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News Release

Last modified: Thursday, October 9, 2008

Informatics professor receives $500,000 NSF grant to foster social Web research

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Fil Menczer, an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Informatics, recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his proposal entitled, "Social Integration of Semantic Annotation Networks for Web Applications." The project brings together complex networks and Web mining techniques to develop a new generation of search engines and collaborative Web applications.

Menczer and his research team will leverage existing annotations from users (such as the bookmarks they already maintain on their browsers) and elicit new ones through useful tools and games. For example, while users browse the Web, the framework will provide them with contextual social maps of related sites, people and topics.

"Our research will be put into a framework that will build socio-semantic networks of relationships between and among users, tags and Web sites," said Menczer. "In the end, these networks will improve social Web applications such as search, recommendation, spam detection and exploratory navigation interfaces."

Founded in 2000 as the first school of its kind in the United States, the IU School of Informatics is dedicated to research and teaching across a broad range of computing and information technology, with emphases on science, applications and societal implications.

The school includes the Departments of Computer Science and Informatics on the Bloomington campus and Informatics on the IUPUI campus. The school administers a variety of bachelor's and master's degree programs in computer science and informatics, as well as Ph.D. programs in computer science and the first-ever Ph.D. in informatics. The school is dedicated to excellence in education and research, to partnerships that bolster economic development and entrepreneurship, and to increasing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in computing and technology.

For more information, visit www.informatics.indiana.edu.

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