Assessing the credibility of online social network messages.

ABSTRACT Information gathered socially online is a key feature of the growth and development of modern society. Presently the Internet is a platform for the distribution of data. Millions of people use Online Social Networks daily as a tool to get updated with social, political, educational or other occurrences. In many cases information derived from an Online Social Network is acted upon and often shared with other networks, without further assessments or judgments. Many people do not check to see if the information shared is credible. A user may trust the information generated by a close friend without questioning its credibility, in contrast to a message generated by an unknown user. This work considers the concept of credibility in the wider sense, by proposing whether a user can trust the service provider or even the information itself. Two key components of credibility have been explored; trustworthiness and expertise. Credibility has been researched in the past using Twitter as a validation tool. The research was focused on automatic methods of assessing the credibility of sets of tweets using analysis of microblog postings related to trending topics to determine the credibility of tweets. This research develops a framework that can assist the assessment of the credibility of messages in Online Social Networks. Four types of credibility are explored (experienced, surface, reputed and presumed credibility) resulting in a credibility hierarchy. To determine the credibility of messages generated and distributed in Online Social Networks, a virtual network is created, which attributes nodes with individual views to generate messages in the network at random, recording data from a network and analysing the data based on the behaviour exhibited by agents (an agent-based modelling approach). The factors considered for the experiment design included; peer-to-peer networking, collaboration, opinion formation and network rewiring. The behaviour of agents, frequency in which messages are shared and used, the pathway of the messages and how this affects credibility of messages is also considered. A framework is designed and the resulting data are tested using the design. The resulting data generated validated the framework in part, supporting an approach whereby the concept of tagging the message status assists the understanding and application of the credibility hierarchy. Validation was carried out with Twitter data acquired through twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API). There were similarities in the generation and frequency of the message distributions in the network; these findings were also recorded and analysed using the framework proposed. Some limitations were encountered while acquiring data from Twitter, however, there was sufficient evidence of correlation between the simulated and real social network datasets to indicate the validity of the framework.N/

Computing point-of-view : modeling and simulating judgments of taste

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-163).People have rich points-of-view that afford them the ability to judge the aesthetics of people, things, and everyday happenstance; yet viewpoint has an ineffable quality that is hard to articulate in words, let alone capture in computer models. Inspired by cultural theories of taste and identity, this thesis explores end-to-end computational modeling of people's tastes-from model acquisition, to generalization, to application- under various realms. Five aesthetical realms are considered-cultural taste, attitudes, ways of perceiving, taste for food, and sense-of-humor. A person's model is acquired by reading her personal texts, such as a weblog diary, a social network profile, or emails. To generalize a person model, methods such as spreading activation, analogy, and imprimer supplementation are applied to semantic resources and search spaces mined from cultural corpora. Once a generalized model is achieved, a person's tastes are brought to life through perspective-based applications, which afford the exploration of someone else's perspective through interactivity and play. The thesis describes model acquisition systems implemented for each of the five aesthetical realms.(cont.) The techniques of 'reading for affective themes' (RATE), and 'culture mining' are described, along with their enabling technologies, which are commonsense reasoning and textual affect analysis. Finally, six perspective-based applications were implemented to illuminate a range of real-world beneficiaries to person modeling-virtual mentoring, self-reflection, and deep customization.by Xinyu Hugo Liu.Ph.D

When in doubt ask the crowd : leveraging collective intelligence for improving event detection and machine learning

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A digital twin body of knowledge: the structure of a new paradigm for urban management

