Hot Topic Discovery in Online Community using Topic Labels and Hot Features

With huge volumes of information on Internet, how to extract user-concerned hot topics quickly and effectively has become a fundamental task for information processing on Internet. Generally, hot topic detection includes two tasks, the first one is topic discovery and the other is its hotness evaluation. In this paper, we propose a hot topic detection method. For topic discovery, topics are identified by clustering based on extracted topic labels. For hotness evaluation, the proposed model has fully considered the internal and external dual features and combined them together. The experimental results over TianYa BBS demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method: compared with topic discovery based on latent semantic indexing, the improved vector space model based on topic labels gets better results and the identified topics are more accurate. Moreover, the proposed hotness features could reflect the popularity of a topic, and hence have obtained better hot topic results finally

Personalized News Recommender using Twitter

Online news reading has become a widely popular way to read news articles from news sources around the globe. With the enormous amount of news articles available, users are easily swamped by information of little interest to them. News recommender systems are one approach to help users find interesting articles to read. News recommender systems present the articles to individual users based on their interests rather than presenting articles in order of their occurrence. In this thesis, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system with the help of a popular micro-blogging service Twitter . The news articles are ranked based on the popularity of the article that is identified with the help of the tweets from the Twitter\u27s public timeline. Also, user profiles are built based on the user\u27s interests and the news articles are ranked by matching the characteristics of the user profile. With the help of these two approaches, we present a hybrid news recommendation model that recommends interesting news stories to the user based on their popularity and their relevance to the user profile

7th Annual Research Week- Event Proceedings

7th Annual Research Wee

Democratizing online political discussion: A practice-oriented exploration in service design

This thesis applies human-centred design methods to explore solutions that could facilitate better political discussion online. Selected works relating to democratic theories, e-democracy, and collective intelligence are reviewed. To address the challenge, the author develops and argues for an ethnographic design research approach utilising practice theory. The approach uses benchmarking, interviews, and design co-creation to form an understanding of the design space and to inspire ideas. Several ideas are developed during the design work and their merits are evaluated. The design synthesis proposes a point of view and problem definition to which a final concept idea is presented as a solution. The outcome and methodology are evaluated critically and future research directions are suggested. The thesis contributes to the discourse of e-democracy.Tämä opinnäytetyö soveltaa ihmislähtöisiä muotoilumenetelmiä tutkiakseen ratkaisuja, jotka voisivat mahdollistaa parempaa poliittista keskustelua Internetissä. Työ sisältää valikoivan katsauksen demokratian teorioita, e-demokratian historiaa, sekä kollektiivisen älykkyyden käsitettä ja aiempia töitä. Tekijä esittelee etnografisen lähestymistapansa muotoiluun, joka hyödyntää käytäntöteoriaa näkökulmanaan. Lähestymistapa sisältää metodeina muun muassa vertailukehittämistä, haastatteluja, sekä osallistavan muotoilun menetelmiä muodostaakseen ymmärryksen mahdollisista ratkaisuista ja inspiroidakseen luovaa suunnittelua. Suunnittelun puitteissa kehitetään useampia ideoita, joiden potentiaalisia vaikutuksia ja ansioita myös arvioidaan. Synteesin puitteissa kehitetään näkökulma ja määritetään ongelma, johon esitetään lopullinen konsepti ratkaisuna. Lopputulosta ja menetelmiä arvioidaan kriittisesti ja tulevaisuuden jatkotutkimusaiheita esitetään. Opinnäytetyö liittyy e-demokratiaan

An Effective News Recommendation Method for Microblog User

Recommending news stories to users, based on their preferences, has long been a favourite domain for recommender systems research. Traditional systems strive to satisfy their user by tracing users' reading history and choosing the proper candidate news articles to recommend. However, most of news websites hardly require any user to register before reading news. Besides, the latent relations between news and microblog, the popularity of particular news, and the news organization are not addressed or solved efficiently in previous approaches. In order to solve these issues, we propose an effective personalized news recommendation method based on microblog user profile building and sub class popularity prediction, in which we propose a news organization method using hybrid classification and clustering, implement a sub class popularity prediction method, and construct user profile according to our actual situation. We had designed several experiments compared to the state-of-the-art approaches on a real world dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that our system significantly improves the accuracy and diversity in mass text data

Confessing Our Sims: The construction of gender and sexuality among women ages 18-22 on MySpace

MySpace is a social network phenomenon with over 100 million profiles and a strong presence in over 24 countries. As digital media become more commonplace, social networks are becoming sites where women create and manage relationships and identities. This thesis is a study of how women ages 18-22 are constructing their gender and sexuality on the social network site MySpace. By using a rhetorical analysis of 58 MySpace profiles, this study identifies several themes, including the strong presence of horizontal hostility. Rather than functioning as a forum for women to challenge conventional gender roles, MySpace gives women an opportunity to perform femininity. These women are reinforcing the values associated with traditional femininity by competing for both social and romantic attentions in their autobiographical writings and profile photographs

Unbreaking Our Hearts: Cultures of Un/Desirability and the Transformative Potential of Queercrip Porn

This dissertation combines critical disability studies, sexuality and porn studies, radical disability politics, interviews and the collaborative creation of queercrip porn to both explain and challenge the operation of cultures of undesirability in dominant culture. The concept "cultures of undesirability," describes the relations between systemic oppression and sexual marginalization: this dissertation documents the potential of queercrip porn to challenge and transform these relations. Through disability justice framework, we can imagine and enact disability not as pathological and unwanted, but as an opportunity to bring forth social organization that emphasizes connection, radical access, interdependency, and collectivity. In this dissertation I theorize porn as a multiple, embodied storytelling practice that contains the potential for disrupting and transforming cultures of undesirability. This dissertation also foregrounds the stories of the nine queercrip collaborators. Major themes to emerge in the research were in/visibility, shame, exclusion, and control. By enacting radical access, generating moments of access intimacy, and building community through practices of shared storytelling this research opens opportunities to push against the harm, erasure, and exclusion of cultures of undesirability. Queercrip porn, a strategic and intentional frame, is complex and always in motion. Centering the subjugated knowledges, experiences, and desires of queercrips, through the production of queercrip porn worlds disrupts dominant narratives, making room for complex personhood and messy and multiple ways of living and being. Also of significance to this work is the importance of community and imagining otherwise to the generation of cultures of resistance and resilience