Understanding citizen science and environmental monitoring: final report on behalf of UK Environmental Observation Framework

Citizen science can broadly be defined as the involvement of volunteers in science. Over the past decade there has been a rapid increase in the number of citizen science initiatives. The breadth of environmental-based citizen science is immense. Citizen scientists have surveyed for and monitored a broad range of taxa, and also contributed data on weather and habitats reflecting an increase in engagement with a diverse range of observational science. Citizen science has taken many varied approaches from citizen-led (co-created) projects with local community groups to, more commonly, scientist-led mass participation initiatives that are open to all sectors of society. Citizen science provides an indispensable means of combining environmental research with environmental education and wildlife recording. Here we provide a synthesis of extant citizen science projects using a novel cross-cutting approach to objectively assess understanding of citizen science and environmental monitoring including: 1. Brief overview of knowledge on the motivations of volunteers. 2. Semi-systematic review of environmental citizen science projects in order to understand the variety of extant citizen science projects. 3. Collation of detailed case studies on a selection of projects to complement the semi-systematic review. 4. Structured interviews with users of citizen science and environmental monitoring data focussing on policy, in order to more fully understand how citizen science can fit into policy needs. 5. Review of technology in citizen science and an exploration of future opportunities

The Shortest Path to Happiness: Recommending Beautiful, Quiet, and Happy Routes in the City

When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant. To quantify the extent to which urban locations are pleasant, we use data from a crowd-sourcing platform that shows two street scenes in London (out of hundreds), and a user votes on which one looks more beautiful, quiet, and happy. We consider votes from more than 3.3K individuals and translate them into quantitative measures of location perceptions. We arrange those locations into a graph upon which we learn pleasant routes. Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy. To test the generality of our approach, we consider Flickr metadata of more than 3.7M pictures in London and 1.3M in Boston, compute proxies for the crowdsourced beauty dimension (the one for which we have collected the most votes), and evaluate those proxies with 30 participants in London and 54 in Boston. These participants have not only rated our recommendations but have also carefully motivated their choices, providing insights for future work.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Online Social Networks’ Investigations of Individuals’ Healthy and Unhealthy Lifestyle Behaviors and Social Factors Influencing Them —Three Essays

More than half of U.S. adults suffer from one or more chronic diseases, which account for 86% of total U.S. healthcare costs. Major contributors to chronic diseases are unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, which include lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, tobacco use, and drinking too much alcohol. A reduction in the prevalence of health-risk behaviors could improve individuals’ longevity and quality of life and may halt the exponential growth of healthcare costs. Prior studies in the field have acknowledged that a comprehensive understanding of health behaviors requires the examination of individual’ behaviors in supra-dyadic social networks. In recent years, the growth of online social networks and popularity of location-based services have opened new research opportunities for observational studies on individuals’ healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. The goal of this three-essay dissertation is to examine the effect of various social factors, shared images, and communities of interest on healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors of individuals. This dissertation makes novel contributions in terms of theoretical implications, data collection and analysis methods, and policy implications for promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors and inhibiting unhealthy behaviors. Essay 1 draws on a synthesis of social cognitive and social network theories to conceptualize a causal model for healthy and unhealthy behaviors. To test the conceptualized model, we developed a new method—dynamic sequential data extraction and integration—to collect and integrate data over time from Twitter and Foursquare. The captured dataset was then combined with relevant data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The final dataset has more than 32,000 individuals from all states in the United States. Using this dataset, we derived variables to measure healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors and metrics for factors representing individuals’ social support, social influence, and homophily, as well as the socioeconomic status of the communities where they live. To capture the impacts of social factors, we collected individuals’ behaviors in two separate time periods. We used zero-inflated negative binomial regression method for data analysis. The results of this study uncover factors that have significant impacts on healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. Essay 2 focuses on embedded images in self-disclosed posts related to healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. While online photo-sharing has become widely popular, and neuroscience has reported the influence of images in brain activities, to our knowledge, there is no published research on the impacts of shared photos on health-related lifestyle behaviors. This study addresses this gap and examines the moderating role of shared images and the direct impacts of their contents. We relied on social learning and multimodality theories to argue that images can attract individuals’ attention and enhance the process of observational learning in online social networks. We developed a novel method for image analysis that involves the extraction, processing, dimensionality reduction, and categorization of images. The results show that the presence of photos in self-disclosed unhealthy lifestyle behaviors positively moderates friends’ social influence. Moreover, the results indicate that the contents of shared photos influence individuals’ health-related behaviors. Essay 3 focuses on the role of personal interests in individuals’ health-related lifestyle behaviors. Prior studies have demonstrated that health promotional programs can benefit from targeting individuals based on their interests. Specifically, prior studies have emphasized the role of interests as a factor influencing behaviors. However, current literature suffers from two major gaps. First, there is no systematic and comprehensive approach to capture individuals’ interests in online social networks. Second, to our knowledge, the role of interests in individuals’ healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors as disclosed online has not been investigated. To address these gaps, we examine the role of individuals’ interests in their health-related behaviors. The theoretical foundation of this study is a synthesis of homophily and self-determination theories. We developed a novel method—the homophily-based interest detection method—that involves network simplification, network clustering, cluster labeling, and interest metrics. This method was applied to social networks of individuals in Essay 1 to measure individuals’ interests. The results show that health-related interests are associated with individuals’ healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. Our findings indicate that other forms of interest, such as music taste and political views, also play a role. Moreover, our results show that belonging to healthy (unhealthy) communities of interest has an inhibitive role that prevents postings of unhealthy (healthy) behaviors

