Tackling food marketing to children in a digital world: trans-disciplinary perspectives. Children’s rights, evidence of impact, methodological challenges, regulatory options and policy implications for the WHO European Region

There is unequivocal evidence that childhood obesity is influenced by marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages high in saturated fat, salt and/or free sugars (HFSS), and a core recommendation of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity is to reduce children’s exposure to all such marketing. As a result, WHO has called on Member States to introduce restrictions on marketing of HFSS foods to children, covering all media, including digital, and to close any regulatory loopholes. This publication provides up-to-date information on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children and the changes that have occurred in recent years, focusing in particular on the major shift to digital marketing. It examines trends in media use among children, marketing methods in the new digital media landscape and children’s engagement with such marketing. It also considers the impact on children and their ability to counter marketing as well as the implications for children’s rights and digital privacy. Finally the report discusses the policy implications and some of the recent policy action by WHO European Member States

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Paradoxical Effects of Blockchain Technology on Social Networking Practices

Blockchain technology is a promising, yet not well understood, enabler of large-scale societal and economic change. For instance, blockchain makes it possible for users to securely and profitably share content on social media platforms. In this study, w

Online Doctoral Students and the Importance of Social Network Connections

University personnel offering online doctoral degrees struggle to address high attrition of students in the dissertation phase; these students can feel isolated, disconnected, and unmotivated. The purpose of this study was to explore ways online doctoral students in the dissertation phase used social networking sites (SNS) to overcome isolation and to increase persistence. The conceptual framework was situated in communities of practice (CoP) and the theory on self-determination. Research questions explored participants\u27 experiences with using SNS to remain connected and persistent. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with 7 online doctoral students, who met the criteria of being in the dissertation phase for a minimum of 2 quarters and using at least 1 social networking site; the participants were from 4 online institutions in the United States. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to examine themes and interpret the lived experiences of participants. Findings revealed that online doctoral students in the dissertation phase valued working with peers and with doctoral graduates from other institutions as a strategy to remain persistent in completing their dissertations. They focused on learning and on sharing with others for social and emotional support in a safe environment. Other elements included being held accountable and being challenged to keep moving. The results could influence instructional design for online doctoral candidates emphasizing the use of SNS for support from a CoP. Implications for positive social change include higher education personnel supporting unmonitored SNS interactions and increasing trust within school-created SNS spaces for students in the dissertation phase

Computing tie strength

Relationships make social media social. But, not all relationships are created equal. We have colleagues with whom we correspond intensely, but not deeply; we have childhood friends we consider close, even if we fell out of touch. Social media, however, treats everybody the same: someone is either a completely trusted friend or a total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the name tie strength, a term for the strength of a relationship between two people. Despite many compelling findings along this line of research, social media does not incorporate tie strength or its lessons. Neither does most research on large-scale social phenomena. In social network analyses, a link either exists or not. Relationships have few properties of their own. Simply put, we do not understand a basic property of relationships expressed online. This dissertation addresses this problem, merging the theories behind tie strength with the data from social media. I show how to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces in online social media, and how to apply it as a tool in design and analysis. Specifically, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, it offers a rich, high-accuracy and general way to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces, traces like recency and a message???s emotional content. For example, the model can split users into strong and weak ties with nearly 89% accuracy. I argue that it also offers us a chance to rethink many of social media???s most fundamental design elements. Next, I showcase an example of how we can redesign social media using tie strength: a Twitter application open to anyone on the internet which puts tie strength at the heart of its design. Through this application, called We Meddle, I show that the tie strength model generalizes to a new online community, and that it can solve real people???s practical problems with social media. Finally, I demonstrate that modeling tie strength is an important new tool for analyzing large-scale social phenomena. Specifically, I show that real-life diffusion in online networks depends on tie strength (i.e., it depends on social relationships). As a body of work, diffusion studies make a big simplifying assumption: simple stochastic rules govern person-to-person transmission. How does a disease spread? With constant probability. How does a chain letter diffuse? As a branching process. I present a case where this simplifying assumption does not hold. The results challenge the macroscopic diffusion properties in today???s literature, and they hint at a nest of complexity below a placid stochastic surface. It may be fair to see this dissertation as linking the online to the offline; that is, it connects the traces we leave in social media to how we feel about relationships in real life

