182,833 research outputs found
Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others.
However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people
and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with
those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we
hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have
been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having
opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or
presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral
change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a
visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends
politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and
displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's
personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform,
and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased
algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the
mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed
politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the
recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects:
first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms
aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces
should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased
behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User
Interfaces 201
Relational Collaborative Filtering:Modeling Multiple Item Relations for Recommendation
Existing item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) methods leverage only the
relation of collaborative similarity. Nevertheless, there exist multiple
relations between items in real-world scenarios. Distinct from the
collaborative similarity that implies co-interact patterns from the user
perspective, these relations reveal fine-grained knowledge on items from
different perspectives of meta-data, functionality, etc. However, how to
incorporate multiple item relations is less explored in recommendation
research. In this work, we propose Relational Collaborative Filtering (RCF), a
general framework to exploit multiple relations between items in recommender
system. We find that both the relation type and the relation value are crucial
in inferring user preference. To this end, we develop a two-level hierarchical
attention mechanism to model user preference. The first-level attention
discriminates which types of relations are more important, and the second-level
attention considers the specific relation values to estimate the contribution
of a historical item in recommending the target item. To make the item
embeddings be reflective of the relational structure between items, we further
formulate a task to preserve the item relations, and jointly train it with the
recommendation task of preference modeling. Empirical results on two real
datasets demonstrate the strong performance of RCF. Furthermore, we also
conduct qualitative analyses to show the benefits of explanations brought by
the modeling of multiple item relations
The live social semantics application: A platform for integrating face-to-face presence with on-line social networking
We describe a novel application that integrates real-world data on the face-to-face proximity of individuals with their identities and contacts in on-line social networks. This application was successfully deployed at two conference gatherings, ESWC09 and HT2009, and actively used by hundreds of people. Personal profiles of the participants were automatically generated using several Web 2.0 systems and semantic data sources, and integrated in real-time with face-to-face proximity relations detected using RFID-enabled badges. The integration of these heterogeneous data sources enables various services that enhance the experience of conference attendees, allowing them to explore their social neighbourhood and to connect with other participants. This paper describes the architecture of the application, the services we provided, and the results we achieved in these deployments
What Trends in Chinese Social Media
There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all
over the world in recent times. While some networks like Twitter and Facebook
have been well documented, the popular Chinese microblogging social network
Sina Weibo has not been studied. In this work, we examine the key topics that
trend on Sina Weibo and contrast them with our observations on Twitter. We find
that there is a vast difference in the content shared in China, when compared
to a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created
almost entirely due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and
videos, whereas on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current
global events and news stories
Live Social Semantics
Social interactions are one of the key factors to the success of conferences and similar community gatherings. This paper describes a novel application that integrates data from the semantic web, online social networks, and a real-world contact sensing platform. This application was successfully deployed at ESWC09, and actively used by 139 people. Personal profiles of the participants were automatically generated using several Web~2.0 systems and semantic academic data sources, and integrated in real-time with face-to-face contact networks derived from wearable sensors. Integration of all these heterogeneous data layers made it possible to offer various services to conference attendees to enhance their social experience such as visualisation of contact data, and a site to explore and connect with other participants. This paper describes the architecture of the application, the services we provided, and the results we achieved in this deployment
The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
We present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network,
consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a
million products. We observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade
sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. We analyze how user
behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network.
Product purchases follow a 'long tail' where a significant share of purchases
belongs to rarely sold items. We establish how the recommendation network grows
over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver
of the recommendations. While on average recommendations are not very effective
at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, we present a model that
successfully identifies communities, product and pricing categories for which
viral marketing seems to be very effective
Co-Following on Twitter
We present an in-depth study of co-following on Twitter based on the
observation that two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are
also similar, even though they might not share any direct links or a single
mutual follower. We show how this observation contributes to (i) a better
understanding of language-agnostic user classification on Twitter, (ii)
eliciting opportunities for Computational Social Science, and (iii) improving
online marketing by identifying cross-selling opportunities.
We start with a machine learning problem of predicting a user's preference
among two alternative choices of Twitter friends. We show that co-following
information provides strong signals for diverse classification tasks and that
these signals persist even when (i) the most discriminative features are
removed and (ii) only relatively "sparse" users with fewer than 152 but more
than 43 Twitter friends are considered.
Going beyond mere classification performance optimization, we present
applications of our methodology to Computational Social Science. Here we
confirm stereotypes such as that the country singer Kenny Chesney
(@kennychesney) is more popular among @GOP followers, whereas Lady Gaga
(@ladygaga) enjoys more support from @TheDemocrats followers.
In the domain of marketing we give evidence that celebrity endorsement is
reflected in co-following and we demonstrate how our methodology can be used to
reveal the audience similarities between Apple and Puma and, less obviously,
between Nike and Coca-Cola. Concerning a user's popularity we find a
statistically significant connection between having a more "average"
followership and having more followers than direct rivals. Interestingly, a
\emph{larger} audience also seems to be linked to a \emph{less diverse}
audience in terms of their co-following.Comment: full version of a short paper at Hypertext 201
Design and Development of a User Specific Dynamic E-Magazine
Internet and electronic media gaining more popularity due to ease and speed,
the count of Internet users has increased tremendously. The world is moving
faster each day with several events taking place at once and the Internet is
flooded with information in every field. There are categories of information
ranging from most relevant to user, to the information totally irrelevant or
less relevant to specific users. In such a scenario getting the information
which is most relevant to the user is indispensable to save time. The
motivation of our solution is based on the idea of optimizing the search for
information automatically. This information is delivered to user in the form of
an interactive GUI. The optimization of the contents or information served to
him is based on his social networking profiles and on his reading habits on the
proposed solution. The aim is to get the user's profile information based on
his social networking profile considering that almost every Internet user has
one. This helps us personalize the contents delivered to the user in order to
produce what is most relevant to him, in the form of a personalized e-magazine.
Further the proposed solution learns user's reading habits for example the news
he saves or clicks the most and makes a decision to provide him with the best
contents.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure
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