The ability to estimate current affective statuses of web users has considerable potential towards the realization of user-centric opportune services. However, determining the type of data to be used for such estimation as well as collecting the ground truth of such affective statuses are difficult in the real world situation. We propose a novel way of such estimation based on a combinational use of user's web search queries and mobile sensor data. Our large-scale data analysis with about 11,000,000 users and 100 recent advertisement log revealed (1) the existence of certain class of advertisement to which mood-status-based delivery would be significantly effective, (2) that our "National Mood Score" shows the ups and downs of people's moods in COVID-19 pandemic that inversely correlated to the number of patients, as well as the weekly mood rhythm of people.
The ability to estimate the current affective statuses of web users has considerable potential for the realization of user-centric services in the society. However, in real-world web services, it is difficult to determine the type of data to be used for such estimation, as well as collecting the ground truths of such affective statuses. We propose a novel method of such estimation based on the combined use of user web search queries and mobile sensor data. The system was deployed in our product server stack, and a large-scale data analysis with more than 11,000,000 users was conducted. Interes…
In this paper the research draws upon reminiscence therapy, which is used in treating dementia, as an applied theory to promote well being in people who experience low moods. The application proposed here aims to promote wellbeing for people suffering from mood disorders and dementia but could potentially be used to enhance wellbeing for many types of users. Use of the application is anticipated to improve mood in a group of users where severe emotional problems are prevalent. The research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a reminiscence based application in promoting well being in people …
The severe outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has affected many countries across the world, and disrupted the day to day activities of many people. During such outbreaks, understanding the emotional state of citizens of a country could be of interest to various organizations to carry out tasks and to take necessary measures. Several studies have been performed on data available on various social media platforms and websites to understand the emotions of people against many events, inclusive of Covid-19, across the world. Twitter and other social media platforms have been bridging the gap between th…
Given concerns about mental health during periods of Covid-19 lockdown, it important to understand how engagement with online Covid-19 related material can affect mood. In the UK and Ireland, online community support initiatives (OCSIs) have emerged to help people manage their lives. Yet, little is known about how people engaged with these or whether they influenced subsequent mood. We conducted surveys to explore how people in the UK and Ireland engaged with OCSIs, and found that 70% did so to offer support (e.g. to provide company). Those who did so reported feeling significantly calmer afte…
The social web has linked people on a global scale, transforming how we communicate and interact. The massive interconnectedness has created new vulnerabilities in the form of social manipulation and misinformation. As the social web matures, we are entering a new phase, where people share their private feelings and emotions. This so-called social emotional web creates new opportunities for human flourishing, but also exposes new vulnerabilities. To reap the benefits of the social emotional web, and reduce potential harms, we must anticipate how it will evolve and create policies that minimize…
The aim of this study is to introduce an application that enables information sharing and communication between visually-impaired individuals and able-bodied. For the purposes of the study, web-based audio library automation was designed and the usability of the system was analyzed regarding the volunteers who record audio books and the visually-impaired individuals. The visually-impaired individuals who took part in the test procedures in order to make a general evaluation of the system reported that the system was theoretically necessary and successful. As for the usability aspect, positive …
The annual consumption of web-based resources is increasing at a very fast rate, mainly due to an increase in affordability and accessibility of the internet. Many are relying on the web to get diverse perspectives, but at the same time, it can expose them to content that is harmful to their mental well-being. Catchy headlines and emotionally charged articles increase the number of readers which in turn increases ad revenue for websites. When a user consumes a large quantity of negative content, it adversely impacts the user's happiness and has a significant impact on his/her mood and state of…
Linked Data applications often assume that connectivity to data repositories and entity resolution services are always available. This may not be a valid assumption in many cases. Indeed, there are about 4.5 billion people in the world who have no or limited Web access. Many data-driven applications may have a critical impact on the life of those people, but are inaccessible to those populations due to the architecture of today's data registries. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new open-source system that can be used as a general-purpose entity registry suitable for deployment in poor…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Weather affects our mood and behaviors, and many aspects of our life. When it is sunny, most people become happier; but when it rains, some people get depressed. Despite this evidence and the abundance of data, weather has mostly been overlooked in the machine learning and data science research. This work presents a causal analysis of how weather affects TV watching patterns. We show that some weather attributes, such as pressure and precipitation, cause major changes in TV watching patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale causal study of the impact of weather on T…
