Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Social Software Development: Insights And Solutions, Abhishek Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over last few decades, the way software is developed has changed drastically. From being an activity performed by developers working individually to develop standalone programs, it has transformed into a highly collaborative and cooperative activity. Software development today can be considered as a participatory culture, where developers coordinate and engage together to develop software while continuously learning from one another and creating knowledge.

In order to support their communication and collaboration needs, software developers often use a variety of social media channels. These channels help software developers to connect with like-minded developers and explore collaborations on software projects of interest. …

Data Mining Approach To The Detection Of Suicide In Social Media: A Case Study Of Singapore, Jane H. K. Seah, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we focus on the social phenomenon of suicide. Specifically, we perform social sensing on digital traces obtained from Reddit. We analyze the posts and comments in that are related to depression and suicide. We perform natural language processing to better understand different aspects of human life that relate to suicide.

Using Smart Card Data To Model Commuters’ Responses Upon Unexpected Train Delays, Xiancai Tian, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The mass rapid transit (MRT) network is playing an increasingly important role in Singapore's transit network, thanks to its advantages of higher capacity and faster speed. Unfortunately, due to aging infrastructure, increasing demand, and other reasons like adverse weather condition, commuters in Singapore recently have been facing increasing unexpected train delays (UTDs), which has become a source of frustration for both commuters and operators. Most, if not all, existing works on delay management do not consider commuters' behavior. We dedicate this paper to the study of commuters' behavior during UTDs. We adopt a data-driven approach to analyzing the six-month' real …

Integrated Reward Scheme And Surge Pricing In A Ride-Sourcing Market, Hai Yang, Chaoyi Shao, Hai Wang, Jieping Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Surge pricing is commonly used in on-demand ride-sourcing platforms (e.g., Uber, Lyft and Didi) to dynamically balance demand and supply. However, since the price for ride service cannot be unlimited, there is usually a reasonable or legitimate range of prices in practice. Such a constrained surge pricing strategy fails to balance demand and supply in certain cases, e.g., even adopting the maximum allowed price cannot reduce the demand to an affordable level during peak hours. In addition, the practice of surge pricing is controversial and has stimulated long debate regarding its pros and cons. To address the limitation of current …

Improving Multi-Label Emotion Classification Via Sentiment Classification With Dual Attention Transfer Network, Jianfei Yu, Luis Marujo, Jing Jiang, Pradeep Karuturi, William Brendel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we target at improving the performance of multi-label emotion classification with the help of sentiment classification. Specifically, we propose a new transfer learning architecture to divide the sentence representation into two different feature spaces, which are expected to respectively capture the general sentiment words and the other important emotion-specific words via a dual attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our transfer learning approach can outperform several strong baselines and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

Centroid-Amenities: An Interactive Visual Analytical Tool For Exploring And Analyzing Amenities In Singapore, Xue Qian Jazreel Siew, Sean Jia Ming Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Planning for civic amenities in a fast-changing urban setting such as Singapore is never an easy task. And as urban planners look toward more data-driven approaches toward urban planning, so grows the demand for more flexible geospatial analytics tools to facilitate a more iterative and granular approach toward urban planning. Such specific tools however, are not always readily available as plugins for traditional desktop GIS software, as numerous customizations must be made to model specific temporal planning scenarios for quick analysis, which could prove both costly and time-consuming. Hence, to address this need, open-source tools such as R Shiny could …

Linky: Visualizing User Identity Linkage Results For Multiple Online Social Networks (Demo), Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ming Shan Hee, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User identity linkage across online social networks is an emerging research topic that has attracted attention in recent years. Many user identity linkage methods have been proposed so far and most of them utilize user profile, content and network information to determine if two social media accounts belong to the same person. In most cases, user identity linkage methods are evaluated by performing some prediction tasks with the results presented using some overall accuracy measures. However, the methods are rarely compared at the individual user level where a predicted matched (or linked) pair of user identities from different online social …

Recommending Who To Follow In The Software Engineering Twitter Space, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, Dinusha Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape.” Unfortunately, due to the general-purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets.To help developers perform this task, in …

Comparing Elm With Svm In The Field Of Sentiment Classification Of Social Media Text Data, Zhihuan Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhiping Lin, Ting Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning has been used in various fields with thousands of applications. Extreme learning machine (ELM), which is the most recently developed machine learning algorithm, has become increasingly popular for its good generalization ability. However, it has been relatively less applied to the domain of social media. Support Vector Machine (SVM), another popular learning-based algorithm, has been applied for sentiment classification of social media text data and has obtained good results. This paper investigates and compares the capabilities of these two learning-based methods in the field of sentiment classification of social media. The results indicate that SVM can obtain good …

Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas From Online Social Media Data, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Soongyo Jung, Joni Salminen, M. Admad, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology to automate creating imaginary people, referred to as personas, by processing complex behavioral and demographic data of social media audiences. From a popular social media account containing more than 30 million interactions by viewers from 198 countries engaging with more than 4,200 online videos produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology has several novel accomplishments, including: (a) identifying distinct user behavioral segments based on the user content consumption patterns; (b) identifying impactful demographics groupings; and (c) creating rich persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent attributes, such as names, photos, and personal characteristics. …

Traffic-Cascade: Mining And Visualizing Lifecycles Of Traffic Congestion Events Using Public Bus Trajectories, Agus Trisnajaya Kwee, Meng-Fen Chiang, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As road transportation supports both economic and social activities in developed cities, it is important to maintain smooth traffic on all highways and local roads. Whenever possible, traffic congestions should be detected early and resolved quickly. While existing traffic monitoring dashboard systems have been put in place in many cities, these systems require high-cost vehicle speed monitoring instruments and detect traffic congestion as independent events. There is a lack of low-cost dashboards to inspect and analyze the lifecycle of traffic congestion which is critical in assessing the overall impact of congestion, determining the possible the source(s) of congestion and its …

Exploiting The Interdependency Of Land Use And Mobility For Urban Planning, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Andrew Tan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Urban planners and economists alike have strong interest in understanding the inter-dependency of land use and people flow. The two-pronged problem entails systematic modeling and understanding of how land use impacts crowd flow to an area and in turn, how the influx of people to an area (or lack thereof) can influence the viability of business entities in that area. With cities becoming increasingly sensor-rich, for example, digitized payments for public transportation and constant trajectory tracking of buses and taxis, understanding and modelling crowd flows at the city scale, as well as, at finer granularity such as at the neighborhood …

Inferring Trip Occupancies In The Rise Of Ride-Hailing Services, Meng-Fen Chiang, Ee-Peng Lim, Wang-Chien Lee, Tuan-Anh Hoang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The knowledge of all occupied and unoccupied trips made by self-employed drivers are essential for optimized vehicle dispatch by ride-hailing services (e.g., Didi Dache, Uber, Lyft, Grab, etc.). However, the occupancy status of vehicles is not always known to the service operators due to adoption of multiple ride-hailing apps. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Learning to INfer Trips (LINT), to infer occupancy of car trips by exploring characteristics of observed occupied trips. Two main research steps, stop point classification and structural segmentation, are included in LINT. In the stop point classification step, we represent a vehicle trajectory …

Unearthing The X-Streams: Visualizing Water Contamination, Akangsha Bandalkul, Angad Srivastava, Kishan Bharadwaj Shridhar, Jason Guan Jie Ong, Yanrong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The datasets released for VAST 2018 Mini Challenge 2 pertain to sensor readings capturing chemical concentrations and physical properties from water bodies in the Boonsong Lekagul wildlife preserve. This challenge is in continuation to the VAST 2017 Challenge, where the company Kasios was identified as the culprit in dumping the chemical - Methylosmoline. In the absence of actual chemical measurements in the soil, challenge participants need to visualize chemical contamination based on the proximal water bodies to identify trends of interest. A horizon plot developed helps to narrow down the complete list of 106 chemicals provided to only 7, …

Diversity In Online Advertising: A Case Study Of 69 Brands On Social Media, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Lack of diversity in advertising is a long-standing problem. Despite growing cultural awareness and missed business opportunities, many minorities remain under- or inappropriately represented in advertising. Previous research has studied how people react to culturally embedded ads, but such work focused mostly on print media or television using lab experiments. In this work, we look at diversity in content posted by 69 U.S. brands on two social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook. Using face detection technology, we infer the gender, race, and age of both the faces in the ads and of the users engaging with ads. Using this dataset, …

Implicit Linking Of Food Entities In Social Media, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dining is an important part in people’s lives and this explains why food-related microblogs and reviews are popular in social media. Identifying food entities in food-related posts is important to food lover profiling and food (or restaurant) recommendations. In this work, we conduct Implicit Entity Linking (IEL) to link food-related posts to food entities in a knowledge base. In IEL, we link posts even if they do not contain explicit entity mentions. We first show empirically that food venues are entity-focused and associated with a limited number of food entities each. Hence same-venue posts are likely to share common food …

