world a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conference brings together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures—indeed all those who are passionate about the Web and what it has to offer. WWW2010 will focus on “openness” in web technologies, standards and practices, and will showcase the best of the region’s technology and culture.
