Big Data, Small Credit: The Digital Revolution and Its Impact on Emerging Market Consumers

This research report sheds light on a new cadre of technology companies who are disrupting the credit scoring business in emerging markets. Using non-financial data -- such as social media activity and mobile phone usage patterns -- complex algorithms and big data analytics are forever changing the economics of how we identify, score, and underwrite credit to consumers who have been invisible to lenders until now

Potential mass surveillance and privacy violations in proximity-based social applications

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and used to build a sense of serendipitous discovery of people, places and interests. Unfortunately, while this class of applications opens different interactions possibilities for people in urban settings, obtaining access to certain identity information could lead a possible privacy attacker to identify and follow a user in their movements in a specific period of time. The same information shared through the platform could also help an attacker to link the victim's online profiles to physical identities. We analyse a set of popular dating application that shares users relative distances within a certain radius and show how, by using the information shared on these platforms, it is possible to formalise a multilateration attack, able to identify the user actual position. The same attack can also be used to follow a user in all their movements within a certain period of time, therefore identifying their habits and Points of Interest across the city. Furthermore we introduce a social attack which uses common Facebook likes to profile a person and finally identify their real identity

The other side of the social web: A taxonomy for social information access

The power of the modern Web, which is frequently called the Social Web or Web 2.0, is frequently traced to the power of users as contributors of various kinds of contents through Wikis, blogs, and resource sharing sites. However, the community power impacts not only the production of Web content, but also the access to all kinds of Web content. A number of research groups worldwide explore what we call social information access techniques that help users get to the right information using "collective wisdom" distilled from actions of those who worked with this information earlier. This invited talk offers a brief introduction into this important research stream and reviews recent works on social information access performed at the University of Pittsburgh's PAWS Lab lead by the author. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)

Preserving our folktales, myths and legends in the digital era

A video recording of Mr. Tshering Cigay Dorji (Tokushima University, Japan) giving a presentation on preserving folktales, myths and legends in the digital era at the National Storytelling Conference in Bhutan, June 2009.World Oral Literature Project: an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record

Applying Bourdieu to socio-technical systems: The importance of affordances for social translucence in building 'capital' and status to eBay's success

This paper introduces the work of Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of ‘the field’ and ‘capital’ in relation to eBay. This paper considers eBay to be a socio-technical system with its own set of social norms, rules and competition over ‘capital’. eBay is used as a case study of the importance of using a Bourdieuean approach to create successful socio-technical systems.Using a two-year qualitative study of eBay users as empirical illustration, this paper argues that a large part of eBay’s success is in the social and cultural affordances for social translucence and navigation of eBay’s website - in supporting the Bourdieuean competition over capital and status. This exploration has implications for wider socio-technical systems design which this paper will discuss - in particular, the importance of creating socially translucent and navigable systems, informed by Bourdieu’s theoretical insights, which support competition for ‘capital’ and status

Recommendation, collaboration and social search

This chapter considers the social component of interactive information retrieval: what is the role of other people in searching and browsing? For simplicity we begin by considering situations without computers. After all, you can interactively retrieve information without a computer; you just have to interact with someone or something else. Such an analysis can then help us think about the new forms of collaborative interactions that extend our conceptions of information search, made possible by the growth of networked ubiquitous computing technology. Information searching and browsing have often been conceptualized as a solitary activity, however they always have a social component. We may talk about 'the' searcher or 'the' user of a database or information resource. Our focus may be on individual uses and our research may look at individual users. Our experiments may be designed to observe the behaviors of individual subjects. Our models and theories derived from our empirical analyses may focus substantially or exclusively on an individual's evolving goals, thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions. Nevertheless there are always social aspects of information seeking and use present, both implicitly and explicitly. We start by summarizing some of the history of information access with an emphasis on social and collaborative interactions. Then we look at the nature of recommendations, social search and interfaces to support collaboration between information seekers. Following this we consider how the design of interactive information systems is influenced by their social elements

Managed Forgetting to Support Information Management and Knowledge Work

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last five years as well as challenges that still need to be tackled. Additionally, we share experiences gained with the prototype of a first forgetful information system used 24/7 in our daily work for the last three years. We also address the untapped potential of more explicated user context as well as features inspired by Memory Inhibition, which is our current focus of research.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, preprint, final version to appear in KI - K\"unstliche Intelligenz, Special Issue: Intentional Forgettin