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Whilst working on the ITA Project - a collaborative research programme between the UK MoD and the US Army Research Laboratory - over the last few years, one of my primary areas has been to research around controlled natural languages, and working with Cardiff University and IBM UK’s Emerging Technology team to develop CENode.
As part of the project - before I joined - researchers at IBM developed the CEStore, which aims to provide tools for working with ITA Controlled English. Controlled English (CE) is a subset of the English language which is structured in a way that attempts to remove ambiguity from statements, enabling machines to understand ‘English’ inputs.
I recently received confirmation of my completed PhD! I submitted my thesis in May 2014, passed my viva in September and returned my final corrections in December.
I was examined internally by Dr Pete Burnap and also by Dr Jeremy Pitt of Imperial College London.
The whole PhD was an amazing experience, even during the more stressful moments. I learnt a huge amount across many domains and I cannot thank my supervisors, Dr Stuart Allen and Prof Roger Whitker, enough for their fantastic support and guidance throughout.
Last week, I was invited to give a seminar to the Agents and Intelligent Systems group in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London.
I gave an overview of my PhD research conducted over the past two or three years, from my initial research into retweet behaviours and propagation characteristics through to studies on the properties exhibited by Twitter’s social graph and the effects that the interconnection of users have on message dissemination.
Last week I visited Karlsruhe, in Germany, to give a presentation accompanying a recently-accepted paper. The paper, “Inferring the Interesting Tweets in Your Network”, was in the proceedings of the Workshop on Analyzing Social Media for the Benefit of Society (Society 2.0), which was part of the Third International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications (SCA).
Although I only attended the first workshop day, there was a variety of interesting talks on social media and crowdsourcing. My own talk went well and there was some useful feedback from the attendees.
Each January the School of Computer Science hosts a poster day in order for the research students to demonstrate their current work to other research students, research staff and undergraduates. The event lets members of the department see what other research is being done outside of their own group and gives researchers an opportunity to defend their research ideas.
This year, I focused on my current research area, which is to do with inferring how interesting a Tweet is based on a comparison between simulated retweet patterns and the propagation behaviour demonstrated by the Tweet in Twitter itself. The poster highlights recent work in the build-up to this, a general overview of how the research works, and finishes with where I want to take this research in the future.
I gave a seminar on my current research phase.
I summarised my work over the past few months; in particular, the work on the network structure of Twitter, the way in which tweets propagate through different network types, and the implications of this. I discussed the importance of precision and recall as metrics for determining a timeline's quality and how this is altered through retweeting in different network types.
I concluded by talking about my next area of research; how I may use the model used for the previous experimentation to determine if a tweet is particularly interesting based on its features. Essentially, this boils down to showing that tweets are siginificantly interesting (or uninteresting) by looking at how they compare to their predicted retweet behaviours as produced by the model.