When I discover who I am, I'll be free. -R. Ellison

Sébastien Paquet

Welcome to my home page! Chances are you came around in the hope of learning more about me. So without further ado, here's a brief listing of what I'm interested in right now. (For a more dynamic view of me I recommend that you take a look at my weblog; if you don't have time to read what follows, have a look at my keywords.)

Online communities

An online community is a sort of virtual meeting ground for people who share interests but for one reason or another cannot gather face-to-face. The idea is simple: members contribute content for the benefit of others. Over the recent years, a number of communities have emerged on the Internet, in particular on the World Wide Web.

Most of the interesting community sites implement a mechanism to ensure that the content is of good quality. This typically falls in one of three categories:

Some people (myself included) think that online communities are such an interesting topic that it warrants its own community! MeatBall is the place to go if you're interested in discovering what makes online communities come alive.

Online knowledge communities

What I'm specifically interested in is online communities of people who focus on sharing knowledge and ideas. These communities are commited to building public, reliable sources of knowledge. Rather successful examples include:

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that is chiefly concerned with ways to encode knowledge for intelligent software systems. However, I believe it is equally important to study how we represent knowledge that is intended for human consumption. In my view, the key problem in getting knowledge from where it is to where it is needed lies in how it is represented and organized. Currently, knowledge flows rather well inside established communities, but strenuously between communities, due to differences in language and culture. I'm looking for ways to alleviate this problem.

If the preceding paragraph made any sense to you, you might want to take a look at my paper, Towards Solving the Interdisciplinary Language Barrier Problem (pdf), which explains how we could exploit analogies between concepts from different areas to build bridges between them. Don't be afraid, it's not a hard read.

For other ramblings of mine on the Web

See my regularly updated weblog (recent headlines below) and my OpenMind. You are also welcome to Google me.

I also have a list of publications in case you're looking for that. These days a large part of my writing goes directly on the Web, though; This page lists some of my pieces of writing that were well liked.

And you can email me by removing the spaces in the following address: paquetse at i r o .umontreal.ca

Recently in my weblog:

Recently in my musiclog:

From my photolog: