Welcome! This web site gives an overview of my academic activities in the areas of Social Computing, Computational Network Analysis, Visual Analytics and Semantic Web. In addition to a short description of my background, recent research activities are highlighted and selected publications are also made available.

I primarily deal with the exploration of virtual network structures in online production systems such as free/open source software projects and Wikipedia. While the final result of such collaborations depends on the type of product (e.g. content, software, tags), there are similarities in collaborations’ modes of actions. My approach is to interpret online production systems as social information spaces, and describe them using a generic vocabulary. This generic vocabulary serves as a base to explore these social and information structures with techniques from Computational Network Analysis and Machine Learning. I increasingly use the semantic description of information in these virtual spaces to gain a better understanding of the interrelatedness of social and informational structures. In addition, finding adequate concepts to visualize computed results is a major concern in my research.

I am a member of the SONIVIS team which is composed of seven developers who are developing on a free software project that primarily serves as a platform for our research. It is a challenge to keep this project running due to time constraints, a distributed team, technical problems, a shrinking number of active developers and communicational difficulties. More specific details of operating such a project are discussed in my weblog.

Overall the weblog is mainly used to disseminate Calls for Papers within the Social Computing research community. From time to time, I will share research results or interesting research-related highlights of the profession.