32,435 research outputs found
You are What you Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries by Analyzing Food & Drink Habits in Foursquare
Food and drink are two of the most basic needs of human beings. However, as
society evolved, food and drink became also a strong cultural aspect, being
able to describe strong differences among people. Traditional methods used to
analyze cross-cultural differences are mainly based on surveys and, for this
reason, they are very difficult to represent a significant statistical sample
at a global scale. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to identify
cultural boundaries and similarities across populations at different scales
based on the analysis of Foursquare check-ins. This approach might be useful
not only for economic purposes, but also to support existing and novel
marketing and social applications. Our methodology consists of the following
steps. First, we map food and drink related check-ins extracted from Foursquare
into users' cultural preferences. Second, we identify particular individual
preferences, such as the taste for a certain type of food or drink, e.g., pizza
or sake, as well as temporal habits, such as the time and day of the week when
an individual goes to a restaurant or a bar. Third, we show how to analyze this
information to assess the cultural distance between two countries, cities or
even areas of a city. Fourth, we apply a simple clustering technique, using
this cultural distance measure, to draw cultural boundaries across countries,
cities and regions.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on
Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2014
Event Organization 101: Understanding Latent Factors of Event Popularity
The problem of understanding people's participation in real-world events has
been a subject of active research and can offer valuable insights for human
behavior analysis and event-related recommendation/advertisement. In this work,
we study the latent factors for determining event popularity using large-scale
datasets collected from the popular Meetup.com EBSN in three major cities
around the world. We have conducted modeling analysis of four contextual
factors (spatial, group, temporal, and semantic), and also developed a
group-based social influence propagation network to model group-specific
influences on events. By combining the Contextual features And Social Influence
NetwOrk, our integrated prediction framework CASINO can capture the diverse
influential factors of event participation and can be used by event organizers
to predict/improve the popularity of their events. Evaluations demonstrate that
our CASINO framework achieves high prediction accuracy with contributions from
all the latent features we capture.Comment: International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2017
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/1557
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