Dr. Sastry Keynotes at Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST)

Dr. Nishanth Sastry, a Lecturer in the Centre for Telecommunications Research at the Department of Informatics, has been invited to give keynote talks at the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST) in Lisbon,Portugal, and at the The 7th Annual Workshop on Simplifying Complex Networks for Practitioners (SIMPLEX). 

Dr. Sastry's talks will shed light on the now ubiquitous social login and social share buttons (e.g., "Login with Facebook" button and the "Share with Facebook"), which Dr. Sastry and his group have been studying for the past 3 years, using Pinterest, one of today's fastest growing social networks as a case study.

Through this work, Dr.Sastry and collaborators have identified a new phenomenon that they term as"social bootstrapping", which has been enabled by social login buttons, and is crucial to forming thriving communities on new websites. They have also analysed how and why users share and curate content online, and have developed novel mechanisms to automate this highly manual process, using a mixture of crowd sourcing and machine learning using so-called "deep learning" networks.

For more details about the research see: http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/nrs/projects/cd-gain/social_curation.html 

Details about the conferences can be found on the SIMPLEX and WEBIST websites.