The proliferation of media sharing and social networking websites has brought with it vast collections of site-specific user generated content. The result is a Social Networking Divide in which the concepts and structure common across different sites are hidden. The knowledge and structures from one social site are not adequately exploited to provide new information and resources to the same or...

BOTS is a socially multiplayer online game designed to teach students about introductory computer science concepts such as loops and functions. Using this game, I plan to explore the use of user-generated content (UGC) in game-based tutors, increasing replayability and, ideally, player engagement. BOTS has so far been used for work towards identifying what makes a level or puzzle in the game “g...

The increasing popularity of Web 2.0 has led to exponential growth of user-generated content in both volume and significance. One important type of user-generated content is the blog. Blogs encompass useful information (e.g., insightful product reviews and information-rich consumer communities) that could potentially be a “gold mine” for business intelligence, bringing great opportunities for b...

Since 1950, information flows have been in the centre of scientific research. Up until internet penetration in the late 90s, these studies were based over traditional offline social networks. Several observations in “offline” information flows studies, such as two-step flow of communication and the importance of weak ties, were verified in several “online” studies, showing that the diffused inf...

This paper develops a framework for studying the popularity dynamics of user-generated videos, presents a characterization of the popularity dynamics, and proposes a model that captures the key properties of these dynamics. We illustrate the biases that may be introduced in the analysis for some choices of the sampling technique used for collecting data; however, sampling from recently-uploaded...

This paper focuses on User-Generated (UG) photos in the understudied Arab Muslim World. Over four million public photos on Flickr.com represent Arab countries‟ UG presence, with Egypt and Palestine the top countries for the respective keywords of travel and Muslim. The findings also reveal varied United Arab Emirates‟ presence, with ten times more Dubai photos than the next highest emirate Abu ...

We introduce a discrete paradigm for developable surface modeling. Unlike previous attempts at interactive developable surface modeling, our system is able to enforce exact developability at every step, ensuring that users do not inadvertently suggest configurations that leave the manifold of admissible folds of a flat two-dimensional sheet. With methods for navigation of this highly nonlinear ...

Social media are media for social interaction that allow creating and exchanging user-generated content. The massive social content can provide rich resources for deriving social profiles that can augment user models and improve adaptation in traditional applications. However, potentially valuable social contributions can be buried within highly noisy content that is irrelevant or spam. This pa...

The user-generated content platforms like MySpace, YouTube or Flickr produce emergent sociability patterns and behaviors, which are well observed in various studies. Few of them deal with the nature of the reputation in these large social networks. In this work, we extract a sample of MySpace Music by parsing the artists’ pages and following the “best friend” links. The study of the network sho...

Online reviews of services and products are increasingly posted via mobile devices rather than a website. Our research shows that opinions posted via mobile devices are more timely, shorter, more “to the point” and more negative than web reviews. Moreover, more positive reviews are on average shorter than negative reviews. We arrived at these conclusions by analyzing all reviews posted in 2012 ...