2,674 research outputs found
Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others.
However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people
and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with
those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we
hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have
been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having
opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or
presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral
change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a
visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends
politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and
displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's
personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform,
and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased
algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the
mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed
politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the
recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects:
first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms
aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces
should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased
behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User
Interfaces 201
Identifying communicator roles in Twitter
Twitter has redefined the way social activities can be coordinated; used for mobilizing people during natural disasters, studying health epidemics, and recently, as a communication platform during social and political change. As a large scale system, the volume of data transmitted per day presents Twitter users with a problem: how can valuable content be distilled from the back chatter, how can the providers of valuable information be promoted, and ultimately how can influential individuals be identified?To tackle this, we have developed a model based upon the Twitter message exchange which enables us to analyze conversations around specific topics and identify key players in a conversation. A working implementation of the model helps categorize Twitter users by specific roles based on their dynamic communication behavior rather than an analysis of their static friendship network. This provides a method of identifying users who are potentially producers or distributers of valuable knowledge
Contextual Social Networking
The thesis centers around the multi-faceted research question of how contexts may
be detected and derived that can be used for new context aware Social Networking
services and for improving the usefulness of existing Social Networking services, giving
rise to the notion of Contextual Social Networking. In a first foundational part,
we characterize the closely related fields of Contextual-, Mobile-, and Decentralized
Social Networking using different methods and focusing on different detailed
aspects. A second part focuses on the question of how short-term and long-term
social contexts as especially interesting forms of context for Social Networking may
be derived. We focus on NLP based methods for the characterization of social relations
as a typical form of long-term social contexts and on Mobile Social Signal
Processing methods for deriving short-term social contexts on the basis of geometry
of interaction and audio. We furthermore investigate, how personal social agents
may combine such social context elements on various levels of abstraction. The third
part discusses new and improved context aware Social Networking service concepts.
We investigate special forms of awareness services, new forms of social information
retrieval, social recommender systems, context aware privacy concepts and services
and platforms supporting Open Innovation and creative processes.
This version of the thesis does not contain the included publications because of
copyrights of the journals etc. Contact in terms of the version with all included
publications: Georg Groh, [email protected] zentrale Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die vielschichtige Frage, wie Kontexte detektiert und abgeleitet werden können, die dazu dienen können, neuartige kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste zu schaffen und bestehende Dienste in ihrem Nutzwert zu verbessern. Die (noch nicht abgeschlossene) erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Programmes fĂŒhrt auf ein Konzept, das man als Contextual Social Networking bezeichnen kann. In einem grundlegenden ersten Teil werden die eng zusammenhĂ€ngenden Gebiete Contextual Social Networking, Mobile Social Networking und Decentralized Social Networking mit verschiedenen Methoden und unter Fokussierung auf verschiedene Detail-Aspekte nĂ€her beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang gesetzt. Ein zweiter Teil behandelt die Frage, wie soziale Kurzzeit- und Langzeit-Kontexte als fĂŒr das Social Networking besonders interessante Formen von Kontext gemessen und abgeleitet werden können. Ein Fokus liegt hierbei auf NLP Methoden zur Charakterisierung sozialer Beziehungen als einer typischen Form von sozialem Langzeit-Kontext. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf Methoden aus dem Mobile Social Signal Processing zur Ableitung sinnvoller sozialer Kurzzeit-Kontexte auf der Basis von Interaktionsgeometrien und Audio-Daten. Es wird ferner untersucht, wie persönliche soziale Agenten Kontext-Elemente verschiedener Abstraktionsgrade miteinander kombinieren können. Der dritte Teil behandelt neuartige und verbesserte Konzepte fĂŒr kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste. Es werden spezielle Formen von Awareness Diensten, neue Formen von sozialem Information Retrieval, Konzepte fĂŒr kontextbewusstes Privacy Management und Dienste und Plattformen zur UnterstĂŒtzung von Open Innovation und KreativitĂ€t untersucht und vorgestellt. Diese Version der Habilitationsschrift enthĂ€lt die inkludierten Publikationen zurVermeidung von Copyright-Verletzungen auf Seiten der Journals u.a. nicht. Kontakt in Bezug auf die Version mit allen inkludierten Publikationen: Georg Groh, [email protected]
Visible relations in online communities : modeling and using social networks
The Internet represents a unique opportunity for people to interact with each other across time and space, and online communities have existed long before the Internet's solidification in everyday living. There are two inherent challenges that online communities continue to contend with: motivating participation and organizing information. An online community's success or failure rests on the content generated by its users. Specifically, users need to continually participate by contributing new content and organizing existing content for others to be attracted and retained. I propose both participation and organization can be enhanced if users have an explicit awareness of the implicit social network which results from their online interactions. My approach makes this normally ``hidden" social network visible and shows users that these intangible relations have an impact on satisfying their information needs and vice versa. That is, users can more readily situate their information needs within social processes, understanding that the value of information they receive and give is influenced and has influence on the mostly incidental relations they have formed with others. First, I describe how to model a social network within an online discussion forum and visualize the subsequent relationships in a way that motivates participation. Second, I show that social networks can also be modeled to generate recommendations of information items and that, through an interactive visualization, users can make direct adjustments to the model in order to improve their personal recommendations. I conclude that these modeling and visualization techniques are beneficial to online communities as their social capital is enhanced by "weaving" users more tightly together
Tag-Aware Recommender Systems: A State-of-the-art Survey
In the past decade, Social Tagging Systems have attracted increasing
attention from both physical and computer science communities. Besides the
underlying structure and dynamics of tagging systems, many efforts have been
addressed to unify tagging information to reveal user behaviors and
preferences, extract the latent semantic relations among items, make
recommendations, and so on. Specifically, this article summarizes recent
progress about tag-aware recommender systems, emphasizing on the contributions
from three mainstream perspectives and approaches: network-based methods,
tensor-based methods, and the topic-based methods. Finally, we outline some
other tag-related works and future challenges of tag-aware recommendation
algorithms.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure
Changing Higher Education Learning with Web 2.0 and Open Education Citation, Annotation, and Thematic Coding Appendices
Appendices of citations, annotations and themes for research conducted on four websites: Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook
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