Results of IEEE CIS Facebook Photo Competition

This is cross-posted from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's blog.

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The Facebook photo competition closed on the 30th of September. The winners, as judged by the number of "likes" each photo received, are as follows:

In first place, and winner of an iPad, is Ryan Rhay Vicerra, of the Philipines, with 1452 Likes. Ryan also wins free membership to the CIS for 2013.

In second and third place, and winning free CIS membership for 2013, are  Kanny Krizzy David, from the Philippines, with 1219 Likes, and Wissam Audah from the UK, with 489 Likes.

Congratulations to the winners! And our thanks to everyone who entered and who voted for the photos, all of whom made the competition such a great success.

Reminder: IEEE CIS Facebook Photo Competition

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society are running a photo competition on Facebook. See the flyer below to find out how to enter.

Reminder: IEEE CIS Facebook Photo Competition

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society are running a photo competition on Facebook. See the flyer below to find out how to enter.

International Neural Network Society Social Media sites

The International Neural Network Society (INNS) has established a presence on several popular social media sites. The goals of this initiative are:

- To promote the membership and activities of the INNS
- To better bring the members of the INNS relevant information about the activities of the society
- To help facilitate networking between members

Members of the INNS and other interested people are invited join us on the following INNS social media sites:

Blog: http://innsorg.blogspot.com/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/#!/INNSorg

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Neural-Network-Society/110873922384495

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2985057

Google+: https://plus.google.com/106354210782755399208/posts

IEEE CIS Facebook Photo Competition

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society are running a photo competition on Facebook. See the flyer below to find out how to enter.

Building an online presence as an academic

There are several reasons an academic might want to establish an online presence. The first is good old-fashioned self-promotion: this is especially important for early-career academics. No-one else is going to promote your work, so you have to do it yourself. Carefully building an online presence that connects your name with your area of expertise is one way to build your profile and to get your name known.

I have quite a common name ("Michael" and "John" are something like the second or third most common given names for males in my generation, and "Watts" is the second or third most common surname for people of English ancestry) but if you Google for "Michael Watts computational intelligence" 45 of the first 50 hits are either my pages or pages that specifically mention me, such as committees I serve on. So, as far as Google is concerned, my name is linked pretty strongly with computational intelligence (certainly more strongly than it is with ecological modelling - 29/50 - which is what I get paid to do).

Secondly, communicating your work to other scientists and to the public is at the heart of what scientists do: idealistically, our work is done to benefit humanity, but it cannot do that if no-one knows about what you do. Of course, the primary means of communicating with other scientists is via papers and conferences, but papers are not very accessible to the general public: they are written for other scientists, that is, they can be quite abstract and hard to read, and papers can be hard to find, that is, locked behind pay-walls. An online presence, however, can be made much more accessible. It does not need to be written in the strict "scientific style", it can include links to supporting material to assist reader comprehension, and it is freely available.


Having a website is a good start, and is a good place to put things like software and teaching materials that you want to make available for others to use. If you have something to say though (and every scientist should have something to say) then a blog is an excellent way of saying it. I started this blog because I was inspired to do so by two of the people I work with, both of whom run popular blogs, on climate change and conservation biology respectively. After studying their blogs and realising that there was nothing equivalent for computational intelligence, I started this blog. It takes me an hour or two per week to produce new content for the blog, which I personally think is time well spent.

There are many social media and networking sites out there, and it is worth your time to establish profiles in as many of them as you can. The obvious ones are Facebook*, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ but there are also a number of networking sites specifically for academics. The big ones appear to be Academia.edu and ResearchGate, but others are network.nature.com, Epernicus, KES International, Research pages, the Research Cooperative, scholarz.net, biomedexperts.com, scispace.com, mynetresearch.com, labroots.com, researchiscool.com, iamresearcher.com, researchr.org and hypertope.com. There are also publication trackers like Google Scholar Citations and Researcher ID. Most networking and social media sites allow you to specify a research interest and a home page, so I always list computational intelligence and point them all to my own web site. This has the effect of creating a lot of points on the web that, firstly, associate my name with computational intelligence, and secondly, associate my name with my website. This has the effect of boosting my name in the search engine results. It can be a lot of work to set these profiles up, especially if you have a lot of publications, but maintenance after that is limited to updating sites when you publish new papers.

Having a website isn't that expensive (I pay about AU$110 per year for the website and domain name). Blogs are free (unless you want to associate it with a domain name, which is still pretty cheap), as are the social media and networking sites I use. The best thing is, many of these can be linked together so that an update on one site is propagated to others (see the report I wrote here about linking this blog to other sites).

There are several articles about scientists and social media that are well worth a read: here, here, here, here, and here. These cover things like using Twitter to communicate more effectively. So, why not invest some time and a bit of money, and start establishing your own online presence?

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*You may notice that I haven't linked to my Facebook profile: this is because I mostly use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and family members, who aren't particularly interested in Computational Intelligence.

Edited 17 April to add link to researchr.org
Edited 11 April to add link to iamresearcher.com

New article: IEEE CIS social media

An article I co-wrote with Albert Lam, Dongrui Wu and Pablo Estevez, describing the social media presence of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society:

Via IEEE Xplore.

