99,845 research outputs found
Smartphones Adoption and Usage of 50+ Adults in the United Kingdom
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Jyoti Choudrie, Sherah Kurnia, and Panayiota Tsatsou, eds., Social Inclusion and Usability of ICT-enabled Services, on October 2017, available online at: https://www.routledge.com/Social-Inclusion-and-Usability-of-ICT-enabled-Services/Choudrie-Kurnia-Tsatsou/p/book/9781138935556. Under embargo until 30 April 2019.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Recommender Systems
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity
of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information.
Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of
communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and
interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical
achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking,
which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments
in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and
evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future
developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to
illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and
future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great
scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of
interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports
The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Influence in Online Systems
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades
cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and
technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior
empirical work on the diffusion of innovations in spatial regions or social
networks has largely focused on the spread of one particular technology among a
subset of all potential adopters. It has also been difficult to determine
whether the observed collective behaviour is driven by natural influence
processes, or whether it follows external signals such as media or marketing
campaigns. Here, we choose an online context that allows us to study social
influence processes by tracking the popularity of a complete set of
applications installed by the user population of a social networking site, thus
capturing the behaviour of all individuals who can influence each other in this
context. By extending standard fluctuation scaling methods, we analyse the
collective behaviour induced by 100 million application installations, and show
that two distinct regimes of behaviour emerge in the system. Once applications
cross a particular threshold of popularity, social influence processes induce
highly correlated adoption behaviour among the users, which propels some of the
applications to extraordinary levels of popularity. Below this threshold, the
collective effect of social influence appears to vanish almost entirely in a
manner that has not been observed in the offline world. Our results demonstrate
that even when external signals are absent, social influence can spontaneously
assume an on-off nature in a digital environment. It remains to be seen whether
a similar outcome could be observed in the offline world if equivalent
experimental conditions could be replicated
The Lifecycle and Cascade of WeChat Social Messaging Groups
Social instant messaging services are emerging as a transformative form with
which people connect, communicate with friends in their daily life - they
catalyze the formation of social groups, and they bring people stronger sense
of community and connection. However, research community still knows little
about the formation and evolution of groups in the context of social messaging
- their lifecycles, the change in their underlying structures over time, and
the diffusion processes by which they develop new members. In this paper, we
analyze the daily usage logs from WeChat group messaging platform - the largest
standalone messaging communication service in China - with the goal of
understanding the processes by which social messaging groups come together,
grow new members, and evolve over time. Specifically, we discover a strong
dichotomy among groups in terms of their lifecycle, and develop a separability
model by taking into account a broad range of group-level features, showing
that long-term and short-term groups are inherently distinct. We also found
that the lifecycle of messaging groups is largely dependent on their social
roles and functions in users' daily social experiences and specific purposes.
Given the strong separability between the long-term and short-term groups, we
further address the problem concerning the early prediction of successful
communities. In addition to modeling the growth and evolution from group-level
perspective, we investigate the individual-level attributes of group members
and study the diffusion process by which groups gain new members. By
considering members' historical engagement behavior as well as the local social
network structure that they embedded in, we develop a membership cascade model
and demonstrate the effectiveness by achieving AUC of 95.31% in predicting
inviter, and an AUC of 98.66% in predicting invitee.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to appear in proceedings of the 25th
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016
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