Mark Davis
April 26, 2007
Ischool
Social Media Guru in 110 South Hall – iSchool
The nature of information, how to rethink it
Context content community
2.7B cell phones on planet – networked mm computers
2010 – 4B will be Internet access will come from mobile
Changes info science.
The four questions:
How many of you read text every day?
How many write text every day?
How many of you look at photos, or listen to audio, watch TV, DVDs
How many take photos, record audio…
We are all becoming MM producers. What happens when everyone has?
Networked vid recorders worldwide.
Hyping iSchool and the field.
Prof Kalay is here from center of new media, CNM.
Ask and investigate fundamental questions and assumptions are the keys
To intellectual and tech innovation.
What is information?
What is a document?
What is a person?
What is context?
What is a computational system?
How do we understand what we see?
Interdisciplinary Innovation
Design is the mediating practice connecting humanistic, social
Scientific, and tech disciples in an iterative process of
(De) constructing theories and (de) constructing artifacts.
If you are not fluent in clashing of sections of multiple disciplines
You can’t innovate.
Conduit metaphor vs. toolmakers paradigm
What is information?
Most people have a naive model of info processing. Dominant models
Exist. Different model evolved for information … it’s a process. The
Toolmaker’s paradigm.
Signals are passed, not objects. Meaning is enacted in dialogue.
What am i storing? Create a mechanism for process.
Can we be human without tools? It requires technology, language and
Culture. We need other people to be human. Human is a function of a
sociotechnical system.
When you think about it this way, you innovate. Design for this
world. Billions of people and mobile computers.
What kind of company is Yahoo?
media? tech?
a people company. you customers are valuable to the company. from
consumption to production.
2005 to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers
and biz
2007 to connect people to their passions, their communities and the
world’s knowledge
The Internet is not a doc repository
The Internet is a live network that connects humans around the planet.
socio-technical system
Social media becomes a platform, programmable network.
Systems Theory to Social Media
… computational history
HCI Interlude
What are the incentives? economics, social science
How do I structure the system?
Interdisciplinary …
How do users connect to each other?
What flows over the network?
II. What is social media?
A. definition
1. Media made by and for users in communities
a business model in which” our customers are our suppliers”
how do you motivate people to participate online
game dynamics proves a more powerful way to do this
social media is a radical change in the business model and it’s also a
new way to socialize
media made by and for users
>From systems theory to social media
networks that connect humans to computer together
it’s not just as computer system there’s human and computer that work
together
but as computer science started to rebuild, there was a limited system
of what the computer-user relationship would be
there will be 4 billion connected to each other in a 4 years
if you think of social media as the way of connecting people to each
other
design the sociotechnical system, not an application or user interface
design the network topology
– how to users connect to each other
– what are the means of communication
– design the network data and metadata
o what flows over the network?
– design to optimize certain activities of the nodes
– how do you design metrics, monitoring and analysis mechanisms for
the state and dynamics of sociotechnical system
– design way to rapidly and iteratively modify all of the above
– all of this requires radically interdisciplinary teams
– scale changes; “quantity is a different type of quality.”
III. Web 2.0 and World 2.0
The intersection of the web and world and causes you to think of the
nature of information
How do you move through your life? Through space? Through time?
Through social relationships? Create a path of your social patterns in
a day.
A. Types of attention
1. shared attention
a. where and when and how and what
b. you leave a trail of data everyday
c. we’re also living in a world where it’s going to be possible for
people to gain ownership
2. contact attention
-online communities are defined by the intersection of these two types
of attention
– you can take the whom, what and when and infer their relationships
to each other
Exercise: what can we learn about people from graphs of a single day?
Hint 1: you’re given where, when, who (some explicit, some implicit).
B. Yahoo is in the attention business
a. We invite, capture connect and monetize human attention
b. Behavioral technology
i. Targeted, personal, contextual marketing
– what you and your social network wants where and when you want it
– advertising delivered in the right context to the right community is
a “gift” not an annoyance.
