Category: Technology

One of the main tasks in my day-to-day work as a science writer is tracking down experts. The web makes this much easier than it ever was for journalists in decades since. There are times when a contact in a highly specialist area does not surface quickly but there are also times when I know for a fact that I’ve already been in touch with an expert in a particular area but for whatever reason cannot bring their name to mind. Google Desktop Search, with its ability to trawl my Thunderbird email archives for any given keyword is a boon in finally “remembering” the contact.

However, finding just a handful of contacts from web searches, email archives and the good-old-fashioned address book pales into insignificance when compared to the kind of industrial data mining companies and organisations require of their “knowledge workers”.

According to Sharman Lichtenstein of the School of Information Systems at Deakin University, in Burwood, Australia, and Sara Tedmori and Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK: “In today’s highly competitive globalised business environment, knowledge workers frequently lack sufficient expertise to perform their work effectively.” The same concern might be applied to those working in any organisation handling vast amounts of data. “Corporate trends such as regular restructures, retirement of the baby boomer generation and high employee mobility have contributed to the displacement and obfuscation of internal expertise,” the researchers explain.

The team explains how knowledge is increasingly distributed across firms and that when staff need to seek out additional expertise they often seek an internal expert to acquire the missing expertise. Indeed, previous studies have shown that employees prefer to ask other people for advice rather than searching documents or databases. Finding an expert quickly can boost company performance and as such locating experts has become a part of the formal Knowledge Management strategy of many organisations.

Such strategies do not necessarily help knowledge workers themselves lacking the search expertise and time required to find the right person for the job, however. So, Jackson developed an initial expertise locator system, later further developed with Tedmori, to address this issue in an automated way. The researchers discuss an automated key-phrase search system that can identify experts from the archives of the organisation’s email system.

Immediately on hearing such an intention, the civil liberties radar pings! There are sociological and ethical issues associated with such easy access and searchability of an email system, surely? More than that, an expert system for finding experts could become wide open to misuse – finding the wrong expert – and abuse – employees and employers unearthing the peculiar personal interests of colleagues for instance.

The first generation of systems designed to find experts used helpdesks as the formal sources of knowledge, and comprised simply of knowledge directories and expert databases. Microsoft’s SPUD project, Hewlett-Packard’s CONNEX KM system, and the SAGE expert finder are key examples of this genre, the researchers point out. Such systems are akin to Yellow Pages and are essentially electronic directories of experts that must be maintained on a continual basis. They allow anyone with access to tap into expertise, but unless the experts keep their profiles up to date, they can quickly lose relevancy and accuracy.

Overall, when large numbers of employees are registered and profiles are inaccurate, credibility is rapidly lost in such systems which are increasingly ignored by knowledge seekers.

Second generation expertise locators were based on organisations offering their staff a personal web space within which they could advertise their expertise internally or externally. Convenient for those searching but again relying on the experts in question to keep their web pages up to date. Moreover, simple keyword matching when searching for an expert would not necessarily find the best expert because the search results would depend on how well the expert had set up their web pages and whether and how well they had included keywords in those pages. In addition, keyword searching can produce lots of hits that must then be scanned manually, which takes time.

The third generation of expert searching relies on secondary sources, such as tracking the browsing patterns and activities of employees to identify individual experts. Such an approach raises massive privacy concerns, even for companies with a strict web access policy. Activity on forums, bulletin boards, and social networks falls into this third generation approach.

The fourth generation approach mashes the first three and perhaps adds natural language searching again with various efficiency and privacy concerns. Again, it does not necessarily find the best expert, but often just the person whose data, profile, and web pages are optimised (deliberately or by chance) to reach the top slot in the search results.

An approach based on key-phrase identification in e-mail messages could, however, address all requirements but throws up a new wave of privacy concerns, which Lichtenstein and colleagues discuss.

