User
Short Bio
Arno Scharl heads the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna. Prior to this appointment, he held professorships at Graz University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, and the position of a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management. Mr. Scharl completed his doctoral research at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and also holds a PhD and MSc from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. Returning from fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley and Curtin University of Technology (funded by an Erwin Schrödinger Research Grant of the Austrian Science Fund), he submitted his habilitation on “Evolutionary Web Development” to the Vienna University of Economics and Business, for which he was awarded the venia docendi and the Senator Wilhelm Wilfling Award in 2000. Mr. Scharl edited two books in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series on "The Geospatial Web" and “Environmental Online Communication”, founded the ECOresearch Network and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection.
Research Interests
His current research interests focus on text mining, integrating semantic and geospatial Web technology, media monitoring, virtual communities and computer-mediated collaboration.
Further Information:
Courses @ MU
- Web Mining and New Media Technology
- Sustainable Tourism
- E-Business
Awards
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2007 : Digital Earth 3D Visualization Grand Challenge Winner ()
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1997 : Rudolf Sallinger-Award (Österreichischer Wirtschaftsbund)
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1998 : Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award (University of Vienna)
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1998 : Stephan Koren-Award (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien)
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1999 : OeNB-WU Research Prize (Austrian National Bank)
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1999 : Erwin Schrödinger Research Grant (FWF Der Wissenschaftsfonds)
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2000 : Senator Wilhelm-Wilfling-Award (Senator Wilhelm Wilfling Stiftung)
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2008 : Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-business (Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft)
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2008 : FIT-IT Award 3rd prize (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technology)
Projects
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US Election 2004 Web Monitor
The | US Election 2004 Web Monitor Web Monitor captures the Web sites of the Fortune 1000 (the biggest US companies in terms of revenue), environmental organizations and international media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. From these sites, the system processes more than 500,000 documents each week, comprising about 125 million words in 11 million sentences. Estimates of attention and attitude towards the presidential candidates complement keywords summarizing key issues associated with each candidate.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: -
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media
IDIOM is a two-year research project funded by FIT-IT Semantic Systems, a program of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and Eutema Technology Management. IDIOM aims to: - investigate new visual interfaces to create, access and analyze electronic content; - reveal fundamental mechanisms of information diffusion across media with distinct interactive characteristics. Recent advances in collaborative Web technology are governed by strong network effects and the harnessing of collective intelligence through customer-self service and algorithmic data management. As a result, information spreads rapidly across Web sites, blogs, Wiki applications, and direct communication channels between members of online communities who utilize these services. The IDIOM (Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media) project will support and investigate electronic interactivity by means of a generic, service-oriented architecture. This architecture will include ontology-based tools to build and maintain contextualized information spaces, a framework for analyzing content diffusion and interaction patterns within these spaces, and interface technology that enables users switch between semantic and geospatial topologies. IDIOM introduces Knowledge Planets as a radically new interface metaphor that leverages the new generation of geo-browsing platforms such as NASA World Wind and Google Earth as a front-end for its portfolio of semantic services. Linguists define “Idiom” as an expression whose meaning is different from the literal meanings of its component words. Similarly, the study of information diffusion promises insights that cannot be inferred from individual network elements. Despite growing research interest, the “Web 2.0” is still dominated by prototypes and mash-ups. At the same time, media monitoring and corporate knowledge management projects lack analytical frameworks, focus on one particular medium, or neglect the dual role of users as consumers and producers of information. IDIOM will address these gaps to reveal fundamental mechanisms of information diffusion across media with distinct interactive characteristics, providing a set of generic services to analyze the production and consumption of electronic content simultaneously.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 06.07.2006 - 05.06.2009
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C)
The Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C) aims to strengthen the relations between environmental stakeholders who recognize the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation, but differ in their specific worldviews, goals and agendas. For this purpose, the collaboratory provides tools to manage expert knowledge as well as a context-sensitive environment for creating and editing documents in a collaborative manner. Building upon the award-winning technology behind the Media Watch on Climate Change, the user's semantic context is provided by a real-time synchronization framework for rendering advanced visualizations including information landscapes, geographic projections, and ontology graphs. Innovative survey instruments in the tradition of “games with a purpose” create shared meaning through collaborative ontology building, and leverage the extensive user base of social networking platforms to capture indicators of environmental attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors. Two project workshops help align Triple-C with the research activities of its associate partners, increase the project’s visibility, and foster the collaboration with leading international organizations.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.03.2010 - 20.09.2012