Prediction, evolution and privacy in social and affiliation networks

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in studying online social and affiliation networks, leading to a new category of inference problems that consider the actor characteristics and their social environments. These problems have a variety of applications, from creating more effective marketing campaigns to designing better personalized services. Predictive statistical models allow learning hidden information automatically in these networks but also bring many privacy concerns. Three of the main challenges that I address in my thesis are understanding 1) how the complex observed and unobserved relationships among actors can help in building better behavior models, and in designing more accurate predictive algorithms, 2) what are the processes that drive the network growth and link formation, and 3) what are the implications of predictive algorithms to the privacy of users who share content online. The majority of previous work in prediction, evolution and privacy in online social networks has concentrated on the single-mode networks which form around user-user links, such as friendship and email communication. However, single-mode networks often co-exist with two-mode affiliation networks in which users are linked to other entities, such as social groups, online content and events. We study the interplay between these two types of networks and show that analyzing these higher-order interactions can reveal dependencies that are difficult to extract from the pair-wise interactions alone. In particular, we present our contributions to the challenging problems of collective classification, link prediction, network evolution, anonymization and preserving privacy in social and affiliation networks. We evaluate our models on real-world data sets from well-known online social networks, such as Flickr, Facebook, Dogster and LiveJournal

PROFILING - CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS

Profiling is an approach to put a label or a set of labels on a subject, considering the characteristics of this subject. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines profiling as: “recording and analysis of a person’s psychological and behavioral characteristics, so as to assess or predict his/her capabilities in a certain sphere or to assist in identifying a particular subgroup of people”. This research extends this definition towards things demonstrating that many methods used for profiling of people may be applied for a different type of subjects, namely things. The goal of this research concerns proposing methods for discovery of profiles of users and things with application of Data Science methods. The profiles are utilized in vertical and 2 horizontal scenarios and concern such domains as smart grid and telecommunication (vertical scenarios), and support provided both for the needs of authorization and personalization (horizontal usage).:The thesis consists of eight chapters including an introduction and a summary. First chapter describes motivation for work that was carried out for the last 8 years together with discussion on its importance both for research and business practice. The motivation for this work is much broader and emerges also from business importance of profiling and personalization. The introduction summarizes major research directions, provides research questions, goals and supplementary objectives addressed in the thesis. Research methodology is also described, showing impact of methodological aspects on the work undertaken. Chapter 2 provides introduction to the notion of profiling. The definition of profiling is introduced. Here, also a relation of a user profile to an identity is discussed. The papers included in this chapter show not only how broadly a profile may be understood, but also how a profile may be constructed considering different data sources. Profiling methods are introduced in Chapter 3. This chapter refers to the notion of a profile developed using the BFI-44 personality test and outcomes of a survey related to color preferences of people with a specific personality. Moreover, insights into profiling of relations between people are provided, with a focus on quality of a relation emerging from contacts between two entities. Chapters from 4 to 7 present different scenarios that benefit from application of profiling methods. Chapter 4 starts with introducing the notion of a public utility company that in the thesis is discussed using examples from smart grid and telecommunication. Then, in chapter 4 follows a description of research results regarding profiling for the smart grid, focusing on a profile of a prosumer and forecasting demand and production of the electric energy in the smart grid what can be influenced e.g. by weather or profiles of appliances. Chapter 5 presents application of profiling techniques in the field of telecommunication. Besides presenting profiling methods based on telecommunication data, in particular on Call Detail Records, also scenarios and issues related to privacy and trust are addressed. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 target at horizontal applications of profiling that may be of benefit for multiple domains. Chapter 6 concerns profiling for authentication using un-typical data sources such as Call Detail Records or data from a mobile phone describing the user behavior. Besides proposing methods, also limitations are discussed. In addition, as a side research effect a methodology for evaluation of authentication methods is proposed. Chapter 7 concerns personalization and consists of two diverse parts. Firstly, behavioral profiles to change interface and behavior of the system are proposed and applied. The performance of solutions personalizing content either locally or on the server is studied. Then, profiles of customers of shopping centers are created based on paths identified using Call Detail Records. The analysis demonstrates that the data that is collected for one purpose, may significantly influence other business scenarios. Chapter 8 summarizes the research results achieved by the author of this document. It presents contribution over state of the art as well as some insights into the future work planned

