52,551 research outputs found
Inferring Social Status and Rich Club Effects in Enterprise Communication Networks
Social status, defined as the relative rank or position that an individual
holds in a social hierarchy, is known to be among the most important motivating
forces in social behaviors. In this paper, we consider the notion of status
from the perspective of a position or title held by a person in an enterprise.
We study the intersection of social status and social networks in an
enterprise. We study whether enterprise communication logs can help reveal how
social interactions and individual status manifest themselves in social
networks. To that end, we use two enterprise datasets with three communication
channels --- voice call, short message, and email --- to demonstrate the
social-behavioral differences among individuals with different status. We have
several interesting findings and based on these findings we also develop a
model to predict social status. On the individual level, high-status
individuals are more likely to be spanned as structural holes by linking to
people in parts of the enterprise networks that are otherwise not well
connected to one another. On the community level, the principle of homophily,
social balance and clique theory generally indicate a "rich club" maintained by
high-status individuals, in the sense that this community is much more
connected, balanced and dense. Our model can predict social status of
individuals with 93% accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
Capturing "attrition intensifying" structural traits from didactic interaction sequences of MOOC learners
This work is an attempt to discover hidden structural configurations in
learning activity sequences of students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Leveraging combined representations of video clickstream interactions and forum
activities, we seek to fundamentally understand traits that are predictive of
decreasing engagement over time. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of
network science, we follow a graph based approach to successfully extract
indicators of active and passive MOOC participation that reflect persistence
and regularity in the overall interaction footprint. Using these rich
educational semantics, we focus on the problem of predicting student attrition,
one of the major highlights of MOOC literature in the recent years. Our results
indicate an improvement over a baseline ngram based approach in capturing
"attrition intensifying" features from the learning activities that MOOC
learners engage in. Implications for some compelling future research are
discussed.Comment: "Shared Task" submission for EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Modeling Large
Scale Social Interaction in Massively Open Online Course
Culture and Cancer
Genetic mechanisms, since they broadly involve information
transmission, should be translatable into information dynamics formalism. From this perspective we reconsider the adaptive mutator, one possible means of 'second order selection' by which a highly structured 'language' of environment and development writes itself onto the variation upon which evolutionary selection and tumorigenesis operate. Our approach uses recent results in the spirit of the Large Deviations Program of applied probability that permit transfer of phase transition approaches from statistical mechanics to information theory, generating evolutionary and developmental punctuation in what we claim to be a highly natural manner
Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is
generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present
a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a
thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data about users:
friends, tweet content and sentiment, network patterns, and activity time
series. We benchmark the classification framework by using a publicly available
dataset of Twitter bots. This training data is enriched by a manually annotated
collection of active Twitter users that include both humans and bots of varying
sophistication. Our models yield high accuracy and agreement with each other
and can detect bots of different nature. Our estimates suggest that between 9%
and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots. Characterizing ties among
accounts, we observe that simple bots tend to interact with bots that exhibit
more human-like behaviors. Analysis of content flows reveals retweet and
mention strategies adopted by bots to interact with different target groups.
Using clustering analysis, we characterize several subclasses of accounts,
including spammers, self promoters, and accounts that post content from
connected applications.Comment: Accepted paper for ICWSM'17, 10 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Children, Humanoid Robots and Caregivers
This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. We consider in particular teaching humanoids as children during the child's Separation and Individuation developmental phase (Mahler, 1979). Cognitive development during this phase is characterized both by the child's dependence on her mother for learning while becoming awareness of her own individuality, and by self-exploration of her physical surroundings. We propose a learning framework for a humanoid robot inspired on such cognitive development
Toward Cultural Oncology: The Evolutionary Information Dynamics of Cancer
'Racial' disparities among cancers, particularly of the breast and prostate, are something of a mystery. For the US, in the face of slavery and its sequelae, centuries of interbreeding have greatly leavened genetic differences between 'Blacks' and 'whites', but marked contrasts in disease prevalence and progression persist. 'Adjustment' for socioeconomic status and lifestyle, while statistically accounting for much of the variance in breast cancer, only begs the question of ultimate causality. Here we propose a more basic biological explanation that extends the theory of immune cognition to include elaborate tumor control mechanisms constituting the principal selection pressure acting on pathologically mutating cell clones. The interplay between them occurs in the context of an embedding, highly structured, system of culturally specific psychosocial stress which we find is able to literally write an image of itself onto disease progression. The dynamics are analogous to punctuated equilibrium in simple evolutionary proces
Normality: Part Descriptive, part prescriptive
Peopleâs beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both peopleâs representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that peopleâs notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, peopleâs representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: peopleâs use of the word âânormalâ (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms
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