Social Media Commons^™

Leicester Public Schools Information And Data Portal: Research And Recommendations, Yue Cen, Natalie Bonetti, Rashida Buchanan, Sathark Jain, Yuwei Wong

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project is to develop a strategy for the creation of a multifaceted portal to help with the organization and dissemination of information about the Leicester public school district. The functionality of this portal is to provide comparative financial, demographic, and academic data to other relative school districts in the area, both for the parents’ and for the city’s reference. It will be an examination into the best practices for creating a portal, both technological and aesthetic recommendations, as well as research into the value the publication of this data would provide for the parents of current …

Water In Worcester A Campaign For Public Fluoridation, Ryan Early, Xiao Gu, Yajing Huang, Lauren Meininger, Emma Phillips, Yao Su

School of Professional Studies

Water in Worcester: A Campaign for Public Fluoridation arose as a project from our sponsors, Chris Philbin, Vice President of Government Relations at UMass Memorial Health Care, and Joe O’Brien, former Worcester Mayor, Executive Director of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and Clark University Adjunct Professor. Our goal has been to produce resources that will support the fight for fluoridation in the City of Worcester. Fluoridation has failed to pass in Worcester on four separate occasions, but Mr. Philbin and Mr. O’Brien believe that the time has come to try again.

In order to fluoridate Worcester’s water supply, the municipal …

Canine For Disabled Kids Awareness Campaign Research And Implementation Plan, Jiamin Gu, Kendall Harcourt, Chang Liu, Kiamu Liu, Jemmie Tejada

School of Professional Studies

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) service animals are: “dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities” ( ADA, 2015). On the other hand, emotional support animals are: “dogs that provide comfort and support in forms of affection and companionship for an individual suffering from various mental and emotional conditions.” In addition, an emotional support animal is not required to perform any specific tasks for a disability like service dogs are (Ibid).

The ADA limits the number of questions that can be asked to protect the privacy of utilizers. In fact, …

Life Can Change In The Blink Of An Eye Capstone, Christopher Rutigliano, Jillian Elalaoui, Kristin Humphrey, Phillip Gates, Mohamed Ndjikam, Highness Meena, Adam Menard, Spencer Pickney

School of Professional Studies

Texting and driving is one of the most widespread and uncontrollable of epidemics that have arose to prominence in the 21st century. Texting and driving is now a global issue, that has left nations across the road scrambling to implement new laws and preventative measures to stunt the increasing rates of accidents and fatalities caused by texting and driving. The severity of the issue has lead to a multitude of different entities ranging from domestic and foreign governments, cell phone and car manufacturers, cell phone carriers, and insurance agencies to seek new methods to prevent texting and driving. Determining the …

A Social Media Plan For The Changemakers’ Playground, Meng Cong, Ciara Kilian, Xinling Wang, Sumanth Wilson, Chenyu Yan

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project was to create a social media plan for the Changemakers’ Playground campaign. The Changemakers’ Playground is a website thought up by our client, Sarah Lange, whereby ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things in their community can be celebrated for the work they are doing. Each person featured on the website, also known as a Changemaker, was interviewed by Sarah and that interview was split into three videos to be posted on the Changemakers’ Playground website throughout the week they are being featured. In short, our task was to create the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content to …

Learning Latent Characteristics Of Locations Using Location-Based Social Networking Data, Thanh Nam Doan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the modeling of latent characteristics of locations to describe the mobility of users of location-based social networking platforms. With many users signing up location-based social networking platforms to share their daily activities, these platforms become a gold mine for researchers to study human visitation behavior and location characteristics. Modeling such visitation behavior and location characteristics can benefit many use- ful applications such as urban planning and location-aware recommender sys- tems. In this dissertation, we focus on modeling two latent characteristics of locations, namely area attraction and neighborhood competition effects using location-based social network data. Our literature survey …

