Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles

In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform, and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects: first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User Interfaces 201

Protecting attributes and contents in online social networks

With the extreme popularity of online social networks, security and privacy issues become critical. In particular, it is important to protect user privacy without preventing them from normal socialization. User privacy in the context of data publishing and structural re-identification attacks has been well studied. However, protection of attributes and data content was mostly neglected in the research community. While social network data is rarely published, billions of messages are shared in various social networks on a daily basis. Therefore, it is more important to protect attributes and textual content in social networks. We first study the vulnerabilities of user attributes and contents, in particular, the identifiability of the users when the adversary learns a small piece of information about the target. We have presented two attribute-reidentification attacks that exploit information retrieval and web search techniques. We have shown that large portions of users with online presence are very identifiable, even with a small piece of seed information, and the seed information could be inaccurate. To protect user attributes and content, we adopt the social circle model derived from the concepts of "privacy as user perception" and "information boundary". Users will have different social circles, and share different information in different circles. We introduce a social circle discovery approach using multi-view clustering. We present our observations on the key features of social circles, including friendship links, content similarity and social interactions. We treat each feature as one view, and propose a one-side co-trained spectral clustering technique, which is tailored for the sparse nature of our data. We also propose two evaluation measurements. One is based on the quantitative measure of similarity ratio, while the other employs human evaluators to examine pairs of users, who are selected by the max-risk active evaluation approach. We evaluate our approach on ego networks of twitter users, and present our clustering results. We also compare our proposed clustering technique with single-view clustering and original co-trained spectral clustering techniques. Our results show that multi-view clustering is more accurate for social circle detection; and our proposed approach gains significantly higher similarity ratio than the original multi-view clustering approach. In addition, we build a proof-of-concept implementation of automatic circle detection and recommendation methods. For a user, the system will return its circle detection result from our proposed multi-view clustering technique, and the key words for each circle are also presented. Users can also enter a message they want to post, and the system will suggest which circle to disseminate the message

ACQR: A Novel Framework to Identify and Predict Influential Users in Micro-Blogging

As key roles of online social networks, influential users in micro-blogging have the ability to influence the attitudes or behaviour of others. When it comes to marketing, the users’ influence should be associated with a certain topic or field on which people have different levels of preference and expertise. In order to identify and predict influential users in a specific topic more effectively, users’ actual influential capability on a certain topic and potential influence unlimited by topics is combined into a novel comprehensive framework named “ACQR” in this research. ACQR framework depicts the attributes of the influentials from four aspects, including activeness (A), centrality (C), quality of post (Q) and reputation (R). Based on this framework, a data mining method is developed for discovering and forecasting the top influentials. Empirical results reveal that our ACQR framework and the data mining method by TOPSIS and SVMs (with polynomial and RBF kernels) can perform very well in identifying and predicting influential users in a certain topic (such as iPhone 5). Furthermore, the dynamic change processes of users’ influence from longitudinal perspective are analysed and suggestions to the sales managers are provided

Fashion Meets Twitter: Does the Source Matter? Perceived Message Credibility, Interactivity and Purchase Intention

Through an online survey, this study explored the perceived source credibility of fashion industry Twitter messages with varying message sources (the brand itself, celebrity endorser, friend/acquaintance). Online interactivity and purchase intention of potential customers were also assessed to examine if a particular message source and its credibility increase the likelihood of online engagement with the message and customers\u27 intention to purchase.;Findings indicate that of all source types, brands were perceived as most credible overall, as well as on dimensions of expertise, character, and attractiveness. Furthermore, there was a higher probability of respondents searching for additional information based on a tweet from a brand. In terms of purchase based on Twitter messages, respondents were most motivated based on the affordability, value and the ability of the fashion item to compliment their personal style. Conversely, celebrity endorsers scored lowest in every variable, including credibility, interactivity and purchase intention, which might provide some insight into social media celebrity endorsement for fashion brands and designers.;These findings highlight the value of source selection in Twitter messaging for the fashion industry, as well as the content of the messages posted in this forum. Optimization and leveraging of messages based on these findings should lead to better return on investment as measured by online engagement and purchase intention