70,128 research outputs found
Local Government Policy and Planning for Unmanned Aerial Systems
This research identifies key state and local government stakeholders in California for drone policy creation and implementation, and describes their perceptions and understanding of drone policy. The investigation assessed stakeholders’ positions, interests, and influence on issues, with the goal of providing potential policy input to achieve successful drone integration in urban environments and within the national airspace of the United States. The research examined regulatory priorities through the use of a two-tiered Stakeholder Analysis Process. The first tier consisted of a detailed survey sent out to over 450 local agencies and jurisdictions in California. The second tier consisted of an in-person focus group to discuss survey results as well as to gain deeper insights into local policymakers’ current concerns. Results from the two tiers of analysis, as well as recommendations, are provided here
Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation
Massive amounts of misinformation have been observed to spread in
uncontrolled fashion across social media. Examples include rumors, hoaxes, fake
news, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, several journalistic
organizations devote significant efforts to high-quality fact checking of
online claims. The resulting information cascades contain instances of both
accurate and inaccurate information, unfold over multiple time scales, and
often reach audiences of considerable size. All these factors pose challenges
for the study of the social dynamics of online news sharing. Here we introduce
Hoaxy, a platform for the collection, detection, and analysis of online
misinformation and its related fact-checking efforts. We discuss the design of
the platform and present a preliminary analysis of a sample of public tweets
containing both fake news and fact checking. We find that, in the aggregate,
the sharing of fact-checking content typically lags that of misinformation by
10--20 hours. Moreover, fake news are dominated by very active users, while
fact checking is a more grass-roots activity. With the increasing risks
connected to massive online misinformation, social news observatories have the
potential to help researchers, journalists, and the general public understand
the dynamics of real and fake news sharing.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Third Workshop on Social News On the
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Horizon Report 2009
El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologĂas emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevĂ©n tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigaciĂłn y la producciĂłn creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. TambiĂ©n estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada ediciĂłn identifica seis tecnologĂas o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevĂ© emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)
Clustering Memes in Social Media
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to
study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their
massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between
different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns
versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal
definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to
person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised
learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication.
The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from
existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for
the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of
social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content,
metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of
pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is
carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis
shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the
best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that
a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as
effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully
automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in
streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201
Online Popularity and Topical Interests through the Lens of Instagram
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to
investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on
Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up
to gathering hundred millions users. Instagram exhibits a mixture of features
including social structure, social tagging and media sharing. The network of
social interactions among users models various dynamics including
follower/followee relations and users' communication by means of
posts/comments. Users can upload and tag media such as photos and pictures, and
they can "like" and comment each piece of information on the platform. In this
work we investigate three major aspects on our Instagram dataset: (i) the
structural characteristics of its network of heterogeneous interactions, to
unveil the emergence of self organization and topically-induced community
structure; (ii) the dynamics of content production and consumption, to
understand how global trends and popular users emerge; (iii) the behavior of
users labeling media with tags, to determine how they devote their attention
and to explore the variety of their topical interests. Our analysis provides
clues to understand human behavior dynamics on socio-technical systems,
specifically users and content popularity, the mechanisms of users'
interactions in online environments and how collective trends emerge from
individuals' topical interests.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201
Big data for monitoring educational systems
This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education
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