Discovering Hidden Topical Hubs And Authorities In Online Social Networks, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Finding influential users in online social networks is an important problem with many possible useful applications. HITS and other link analysis methods, in particular, have been often used to identify hub and authority users in web graphs and online social networks. These works, however, have not considered topical aspect of links in their analysis. A straightforward approach to overcome this limitation is to first apply topic models to learn the user topics before applying the HITS algorithm. In this paper, we instead propose a novel topic model known as Hub and Authority Topic (HAT) model to combines the two process …

Social Media: On Tech-Caves, Virtual Panopticism, And The Science Fiction-Like State In Which We Unwittingly Find Ourselves, Michael Major

Theses

Making use of three historic philosophical thought experiments, this paper blends psychological perspectives with philosophical reasoning to show how social media is corrupting our perception of reality, the result of which is ultimately detrimental to society as a whole. This is accomplished by first using Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to analyze and discuss the ways in which social media is limiting humanity’s access to real knowledge. Next, Michel Foucault’s analysis of punishment in its social context, Discipline and Punish, is used to discuss the ways in which social media is adversely affecting our behavior. Finally, Robert Nozick’s “Experience …

Effectiveness Of Social Media Analytics On Detecting Service Quality Metrics In The U.S. Airline Industry, Xin Tian

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Theses & Dissertations

During the past few decades, social media has provided a number of online tools that allow people to discuss anything freely, with an increase in mobile connectivity. More and more consumers are sharing their opinions online with others. Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) is the virtual communication in use; it plays an important role in customers’ buying decisions. Customers can choose to complain or to compliment services or products on their social media platforms, rather than to complete the survey offered by the providers of those services. Compared with the traditional survey, or with the air travel customer report published …

Exploiting User And Venue Characteristics For Fine-Grained Tweet Geolocation, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We call this a fine-grained geolocation problem. Given an observed tweet, the task is to infer its discrete posting venue, e.g., a specific restaurant. This recovers the venue context and differs from prior work, which geolocats tweets to location coordinates or cities/neighborhoods. First, we conduct empirical analysis to uncover venue and user characteristics for improving geolocation. For venues, we observe spatial homophily, in which venues near each other have more similar tweet content (i.e., text representations) compared to venues further apart. For users, we observe that they are spatially focused and more likely …

Detect Rumor And Stance Jointly By Neural Multi-Task Learning, Jing Ma, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, an unhealthy phenomenon characterized as the massive spread of fake news or unverified information (i.e., rumors) has become increasingly a daunting issue in human society. The rumors commonly originate from social media outlets, primarily microblogging platforms, being viral afterwards by the wild, willful propagation via a large number of participants. It is observed that rumorous posts often trigger versatile, mostly controversial stances among participating users. Thus, determining the stances on the posts in question can be pertinent to the successful detection of rumors, and vice versa. Existing studies, however, mainly regard rumor detection and stance classification as …

What Is Gab: A Bastion Of Free Speech Or An Alt-Right Echo Chamber, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free …

Do Your Friends Make You Buy This Brand?: Modeling Social Recommendation With Topics And Brands, Minh Duc Luu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consumer behavior and marketing research have shown that brand has significant influence on product reviews and product purchase decisions. However, there is very little work on incorporating brand related factors into product recommender systems. Meanwhile, the similarity in brand preference between a user and other socially connected users also affects her adoption decisions. To integrate seamlessly the individual and social brand related factors into the recommendation process, we propose a novel model called Social Brand–Item–Topic (SocBIT). As the original SocBIT model does not enforce non-negativity, which poses some difficulty in result interpretation, we also propose a non-negative version, called SocBIT(Formula …

Graduate Admissions Recruitment Project, Kevin Anderson, Chiemela Dike, Yixin Du, Arvinder Kaur, Amanda Popp, Huizhong Yang

School of Professional Studies

In this project, several comparison schools were interviewed and disclosed to have used search lists to find candidates. The organizations that have valuable search lists which may be of good use for the School of Professional Studies include Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). By choosing criteria such as demographics, location, academic performance, educational history provided by search lists, we believe there are many quality candidates for SPS programs. However, as we further investigated the functionality and cost-efficiency or return of investment of GRE search list, we spotted many uncertainties and few solid and successful …

Worcester Center For Crafts: A Transition To Online Sales, Monica Gow, Carly Branconnier, Srilatha Prodduturi, Ekaterina Shusharina, Alberta Yamoah

School of Professional Studies

The Clark University School of Professional Studies created a capstone team consisting of Monica Gow, Carly Branconnier, Iana Matkovskaia, Srilatha Prodduturi, Ekaterina Shusharina, and Alberta Yamoah to assist Worcester Center for Crafts (WCC) with the launch of their new online store. Worcester Center for Crafts wanted to showcase their beautiful American handmade crafts on an online platform, Shopify, in order to increase their sales and expand their market reach. The capstone team created a charter that outlined the scope of the project and what the team would deliver to WCC by the end of the project. The team agreed to …

Audubon Data Project Final Report, Askhat Beygenov, Valinur Kutlambetov, Shrikant Patel, Phoebe Roberts, Ulfat Sayyed, Shriram Sivaraman

School of Professional Studies

The Audubon Data Project was initiated as a Clark University Capstone project. The project’s client, Mass Audubon’s Shaping the Future of Your Community program, had identified a need to improve their data management methods and make better use of their data. The Capstone team, composed of Clark University graduate students, met with the client regularly to review the current state of the data and potential improvements to be made. The process began with a data review. During the review we worked with the client to explicitly define the purposes and requirements of the data, the current process for updating and …

Social Collaborative Media In Software Development, Didi Surian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this entry, we discuss various collaborative media which are commonly used among software developers. We start by discussing common communication channels developers used. These communication channels are discussed in two groups: public and enterprise-wide media. We then elaborate project management media in coordinating and managing project activities. Finally, we discuss a number of online knowledge resources, i.e., collaborative/individual knowledge resources and social networks.

Virtual Collaboration With Mobile Social Media In Multiple-Organization Projects, Zhaojun Yang, Jun Sun, Yali Zhang, Ying Wang

Information Systems Faculty Publications

This study investigates the use of mobile social media as emerging collaboration tools by virtual teams. Based on the construal level theory, it develops a research model hypothesizes that collaboration tool effectiveness influence contextual performance and task performance through the mediation of procedure agreeability. In addition, geographic dispersion, team size and project duration serve as moderators as they reflect virtual collaboration complexity. Empirical findings support most hypothesized relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Anatomy Of Online Hate: Developing A Taxonomy And Machine Learning Models For Identifying And Classifying Hate In Online News Media, Joni Salminen, Hind Almerekhi, Milica Milenkovic, Soon-Gyu Jung, Haewoon Kwak, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social media platforms generally attempt to mitigate hateful expressions, as these comments can be detrimental to the health of the community. However, automatically identifying hateful comments can be challenging. We manually label 5,143 hateful expressions posted to YouTube and Facebook videos among a dataset of 137,098 comments from an online news media. We then create a granular taxonomy of different types and targets of online hate and train machine learning models to automatically detect and classify the hateful comments in the full dataset. Our contribution is twofold: 1) creating a granular taxonomy for hateful online comments that includes both …

Canines For Disabled Kids, Erin Jerrett, Margarita Mnatsakanyan, Colleen Reynolds, Yin Wang

School of Professional Studies

Canines for Disabled Kids have been working on behalf of children and their families to educate communities and promote service dog partnerships for almost twenty years. Their advocacy with local legislatures, business owners, and community leaders highlighted the difficulties encountered when differentiating service dogs from emotional support/comfort dogs. Service dogs are entitled to access by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), while emotional support/comfort dogs are not protected under the federal statute or to the same rights. Canines for Disabled Kids proposed a study to obtain a current count of licensed service dogs in the Commonwealth and investigate the feasibility …

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis : From Formal To Informal And Scarce Resource Languages, Siaw Ling Lo, Erik Cambria, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to analyse online user-generated content related to sentiments (e.g., thoughts and opinions) on products or policies has become a de-facto skillset for many companies and organisations. Besides the challenge of understanding formal textual content, it is also necessary to take into consideration the informal and mixed linguistic nature of online social media languages, which are often coupled with localised slang as a way to express ‘true’ feelings. Due to the multilingual nature of social media data, analysis based on a single official language may carry the risk of not capturing the overall sentiment of online content. While efforts …

