1,339 research outputs found
Optimizing Sensing: From Water to the Web
Where should we place sensors to quickly detect contamination in drinking water distribution networks? Which blogs should we read to learn about the biggest stories on the Web? Such problems are typically NP-hard in theory and extremely challenging in practice. The authors present algorithms that exploit submodularity to efficiently find provably near-optimal solutions to large, complex real-world sensing problems
Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement
Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs ("web logs," web pages that are regularly updated with links and opinion), wikis (web pages that non-programmers can edit easily), podcasts (digital radio productions distributed through the Internet), and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on "public voice," should be considered a pillar -- not just a component -- of twenty-first-century civic curriculum. Participatory media that enable young people to create as well as consume media are popular among high school and college students. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation. The participatory characteristics of online digital media are described, examples briefly cited, the connection between individual expression and public opinion discussed, and specific exercises for developing a public voice through blogs, wikis, and podcasts are suggested. A companion wiki provides an open-ended collection of resources for educators: https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy
Managing Corporate Reputation in the Blogosphere: The Case of Dell Computer
none4The emergence of the blogosphere has created
new challenges for large companies in the management
of their corporate reputations, since
grass roots blogs can generate negative perceptions
about a firm and then spread them
rapidly and widely. The blogosphere has also
created new opportunities for firms to enhance
their reputations, because the informal and
personal communication that occurs on blogs
may generate significant positive ‘ Internet word
of mouth ’ . This paper examines the interaction
between the blogosphere and a leading technology
company, Dell Computer, over a critical
two-year period. Our approach combines two
novel techniques: automated mining of blog
entries, enabled by parsing software, which
generates semantic analysis and network maps
of the relevant blog entries; and netnography,
a method derived from ethnography for analyzing
Internet-based discussions. This study shows
that many established reputation management
approaches, which were developed during the
era of mass media, need to be reshaped to meet
new realities in the age of Web 2.0.Pasquale Del Vecchio; Robert Laubacher; Valentina Ndou; Giuseppina PassianteDEL VECCHIO, Pasquale; Robert, Laubacher; Ndou, Valentina; Passiante, Giuseppin
Online politics and grassroots activism in Lebanon: negotiating sectarian gloom and revolutionary hope
This article describes the confluence of online activism and street protests in Lebanon. While Arab protesters have systematically been portrayed as young, urban and wired since the 2011 uprisings, Lebanese activists are also often regarded as trapped between war and sectarianism. This article challenges both frameworks and looks closer at the ways pre-existing waves of discontent crystallised into the mobilisation of thousands of Lebanese onto the streets of Beirut in 2010 and 2011. To achieve this, the article critiques the over-emphasis on network politics that accompanies internet-related hypotheses. The fashioning of a new kind of politics outside the dominant political factions (‘8–14 March’ blocs) was crucial for activists in Lebanon. New independent initiatives that locate feminist and queer politics within an overall analysis of imperialism and capitalism, as well as experimentation with digital technologies, helped forge a unique and non-sectarian camaraderie. By conveying the circumstances that have shaped political involvement, this article avoids the projection of non-ideological/networked politics that dominate concepts of online activism. The internet played a dual role in Lebanese grassroots politics, as illustrated through the experiences of the feminist collective Nasawiya
Cybertopia, Dystopia Or More Of The Same—Recent Writings On The Unknowable Future Of The Internet.
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Noisy Submodular Maximization via Adaptive Sampling with Applications to Crowdsourced Image Collection Summarization
We address the problem of maximizing an unknown submodular function that can
only be accessed via noisy evaluations. Our work is motivated by the task of
summarizing content, e.g., image collections, by leveraging users' feedback in
form of clicks or ratings. For summarization tasks with the goal of maximizing
coverage and diversity, submodular set functions are a natural choice. When the
underlying submodular function is unknown, users' feedback can provide noisy
evaluations of the function that we seek to maximize. We provide a generic
algorithm -- \submM{} -- for maximizing an unknown submodular function under
cardinality constraints. This algorithm makes use of a novel exploration module
-- \blbox{} -- that proposes good elements based on adaptively sampling noisy
function evaluations. \blbox{} is able to accommodate different kinds of
observation models such as value queries and pairwise comparisons. We provide
PAC-style guarantees on the quality and sampling cost of the solution obtained
by \submM{}. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in an
interactive, crowdsourced image collection summarization application.Comment: Extended version of AAAI'16 pape
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