Harnessing Twitter to support serendipitous learning of developers

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Facilitating Creativity in Collaborative Work with Computational Intelligence Software

The use of computational intelligence for leveraging social creativity is a relatively new approach that allows organizations to find creative solutions to complex problems in which the interaction between stakeholders is crucial. The creative solutions that come from joint thinking-from the combined knowledge and abilities of people with diverse perspectives-contrast with traditional views of creativity that focus primarily on the individual as the main contributor of creativity. In an effort to support social creativity in organizations, in this paper we present computational intelligence software tools for that aim and an architecture for creating software mashups based on the concept of affinity space. The affinity space defines a digital setting to facilitate specific scenarios in collaborative business environments. The solution presented includes a set of free and open source software tools ranging from newly developed brainstorming applications to an expertise recommender for enhancing social creativity in the enterprise. The current paper addresses software design issues and presents reflections on the research work undertaken in the COLLAGE project between 2012 and 2015

Learners - should we leave them to their own devices?

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring learner owned devices and their potential for edcuatio

How Software Practitioners Use Informal Local Meetups to Share Software Engineering Knowledge

Informal technology "meetups" have become an important aspect of the software development community, engaging many thousands of practitioners on a regular basis. However, although local technology meetups are well-attended by developers, little is known about their motivations for participating, the type or usefulness of information that they acquire, and how local meetups might differ from and complement other available communication channels for software engineering information. We interviewed the leaders of technology-oriented Meetup groups, and collected quantitative information via a survey distributed to participants in technology-oriented groups. Our findings suggest that participants in these groups are primarily experienced software practitioners, who use Meetup for staying abreast of new developments, building local networks and achieving transfer of rich tacit knowledge with peers to improve their practice. We also suggest that face to face meetings are useful forums for exchanging tacit knowledge and contextual information needed for software engineering practice

Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are "pictorial characters" similar to emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a pre-defined set of such symbols to react to issues and pull requests. However, little is known about the real usage and impact of GitHub reactions. In this paper, we analyze the reactions provided by developers to more than 2.5 million issues and 9.7 million issue comments, in order to answer an extensive list of nine research questions about the usage and adoption of reactions. We show that reactions are being increasingly used by open source developers. Moreover, we also found that issues with reactions usually take more time to be handled and have longer discussions.Comment: 10 page

SIEVE: Helping developers sift wheat from chaff via cross-platform analysis

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Privacy Law\u27s Precautionary Principle Problem

Privacy law today faces two interrelated problems. The first is an information control problem. Like so many other fields of modern cyberlaw—intellectual property, online safety, cybersecurity, etc.—privacy law is being challenged by intractable Information Age realties. Specifically, it is easier than ever before for information to circulate freely and harder than ever to bottle it up once it is released. This has not slowed efforts to fashion new rules aimed at bottling up those information flows. If anything, the pace of privacy-related regulatory proposals has been steadily increasing in recent years even as these information control challenges multiply. This has led to privacy law’s second major problem: the precautionary principle problem. The precautionary principle generally holds that new innovations should be curbed or even forbidden until they are proven safe. Fashioning privacy rules based on precautionary principle reasoning necessitates prophylactic regulation that makes new forms of digital innovations guilty until proven innocent. This puts privacy law on a collision course with the general freedom to innovate that has thus far powered the Internet revolution, and privacy law threatens to limit innovations consumers have come to expect or even raise prices for services consumers currently receive free of charge. As a result, even if new regulations are pursued or imposed, there will likely be formidable push-up not just from affected industries but also from their consumers. In light of both of these information control and precautionary principle problems, new approaches to privacy protection are necessary. We need to invert the process of how we go about protecting privacy by focusing more on practical “bottom-up” solution—education, empowerment, public and media pressure, social norms and etiquette, industry self-regulation and best practices, and an enhanced role for privacy professionals within organizations—instead of “top-down” legalistic solutions and regulatory techo-fixes. Resources expended on top-down regulatory pursuits should instead be put into bottom-up efforts to help citizens better prepare for an uncertain future. In this regard, policymakers can draw important lessons form the debate over how best to protect children from objectionable online content. In a sense, there is nothing new under the sun; the current debate over privacy protection has many parallels with earlier debates about how best to protect online child safety. Most notably, just as top-down regulatory constraints came to be viewed as even be workable in the long-run for protecting online child safety, the same will likely be true for most privacy related regulatory enactments. This article sketches out some general lessons from those online safety debates and discusses their implications for privacy policy going forward