Autism research : An objective quantitative review of progress and focus between 1994 and 2015

The nosology and epidemiology of Autism has undergone transformation following consolidation of once disparate disorders under the umbrella diagnostic, autism spectrum disorders. Despite this re-conceptualization, research initiatives, including the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria and Precision Medicine, highlight the need to bridge psychiatric and psychological classification methodologies with biomedical techniques. Combining traditional bibliometric co-word techniques, with tenets of graph theory and network analysis, this article provides an objective thematic review of research between 1994 and 2015 to consider evolution and focus. Results illustrate growth in Autism research since 2006, with nascent focus on physiology. However, modularity and citation analytics demonstrate dominance of subjective psychological or psychiatric constructs, which may impede progress in the identification and stratification of biomarkers as endorsed by new research initiatives.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

The impact of attribution modelling in luxury e-commerce : attribution model simulation

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementLuxurious goods started to be sold in online stores at a slow pace, but today the market has grown and it is working at high speed and has great potential. In fashion world exclusivity is the main word and along with the creation of online stores by luxurious brands, it is necessary to advertise them to the right audience and at the right time. So, companies tend to apply their marketing budget in multiple channels (search, email, display, affiliate and social networks) and because there are multiple ways to reward each channel, companies need to decide which Attribution Models they will use when rewarding affiliates. Using a well-known andmulti-brand seller as an allied to better understand advertise in ecommerce websites, this project will be based in a real database in order to create accurate simulations and to get the best model for similar companies. The simulations created for this project were based in almost two hundred and fifty thousand conversions and more than two million interactions with the e-commerce website.Inicialmente, os bens de luxo começaram por ser vendidos em lojas online a um ritmo consideravelmente lento, sendo que, atualmente, já é possível ver um rápido crescimento do mercado e o seu grande potencial. Neste mundo em que "exclusividade"é palavra chave e com, cada vez mais, marcas a lançar as suas próprias lojas online, é imperativo atrair o público certo, no momento certo. Desta forma, as empresas tendem a aplicar o orçamento de marketing em vários canais (pesquisa, e-mail, display, redes de afiliados, ou até em redes sociais). Como é possível utilizar diferentes Modelos de Atribuição para definir recompensas, as empresas necessitam de selecionar qual o que deve ser utilizado para premiar cada um desses canais. Através da parceria com uma empresa do setor de luxo, cujas vendas se baseiam em produtos de diversas marcas conhecidas mundialmente, foi possível utilizar neste projecto, desde início, uma base de dados real. Desta forma, foi possível criar simulações precisas de forma a obter o melhor modelo para empresas como esta, tendo sido baseadas em quase duzentas e cinquenta mil conversões e mais de dois milhões de interações geradas na loja eletrónica da empresa

eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

Mapping Tasks to Interactions for Graph Exploration and Graph Editing on Interactive Surfaces

Graph exploration and editing are still mostly considered independently and systems to work with are not designed for todays interactive surfaces like smartphones, tablets or tabletops. When developing a system for those modern devices that supports both graph exploration and graph editing, it is necessary to 1) identify what basic tasks need to be supported, 2) what interactions can be used, and 3) how to map these tasks and interactions. This technical report provides a list of basic interaction tasks for graph exploration and editing as a result of an extensive system review. Moreover, different interaction modalities of interactive surfaces are reviewed according to their interaction vocabulary and further degrees of freedom that can be used to make interactions distinguishable are discussed. Beyond the scope of graph exploration and editing, we provide an approach for finding and evaluating a mapping from tasks to interactions, that is generally applicable. Thus, this work acts as a guideline for developing a system for graph exploration and editing that is specifically designed for interactive surfaces.Comment: 21 pages, minor corrections (typos etc.

