Monitoring ethnic minorities in the Netherlands

Item does not contain fulltextThe article first summarises the history of ethnic minority policy in the Netherlands and the development of the ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘allochthonous’ categories, which are peculiar in comparative perspective in emphasising socio-economic disadvantage as a constitutive dimension of minority status and in setting the minority question within the broader Dutch political principle of ‘pillarisation’. The article then examines the use of statistics in public policy, in a context where the national census has been discontinued since 1971, focusing more specifically on the case of education, where major statistical efforts have been devoted to identifying patterns of disadvantage and integration. Finally, the article briefly examines current debates on the situation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands in the context of growing questioning of established Dutch models of minority policy.13 p

Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

Publication and archival of scientific results is still commonly considered the responsability of classical publishing companies. Classical forms of publishing, however, which center around printed narrative articles, no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this article, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data. We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used as a low-level data publication layer to serve the Semantic Web in general. Our evaluation of the current network shows that this system is efficient and reliable

Linked Stream Data: A Position Paper

The amount of sensors publishing data on the Web is increasing as a result of the online availability of Sensor Web platforms that provide support for this task. With such increase in sensor data publication, new challenges arise for the identification, discovery and access to this data. Following the set of best practices to publish and link structured data on the web proposed by the Linked Data community, in this paper we introduce the concept of Linked Stream Data, a way in which the Linked Data principles can be applied to stream data and be part of the Web of Linked Data

Detection of Trending Topic Communities: Bridging Content Creators and Distributors

The rise of a trending topic on Twitter or Facebook leads to the temporal emergence of a set of users currently interested in that topic. Given the temporary nature of the links between these users, being able to dynamically identify communities of users related to this trending topic would allow for a rapid spread of information. Indeed, individual users inside a community might receive recommendations of content generated by the other users, or the community as a whole could receive group recommendations, with new content related to that trending topic. In this paper, we tackle this challenge, by identifying coherent topic-dependent user groups, linking those who generate the content (creators) and those who spread this content, e.g., by retweeting/reposting it (distributors). This is a novel problem on group-to-group interactions in the context of recommender systems. Analysis on real-world Twitter data compare our proposal with a baseline approach that considers the retweeting activity, and validate it with standard metrics. Results show the effectiveness of our approach to identify communities interested in a topic where each includes content creators and content distributors, facilitating users' interactions and the spread of new information.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, Hypertext 2017 conferenc

Transparency about net neutrality: A translation of the new European rules into a multi-stakeholder model

The new European framework directive contains a number of policy objectives in the area of net neutrality. In support of these objectives, the universal service directive includes a transparency obligation for ISPs. This paper proposes a multi-stakeholder model for the implementation of this transparency obligation. The model is a multi-stakeholder model in the sense that it treats the content and form of the transparent information in close connection with the parties involved in the provision of the information and the processes in which they take part. Another crucial property of the model is that it distinguishes between technical and user-friendly information. This distinction makes it possible to limit the obligation to ISPs to the information for which they are in the best position to provide: the technical information on the traffic management measures that they apply, e.g., which traffic streams are subject to special treatment? Which measures are applied and when? The public availability of this technical information creates the opportunity for the other parties in the model to step in and contribute to the formulation of the user-friendly information for end users: which applications and services receive special treatment? When is their effect noticeable? It is expected that the involvement of other parties will lead to multiple, complementary routes for the formulation of the user-friendly information. Thus, the user-friendly information emerges in ways driven by market players and stakeholders that would be difficult to design and lay down in advance in the transparency obligation. --net neutrality,transparency,traffic management

CREATe public lectures on the proposed EU right for press publishers

Presents the edited text of lectures by Hoppner and Xalabarder arguing in favour and against the proposal to extend Directive 2001/29 arts 2 and 3 to press publishers, providing them with the exclusive right to publish journalistic material online for a period of 20 years. Discusses the controversies surrounding two similar initiatives in Germany and Spain

Spott : on-the-spot e-commerce for television using deep learning-based video analysis techniques

Spott is an innovative second screen mobile multimedia application which offers viewers relevant information on objects (e.g., clothing, furniture, food) they see and like on their television screens. The application enables interaction between TV audiences and brands, so producers and advertisers can offer potential consumers tailored promotions, e-shop items, and/or free samples. In line with the current views on innovation management, the technological excellence of the Spott application is coupled with iterative user involvement throughout the entire development process. This article discusses both of these aspects and how they impact each other. First, we focus on the technological building blocks that facilitate the (semi-) automatic interactive tagging process of objects in the video streams. The majority of these building blocks extensively make use of novel and state-of-the-art deep learning concepts and methodologies. We show how these deep learning based video analysis techniques facilitate video summarization, semantic keyframe clustering, and (similar) object retrieval. Secondly, we provide insights in user tests that have been performed to evaluate and optimize the application's user experience. The lessons learned from these open field tests have already been an essential input in the technology development and will further shape the future modifications to the Spott application