Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities

Technologies such as algorithms, applications and formats are an important part of the knowledge produced and reused in the research process. Typically, a technology is expected to originate in the context of a research area and then spread and contribute to several other fields. For example, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully adopted by a variety of fields, e.g., Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Biology, and many others. Unfortunately, the spreading of technologies across research areas may be a slow and inefficient process, since it is easy for researchers to be unaware of potentially relevant solutions produced by other research communities. In this paper, we hypothesise that it is possible to learn typical technology propagation patterns from historical data and to exploit this knowledge i) to anticipate where a technology may be adopted next and ii) to alert relevant stakeholders about emerging and relevant technologies in other fields. To do so, we propose the Technology-Topic Framework, a novel approach which uses a semantically enhanced technology-topic model to forecast the propagation of technologies to research areas. A formal evaluation of the approach on a set of technologies in the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence areas has produced excellent results, confirming the validity of our solution

Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic change over the United States. Our model is robust to unpredictable changes in Twitter's sampling rate, and provides a probabilistic characterization of the relationship of macro-scale linguistic influence to a set of demographic and geographic predictors. The results of this analysis offer support for prior arguments that focus on geographical proximity and population size. However, demographic similarity -- especially with regard to race -- plays an even more central role, as cities with similar racial demographics are far more likely to share linguistic influence. Rather than moving towards a single unified "netspeak" dialect, language evolution in computer-mediated communication reproduces existing fault lines in spoken American English.Comment: preprint of PLOS-ONE paper from November 2014; PLoS ONE 9(11) e11311

Talking to the Empowered Consumer Dealing with the Shift of Power

The concept of the empowered consumer cannot be considered as a field of exact scientific research yet. Nevertheless, it has become part of scholars’ interest and gains more and more importance in the research of organisational relationships with customers. It is suggested that two influencing criteria are especially at the forefront: The emergence of the Internet, which effected that barriers to collect and to disseminate information across boundaries were decisively reduced. As a consequence consumers could organise globally and collect and exchange information and experiences about organisations and their products. Furthermore, flexible interactivity between companies and consumers, but particularly from consumers to consumers enable direct interaction changing many previously established rules of doing business. Due to these new opportunities new business models developed and the proposition is that intangible values such as reputation gained even more importance and influence tangible outcomes. Suggestions are that 1.), this concept links communication, corporate behaviour and legitimacy of activities influencing reputation as a driver of value. 2.), reputation as a corporate asset can be managed but it is beyond the pure control of an organisation. 3.), reputation is part of public perception, which an organisation has to build, maintain and expand depending on communicative abilities and willingness to accept consumers as a centre of power. The following discussion will present Grunig et al.’s communication model explaining changed organisational challenges. It is put forward as a framework for marketing for times in which online opportunities added to the earlier b2b and b2c models c2c and P2P considerations and architectures. The annual studies of the market research institute puls undertaking regular representative research among German consumers since November 2005 will present evidence for the relationship of improved prices, which may be achieved, and the perception a firm possesses. This paper deals mostly with German examples and data, but the hypothesis is that a) the general situation in other Western countries is alike, but needs b) specific additional research, since cultural differences are expected to have a considerable influence, especially when criteria such as individualist and collectivist organisation of society and high and low context communication styles are involved. Hence, the results of the same study in different countries are therefore expected to present some variation. Additionally, the Cluetrain Manifesto challenges corporate behaviour of those companies still believing to have the ability to control information disseminated by and written about it. Examples provided will support the hypothesis that powerful consumers may have significant impact on organisational behaviour, decision-making and outcomes. Keywords: Empowered Consumer Concept, Symmetric Two-way communication, Reputation, c2c, P2