The Decentralised Web (DW) has recently seen a renewed momentum, with number of DW platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Hubzilla gaining increasing traction. These offer alternatives to traditional social networks Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, by enabling the operation web infrastructure services without centralised ownership or control. Although their differ greatly, modern mostly rely on two key innovations: first, open source software allows anybody setup independent servers ("instances")...

Abstract Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount chaos but, in reality, can be understood a systematic way through the lens of “epidemic psychology”. According Philip Strong, founder sociological study infectious diseases, not only is biological; there also potential for three psycho-social epidemics: fear, moralization, and action. This work empirically tests Strong’s model at scale by studying use language 122M tweets related COVID-19 pandemic posted U.S. during...

Self-management support can improve health and reduce care utilization by people with long-term conditions. Online communities for conditions have the potential to influence health, usage of resources, facilitate illness self-management. Only recently, however, has evidence been reported on how such function evolve, they self-management in practice.The aim this study is gain a better understanding mechanisms underlying online systems analyzing structure dynamics networks connecting users who...

Information visualization has great potential to make sense of the increasing amount data generated by complex machine-learning algorithms. We design a set visualizations for new deep-learning algorithm called FaceLift (goodcitylife.org/facelift). This is able generate beautified version given urban image (such as from Google Street View), and our compare pairs original images. With those visualizations, we aim at helping practitioners understand what happened during algorithmic...

In the area of computer vision, deep learning techniques have recently been used to predict whether urban scenes are likely be considered beautiful: it turns out that these able make accurate predictions. Yet they fall short when comes generating actionable insights for design. To support interventions, one needs go beyond predicting beauty, and tackle challenge recreating beauty. Unfortunately, not designed with in mind. Given their ‘black-box nature’, models cannot directly explain why a...

Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content, usually reflecting hard party lines on political and socio-economic topics. Though this polarization has been extensively studied respect it still unknown how associates online tracking experienced by browsing especially when they exhibit certain demographic...

The presence of people in an urban area throughout the day -- often called 'urban vitality' is one qualities world-class cities aspire to most, yet it hardest achieve. Back 1970s, Jane Jacobs theorized vitality and found that there are four conditions required for promotion life cities: diversity land use, small block sizes, mix economic activities, concentration people. To build proxies those ultimately test Jacobs's theory at scale, researchers have had collect both private public data...

This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites their corresponding Facebook pages, identify key characteristics mediate traffic flow within this ecosystem. uncover pattern new being established in run up elections, abandoned after. Such form an ecosystem, creating...

Social media has been on the vanguard of political information diffusion in 21st century. Most studies that look into disinformation, influence and fake-news focus mainstream social platforms. This inevitably made English an important factor our current understanding activity media. As a result, there only limited number large portion world, including largest, multilingual multicultural democracy: India. In this paper we present characterisation network India called ShareChat. We collect...

Online forums that allow participatory engagement between users have been transformative for public discussion of important issues. However, debates on such can sometimes escalate into full blown exchanges hate or misinformation. An tool in understanding and tackling problems is to be able infer the argumentative relation whether a reply supporting attacking post it replying to. This so called polarity prediction task difficult because replies may based external context beyond whose being...

The Decentralised Web (DW) has recently seen a renewed momentum, with number of DW platforms like Mastodon, Peer-Tube, and Hubzilla gaining increasing traction. These offer alternatives to traditional social networks Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, by enabling the operation web infrastructure services without centralised ownership or control. Although their differ greatly, modern mostly rely on two key innovations: first, open source software allows anybody setup independent servers...

Successful meetings create a safe environment for contribution; one that attendees feel engaged in and part of. Previous research has shown success depends not only on execution, but also whether psychologically safe. While this aspect is, to great extent, partly observable through certain body cues during in-person meetings, they are often overlooked virtual ones. To fix that, we developed "Kairos"-a system multi-modal monitoring of captures subtle cues. We deployed it 55 real-world...

Many adult content websites incorporate social networking features. Although these are popular, they raise significant challenges, including the potential for users to "catfish", i.e., create fake profiles deceive other users. This paper takes an initial step towards automated catfish detection. We explore characteristics of different age and gender groups, identifying a number distinctions. Through this, we train models based on user comments, via ground truth specially verified profiles....

Application testing is an integral part of the application life cycle. This effort more for 3 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">rd</sup> party applications in mobile phone market, due to wide number handsets available on which needs be tested before being released. At same time, majority use cellular network, necessitating tester xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> (along with handset) present service area network....

A biological understanding is key for managing medical conditions, yet psychological and social aspects matter too. The main problem that these two are hard to quantify inherently difficult communicate. To aspects, this work mined around half a million Reddit posts in the sub-communities specialised 14 it did so with new deep-learning framework. In doing, was able associate mentions of conditions those emotions. then designed probabilistic approach mines open prescription data from National...

Online forums that allow for participatory engagement between users have been transformative the public discussion of many important issues. However, such conversations can sometimes escalate into full-blown exchanges hate and misinformation. Existing approaches in natural language processing (NLP), as deep learning models classification tasks, use inputs only a single comment or pair comments depending upon whether task concerns inference properties individual replies pairs comments,...

Online debates typically possess a large number of argumentative comments. Most readers who would like to see which comments are winning arguments often only read part the debate. Many platforms that host such allow for be sorted, say from earliest latest. How can argumentation theory used evaluate effectiveness policies sorting comments, in terms actually displayed reader may not have whole debate? We devise pipeline captures an online debate tree as bipolar framework (BAF), is sorted...

Abstract Can the shape of a city promote physical activity? The question why individuals engage in activity has been widely researched, but that research predominantly focused on socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, economic status) and coarse-grained spatial population density), overlooking key urban of, say, whether is navigable or, as theorist Kevin Lynch put it, it ‘imageable’ (whether its configuration mental effort). That mainly because, at scale, neither easy to model...

It is important to study and understand Internet debates because they often have consequences in the offline world, for better or worse. We show that argumentation theory, a branch of AI concerned with resolution disagreements, provides powerful toolbox which we can represent reason about such debates. After summarising relevant ideas overview three recent contributions from authors their collaborators: (1) on how automatically identify reply polarity (agreement disagreement) between...

Demining is a highly impactful but complex problem which requires considerable resources and time. Land mine detection the most hazardous time consuming of tasks in demining pipeline. Currently, risk landmines being present an area estimated on basis non-technical surveys are expensive slow. This paper presents novel spatial landmine prediction model to help improve allocation operations even predict future areas interest. Our approach based training predictive models geographical social...

In online debates, as in offline ones, individual utterances or arguments support attack each other, leading to some subset of (potentially from different sides the debate) being considered more relevant than others. However, conversations are much larger scale with often hundreds thousands users weighing in, collaboratively forming large trees comments by starting an original post and replying other. discussions, readers forced sample a put forth. Since such sampling is rarely done...

Abstract Recent years have witnessed the emerging of novel shared mobility solutions that provide diffused on-demand access to transportation. The widespread adoption these solutions, particularly electric mopeds (e-mopeds), is expected bring important benefits such as reduction noise and atmospheric pollution, road congestion, with extensive repercussions on liveability quality life in urban areas. Currently, almost no effort has been devoted exploring patterns e-moped sharing services,...

The remote work ecosystem is transforming patterns of communication between teams and individuals located at distance. Particularly, the absence certain subtle cues in current tools may hinder an online's meeting outcome by negatively impacting attendees' overall experience and, often, make them feeling disconnected. problem here might be due to fact that fall short capturing it. To partly address this, we developed online platform-MeetCues-with aim supporting during meetings. MeetCues a...