Socialising around media. Improving the second screen experience through semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities

SAM is a social media platform that enhances the experience of watching video content in a conventional living room setting, with a service that lets the viewer use a second screen (such as a smart phone) to interact with content, context and communities related to the main video content. This article describes three key functionalities used in the SAM platform in order to create an advanced interactive and social second screen experience for users: semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities. Both dataset-based and end user evaluations of system functionalities are reported in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the components directly involved and the platform as a whole

Indie hype cycle built for two, An: a case study of the Pitchfork album reviews of Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

2012 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates the whims of critical reception in the indie rock world and its effects upon the hype cycle. I define the indie hype cycle as a naturalized communicative process governing the flow of critical favor within the indie music community and identify its four primary phases as entrance on to the scene, hype generation, backlash, and obscurity/visibility. To understand the interaction between the hype cycle and critical reception, the project focuses on Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (CYHSY) as two bands emblematic of the critical divergence possible after initial success. It compares the reviews of the bands' debut and sophomore albums by Pitchfork, a prominent indie music website, and identifies genre, elitism, and authenticity as key constructs in the way the site frames the bands as indie, and thus, worthy of praise. I argue that an economy of authenticity--featuring emotional, economic, and talent-based forms--affects the indie hype cycle in a variety of ways. The thesis concludes that the mechanics of indie music criticism have extensive influence upon the indie hype cycle. The initial framing of band authenticity that accompanies debut releases can have years-long ramifications on the way that band is received and covered in the indie press. To inform its analysis, the thesis draws upon a wide variety of scholars including Ryan Hibbet, Michael Albrecht, and Devon Powers, along with commentators from the popular music press including Carl Wilson and Nitsuh Abebe

Learning with Joint Inference and Latent Linguistic Structure in Graphical Models

Constructing end-to-end NLP systems requires the processing of many types of linguistic information prior to solving the desired end task. A common approach to this problem is to construct a pipeline, one component for each task, with each system\u27s output becoming input for the next. This approach poses two problems. First, errors propagate, and, much like the childhood game of telephone , combining systems in this manner can lead to unintelligible outcomes. Second, each component task requires annotated training data to act as supervision for training the model. These annotations are often expensive and time-consuming to produce, may differ from each other in genre and style, and may not match the intended application. In this dissertation we present a general framework for constructing and reasoning on joint graphical model formulations of NLP problems. Individual models are composed using weighted Boolean logic constraints, and inference is performed using belief propagation. The systems we develop are composed of two parts: one a representation of syntax, the other a desired end task (semantic role labeling, named entity recognition, or relation extraction). By modeling these problems jointly, both models are trained in a single, integrated process, with uncertainty propagated between them. This mitigates the accumulation of errors typical of pipelined approaches. Additionally we propose a novel marginalization-based training method in which the error signal from end task annotations is used to guide the induction of a constrained latent syntactic representation. This allows training in the absence of syntactic training data, where the latent syntactic structure is instead optimized to best support the end task predictions. We find that across many NLP tasks this training method offers performance comparable to fully supervised training of each individual component, and in some instances improves upon it by learning latent structures which are more appropriate for the task

Data-Driven Analysis towards Monitoring Software Evolution by Continuously Understanding Changes in Users’ Needs