There are several features of email that make it popular and valuable for organisational knowledge work, and relevant to to finding an expert:

• It attracts worker attention
• It is integrated with everyday work
• It provides a context for sense-making about ideas, projects and other types of business knowledge
• It enables the referencing of work objects (such as digital documents), and provides a history via quoted messages
• It has high levels of personalised messages which are appealing, meaningful and easily understood
• It encourages commitment and accountability by automatically documenting exchanges
• It can be archived, so providing valuable individual, collective and organisational memories that may be mined
• It facilitates the resolution of multiple conflicting perspectives which can stimulate an idea for a new or improved process, product or service.

All these factors mean that email could become a very useful tool for finding experts. Already many people use their personal email archives to seek out knowledge and experts, but widen that to the organisational level and the possibilities become enormous.

The researchers have developed an Email Knowledge Extraction (EKE) system that utilises a Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK) employed to build a key-phrase extraction “engine”. The system is applied in two stages, the first of which “teaches” the system how to tag the speech parts of an email, so that headers and other extraneous information become non-searched “stop words” within the email repository. The second stage extracts key-phrases from the searchable sections of an email once it is sent. This extraction process is transparent to the sender and takes just milliseconds to operate on each email. A final stage involves the sender being asked to rank each identified key-phrase to indicate their level of expertise in that key-phrase area. A database of experts and their areas of expertise is gradually developed by this approach. Later, employees searching for experts can simply consult this database.

The EKE system has been implemented at Loughborough University and at AstraZeneca in trials and found to be able to capture employee knowledge of their own expertise and to allow knowledge workers to correctly identify suitable experts given specific requirements. The researchers, however, highlights the social and ethical issues that arise with the use of such as system:

• Employee justice and rights and how these might conflict with employer rights.
• Privacy and monitoring, as there is more than a small element of “Big Brother” inherent in such a system
• Motivational issues for sharing knowledge, as not all those with expertise may wish to be data mined in this way, having enough work of their own to fill their 9-to-5 for instance
• Relationships, as not everyone will be able to work well together regardless of expertise
• Ethical implications of expert or non-expert classification, as the system could ultimately flag as experts those employees with little or no expertise.
• Deliberate misclassification of experts, as all systems are open to abuse and malpractice.
• Expert database disclosure, as such a comprehensive database if accessed illicitly by an organisation’s rivals could wreak havoc in terms of stealing competitive advantage, headhunting or other related activities.

Lichtenstein, S., Tedmori, S., Jackson, T. (2008). Socio-ethical issues for expertise location from electronic mail. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 4(1), 58. DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2008.019737

Intellectual property, copyright, creative commons, copyleft, open access… These are all terms high on the science and other agenda these days. For example, public-funded scientists the world over are calling for research results to be available free to them and their peers for the public good and for the good of scientific advancement itself. Librarians likewise are also interested in the fullest dissemination and sharing of knowledge and information, while user-creators and the new breed of citizen journalists that are the result of the Internet Age are also more liberal in their outlook regarding the proprietary nature of creative works.

On the other hand, traditional publishers, database disseminators, and the commercial creative industry consider the investment they put into the creation and distribution of works as a basis for the right to charge readers and users and for profit-making. Meanwhile, adventurous organisations that are not necessarily beholden to shareholders, to other commercial concerns, and to learned society memberships, are experimenting with alternative business models with varying degrees of success.

One aspect of copyright that arises repeatedly in any discussion is what is considered fair use and what kind of usage warrants a cease & desist order from the owner of copyright in their works.

Now, Warren Chik, an Assistant Professor of Law at Singapore Management University, is calling for a reinvention of the general and flexible fair use doctrine through the simple powerful elevation of its legal status from a legal exception to that of a legal right.

Writing in the International Journal of Private Law, 2008, 1, 157-210, Chik explains that it is the relatively recent emergence of information technology and its impact on the duplication and dissemination of creative works – whether it is a photograph, music file, digitised book, or other creative work – that has led to a strengthening of the copyright regime to the extent that it has introduced “a state of disequilibrium into the delicate equation of balance that underlies the international copyright regime”.

Copyright holders have lobbied for their interests and sought legal extension to the protection over “their” creative works. But, the law in several countries has undergone a knee-jerk reaction that is not necessarily to the benefit of the actual creator of the copyright work or of the user. Chik summarises the impact this has had quite succinctly:

The speedy, overzealous and untested manner in which the legal response has taken has resulted in overcompensation such that the interests of individuals and society have been compromised to an unacceptable degree.

