The step project:societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues

Decisions on environmental topics taken today are going to have long-term consequences that will affect future generations. Young people will have to live with the consequences of these decisions and undertake special responsibilities. Moreover, as tomorrow’s decision makers, they themselves should learn how to negotiate and debate issues before final decisions are made. Therefore, any participation they can have in environmental decision making processes will prove essential in developing a sustainable future for the community.However, recent data indicate that the young distance themselves from community affairs, mainly because the procedures involved are ‘wooden’, politicians’ discourse alienates the young and the whole experience is too formalized to them. Authorities are aware of this fact and try to establish communication channels to ensure transparency and use a language that speaks to new generations of citizens. This is where STEP project comes in.STEP (www.step4youth.eu) is a digital Platform (web/mobile) enabling youth Societal and Political e-Participation in decision-making procedures concerning environmental issues. STEP is enhanced with web/social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features.Six pilots in real contexts are being organised for the deployment of the STEP solution in 4 European Countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Pilots are implemented with the direct participation of one regional authority, four municipalities, and one association of municipalities, and include decision-making procedures on significant environmental questions.</p

GAP: Geometric Aggregation of Popularity Metrics

Estimating and analyzing the popularity of an entity is an important task for professionals in several areas, e.g., music, social media, and cinema. Furthermore, the ample availability of online data should enhance our insights into the collective consumer behavior. However, effectively modeling popularity and integrating diverse data sources are very challenging problems with no consensus on the optimal approach to tackle them. To this end, we propose a non-linear method for popularity metric aggregation based on geometrical shapes derived from the individual metrics&rsquo; values, termed Geometric Aggregation of Popularity metrics (GAP). In this work, we particularly focus on the estimation of artist popularity by aggregating web-based artist popularity metrics. Finally, even though the most natural choice for metric aggregation would be a linear model, our approach leads to stronger rank correlation and non-linear correlation scores compared to linear aggregation schemes. More precisely, our approach outperforms the simple average method in five out of seven evaluation measures