A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users

On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their characterisation still requires experimenting. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant footprint on Twitter. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream. The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics, enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise specific classes of online users. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore

Participatory analytics for transport decision-making

This thesis investigates the design and evaluation of several software platforms that facilitate participatory outcomes in transport decision-making across operational, local and strategic scales. These platforms act as instruments to explore aspects of the research question: "How can urban dashboards be contextualised, designed & evaluated in a way that is sensitive to the changing role of digital democracy, immersive technologies and the increasingly collaborative nature of planning?". The concept of participatory urban dashboards is introduced, followed by process of participatory analytics. This process involves bringing more people on board with both using the dashboard (e.g., together or collaboratively) and allowing a more general audience of citizens or stakeholders to make sense and validate what is displayed. The research is applied to the city of Sydney, Australia. Sydney is a growing, global city with a wide variety of transport infrastructure ambitions and a strong, open-data ecosystem. Sydney’s transport system underpins the case studies of the operational, local and strategic digital artefacts assessed in this research. Participatory analytics outcomes as a result of interacting with these digital prototypes are evaluated. This will, in turn, help direct research and real-life applications and development of these tools. Further, it aims to build on research gap calling for further understanding of context-specific, user-centric design and evaluation of these participatory analytics tools

Socially Responsible Higher Education

Is higher education contributing to our global crises? Does it offer stories of hope? The editors feature authors and viewpoints from often excluded groups of emerging scholars and parts of the world seldom read in literature on higher education and social responsibility.; Readership: Higher education students, scholars and administrators. Ministries of higher education, policy makers, networks, foundations, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Climate crisis and social justice activists, University World News

Socially Responsible Higher Education

Is higher education contributing to our global crises? Does it offer stories of hope? The editors feature authors and viewpoints from often excluded groups of emerging scholars and parts of the world seldom read in literature on higher education and social responsibility.; Readership: Higher education students, scholars and administrators. Ministries of higher education, policy makers, networks, foundations, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Climate crisis and social justice activists, University World News

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Across Space and Time. Papers from the 41st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Perth, 25-28 March 2013

This volume presents a selection of the best papers presented at the forty-first annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. The theme for the conference was "Across Space and Time", and the papers explore a multitude of topics related to that concept, including databases, the semantic Web, geographical information systems, data collection and management, and more