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Collective intelligence through the lens of a
company
ICT 2008, Lyon, 25-27 Nov

• Dr. Andre Skusa
• Lycos Europe GmbH, Research
• Gütersloh, Germany
• http//research.lycos-europe.com/

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Company presentation Lycos Europe
An International Internet Brand

• Presence in 7 European key markets and the USA
• Portal provider and developer of web applications

• About 700 employees incl. one of the largest
  product development teams of European Internet
  companies
• Main shareholders Bertelsmann and Telefónica

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Overview
From collecting information to collective
intelligence

• Products collecting information
• Bridging the gap Research activities
• Resulting collective intelligence

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Products collecting information

• LYCOS iQ
• Question and answer community
• Available in 6 European countries
• More than 1,5 Mio Questions in Germany
• Social network component
• Navigation and content store based on tagging
• Different white label versions, some are
  thematically focussed (cars, women)

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Products collecting information

• LYCOS Chat
• Communication and meeting
• Available in 7 European countries
• Located on a virtual ship with diverse cabins
• Complex administration and security features
• Implicit and explicit networking
• Cascading rights and feature system depending on
  product experience of the user (mainly activity
  level)

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Products collecting information

• Other Products
• Video and Foto Communities (LYCOS Fotomania,
  Jubii yeah!, JubiiTV,)
• Dating Communities (Love_at_Lycos, Sexy Like Us,
  Voteztouspourmoi,)
• Products using tagging
• LYCOS iQ, LYCOS Fotomania, LYCOS Mail Plus
  (JubiiMail), JubiiPages, Jubii yeah!

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Research activities Theseus/Alexandria

• Theseus
• Large German research initiative
• Goal developing an infrastructure in order to
  better use and utilize the knowledge available on
  the Internet
• 8 base technology work packages and 5 application
  scenarios
• Alexandria (application scenario of Theseus)
• Creation of an end-user oriented knowledge
  platform
• Support
• of users for publishing content
• by users for annotations and enhancing
  information quality
• Connection of semantic web and Web 2.0
  communities

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Research activities Theseus/Alexandria

• Chroneo (Alexandria prototype)
• Sample showcase of Alexandria technologies on
  History topics
• Users publish information objects (IOs
  persons, events, locations)
• Goal automatic and manual detection of semantic
  relationships between IOs ? improving search and
  navigation

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Research activities Theseus/Alexandria

• Related research results
• Tagging framework
• tag suggestions, tag relations and tag merging
• text classification on training data, machine
  learning
• Marry-O-Meter
• Identification of relationships
• Web search and statistics
• Social Search
• Connecting classic search with social bookmarking
• Re-ranking of search results by Lycos iQ
  occurrences

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Research activities Theseus/Alexandria
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Research activities WeKnowIt

• Overall project goalCompiling collective
  intelligence
• by using different sources in the Internet
• on different intelligence layers(e.g., mass
  intelligence, social intelligence etc.)
• Focus of Lycos
• Analysis and improvement of mass intelligence
  systems (based on Lycos iQ)
• Collective Intelligence Architecture

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Research activities WeKnowIt

• Research on mass intelligence systems (based on
  Lycos iQ)
• Network analysis, e.g. tag communities
• Seed node approach
• Comparison on synthetic and real networks
• Further analysis
• Trend detection
• Answer quality rating / ranking improvements
• Assessing textual information

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Resulting collective intelligence

• Achieved improvements for Lycos iQ
• (Semi)automated support of users and moderators
  for different tasks
• Advertisement improvements
• Outlook to future investigations
• Chat network analysis, crime prevention
• Tag merging between different products (?
  ontology construction)

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Thank you!

• Dr. Andre Skusa, Nadine Eckert, René Wagner
• Lycos Europe GmbH, Research
• Gütersloh, Germany
• http//research.lycos-europe.com

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Research activities WeKnowIt

• Collective intelligence architecture
• Service-oriented, message based, event-driven
• allowing synchronous and asynchronous (for
  allowing computational intensive processes)