For some forms of creative works, such as music and videos, there has emerged a protectionist climate that has led to the creation of double protection in law the form of the digital rights management (DRM) system and anti-circumvention laws that allows copyright owners to prosecute those that attempt to get around such restrictive devices. This, Chik affirms, has “inadvertently caused the displacement of the important fair use exemptions that many consider the last bastion for the protection of civil rights to works.”

Chik points out that this tightening of the laws run counter to the increasing penetration of electronic forms of storage and communication, the borderless nature of the Internet and the invention of enabling technologies such as the so-called “Web 2.0”. This in turn is apparently leading to a general social shift towards more open collaborative creativity, whether in the arts or the sciences, and what he describes as “the rise of a new global consciousness of sharing and participation across national, physical and jurisdictional borders.”

Whether that view is strictly true or not is a different matter. At what scale will those who like to share a few snapshots among strangers or a small-scale collaboration between laboratories realise the need for a more robust approach to their images and data? For example, if you are sharing a few dozen photos you may not see any point in protecting them beyond a creative commons licence, but what happens when you realise you have tens of thousands of saleable photos in storage? Similarly, a nifty chemical reagent that saves a few minutes in a small laboratory each week could take on global significance if it turns out to be relevant to cropping a synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. Who would not wish to receive full credit and monetary compensation for their creative works in such cases?

Chik proposes not to destroy or even radically overhaul the present copyright regime, instead he endorses a no less significant reinvention of the general and flexible fair use doctrine through the simple powerful elevation of its legal status from a legal exception to that of a legal right, with all the benefits that a legal right entails. This change, he suggests could be widely and rapidly adopted.

Currently, he says, fair use exists formally only as a defence to an action of copyright infringement. But, DRM and other copyright protection threaten this defence and skew the playing field once more in favour of copyright holders. “Fair use should exist in the law as something that one should be able to assert and be protected from being sued for doing,” Chik says.

Such a change will render copyright law more accurately reflective of an electronically interconnected global society and also acknowledge the importance and benefits of enabling technologies and its role in human integration, progress and development.

Chik, W. (2008). Better a sword than a shield: the case for statutory fair use right in place of a defence. International Journal of Private Law, 1(1/2), 157. DOI: 10.1504/IJPL.2008.019438

Sciencebase readers will likely be aware that when I cite a research paper, I usually use the DOI system, the Digital Object Identifier. This acts like a redirect service taking a unique number, which might look like this assigned to each research paper by its publisher and passing it to a server that works out where the actual paper is on the web.

The DOI system has several handlers, and indeed, that’s one of its strength: it is distributed. So, as long as you have the DOI, you can use any of the handlers (dx.doi.org, http://hdl.handle.net, http://hdl.nature.com/ etc) to look up a paper of interest, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJGENVI.2008.018637 will take you to a paper on water supplies on which I reported recently.

The DOI is kind of a hard-wired redirect for the actual URL of the object itself, which at the moment will be a research paper. It could, however, be any another digital object: an astronomical photograph, a chemical structure, or a genome sequence, for instance. In fact, thinking about it, a DOI could be used as a shorthand, a barcode, if you like, for whole genomes, protein libraries, databases, molecular depositions.

I’m not entirely sure why we will also need the Library of Congress permalinks, the National Institutes of Health simplified web links, as well as the likes of PURL and all those URL shortening systems like tinyURL and snipurl. A unified approach, which perhaps worked at the point of origin, the creator of the digital object, which I’ve suggested previously and coined the term PaperID, would seem so much more straightforward.

One critical aspect of the DOI is that it ties to hard, unchanging, non-dynamic links (URLs) for any given paper, or other object. Over on the CrossTech blog, Tony Hammond raises an interesting point regarding one important difference between hard and soft links and the rank that material at the end of such a link will receive in the search engines. His post discusses DOI and related systems, such as PURL (the Persistent URL system), which also uses an intermediate resolution system to find a specific object at the end of a URL. There are other systems emerging such as OpenURL and LCCN permalinks, which seek to do something similar.

