Seoul is a fascinating city, probably the most modern I have ever seen. I traveled through Seoul for a week and visited cultural heritage sights as well as modern ones. But the main reason for the long journey across the globe was the recent WWW conference, because the paper I co-authored and which is based on the results of my master thesis has been presented and published there - and it was well received. It is rather likely (to the amusement of some of our conversational partners), that Elias Zeitfogel, who accompanied me, and myself were the youngest attendees, and probably the only ones who paid for admittance fees and travel expenses themselves. But we embraced the opportunity to meet new people (especially the Google networking event we were invited to emerged to be a good and fun opportunity to do this), and join other presentation of papers that are published in the WWW proceedings.

The first keynote by Prof. Christos Faloutsos related to the cross-disciplinary of graphs, how to utilize Triangle Laws (relation triangles to degree) and to avoid the Gaussian Trap (immense memory requirements of extensive graphs). The first application was fraud detection in diverse examples. Analyze the who-likes-what-and-when, find lockstep behavior (same likes in the same time, generates close clusters in a graph - see CopyCatch Paper for reference). He presented time evolution and SVD matrix factorations to find blocks (e.g. for recommender systems). In this context, Faloutsos referred to canonical polyadic decomposition for pattern, group and triplet detection (with applications in anomaly detection or neuro-semantics). Correlating Net Science with (US) Medicare networks offers opportunities to, for instance, optimize immunization of patients (decrease connectivity by eigenvalue and minimalize the first eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix). The reverse is viable as well: to propagate a product, increase connectivity by eigenvalue to optimize the spread. All these approaches can be pretty quick and scalable, when exploiting sparsity and (Giga)Tensors.

At the plenary panel with the title “WWW: The next 25 years”, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (MIT & W3C), the inventor of the Internet, spoke about the importance of a free and independent Web without going too deep into political territory. The speakers Dr. Ramanathan Guha (Google), Prof. James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Dr. Unna Huh (Start-up Forum), Yong Hak Kim (Yonsei Univ.) and Mary Ellen Zurko (Cisco & IW3C2) elaborated on various topics and questions from the audience concerning the future of the WWW.

The second keynote by Samsung’s Executive Vice President (and head of its Software R&D Center) Dr. Jong-Deok Choi was quite entertaining. He referred to the WWW as the Wild Wild West and compared it to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Using statistics and examples like the WWW14 website, which is optimized for IE8 but broken on IE10 (mostly working on IE11), or the fact that 74% of Korea’s top 200 websites still used ActiveX, he underlined his question “What stops devs from using HTML5?”. Furthermore, Jong-Deok Choi spoke about the two worlds that talk different language: the device world (Android - Java, iOS - Objective C, Windows Phone - C/C++) and the Web world. According to him, the walls that divide these worlds need to be torn down to build a better future, and he suggested Tizen for this purpose. Tizen is an operating system for all kinds devices based on Linux. Its SDK provides its own device API and Web UI framework, which utilizes standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS, JS, Widgets).

Friday’s keynote was held by Dr. Qi Lu, Executive Vice President at Microsoft. Presenting the evolution of the Web in dimensions (Social [Facebook and the likes], Spacial [Google Maps, Virtual World, Streetview], Temporal [Twitter, Weibo]), and the role Microsoft had played, he focused on the importance and excrescence of the Mobile Era. Appification, to envelop everything in (mobile) apps, is a center point of this, and Qi Lu talked about the challenges, opportunities and downsites. Key vectors of innovations would be lower barriers (a topic that Dr. Jong-Deok Choi already emphasized), capture more digital observables, reduce the distance between physical and digital world, to induce action and create incentive in interaction design, but most importantly, to always establish and accelerate feedback loops.

Initially, I planned on summarizing all the presentations of papers I attended. I shall spare you and myself, but I strongly recommend to take a look into some of them - they are worth it! I have photos and transcripts of most of them. Contact me if you are interested in them. These are my personal favorites:

Quizz: Targeted Crowdsourcing with a Billion (Potential) Users

A study on efficient crowdsourcing in a predictable way, without monetary costs

Stranger Danger: Exploring the Ecosystem of Ad-based URL Shortening Services

A warning what shady advertisers and link providers (can) do with ad-based link shorteners like adf.ly.

The Wisdom of the Minority: Discovering and Targeting the Right Group of Workers for Crowdsourcing

“Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion” (Soren Kierkegaard)

Analyzing behavioral data for improving search experience

An interesting paper by (and about) Yandex

The semantic evolution of online communities

Models and approaches in analysis of online communities

User churn in focused question answering sites: characterizations and prediction

A study on user fluctuation on Stackoverflow

A study of the online profile of enterprise users in professional social networks

IBM showed us how to find connections and contradictions between internal data about employees and their LinkedIn profiles.

Understanding toxic behavior in online games

Research on bad manners of players in League of Legends, the impact on gaming and income, and how to (semi)automate a punish-or-pardon system based on reports by players