8,256 research outputs found

    Using Social Media to Promote STEM Education: Matching College Students with Role Models

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    STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields have become increasingly central to U.S. economic competitiveness and growth. The shortage in the STEM workforce has brought promoting STEM education upfront. The rapid growth of social media usage provides a unique opportunity to predict users' real-life identities and interests from online texts and photos. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach by leveraging social media to promote STEM education: matching Twitter college student users with diverse LinkedIn STEM professionals using a ranking algorithm based on the similarities of their demographics and interests. We share the belief that increasing STEM presence in the form of introducing career role models who share similar interests and demographics will inspire students to develop interests in STEM related fields and emulate their models. Our evaluation on 2,000 real college students demonstrated the accuracy of our ranking algorithm. We also design a novel implementation that recommends matched role models to the students.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, accepted by ECML/PKDD 2016, Industrial Trac

    Three Essays on Friend Recommendation Systems for Online Social Networks

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    Social networking sites (SNSs) first appeared in the mid-90s. In recent years, however, Web 2.0 technologies have made modern SNSs increasingly popular and easier to use, and social networking has expanded explosively across the web. This brought a massive number of new users. Two of the most popular SNSs, Facebook and Twitter, have reached one billion users and exceeded half billion users, respectively. Too many new users may cause the cold start problem. Users sign up on a SNS and discover they do not have any friends. Normally, SNSs solve this problem by recommending potential friends. The current major methods for friend recommendations are profile matching and “friends-of-friends.” The profile matching method compares two users’ profiles. This is relatively inflexible because it ignores the changing nature of users. It also requires complete profiles. The friends-of-friends method can only find people who are likely to be previously known to each other and neglects many users who share the same interests. To the best of my knowledge, existing research has not proposed guidelines for building a better recommendation system based on context information (location information) and user-generated content (UGC). This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay focuses on location information and then develops a framework for using location to recommend friends--a framework that is not limited to making only known people recommendations but that also adds stranger recommendations. The second essay employs UGC by developing a text analytic framework that discovers users’ interests and personalities and uses this information to recommend friends. The third essay discusses friend recommendations in a certain type of online community – health and fitness social networking sites, physical activities and health status become more important factors in this case. Essay 1: Location-sensitive Friend Recommendations in Online Social Networks GPS-embedded smart devices and wearable devices such as smart phones, tablets, smart watches, etc., have significantly increased in recent years. Because of them, users can record their location at anytime and anyplace. SNSs such as Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter all have developed their own location-based services to collect users’ location check-in data and provide location-sensitive services such as location-based promotions. None of these sites, however, have used location information to make friend recommendations. In this essay, we investigate a new model to make friend recommendations. This model includes location check-in data as predictors and calculates users’ check-in histories--users’ life patterns--to make friend recommendations. The results of our experiment show that this novel model provides better performance in making friend recommendations. Essay 2: Novel Friend Recommendations Based on User-generated Contents More and more users have joined and contributed to SNSs. Users share stories of their daily life (such as having delicious food, enjoying shopping, traveling, hanging out, etc.) and leave comments. This huge amount of UGC could provide rich data for building an accurate, adaptable, effective, and extensible user model that reflects users’ interests, their sentiments about different type of locations, and their personalities. From the computer-supported social matching process, these attributes could influence friend matches. Unfortunately, none of the previous studies in this area have focused on using these extracted meta-text features for friend recommendation systems. In this study, we develop a text analytic framework and apply it to UGCs on SNSs. By extracting interests and personality features from UGCs, we can make text-based friend recommendations. The results of our experiment show that text features could further improve recommendation performance. Essay 3: Friend Recommendations in Health/Fitness Social Networking Sites Thanks to the growing number of wearable devices, online health/fitness communities are becoming more and more popular. This type of social networking sites offers individuals the opportunity to monitor their diet process and motivating them to change their lifestyles. Users can improve their physical activity level and health status by receiving information, advice and supports from their friends in the social networks. Many studies have confirmed that social network structure and the degree of homophily in a network will affect how health behavior and innovations are spread. However, very few studies have focused on the opposite, the impact from users’ daily activities for building friendships in a health/fitness social networking site. In this study, we track and collect users’ daily activities from Record, a famous online fitness social networking sites. By building an analytic framework, we test and evaluate how people’s daily activities could help friend recommendations. The results of our experiment have shown that by using the helps from these information, friend recommendation systems become more accurate and more precise

    Identifying target audiences on social network sites by analyisng user connections : a social network analysis approach for instagram

