Social Media for Cities, Counties and Communities

Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other tools and services with user- generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Some government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens, especially during crises and emergencies. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Potential exists to rapidly identify issues of concern for emergency management by detecting meaningful patterns or trends in the stream of messages and information flow. Similarly, monitoring these patterns and themes over time could provide officials with insights into the perceptions and mood of the community that cannot be collected through traditional methods (e.g., phone or mail surveys) due to their substantive costs, especially in light of reduced and shrinking budgets of governments at all levels. We conducted a pilot study in 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and to a lesser extent representatives of groups from Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia) with a view to contributing to a general understanding of the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We were especially interested in gaining greater insight into social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly routine crises, such as traffic or weather disruptions)

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop

An Ontological Approach to Misinformation: Quickly Finding Relevant Information

Identifying misinformation (i.e. rumors) is a growing field of research in the information systems field. This is due to the fact that during recent tragedies (i.e. Boston Bombings, Ebola, etcetera), rumors spread rapidly on social media platforms, which will hide the facts about an event. This results in rumors being spread even more, further hiding the events. In this study, we draw from research from the semantic web to tackle this problem. We propose the use of ontologies and related concepts can help find accurate information for a case quickly and accurately. Combined with a weighting formula, we will be able to display the most relevant results to an interested party. In this research in progress, we outline our plan on how to accomplish this once an ontology and dataset is found

Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

Text in the Natural World: Topics of Evolutionary Theory of Literature

The study of literature has expanded to include an evolutionary perspective. Its premise is that the literary text and literature as an overarching institution came into existence as a product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the human species. In this view, literature is an evolutionary adaptation that functions as any other adaptation does, as a means of enhancing survivability and also promoting benefits for the individual and society. Text in the Natural World is an introduction to the theory and a survey of topics pertinent to the evolutionary view of literature. After a polemical, prefatory chapter and an overview of the pertinent aspects of evolutionary theory itself, the book examines integral building blocks of literature and literary expression as effects of evolutionary development. This includes chapters on moral sense, symbolic thought, literary aesthetics in general, literary ontology, the broad topic of form, function and device in literature, a last theoretical chapter on narrative, and a chapter on literary themes. The concluding chapter builds on the preceding one as an illustration of evolutionary thematic study in practice, in a study of the fauna in the fiction of Maupassant. This text is designed to be of interest to those who read and think about things literary, as well as to those who have interest in the extension of Darwin’s great idea across the horizon of human culture. It tries to bridge the gulf that has separated the humanities from the sciences, and would be a helpful text for courses taught in both literary theory and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and philosophy.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1125/thumbnail.jp

Design and Architecture of an Ontology-driven Dialogue System for HPV Vaccine Counseling

Speech and conversational technologies are increasingly being used by consumers, with the inevitability that one day they will be integrated in health care. Where this technology could be of service is in patient-provider communication, specifically for communicating the risks and benefits of vaccines. Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, in particular, is a vaccine that inoculates individuals from certain HPV viruses responsible for adulthood cancers - cervical, head and neck cancers, etc. My research focuses on the architecture and development of speech-enabled conversational agent that relies on series of consumer-centric health ontologies and the technology that utilizes these ontologies. Ontologies are computable artifacts that encode and structure domain knowledge that can be utilized by machines to provide high level capabilities, such as reasoning and sharing information. I will focus the agent’s impact on the HPV vaccine domain to observe if users would respond favorably towards conversational agents and the possible impact of the agent on their beliefs of the HPV vaccine. The approach of this study involves a multi-tier structure. The first tier is the domain knowledge base, the second is the application interaction design tier, and the third is the feasibility assessment of the participants. The research in this study proposes the following questions: Can ontologies support the system architecture for a spoken conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling? How would prospective users’ perception towards an agent and towards the HPV vaccine be impacted after using conversational agent for HPV vaccine education? The outcome of this study is a comprehensive assessment of a system architecture of a conversational agent for patient-centric HPV vaccine counseling. Each layer of the agent architecture is regulated through domain and application ontologies, and supported by the various ontology-driven software components that I developed to compose the agent architecture. Also discussed in this work, I present preliminary evidence of high usability of the agent and improvement of the users’ health beliefs toward the HPV vaccine. All in all, I introduce a comprehensive and feasible model for the design and development of an open-sourced, ontology-driven conversational agent for any health consumer domain, and corroborate the viability of a conversational agent as a health intervention tool

Characterizing Online Vandalism: A Rational Choice Perspective

What factors influence the decision to vandalize? Although the harm is clear, the benefit to the vandal is less clear. In many cases, the thing being damaged may itself be something the vandal uses or enjoys. Vandalism holds communicative value: perhaps to the vandal themselves, to some audience at whom the vandalism is aimed, and to the general public. Viewing vandals as rational community participants despite their antinormative behavior offers the possibility of engaging with or countering their choices in novel ways. Rational choice theory (RCT) as applied in value expectancy theory (VET) offers a strategy for characterizing behaviors in a framework of rational choices, and begins with the supposition that subject to some weighting of personal preferences and constraints, individuals maximize their own utility by committing acts of vandalism. This study applies the framework of RCT and VET to gain insight into vandals' preferences and constraints. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Wikipedia, I combine social computing and criminological perspectives on vandalism to propose an ontology of vandalism for online content communities. I use this ontology to categorize 141 instances of vandalism and find that the character of vandalistic acts varies by vandals' relative identifiability, policy history with Wikipedia, and the effort required to vandalize

Islam Between Inclusion and Exclusion: A (Decolonial) Frame Problem

In this chapter, the 'Frame Problem' in AI is mobilized as a trope in order to engage the 'question' concerning the inclusion and/or exclusion of Islam (and Muslims) from European – and, more broadly, 'Western' – society. Adopting a decolonial perspective, wherein body-political, geo-political and theo-political concerns are centered, the meaning and applicability of categorical dichotomies such as 'religion' and 'politics' and their relationship to the historical entanglement of 'religion' and 'race' in the formation of the modern world are interrogated in the context of understanding the nature of the relationship between Islam and Europe/'the West'. It is argued that the tendency within Western liberal democratic discourses to (1) frame the problem of Islamophobia and 'the Muslim question' in terms of misrepresentation – that is, misinformation, disinformation and 'distortion' of the flow of information – and (2) frame the issue of "Islam and Europe/'the West'" in terms of inclusion and/or exclusion of the members of a 'religious' minority into a post-modern, post- Christian/'secular' polity circumvents disclosure of the violent historically-constituted structural background or 'horizon' against which such 'options' are generated. The essay concludes by sketching some possible decolonial responses to this critical and existentially-problematic state of affairs