Social media are an important source of information about the political issues, reflecting, as well as influencing, public mood. We present an analysis of Twitter data, collected over 6 weeks before the Brexit referendum, held in the UK in June 2016. We address two questions: what is the relation between the Twitter mood and the referendum outcome, and who were the most influential Twitter user...

Web-based Doodle polls, where respondents indicate their availability for a collection of times provided by the poll initiator, are an increasingly common way of selecting a time for an event or meeting. Yet group dynamics can markedly influence an individual’s response, and thus the overall solution quality. Via theoretical worst-case analysis, we analyze certain common behaviors of Doodle pol...

Internet polls are becoming nowadays more and more important as they are being used on a large scale. Their security aspects are probably the most significant and hardest issue to be solved when we consider web surveys. In this paper we present an innovative solution which considerably increases the security of Internet polls and the reliability of their results by discriminating between human-...

We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples ("PUMS files") of the 2000 Census, the 2003-2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004-2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor-fo...

Presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections all require state-level polling, but continuous real-time polling of every state during a campaign remains prohibitively expensive, and quite neglected for less competitive states. This paper employs a new dataset of over 500GB of politics-related Tweets from the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign to interpolate and predict state...

In Doodle polls, each voter may approve a subset of the available alternatives according to his preferences. While such polls can be captured by the standard models of Approval voting, Zou et al. [17] analyse reallife Doodle poll data and conclude that poll participants’ behaviour seems to be affected by considerations other than their intrinsic preferences over the alternatives. In particular,...