The Role of Gender in Social Network Organization

The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of settings, the majority of studies focus on a single data stream in isolation. Here we use a dataset of high resolution data collected using mobile phones, as well as detailed questionnaires, to study gender differences in a large cohort. We consider mobility behavior and individual personality traits among a group of more than $800$ university students. We also investigate interactions among them expressed via person-to-person contacts, interactions on online social networks, and telecommunication. Thus, we are able to study the differences between male and female behavior captured through a multitude of channels for a single cohort. We find that while the two genders are similar in a number of aspects, there are robust deviations that include multiple facets of social interactions, suggesting the existence of inherent behavioral differences. Finally, we quantify how aspects of an individual's characteristics and social behavior reveals their gender by posing it as a classification problem. We ask: How well can we distinguish between male and female study participants based on behavior alone? Which behavioral features are most predictive

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Rhetoric of Big Data: Collecting, Interpreting, and Representing in the Age of Datafication

Rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM) have provided critical understanding of how argument and argument norms within a field shape what we mean by “data.” Work has also examined how questions that shape data collection are asked, how data is interpreted, and even how data is shared. Understood as a form of argument, data reveals important insights into rhetorical situations, the motives of rhetorical actors, and the broader appeals that shape everything from the kinds of technologies built, to their inclusion in our daily lives, to the infrastructures of cities, the medical practices and policies concerning public health, etc. Big data merits continued attention from RSTM scholars as our understanding of its pervasive use and its ethos grows, but its arguments remain elusive (Salvo, 2012). To unpack the elusivity of big data, we explore one particularly illustrative case of big data and political, democratic influence: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. To understand the case, we turn to social studies of data to explore the range of ethical issues raised by big data, and to examine the rhetorical strategies that entail big data

Improving Collection Understanding for Web Archives with Storytelling: Shining Light Into Dark and Stormy Archives

Collections are the tools that people use to make sense of an ever-increasing number of archived web pages. As collections themselves grow, we need tools to make sense of them. Tools that work on the general web, like search engines, are not a good fit for these collections because search engines do not currently represent multiple document versions well. Web archive collections are vast, some containing hundreds of thousands of documents. Thousands of collections exist, many of which cover the same topic. Few collections include standardized metadata. Too many documents from too many collections with insufficient metadata makes collection understanding an expensive proposition. This dissertation establishes a five-process model to assist with web archive collection understanding. This model aims to produce a social media story – a visualization with which most web users are familiar. Each social media story contains surrogates which are summaries of individual documents. These surrogates, when presented together, summarize the topic of the story. After applying our storytelling model, they summarize the topic of a web archive collection. We develop and test a framework to select the best exemplars that represent a collection. We establish that algorithms produced from these primitives select exemplars that are otherwise undiscoverable using conventional search engine methods. We generate story metadata to improve the information scent of a story so users can understand it better. After an analysis showing that existing platforms perform poorly for web archives and a user study establishing the best surrogate type, we generate document metadata for the exemplars with machine learning. We then visualize the story and document metadata together and distribute it to satisfy the information needs of multiple personas who benefit from our model. Our tools serve as a reference implementation of our Dark and Stormy Archives storytelling model. Hypercane selects exemplars and generates story metadata. MementoEmbed generates document metadata. Raintale visualizes and distributes the story based on the story metadata and the document metadata of these exemplars. By providing understanding immediately, our stories save users the time and effort of reading thousands of documents and, most importantly, help them understand web archive collections

Updating the art history curriculum: incorporating virtual and augmented reality technologies to improve interactivity and engagement

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This project investigates how the art history curricula in higher education can borrow from and incorporate emerging technologies currently being used in art museums. Many art museums are using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to transform their visitors' experiences into experiences that are interactive and engaging. Art museums have historically offered static visitor experiences, which have been mirrored in the study of art. This project explores the current state of the art history classroom in higher education, which is historically a teacher-centered learning environment and the learning effects of that environment. The project then looks at how art museums are creating visitor-centered learning environments; specifically looking at how they are using reality technologies (virtual and augmented) to transition into digitally interactive learning environments that support various learning theories. Lastly, the project examines the learning benefits of such tools to see what could (and should) be implemented into the art history curricula at the higher education level and provides a sample section of a curriculum demonstrating what that implementation could look like. Art and art history are a crucial part of our culture and being able to successfully engage with it and learn from it enables the spread of our culture through digital means and of digital culture

Aesthetic Pleasure from Visual Quotes and its Influence on Individuals' Motivation to Exercise

