ABSTRACT

Categories and Subject Descriptors

INTRODUCTION
1.
In this paper, we discuss importance and utilization of per- sonal network in a community system through the result of management and analysis of the scheduling support sys- tem for an academic conference. The system is designed to support not only personal activities in conferences such as scheduling but also communication among participants. To activate discussion in academic conferences and promote communication among participants, it is important for par- ticipants to find interesting presentations and to know what kinds of people participate and which participants share sim¬ ilar concerns. However, it is hard for a user to learn such information from a large amount of information on presen- tation and participants. This system adopted a "person as content" strategy. It means that persons are information sources; it treats per¬ sons as information nodes that are accessible to other users. These nodes are connected through interpersonal network based on their own relationships. Interpersonal network can show what kinds of people par¬ ticipate. Furthermore, new routes are created for discovery of papers and other persons because persons are connected with papers or other persons with links. Based on the de¬ veloped network this system also offers services for recom¬ mending papers and participants that are considered to be interesting for individual users.
SYSTEM OUTLINE
2.
The system dynamically generates the following four types of HTML pages: author, paper, session, and personal timetable. Each HTML page is linked mutually based on the relation¬ ship stored in the databases; a user can browse the gener¬ ated HTML pages freely and even add a new relationship. The personal timetable is changed based on the relationships added by users. This system roughly addresses two types of data: resources and links. Resources include three categories: session, pre¬ sented paper, and person (author, chairperson, and other user). A link shows the relevance from one resource to an- other. There are five categories on links: Contain (session¬ paper), Author (author-paper), Chair (chairperson-session), Check (user-paper), and Know (user-people). Contents, Chairs, and Authors are registered in advance, while Check and Know can be added by users.
3.
OFFERED SERVICES Creation of a personal timetable and the acquaintance lists ("I-know" and "I-known-by" lists) are basic functions. When a user can find an interesting paper in the conference sched- ule or the paper list, she/he can add it to her/his schedule. Then, her/his timetable is updated. Similarly, when a user finds an acquaintance on paper or session pages, she/he can add the acquaintance to her/his "I-know" list. At the same time, the user is added to the acquaintance's "I-known-by" list. These actions mean additions of a Check link and a Know link, respectively. Figure 1 is an example of personal page provided for each user. In the page, there are personal information, her/his presentations and hyperlinks to some services. Below them "I-know" and "I-known-by" lists. Added links are a kind of private information; it is not suit- able to the public unconditionally. This system conducts access control using the generated network. The detail in- formation of a person can be accessible for persons who are registered as her/his acquaintance. The similar control is applied for detail information on who "checked" the specific paper. We provide information recommendation service using the links added by users. This service recommends both papers and persons. A user can find interesting papers and persons not only by browsing but also by recommendation.
4.
RESULTS
We applied this system to the academic conference J SAI2003 and JSAI 2004. The following analysis is based on JSAI 2003. In this conference there are 30 sessions, 259 presentations and 510 authors (including co-authors). About 400 partici- pants joined that conference between Jun 23 and 27, 2003. The system was used by 276 users. 160 users added 1840 Check-Links and 99 users of them added 840 Know-Links. Figure 2 shows co-author networks and know-link networks. In these networks a node is a person and an edge is a rela- tionship among persons (co-author or know-link). The two The co-a uthor networks have 73 clusters, while the network merged with the know-link network has only clusters.  It indicates that edges made by know-links connect scattered co-a ut hor net work s. Figure 3 shows log-log plot of the cumulative distributions of incoming know-links.  It shows a tendency of "broad scale" | 1 | . The system provided two types of recommendation services. One used check-links and the other used know-links. 135 persons used this service. Table 1 shows behaviors of users when they received recommended items. The results show that the recommendation using know-links is comparatively useful with recommendation using check-links which is a kind of collaborative  filtering

5.
CONCLUSIONS
This paper reported the conference support system based on interpersonal network. This system has offered important new services that support person-to-person and person-to- content encounters before, during, and after an academic conference.
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