(5 items)
Yesterday, I gave a talk about my experiences with developing and using RESTful APIs, with the goal of providing tips for structuring such interfaces so that they work in a useful and sensible way.
I went back to first principles, with overviews of basic HTTP messages as part of the request-response cycle and using sensible status codes in HTTP responses. I discussed the benefits of ‘collection-oriented’ endpoint URLs to identify resources that can be accessed and modified and the use of HTTP methods to describe what to do with these resources.
Today I gave an internal talk at the School of Computer Science & Informatics about open-source contribution.
The talk described some of the disadvantages of the ways in which hobbyists and the non-professional sector publicly publish their code. A lot of the time these projects do not receive much visibility or use from others.
Public contribution is important to the open-source community, which is driven largely by volunteers and enthusiasts, so the point of the talk was to try and encourage people to share expert knowledge through contributing documentation (wikis, forums, articles, etc.), maintaining and adopting packages, and getting more widely involved.
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.
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.