This paper characterizes the propagation of the information in one of the major OSNs, Google+ (G+). It extends previous works, which study information dissemination in other OSNs, based on two main contributions: (i) it is the first work that takes into account all publicly available information in a major OSN to perform such characterization rather than only use a limited sample of the network...

How to identify influential nodes is a central research topic in information diffusion analysis. Many existing methods rely on the assumption that the network structure is completely known by the model. However, in many applications, such a network is either unavailable or insufficient to explain the underlying information diffusion phenomena. To address this challenge, we develop a multi-task ...

In this paper, we analyze the existence of possible correlation between public opinion of twitter users and the decision-making of persons who are influential in the society. We carry out this analysis on the example of the discussion of probable name of the British crown baby, born in July, 2013. In our study, we use the methods of quantitative processing of natural language, the theory of fre...

Social media enable users to express their emotion promptly, helping health policy makers to gauge public sentiment of disease outbreak. In this research, we developed an approach to social-media-based public health informatics and built a proof-of-concept system named eMood that helps to collect, analyze, and visualize Ebola outbreak discussions on Twitter. Our approach uses a comprehensive le...

One of the commonly acknowledged shortcomings of Semantic Technologies that prevents their wide adoption in industry is the lack of the commitment by the intended domain experts and users. This shortcoming becomes even more influential in the domains that change sporadically and require appropriate changes in the respective knowledge representations. This discussion paper argues that a more act...

The recent years have seen an unprecedented boom of social network services, such as Twitter, which boasts over 200 million users. In such big social platforms, the influential users are ideal targets for viral marketing to potentially reach an audience of maximal size. Most proposed algorithms rely on the linkage structure of the respective underlying network to determine the information flow ...

Title of dissertation: WIDE-AREA MOBILE CONTENT DELIVERY Bo Han, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation directed by: Professor Aravind Srinivasan Department of Computer Science and Professor Bobby Bhattacharjee Department of Computer Science Hybrid mobile content delivery systems improve performance of wide-area networks by combining both wide-area and local-area communications. In hybrid cont...

User participation in the Information Systems (IS) user studies has become a popular and widely studied research topic. Understanding of how users should be involved in the projects and how to deal with the various challenges of involving users is important. Keeping users motivated over time is one of the biggest challenges in the process of user involvement. As the first step of research on ho...

The development of e-cigarettes was initially hailed as a resource in facilitating a reduction in or cessation of cigarette smoking. Many users of e-cigarettes are 'dual users', smoking traditional cigarettes and e-cigarettes. The present qualitative study examines the factors that a group of 20 dual users considered to have been influential in their decisions to use e-cigarettes and their comp...