It is well-known that physical activity has many benefits for health and well-being. However, one in four adults worldwide does not engage in enough physical activity. On the other hand, nowadays, many people look for physical exercise motivation online on image-sharing social media platforms, where it is relatively common to find encouraging text messages embedded in visual presentations (as visual quotes). Considering that perceived beauty can influence our perception of an artifact, this research project explored whether and how aesthetic pleasure affects people's perception of motivational text messages and the textual content's motivating capability on people's exercise motivation. The influence of several aesthetic pleasure levels (ugly, neutral, and beautiful) was explored in textual content with different characteristics (e.g., positive-framed, self-liberating messages, low-perceived competence, high-perceived competence). Several experiments revealed that high levels of aesthetic pleasure does not necessarily lead individuals to perceive a textual message as more positive. Similarly, low levels of aesthetic pleasure did not affect textual content perception. Indeed, ultimately, the influence of aesthetic pleasure seemed dependent on the textual content's own characteristics. Some experiments focused on the immediate effect of aesthetic pleasure, while others focused on aesthetic pleasure in the mid-term (over four weeks). In none of the scenarios did aesthetic pleasure influence intrinsic motivation, which has been found to be linked to individuals’ enjoyment of and likelihood of engagement with exercise over the long-term, or influence the extrinsic motivation (the identified behavior regulation), related to the initial adoption of physical exercise. Nonetheless, it was found that visual presentations perceived as aesthetically appealing help to instill a positive feeling regarding the textual content. Possibilities for future research are suggested on the basis of Cognitive Evaluation Theory, a sub-theory of Self-Determination Theory).É de conhecimento geral que fazer exercício físico traz vários benefícios para a saúde e bem-estar. Contudo, um em quatro adultos em todo o mundo não faz exercício físico suficiente. Por outro lado, hoje em dia, muitas pessoas procuram motivação para fazer exercício físico na internet nas redes sociais, onde facilmente se podem encontrar mensagens de texto motivacionais embutidas em apresentações visuais (designadas visual quotes). Tendo em conta que a perceção de prazer estético pode influenciar a nossa perceção sobre um determinado artefacto ou pessoa. Este projeto de investigação explorou se e como o prazer estético pode afetar a perceção de mensagens motivacionais e a capacidade motivadora do conteúdo textual na motivação das pessoas para fazer exercício físico.Foram explorados a influência de diversos níveis de prazer estético (feio, neutro, belo) em conteúdo textual com diferentes características (por exemplo, positive-framed, self-liberating, perceção de baixa-competência, perceção de alta-competência). Vários estudos (experiments) revelaram que níveis de perceção de prazer estético altos não levam necessariamente a que as pessoas percecionem as mensagens de texto como mais positivas. De forma similar, níveis de perceção de prazer estético baixos não afetaram a perceção do conteúdo textual. Em último caso, a influência da perceção de prazer estético pareceu dependente das próprias características do conteúdo textual. Alguns dos estudos focaram-se no efeito imediato da perceção de prazer estético enquanto outros focarem-se no efeito a curto prazo (até quatro semanas). Em nenhum dos cenários, a perceção de prazer estético influenciou a motivação intrínseca para fazer exercício físico dos participantes, que está associada à prática de fazer exercício físico a longo-prazo; Ou influenciou a motivação extrínseca identified behavior regulation, que está associada à adoção inicial de hábitos de exercício físico. Não obstante, verificou-se que as apresentações visuais das visual quotes percecionadas como esteticamente apelativas ajudam a incutir um “sentimento” positivo relativo ao conteúdo textual. Por último, são sugeridas possibilidades para futura investigação tendo como base a teoria Cognitive Evalution (uma sub-teoria da teoria da Auto-determinação)

Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour

According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-channel data. Here, we focus on the relationship between mobility and social behaviour by analysing trajectories and mobile phone interactions of ∼1000 individuals from two high-resolution longitudinal datasets. We identify a connection between the way in which individuals explore new resources and exploit known assets in the social and spatial spheres. We show that different individuals balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off in different ways and we explain part of the variability in the data by the big five personality traits. We point out that, in both realms, extraversion correlates with the attitude towards exploration and routine diversity, while neuroticism and openness account for the tendency to evolve routine over long time-scales. We find no evidence for the existence of classes of individuals across the spatio-social domains. Our results bridge the fields of human geography, sociology and personality psychology and can help improve current models of mobility and tie formation