Human-Centered Technologies for Inclusive Collection and Analysis of Public-Generated Data

The meteoric rise in the popularity of public engagement platforms such as social media, customer review websites, and public input solicitation efforts strives for establishing an inclusive environment for the public to share their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Many decisions made at a personal, local, or national scale are often fueled by data generated by the public. As such, inclusive collection, analysis, sensemaking, and utilization of pubic-generated data are crucial to support the exercise of successful decision-making processes. However, people often struggle to engage, participate, and share their opinions due to inaccessibility, the rigidity of traditional public engagement methods, and the lack of options to provide opinions while avoiding potential confrontations. Concurrently, data analysts and decision-makers grapple with the challenges of analyzing, sensemaking, and making informed decisions based on public-generated data, which includes high dimensionality, ambiguity present in human language, and a lack of tools and techniques catered to their needs. Novel technological interventions are therefore necessary to enable the public to share their input without barriers and allow decision-makers to capture, forage, peruse, and sublimate public-generated data into concrete and actionable insights. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate how human-centered approaches involve the stakeholders in the design, development, and evaluation of tools and techniques that can lead to inclusive, effective, and efficient approaches to public-generated data collection and analysis to support informed decision-making. To that end, in this dissertation, I first addressed the challenges of empowering the public to share their opinions by exploring two major opinion-sharing avenues --- social media and public consultation. To learn more about people\u27s social media experiences and challenges, I built two technology probes and conducted a qualitative exploratory study with 16 participants. This study is followed up by exploring the challenges of inclusive participation during public consultations such as town halls. Based on a formative study with 66 participants and 20 organizers, I designed and developed CommunityClick to enable reticent share their opinions silently and anonymously during town halls. Equipped with the knowledge and experiences from these works, I designed, developed, and evaluated technologies and methods to facilitate and accelerate informed data-driven decision-making based on increased public-generated data. Based on interviews with 14 analysts and decision-makers in the civic domain, I built a visual analytics system CommunityClick that can facilitate public input analysis by surfacing hidden insights, people\u27s reflections, and priorities. Leveraging the lessons learned during this work, I created a visual text analytics system that supports serendipitous discovery and balanced analysis of textual data to help make informed decisions. In this work, I contribute an understanding of how people collect and analyze public-generated data to fuel their decisions when they have increased exposure to alternative avenues for opinion-sharing. Through a series of human-centered studies, I highlight the challenges that inhibit inclusivity in opinion sharing and shortcomings of existing methods that prevent decision-makers to account for comprehensive public input that includes marginalized or unpopular opinions. To address these challenges, I designed, developed, and evaluated a collection of interactive systems including CommunityClick, CommunityPulse, and Serendyze. Through a rigorous set of evaluation strategies which include creativity sessions, controlled lab studies, in-the-wild deployment, and field experiments, I involved stakeholders to assess the effectiveness and utility of the built systems. Through the empirical evidence from these studies, I demonstrate how alternative designs for social media could enhance people\u27s social media experiences and enable them to make new connections with others to share opinions. In addition, I show how CommunityClick can be utilized to enable reticent attendees during public consultation to share their opinions while avoiding unwanted confrontation and allowing organizers to capture and account for silent feedback. I highlight how CommunityPulse allowed analysts and decision-makers to examine public input from multiple angles for an accelerated analysis and more informed decision-making. Furthermore, I demonstrate how supporting serendipitous discovery and balanced analysis using Serendyze can lead to more informed data-driven decision-making. I conclude the dissertation with a discussion on future avenues to expand this research including the facilitation of multi-user collaborative analysis, integration of multi-modal signals in the analysis of public-generated data, and potential adoption strategies for decision-support systems designed for inclusive collection and analysis of public-generated data

Advanced Digital Auditing

This open access book discusses the most modern approach to auditing complex digital systems and technologies. It combines proven auditing approaches, advanced programming techniques and complex application areas, and covers the latest findings on theory and practice in this rapidly developing field. Especially for those who want to learn more about novel approaches to testing complex information systems and related technologies, such as blockchain and self-learning systems, the book will be a valuable resource. It is aimed at students and practitioners who are interested in contemporary technology and managerial implications

