Social networks : the future for health care delivery

With the rapid growth of online social networking for health, health care systems are experiencing an inescapable increase in complexity. This is not necessarily a drawback; self-organising, adaptive networks could become central to future health care delivery. This paper considers whether social networks composed of patients and their social circles can compete with, or complement, professional networks in assembling health-related information of value for improving health and health care. Using the framework of analysis of a two-sided network – patients and providers – with multiple platforms for interaction, we argue that the structure and dynamics of such a network has implications for future health care. Patients are using social networking to access and contribute health information. Among those living with chronic illness and disability and engaging with social networks, there is considerable expertise in assessing, combining and exploiting information. Social networking is providing a new landscape for patients to assemble health information, relatively free from the constraints of traditional health care. However, health information from social networks currently complements traditional sources rather than substituting for them. Networking among health care provider organisations is enabling greater exploitation of health information for health care planning. The platforms of interaction are also changing. Patient-doctor encounters are now more permeable to influence from social networks and professional networks. Diffuse and temporary platforms of interaction enable discourse between patients and professionals, and include platforms controlled by patients. We argue that social networking has the potential to change patterns of health inequalities and access to health care, alter the stability of health care provision and lead to a reformulation of the role of health professionals. Further research is needed to understand how network structure combined with its dynamics will affect the flow of information and potentially the allocation of health care resources

The Four Pillars of Crowdsourcing: A Reference Model

Crowdsourcing is an emerging business model where tasks are accomplished by the general public; the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been used in a variety of disciplines, including information systems development, marketing and operationalization. It has been shown to be a successful model in recommendation systems, multimedia design and evaluation, database design, and search engine evaluation. Despite the increasing academic and industrial interest in crowdsourcing,there is still a high degree of diversity in the interpretation and the application of the concept. This paper analyses the literature and deduces a taxonomy of crowdsourcing. The taxonomy is meant to represent the different configurations of crowdsourcing in its main four pillars: the crowdsourcer, the crowd, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. Our outcome will help researchers and developers as a reference model to concretely and precisely state their particular interpretation and configuration of crowdsourcing

Game Theory Based Privacy Protection for Context-Aware Services

In the era of context-aware services, users are enjoying remarkable services based on data collected from a multitude of users. To receive services, they are at risk of leaking private information from adversaries possibly eavesdropping on the data and/or the un--trusted service platform selling off its data. Malicious adversaries may use leaked information to violate users\u27 privacy in unpredictable ways. To protect users\u27 privacy, many algorithms are proposed to protect users\u27 sensitive information by adding noise, thus causing context-aware service quality loss. Game theory has been utilized as a powerful tool to balance the tradeoff between privacy protection level and service quality. However, most of the existing schemes fail to depict the mutual relationship between any two parties involved: user, platform, and adversary. There is also an oversight to formulate the interaction occurring between multiple users, as well as the interaction between any two attributes. To solve these issues, this dissertation firstly proposes a three-party game framework to formulate the mutual interaction between three parties and study the optimal privacy protection level for context-aware services, thus optimize the service quality. Next, this dissertation extends the framework to a multi-user scenario and proposes a two-layer three-party game framework. This makes the proposed framework more realistic by further exploring the interaction, not only between different parties, but also between users. Finally, we focus on analyzing the impact of long-term time-serial data and the active actions of the platform and adversary. To achieve this objective, we design a three-party Stackelberg game model to help the user to decide whether to update information and the granularity of updated information

Matching Algorithm Design in E-Commerce: Harnessing the Power of Machine Learning via Stochastic Optimization

Internet-based matching markets have gained great attention during the last decade, such as Internet advertising (matching keywords and advertisers), ridesharing platforms (pairing riders and drivers), crowdsourcing markets (assigning tasks to workers), online dating (pairing romantically attracted partners), etc. A fundamental challenge is the presence of \emph{uncertainty}, which manifests in the following two ways. The first is on the arrival of agents in the system, e.g., \emph{drivers} and \emph{riders} in ridesharing services, \emph{keywords} in the Internet advertising, and \emph{online workers} in crowdsourcing markets. The second is on the outcome of interaction. For example, two users may \emph{like} or \emph{dislike} each other after a dating arranged by a match-making firm, a user may \emph{click} or \emph{not click} the link of an advertisement shown by an Ad company, to name a few. We are now living in an era of big data, fortunately. Thus, by applying powerful machine learning techniques to huge volumes of historical data, we can often get very accurate estimates of the uncertainty in the system as described above. Given this, the question then is as follows: \emph{How can we exploit estimates for our benefits as a matching-policy designer}? This dissertation aims to address this question. We have built an AI toolbox, which takes as input the estimates over uncertainty in the system, appropriate objectives (e.g., maximization of the total profit, maximization of fairness, etc.), and outputs a matching policy which works well both theoretically and experimentally on those pre-specified targets. The key ingredients are two matching models: stochastic matching and online matching. We have made several foundational algorithmic progress for these two models. Additionally, we have successfully utilized these two models to harness estimates from powerful machine learning algorithms, and designed improved matching policies for various real matching markets including ridesharing, crowdsourcing, and online recommendation applications

A Machine Learning Technique for Detection of Social Media Fake News

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