Open Seminars / Projects / Bachelor / Master theses in
Agent-Oriented Engineering and Social Computing

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My main areas of research are agent/goal-oriented engineering and social computing. The topics listed below require good programming skills, analytical thinking and writing skills and most of all - having fun working on novel and challenging problems. Selected topics offer a modest salary. The projected duration of masters' theses is 6-9 months based on the assumption that students commit to their work full-time.

Demo created by our research group: 43things Geosearch enables you to search and map goals of 43things users (also see 43things Vision )

If your answer to one of the following questions is yes!, then it is likely that you'd find it interesting to do your Seminar/Project/Bachelor/Master work in our group.

• You are interested in social software / web 2.0 or you want to develop your own social software?
• You are interested in the goals that people have when they surf the web, and how they can be identified, represented and analyzed?
• You are interested in search, and how information and knowledge spreads across the web?
• You are interested in social software, the "social web" and agent-oriented modeling?
• You want to learn more about social interactions on the web?
• You are interested in goal prediction and search? (let us predict your goals)

There is a good chance that your work will involve social aspects of the web in combination with goals, goal modeling and/or goal graphs.

I am looking for students interested in Social Computing/Social Software and Agents/Goals. Current open topics for seminars/projects/bachelor/master theses include, but are not limited to (please also see current and past projects). Working on these topics in small teams is possible.

• Goal extraction and goal graph construction from large text corpora, such as the AOL search database
• Goal analysis on the web (example screenshot1, example dataset.txt 10 MB)
• Goal-oriented user interfaces for social search applications, including applications such as Yahoo BOSS, Google coop (example search interface)
• Algorithms for social search applications
• Information diffusion and knowledge transfer in social software (e.g. in social bookmarking sites)
• Eliciting and identifying user goals via natural language processing and social network analysis (in the context of, e.g. blogosphere)
• Evaluating knowledge transfer effectiveness of social software (e.g. in organizational settings)
• Agent-oriented analysis and design of "web2.0" applications (such as weblogs, wikis, etc)
• Expressing user goals in distributed ontologies (e.g. WSMO, Microformats, etc)
• Goal-oriented design and implementation of webapplications (example goal-tagging application)
• Intentional metadata
• Human computation, games with a purpose

Please also see my list of topics on the KMI's project blog.

Dataset collected by our research group: an excerpt of a goal graph that was automatically constructed from a web corpus (see larger graph)

If you are doing your Master thesis with me, it is likely that we will try to get you started by working on some small, well defined project. After having familiarized yourself with the problem domain, I will expect you to delve into the research literature more deeply and work on more advanced problems during the course of your Master's thesis. You might also want to have a look at the bits and bytes of doing research with me.

The best way to figure things out is to drop me a line at markus.strohmaier [insert “at” here] tugraz.at and we will discuss your options.