Internet-TV Combination Makes Life Easier

CORDIS News (04/22/13)

European Union researchers are working on the networks and ontologies for the transformation and unification of broadcasting and the Internet (NOTUBE) project, developing solutions that convert the TV into a personalized, interactive experience.  Over the last three years, NOTUBE researchers have developed several technologies.  For example, the N-screen is a Web application that can help small groups determine what they want to watch.  Beancounter is a social Web user-profiling system that can bring people together, regardless of their location or the tools they use to connect.  The NOTUBE TV application programming interface gives broadcasters the means to develop novel Web-based applications and systems that make TV both more interactive and better.  "The concept of linked data allowed the NOTUBE team to set reference standards for online publishers," says NOTUBE researcher Dan Brickley.  "This made it possible, for example, for broadcasters to create personalized news environments and online program guides, showing users what they most want to see."  Brickley notes that NOTUBE works across different devices and languages.  "The results and prototypes from NOTUBE are now more relevant than ever, and show the way forward to develop personalized TV applications where the user still controls their data," he says.
http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=35667

Big Questions for Big Data: Stanford's Jure Leskovec

Stanford University (04/17/13) Kelly Servick

Stanford University professor Jure Leskovec studies big data gathered by sites such as Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook to learn about the way society functions.  Leskovec says fundamental patterns of behavior are revealed in online activities such as sharing news, clicking links, and casting votes.  He recently studied data mined from 6 billion news articles and blog posts collected daily for the last four years, some of which was crawled from the Internet, while other data came from companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft.  The companies hoped that working with Leskovec would yield useful information about how people make sense of the Internet and social media.  Facebook, for example, worked with Leskovec's team to discover a way to forecast which friends Facebook users would add next, and this evolved into the "people you may know" feature.  Leskovec also is developing programs that forecast what people are trying to find based on the way they navigate and whether they will abandon their search, which could result in technology that points users in the right direction when they are not finding the information they need.  Leskovec's most recent work involves the study of how news and other information travels through networks.
http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/big-questions-big-data-stanfords-jure-leskovec