A big-data analytics method for capturing visitor activities and flows: the case of an island country

© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Understanding how people move from one location to another is important both for smart city planners and destination managers. Big-data generated on social media sites have created opportunities for developing evidence-based insights that can be useful for decision-makers. While previous studies have introduced observational data analysis methods for social media data, there remains a need for method development—specifically for capturing people’s movement flows and behavioural details. This paper reports a study outlining a new analytical method, to explore people’s activities, behavioural, and movement details for people monitoring and planning purposes. Our method utilises online geotagged content uploaded by users from various locations. The effectiveness of the proposed method, which combines content capturing, processing and predicting algorithms, is demonstrated through a case study of the Fiji Islands. The results show good performance compared to other relevant methods and show applicability to national decisions and policies

Geo-Information Harvesting from Social Media Data

As unconventional sources of geo-information, massive imagery and text messages from open platforms and social media form a temporally quasi-seamless, spatially multi-perspective stream, but with unknown and diverse quality. Due to its complementarity to remote sensing data, geo-information from these sources offers promising perspectives, but harvesting is not trivial due to its data characteristics. In this article, we address key aspects in the field, including data availability, analysis-ready data preparation and data management, geo-information extraction from social media text messages and images, and the fusion of social media and remote sensing data. We then showcase some exemplary geographic applications. In addition, we present the first extensive discussion of ethical considerations of social media data in the context of geo-information harvesting and geographic applications. With this effort, we wish to stimulate curiosity and lay the groundwork for researchers who intend to explore social media data for geo-applications. We encourage the community to join forces by sharing their code and data.Comment: Accepted for publication IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazin

The use of social media in travel planning: solutions for destination management organizations (DMOS)

JEL Codes: L83, M31Social media has been a widely discussed subject in the marketing and tourism literature. Even though most of tourism entities have adopted social media as marketing tool, its real potential and benefits still remain unclear for most of companies and businesses involved. Also, there is little evidence on the purposes of using social media in the travel planning and whether these platforms are relevant or not for companies to market their products and destinations. This project aims at understanding the role of social media in tourists’ travel planning while analyzing the current role of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) in destination promotion. This study comprised a survey with 200 tourists visiting the city of Lisbon. It was examined their usage of social media in travel planning, sites content information and influence in their travel plans and destination image. The analysis suggests social media is a relevant source in tourists’ travel planning, providing a wide range of information and used throughout all travel planning stages. Also, research claimed social media content is perceived as trustworthy and it will influence tourists travel plans as well as tourists’ destination overall image. In addition, the current level knowledge and satisfaction with Portuguese DMOs social media sites content and features was also analyzed and further combined with a qualitative study of two DMOs interviews. This work provides insights of social media usage in the travel context and ultimately point solutions for DMOs to use them as a marketing tool. Given the fact this is one of the first studies analyzing Portuguese DMOs social sites, several recommendations are provided for future research.O tema das redes sociais tem sido amplamente discutido na literatura de marketing e turismo. Ainda que a maior parte das entidades turísticas tenha adotado as redes sociais como ferramenta de marketing, o seu potencial e benefícios ainda parecem não ser totalmente conhecidos pela maior parte das empresas e negócios. Acresce a isto, parece predominar pouca fundamentação científica relativamente aos motivos de utilização das redes sociais no planeamento de viagens, e na importância destas plataformas para as empresas na promoção de produtos e destinos. A presente tese procura aprofundar o papel das redes sociais no planeamento das viagens pelos turistas e analisar o papel atual das Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) portuguesas na promoção do destino. Este estudo compreendeu uma pesquisa quantitativa a 200 turistas que visitavam a cidade de Lisboa. Foram examinadas a utilização das redes sociais no planeamento das viagens, conteúdo dos sites e influência nos planos de viagem e imagem do destino. A análise sugere que as redes sociais são uma fonte relevante no planeamento das viagens pelos turistas e usada durante as fases de planeamento da viagem. Sugere-se ainda que o conteúdo apresentado nas redes sociais é confiável e que este influencia os planos de viagem bem como a imagem do destino pelos turistas. O nível de conhecimento e satisfação como os sites de redes sociais dos DMOs portugueses foram também analisados e posteriormente combinados com um estudo qualitativo de duas entrevistas a DMOs nacionais. Este projeto visa contribuir para uma melhor compreensão da utilização das redes sociais no âmbito turístico e sugerir soluções para os DMOs para utilização destas plataformas como meio de promoção. Sendo este estudo pioneiro na análise das redes sociais destas entidades turísticas, é apontado um número de sugestões para pesquisa futura nesta área

The application of digital marketing strategies to increase profits of the organization

This thesis focuses on the solution of the problem raised by a Finnish manufacturer of high-quality amplifiers, guitar pedals, and cables, Mad Professor Amplification Oy. To provide an answer to the research question – “How can Mad Professor Amplification Oy implement proper digital marketing strategies to improve stable sales growth?” digital marketing approaches of the company, theoretical material, and information during the research process were examined. The scope of the research is narrowed down to the analysis of the internal data obtained from the company. Interviews and a questionnaire are the major research methods, selected for gathering supporting information. An external view of the author, literature, and other valid sources such articles compliment the chosen research methods. Strengths and weaknesses of the digital marketing strategy of the company were indicated through analysis of the actual situation, which proved insufficiency in its approaches. An action plan for the improvement of the situation was proposed by the author. It includes recommendations on optimization of social media channels and utilization of content marketing