Teaching Basic Programming To Pre-University Students Through Blended Learning Pedagogy: A Descriptive Study, Vandana Ramachandra Rao, Ngee Mok Heng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Students enrolling for undergraduate programmes in Singapore would have either finished their polytechnic diploma or completed Junior College (JC) studies. Most pre-university students coming through the JC pathway are not exposed to programming as computing is offered as a subject in a very few JCs. The authors of this paper conducted four runs of an introductory programing course between 2016 and 2017 for a research project funded by the Ministry of Education, Singapore. The project named “Let’s Code!” was intended to introduce fundamental programming concepts to students and guide them to consider taking a computer-science related degree for their university …

Transferring Time-Series Discrete Choice To Link-Based Route Choice In Space: Estimating Vehicle Type Preference Using Recursive Logit Model, Fabian Bastin, Yan Liu, Cinzia Cirillo, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers a sequential discrete choice problem in a time domain, formulated and solved as a route choice problem in a space domain. Starting from a dynamic specification of time-series discrete choices, we show how it is transferrable to link-based route choices that can be formulated by a finite path choice multinomial logit model. This study establishes that modeling sequential choices over time and in space are equivalent as long as the utility of the choice sequence is additive over the decision steps, the link-specific attributes are deterministic, and the decision process is Markovian. We employ the recursive logit …

Offline Versus Online: A Meaningful Categorization Of Ties For Retweets, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the recent proliferation of news being shared through online social networks, it is crucial to determine how news is spread and what drives people to share certain stories. In this paper, we focus on the social networking site Twitter and analyse user’s retweets. We study retweeting patterns between offline and online friends, particularly, how tweet novelty and tweet topic differ between tweets retweeted by offline friends and those retweeted by online friends.

Esg And Corporate Financial Performance: Empirical Evidence From China's Listed Power Generation Companies, Changhong Zhao, Yu Guo, Jiahai Yuan, Mengya Wu, Daiyu Li, Yiou Zhou, Jiangang Kang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, listed companies around the world are shifting from short-term goals of maximizing profits to long-term sustainable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. People have come to realize that ESG has become an important source of the corporate risk and may affect the company's financial performance and profitability. Recent research shows that good ESG performance could improve the financial performance in some countries. Yet, the question of how does ESG affect financial performance has not been thoroughly discussed and studied in China. In this article, we study China's listed power generation groups to explore the relationship between ESG performance and …

Technology-Enabled Medication Adherence For Seniors Living In The Community: Experiences, Lessons, And The Road Ahead, Hwee Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan, Huiguang Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Medication non-adherence in seniors can lead to severe health complications, including morbidity, mortality and decreased quality of life. In view of ageing populations worldwide, there is significant interest among the healthcare sector and researchers to improve medication adherence rates for seniors. However, existing studies in the literature focus primarily on identifying the predictors of medication non-adherence. In this paper, we present our work on technology-enabled medication adherence for 24 community-dwelling seniors over a period of more than 2 years. We leverage Internet of Things (IoT) devices to track inferred medication consumption in the seniors’ homes, and provide quasi real-time alerts …

Context Recovery In Location-Based Social Networks, Wen Haw Chong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses context recovery in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), which are platforms where users post content from various locations. With this general LBSN definition, many existing social media platforms that support user-generated location relevant content using mobile devices could also qualify as LBSNs. Context recovery for such user posts refers to recovering the venue and the semantic contexts of these user posts. Such information is useful for user profiling and to support various applications such as venue recommendation and location- based advertising.

Pacela: A Neural Framework For User Visitation In Location-Based Social Networks, Thanh Nam Doan, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Check-in prediction using location-based social network data is an important research problem for both academia and industry since an accurate check-in predictive model is useful to many applications, e.g. urban planning, venue recommendation, route suggestion, and context-aware advertising. Intuitively, when considering venues to visit, users may rely on their past observed visit histories as well as some latent attributes associated with the venues. In this paper, we therefore propose a check-in prediction model based on a neural framework called Preference and Context Embeddings with Latent Attributes (PACELA). PACELA learns the embeddings space for the user and venue data as well …

