Experiments in Diversifying Flickr Result Sets

The 2013 MediaEval Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task looked to tackling the problem of search result diversification of Flickr results sets formed from queries about geographic places and landmarks. In this paper we describe our approach of using a min-max similarity diversifier coupled with pre-filters and a reranker. We also demonstrate a number of novel features for measuring similarity to use in the diversification step

Identifying the Geographic Location of an Image with a Multimodal Probability Density Function

There is a wide array of online photographic content that is not geotagged. Algorithms for efficient and accurate geographical estimation of an image are needed to geolocate these photos. This paper presents a general model for using both textual metadata and visual features of photos to automatically place them on a world map

The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries

Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies). Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should be addressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitative studies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter. We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on science communication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate change and its future role in social life

Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment

The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of the methods, and grounding of the hypothese

The Emerging Role of Big Data in Key Development Issues: Opportunities, Challenges, and Concerns

This paper presents a review of academic literature, policy documents from government organizations and international agencies, and reports from industries and popular media on the trends in Big Data utilization in key development issues and its worthwhileness, usefulness, and relevance. By looking at Big Data deployment in a number of key economic sectors, it seeks to provide a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges of using it for addressing key issues facing the developing world. It reviews the uses of Big Data in agriculture and farming activities in developing countries to assess the capabilities required at various levels to benefit from Big Data. It also provides insights into how the current digital divide is associated with and facilitated by the pattern of Big Data diffusion and its effective use in key development areas. It also discusses the lessons that developing countries can learn from the utilization of Big Data in big corporations as well as in other activities in industrialized countries

Twitter as a first draft of the present - and the challenges of preserving it for the future

"This paper provides a framework for understanding Twitter as a historical source. We address digital humanities scholars to enable the transfer of concepts from traditional source criticism to new media formats, and to encourage the preservation of Twitter as a cultural artifact. Twitter has established itself as a key social media platform which plays an important role in public, real-time conversation. Twitter is also unique as its content is being archived by a public institution (the Library of Congress). In this paper we will show that we still have to assume that much of the contextual information beyond the pure tweet texts is already lost, and propose additional objectives for preservation." (author's abstract

The Pacifican May 9, 2015

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/pacifican/1097/thumbnail.jp

Social networks for lonely objects

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-119).Visions of ubiquitous computing describe a network of devices that quietly supports human goals, but this may also add complexity to an already frustrating relationship between humans and their electronic objects. As we move from vision to reality, there is an opportunity to rethink how we interact with our objects and networks of objects, and close the communication gap between man and machine. 'This thesis defines social and super-mechanical affordances for products which may consist of many physical and digital objects. These new objects will not look like stripped-down contemporary computers, but augmented ordinary objects that are focused on input and output, exposed on Twitter. Apps in the cloud use Twitter to marshall the appropriate objects to execute human tasks. Using a social network as transport allows apps and their owners to manage a large network of computing objects with the same constructs that we use to manage many human relationships. From this direction, we take a step toward a consumer-amenable implementation of ubiquitous computing.by John Anthony Kestner.S.M