On the predictability of talk attendance at academic conferences

Abstract

This paper focuses on the prediction of real-world talk attendances at academic conferences with respect to different influence factors. We study the predictability of talk attendances using real-world tracked face-to-face contacts. Furthermore, we investigate and discuss the predictive power of user interests extracted from the users' previous publications. We apply Hybrid Rooted PageRank, a stateof-the-art unsupervised machine learning method that combines information from different sources. Using this method, we analyze and discuss the predictive power of contact and interest networks separately and in combination. We find that contact and similarity networks achieve comparable results, and that combinations of different networks can only to a limited extend help to improve the prediction quality.For our experiments, we analyze the predictability of talk attendance at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 2011 collected using the conference management system CONFERATOR.

Linking information and people in a social system for academic conferences

“…In collaboration with the Conferator team (Atzmüller et al, 2011), we created a new version of the Conferator system where presentation exploration and scheduling were supported by the new version of TalkRadar based on CN3, while social linking was supported by the original badge-enabled PeerRadar system. This collaboration brought some interesting results that were presented in (Macek et al, 2012;Scholz et al, 2014).…”

“…More recent projects focused solely on recommendation algorithms rather than on building conference support systems (Pham et al, 2012;Scholz, Illig, Atzmueller, & Stumme, 2014;Yaw Asabere et al, 2014) with some of these projects exploring implicit social connections, as could be tracked by sensors. In this context the CN3 project still stands out as one the first implementations of advanced recommender approaches in a conference support system and as the only extensive exploration of explicit social links for presentation recommendations (Lee & Brusilovsky, 2014).…”

Reeling Them In: Initial Insight into the Factors Affecting Presentation Attendance at American Fisheries Society Meetings

“…Neither Scholz et al. () nor Günther et al. () found an effect of seniority on presentation attendance.…”

“…For example, attendance may be influenced by presentation topic (Scholz et al. ), the cleverness of the presentation title (Hartley ; Günther et al. ), and sentiment (the degree to which the language that is used in titles and abstracts is positive, negative, or neutral).…”

“…Scholz et al. () emphasized social interactions and topic interest as predictors of presentation attendance at a software conference. Similarly, Günther et al.…”