Social Bots: Human-Like by Means of Human Control?

Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their application is even suspected to be partly responsible for recent election results. Astonishingly, the term `Social Bot' is not well defined and different scientific disciplines use divergent definitions. This work starts with a balanced definition attempt, before providing an overview of how social bots actually work (taking the example of Twitter) and what their current technical limitations are. Despite recent research progress in Deep Learning and Big Data, there are many activities bots cannot handle well. We then discuss how bot capabilities can be extended and controlled by integrating humans into the process and reason that this is currently the most promising way to go in order to realize effective interactions with other humans.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure

Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

A Model for the Portuguese Online Retailers Adoption of Web 2.0 Tools

The Internet has become a major sales platform, assuming a growing importance in increasing the economic growth of a company. Therefore it is of great importance to analyse the incorporation of Web 2.0 tools and their relation to the website success and its design. Through a systematic exploration of the 36 most visited Portuguese e-commerce websites, according to the ranking published by Marktest, information was gathered about the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by these online retailers. Results indicate that the most frequently implemented tools are social networking, Rich Internet Application (RIA), mashups and Really Simple Syndication (RSS feeds). The least often adopted were semantic search, wikis and blogs. Based on these results and those in additional studies, an optimized model of Web 2.0 tools implementation is proposed for online retailers operating in Portugal. In the short term, it is suggested that the retailer should implement easier features which bring quicker success in terms of return on investments, such as social networking, mashups, RSS feeds and tagging, each one of which leads to a specific business benefit. In the medium-to-long term, it is suggested that retailers should adopt RIA-based features and podcasts/vodcasts. The adoption of these Web tools must be based on a complete and differentiated set tools