Linking information and people in a social system for academic conferences

Abstract

This paper investigates the feasibility of maintaining a social information system to support attendees at an academic conference. The main challenge of this work was to create an infrastructure where users' social activities, such as bookmarking, tagging, and social linking could be used to enhance user navigation and maximize the users' ability to locate two important types of information in conference settings: presentations to attend and attendees to meet. We developed Conference Navigator 3, a social conference support system that integrates a conference schedule planner with a social linking service. We examined its potential and functions in the context of a mediumscale academic conference. In this paper, we present the design of the system's socially enabled features and report the results of a conference-based study. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of social information systems for supporting academic conferences. Despite the low number of potential users and the short timeframe in which conferences took place, the usage of the system was high enough to provide sufficient data for social mechanisms. The study shows that most critical social features were highly appreciated and used, and provides direction for further research. ARTICLE HISTORY

Supporting Conference Attendees with Visual Decision Making Interfaces

“…In order to evaluate IEx, we have deployed it on top of Conference Navigator 3 (CN3) [2]. CN3 is a social, personalized web-based system that supports academic conference attendees and suggests talks using different recommendation engines.…”

Progress towards a World-Class Research University status: The case of Nanjing Agricultural University

“…Further, conferences are important channels of knowledge transfer. They are intense cases of information and social linking, where academics interact with one another not only when presenting, but also before, during, and after the conference (Brusilovsky, Oh, López, Parra, & Jeng, 2017;Nicolson, 2016). These interactions enrich professional knowledge and facilitate knowledge exchange between peers, industry, and community members.…”

Leveraging Interfaces to Improve Recommendation Diversity

“…e work presented in this paper has been performed in the context of developing a social recommendation function for the Conference Navigator system [6]. is function was added to the original system to help conference a endees to connect with other scholars at the venue.…”