Deeptravel: A Neural Network Based Travel Time Estimation Model With Auxiliary Supervision, Hanyuan Zhang, Hao Wu, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Estimating the travel time of a path is of great importance to smart urban mobility. Existing approaches are either based on estimating the time cost of each road segment or designed heuristically in a non-learning-based way. The former is not able to capture many cross-segment complex factors while the latter fails to utilize the existing abundant temporal labels of the data, i.e., the time stamp of each trajectory point. In this paper, we leverage on new development of deep neural networks and propose a novel auxiliary supervision model, namely DeepTravel, that can automatically and effectively extract different features, as well …

Detecting Personal Intake Of Medicine From Twitter, Debanjan Mahata, Jasper Friedrichs, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mining social media messages such as tweets, blogs, and Facebook posts for health and drug related information has received significant interest in pharmacovigilance research. Social media sites (e.g., Twitter), have been used for monitoring drug abuse, adverse reactions to drug usage, and analyzing expression of sentiments related to drugs. Most of these studies are based on aggregated results from a large population rather than specific sets of individuals. In order to conduct studies at an individual level or specific groups of people, identifying posts mentioning intake of medicine by the user is necessary. Toward this objective we develop a classifier …

Identifying Elderlies At Risk Of Becoming More Depressed With Internet-Of-Things, Jiajue Ou, Huiguang Liang, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Depression in the elderly is common and dangerous. Current methods to monitor elderly depression, however, are costly, time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we present a novel depression-monitoring system that infers an elderly’s changes in depression level based on his/her activity patterns, extracted from wireless sensor data. To do so, we build predictive models to learn the relationship between depression level changes and behaviors using historical data. We also deploy the system for a group of elderly, in their homes, and run the experiments for more than one year. Our experimental study gives encouraging results, suggesting that our IoT system …

Unobtrusive Detection Of Frailty In Older Adults, Nadee Goonawardene, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lee Buay Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensor technologies have gained attention as an effective means to monitor physical and mental wellbeing of elderly. In this study, we examined the possibility of using passive in-home sensors to detect frailty in older adults based on their day-to-day in-home living pattern. The sensor-based elderly monitoring system consists of PIR motion sensors and a door contact sensor attached to the main door. A set of pre-defined features associated with elderly’s day-to-day living patterns were derived based on sensor data of 46 elderly gathered over two different time periods. A series of feature vectors depicting different behavioral aspects were derived to …

Situation-Aware Authenticated Video Broadcasting Over Train-Trackside Wifi Networks, Yongdong Wu, Dengpan Ye, Zhuo Wei, Qian Wang, William Tan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Live video programmes can bring in better travel experience for subway passengers and earn abundant advertisement revenue for subway operators. However, because the train-trackside channels for video dissemination are easily accessible to anyone, the video traffic are vulnerable to attacks which may cause deadly tragedies. This paper presents a situation-aware authenticated video broadcasting scheme in the railway network which consists of train, on-board sensor, trackside GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communications-Railway) device, WiFi AP (Access Point), and train control center. Specifically, the scheme has four modules: (1) a train uses its on-board sensors to obtain its speed, location, and RSSI …

A Driver Guidance System For Taxis In Singapore, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Shih-Fen Cheng, Meghna Lowalekar, Nicholas Wong, Rishikeshan Rajendram, Pradeep Varakantham, Nghia Troung Troung, Firmansyah Bin Abd Rahman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional taxi fleet operators world-over have been facing intense competitions from various ride-hailing services such as Uber and Grab.Based on our studies on the taxi industry in Singapore, we see that the emergence of Uber and Grab in the ride-hailing market has greatly impacted the taxi industry: the average daily taxi ridership for the past two years has been falling continuously, by close to 20% in total. In this work, we discuss how efficient real-time data analytics and large-scale multiagent optimization technology could help taxi drivers compete against more technologically advanced service platforms. Our system has been in field trial …

Taxis Strike Back: A Field Trial Of The Driver Guidance System, Shih-Fen Cheng, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Rishikeshan Rajendram

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional taxi fleet operators world-over have been facing intense competitions from various ride-hailing services such as Uber and Grab (specific to the Southeast Asia region). Based on our studies on the taxi industry in Singapore, we see that the emergence of Uber and Grab in the ride-hailing market has greatly impacted the taxi industry: the average daily taxi ridership for the past two years has been falling continuously, by close to 20% in total. In this work, we discuss how efficient real-time data analytics and large-scale multi-agent optimization technology could potentially help taxi drivers compete against more technologically advanced service …