921,182 research outputs found
Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search
Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of
an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey
of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social
interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main
contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in
sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social
model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in
the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to
individual searchers.Comment: Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking,
2008 (arXiv:0908.0583
V.I. Vernadsky and the noosphere concept: Russian understandings of society-nature interaction
Recent Russian legislative and policy documentation concerning national progress towards sustainable development has suggested that the attainment of such a state would represent the first stage in the development of the noosphere as outlined by the Russian scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945). This paper explores Vernadsky’s model of evolutionary change through a focus on his work on the biosphere and noosphere in an attempt to further understanding of the way in which Russia is approaching the concept of sustainable development in the contemporary period. It is argued that the official Russian interpretation of the noosphere idea tends to obscure the evolutionary and materialist foundations of Vernadsky’s biosphere–noosphere conceptualisation. At the same time, the concluding section of the paper suggests that the scope of Vernadsky’s work can be used to stimulate the search for a more coherent approach to work in areas of sustainable development and sustainability across the span of the social and physical sciences
Opinion Formation and the Collective Dynamics of Risk Perception
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from
the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between
individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation
specifically designed to address risk judgments, such as attitudes towards
climate change, terrorist threats, or children vaccination. The model assumes
that people collect risk information from the media environment and exchange
them locally with other individuals. Even though individuals are initially
exposed to the same sample of information, the model predicts the emergence of
opinion polarization and clustering. In particular, numerical simulations
highlight two crucial factors that determine the collective outcome: the
propensity of individuals to search for independent information, and the
strength of social influence. This work provides a quantitative framework to
anticipate and manage how the public responds to a given risk, and could help
understanding the systemic amplification of fears and worries, or the
underestimation of real dangers
Managers' brokerage for business model innovation : A case study
Business model innovation is recognized as a key process for strengthening firms' performance in situations of strong competitive pressure and environmental changes. This process is driven by intra-organizational advice networks between managers, which exchange different types of advice based on organizational learning mechanisms such as cognitive search (how to conceptualize and create a novel business model) and experiential learning (how to adapt and experiment a novel business model. Investigating what are the key figures emerging from such network is essential for an in-depth understanding of the business model innovation process. By focusing on a multi-unit firm operating in the personal care service industry, we use Social Network Analysis (SNA) to examine the brokerage role of managers when sharing different types of advice towards a novel business model. Our results show that middle-level managers connect different managerial groups in different networks; however, differences exist between groups of middle managers, confirming their peculiar nature within organizations.Peer reviewe
Crime in Philadelphia: Bayesian Clustering with Particle Optimization
Accurate estimation of the change in crime over time is a critical first step
towards better understanding of public safety in large urban environments.
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a natural way to study spatial variation in
urban crime dynamics at the neighborhood level, since it facilitates principled
"sharing of information" between spatially adjacent neighborhoods. Typically,
however, cities contain many physical and social boundaries that may manifest
as spatial discontinuities in crime patterns. In this situation, standard prior
choices often yield overly-smooth parameter estimates, which can ultimately
produce miscalibrated forecasts. To prevent potential over-smoothing, we
introduce a prior that partitions the set of neighborhoods into several
clusters and encourages spatial smoothness within each cluster. In terms of
model implementation, conventional stochastic search techniques are
computationally prohibitive, as they must traverse a combinatorially vast space
of partitions. We introduce an ensemble optimization procedure that
simultaneously identifies several high probability partitions by solving one
optimization problem using a new local search strategy. We then use the
identified partitions to estimate crime trends in Philadelphia between 2006 and
2017. On simulated and real data, our proposed method demonstrates good
estimation and partition selection performance. Supplementary materials for
this article are available online
Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)
The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017
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