Social Signal Processing for Real-time Situational Understanding: A Vision and Approach

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

Tracing the German Centennial Flood in the Stream of Tweets: First Lessons Learned

Social microblogging services such as Twitter result in massive streams of georeferenced messages and geolocated status updates. This real-time source of information is invaluable for many application areas, in particular for disaster detection and response scenarios. Consequently, a considerable number of works has dealt with issues of their acquisition, analysis and visualization. Most of these works not only assume an appropriate percentage of georeferenced messages that allows for detecting relevant events for a specific region and time frame, but also that these geolocations are reasonably correct in representing places and times of the underlying spatio-temporal situation. In this paper, we review these two key assumption based on the results of applying a visual analytics approach to a dataset of georeferenced Tweets from Germany over eight months witnessing several large-scale flooding situations throughout the country. Our results con rm the potential of Twitter as a distributed 'social sensor' but at the same time highlight some caveats in interpreting immediate results. To overcome these limits we explore incorporating evidence from other data sources including further social media and mobile phone network metrics to detect, confirm and refine events with respect to location and time. We summarize the lessons learned from our initial analysis by proposing recommendations and outline possible future work directions

Modeling Analytical Streams for Social Business Intelligence

Social Business Intelligence (SBI) enables companies to capture strategic information from public social networks. Contrary to traditional Business Intelligence (BI), SBI has to face the high dynamicity of both the social network’s contents and the company’s analytical requests, as well as the enormous amount of noisy data. Effective exploitation of these continuous sources of data requires efficient processing of the streamed data to be semantically shaped into insightful facts. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional formalism to represent and evaluate social indicators directly from fact streams derived in turn from social network data. This formalism relies on two main aspects: the semantic representation of facts via Linked Open Data and the support of OLAP-like multidimensional analysis models. Contrary to traditional BI formalisms, we start the process by modeling the required social indicators according to the strategic goals of the company. From these specifications, all the required fact streams are modeled and deployed to trace the indicators. The main advantages of this approach are the easy definition of on-demand social indicators, and the treatment of changing dimensions and metrics through streamed facts. We demonstrate its usefulness by introducing a real scenario user case in the automotive sector

Curbing the Spread of Disinformation Through User Interface Design

Solutions to the problem of the spread of disinformation have come from a variety of disciplines. However, little academic research has examined the whether or not the user interface design of social media platforms could affect the spread of disinformation. Drawing from research from the uses and gratifications paradigm and technological affordances, this study examines user behavior on three versions of a researcher-created news sharing social networking service, called The Hive. Findings were inconclusive about the modifications tested in this study but nevertheless revealed interesting patterns in user behavior. This project, by closely examining the relationship between user interface design and user behavior, sheds new light on the problem of disinformation by arguing that users can be prompted to be more active consumers of news through changes in the interface

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

A Review of Traditional and Modern Viticulture Systems in the Lima and Cávado Subregions of the Vinho Verde DOC in Northern Portugal

This study topic is important as the density of traditional viticulture systems is diminishing and being replaced by modern, more efficient production methods. This is due to low perceived value of traditional wine production. The purpose of this study was to provide an analysis of the region and showcase what viticulture currently exists. In the coming future, climate change will alter important micro-climate conditions that allow for the production of this specific type of wine. The methods in which Vinho Verde wine are produced will need to adapt in order to keep a similar composition and taste. In summary, future objectives would be to provide design planning suggestions for maintaining Vinho Verde wine production in northern Portugal, based off of currently mapped viticulture practices and future climate change models

“Welcome to the FEMINIST CULT”: Building a Feminist Community of Practice on Tumblr

Over the course of the last twenty years, the internet has become a powerful tool for the mobilization of social movements because of its ease of access, its allowance for greater control of organization and communication, and its rapid spread and dissemination of ideas. Tumblr, a micro-blogging site that is comprised of 227.6 million blogs and 106.3 billion posts by March 2015, is one of the most significant locations of social activism online. In recent years, Tumblr has become a platform for highly involved feminist dialogue because of the ability for like-minded users to follow and reblog posts regarding feminist issues and content. The goal of this research is to use textual analysis to uncover how feminism is acting as a rallying point and space of community building that spans intersections of race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, etc., and how that rallying point is being created through a live-stream collective conscious. I do not contend that Tumblr is a perfect and unproblematic feminist utopia. Instead, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate that Tumblr is ultimately a hopeful space for discussion that has the potential for real social change. Thus, although negativity towards feminism is propagated through the anonymity of the internet, Tumblr has become both a location for feminist “world building” as a feminist community of practice. Through this platform comes the reshaping of feminism for the internet generation through female-to-female positivity, education and consciousness-raising, solidarity formed through the humor of ironic misandry, the increased importance and awareness of intersectionality and community reactions against anti-feminist content

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design