Streamlining Social Media Information Retrieval for Public Health Research with Deep Learning

The utilization of social media in epidemic surveillance has been well established. Nonetheless, bias is often introduced when pre-defined lexicons are used to retrieve relevant corpus. This study introduces a framework aimed at curating extensive dictionaries of medical colloquialisms and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts. The framework comprises three modules: a BERT-based Named Entity Recognition (NER) model that identifies medical entities from social media content, a deep-learning powered normalization module that standardizes the extracted entities, and a semi-supervised clustering module that assigns the most probable UMLS concept to each standardized entity. We applied this framework to COVID-19-related tweets from February 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022, generating a symptom dictionary (available at https://github.com/ningkko/UMLS_colloquialism/) composed of 9,249 standardized entities mapped to 876 UMLS concepts and 38,175 colloquial expressions. This framework demonstrates encouraging potential in addressing the constraints of keyword matching information retrieval in social media-based public health research.Comment: Accepted to ICHI 2023 (The 11th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics) as a poster presentatio

We are the Change that we Seek: Information Interactions During a Change of Viewpoint

There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation

Social Intelligence Design for Mediated Communication

Without abstract

On Measuring Bias in Online Information

Bias in online information has recently become a pressing issue, with search engines, social networks and recommendation services being accused of exhibiting some form of bias. In this vision paper, we make the case for a systematic approach towards measuring bias. To this end, we discuss formal measures for quantifying the various types of bias, we outline the system components necessary for realizing them, and we highlight the related research challenges and open problems.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Could There Ever be an App for that? Consent Apps and the Problem of Sexual Assault

Rape and sexual assault are major problems. In the majority of sexual assault cases consent is the central issue. Consent is, to borrow a phrase, the ‘moral magic’ that converts an impermissible act into a permissible one. In recent years, a handful of companies have tried to launch consent apps which aim to educate young people about the nature of sexual consent and allow them to record signals of consent for future verification. Although ostensibly aimed at addressing the problems of rape and sexual assault on university campuses, these apps have attracted a number of critics. In this paper, I subject the phenomenon of consent apps to philosophical scrutiny. I argue that the consent apps that have been launched to date are unhelpful because they fail to address the landscape of ethical and epistemic problems that arise in the typical rape or sexual assault case: they produce distorted and decontextualised records of consent which may in turn exacerbate the other problems associated with rape and sexual assault. Furthermore, because of the tradeoffs involved, it is unlikely that app-based technologies could ever be created that would significantly address the problems of rape and sexual assault

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges