Futures Studies in the Interactive Society

This book consists of papers which were prepared within the framework of the research project (No. T 048539) entitled Futures Studies in the Interactive Society (project leader: Éva Hideg) and funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) between 2005 and 2009. Some discuss the theoretical and methodological questions of futures studies and foresight; others present new approaches to or procedures of certain questions which are very important and topical from the perspective of forecast and foresight practice. Each study was conducted in pursuit of improvement in futures fields

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

GPT-4V(ision) as A Social Media Analysis Engine

Recent research has offered insights into the extraordinary capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in various general vision and language tasks. There is growing interest in how LMMs perform in more specialized domains. Social media content, inherently multimodal, blends text, images, videos, and sometimes audio. Understanding social multimedia content remains a challenging problem for contemporary machine learning frameworks. In this paper, we explore GPT-4V(ision)'s capabilities for social multimedia analysis. We select five representative tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, fake news identification, demographic inference, and political ideology detection, to evaluate GPT-4V. Our investigation begins with a preliminary quantitative analysis for each task using existing benchmark datasets, followed by a careful review of the results and a selection of qualitative samples that illustrate GPT-4V's potential in understanding multimodal social media content. GPT-4V demonstrates remarkable efficacy in these tasks, showcasing strengths such as joint understanding of image-text pairs, contextual and cultural awareness, and extensive commonsense knowledge. Despite the overall impressive capacity of GPT-4V in the social media domain, there remain notable challenges. GPT-4V struggles with tasks involving multilingual social multimedia comprehension and has difficulties in generalizing to the latest trends in social media. Additionally, it exhibits a tendency to generate erroneous information in the context of evolving celebrity and politician knowledge, reflecting the known hallucination problem. The insights gleaned from our findings underscore a promising future for LMMs in enhancing our comprehension of social media content and its users through the analysis of multimodal information

Detecting Well-being in Digital Communities: An Interdisciplinary Engineering Approach for its Indicators

In this thesis, the challenges of defining, refining, and applying well-being as a progressive management indicator are addressed. This work\u27s implications and contributions are highly relevant for service research as it advances the integration of consumer well-being and the service value chain. It also provides a substantial contribution to policy and strategic management by integrating constituents\u27 values and experiences with recommendations for progressive community management

AI and extremism in social networks

Studien utforsker hvordan midler som kunstig intelligens, AI- drevne chatbots, kan være kilder man kan regne med som moralske aktører på digitale plattformer og som kan være identifiserbare opprørsmodeller til bekjempelse av ekstremistiske og voldsforherligende ytringer på sosiale medieplattformer. Fremveksten av digital nettverkskommunikasjon har lettet prosessen med sosiale bevegelser, noe fenomenet «Den arabiske våren» tydelig demonstrerer. Sosiale medier har vært et verdifullt verktøy når det gjelder å utvikle kollektive identiteter med en felles ideologi for å fremme et bestemt mål eller en sak og gi alternative plattformer for undertrykte samfunn. Imidlertid forblir virkningen og konsekvensene av sosiale medier i samfunn der maktbalansen forrykkes gjennom fundamentale endringer et bekymringsfullt fenomen. Radikaliserte individer og grupper har også hevdet sin tilstedeværelse på sosiale medieplattformer gjennom å fremme fordommer, hat og vold. Ekstremistiske grupper bruker ulike taktikker for å utøve makten sin på disse plattformene. Bekjempelsen av voldelig ekstremisme på sosiale medieplattformer blir som regel ikke koordinert av aktuelle aktører som regjeringer, sosiale medieselskaper, FN eller andre private organisasjoner. I tillegg har fremdeles ikke forsøk på å konstituere AI til bekjempelse av voldelig ekstremisme blitt gjennomført, men lovende resultater har blitt oppnådd gjennom noen initiativer. Prosjektet som en ‘case study’ ser på den nylige reformen i Etiopia som ble gjennomført av Nobels fredsprisvinner 2019 Abiy Ahmed etter at han tiltrådte som statsminister i Etiopia i april 2018. Etter flere tiår med undertrykkelse har den nye maktovertakelsen der det politiske rommet ble åpnet opp og ytringsfrihet ble tillatt, uventet ført til et skred av etniske gruppers polarisering. Nye etno-ekstremister har dukket frem fra alle kriker og kroker av landet og også fra sin tilværelse i diaspora. Studien ser videre på hvilken rolle sosiale medier til tider spiller ved direkte å presse på for å påvirke til og dermed forårsake voldelige handlinger på grasrota.Ved å bruke en kvalitativ forskningsmetode for ustrukturerte intervjuer med etiopiske brukere av sosiale medier, journalister og aktivister, identifiserer studien kjerneaspektene ved konfliktene og foreslår initiativer som kan brukes til å motvirke voldelig etnisk ekstremisme. Ved å bruke relevant litteratur ser prosjektet videre på innarbeidelsen av kunstig intelligens (AI) i «moralske handlinger» på sosiale medier og hvordan den kan utformes slik at den av seg selv kan ta i bruk moralske beslutningsevner i nettverket. I tillegg ser studien på mulighetene videre for bekjempelse av voldelig ekstremisme og skisserer den spesifikke rollen ikke menneskelige aktører som profesjonelle troll og bots på sosiale medier bør spille for å slåss mot radikalisering som kan føre til voldelige handlinger.Mastergradsoppgave i digital kulturMAHF-DIKULDIKULT35

Detecting Well-being in Digital Communities: An Interdisciplinary Engineering Approach for its Indicators

In this thesis, the challenges of defining, refining, and applying well-being as a progressive management indicator are addressed. This work\u27s implications and contributions are highly relevant for service research as it advances the integration of consumer well-being and the service value chain. It also provides a substantial contribution to policy and strategic management by integrating constituents\u27 values and experiences with recommendations for progressive community management

Transformation of international economic relations: modern challenges, risks, opportunities and prospects: collective monograph

The authors of the book have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to effectively use the methodological tools for assessing the competitiveness of financial and insurance markets, methodological approaches to assessing the effectiveness of regional policy, internal audit of resources. Basic research is aimed at researching the main trends in the international economy, socialization of global economic development, investment aspects of development countries, functioning of consumer market in the international economic system, trends of international population migration, processes of European integration in the field of energy efficiency. The research results have been implemented in the different models of the behavior of the economic system in the conditions of crisis, provision competitiveness of national economy in the face of increasing burden of public debt. The results of the study can be used in decision-making at the level of international business, ministries and departments that regulate international relations, ensuring security and overcoming risks. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in modern concepts of the formation of international economic relations in the context of strengthening European integration processes and globalization of the economy