Ohjelmistot eivät usein vastaa käyttäjiensä odotuksia siitä huolimatta, että niiden odotetaan tarjoavan riittävä toiminnallisuus ja olevan virheettömiä. Tästä syystä ohjelmiston ylläpito on väistämätöntä ja tärkeää jokaiselle ohjelmistoyritykselle, joka haluaa pitää tuotteensa tai palvelunsa kannattavana. Koska kilpailu nykyajan ohjelmistomarkkinoilla on tiukkaa ja käyttäjien on helppo lopettaa tuotteen käyttö, yritysten on erityisen tärkeää tarkkailla ja ylläpitää käyttäjätyytyväisyyttä pitkäaikaisen menestyksen turvaamiseksi. Tämän saavuttamiseksi tärkeää on jatkuvasti ymmärtää ja kohdata käyttäjien tarpeet ja odotukset, sillä on tehokkaampaa kohdentaa ylläpito käyttäjien esittämien ongelmien perusteella. Toisaalta internet-teknologiat ovat kehittyneet nopeasti samalla, kun käyttäjien luoman sisällön määrä on kasvanut räjähdysmäisesti. Käyttäjien antama palaute (numeerinen arvostelu, ehdotus tai tekstuaalinen arvio) on esimerkki tällaisesta käyttäjien luomasta sisällöstä ja sen merkitys tuotteiden kehittämisessä asiakkaiden tarpeiden pohjalta kasvaa jatkuvasti. Käyttäjien tarpeiden ymmärtäminen on erityisen tärkeää jatkuvaa ylläpitoa ja kehitystystä vaativissa ohjelmistoissa. Tällöin on myös oleellista ymmärtää, miten asiakkaiden mielipiteet muuttuvat ajan kuluessa. Tämän lisäksi datan louhimisen ja koneoppimisen kehitys vähentävät vaivaa, joka käyttäjän tuottaman datan analysointiin ja erityisesti heidän käyttymisensä ymmärtämiseen tarvitaan. Vaikka useat tutkimukset ehdottavat tietokeskeistä lähestymistä palautteen arvioin- tiin, ohjelmiston ylläpitoa ja kehitystä hyödyntäviä lähestymistapoja on vähän. Monet menetelmät keskittyvät arvostelujen analysoinnissa tekstinlouhintaan paljastaakseen käyttäjien mielipiteet. Useat menetelmät keskittyvät myös tunnistamaan ja luokit- telemaan palautetyyppejä kuten ominaisuuspyyntöjä, virheilmoituksia ja tunteenilmauksia. Jotta ohjelmiston ylläpidosta saataisiin tehokkaampaa, tarvitaankin tehokas lähestymistapa ohjelmiston havaitun käyttäjäkokemuksen ja sen muutosten tarkkailuun ohjelmiston kehittyessä.Software products, though always being expected to provide satisfactory functionalities and be bug-free, somehow fail to meet the expectations of their users. Thus, software maintenance is inevitable and critical for any software companies who want their products or services to continue profiting. On the other hand, due to the fierce competitiveness in the contemporary software market, as well as the ease of user churns, monitoring and sustaining the satisfaction of the users is a critical criterion for the long-term success of any software products within their evolution stage. To such an end, continuously understanding and meeting the users’ needs and expectations is the key, as it is more efficient and effective to allocate maintenance effort accordingly to address the issues raised by users. On the other hand, accompanied by the rapid development of internet technologies, the volume of user-generated content has been increasing exponentially. Among such user-generated content, feedback from the customers, either numeric rating, recommendation, or textual reviews, have been playing an increasingly critical role in product designs in terms of understanding customers’ needs. Especially for software products that require constant maintenance and are continuously evolving, understanding of users’ needs and complaints, as well as the changes in their opinions through time, is of great importance. Additionally, supported by the advance of data mining and machine learning techniques, the effort of knowledge discovery from analyzing such data and specially understanding the behavior of the users shall be largely reduced. However, though many studies propose data-driven approaches for feedback analysis, the ones specifically on applying such methods supporting software maintenance and evolution are limited. Many studies focus on the text mining perspective of review analysis towards eliciting users’ opinions. Many others focus on the detection and classification of feedback types, e.g., feature requests, bug reports, and emotion expression, etc. For the purpose of enhancing the effectiveness in soft ware maintenance and evolution practice, an effective approach on the software’s perceived user experience and the monitoring of its changes during evolution is re- quired. To support the practice of software maintenance and evolution targeting enhancing user satisfaction, we propose a data-driven user review analysis approach. The contribution of this research aims to answer the following research questions: RQ1. How to analyze users’ collective expectation and perceived quality in use with data- driven approaches by exploiting sentiment and topics? RQ2. How to monitor user satisfaction over software updates during software evolution using reviews’ topics and sentiments? RQ3. How to analyze users’ profiles, software types and situational contexts as contexts of use that supports the analysis of user satisfaction? Towards answering RQ1, the thesis proposes a data-driven approach of user perceived quality evaluation and users’ needs extraction via sentiment analysis and topic modeling on large volume of user review data. Based on such outcome, the answer to RQ2 encompasses of 1) the approach to monitor user opinion changes through software evolution by detecting similar topic pairs and 2) the approach to identify the problematic updates based on anomalies in review sentiment distribution. Towards the answer to RQ3, a three-fold analysis is proposed: 1) situational contexts and ways of interaction analysis, 2) user profile and preference analysis and 3) software type and related features analysis. All the above approaches are validated by case studies. This thesis contributes to the examination of applying data-driven end user re- view analysis methods supporting software maintenance and evolution. The main implication is to enrich the existing domain knowledge of software maintenance and evolution in terms of taking advantage of the collective intelligence of end users. In addition, it conveys unique contribution to the research on software evolution con- texts in terms of various meaningful aspects and leads to a potential interdisciplinary contribution as well. On the other hand, this thesis also contributes to software maintenance and evolution practice even in the larger scope of the software industry by proposing an effective series of approaches that address critical issues within. It helps the developers ease their effort in release planning and other decision-making activities

