"From User Behaviours to Collective Semantics" by Ching-man Au Yeung with Jessica Rubart as Coordinator

Ching-man Au Yeung received his PhD in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom in October 2009. He worked under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Shadbolt and Dr. Nicholas Gibbins. His thesis studies how semantics of different entities on the Web can be extracted by analysing collective user behaviours, with emphasise on user activities and interactions observed in collaborative tagging systems. He is currently a research associate at the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. He currently works on projects related to analysis of online social networks, recommendation algorithms in trust networks, and information dissemination in collaborative writing systems such as Wikipedia. The following is an extended abstract of his PhD thesis.