– Understanding enough of what people attend to be able to give them
literally what they want
C. context content community
1. content – the what, the this the strings, the different things
you’re looking at
a. but how do you begin to understand content
content
context community
– semantic gap
– sensor gap
gap between how an objects appears and what it is
different images of the same object can appear dissimilar
– what is it that allows people to bridge this gap
Computer vision and context
– you go out drinking with our friends
– you get drunk
– really drunk
– you get hit over the head and pass out
– you are flown to a city in a country you’ve never been to with
language you don’t’ understand and an alphabet you can’t read
– you wake up face down in a gutter with a terrible hangover
– you have no idea where you are or how you got there
– that is what it’s like to be most computer vision systems – they
have no context
– context is what enables us to understand where we are.
o There are other pieces of metadata that the world is giving us
o Model – World
– if I want to understand text, images, video, audio, how might I get
that other metadata?
o Cell phone is a revolutionary body
o It’s the most personal computer there is
o A two-way voice communication device
o It’s a media consumption device
o More importantly it’s a media production device.
o When you think about time, don’t just think about linear time, think
about cyclical time
– Spatial structures
o Maps and trees
o Useful for privacy protection
o Social data structures; the Who would for example by Dana Boyd’s
social data structures
o Dynamic, temporal structures of people’s dynamic interactions
o The flows of data and metadata
– experience flow; it’s a new form of architecture of information
activit
IV. Other Yahoo and Berkeley projects:
A. MMM2 Web Site
B. Photo LOI (level of interest)
C. ACM MM 2005 – analyzed patterns of photo taking
1.Context-Aware Face Recognition
-context is one of the most difficult challenges of computer vision
-if the information is in the photo then facial recognition should
work.
– image analysis alone (PCA on image content) 43% accuracy
– context analysis alone (SFA on contextual metadata) = 50% accuracy
– context+content analysis (clustering on CVA)
He showcases different social tracking projects. Where projects can we
find these projects?
Ex. a radio calendar of where photos are taken.
Tokyo tidbits walk.
D. MMM2 assisted metadata propagation
E. Student mobile startups – from Garage Cinema Research
V. Yahoo Research Lab
Yahooresearchberekely.com
A. Zone tag, similar to MM1
B. What’s happening with social media?
1. Data is being automatically gathered from cell phones
2. Tags provide a social temporal information space, so that all these
relationship strings are beginning to create a social map of the world
3. Invisible, intangible, permanent human activity slowly becoming
track able
New word for the day:
“dis-embiguation”
>From phone tags, not only can you track what people like or where they
go or are moving, but you can also track how people are shaping spaces
they’re in. So people are forming a collective view of the world that
could be filtered by whatever people find interesting.
Zone tag forms a map from the number of photos and what people take
pictures of from their cell phone and forms a map of collectively
authored map drawn by the attention of human beings around the world
and it’s happening right now.
V. but what do people do with this information?
A. the relationship between media production and the relation of media
production
B. who are the people who consume media, but tell you a lot about it.
1. roles from type of data and who generates it
producers, enthusiasts, remixes, consumers
C. Old model of one source to many consumers to this heterogeneous
ecosystem of production, consumption, remixing.
Ref. Jump Cut yahoo program
D. there are 99 million people in 7 million groups creating media and
sharing it
E. changing monetization
1. part of yahoo’s “brand universe”
2. leverages yahoo’s social media, communication, info, shopping,
search, etc assets – in a fully integrated, completely brand centric
environment
3. provides fans a place to hang out on yahoo while extending and
deepening their relationship with the brad
4. provides the brand owner with…
F. we’re looking at world we’re going to be able to track human
attention, spatial content and create a new ecosystem of how
information is creating, recombined and routed.
VI. Trends
A. context
– growth of context-aware devices (like camera phones)
B. content
a. user generated content and social media offer a better economic
model and monetization opportunities that traditional media
C. community
a. social search and community-based products and services support
user engagement and word of mouth marketing
it changes the model of advertising quite rapidly
D. challenges
1. mobile software development and distribution
2. privacy
3. interoperable metadata and unique identifiers
4. monetization models
5. merging markets
VII. Q & A
A. accuracy of tags and inaccurate tracking of people
There is a fundamental discussion of what journalists’ role today and
about the information they convey.
B. social networking and journalism
1. He’s optimistic about highly decentralized journalism because the
centralized journalism is very limiting in its coverage
In a world he’s describing he can see other angles, hear other voices
and potentially in real time. There’s a challenge where journalism
will be.
3. There’s a difference between a most popular and most viewed photo
guided by a computational theory of beauty. The same with news. The
role of professional editors, especially where there is a radical
democratization of data and information, is to allow people people to
consume, produce and remix information….
4. goes back to this model:
conduit metaphor vs. toolmakers paradigm
take the paths of people interactions and try to create other types of
interaction
VIII. for even more fun
I’m hiring a few great innovative mobile designers and prototypes for
a new team. come talk to me…
-Yahoo research media experience research: email Elizabeth Churchill
echu@yahoo-inc.com
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