The BlogoCenter project is a collaborative effort (0534784, Junghoo 'John' Cho, University of California-Los Angeles and 0534323, Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan Ann Arbor) with a goal to develop innovative technologies for building a system that (1) continuously monitors, collects, and stores personal Weblogs (or blogs) at a central location; (2) discovers hidden structures and trends automatically from the blogs; and (3) makes them easily accessible to general users. By making the new information on the blogs easy to discover and access, this project is helping blogs realize their full potential for societal change as the "grassroots media." It is also collecting an important hypertext dataset of human interactions for further analysis by the social and behavioral sciences research communities.
In developing such a system, the project investigates new research challenges in three areas: (1) novel monitoring algorithms that discover and download new information from rapidly-changing distributed sources with minimal delay; (2) new text and graph mining techniques appropriate for large-scale hypertext corpora; and (3) novel text ranking and summarization algorithms to help the users access new and high-quality information quickly from the rapidly-evolving blogs.
The project will make a significant impact to the scientific community by making the collected datasets and the source code of the prototype available to other research groups via the Web (www.eecs.umich.edu/~radev/blogocenter), accelerating progress in the blog-related research. The new research findings will be disseminated via scientific conferences and journals, spurring significant advancements in distributed Web-source monitoring, text summarization and ranking, and large-scale text and graph mining. In addition, this project will support graduate and undergraduate student research and foster cross-institution collaboration.
