Social Media Fashion Knowledge Extraction as Captioning

Social media plays a significant role in boosting the fashion industry, where a massive amount of fashion-related posts are generated every day. In order to obtain the rich fashion information from the posts, we study the task of social media fashion knowledge extraction. Fashion knowledge, which typically consists of the occasion, person attributes, and fashion item information, can be effectively represented as a set of tuples. Most previous studies on fashion knowledge extraction are based on the fashion product images without considering the rich text information in social media posts. Existing work on fashion knowledge extraction in social media is classification-based and requires to manually determine a set of fashion knowledge categories in advance. In our work, we propose to cast the task as a captioning problem to capture the interplay of the multimodal post information. Specifically, we transform the fashion knowledge tuples into a natural language caption with a sentence transformation method. Our framework then aims to generate the sentence-based fashion knowledge directly from the social media post. Inspired by the big success of pre-trained models, we build our model based on a multimodal pre-trained generative model and design several auxiliary tasks for enhancing the knowledge extraction. Since there is no existing dataset which can be directly borrowed to our task, we introduce a dataset consisting of social media posts with manual fashion knowledge annotation. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.Comment: Accepted by SIGIR-AP 202

Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks

Aiming to enhance the safety of their users, social media platforms enforce terms of service by performing active moderation, including removing content or suspending users. Nevertheless, we do not have a clear understanding of how effective it is, ultimately, to suspend users who engage in toxic behavior, as that might actually draw users to alternative platforms where moderation is laxer. Moreover, this deplatforming efforts might end up nudging abusive users towards more extreme ideologies and potential radicalization risks. In this paper, we set to understand what happens when users get suspended on a social platform and move to an alternative one. We focus on accounts active on Gab that were suspended from Twitter and Reddit. We develop a method to identify accounts belonging to the same person on these platforms, and observe whether there was a measurable difference in the activity and toxicity of these accounts after suspension. We find that users who get banned on Twitter/Reddit exhibit an increased level of activity and toxicity on Gab, although the audience they potentially reach decreases. Overall, we argue that moderation efforts should go beyond ensuring the safety of users on a single platform, taking into account the potential adverse effects of banning users on major platforms

Improving Development Aid Design and Evaluation: Plan for Sailboats, Not Trains

The reality is that most development involves politics in some way. Sometimes development projects engage in bureaucratic or small-scale politics, such as deciding where to place a village well -- near the chief 's home, where he has kindly donated land but could then control use, or near the poorer people of the village. This is not the level of politics under discussion.Instead, this report is concerned with larger-scale political and policy engagement. It applies to the subset of the development world that is engaged in democratization, a community that it has long been clear is involved in politics. But it also has a broader ambit. The development community has more recently become involved in governance, anticorruption, transparency, and rule of law programs. These efforts universally affect laws and policies, and nearly all face opposition -- and thus all are political. Finally, many, perhaps most, large-scale socioeconomic development programs also require political engagement. Politics is the process of making decisions about the rules that govern a society and the use of public resources. These decisions are never purely technical. Even if the end goal is not to affect a regime or a political party -- but simply to build a road, help girls get education, or reduce child mortality -- interventions that affect how public resources are produced, who gets those resources, who makes allocation decisions, and what rules govern relations between those who make decisions and those who don't are all political interventions.This report concerns program design and evaluation for all three types of engagement: in other words, most of development work. As the fight over the 2015 Millennium Development Goals illustrates, the decisions that funding agencies make about what to measure can determine their activities and their program designs. It's important to measure the right things in order to incentivize programming that works

We Could, but Should We? Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections

We live in an era in which the ways that we can make sense of our past are evolving as more artifacts from that past become digital. At the same time, the responsibilities of traditional gatekeepers who have negotiated the ethics of historical data collection and use, such as librarians and archivists, are increasingly being sidelined by the system builders who decide whether and how to provide access to historical digital collections, often without sufficient reflection on the ethical issues at hand. It is our aim to better prepare system builders to grapple with these issues. This paper focuses discussions around one such digital collection from the dawn of the web, asking what sorts of analyses can and should be conducted on archival copies of the GeoCities web hosting platform that dates to 1994.This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the US National Science Foundation (grants 1618695 and 1704369), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Start Smart Labs, and Compute Canada

The Slender Man Mythos: a structuralist analysis of an online mythology

The Slender Man first started on the Something Awful forum threads in 2009, where many users all jointly contributed to the creation of a tall monster who appears to be wearing a suit. He is known for making children disappear and causing violent deaths to the adults who seek to know more about him. His creation was caused by mass communal storytelling, each singular narrative being created by different authors all inspired by their own view of the creature. Despite this more disjointed creation almost ten years ago, the Slender Man has retained an important place online, having spread from his forum thread to web videos, humorous memes, and even video games. This work seeks to answer the question about what this mythos is truly saying in its deeper levels. Structural anthropological mythic analysis, sometimes paired with ethnographic details, seeks to demonstrate how the Slender Man mythology is structured. Connected to this, we also seek to answer the question of what cultural group the Slender Man’s mythology belongs to, leading to an important question on the existence of “digital culture”. We find the narrative holds a triadic structure, in which the Slender Man does not necessarily have a place, but controls the structural flow. We also find there is little in the way of an existence of a full “digital culture”, but rather that the online environment is comprised of communities

Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes

Humans inevitably develop a sense of the relationships between objects, some of which are based on their appearance. Some pairs of objects might be seen as being alternatives to each other (such as two pairs of jeans), while others may be seen as being complementary (such as a pair of jeans and a matching shirt). This information guides many of the choices that people make, from buying clothes to their interactions with each other. We seek here to model this human sense of the relationships between objects based on their appearance. Our approach is not based on fine-grained modeling of user annotations but rather on capturing the largest dataset possible and developing a scalable method for uncovering human notions of the visual relationships within. We cast this as a network inference problem defined on graphs of related images, and provide a large-scale dataset for the training and evaluation of the same. The system we develop is capable of recommending which clothes and accessories will go well together (and which will not), amongst a host of other applications.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, SIGIR 201

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

The local and the global: Gina Nahai and the taking up of serpents and stereotypes

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahai's Sunday's Silence. Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novel's politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of “minority” literature with discrete “national” models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity