Social Media Commons^™

Analyzing Shared Value And Social Business Principles: A Case Study Of Honeydrop Beverages And Seven Hills Foundation, Sarah Dys, Maya Grevatt, Brianna Mirabile

School of Professional Studies

Can the business world come together with the nonprofit world to create systems to lift low income women, children, and families out of poverty? The following report aims to show how the changing principles of business have the potential to serve international populations living on less than $2USD per day. For-profit organizations working with citizen sector organizations instead of giving charity provides a sustainable model to connect profit maximization with social good.

Honeydrop Beverages is a company based out of New York that produces lemonade sweetened with honey. Their products do not contain any refined products, only using fresh and …

Doc Wayne Youth Services, Inc. Capstone Project Youth Employment And Mentoring, Bongani T. Jeranyama, Zhengjun Liu, Sarah Parsons

School of Professional Studies

In Boston, Massachusetts, young adults age 16-19 who have dropped out of high school have a very high unemployment rate of 43.8%. Additionally, in the United States of America the difference between a young adult with a high school diploma as opposed to a young adult without a high school diploma in terms of weekly income is $180 USD; between a young adult with a high school diploma versus a young professional with a bachelor’s degree is $433 USD. These numbers demonstrate the need for services that improve academic achievement, job readiness and preparedness, and youth mentorship for struggling young …

A Nonprofit Model In A For-Profit World: A Closer Look At Sheltered Workshops And Sustainability As An Employee Run Business, Bing Jang, Mitchell Perry, Nikolin Vangjeli, Laura Ducharme

School of Professional Studies

Historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite improvements such forms of discrimination continue to be a serious social problem. On October 11, 2011, the Department of Justice began an investigation into several state’s systems of providing vocational services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This action came about due to several states being out of compliance around Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title II of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability for all services, programs and activities provided to the public by state and …

What Makes A Music Track Popular In Online Social Networks?, Jing Ren, Jialie Shen, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tens of thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through social networks that focus on music and videos, as well as portal websites. While some of the content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been completely ignored. So what makes a music track popular? Can we predict the popularity of a music track before it is released? In this research, we will focus on an online music social network, Last.fm, and investigate three key factors of a music track that may have impact on its popularity. They include: the …

Learning To Find Topic Experts In Twitter Via Different Relations, Wei Wei, Gao Cong, Chunyan Miao, Feida Zhu, Guohui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Expert finding has become a hot topic along with the flourishing of social networks, such as micro-blogging services like Twitter. Finding experts in Twitter is an important problem because tweets from experts are valuable sources that carry rich information (e.g., trends) in various domains. However, previous methods cannot be directly applied to Twitter expert finding problem. Recently, several attempts use the relations among users and Twitter Lists for expert finding. Nevertheless, these approaches only partially utilize such relations. To this end, we develop a probabilistic method to jointly exploit three types of relations (i.e., follower relation, user-list relation and list-list …

Ranking Of High-Value Social Audiences On Twitter, Siaw Ling Lo, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Even though social media offers plenty of business opportunities, for a company to identify the right audience from the massive amount of social media data is highly challenging given finite resources and marketing budgets. In this paper, we present a ranking mechanism that is capable of identifying the top-k social audience members on Twitter based on an index. Data from three different Twitter business account owners were used in our experiments to validate this ranking mechanism. The results show that the index developed using a combination of semi-supervised and supervised learning methods is indeed generic enough to retrieve relevant audience …

Best Practices To Increase Efficacy Of Graduate School Admissions Communications At Clark University, Diana Curran, Nikki Feinberg, Mitchell Kelley, Ruiqi Li, Anning Zhou

School of Professional Studies

Within the period of time that a graduate student deposits and subsequently arrives at their academic institution, receiving timely information is important for their preparation. This process has been deemed by the Deans of the Enterprise Schools at Clark University as one that needs further investigation. As such, this Capstone looks at the array of communication that goes out to each graduate student during this four-month period. The purpose of examining this communication is to analyze its effectiveness in engaging students. To analyze the effectiveness of this communication, surveys were distributed to current students in these schools to gather data …