Alternative link.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Call for Social Media Subcommittee members

Dear CIS members,

This is a call for active participation in the CIS Social Media Subcommittee.

The Social Media Subcommittee, established in 2011, is a subcommittee under the Member Activities committee of CIS. Our objectives are to promote CIS membership and activities, to leverage our online presence, and build our leadership in CIS-related research and industrial communities.

Social Media have become very popular in recent years. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Second Life. They have become part of our lives and some of the major channels to get updates about our friends and the rest of the world. Our mission is to keep you up-to-date about CIS and computational intelligence-related information in the most direct and timely manner. You will no longer miss deadlines for submitting papers to our conferences and you will be able to get involved in discussions of the hottest topics in computational intelligence with our professionals.

The Subcommittee is continuously seeking to develop new and innovative initiatives for promoting CIS with Social Media. We are looking for enthusiastic members who are keen to get involved in the activities of the Subcommittee. The main tasks are to set up and manage the accounts in some of the major Social Media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Second Life, etc.) and to pursue suggestions for using Social Media to other parties of CIS. Experience in programming in Facebook and Second Life is preferred.

We believe you may have experience in and use one or more Social Media on a regular basis. To be a Subcommittee member, you will just need to spare some of your time working with Social Media for CIS. You will provide valuable experience in committee membership and society involvement that could be useful on your CV, or as a stepping-stone towards further CIS technical committee involvement.

Being a member will require enthusiasm, dedication and the investment of some of your time for meetings, preparing documents for initiatives, and managing the CIS Social Media activities. As the Chairs of the IEEE CIS Social Media Subcommittee, we would like to invite any interested IEEE CIS members worldwide to join us.

If you are interested in joining this Social Media Subcommittee and further promoting your professional careers, please send your CV to us (cis.socialmedia@gmail.com) with email subject title “[SMS] Recruitment 2012” before January 28, 2012.

If you are not interested in joining the Subcommittee but are keen to provide input and feedback on CIS initiatives for Social Media, please also contact us.

We would appreciate it if you could forward this call to any IEEE CIS members who may be interested.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for your attention.

Best Regards,

Albert Y.S. Lam

Chair, IEEE CIS Social Media Subcommittee

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ayslam/

Multi-lingual social internetworking

As I promised in this post, the social media sites of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) are now available in several new languages: in the last week, we have set up sites in Korean, Greek, German and Spanish.

I have also posted a document describing how it works: in short, a post is published on the CIS blog, which is then automatically translated by Yahoo! Pipes, then sent to the social media sites. So, it is now possible to follow IEEE CIS news in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Korean, Greek, German and Spanish. These are machine translations, so they can be a bit off sometimes, but I'm told that for the most part they're OK.

A complete listing of the English language social media sites is in this post. The addresses for the Chinese, French and Portuguese sites are listed in this post. Finally, the Korean, Greek, German and Spanish sites are as follows:

Korean

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciskr


Greek

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisgr


German


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisde


Spanish

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecises

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Multi-Lingual Social Media

The social media presences of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now include sites in languages other than English. This work has been carried out by the Social Media subcommittee, and so far, we have set up sites for Chinese (Simplified), French and Portuguese.

More sites are being developed and I'll blog about those when they become available. I'm also working on a report describing how the automatic translation is done, similar to this previous post on connecting social media sites. The English language sites are listed in this post. The new sites are listed below.

Chinese


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciscn
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeeciscn
http://www.plerb.com/ieeeciscn
http://ieeecis-cn.tumblr.com/
http://zuosa.com/ieeecis
http://ieeeciscn.jaiku.com/
http://digu.com/opi37q
http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeeciscn/
http://www.plurk.com/ieeeciscn
http://weibo.com/ieeecis

French


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisfr
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.jaiku.com/

Portuguese

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecispt
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.jaiku.com/

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society social media presence expands

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now has presences on several more social media sites. This expansion is due to the ongoing work of the Social Media Subcommittee.

The first of the new sites is the CIS blog: http://ieee-cis.blogspot.com/. This is the source of and archive for news and announcements from the society. When a new post is published on the blog, it is automatically distributed to the other social media presences, using the methods described in this report.

The major social media sites are:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecis
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/IEEE.CIS
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=75152

Newer presences are now up at the following sites:

Identica: http://identi.ca/ieeecis
Plurk: http://www.plurk.com/ieeecis
Qaiku: http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeecis/
Jaiku: http://ieeecis.jaiku.com/
Tumblr: http://ieeecis.tumblr.com/
Shoutitout: http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecis

More expansions are planned for the near future. I will blog about them when they happen.

Social Internetworking

I've just put online a brief description (PDF) of how I connect this blog to other social media sites, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and ResearchGATE.

I describe it as "Social Internetworking" (not an original phrase) and it involves using various free aggregators and web services to export blog posts.

You can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/DrMikeWatts, where you will see updates to this blog as soon as they are posted. You can find a complete list of my social networking profiles on my personal web page, mike.watts.net.nz.