No Arabic abstract
Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid development and ease of access to the Internet, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have given rise to massive numbers of users joining online communities and the digitization of analogous data such as political debates. These communities and digitized data contain both explicit and latent information about users and their behaviors related to politics. For researchers, it is essential to utilize data from these sources to develop and design systems that not only provide solutions to computational politics but also help other businesses, such as marketers to increase users, participation and interactions. In this survey, we attempt to categorize main areas in computational politics and summarize the prominent studies in one place to better understand computational politics across different and multidimensional platforms. e.g., online social networks, online forums, and political debates. We then conclude this study by highlighting future research directions, opportunities, and challenges.
Social networks have become in the last decade central to political life. However, to those interested in analysing the communication strategies of parties and candidates at election time, the introduction of the Internet into the political sphere has proved a mixed blessing. Indeed, while retrieving, consulting, and archiving original documents pertaining to a specific campaign have become easier, faster, and achievable on a larger scale, thus opening up a promising El Dorado for research in this area, studying online campaigns has also inevitably introduced new technical, methodological and legal challenges which have turned out to be increasingly complex for academics in the humanities and social sciences to solve on their own.This paper therefore proposes to provide feedback on experience and experimental validation from a multidisciplinary project called POLIWEB devoted to the comparative analysis of political campaigns on social media in the run up to the 2014 elections to the European Parliament in France and in the United Kingdom. Together with observations from a humanities perspective on issues related to such a project, this paper also presents experimental results concerning three of the data collection life cycle phases: collection, cleaning, and storage. The outcome is a data collection ready to be analysed for various purposes meant to address the political science topic under consideration.
Differential privacy is effective in sharing information and preserving privacy with a strong guarantee. As social network analysis has been extensively adopted in many applications, it opens a new arena for the application of differential privacy. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey connecting the basic principles of differential privacy and applications in social network analysis. We present a concise review of the foundations of differential privacy and the major variants and discuss how differential privacy is applied to social network analysis, including privacy attacks in social networks, types of differential privacy in social network analysis, and a series of popular tasks, such as degree distribution analysis, subgraph counting and edge weights. We also discuss a series of challenges for future studies.
Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with first responders on their use of social media for situational awareness. We further assess the impact of SMART-a social media visual analytics system-on first responder operations.
The large-scale online management systems (e.g. Moodle), online web forums (e.g. Piazza), and online homework systems (e.g. WebAssign) have been widely used in the blended courses recently. Instructors can use these systems to deliver class content and materials. Students can communicate with the classmates, share the course materials, and discuss the course questions via the online forums. With the increased use of the online systems, a large amount of students interaction data has been collected. This data can be used to analyze students learning behaviors and predict students learning outcomes. In this work, we collected students interaction data in three different blended courses. We represented the data as directed graphs and investigated the correlation between the social graph properties and students final grades. Our results showed that in all these classes, students who asked more answers and received more feedbacks on the forum tend to obtain higher grades. The significance of this work is that we can use the results to encourage students to participate more in forums to learn the class materials better; we can also build a predictive model based on the social metrics to show us low performing students early in the semester.
In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with Q&A hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We surveyed Twitter users and found they employ these Q&A hashtags both as a topical signifier (this tweet needs an answer!) and to reach out to those beyond their immediate followers (a community of helpful tweeters who monitor the hashtag). However, our log analysis of thousands of hashtagged Q&A exchanges reveals that nearly all replies to hashtagged questions come from a users immediate follower network, contradicting users beliefs that they are tapping into a larger community by tagging their question tweets. This finding has implications for designing next-generation social search systems that reach and engage a wide audience of answerers.