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ …

Tweet Geolocation: Leveraging Location, User And Peer Signals, Wen-Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We referred this as fine-grained geolocation. To solve this problem effectively, we develop novel techniques to exploit each posting user's content history. This is motivated by our finding that most users do not share their visitation history, but have ample content history from tweet posts. We formulate fine-grained geolocation as a ranking problem whereby given a test tweet, we rank candidate venues. We propose several models that leverage on three types of signals from locations, users and peers. Firstly, the location signals are words that are indicative of venues. We propose a location-indicative …

Interactive Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chenghao Liu, Martin Ester

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation has been an active research topic over the last decade, based on the assumption that social information from friendship networks is beneficial for improving recommendation accuracy, especially when dealing with cold-start users who lack sufficient past behavior information for accurate recommendation. However, it is nontrivial to use such information, since some of a person's friends may share similar preferences in certain aspects, but others may be totally irrelevant for recommendations. Thus one challenge is to explore and exploit the extend to which a user trusts his/her friends when utilizing social information to improve recommendations. On the other hand, …

A Framework For Recommendation Of Highly Popular News Lacking Social Feedback, Nuno Moniz, Luís Torgo, Magdalini Eirinaki, Paula Branco

Faculty Publications

Social media is rapidly becoming the main source of news consumption for users, raising significant challenges to news aggregation and recommendation tasks. One of these challenges concerns the recommendation of very recent news. To tackle this problem, approaches to the prediction of news popularity have been proposed. In this paper, we study the task of predicting news popularity upon their publication, when social feedback is unavailable or scarce, and to use such predictions to produce news rankings. Unlike previous work, we focus on accurately predicting highly popular news. Such cases are rare, causing known issues for standard prediction models and …

Inferring Spread Of Readers’ Emotion Affected By Online News, Agus Sulistya, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Depending on the reader, A news article may be viewed from many different perspectives, thus triggering different (and possibly contradicting) emotions. In this paper, we formulate a problem of predicting readers’ emotion distribution affected by a news article. Our approach analyzes affective annotations provided by readers of news articles taken from a non-English online news site. We create a new corpus from the annotated articles, and build a domain-specific emotion lexicon and word embedding features. We finally construct a multi-target regression model from a set of features extracted from online news articles. Our experiments show that by combining lexicon and …

Marketing Strategy Of School Of Professional Studies In China, Jiahui Liu, Jing Wang, Shuo An, Wengxing Wang, Yiwei Wang

School of Professional Studies

Chinese students are the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and the number continues to grow. Since 2010, The number of graduate students studying abroad has entered the period in which the increase has been declining. Under the circumstance of the weak global economy and high cost of education, the administration needs to attract the attention of Chinese students. In the process of competing for applicants, how to develop marketing strategies to attract students’ eyeballs has become an important means of trying to increase school income through Chinese students. The marketing strategy mentioned in this …

Real-Time Influence Maximization On Dynamic Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence maximization (IM), which selects a set of k users(called seeds) to maximize the influence spread over a social network, is a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications such as viral marketing and network monitoring.Existing IM solutions fail to consider the highly dynamic nature of social influence, which results in either poor seed qualities or long processing time when the network evolves.To address this problem, we define a novel IM query named Stream Influence Maximization (SIM) on social streams.Technically, SIM adopts the sliding window model and maintains a set of k seeds with the largest influence value over …

The Role Of Knowledge Sharing Via Organizational Social Media In The Workplace, Murad A. Moqbel, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although a plethora of studies have been recently conducted on organizational social media, little research has specifically examined how organizational social media can contribute to organizational workers’ performance through knowledge sharing. The objective of this research is to fill this gap by investigating the role of knowledge sharing in organizational social media use and its effect on in-role and innovative performance through the lens of social capital and social cognitive theories. Hypotheses were developed and a survey study is proposed.

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative …