Hi I'm Jon

In the summer of 2009 I obtained a upper second class (2.i) Bachelors of Science degree with Honors from The University of Wales, Swansea in the field of Computer Science.

My dissertation was entitled 'Tricking Google', and concentrated on researching methods used by Google to rank search results. In Particular researching the effect of markup, and how different markup effects the position of results in a search engine results page. My dissertation was supervised by Dr. Markus Roggenbach.

From September 2009 to October 2010, I was studying for a Master of Science at the Future Interactive Technology Lab, located at Swansea University entitled Future Interactive Technologies and Computing. My thesis focused on researching perceptions of useful and non useful data within tweets. As well as building a natural language processing powered search engine, based on the research that I had conducted. This was under the supervision of Dr. Max L. Wilson.

As of October 2010, I have started a Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Max L. Wilson and Prof. Matt Jones which is concerned with information retrieval and social media. My Ph.D. is funded by a KESS Maxi scholarship, in conjunction with a local industrial partner. I will be primarily based in the Future Interactive Technology Lab, located at Swansea University for the duration of my Ph.D.

Whilst at the FIT Lab, I have been able to participate in Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2010 competition. As part of a team made up of fellow FIT Labbers, we progressed to round two of three, reaching the UK finals of the software design competition. This means we were in the top six teams that initially entered. Our entry was Frenigy, please take a look at our site and send feedback our way.

Along with my supervisor (Dr. Max L. Wilson) in July 2010, I was able to help make Tweempact. Tweempact allow users to see how far a single tweet reaches, by assessing the size of audience that it has reached, and placing them (where possible) on a map. You can read more about Tweempact here.

Conference Papers

1. Wilson, M. J., Wilson, M. L. and Hurlock, J
   Keyword Clouds: Having very little effect on sensemaking in web search engines. To appear in Proceedings of CHI'12 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts.
   • Acceptance Rate: 48%
   • Download coming Soon
2. Hurlock, J and Wilson, M. L.
   Searching Twitter: Separating the Tweet from the Chaff. In Proceedings of 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, in press.
   • Acceptance Rate: 23%
   • Download Paper (PDF)

Theses & Dissertations

1. Searching Twitter: Extracting Useful Information
   Masters of Science Thesis
   • Date: October 2010
   • Download coming soon
2. Tricking Google
   Bachelor of Science Dissertation
   • Date: June 2009
   • Download coming soon

External Presentations

1. Searching Twitter: Separating the Tweet from the Chaff.
   • Date: July 2011
   • Location: ICWSM, Barcelona, Spain
   • Type: Full Paper Presentation
   Click here to see the presentation

   Click Here to see download options

   • Keynote Slides Zipped
   • Slides as a PDF
   • Slides as an Interactive Movie (102.5 mb)
   • Slides as a Movie (124.3 mb)

   Watch me present the paper at ICWSM 2011

Internal Presentations

1. Understanding Temporal Query Dynamics by Kulkami, Teevan, Svore and Dumais
   • Date: March 2011
   • Type: Reading Group
   • Download coming soon
2. Research Away Day Pecha Kucha Style Presentation
   • Date: January 2011
   • Type: Departmental Presentation
   • Download coming soon
3. Questions are Content: A Taxonomy of Questions in a Microblogging Environment by Miles Efron and Megan Winget
   • Date: November 2010
   • Type: Reading Group
   • Download coming soon
4. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine by Damon Horowitz, Sepandar Kamvar
   • Date: May 2010
   • Type: Reading Group
   • Download coming soon

Through out my time at university, I have made several websites, some of which have won awards. Below are some of my more recent projects, some of these are applications, and some are websites.

Confabulation

Site: http://www.confabulationapp.com (Under construction)

About: Visualisation tool, allowing users, to see conversations happening over twitter.

Technologies: Processing, Twitter Streaming API

Tweempact

Site: http://www.tweempact.com

About: Visualisation tool, allowing users, to track the impact of a tweet.

Technologies: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, Twitter Search API, Google Maps API

Frenigy

Site: http://www.frenigy.com

About: Encouraging social motivation, to reduce energy consumption.

Technologies: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, WordPress, Facebook Connect, Google Earth API, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Silverlight

To obtain a comprehensive copy of my portfolio or my C.V. please email me, using the email form located here. However, please not I am currently not accepting any work until mid October.