Centre or e-Research (CeRch) conducts a wide range of interdisciplinary research. It is a part of
ISS. CeRch works on fields of research and practice of creation and management of information; creation of knowledge, methods and tools of
ICT technologies. The Centre includes
AHDS and its projects.
Five main areas of CeRch work:
- As a department in ISS contributes to wide program of e-Research and education, as well as development of virtual research environment./li>
- As a centre researching e-infrastructure, methods of e-research and digital informatics, together with application of e-science in research
- As a centre of education offers postgraduate studies and courses in the field of digital assets management
- As a host for national and international projects and services, including support for e-learning, ICTGuides, arts-humanities.net and UE DARIAH project
- As a provider of guidance, trainings and services creating, fixing and maintaining data
www: www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch
Research conducted by the Centre includes all areas of social politics, and its results have direct practical application in reference to understanding of social behaviour. The Centre brings to life what actually happens now in Great Britain. Research is conducted by experienced scientists with the use of innovative, high quality research methods, obtaining international recognition for delivery of solid and rigorous research. The Centre is a non-for-profit organisation, trying to influence the society and support progress in social research in Great Britain. Its aim is to understand and share knowledge with the society, by NatCen Learning and recently started Survey Skills programme.
www: www.natcen.ac.uk
Growth of networks and huge databases changes our society. Main goals of the Department are conducting research and education of society in order to analyse society with such dynamic information, and design of social information systems. E-commerce, digital libraries, environment observation, bio-sources, prevention of natural disasters and processing of medical information are among the main fields of research. The department also works on network security and intellectual property.
www: www.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Social Informatics is a research field that aims to improve our knowledge on social context of technological actions and co-evolution of technologies, organisations and society, by research and modelling. Topics of the research include: inter-organisational coordination on removing effects of natural disasters, social innovations, IT adoption, IT work force, IT at home and work, global diffusion, virtual worlds and artificial environments, IT and powers of organisation, mobile technologies for developing countries and technologies for social integration.
www: ist.psu.edu
Centre for Research in Social Simulation (CRESS) based at the Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on University of Surrey, Great Britain is a interdisciplinary centre bringing together social sciences, software engineering and multi-agent systems. Its aim is to promote and support application of social simulations in social science research.
www: cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk
On Lausanne polytechnic there is a team under a management of Karl Aberer, that deals with research work on theoretical foundations and implementation of peer-to-peer systems; and trust management. Web page with detailed description of the team’s activity is here.
www: www.epfl.ch
Wikipedia is a very good example of a project that owes its great success to a cooperation of many people without the existence of any formal organisation. Everyone can change the content of its pages. This open model of cooperation without artificial organisational barriers fosters a creative work of teams. Peter Gloor describes in his book Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks the usage of social structure (COIN), in which the coordination is intuitive, without formal leadership as an efficient form of leading the organisation, also in a business sense.
Our research is focused on evaluation of teams editing content of separate articles, based on multidimensional social network. The construction of this network in built on a history of editing all articles and its discussion pages. We have distinguished four dimensions in which we examine relations between authors: trust (based on extending the content created by one author without deleting it), wariness (based on deleting content and restoring the edition), familiarity (modelled on base of activity of pairs of authors on disussion pages), knowledge/interest (linking authors editing content of pages from similar categories).