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

Towards An Infodemiological Algorithm For Classification Of Filipino Health Tweets, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, Kennedy E. Espina, Delfin Jay Sabido Ix, Raymond Josef Edward Lara, Vikki Car De Los Reyes

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Finding innovative ICT solutions to enhance the Philippines’ health sector is part and parcel of the Philippine eHealth Strategic Framework and Plan 2020 program. This study sees the opportunity of using collected Twitter data to create a model that processes tweets to produce a dataset that may be relevant in the field of epidemiology and infodemiology. Through the collection of relevant tweets, future studies may make use of the output of this research for various purposes, such as the improvement of epidemiological systems of the Department of Health in support of the eHealth strategy. In this study, we …

Posting Topics ≠ Reading Topics: On Discovering Posting And Reading Topics In Social Media, Wei Gong, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media users make decisions about what content to post and read. As posted content is often visible to others, users are likely to impose self-censorship when deciding what content to post. On the other hand, such a concern may not apply to reading social media content. As a result, the topics of content that a user posted and read can be different and this has major implications to the applications that require personalization. To better determine and profile social media users’ topic interests, we conduct a user survey in Twitter. In this survey, participants chose the topics they like …

Friendship Maintenance And Prediction In Multiple Social Networks, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the proliferation of online social networks (OSNs), users find themselves participating in multiple OSNs. These users leave their activity traces as they maintain friendships and interact with other users in these OSNs. In this work, we analyze how users maintain friendship in multiple OSNs by studying users who have accounts in both Twitter and Instagram. Specifically, we study the similarity of a user's friendship and the evenness of friendship distribution in multiple OSNs. Our study shows that most users in Twitter and Instagram prefer to maintain different friendships in the two OSNs, keeping only a small clique of …

On Analyzing Geotagged Tweets For Location-Based Patterns, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Geotagged social media is becoming highly popular as social media access is now made very easy through a wide range of mobile apps which automatically detect and augment social media posts with geo-locations. In this paper, we analyze two kinds of location-based patterns. The first is the association between location attributes and the locations of user tweets. The second is location association pattern which comprises a pair of locations that are co-visited by users. We demonstrate that through tracking the Twitter data of Singapore-based users, we are able to reveal association between users tweeting from school locations and the school …

Investigating The Influence Of Offline Friendship On Twitter Networking Behaviors, Young Soo Kim, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the influence of offline friendship in three specific areas of Twitter networking behaviors: (a) network structure, (b) Twitter content and (c) interaction on Twitter. We observe some interesting findings through the empirical analysis of 2193 pairs of users who are online friends. When these pairs of users know each other offline, they are more likely to (1) respond to the online gesture of friendship from their friend, (2) share mutual online friends, (3) distribute and gather information in their friend’s Twitter network, (4) pay attention to their friend’s tweets, (5) post tweets that might be of interest to …

A Comparison Of Fundamental Network Formation Principles Between Offline And Online Friends On Twitter, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the differences between how some of the fundamental principles of network formation apply among offline friends and how they apply among online friends on Twitter. We consider three fundamental principles of network formation proposed by Schaefer et al.: reciprocity, popularity, and triadic closure. Overall, we discover that these principles mainly apply to offline friends on Twitter. Based on how these principles apply to offline versus online friends, we formulate rules to predict offline friendship on Twitter. We compare our algorithm with popular machine learning algorithms and Xiewei’s random walk algorithm. Our algorithm beats the machine learning algorithms on …

Capstone Revival, Mary Mesele, Ruochen Lu, Quilin Jiang

School of Professional Studies

The capstone project is a culminating experience whereby students choose to research a topic that is relevant in their field of study and have been highly regarded as important learning activities. The capstone allows students to use research, analytical, problem solving and evaluation skills they have learned in the course of the graduate program. McGill indicates the benefit of the completion of a capstone project not only in gaining knowledge in capstone but also in learning how to apply the knowledge gained in other courses in the major (McGill, 2012). Currently, COPACE (College of Professional and Continuing Education) has three …

