Opinion Space

Last updated

Developed at UC Berkeley, "Opinion Space" (also known as The Collective Discovery Engine) is a social media technology designed to help communities generate and exchange ideas about important issues and policies. [1] Version 1.0 was launched on April 4, 2009 at UC Berkeley, and explored the question "Do you think legalizing marijuana is a good idea?" It has since undergone 4 different iterations, and been used in partnership with various organizations including The Occupy movement (Version 4.0, 5/24/2013 [2] ) and the African Robots Network (Version 4.0, 5/25/2013 [3] ). Opinion Space has also been used in collaboration with the United States State Department and the University of California's Berkeley Center for New Media (Version 2.0, 12/1/2009 [4] and Version 3.0, 2/25/2012 [5] ) to gain public perspective on foreign policy issues. Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explained, "Opinion Space will harness the power of connection technologies to provide a unique forum for international dialogue. This is...an opportunity to extend our engagement beyond the halls of government directly to the people of the world" (2010).

Contents

The website uses data visualization and statistical analysis to present and develop public opinion and ideas. Opinion Space is a self-organizing system that uses an intuitive graphical "map" that displays patterns, trends, and insights as they emerge and employs the wisdom of crowds to identify and highlight the most insightful ideas. The system uses a game model that incorporates techniques from deliberative polling, collaborative filtering, and multidimensional visualization.

See also

Scholarly work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collaborative filtering</span> Algorithm

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems. Collaborative filtering has two senses, a narrow one and a more general one.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart J. Russell</span> British computer scientist and author (born 1962)

Stuart Jonathan Russell is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the authoritative textbook of the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.

A recommender system, or a recommendation system, is a subclass of information filtering system that provides suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular user. Recommender systems are particularly useful when an individual needs to choose an item from a potentially overwhelming number of items that a service may offer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visualization (graphics)</span> Set of techniques for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message

Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Patterson (computer scientist)</span> American computer pioneer and academic (born 1947)

David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Goldberg</span> American computer scientist

Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Paulos</span> American computer scientist

Eric Paulos is an American computer scientist, artist, and inventor, best known for his early work on internet robotic teleoperation and is considered a founder of the field of Urban Computing, coining the term "urban computing" in 2004. His current work is in the areas of emancipation fabrication, cosmetic computing, citizen science, New Making Renaissance, Critical Making, Robotics, DIY Biology, DIY culture, Micro-volunteering, and the cultural critique of such technologies through New Media strategies.

Jock D. Mackinlay is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences</span>

The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute affiliated with three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.

Brian A. Barsky is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, working in computer graphics and geometric modeling as well as in optometry and vision science. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Vision Science and an Affiliate Professor of Optometry. He is also a member of the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, an inter-campus program, between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Stonebraker</span> American computer scientist (born 1943)

Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ELKI</span> Data mining framework

ELKI is a data mining software framework developed for use in research and teaching. It was originally created by the database systems research unit at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, led by Professor Hans-Peter Kriegel. The project has continued at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. It aims at allowing the development and evaluation of advanced data mining algorithms and their interaction with database index structures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ion Stoica</span> Romanian–American computer scientist

Ion Stoica is a Romanian–American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva and Databricks with other original developers of Apache Spark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marti Hearst</span> American computer scientist

Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word sense disambiguation. She invented an algorithm that became known as "Hearst patterns" which applies lexico-syntactic patterns to recognize hyponymy (ISA) relations with high accuracy in large text collections, including an early application of it to WordNet; this algorithm is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning. Hearst also developed early work in automatic segmentation of text into topical discourse boundaries, inventing a now well-known approach called TextTiling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lise Getoor</span> American computer scientist

Lise Getoor is a professor in the computer science department, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and reasoning with uncertainty, applied to graphs and structured data. She also works in data integration, social network analysis and visual analytics. She has edited a book on Statistical relational learning that is a main reference in this domain. She has published many highly cited papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. She has also served as action editor for the Machine Learning Journal, JAIR associate editor, and TKDD associate editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Report Card</span>

The California Report Card (CRC) is a mobile-optimized web application designed to promote public involvement in the California government. Developed by Prof. Ken Goldberg and the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley with California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, version 1.0 was released in January 2014. On the CRC site, participants are encouraged to grade California on a scale from A+ to F on six timely topics and to propose their own suggestions of issues that merit attention at the state level. The CRC is a form of E-democracy, structuring and streamlining communication from the California residents to their elected officials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Heer</span> American computer scientist

Jeffrey Michael Heer is an American computer scientist best known for his work on information visualization and interactive data analysis. He is a professor of computer science & engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the UW Interactive Data Lab. He co-founded Trifacta with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Kandel</span>

Sean Kandel is Trifacta's Chief Technical Officer and Co-founder, along with Joseph M. Hellerstein and Jeffrey Heer. He is known for the development of new tools for data transformation and discovery and is the co-developed of Data Wrangler, an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation.

Jessica Hullman is a computer scientist and the Ginni Rometty associate professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. She is known for her research in Information visualization.

Tim Kraska is a German computer scientist specializing in data systems and the intersection of systems and machine learning. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

References

  1. http://opinion.berkeley.edu/
  2. http://opinion.berkeley.edu/occupy#
  3. http://opinion.berkeley.edu/afron#
  4. http://opinion-labs.berkeley.edu/
  5. Department of State Launches New Tool to Foster Online Open Dialogue March 15, 2010 http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/03/138326.htm