On Simulating the Propagation and Countermeasures of Hate Speech in Social Networks

Hate speech expresses prejudice and discrimination based on actual or perceived innate characteristics such as gender, race, religion, ethnicity, colour, national origin, disability or sexual orientation. Research has proven that the amount of hateful messages increases inevitably on online social media. Although hate propagators constitute a tiny minority with less than 1% participants they create an unproportionally high amount of hate motivated content. Thus, if not countered properly, hate speech can propagate through the whole society. In this paper we apply agent-based modelling to reproduce how the hate speech phenomenon spreads within social networks. We reuse insights from the research literature to construct and validate a baseline model for the propagation of hate speech. From this, three countermeasures are modelled and simulated to investigate their effectiveness in containing the spread of hatred: Education, deferring hateful content, and cyber activism. Our simulations suggest that: (1) Education consititutes a very successful countermeasure, but it is long term and still cannot eliminate hatred completely; (2) Deferring hateful content has a similar although lower positive effect than education, and it has the advantage of being a short-term countermeasure; (3) In our simulations, extreme cyber activism against hatred shows the poorest performance as a countermeasure, since it seems to increase the likelihood of resulting in highly polarised societies

Automating decision making to help establish norm-based regulations

Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose from may not be independent (i.e, they can be related to each other). Second, different preference criteria may be applied when choosing the norms to enact. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling a series of decision-making problems that regulation authorities confront when choosing the policies to establish. In order to do so, we first identify three different norm relationships -namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability- and we then consider norm representation power, cost, and associated moral values as alternative preference criteria. Thereafter, we show that the decision-making problems faced by policy makers can be encoded as linear programs, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers

Online Automated Synthesis of Compact Normative Systems

Peer reviewedPostprin

Iterative Design of a Gamified Course in High Education: deployment and evaluation

[EN] During the last years, gamification has been used to engage students in more attractive educational activities in different Computer Science subjects at the university level, thereby improving their motivation and learning outcomes. This work continues a research that initially proposed a gamified design for the course “Distributed Artificial Intelligence”, an optional undergraduate course of the Computer Engineering degree. Specifically, we focused on reinforcing subjects related to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) by means of fun hands-on activities to experiment theoretical concepts in practice. A first iteration of the design was deployed during two consecutive academic years, with good results in terms of students’ perceived learning, engagement and commitment during the class. Nevertheless, a posterior analysis of the design showed that the proposed mechanics did not consider some types of players - such as disruptors -, and some of the learning profiles - such as theoretical and reflexive -. Then, we proposed a card-based game to redesign the learning experience, using a LEarner-centered GAmification Design Framework (LEGA) that aligns both educational and gamification approaches. This paper focuses on this second iteration of the design, which has been deployed and evaluated during the last semester. The obtained results show that students liked the card game, were engaged and motivated during the gamified class, as well as they perceived an increased learning in the subject.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Baldeón, J.; Rodríguez, I.; Puig, A.; Lopez-Sanchez, M. (2018). Iterative Design of a Gamified Course in High Education: deployment and evaluation. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1521-1529. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8241OCS1521152

A model to support collective reasoning: Formalization, analysis and computational assessment

Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to introduce new pieces of information into the discussion, to relate them to existing pieces, and also to express their opinion on the pieces proposed by other users. In addition, our model does not assume that users' opinions are rational in order to extract information from it, an assumption that significantly limits current approaches. Instead, we define a weaker notion of rationality that characterises coherent opinions, and we consider different scenarios based on the coherence of individual opinions and the level of consensus that users have on the debate structure. Considering these two factors, we analyse the outcomes of different opinion aggregation functions that compute a collective decision based on the individual opinions and the debate structure. In particular, we demonstrate that aggregated opinions can be coherent even if there is a lack of consensus and individual opinions are not coherent. We conclude our analysis with a computational evaluation demonstrating that collective opinions can be computed efficiently for real-sized debates

