Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research

Big tech-players have been successful in pushing the chatbots forward. Investments in the technology are growing fast, as well as the number of users and applications available. Instead of driving investments towards a successful diffusion of the technology, user-centred studies are currently chasing the popularity of chatbots. A literature analysis evidences how recent this research topic is, and the predominance of technical challenges rather than understanding users’ perceptions, expectations and contexts of use. Looking for answers to interaction and design questions raised in 2007, when the presence of clever computers in everyday life had been predicted for the year 2020, this paper presents a panorama of the recent literature, revealing gaps and pointing directions for further user-centred research

Detecting malicious social bots: Story of a never-ending clash

Recently, studies on the characterization and detection of social bots were published at an impressive rate. By looking back at over ten years of research and experimentation on social bots detection, in this paper we aim at understanding past, present, and future research trends in this crucial field. In doing so, we discuss about one of the nastiest features of social bots – that is, their evolutionary nature. Then, we highlight the switch from supervised bot detection techniques – focusing on feature engineering and on the analysis of one account at a time – to unsupervised ones, where the focus is on proposing new detection algorithms and on the analysis of groups of accounts that behave in a coordinated and synchronized fashion. These unsupervised, group-analyses techniques currently represent the state-of-the-art in social bot detection. Going forward, we analyze the latest research trend in social bot detection in order to highlight a promising new development of this crucial field