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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WebLyzard
Built on more than five years of research into developing and managing Web-based information systems, the project analyzes navigational system and interface design from structural and textual perspectives. Web metrics aim to determine success factors and uncover weaknesses of deployed systems by comparing large samples of Web sites across regions and industries. Currently, webLyzard mirrors and analyzes a set of more than 6000 sites in monthly intervals. News and social media represent important interfaces to customers and stakeholders. The award-winning Web intelligence platform of webLyzard identifies opinion leaders and visualizes emerging trends across a wide range of online channels. It supports decision makers by identifying relevance and sentiment of user-generated content, measuring brand reputation, and providing the industry’s most advanced communication success metric. webLyzard compiles multilingual content repositories from public online sources and extracts actionable knowledge from these repositories. Marketing and public outreach managers, strategists and chief information officers alike use this knowledge to conduct market research, benchmark campaigns, and improve online communication strategies. The visual dashboard not only identifies where and through which channels information is communicated, but also provides a real-time account of topics that target audiences associate with the products and services of a company. Given the intense attention that online media channels attract these days, key questions for large organizations such as NOAA are how stakeholders perceive specific issues, how opinion leaders react to new insights, and how journalists present scientific knowledge to the public. The metrics and visualizations of webLyzard have proved invaluable for addressing these questions.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.01.2008 -
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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ECOResearch
The Research Network for Environmental Online Communication (ECOresearch presents and promotes interactive technologies for bringing together stakeholders of different disciplines and geographic regions to explore the design, implementation and evaluation of new media applications that advocate sustainability and the protection of natural ecosystems. Technology showcases such as the Media Watch on Climate Change, the Climate Resilience Toolkit and the Climate Challenge build upon the webLyzard media monitoring and Web intelligence platform, which is continually being extended and refined through research projects on natural language processing, information extraction, visual analytics and semantic technologies. As part of the DecarboNet research project and ongoing collaboration between international partner organizations, the Media Watch on Climate Change is currently being transformed from a news and social media aggregator into a collective awareness platform including advanced support of real-time collaboration among citizens and environmental stakeholders. It also serves as a knowledge repository for the Climate Challenge, a social media competition in the tradition of games with a purpose. The platform was presented in a recent IEEE Internet Computing article, an expert workshop of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), hosted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Switzerland, and at the 46th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl, Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel
Date: -
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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uComp
The rapid growth and fragmented character of social media and publicly available structured data challenges established approaches to knowledge extraction. Many algorithms fail when they encounter noisy, multilingual and contradictory input. Efforts to increase the reliability and scalability of these algorithms face a lack of suitable training data and gold standards. Given that humans excel at interpreting contradictory and context-dependent evidence, the uComp project will address the above mentioned shortcomings by merging collective human intelligence and automated knowledge extraction methods in a symbiotic fashion. The project will build upon the emerging field of Human Computation (HC) in the tradition of games with a purpose and crowdsourcing marketplaces. It will advance the field of Web Science by developing a scalable and generic HC framework for knowledge extraction and evaluation, delegating the most challenging tasks to large communities of users and continuously learning from their feedback to optimise automated methods as part of an iterative process. A major contribution is the proposed foundational research on Embedded Human Computation (EHC), which will advance and integrate the currently disjoint research fields of human and machine computation. EHC goes beyond mere data collection and embeds the HC paradigm into adaptive knowledge extraction workflows. An open evaluation campaign will validate the accuracy and scalability of EHC to acquire factual and affective knowledge. In addition to novel evaluation methods, uComp will also provide shared datasets and benchmark EHC against established knowledge processing frameworks. While uComp methods will be generic and evaluated across domains, climate change was chosen as the main use case for its challenging nature, subject to fluctuating and often conflicting interpretations. Public showcases include the Media Watch on Climate Change and the Climate Resilience Toolkit. The ongoing collaboration with international organisations such as the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Earth Observatory will increase impact, provide a rich stream of input data, attract and retain a critical mass of users, and promote the adoption of EHC among a wide range of stakeholders.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 15.11.2012 - 14.05.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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DecarboNet