Ethics by Design

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017

Experiencias de gamificación en aulas

Experiencias de gamificación en aulas / Contreras Espinosa, Ruth S.; Eguia, José Luis -- Gamificación en escenarios educativos. Revisando literatura para aclarar conceptos / Contreras Espinosa, Ruth S. -- Gamificación con PBL para una signatura del grado de Maestro de Educación Infantil / Revuelta Domínguez, Francisco Ignacio; Guerra Antequera, Jorge; Pedrera Rodríguez, Inmaculada -- Del Storytelling al Storylearning. Como motivar a los alumnos de guión y diseño multimedia / Legerén Lago, Beatriz -- Aprendizaje y motivación de la semiótica aplicada. Gamificación con base en la prueba piloto de la plataforma "Aprendiz" / Lugo, Nohemí; Alcántara, Alejandro -- Ethos files : un juego de rol para el área de "valores éticos" / Rubio Méndez, María -- Reader Wars : motivar a los alumnos por la lectura / Paula, Oscar de -- Evaluación y rediseño de una experiencia de gamificación en el aula basada en estilos de aprendizaje y tipos de jugador / Baldeón, Johan; Rodríguez, Inmaculada; Puig, Anna; Lopez-Sanchez, Maite -- Aprender a diseñar diseñando y jugando Serious Games en las aulas / Morales Moras, JoanEste libro pretende reunir experiencias e ideas de un grupo de profesores y expertos en distintos espacios educativos. Además, tiene como intento, anclar el concepto “gamificación” en el creciente cuerpo de literatura sobre esta área y demostrar ejemplos prácticos en asignaturas reales. La gamificación se refiere a un proceso de mejora, con posibilidades para proporcionar experiencias de juego y con el fin de apoyar a las actividades que desarrollan los usuarios. Las definiciones que se han descrito al inicio de la presentación, se han basado en la noción de que la gamificación procede del uso de elementos de diseño de juegos. Sin embargo, no parece haber un conjunto de elementos de juego claramente definidos, es decir, elementos que son estrictamente exclusivos de los juegos pero que no dan lugar automáticamente a experiencias de juego. La gamificación no siempre se lleva a cabo solo a través de elementos concretos. Por lo tanto, se cree que basar estas definiciones en un conjunto de mecanismos es un tema que puede causar confusión. En su lugar, propone que la gamificación podría entenderse de una forma mucho más amplia, y como un proceso en el que el “gamificador” intenta aumentar las probabilidades de la aparición de diferentes experiencias de juego al contagiar posibilidades para ese fin (ya sea mediante distintivos, puntos, etc.)

Association of Candidate Gene Polymorphisms With Chronic Kidney Disease: Results of a Case-Control Analysis in the Nefrona Cohort

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major risk factor for end-stage renal disease, cardiovascular disease and premature death. Despite classical clinical risk factors for CKD and some genetic risk factors have been identified, the residual risk observed in prediction models is still high. Therefore, new risk factors need to be identified in order to better predict the risk of CKD in the population. Here, we analyzed the genetic association of 79 SNPs of proteins associated with mineral metabolism disturbances with CKD in a cohort that includes 2, 445 CKD cases and 559 controls. Genotyping was performed with matrix assisted laser desorption ionizationtime of flight mass spectrometry. We used logistic regression models considering different genetic inheritance models to assess the association of the SNPs with the prevalence of CKD, adjusting for known risk factors. Eight SNPs (rs1126616, rs35068180, rs2238135, rs1800247, rs385564, rs4236, rs2248359, and rs1564858) were associated with CKD even after adjusting by sex, age and race. A model containing five of these SNPs (rs1126616, rs35068180, rs1800247, rs4236, and rs2248359), diabetes and hypertension showed better performance than models considering only clinical risk factors, significantly increasing the area under the curve of the model without polymorphisms. Furthermore, one of the SNPs (the rs2248359) showed an interaction with hypertension, being the risk genotype affecting only hypertensive patients. We conclude that 5 SNPs related to proteins implicated in mineral metabolism disturbances (Osteopontin, osteocalcin, matrix gla protein, matrix metalloprotease 3 and 24 hydroxylase) are associated to an increased risk of suffering CKD

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field