Rising global trends like increasing world population, rapid urbanisation, and escalating complexity are posing immense challenges to urban sustainability and well-being. Last month, the world’s population, according to the United Nations, has reached 8 billion for the first time. Also, the United Nations expects that the percentage of the world’s population living in cities and urban areas will increase from 55% in 2022 to 68% by 2050. Moreover, the escalating urban complexity further exacerbates the situation. The evolution of an extremely complex urban system of systems, including vastly interconnected urban dynamics and networks, eventually leads to the emergence of unexpected events with undesirable consequences. Therefore, increasing attention is being directed towards Sustainable Urban Development [SUD] and establishing a new paradigm in Urban Management [UM]. The discipline of UM is concerned with the planning for and implementation of interventions into the complex urban environment in such ways that lead to the emergence of better conditions for people and nature. On the one hand, achieving this aim, towards the realisation of SUD, has proven to be far from being a straightforward task. On the other hand, the recently emerging concept of Digital Twin [DT] has presented itself as an enabler of a revolution within the discipline of UM. A DT is based on the idea of connecting a physical system in the physical world to its virtual representation in the cyber world via bidirectional communication, with or without human-in-the-loop to make better decisions and unlock value. Implementing this concept to support UM research and practices has arguably given birth to a new paradigm, namely Digital Twins for Urban Management [DT for UM]. However, for a new paradigm to grow and mature, its cultural system – comprising theories, ideational projects, and methods – needs to be well-structured, systematised, and unified. The critical examination of the literature pertaining to DT for UM, conducted at three different levels of analysis (i.e.: philosophical, methodological, and methodical), showed lack of consistency, coherence, and uniformity. Philosophical worldviews adopted across this new paradigm are wildly heterogenous, incommensurable, and result in oxymoronic theoretical positions when integrated in face of multifaceted real-world wicked urban problems. The existing cultural system shows absence of systematic methodology that can offer clear guidelines to implementation of DT. Moreover, at the most concrete and practical level, DT-based methods and tools are ad-hoc and lack standardisation needed for discipline members to communicate in an unambiguous common language. Hence, the aim of this research is to systematise and unify the new paradigm DT for UM in order to foster its growth and maturity. To this end, this research developed a theoretical artefact, namely the Digital Twin Body of Knowledge [DTBOK], using Design Science Research methodology. It constitutes a new cultural system for the new paradigm DT for UM that addresses the existing gaps. DTBOK is made of the following three key elements: Philosophical element: Built upon the philosophy of Critical Realism, which is an intrinsically pluralistic philosophy that enables pluralistic and practically adequate interventions without falling into theoretical contradictions or inconsistencies. Methodological element: namely, the Data-Driven Multi-Method methodology [DM2] is formulated to provide a systematic procedure to guide DT-based interventions and bridge the abstract philosophical element and the concrete methodical element described below. Methodical element: namely, the Digital Twin Uses and Classification System [DTUCS] is created in the form of a three-pronged structure. Prong-A provides a framework that aids in classifying DTs and DT use cases according to a set of standard features. Prong-B is a taxonomy of DT uses or functions that DT can plausibly execute, all put in standard terms. Prong-C draws on the Unified Modelling Language [UML] to model and document DT use case scenarios. The contributions of DTBOK are manifold. On the one hand, DTBOK directly contributes to practice by offering a standard common language that can be used to define DT use cases at the outset of a project, specify required DT features and DT uses, and support clear and unambiguous communications across DT market. It also supplies practitioners with a systematic methodology that guides them through a DT-based intervention. DTBOK’s contribution to theory, on the other hand, involves initiating a philosophical debate that is absent from the DT for UM literature. It explores the philosophical assumptions and worldviews shaping and influencing the DT practices within this nascent paradigm. Built upon the intrinsically pluralistic philosophy of critical realism and by pragmatizing its abstract principles, DTBOK protects researchers and practitioners from adopting an atheoretical or a theoretically inconsistent position while performing in a pluralistic manner, integrating, and combining different DT approaches and methods. The benefits DTBOK brings about by linking theory and practice are manifold. It augments practitioners’ reflexivity, where it provides rigorous grounds based on which practical implementation can be explained, justified, or criticised. Moreover, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of the various DT methods and approaches, ranging from quantitative and tech-driven to qualitative and humanistic approaches, helps in undertaking genuinely pluralistic interventions in the face of complex and multi-dimensional real-world problems. Using an evaluation-specific methodology, the following three types of research were used to evaluate DTBOK: Abstract research: to evaluate the philosophical unifiability of DTBOK’s philosophical element. Focus group discussions were carried out to assess how well the philosophical element of DTBOK can consistently unite the distinct worldviews within the paradigm DT for UM. Intensive research: employing action research to evaluate DTBOK as one whole artefact, including all of its three elements, in terms of its overall adequacy and usability

Plagues and Players: an Environmental and Scientific History of Australia's Southern Locusts

This thesis traces the changing course of locust and grasshopper outbreaks in southern Australia and relates them to environmental changes. It also examines the creation and use of scientific knowledge about locusts over more than a century of research. Together, these historical investigations show how the insects’ responses to environmental change influenced the course of ecological and agricultural science. Digitised newspaper records of locust occurrence allow a more complete reconstruction of historic plagues and a new interpretation of the species involved and the environmental correlates of their changing incidence. They also provide a different view of the scientific players who investigated locusts in Australia. These sources are complemented by the writings of many entomologists about locust outbreaks and ecologies from the 1840s to the 1970s. The popular and scientific sources reveal the complexity of ecological ideas, technologies and institutional settings, framed by the common material context of environmental change. This is a history of entomological, ecological and public agricultural science as well as an analysis of the environments in which the outbreaks developed. European settlers encountered grasshoppers and locusts soon after establishing pastoral and agricultural land use. Swarming populations developed patterns of occurrence that were observed by farmers and naturalists, and there is evidence that their incidence increased during the nineteenth century. Two species, Austroicetes cruciata and Chortoicetes terminifera, developed frequent outbreak populations on the southern grasslands, making them significant agricultural pests, but they responded differently to changes of climate, landscape and land use. The former swarmed almost annually soon after livestock altered grassland ecosystems within its range, but it declined during the twentieth century. The latter first swarmed across the southern grasslands in the 1870s, but has since maintained irregular outbreak populations through migratory exchanges. They are taxonomically related native locusts with a similar appearance but distinct ecologies. Untangling their identities was historically marked by scientific confusion. However, the two species can sometimes be distinguished in newspaper reports by diagnostic morphological features, and can often be separated by differences in their seasonal occurrence, abundance, phenology and behaviour. This thesis argues that the fundamental changes to grassy ecosystems resulting from the rapid expansion of the pastoral industry favoured the development of swarming populations of both Australian species. Evidence comes from early Aboriginal comments, thousands of newspaper and official reports, climatic sequences and the nature of landscape changes, as well as the subsequent contraction in outbreak extent and frequency when land use and land cover stabilised in the second half of the twentieth century. The writings of many investigators reveal overlapping trends in ecological and technological investigations, and place each player within their scientific era. These are examined in the context of international developments and the broader public discourse about locusts and the importance and relevance of science. In this long relationship of feedbacks, the materiality of the insects allowed scientists to discern their ecologies. Science directed government policy on how to respond and governments sponsored more science in managing the politics of successive agricultural crises

The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology

My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children's national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of "national" text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and symbolic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991-01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of "universal" technologies, 4) prospects of "proper" national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices