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UKOLUG RESEARCH AWARD

"A Learning Classifier for Social and Organisational
Informatics"

UKOLUG is pleased to announce that this year's Research
Award has been won by Elisabeth Davenport of Napier
University Business School. The award of £1,000 will fund
the development and evaluation of a demonstrator for a
learning classifier system that can improve retrieval
from heterogeneous data sets.

The proposal noted that human beings, both trained and
untrained, tend to categorise Web sites poorly. They
think they know what the categories are, but act as if
different categories are being used. There may therefore
be a case to complement human categories with categories
discovered by means of automated machine learning.

The UKOLUG grant will support the construction of a
system that will automate categorisation and allow
powerful, intuitive, accurate searches. This will be
tested in a real world situation by using the system to
provide a gateway (of links to Web pages and academic
papers) for information resources covering such areas as
organisational and social informatics, information
management, knowledge management, e-commerce and business
development. It is designed to facilitate access for
three groups: academic, business and lay users. The
system will therefore have to cope with both varied
requests and varied user requirements and expectations.
Though 'concept' systems been described in the
literature, the problem has never been addressed in the
context of social science literature, with a working
prototype.

The Napier team is led by Lizzie Davenport and will
comprise a Research Assistant and a Consultant Programmer
with doctoral-level experience in the learning classifier
area. A short mid-project report and a final report will
appear in the Newsletter later in the year.

A student from Napier University Business School also won
the UKOLUG Student Award earlier this year - her winning
entry appears as the Feature Article in the July/August
edition of the UKOLUG Newsletter.

[Editors: UKOLUG is the UK Online User Group, a Special
Interest Group of the Institute of Information
Scientists, and a professional body with concerns
relating to online, CD-ROM and Internet resource
provision, use and training. UKOLUG has an annual
programme of meetings and publishes Quick Guides as well
as a substantial Newsletter 6 times a year. UKOLUG also
offers a number of awards as well as two student
bursaries. Details of UKOLUG activities can be found on
their Web site at <http://www.ukolug.org.uk/>.]

Contact for press release:
Chris Armstrong
UKOLUG
Information Automation Limited
Penbryn
Bronant
Aberystwyth
SY23 4 TJ
Tel: 01974 251302
Fax: 01974 251441
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


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