Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services

Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph, containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI & Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS

Applying Deep Machine Learning for psycho-demographic profiling of Internet users using O.C.E.A.N. model of personality

In the modern era, each Internet user leaves enormous amounts of auxiliary digital residuals (footprints) by using a variety of on-line services. All this data is already collected and stored for many years. In recent works, it was demonstrated that it's possible to apply simple machine learning methods to analyze collected digital footprints and to create psycho-demographic profiles of individuals. However, while these works clearly demonstrated the applicability of machine learning methods for such an analysis, created simple prediction models still lacks accuracy necessary to be successfully applied for practical needs. We have assumed that using advanced deep machine learning methods may considerably increase the accuracy of predictions. We started with simple machine learning methods to estimate basic prediction performance and moved further by applying advanced methods based on shallow and deep neural networks. Then we compared prediction power of studied models and made conclusions about its performance. Finally, we made hypotheses how prediction accuracy can be further improved. As result of this work, we provide full source code used in the experiments for all interested researchers and practitioners in corresponding GitHub repository. We believe that applying deep machine learning for psycho-demographic profiling may have an enormous impact on the society (for good or worse) and provides means for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to better understand humans by creating their psychological profiles. Thus AI agents may achieve the human-like ability to participate in conversation (communication) flow by anticipating human opponents' reactions, expectations, and behavior

Wearing Many (Social) Hats: How Different are Your Different Social Network Personae?

This paper investigates when users create profiles in different social networks, whether they are redundant expressions of the same persona, or they are adapted to each platform. Using the personal webpages of 116,998 users on About.me, we identify and extract matched user profiles on several major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We find evidence for distinct site-specific norms, such as differences in the language used in the text of the profile self-description, and the kind of picture used as profile image. By learning a model that robustly identifies the platform given a user's profile image (0.657--0.829 AUC) or self-description (0.608--0.847 AUC), we confirm that users do adapt their behaviour to individual platforms in an identifiable and learnable manner. However, different genders and age groups adapt their behaviour differently from each other, and these differences are, in general, consistent across different platforms. We show that differences in social profile construction correspond to differences in how formal or informal the platform is.Comment: Accepted at the 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM17

The pictures we like are our image: continuous mapping of favorite pictures into self-assessed and attributed personality traits

Flickr allows its users to tag the pictures they like as “favorite”. As a result, many users of the popular photo-sharing platform produce galleries of favorite pictures. This article proposes new approaches, based on Computational Aesthetics, capable to infer the personality traits of Flickr users from the galleries above. In particular, the approaches map low-level features extracted from the pictures into numerical scores corresponding to the Big-Five Traits, both self-assessed and attributed. The experiments were performed over 60,000 pictures tagged as favorite by 300 users (the PsychoFlickr Corpus). The results show that it is possible to predict beyond chance both self-assessed and attributed traits. In line with the state-of-the art of Personality Computing, these latter are predicted with higher effectiveness (correlation up to 0.68 between actual and predicted traits)

Enhancing Transparency and Control when Drawing Data-Driven Inferences about Individuals

Recent studies have shown that information disclosed on social network sites (such as Facebook) can be used to predict personal characteristics with surprisingly high accuracy. In this paper we examine a method to give online users transparency into why certain inferences are made about them by statistical models, and control to inhibit those inferences by hiding ("cloaking") certain personal information from inference. We use this method to examine whether such transparency and control would be a reasonable goal by assessing how difficult it would be for users to actually inhibit inferences. Applying the method to data from a large collection of real users on Facebook, we show that a user must cloak only a small portion of her Facebook Likes in order to inhibit inferences about their personal characteristics. However, we also show that in response a firm could change its modeling of users to make cloaking more difficult.Comment: presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2016), New York, N