Václav Belák

Hi. Welcome to my rudimentary homepage. You can find here general information about me, contact information, list of publications, posters, and presentations. A more formal (and prettier;-)) overview is provided in my CV. I also try to keep blogging regularly about topics more-or-less related to my research.

About

I am a PhD student at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in the Unit of Information Mining and Retrieval. I am interested in large-scale dynamics of online social communities and how we can manage or foster their activity by means of scalable and automatic analytical techniques. Social communities are usually centred around shared interests and thus I have worked both on modelling of these interests using Semantic Web technologies (top-down approach) and statistical processing of unstructured content (bottom-up approach). I have been particularly interested in how to combine structural analysis of social networks with the analysis of the content related to the communities in order to understand how:
  1. information flow from one community to another
  2. can we support the process of community formation
  3. communities influence each other, and
  4. to predict future states of communities with a particular emphasis on predicting unwanted situations like a community dissolution
As the social-semantic networks I have worked with were sometimes very large (millions of nodes/edges or documents) I focus on scalability of the developed methods eventually employing parallel programming and MapReduce approaches. Further I have also investigated how to properly visualize dynamic communities and the content associated to them.

Contact

Václav Belák
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
IDA Business Park
Lower Dangan
Galway, Ireland

Publications

Posters

Presentations

Please find my presentations at Slideshare.
Last modified: Thu Mar 15 18:02:44 GMT 2012