In this article we discuss our key idea that informal exchange in twitter contributes to the motivation of participants in online courses. Micro-blogging (via twitter) was introduced to groups of educators that participated in three online courses on the use of Web2.0 technologies and Online Didactics in educational settings. We used qualitative as well as quantitative methods to investigate th...

Microblogging sites like Twitter have emerged as a popular platform for exchanging real-time information on the Web. Twitter is used by hundreds of millions of users ranging from popular news organizations and celebrities to domain experts in fields like computer science and astrophysics and spammers. As a result, the quality of information posted in Twitter is highly variable and finding the u...

Speech acts provide good insights into the communicative behavior of tweeters on Twitter. This paper is mainly concerned with speech act recognition in Twitter as a multiclass classification problem, for which we propose a set of word-based and character-based features. Inexpensive, robust and efficient, our method achieves an average F1 score of nearly 0.7 with the existence of much noise in o...

Nowadays, the use of social media such as Twitter is necessary to monitor trends of people on political issues. As a case study, we collected the main stream of Twitter related to the 2010 UK general election during the associated period. We analyse the characteristics of the three main parties in the election. Also, we propose a simple and practical algorithm to identify the political leaning ...

The research presented in this paper attempts an initial evaluation of Twitter as an instrument for emergency response in the context of a recent crisis event. The case of the 2013 disaster, when typhoon Haiyan hit Philippines is examined by analyzing nine consecutive days of Twitter messages and comparing them to the actual events. The results indicate that during disasters, Twitter users tend...

Dr. Abdur Chowdhury serves as Twitter’s Chief Scientist. Prior to that, Dr. Chowdhury co-founded Summize, a real-time search engine sold to Twitter in 2008. Dr. Chowdhury has held positions at AOL as their Chief Architect for Search, Georgetown’s Computer Science Department and University of Maryland’s Institute for Systems Research. His research interest lays in Information Retrieval focusing ...

A more realistic mathematical influenza model including dynamics of Twitter, which may reduce and increase the spread of influenza, is introduced. The basic reproductive number is derived and the stability of the steady states is proved. The existence of Hopf bifurcation are also demonstrated by analyzing the associated characteristic equation. Furthermore, numerical simulations and sensitivity...

In recent years, many researchers have studied the characteristics of Twitter, which is a microblogging service used by a large number of people worldwide. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet been conducted to study the relationship between profile images and user behaviors on Twitter. We assume that the profile images and behaviors of users are influenced by their internal ...

Twitter is one among the fastest growing social networking services. This growth has led to an increase in Twitter scams (e.g., intentional deception). There is relatively little effort in identifying scams in Twitter. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised Twitter scam detector based on a small labeled data. The scam detector combines selflearning and clustering analysis. A suffix tree dat...

Some recent systems accurately produce high-level situational awareness by mining traffic in Twitter. Where these systems have been successful, there has been no attempt to evaluate Twitter streams for source reliability and information credibility because the situations have not been adversarial. The use of Twitter in recent political dissent in the Mideast makes the need for computationally t...