Modeling Social Media Content With Word Vectors For Recommendation, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social media, recommender systems are becoming more and more important. Different techniques have been designed for recommendations under various scenarios, but many of them do not use user-generated content, which potentially reflects users’ opinions and interests. Although a few studies have tried to combine user-generated content with rating or adoption data, they mostly reply on lexical similarity to calculate textual similarity. However, in social media, a diverse range of words is used. This renders the traditional ways of calculating textual similarity ineffective. In this work, we apply vector representation of words to measure the semantic similarity between text. We …

Using Digital Genomics To Create An Intelligent Enterprise, Mario Domingo

Asian Management Insights

Every business knows that it needs to leverage customer data, but few know the potential it has to transform business processes, decisions and performance.

Whom Should We Sense In 'Social Sensing' - Analyzing Which Users Work Best For Social Media Now-Casting, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given the ever increasing amount of publicly available social media data, there is growing interest in using online data to study and quantify phenomena in the offline 'real' world. As social media data can be obtained in near real-time and at low cost, it is often used for 'now-casting' indices such as levels of flu activity or unemployment. The term 'social sensing' is often used in this context to describe the idea that users act as 'sensors', publicly reporting their health status or job losses. Sensor activity during a time period is then typically aggregated in a 'one tweet, one …

A Method And System For Sentiment Classification And Emotion Classification [Us Patent 20170308523a1], Zhaoxia Wang, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Yinping Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A system and a method for classifying text messages, such as social media messages into sentiment valence categories are provided. The system comprising a module for decomposing text messages, a module for cleaning text messages, a module for producing feature data of text messages, and a module for classifying text messages into sentiment valence categories. The module for decomposing text messages is configured to: receive a text message, parse the text message into separate portions in response to parsing criteria based on sentence delimiters, wherein the separate portions are sentences, phrases and words, and rejoin at least some of the …

Social Signal Processing For Real-Time Situational Understanding: A Vision And Approach, Kasthuri Jeyarajah, Shuchao Yao, Raghava Muthuraju, Archan Misra, Geeth De Mel, Julie Skipper, Tarek Abdelzaher, Michael Kolodny

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have established a collaborative research enterprise referred to as the Situational Understanding Research Institute (SURI). The goal is to develop an information processing framework to help the military obtain real-time situational awareness of physical events by harnessing the combined power of multiple sensing sources to obtain insights about events and their evolution. It is envisioned that one could use such information to predict behaviors of groups, be they local transient groups (e.g., protests) or widespread, networked groups, and thus enable proactive prevention of nefarious activities. This paper …

Two Formulas For Success In Social Media: Learning And Network Effects, Liangfei Qiu, Qian Tang, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented explosion in information technology that enables dynamic diffusion of user-generated content in social networks. Online videos, in particular, have changed the landscape of marketing and entertainment, competing with premium content and spurring business innovations. In the present study, we examine how learning and network effects drive the diffusion of online videos. While learning happens through informational externalities, network effects are direct payoff externalities. Using a unique data set from YouTube, we empirically identify learning and network effects separately, and find that both mechanisms have statistically and economically significant effects on video views; furthermore, the …

What's Hot In Software Engineering Twitter Space?, Abhishek Sharma, Tian Yuan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular means to disseminate information and currently more than 300 million people are using it actively. Software engineers are no exception; Singer et al. have shown that many developers use Twitter to stay current with recent technological trends. At various time points, many users are posting microblogs (i.e., tweets) about the same topic in Twitter. We refer to this reasonably large set of topically-coherent microblogs in the Twitter space made at a particular point in time as an event. In this work, we perform an exploratory study on software engineering related events in Twitter. We collect a …

Information Diffusion, Facebook Clusters, And The Simplicial Model Of Social Aggregation: A Computational Simulation Of Simplicial Diffusers For Community Health Interventions, Kerk Kee, Lisa Sparks, Daniele C. Struppa, Mirco A. Manucci, Alberto Damiano