DecarboNet is a research project funded by the European Commission to investigate the potential of social platforms in mitigating climate change. Engaging the public in energy debates and encouraging behaviour change are essential strategies for reducing energy consumption and saving our planet. Studies show that information and technology alone are insufficient for changing behaviour towards more sustainable lifestyle choices, and that what is needed is a combination of socio-technical interventions. How to raise awareness collectively by means of social platforms and how to transform it into behaviour change are some of the challenges addressed by the project’s research agenda. DecarboNet is funded by CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability & Social Innovation), a FP7 and H2020 research programme of the European Commission to enable new forms of social innovation and leverage emerging network effects by combining social media, distributed knowledge creation and data from the “Internet of Things”, increasing awareness and identifying possible solutions to problems that require collective efforts. Witness emerging DecarboNet technologies in action by exploring the Media Watch on Climate Change, participating in the Climate Challenge, or using the faceted search of the Climate Resilience Toolkit.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.10.2013 - 30.11.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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PHEME – Computing Veracity across Media, Languages, and Social Networks
Analyzing big data repositories aggregated from context-dependent social media streams poses three major computational challenges: volume, velocity, and variety. This project will focus on a fourth, hitherto largely unstudied computational challenge: veracity. It will model, identify, and verify phemes (Internet memes with added information on truthfulness or deception) as they spread across media, languages, and social networks.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.01.2014 - 31.12.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
Research Output
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"Visualizing statistical linked knowledge for decision support"in: Semantic Web Journal
In a global and interconnected economy, decision makers often need to consider information from various domains. A tourism destination manager, for example, has to correlate tourist behavior with financial and environmental indicators to allocate funds for strategic long-term investments. Statistical data underpins a broad range of such cross-domain decision tasks. A variety of statistical datasets are available as Linked Open Data, often incorporated into visual analytics solutions to support decision making. What are the principles, architectures, workflows and implementation design patterns that should be followed for building such visual cross-domain decision support systems. This article introduces a methodology to integrate and visualize cross-domain statistical data sources by applying selected RDF Data Cube (QB) principles. A visual dashboard built according to this methodology is presented and evaluated in the context of two use cases in the tourism and telecommunications domains.
Author(s): Adrian Brasoveanu, Marta Sabou, Arno Scharl, Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel, Daniel Fischl
Publication date: 2017
Volume: 8
Issue number: 1
Pages: 113-137
Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/SW-160225
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"Aspect-Based Extraction and Analysis of Affective Knowledge from Social Media Streams"in: IEEE Intelligent Systems
Extracting and analyzing affective knowledge from social media in a structured manner is a challenging task. Decision makers require insights into the public perception of a company's products and services, as a strategic feedback channel to guide communication campaigns, and as an early warning system to quickly react in the case of unforeseen events. The approach presented in this paper goes beyond bipolar metrics of sentiment. It combines factual and affective knowledge extracted from rich public knowledge bases to analyze emotions expressed towards specific entities (targets) in social media. We obtain common and common-sense domain knowledge from DBpedia and ConceptNet to identify potential sentiment targets. We employ affective knowledge about emotional categories available from SenticNet to assess how those targets and their aspects (e.g. specific product features) are perceived in social media. An evaluation shows the usefulness and correctness of the extracted domain knowledge, which is used in a proof-of-concept data analytics application to investigate the perception of car brands on social media in the period between September and November 2015.
Author(s): Albert Weichselbraun, Stefan Gindl, Fabian Fischer, Svitlana Vakulenko, Arno Scharl
Publication date: 2017
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"Tourism Intelligence and Visual Media Analytics for Destination Management Organizations"
Understanding dynamic changes in tourist perceptions and analyzing user-generated content to assess the impact of campaigns and promotional activities are among the key questions facing many destination management organizations. Web intelligence platforms help to answer these questions, particularly when they are scalable enough to analyze and visualize Web-scale information flows in real time. This paper presents a tourism Web intelligence platform for acquiring and processing real-time streams of online content from Web sites and social media platforms, advanced methods to extract factual and affective knowledge from these sources, and interactive visualization techniques to explore topical trends and assess the impact of communication campaigns. The extracted knowledge is analyzed from a destination image perspective, incorporating Aaker’s dimensions of brand personality. The chapter highlights the importance of real-time analytics solutions for marketers to respond in a timely manner and adapt their positioning strategies.
Author(s): Arno Scharl, Lidija Lalicic, Irem Önder
Publication date: 1. 12. 2016
Series information: Tourism on the Verge
Publisher: Springer
Pages: 165-178
Host publication editor(s): Z. Xiang, D. Fesenmaier
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"A Regional News Corpora for Contextualized Entity Discovery and Linking"
Author(s): Lyndon Nixon, Arno Scharl, Adrian Brasoveanu, Albert Weichselbraun
Publication date: 1. 5. 2016
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"Know which Way the Wind Blows: Visualising the Propagation of News on the Web"
Author(s): Svitlana Vakulenko, Max Göbel, Arno Scharl, Lyndon Nixon
Publication date: 1. 3. 2016
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