However, while Google still predominates online search, hard links will be the only way for a specific digital object to be given any weight in its results page. Dynamic or soft links are discounted, or not counted at all, and so never rank in the way that material at the end of a hard link will.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter, as those scouring the literature will have their own databases to trawl that require their own ranking algorithms based on keywords chosen. But, I worry about serendipity. What of the student taking a random walk on the web for recreation or perhaps in the hope of finding an inspirational gem? If that gem is, to mix a metaphor, a moving target behind a soft link, then it is unlikely to rank in the SERPs and may never be seen.

Perhaps I’m being naive, maybe students never surf the web in this way, looking for research papers of interest. However, with multidisciplinarity increasingly necessary in many cross-disciplines it seems unlikely that gems are going to be unearthed through conventional literature searching of a parochial database that covers a limited range of journals and other resources.

Social engineering attacks, what used to be known as a confidence, or con, tricks, can only be defeated by potential victims taking a sceptical attitude to unsolicited approaches and requests for privileged information and resources. That is the message that arrives from European researchers.

Most of us have received probably dozens of phishing messages and emails from scammers on the African continent seeking to relieve us of our hard-earned cash. Apparently, these confidence tricksters are so persuasive that they succeed repeatedly in hustling funds even from those among us with a normally cynical outlook and awareness of the ways of the world.

On the increase too are cowboy construction outfits and hoax double-glazing sales staff who wrest the life savings from senior citizens and so-called boiler room fraudsters who present get-rich-quick schemes so persuasively that thousands of unwitting individuals lose money totalling millions of dollars each year.

Con artists and hustlers have always preyed on greed and ignorance. As the saying, goes a fool and their money are easily parted. However, the new generation of social engineers, are not necessarily plundering bank accounts with promises of riches untold, but are finding ways to infiltrate sensitive databases, accounts, and other resources, using time-honoured tricks and a few new sleights of hand.

Now, Jose Sarriegi of the Tecnun (University of Navarra), in San Sebastian, Spain, and Jose Gonzalez, currently in the department of Security and Quality and Organizations, at the University of Agder, Norway, have taken a look at the concept of social engineering, and stripped it down to the most abstract level (International Journal of System of Systems Engineering (2008, 1, 111-127)). Their research could lead to a shift in attitude that will arm even the least sceptical person with the necessary social tools to spot an attempt at social engineering and stave off the attack with diligence.

Fundamentally, the researchers explain, social engineering is an attempt to exploit a victim, whether an individual or organization, in order to steal an asset, money, data, or another resource or else to make some resource unavailable to legitimate users in a denial of service attack or in the extreme instigate some terrorist, or equally destructive, activity.

Of course, a social engineering attack may not amount to a single intrusion, it could involve layer upon layer of deceptions at different places and on different people and resources. The creation of a sophisticated back-story, access to less sensitive resources, and targeting of the ultimate goal is more likely to be a dynamic process. This, the researchers suggest, means that looking for “heaps of symptoms”, as might occur in attempting to detect someone breaking into a computer system, is no longer appropriate and a dynamic response to a dynamic attack is more necessary now than ever before.

Recognising the shifting patterns of an ongoing and ever-changing social engineering attack means better detection of problems low in the metaphorical radar, the team suggests. Better detection means improved efficacy of security controls. The best defence is then to build, layer-by-layer, feedback loops that can catch an intruder at any of many different stages rather than relying on a single front-line defence that might be defeated with a single blow.

How can science benefit from online social media?

My good friend, Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University, a chemist and host of the UsefulChem Blogspot blog, who is very keen on the use of information technology and the notion of the open notebook was first to respond to my question when I asked a variety of contacts for their opinions: “For me the answer is clear: it is a great way to find new collaborators whom I would otherwise not have met.” I’d have to agree, I’ve known JCB for quite some time now, although we’ve never even shaken hands. He was one of the early interviewees for my Reactive Profiles column. We didn’t meet virtually through online media, however, but through a mutual friend Tony Williams, then of ACD/Labs and now increasingly well known as ChemSpiderman.