ICT and InnovationA Step Forward to a Global Society

ItAIS (www.itais.org) was established in 2003 as the Italian Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS - www.aisnet.org) and has since then been promoting the exchange of ideas, experience, and knowledge among both academics and professionals committed to the development, management, organization and use of information systems. The itAIS conference is the major annual event of the Italian Information System community and it is thought as a forum to promote discussions and experiences exchanges among researchers in the field, both from the academy and the industry. Being the current the eleventh edition, in 2016 itAIS was held in Verona. The previous editions took place in Rome on 2015, Genova on 2014, Milan on 2013, Rome on 2012 and 2011, Naples on 2010, Costa Smeralda on 2009, Paris on 2008, Venice on 2007, Milan on 2006, Verona on 2005, and again Naples on 2004. itAIS 2016 aims to bring together researchers, scientists, engineers, and doctoral students to exchange and share their experiences, ideas, challenges, solutions, and research results about all aspects related to the impact of Information Technology and Innovation Trends in Organizations. The conference includes 16 tracks: (1) Organizational change and Impact of ICT; (2) Accounting Information Systems; (3) Advanced ICT support for innovation strategies, management, and implementations; (4) Human-computer interaction; (5) Continuous Redesign of Socio-Technical Systems; (6) Digitalization trends in Human Resources Management; (7) e-Services, Social Networks, and Smartcities; (8) ICT-enabled innovation in public services: co-production and collaborative networking; (9) The new era of digitalization in Healthcare and Public sector; (10) IS (lost) in the Cloud; (11) Internet of Things: exploring tensions in global information infrastructures; (12) Technology- enhanced learning: transforming learning processes in organizations; (13) Supply Chain Resilience and Security; (14) Digital Marketing and Analytics. The participation success that has been registered in the previous editions is confirmed this year. The conference attracted more than 80 submissions from Italian and foreigner researchers. Among them, more 6 than 68 contributions have been accepted for presentation at the conference following a double-blind review process. Among them, 19 are published in this book, the other will appear in a volume of the Springer Series Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisations1. The conference took place at Economics Department, University of Verona (Santa Marta campus) on October 7th \u2013 8th, 2016 and is organized in 5 parallel sessions. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers and all conference participants. We are also grateful to the chairs of the fourteen tracks and the external referees, for their thorough work in reviewing submissions with expertise and patience, and to the President and members of the itAIS steering committee for their strong support and encouragement in the organization of itAIS 2016. A special thanks to all members of the Organizing Committee for their precious support to the organization and management of the event and in the publication of the enclosed proceedings