Advanced Digital Auditing

This open access book discusses the most modern approach to auditing complex digital systems and technologies. It combines proven auditing approaches, advanced programming techniques and complex application areas, and covers the latest findings on theory and practice in this rapidly developing field. Especially for those who want to learn more about novel approaches to testing complex information systems and related technologies, such as blockchain and self-learning systems, the book will be a valuable resource. It is aimed at students and practitioners who are interested in contemporary technology and managerial implications

Proceedings of the 2004 ONR Decision-Support Workshop Series: Interoperability

In August of 1998 the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), approached Dr. Phillip Abraham of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the proposal for an annual workshop focusing on emerging concepts in decision-support systems for military applications. The proposal was considered timely by the ONR Logistics Program Office for at least two reasons. First, rapid advances in information systems technology over the past decade had produced distributed collaborative computer-assistance capabilities with profound potential for providing meaningful support to military decision makers. Indeed, some systems based on these new capabilities such as the Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) and the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) had already reached the field-testing and final product stages, respectively. Second, over the past two decades the US Navy and Marine Corps had been increasingly challenged by missions demanding the rapid deployment of forces into hostile or devastate dterritories with minimum or non-existent indigenous support capabilities. Under these conditions Marine Corps forces had to rely mostly, if not entirely, on sea-based support and sustainment operations. Particularly today, operational strategies such as Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS) and Sea To Objective Maneuver (STOM) are very much in need of intelligent, near real-time and adaptive decision-support tools to assist military commanders and their staff under conditions of rapid change and overwhelming data loads. In the light of these developments the Logistics Program Office of ONR considered it timely to provide an annual forum for the interchange of ideas, needs and concepts that would address the decision-support requirements and opportunities in combined Navy and Marine Corps sea-based warfare and humanitarian relief operations. The first ONR Workshop was held April 20-22, 1999 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California. It focused on advances in technology with particular emphasis on an emerging family of powerful computer-based tools, and concluded that the most able members of this family of tools appear to be computer-based agents that are capable of communicating within a virtual environment of the real world. From 2001 onward the venue of the Workshop moved from the West Coast to Washington, and in 2003 the sponsorship was taken over by ONR’s Littoral Combat/Power Projection (FNC) Program Office (Program Manager: Mr. Barry Blumenthal). Themes and keynote speakers of past Workshops have included: 1999: ‘Collaborative Decision Making Tools’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.);Radm Leland Kollmorgen (USN Ret.); and, Dr. Gary Klein (KleinAssociates) 2000: ‘The Human-Computer Partnership in Decision-Support’ Dr. Ronald DeMarco (Associate Technical Director, ONR); Radm CharlesMunns; Col Robert Schmidle; and, Col Ray Cole (USMC Ret.) 2001: ‘Continuing the Revolution in Military Affairs’ Mr. Andrew Marshall (Director, Office of Net Assessment, OSD); and,Radm Jay M. Cohen (Chief of Naval Research, ONR) 2002: ‘Transformation ... ’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); and, Steve Cooper (CIO, Office ofHomeland Security) 2003: ‘Developing the New Infostructure’ Richard P. Lee (Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, OSD); and, MichaelO’Neil (Boeing) 2004: ‘Interoperability’ MajGen Bradley M. Lott (USMC), Deputy Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command; Donald Diggs, Director, C2 Policy, OASD (NII

News sources and perceptual effects: an analysis of source attribution within news coverage of alleged terrorist plots.