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

By integrating the simplicial model of social aggregation with existing research on opinion leadership and diffusion networks, this article introduces the constructs of simplicial diffusers (mathematically defined as nodes embedded in simplexes; a simplex is a socially bonded cluster) and simplicial diffusing sets (mathematically defined as minimal covers of a simplicial complex; a simplicial complex is a social aggregation in which socially bonded clusters are embedded) to propose a strategic approach for information diffusion of cancer screenings as a health intervention on Facebook for community cancer prevention and control. This approach is novel in its incorporation of interpersonally bonded clusters, …

Did You Expect Your Users To Say This?: Distilling Unexpected Micro-Reviews For Venue Owners, Wen-Haw Chong, Bingtian Dai, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With social media platforms such as Foursquare, users can now generate concise reviews, i.e. micro-reviews, about entities such as venues (or products). From the venue owner's perspective, analysing these micro-reviews will offer interesting insights, useful for event detection and customer relationship management. However not all micro-reviews are equally important, especially since a venue owner should already be familiar with his venue's primary aspects. Instead we envisage that a venue owner will be interested in micro-reviews that are unexpected to him. These can arise in many ways, such as users focusing on easily overlooked aspects (by the venue owner), making comparisons …

Event Identification And Analysis On Twitter, Qiming Diao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant messages. Because of such wide adoption of Twitter, events like breaking news and release of popular videos can easily capture people’s attention and spread rapidly on Twitter. Therefore, the popularity and importance of an event can be approximately gauged by the volume of tweets covering the event. Moreover, the relevant tweets also reflect the public’s opinions and reactions to events. It is therefore very important to identify and analyze the events on Twitter. In this dissertation, …

Efficacy Of Social Media Utilization By Public Accounting Firms: Findings And Directions For Future Research, B. Eschenbrenner, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, V. Telaprolu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media presents a new platform for businesses to communicate and interact with others, both internally and externally. Social media may be utilized for activities such as sharing success stories and providing industry updates. Although a plethora of opportunities to achieve business objectives with social media usage exists, the efficacy of its use by public accounting firms is unclear. This article identifies the business objectives that Big 4 and second-tier firms are pursuing with social media. Primary business objectives being fulfilled by social media include Knowledge Sharing, Branding and Marketing, and Socialization and Onboarding. The findings suggest that Big 4 …

Classifying Political Similarity Of Twitter Users, William K. Paustian

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The emergence of large scale social networks has led to research in approaches to classify similar users on a network. While many such approaches use data mining techniques, recent efforts have focused on measuring the similarity of users using structural properties of the underlying graph representing the network. In this paper, we identify the Twitter followers of the 2016 presidential candidates and classify them as Democrat, Republican or Bipartisan. We did this by designing a new approach to measuring structural similarity, PolRANK. PolRANK computes the similarity of a pair of users by accounting for both the number of candidates they …

Detecting, Modeling, And Predicting User Temporal Intention, Hany M. Salaheldeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, …

Cross-Promotion In Social Media: Choosing The Right Allies, Tingting Song, Qian Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the strategic use of cross-promotion for content producers in social media. In particular, we study how a producer chooses other producers to cross-promote so as to maximize the expected benefits of them cross-promoting him/her in return. Theories on homophily effect and social influence suggest that cross-promoted producers are more likely to cross-promote the initiator in return when they are in the similar categories or share more common friends and when the initiator has higher status. However, the cross-promotion from producers of different categories and social groups (i.e., share fewer common friends) tend to benefit the initiator more. …

Structured Learning From Heterogeneous Behavior For Social Identity Linkage, Siyuan Liu, Shuhui Wang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social identity linkage across different social media platforms is of critical importance to business intelligence by gaining from social data a deeper understanding and more accurate profiling of users. In this paper, we propose a solution framework, HYDRA, which consists of three key steps: (I) we model heterogeneous behavior by long-term topical distribution analysis and multi-resolution temporal behavior matching against high noise and information missing, and the behavior similarity are described by multi-dimensional similarity vector for each user pair; (II) we build structure consistency models to maximize the structure and behavior consistency on users' core social structure across different platforms, …