A European Voice In Game Design

The definition of terminology is important with regards to the advancement of knowledge. Without clear and understandable definitions, work can become difficult to comprehend and loses clarity. This is important when examining culture, a field which changes substantially over short periods of time. When combined with video games, another field which sees accelerated growth and change, this becomes even more so due to the rapid expansion of consumer understanding and mentality with regards to video games. The focus of this thesis is to ascertain the meaning behind the use of current geographical terms such as ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ in the video games industry, and in doing so highlight the existence of an emerging European voice within game design and culture. This is achieved through a literature review exploring the preliminary use of the terms, the evolution of the necessity of them in popular culture and the justification of the use of games in research. The first study within the thesis examines the use of and current meaning behind the current geographical terms within the video gaming industry and culture, while also exploring emerging markets through focus groups consisting of participants within the field. This produces a reasoning for the use of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ as terminology in game culture. The second study uses this data, in combination with games analysed over a five-year period, to display examples of what Eastern, Western and European games are and gives context to these terms. These are presented as case studies containing key information, a previously developed model used to clearly identify a game’s reward systems and netnographic review. The thesis concludes that a European voice in game design is present. This has implications into the ways in which video games will be developed and produced. These conclusions challenge the conclusions of existing literature into the East/West divide as well as highlighting new areas for future study

Sentiment Analysis of Text Guided by Semantics and Structure

As moods and opinions play a pivotal role in various business and economic processes, keeping track of one's stakeholders' sentiment can be of crucial importance to decision makers. Today's abundance of user-generated content allows for the automated monitoring of the opinions of many stakeholders, like consumers. One challenge for such automated sentiment analysis systems is to identify whether pieces of natural language text are positive or negative. Typical methods of identifying this polarity involve low-level linguistic analysis. Existing systems predominantly use morphological, lexical, and syntactic cues for polarity, like a text's words, their parts-of-speech, and negation or amplification of the conveyed sentiment. This dissertation argues that the polarity of text can be analysed more accurately when additionally accounting for semantics and structure. Polarity classification performance can benefit from exploiting the interactions that emoticons have on a semantic level with words – emoticons can express, stress, or disambiguate sentiment. Furthermore, semantic relations between and within languages can help identify meaningful cues for sentiment in multi-lingual polarity classification. An even better understanding of a text's conveyed sentiment can be obtained by guiding automated sentiment analysis by the rhetorical structure of the text, or at least of its most sentiment-carrying segments. Thus, the sentiment in, e.g., conclusions can be treated differently from the sentiment in background information. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the polarity of natural language text should not be determined solely based on what is said. Instead, one should account for how this message is conveyed as well

The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism. The Anxiety of Authority

Film criticism is in crisis. Dwelling on the many film journalists made redundant at newspapers, magazines, and other 'old media' in past years, commentators have voiced existential questions about the purpose and worth of the profession in the age of WordPress blogospheres and proclaimed the 'death of the critic'. Bemoaning the current anarchy of internet amateurs and the lack of authoritative critics, many journalists and academics claim that in the digital age, cultural commentary has become dumbed down and fragmented into niche markets. Mattias Freu, arguing against these claims, examines the history of film critical discourse in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States . He demonstrates that since its origins, film criticism has always found itself in crisis: the need to show critical authority and the anxieties over challenges to that authority have been longstanding concerns

Architecture Supporting Computational Trust Formation

Trust is a concept that has been used in computing to support better decision making. For example, trust can be used in access control. Trust can also be used to support service selection. Although certain elements of trust such as reputation has gained widespread acceptance, a general model of trust has so far not seen widespread usage. This is due to the challenges of implementing a general trust model. In this thesis, a middleware based approach is proposed to address the implementation challenges. The thesis proposes a general trust model known as computational trust. Computational trust is based on research in social psychology. An individual’s computational trust is formed with the support of the proposed computational trust architecture. The architecture consists of a middleware and middleware clients. The middleware can be viewed as a representation of the individual that shares its knowledge with all the middleware clients. Each application uses its own middleware client to form computational trust for its decision making needs. Computational trust formation can be adapted to changing circumstances. The thesis also proposed algorithms for computational trust formation. Experiments, evaluations and scenarios are also presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the middleware based approach to computational trust formation

Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach

Video games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In this study, the author investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of time in this novel medium. This book-length study dedicated to time perception and video games is an indispensable resource for game scholars and game developers alike. Its reader-friendly style makes it readily accessible to the interested layperson