Erik Mols, a Lecturer in Bioinformatics at Leiden University of Applied Science, The Netherlands, echoed JCB’s remark: “It gives me the opportunity to discuss with people I never would have met,” he said, and added that, “It creates possibilities for my students to do their internship abroad.”

Another good friend, Egon Willighagen, who is a post-doc at Wageningen University & Research Center, provided a quite detailed answer: “It provides one with the means to mine the overwhelming amount of information,” he says, “For example, searching for some scientific piece of software is more targeted when I search amongst bookmarks of fellow bio/chemoinformaticians than if I were to search Google.” He points out that the Web 2.0 services are most useful when one’s online friends have labelled or tagged particular tools, or better still commented or rated them, as can be done with http://del.icio.us/, for instance. This concept holds just as true for publications, courses, molecules, and other content.

Willighagen points out that conventional search engines do fill an important gap (WoS, Google, etc), “But, they lack the ability in itself to link this with expert knowledge,” he says, “This is particularly why Google, I think, is offering all sorts of services: to find a user profile from a mining point of view. FOAF, social bookmarking, etc, makes such profiles more explicit, allowing more targeted search results.”

Personal contact Joerg Kurt Wegner, a scientist at Tibotec (Johnson & Johnson), suggested that my original question might be couched in slightly different terms: “The question is rather why ‘social science’ is different to ‘editorial science’?”

He suggests that one of the best visualizations for this difference is Alexa’s web ranking statistic comparing Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia is a social information gathering process and Britannica is an editorial process. The graph shows that Wikipedia increased its access and popularity dramatically compared to Britannica. “Based on this, I would conclude that the benefit (not only the plain access) is higher for the social service,” Wegner says. He then emphasises that there is indeed a shared problem among scientists, that of information overload.

“Honestly, I cannot see how any editorial process can cope with this problem,” says Wegner. Social software in contrast might be able to tackle this challenge. “Social software is driven by small dedicated user groups (oligarchies),” he explains, “So, compared to an editorial process the number of ‘real’ contributors might actually not be higher. However, the enrichment of diverse and really interested people might be better. If you think that you need for science the smartest set of diverse people, then ‘social software’ cannot be a bad choice, right?”

Wegner suggests that anyone who does not believe this to be the case should carry out a search for their collaborative partners using conventional information sources. The likely result once again will be information overload. More information but no increase in our reading capacity. “Information overload solutions and social software looks like a matching relationship to me,” he adds. The final obstacle is for social software, web 2.0, online networking, social media, whatever you want to call it, to be accepted by the majority and to mature. “Has social software reached a mature status in Gartner’s hype cycle,” asks Wegner, “that means that even conservative people will realize that it is highly recommended to adopt this technology. The question here is also not if science benefits from social media, but how steep the benefit curve is. The longer you wait, the flatter the benefit curve.”

Deepak Singh of the business|bytes|genes|molecules blog adds that, “Historically communication among scientists was limited, e.g. you could get together with your peers from around the world at a conference, or through newsgroups. That’s where collaborations were born, but the scale was limited out of necessity.” Things have changed significantly. “Today, with resources like open wet-ware, etc, and more avenues for online conversation, including blogs and wikis collaborations become a lot easier and feasible.”

In addition, Singh suggests that science is no longer restricted to peer-reviewed publications as the only means of formal communication within the scientific community. “You could publish a paper and blog about the back story, or like some others, e.g. Jean-Claude Bradley, you could practice Open Notebook Science.” He points out that the likes of videos and podcasts only add to the options now available for communicating science.

However, there is another thread to the idea of social media benefiting science and that is that it could also benefit the public with respect to science. “For some reason,” says Singh, “science ended up becoming this silo and preserve of the experts and we ended up with a chasm between experts and others.” Social media could close this gap and make it easier to create virtual communities of people who have common interests, like to share their knowledge, are just curious about things, or are lobbyists and others. “One area where I see tremendous opportunity is education,” Singh adds, “whether through screencasting, or podcasts, or just video lectures and wiki-based learning, that’s probably the one area where I am most hopeful.”

Find David Bradley on Nature Network here and on Nanopaprika nano science network here.