Graph Analysis

Springer Nature Hack Day – Berlin

by

On 26-27 April 2018, Francesco Osborne and I attended the third edition of the Springer Nature Hack Day, which was held in its headquarter in Berlin.

The Springer Nature Hack Day is an event that allows researchers, developers, tech companies, and Springer Nature itself, to gather together and tackle current research issues. Offering also opportunities for potential collaborations and networking.

This was my second time attending a hack day organised by Springer Nature. Indeed, with my colleagues Andrea Mannocci and Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, we attended the previous edition, back in November 2017, working on a Venue-centric trends project (read full story here). An extended version of this project has then been presented at the SAVE-SD workshop co-located with The Web Conference 2018 [1].

 

In this edition, the participants pitched six different ideas and projects, centred around “analytics and metrics to measure the impact of science”, such as: Disease Dashboard, Hot Topics (our project), Keyword Recommendation, Data mining for historians, Search-Assist, and Semantic Entity Marker. More information about the whole event can be found in this Springer Nature blog post.

Read more

AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics

by

“AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics” is a paper submitted to the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2018, presented on June 5 2018, in Fort Worth, TX, USA   Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta   Abstract Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, … Read more

Computer Science Ontology Portal (or simply CSO Portal)

by

The Computer Science Ontology Portal (also referred to simply as CSO Portal) is a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO at different levels. This last feature allows us to periodically review the status ontology and release new version according to the received feedbacks.

SpringerNature Hackday – London

by

On the 29th November 2017, myself with two KMi colleagues (Andrea Mannocci and Thiviyan Thanapalasingam) attended the second edition of SpringerNature HackDay in London (@ SpringerNature Campus).

Aliaksandr Birukou, Executive Editor of Computer Science at Springer Nature and collaborator of our research team at the Knowledge Media Institute, also joined our group on the HackDay.

The whole event aimed at joining together the skills and interests of many developers and researchers with SciGraph, for advancing discovery.

The main web page for the event is here: https://github.com/SN-HackDay/Advancing-discovery-with-research-data (or here in case someone removes it).

As a team, we worked on Venue-centric trends problem. In particular, our projects provides to editors, conference organizers and many others, a dashboard to understand how knowledge flows across countries and continents, who are the main producers and consumers of the research output for a given conference, whether the conference is open to interdisciplinarity, and many other questions.

Read more

Early Detection of Research Trends

by

Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge.

3MT – Early detection of research trends

by

On 16th May 2017, the STEM Faculty of my university organised a 3 Minutes Thesis (3MT) in which each candidate has a time slot of three minutes to describe their thesis. The speech can be supported by one static slide showing important features of the work. I wish I had shown the one above. In … Read more

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

by

“How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas” is a peer-reviewed paper submitted to PeerJ Computer Science. The paper has been submitted in July 2016 and accepted in May 2017. All the co-authors are thankful to the reviewers and the editor for providing insightful comments and thus improving the … Read more

Export Graph in R via JSON

by

This post presents an easy solution for exporting and importing a graph object of igraph library.
In its previous versions, the library used to have the save and load functions in which you could respectively export and import the graph object [1]. Although they seem to not be in the library anymore, the documentation states:

“Attribute values can be set to any R object, but note that storing the graph in some file formats might result the loss of complex attribute values. All attribute values are preserved if you use save and load to store/retrieve your graphs.“

The library also proposes write_graph and read_graph, that rely on the GraphML format, for exporting and importing back graph objects.

However, here I propose my little solution with almost zero options. It saves the graph and allows to re-load it again (in another session as well) simply saving all the fields and values in a JSON file.

Read more

BigDat2017: a review

by

This week I have been attending the 3rd edition of the Big Data winter school: BigDat2017. It was held in my former campus, at the University of Bari (IT). It was a really nice feeling to be back for a while, sitting on those benches and following courses, once again.
Big Data has recently gained a lot of interest in research and many believe that it will still play its leading role for many years. Nowadays, we live in a world in which all information seems to be available, we are surrounded by data-driven applications (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, just to name a few), which gather data and try to provide tailor-made solutions for their users. To this end, having such event like BigDat2017 with its clear mission —introduce and update new researchers into this fast advancing research area—is really important.

Read more

Department Research Seminar: Early Detection of Research Topics

by

On the 8th February I delivered a seminar to my department (KMi @ OU) in which I described the work I have been doing in the last two years for my postgraduate research.

I started with a little bit of introduction about science. Shortly, I moved to the currently available technologies for keeping track of the development of the different research areas. I showed how this technologies were not satisfactory enough if we want to perform an early detection of research topics.

In presenting, the state of the art (including The Structure of Scientific Revolution by Kuhn), I could state my main hypothesis, regarding the existence of an embryonic stage that research areas face, and that it is possible to detect their emergence during this stage1.

Read more