Kujutletavate auditooriumite tajumine sotsiaalmeediapädevuste osana

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneDoktoritöö eesmärk on uurida, kuidas inimesed tajuvad ja konstrueerivad sotsiaalmeediasuhtluses oma kujutletavaid auditooriume ning millised kesksed sotsiaalmeediapädevused auditooriumi tajumisega seonduvad. Lisaks käsitletakse töös loovuurimismeetodi metodoloogilisi võimalusi ning uurija rolli tundlike teemade uurimisel. Sotsiaalmeedias toimub pidev ja massiline tehnoloogia poolt vahendatud ühisjälgimine, kus kõik kasutajad jälgivad kõiki. Väär ettekujutus enda sotsiaalvõrgustikus tehtud postituste auditooriumist on põhjustanud mitmeid kurikuulsaks saanud nn. avaliku häbistamise juhtumeid, mis on toonud postitajale kaasa eraelulisi või tööalaseid probleeme. Sotsiaalvõrgustikes infot jagades keskendutakse reeglina kujutletava auditooriumi „ideaalsete lugejate“ ootustele ja eeldatavatele reaktsioonidele, st vastuvõtjatele, kes jagavad sõnumi saatja poolt tajutud norme ja väärtusi. Sageli omavad infole ligipääsu ka „košmaarsed lugejad“, kes ei pruugi maailma mõtestada sarnasel viisil ja seega tõlgendavad saadetud sõnumeid ka oodatust erineval viisil. Kvalitatiivseid meetodeid kasutades uurisin teemat noorte ning nende košmaarsete lugejate, õpetajate kaudu. Noorte jaoks on tehnoloogia poolt vahendatud sotsiaalsus normaalsus, mille juurde kuulub ka enda kohta kõikvõimaliku info jagamine ning vigade tegemine. Ootuspäraselt ei mõista õpetajad nooremate eagruppide poolt omaks võetud uusi norme täiel määral ning sildistavad noori üheltpoolt „võimekateks diginoorteks“, kelle oskustega võistelda ei suudeta, kuid samaaegselt ka „hukkaläinud nooruseks“, kelle online-käitumine tekitab hämmingut. Kui õpetajad eelistavad eelkõige privaatsust kaitsvaid strateegiaid, mis põhinevad enesetsensuuril ja info leviku kontrollimise püüdel, siis noorte praktikad on mitmekesisemad ning kohati eelistatakse info peitmise asemel peita hoopis sõnumi tähendust või andmeid hägustada. Doktoritöös on välja toodud alapädevusteks jagunevad laiemad sotsiaalmeediapädevused, mis hõlmavad endas nii teadlikkust auditooriumite erinäolisusest, infole ligipääsu võimaldavaid ja piiravaid strateegiaid kui ka iseenda rolli mõtestamist erinevate massilise ühisjälgimise osalisena, oskust teatud hetkedel astuda auditooriumi liikme rollist teadlikult väljaThe aim of this thesis is to explore how people perceive and construct their imagined audiences on social media and which social media literacies are central to the process. In addition, the methodological approach of creative research methods and researcher’s role in studying sensitive topic is analysed. Due to living in technologically mediated continuous mutual surveillance we have witnessed the rise of problematic cases that have sprouted from situations where one has misjudged the size and expectations of their online audience, ending in massive online public shaming and negative consequences in private or professional sphere. When sharing information on social networking sites, people tend to focus on the expectations and anticipated reactions of the „ideal readers“ of their imagined audiences, those perceived to be similar to ourselves. However, „nightmare readers“ who usually decode the messages significantly differently, will also have access to this information. Two groups’ perceptions – the young and their nightmare readers, the teachers – are at the heart of this thesis. For the young, technologically saturated sociality is the new norm, including the disclosure of various types of information about themselves and inevitability of making mistakes online. Interviewed teachers have difficulties in understanding these new norms and label the youth as a „digital generation“ with superior digital skills. At the same time they express juvenoia, the classic „youth is doomed“, based on young people’s online behavior. When teachers have mostly made use of privacy protecting strategies that are based on self-censorship, moderate use and trying to control the spread of the information, the repertoire of strategies for the youth is noticeably wider, often aiming to hide the meaning of the information (e.g. social steganography, shift of responsibility, data obfuscation) rather than information itself. The social media literacies necessary for successful navigation of imagined audiences include being aware of different audiences and their shifting norms, the knowledge and use of audience management strategies and the reaction and restriction of self as audience