Hossein Derakhshan: Killing the Hyperlink, Killing the Web: the Shift from Library-Internet to Television-Internet  

Wednesday, July 13 (shared keynote speaker with Hypertext 2016)

The Web, as envisaged by its inventors, was founded on the idea of hyperlinks. Derived from the notion of 
hypertext in literary theory, a hyperlink is a relation rather than an object. It is a system of connections that 
connects distant pieces of text, resulting in a non-linear, open, active, decentralized, and diverse space we 
called the World Wide Web. But in the past few years, and with the rise of closed social networks, as well as 
mobile apps, the hyperlink - and thereby the Web - are in serious trouble. Most social networks have created 
a closed, linear, centralized, sequential, passive, and homogeneous space, where users are encouraged to 
stay in all the time - a space that is more like television. The Web was imagined as an intellectual project 
that promoted knowledge, debate, and tolerance; as something I call library-internet. Now it has become
more about entertainment and commerce; I call this tv-internet.

Hossein Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, is an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014. He is credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and is called the father of Persian blogging by many journalists. He also helped to promote podcasting in Iran. Derakhshan was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 19½ years in prison in 2010. His sentence was reduced to 17 years in October 2013. He was pardoned by Iran's supreme leader and on November 19, 2014 was released from Evin prison. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia.

Lada Adamic: The Life and Times of Information in Networks

Thursday, July 14 

Cascades of information-sharing are a primary mechanism by which content reaches its audience on social media. 
In this talk, I will describe three large-scale analyses of reshare cascades on Facebook, which were performed
in aggregate using de-identified data.

Lada Adamic leads the Product Science group within Facebook's Data Science Team. She is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structural and communication patterns in online social media. She has received an NSF CAREER award, a University of Michigan Henry Russell award, the 2012 Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems.

Sandra Carberry: User Modeling: The Past, The Present and The Future

Friday, July 15

User modeling and adaptation had its inception as a field at a
workshop in Maria Laach, Germany in 1986.  Most of the work at that
time focused on applications in natural language processing, such as
adapting explanations to the user's level of expertise.  Since then,
the field has grown tremendously and new applications are arising each
year.  As appropriate for the 30th anniversary of the first workshop,
this talk will discuss how the field has evolved, novel work that we
are pursuing on applying user modeling and adaptation to information
retrieval, insights into where the field is headed and the hottest
topics for exploration, and some thoughts on the conflict between the
benefits of user modeling and its intrusion on people's lives.

Professor Sandra Carberry is one of the founders of the User Modeling research area at the first woskshop in Maria Laach, 1986. She is a well known researcher in the areas of computational linguistics, dialogue systems, and explanation generation. Her main areas of research are Natural language understanding, response generation, user modelling, dialogue systems, summarization, digital libraries, intelligent interfaces, and plan recognition. During her long and stellar academic carrer she has served as program chair of UM, has been editorial board member of UMUAI since its inception,  co-edited special issues, co-chaired many workshops, doctoral consortiums, and has served on the board of directors of UM Inc for 20 years.  Many of her papershave received best-paper awards, and she has received several excellence in teaching awards.  She has serverd also as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, on the editorial board of the Computational Linguistics Journal, on the executive board of the North American Chapter of ACL, was Vice-president of User Modeling Inc. (1999-2001).