What do academics ask their online networks? An analysis of questions posed via Academia.edu

Social networking sites (SNS) aimed at academics have the potential to enhance academic practice through developing an online academic identity and as a portal to further opportunities for collaboration and communication. This paper explores part of the communicative affordance offered by academic SNS through an analysis of the questions posed by academics via the Academia.edu website

Efficient Mechanism For Privacy And Improve The Quality Answers In Q&A Systems

Question and Answer (Q&A) systems piece a dynamic role in our daily life for evidence and data sharing. Users post questions and pick questions to rejoinder in the system. Due to the hastilybudding user population and the number of questions, it is questionable for a user to stagger upon a request by unplanned that (s)he can answer. Also, selflessness does not embolden all users to afford answers, not to mention high quality rejoinders with a short answer wait time. The principalunprejudiced of this paper is to increase the performance of Q&A systems by dynamicallyaccelerating questions to users who are gifted and disposed to answer the questions. Our results submit that social networks can be leveraged to recover the response quality and asker’s waiting time. We also applied a real prototype of SocialQ&A, and examine the Q&A conduct of real users and queries from a small-scale real-world SocialQ&A system

Leveraging Social Foci for Information Seeking in Social Media

The rise of social media provides a great opportunity for people to reach out to their social connections to satisfy their information needs. However, generic social media platforms are not explicitly designed to assist information seeking of users. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identify the social connections of a user able to satisfy his information needs. The information need of a social media user is subjective and personal, and we investigate the utility of his social context to identify people able to satisfy it. We present questions users post on Twitter as instances of information seeking activities in social media. We infer soft community memberships of the asker and his social connections by integrating network and content information. Drawing concepts from the social foci theory, we identify answerers who share communities with the asker w.r.t. the question. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework is effective in identifying answerers to social media questions.Comment: AAAI 201

My favorite unreliable source? Information sharing and acquisition through informal networks

Informal information networks are the personal connections of friends, family and colleagues that people use to help them find information. Recently, a great deal of attention has been paid to social network sites, and other social media, as a key source of information and misinformation in contemporary society. This panel will probe deeper, to investigate the personal connections that underpin and lie behind the social connections visible on social network sites. This issue is of increasing importance as more of our everyday lives are moved online. We will debate what we actually know, and do not know, about how people find information through others, both on‐ and off‐line. From the panel we hope to create a network of scholars interested in creating a research agenda to make informal networks a focus of study going forward.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163474/2/pra2294.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163474/1/pra2294_am.pd

Is Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q&A Hashtags on Twitter

In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with "Q&A" hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We surveyed Twitter users and found they employ these Q&A hashtags both as a topical signifier (this tweet needs an answer!) and to reach out to those beyond their immediate followers (a community of helpful tweeters who monitor the hashtag). However, our log analysis of thousands of hashtagged Q&A exchanges reveals that nearly all replies to hashtagged questions come from a user's immediate follower network, contradicting user's beliefs that they are tapping into a larger community by tagging their question tweets. This finding has implications for designing next-generation social search systems that reach and engage a wide audience of answerers

AnswerPro: Designing to Motivate Interaction

This paper describes the design and initial testing of AnswerPro, a mobile academic peer support system for UK Key Stage 3 and 4 pupils (11-16 year olds). AnswerPro is a web application that enables pupils to seek support from their knowledgeable peers on various subjects. This paper correlates the findings from a previous requirements-gathering exercise, and from research into academic motivation, to propose design elements embedded within AnswerPro. A pilot study was conducted with 7 school pupils over 3 weeks. Participants then engaged in a focus group which discussed their experience using AnswerPro and the motivational elements embedded within it. Findings from their use of AnswerPro, and from the subsequent discussion, highlighted some problems with the embedded motivational features. As a result, suggestions for potential solutions and their merits are proposed for the next version of AnswerPro