Studies of source-media relations have tended towards two principal frameworks for analysis: developing a structural approach, where access is determined by the source's position within the dominant hegemony (Hall et al. 1978); or through sociological enquiries, which examine the relationship between journalists and their news sources (Gans 1979; Schlesinger 1990). There is, however, a much smaller body of research that has considered the influence of news sources upon audiences. This thesis develops an audience centric approach to sourcing, in order to understand how journalists may influence audiences' interpretation of a story through the attribution of information to particular types of institutional sources. This issue is considered through the media discourse of Islamist terrorism, to explore the potential for source attribution to influence audiences' perceptions of alleged terrorist plots. The justifications for focusing upon this issue are twofold. First, news coverage of suspected terrorist plots has raised questions over the position and types of sources appearing in reports. Second, news media reporting of terrorism has become synonymous with unofficial sources and leaked information. Accusations have been made, particularly following news of a foiled kidnap plot in January 2007, that government sources had relayed intelligence or operational information about the threat to a select group of journalists. For some, these charges evidence the social and political construction of contemporary terrorism, a condition, which it has been argued, is engineered by elites to make a raft of legal responses politically acceptable to the electorate (Jackson 2006; Mythen and Walklate 2006). This thesis explores source attribution upon audiences' perceptions of terrorism through two stages of empirical research. A content analysis of UK newspaper coverage of five alleged terrorist plots and a media experiment that simulates exposure to three different types of source attribution. The results reveal that veiled references to public institutions were predominant within coverage, however, contrary to conspiratorial approaches to political discourse,government sources were not influential in supporting details of a specific threat.Furthermore, that sourcing may simply arise as a feature of the news narrative to each event. The findings also suggest that sourcing was indicative of a broader shift in the media discourse of terrorism, with more recent coverage seeking to address public concerns over the way official or government sources communicate information about the threat from terrorism. For news audiences, the results show that the more powerful cumulative effects of trust in the media and concern over terrorism undermine any influence source attribution may have upon audiences' perceptions of the credibility of a story reporting an alleged terrorist plot. Moreover, taken together the findings demonstrate that the effect of subtle or nuanced variations in the presentation of media content upon audiences is limited and that the attitudinal and demographic characteristics of audiences serve as more significant determinants of audiences' perceptions of news

Contextualising emotion regulation: A mixed-methods approach to understanding the mechanisms through which emotion controllability beliefs influence adolescent anxiety

Given the developmental challenges and opportunities encountered during adolescence and the current COVID-19 context, it seems particularly important to consider protective factors for adolescent mental health, especially anxiety. One such factor relates to the beliefs adolescents hold about whether they can control their emotions. One mechanism for explaining the link between emotion controllability beliefs and anxiety may be emotion regulation. Believing that emotions can be controlled may encourage the use of ‘healthy’ (over ‘unhealthy’) emotion regulation strategies, which can, in turn, lead to better mental health outcomes. Recent revisions to the most widely used process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 2015) suggest that emotion controllability beliefs influence not only emotion regulation choice but the whole emotion-generative-and-regulation process. Research has, however, rarely examined what happens in the different stages of the emotion regulation process (other than the stage of strategy selection), or why certain strategies are preferred over others. Further, theory and research have mainly focused on intra-personal emotion regulation processes, despite emotion regulation often occurring in a social context and likely being influenced by it. The present study aimed to examine the relationships between adolescent emotion controllability beliefs, emotion regulation, and anxiety; explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of emotion regulation processes, and investigate aspects of the interpersonal context perceived as helpful/hindering in the regulation of anxiety. Year 9 - 11 students recruited from 10 English secondary schools completed questionnaires (n=81) examining the relationships between emotion controllability beliefs, emotion regulation, and anxiety, and semi-structured interviews (n=10) exploring intra- and inter-personal emotion regulation processes. Quantitative findings demonstrated an indirect effect of emotion controllability beliefs on anxiety via ‘healthy’ emotion regulation. Thematic analysis elicited six themes: manifestations of anxiety; negative views around anxiety; individual, contextual, and interpersonal factors (affecting emotion regulation choices); and emotionally-containing environments. Implications for emotion regulation theory, Educational Psychology (EP) practice, mental health assessment and intervention, and educational practices are presented and discussed

Media and information literate citizens: think critically, click wisely!

Can we improve our societies by clicking wisely? Content providers such as libraries, archives, museums, media and digital communications companies can enable inclusive and sustainable development. However, they do not always live up to these ideals, which creates challenges for the users of these services. Content providers of all types open up new opportunities for lifelong learning. But at the same time, they open up challenges such as misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and infringement of online privacy, among others. Media and information literacy is a set of competencies that help people to maximize advantages and minimize harms. Media and information literacy covers competencies that enable people to critically and effectively engage with: communications content; the institutions that facilitate this content; and the use of digital technologies. Capacities in these areas are indispensable for all citizens regardless of their ages or backgrounds. This pioneering curriculum presents a comprehensive competency framework of media and information literacy and offers educators and learners structured pedagogical suggestions. It features various detailed modules covering the range of competencies needed to navigate today’s communications ecosystem. This resource links media and information literacy to emerging issues, such as artificial intelligence, digital citizenship education, education for sustainable development, cultural literacy and the exponential rise in misinformation and disinformation. With effective use of this media and information literacy curriculum, everyone can become media and information literate as well as peer-educators of media and information literacy