Echoes of power: Language effects and power differences in social interaction

Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions themselves, however, generally take place in the form of natural language --- either spoken or written --- and one could reasonably suppose that signals manifested in language might also provide information about roles, status, and other aspects of the group's dynamics. To date, however, finding such domain-independent language-based signals has been a challenge. Here, we show that in group discussions power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to. Starting from this observation, we propose an analysis framework based on linguistic coordination that can be used to shed light on power relationships and that works consistently across multiple types of power --- including a more "static" form of power based on status differences, and a more "situational" form of power in which one individual experiences a type of dependence on another. Using this framework, we study how conversational behavior can reveal power relationships in two very different settings: discussions among Wikipedians and arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.Comment: v3 is the camera-ready for the Proceedings of WWW 2012. Changes from v2 include additional technical analysis. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/www2012 for data and more inf

Automatic Synchronization of Multi-User Photo Galleries

In this paper we address the issue of photo galleries synchronization, where pictures related to the same event are collected by different users. Existing solutions to address the problem are usually based on unrealistic assumptions, like time consistency across photo galleries, and often heavily rely on heuristics, limiting therefore the applicability to real-world scenarios. We propose a solution that achieves better generalization performance for the synchronization task compared to the available literature. The method is characterized by three stages: at first, deep convolutional neural network features are used to assess the visual similarity among the photos; then, pairs of similar photos are detected across different galleries and used to construct a graph; eventually, a probabilistic graphical model is used to estimate the temporal offset of each pair of galleries, by traversing the minimum spanning tree extracted from this graph. The experimental evaluation is conducted on four publicly available datasets covering different types of events, demonstrating the strength of our proposed method. A thorough discussion of the obtained results is provided for a critical assessment of the quality in synchronization.Comment: ACCEPTED to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi

Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior

Investigating Secure Agile Requirements Engineering Practices in Software Development

The aim of this research study was to assess Agile RE practices in the South African software development industry and investigate secure Agile RE initiatives towards developing secure products. This qualitative research study was contextualized in seventeen South African software development companies. The researchers used structured interviews and document reviews as the primary data collection instruments. Qualitative data was analyzed inductively using content analysis. Emanating from the research were recommendations to guide a regular software developer on good Agile RE practices. The study concluded that although Agile Software Development is practiced in the South African software industry, there needs to be stricter adherences to the Agile Manifesto and Agile Security Manifesto in requirements engineering