Thursday, September 30, 2010

Feature of the Week: Conferator - a ubiquitous, BibSonomy-based conference service

With Conferator, we offer a new service to conference participants which is supporting them in their social interaction. Conferator features two key functionalities: PeerRadar and TalkRadar.

PeerRadar will show you a history of your social contacts at the conference and provides additional information about them, such as their homepage, facebook and twitter accounts, contact details (skype, icq, etc.), and their last (public) posts in BibSonomy. After the conference, PeerRadar will thus enable you to recall your social contacts you had during the conference.
TalkRadar gives you the opportunity to personalize the conference schedule. You can select the talks that you intend to attend, and can store them in BibSonomy, so that it will be easier to cite them within your next publication. TalkRadar will give you more information about the current talk, such as additional information about the presenter, his or her publications, etc. It will also recommend upcoming talks. Last but not least, TalkRadar stores the talks that you have actually attended.

All conference participants who want to join the service will be provided with an RFID-Tag


that is worn like a name tag. The tags communicate to readers that are installed at the walls, and also communicate with each other. In this way, the system can determine the room you are actually in, and the people you are currently talking to (more precisely: the people who are face to face with you). The hardware we use was developed within the Sociopatterns project, whose generous support we kindly acknowledge.

The world premiere of Conferator will take place at the workshop week "Lernen - Wissen - Adaptivität (LWA 2010)" of four special interest groups of Gesellschaft für Informatik, the German Computer Science Association. LWA 2010 will take place October 4-6 in Kassel, organized by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel. If you are nearby, please drop in and give it a try!



You can find more information about Conferator here.