Web Services Based Summarization of Informative Web Content on Mobile Devices

Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and other social networking sites are more and more becoming the tool of choice through which millions of people connect and interact. However, with the rapid growth of social networking sites, they started suffering from the traditional problem that exists in online news aggregation, web search engines, web-directories, and other web-based information services, namely information overload. With typical users having tens or perhaps hundreds of online friends, users are likely to receive hundreds or thousands of postings daily. Reading all these postings is a daunting task and the vast majority of them are likely skipped. In a CMIC funded research at the American University in Cairo, Dr. Sherif Ali and Dr. Ahmed Rafea explore ways to distill the information postings in ways that promote important content and hide unnecessary content to suite users who only have limited time or limited display space, such a cell phone screen. They explore a variety of summarization and distillation techniques to filter out off-topic or uninteresting postings and cluster similar postings. They are also looking at ways of visualizing the distilled and clustered postings to maximize the use of constrained displays.

Key Investigators
Dr. Ahmed Rafea
Dr. Sherif Ali

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