IN THE literature of the West, concepts and models of social policy are as diverse as contemporary concepts of poverty. Historically, the t,wo have indeed had much in common. They certainly share diversity. There are today those at, one end of the political spectrum who see social policy as a tra.nsitory minimum activity of minimum government for a minimum number of poor people; as a form of so...

Social capital designs the ensemble of resources which are accessible to a social actor through its relationship with other actors [1]. As such, social capital is always embedded in a social network, where nodes represent actors (e.g. individuals, political groups, associations), and links represent relationships (e.g., friendship, common interests, hostility) [2]. Social networks are inherentl...

e-Learning has turned to be a necessity for everyone, as it enables continuous and life-long education. Learners are social by nature. They want to connect to othersand share the same interests. Online communities are important to help and encourage learners to continue education. Learners through social capabilities can share different experiences.Social networks are cornerstone for e-Learning...

The paper first analyzes the different meanings of and interests in “societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology” by science fiction authors, scientists and engineers, policy makers and science managers, business people, transhumanists, the media, and cultural and social scientists. Based on the mutual semantic impact among these groups, a dynamical model of the debate on “societal and ...

Rich-media, pictures, and videos, are becoming an increasingly important aspect of online social networks. Unlike social networks, where users are connected primarily because of being friends, peers, or co-workers, content-based networks build connections between individuals founded on a shared interest in rich-media content. In this study, “interest-graphs” comprised of these content-based con...

Recent advances in social media and social networks have made clustering on very large networks a vibrant and important research topic. In many real world applications, we require clusters to be overlapping [22]. For example, the clusters in a social network are overlapping groups of friends [4], and clusters in scientific collaboration network are overlapping sets of authors sharing some commo...

The growths of online Social Networks in scale and amount of information are immense in recent years. The analyses of the structure of online social networks have thus drawn much research interests. Before the analyses, the information and the characteristics of the structure have to be obtained. However, the complexity of today’s web technologies imposes challenges for collecting the data. In ...

The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around shared beliefs, interests, worldviews and narratives. In spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called collective intelligence unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories-e.g., chemtrails, reptilians or the Illuminati-are pervasive in online social networks (OSN). In this wo...

Online social networks improve social experience by connecting users with common interests. Similar to real life, seeking good friends is much easier with recommendations in online social networks. In this paper, we investigate a series of problems related to friendship formation in the hope of improving friend recommendation in social networks. Specially, we seek to understand whether users wh...