Understanding the Internet: Model, Metaphor, and Analogy

published or submitted for publicatio

Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques

We consider the problem of classifying documents not by topic, but by overall sentiment, e.g., determining whether a review is positive or negative. Using movie reviews as data, we find that standard machine learning techniques definitively outperform human-produced baselines. However, the three machine learning methods we employed (Naive Bayes, maximum entropy classification, and support vector machines) do not perform as well on sentiment classification as on traditional topic-based categorization. We conclude by examining factors that make the sentiment classification problem more challenging.Comment: To appear in EMNLP-200

Taking apart the roads ahead: user power versus the futurology of IT

How often have futurologists ever succeeded in making accurate global predictions? Bell’s utopian vision of a leisure-laden ‘Post-Industrial’ society now seems hopelessly naive; Fukuyama’s ‘End of history’ thesis was arguably just a fleeting Reaganite delusion about the stabilization of post Cold War politics. Notwithstanding the failure of such widely hailed prophesies, and despite the lack of any well-attested laws about the historical development of information technologies, a brazenly upbeat futurology pervades many debates on new IT. This is most obviously the case in Bill Gates’ recently updated The Road Ahead. To challenge Gates’ prognostications about the future of information technologies, I will argue for the importance of users (vis-à-vis producers) in the social shaping and ‘consumption’ of IT, especially the power of many (if not necessarily all) such users to resist falling into futures that others prescribe for them. I contend that the non-passivity of IT users undermines the cogency of any claims about the inevitability of technological change, and helps to explain why so many past ‘futures’ of IT have never fully materialized

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

Ethics of e-voting: an essay on requirements and values in Internet elections

In this paper, we investigate ethical issues involved in the development and implementation of Internet voting technology. From a phenomenological perspective, we describe how voting via the Internet mediates the relation between people and democracy. In this relation, trust plays a major role. The dynamics of trust in the relation between people and their world forms the basis for our analysis of the ethical issues involved. First, we consider established principles of voting, confirming the identity of our democracy, which function as expectations in current experiments with online voting in the Netherlands. We investigate whether and how Internet voting can meet these expectations and thereby earn trust, based on the experiments in the Netherlands. We identify major challenges, and provide a basis for ethical and political discussion on these issues, especially the changed relation between public and private. If we decide that we want to vote via the Internet, more practical matters come into play in the implementation of the technology. The choices involved here are discussed in relation to the mediating role of concrete voting technologies in the relation between citizen and state

Hikester - the event management application

Today social networks and services are one of the most important part of our everyday life. Most of the daily activities, such as communicating with friends, reading news or dating is usually done using social networks. However, there are activities for which social networks do not yet provide adequate support. This paper focuses on event management and introduces "Hikester". The main objective of this service is to provide users with the possibility to create any event they desire and to invite other users. "Hikester" supports the creation and management of events like attendance of football matches, quest rooms, shared train rides or visit of museums in foreign countries. Here we discuss the project architecture as well as the detailed implementation of the system components: the recommender system, the spam recognition service and the parameters optimizer

A reflective characterisation of occasional user

This work revisits established user classifications and aims to characterise a historically unspecified user category, the Occasional User (OU). Three user categories, novice, intermediate and expert, have dominated the work of user interface (UI) designers, researchers and educators for decades. These categories were created to conceptualise user's needs, strategies and goals around the 80s. Since then, UI paradigm shifts, such as direct manipulation and touch, along with other advances in technology, gave new access to people with little computer knowledge. This fact produced a diversification of the existing user categories not observed in the literature review of traditional classification of users. The findings of this work include a new characterisation of the occasional user, distinguished by user's uncertainty of repetitive use of an interface and little knowledge about its functioning. In addition, the specification of the OU, together with principles and recommendations will help UI community to informatively design for users without requiring a prospective use and previous knowledge of the UI. The OU is an essential type of user to apply user-centred design approach to understand the interaction with technology as universal, accessible and transparent for the user, independently of accumulated experience and technological era that users live in