Steve Stein: Scientific Research

     Politik 2.0 is a web application that allows vistitors to compare the different online activities of German parties before and while the German Bundestag elections. The web based programm crawles and analysis data from various different online sources with special focus on web 2.0 applicationas and social networking sites. It shows the relations between the fraction of the distribution of votes and the web 2.0-activities.
Students: Sascha Arnold & Janine Schmutzer. 2009.

     ViSoR is based on the crimeblibs framework and focusses on the Ruhr Area in Germany. The application provides a visualization of several social indicators, statistics and crimes. In addition to the normal features of the framework further functions have been added that allow a dynamic embedding of various new parameters such as schools and businesses. ViSoR allows its users to view and compare particular suburbs or regions in this area.
Students: Luciano Pico & Thorsten Brügge. 2009.

     CrimeAnalyzer is an adaption of the crimeblibs project. It ports the capability of visualizing up-to-date crime statistics for the city of Hamburg (Germany). The application maps and visualizes crimes and allows the users to identify crime hot spots, trends and general patterns. Besides the visualization of the police reports an additional function provides statistical analysis of crime scene distribution for the specific regions of the city and allows to compare those date with the actual population.
Students: Jennifer Fuchs & Stefanie Müller. 2009.

     Environment of Crime is a further development of the crimeblibs project that visualizes Berlins police reports within a google maps mashup. The generic interface of the application allows to visualize and present social data and crime satistics from Berlin (Germany). Bayesian algorithms are used to extract relevant information from different sources such as environmental conditions, cultural locations and public transportation. All of those parameters are individually calculated and clustered.
Students: Christian Maurer & Michael Schaller. 2009.

     HelloWorld Goes Mobile, a scalable and decentralized social network for Google Android compatible mobile phones, is location aware and provides mapping, friend-locating, as directions and distance features for objects and services. The software relies on open standards (XML, OpenID and OpenSocial), public key infrastructures (private- and public key concepts), signatures, and Java-encryption technologies like RSA, PBEMD5 and AES.
Students: Artur Friesen, Kok-Chee Lim, Tobias Schröter and Julian Weigle. Winter 2008/2009.

     Social Movie Map analyzes and visualizes the movie consumption patterns of MySpace users, focusing on the relationships between listed movies, user profiles, origin, age and gender. Social Movie Map is currently based on a data set of more than 6 million MySpace user profiles, collected by a distributed information retrieval system. The visualization is based on the Adobe Flex and open source visual analytics library "BirdEye RaVis", the analysis is based on statistics, Bayesian and Levenshtein algorithms.
Students: Philipp Bender and Florian Wilhelm. Winter 2008/2009.

     Bookstats analyzes literature consumption patterns based on the profile data of about 6 million MySpace users. The application uses Java, PHP, MySQL, Flash, ActionScript and Adobe Flex to generate charts and treemap visualizations in a web based interface, filtering results by age, country of origin, ethnicity, gender, and income. Reflecting the demographic change in media usage, from six million profiles only one million included favourite book titles, "Harry Potter" was featured in all cultures and religions right next to the Bible and the Qur'an.
Students: Sebastian Daum and Anika Faber. Winter 2008/2009.

      WorldMusicTracker analyzes music bands of different genres, audiences, popularity, and interactions across the globe and is based on a datasample of several million MySpace users, 600.000 bands, and 3 million comments. The application uses MySQL, JSP, HTML, CSS, and Ampcharts for heatmaps and visualisations. WorldMusicTrackers provides solid evidence for the popularity of American, Canadian and British bands and reveals that most user comments are created in the Winter, generally after 8pm.
Students: Thomas Kuhn and Eugen Schäfer. Winter 2008/2009.