Public discourse and news consumption on online social media: A quantitative, cross-platform analysis of the Italian Referendum

The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence showed that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims while dissenting information is mainly ignored or might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives on online social media. In this paper we address such a challenge by focusing on the discussion around the Italian Constitutional Referendum by conducting a quantitative, cross-platform analysis on both Facebook public pages and Twitter accounts. We observe the spontaneous emergence of well-separated communities on both platforms. Such a segregation is completely spontaneous, since no categorization of contents was performed a priori. By exploring the dynamics behind the discussion, we find that users tend to restrict their attention to a specific set of Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. Finally, taking advantage of automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis techniques, we are able to identify the most controversial topics inside and across both platforms. We measure the distance between how a certain topic is presented in the posts/tweets and the related emotional response of users. Our results provide interesting insights for the understanding of the evolution of the core narratives behind different echo chambers and for the early detection of massive viral phenomena around false claims

Privacy and Security Analysis of mHealth Apps

The widespread availability of Mobile Health (mHealth) applications has been significantly accelerated by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While bringing many benefits, from self-monitoring to medical consultations, mHealth apps process many sensitive health-related user data. Therefore, they are subject to privacy regulations set by government, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the USA, as well as privacy guidelines of the app store (e.g., Google Android). In this work, we analyze the privacy, compliance, and security of 232 mHealth apps in the Android ecosystem, mainly focusing on the most popular free apps (199), but also considering a sample of paid apps (25) and healthcare provider/clinician apps published on the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s website (8). For our analysis, we leverage both static approaches, such as privacy policy and APK analysis, and dynamic approaches, like network traffic inspection and analysis of in-app consent acquisition. Our findings reveal that 85.4\% of the free mHealth apps do not properly inform the users about all the aspects of the data processing required by the regulations. In addition, they often contain conflicting or incomplete information: only 2.51% of them are completely consistent. Moreover, 55.8% of these apps process user data without explicit consent. Our analysis shows that, when compared to free apps, paid ones are less careful in writing the privacy policy, while containing a lower number of trackers and dangerous permissions on average. We found that 76% of these apps fail in obtaining explicit consent and 84% of them process some types of data without informing the user. Concerning the CDC-endorsed apps, while we did not detect a pervasive presence of trackers, dangerous permissions or sensitive data in the network traffic, our results show that all of them have incomplete privacy policies and fail to ask for explicit consent before accessing their services. As we consider apps with a mean of 8 millions downloads each, our study impacts a lot of end-users and helps creating awareness of mHealth apps' privacy importance among both users and developers

the video abstract in Ecology and Environmental Sciences

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020 SFRH/BD/131072/2017In recent years, the use of videos by the scientific community has evolved continuously. Researchers, communicators, and other players are using audio-visual media to reinvent their stories, to deconstruct complex phenomena and to increase the outreach and impact of their scientific publications. An example of this trend is the video abstract: an audio-visual representation of the key findings described in the written abstract. Much of the research in this area is new and focused on content analysis and classification of online science videos. Furthermore, studies with videos and environmental communication are attached to specific topics like climate change. So far, a small fraction of publications has explored the study of the video abstract, its effects, and its potential, as one general scientific area. This paper provides the first characterization of video abstracts in the areas of Ecology and Environmental Sciences. We identified video abstracts in 29 scientific journals, based on impact, representativeness and visibility criteria. A database of 171 videos, from 7 publishers and 17 different video channels was created. Each video was analysed for different parameters. The analysis considered not only characteristics of each video, but also characteristics from the corresponding scientific papers. Results indicate that between 2010 and 2018 the number of video abstracts increased sevenfold. Despite this growth, there was no solid strategy for disseminating the videos. While most of them are still associated with classic models, such as documentaries, disruptive formats such as animation are the ones that arouse greater interest. Professional shorter videos (2-3 minutes in length) showed a significantly higher number of daily views and their papers garnered a higher number of citations per day. This data, combined with future qualitative research, will help to develop a model for validating the quality of an Ecology video abstract and provide new insights into the global study of audio-visual communication of science.publishersversionpublishe