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    Social Network Sites offer users and brands a platform to interact by following each other and liking, commenting and sharing of content. This dissertation demonstrates that brands can leverage on rich data emerging from user-user-, user-brand-, and brand-brand-connections on Instagram to identify, understand and target new prospects. The concept of homophily suggests that users are mainly connected to other users they perceive as similar to themselves and to brands they identify with. Taking these insights into account, this dissertation aims to develop an audience selection approach to identify prospects that are likely to be interest in following a focal brand on Instagram. By extracting real network data from Instagram, users were segmented based on their “follow-relationship” to a set of exemplar brands that share a similar image with the focal brand. Four segments were identified and profiled: True-Brand-Lovers, Fashion Seeker, Hidden Treasures and Intangibles. Additionally, by taking secondary layer effects into account, a targeting experiment was conducted on Instagram to examine whether and to what extent resulted segments can be employed to find highly interested prospects. Findings disclosed that new prospects can especially be found by detecting overlapping followers between brands within the set. Moreover, tendencies were found that new prospects can be detected in the secondary layer of existing followers, especially when their connection to the set is taken into account as well. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that taking users affinity to other entities to account can help brands to define more precisely targeting decisions.As redes sociais oferecem a utilizadores e marcas uma plataforma para que interajam. Esta dissertação demonstra que as marcas podem aproveitar a rich data emergente de interações utilizador-utilizador, utilizador-marca e marca-marca no Instagram, para identificar, perceber e visar potenciais clientes. O conceito de homofilia sugere que utilizadores estão principalmente ligados a outros utilizadores que sejam semelhantes a si mesmos e a marcas com que se identificam. Esta dissertação ambiciona desenvolver uma abordagem de seleção de audiência para identificar novos clientes que poderão ter interesse em seguir uma marca no Instagram. Ao extrair dados reais do Instagram, os utilizadores são segmentados com base na sua “follow-relationship” para determinar um conjunto de marcas que partilham uma imagem semelhante com a marca focal. Quatro segmentos foram identificados e divididos: True-Brand-Lovers, Fashion Seeker, Hidden Treasures e Intangibles. Adicionalmente, ao ter em consideração efeitos de segunda camada, uma experiência de targeting foi conduzida no Instagram para examinar se e em que medida os segmentos resultantes podem ser utilizados para descobrir potenciais clientes altamente interessados. Os resultados indicam que potenciais clientes podem ser encontrados particularmente ao detetar seguidores sobrepostos dentro do grupo. Para além disso, foram encontradas tendências que indiciam que potenciais clientes podem ser detetados na segunda camada de seguidores, especialmente quando a sua conexão ao grupo é levada também em conta. Portanto, os resultados deste estudo sugerem que ter em conta a afinidade dos utilizadores a outras entidades pode ajudar as marcas a definirem com mais precisão as suas decisões de targeting

    The Independent Living Movement in the UK

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    [Excerpt] The origin of the Independent Living Movement in the UK go back to the late 1970s. Disabled People in the UK, like many other disabled people in other Countries were very disenchanted by the services being provided for them at this time. Disabled people felt the services were paternalistic, institutional, second class, too medically orientated and out of touch with their real needs As a result of this they looked elsewhere for solutions to overcome their restricted predicament and living conditions. This led to a number of disabled people finding out about Independent Living which consequently led them to visit the USA, researching into their Independent Living Movement in terms of how it started, what it did and how it developed. They felt the concepts, ideas and philosophy of Independent Living were very significant and appropriate, and would be helpful and innovative in the UK and point a way forward for disabled people in the future. During 1980 and 1981 a number of leading and key individual disabled people were able to raise funds so that they could travel to explore looking into the Independent Living possibilities in the USA, particularly in Berkeley California, which is where the first Centre for Independent Living was established. These people included Vic Finkelstein, a radical activist, sociologist and founder of UPIAS, (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation) which was largely responsible for the conception of the social model of disability, Rosalie Wilkins, a TV presenter of a disability programme and disability activist, and John Evans, one of the founders of Project 81, an innovative scheme to help disabled people get out of institutions and at the time living in an institution himself. These 3 were followed by many others in later years. It was not only disabled people from the UK who went to America, looking for answers and inspirations for their situation at this time, as many other European disabled people did so in their quest for Independent Living too

    Philanthropy and Equity: The Case of South Africa

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    This paper explores the potential role for philanthropy to promote greater equity in South Africa. It also aims to stimulate further discussion and debate about how philanthropic resources can best contribute to a more just and equitable South Africa, and encourage others engaged in philanthropy elsewhere in the world to reflect on South Africa's experience
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