The advent of the Web brought about major changes in the way people search for jobs and companies look for suitable candidates. As more employers and recruitment firms turn to the Web for job candidate search, an increasing number of people turn to the Web for uploading and creating their online resumes. Resumes are often the first source of information about candidates and also the first item of evaluation in candidate selection. Thus, it is imperative that resumes are complete, free of errors and well-organized. We present an automated resume evaluation tool called "CareerMapper". Our tool i…
Despite sophisticated phishing email detection systems, and training and awareness programs, humans continue to be tricked by phishing emails. In an attempt to better understand why phishing email attacks still work and how best to mitigate them, we have carried out an empirical study to investigate people's thought processes when reading their emails. We used a scenario-based role-play "think aloud" method and follow-up interviews to collect data from 19 participants. The experiment was conducted using a simulated web email client, and real phishing and legitimate emails adapted to the given …
SinaWeibo is a Twitter-like social network service emerging in China in recent years. People can post weibos (microblogs) and communicate with others on it. Based on a dataset of 650 million weibos from August 2009 to January 2012 crawled from APIs of SinaWeibo, we study the hot ones that have been reposted for at least 1000 times. We find that hot weibos can be roughly classified into eight categories, i.e. Entertainment & Fashion, Hot Social Events, Leisure & Mood, Life & Health, Seeking for Help, Sales Promotion, Fengshui & Fortune and Deleted Weibos. In particular, Leisure & Mood and Hot S…
There are several web platforms that people use to interact and exchange ideas, such as social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+; Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers; and myriad independent fora. However, there is a scarcity of platforms that facilitate discussion of complex subjects where people with divergent views can easily rationalize their points of view using a shared knowledge base, and leverage it towards shared objectives, e.g. to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise. In this paper, as a first step, we present Widescope, a novel collaborative web platform for cat…
This study concerns the security challenges that the people face in the usage and implementation of cloud computing. Despite its growth in the past few decades, this platform has experienced different challenges. They all arise from the concern of data safety that the nature of sharing in the cloud presents. This paper looks to identify the benefits of using a cloud computing platform and the issue of information security. The paper also reviews the concept of information hiding and its relevance to the cloud. This technique has two ways about it that impact how people use cloud computing in t…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally represented and studied by means of clickstreams, i.e., graphs whose vertices are web pages, and edges are the paths followed by users. Obtaining large and representative data to extract clickstreams is however challenging. The evolution of the web questions whether browsing behavior is changing and, by consequence, whether properties of clickstreams are changing. Th…
Web Accessibility for disabled people has posed a challenge to the civilized societies that claim to uphold the principles of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Certain concrete measures have been taken to narrow down the digital divide between normal and disabled users of Internet technology. The efforts have resulted in enactment of legislations and laws and mass awareness about the discriminatory nature of the accessibility issue, besides the efforts have resulted in the development of commensurate technological tools to develop and test the Web accessibility. World Wide Web consortiu…
As the information on the Internet continues growing exponentially, understanding and assessing the reliability of a website is becoming increasingly important. Misinformation has far-ranging repercussions, from sowing mistrust in media to undermining democratic elections. While some research investigates how to alert people to misinformation on the web, much less research has been conducted on explaining how websites engage in spreading false information. To fill the research gap, we present MisVis, a web-based interactive visualization tool that helps users assess a website's reliability by …
A variety of tools have been introduced recently that are designed to help people protect their privacy on the Internet. These tools perform many different functions in-cluding encrypting and/or anonymizing communications, preventing the use of persistent identifiers such as cookies, automatically fetching and analyzing web site privacy policies, and displaying privacy-related information to users. This paper discusses the set of privacy tools that aim specifically at facilitating notice and choice about Web site data practices. While these tools may also have components that perform other fun…
When the World Wide Web was first conceived as a way to facilitate the sharing of scientific information at the CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) few could have imagined the role it would come to play in the following decades. Since then, the increasing ubiquity of Internet access and the frequency with which people interact with it raise the possibility of using the Web to better observe, understand, and monitor several aspects of human social behavior. Web sites with large numbers of frequently returning users are ideal for this task. If these sites belong to companies or universit…
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access blockage matters only when such sites are blocked. We examine the case of China, where online blockage is notoriously comprehensive, and compare Chinese…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and personalization. In this work, we demonstrate that people tend to follow routines on the Web, and these repetitive patterns of web visits increase their browsing behavior's achievable predictability. We present an information-theoretic framework for measuring the uncertainty and theoretical limits of predictability of human mobility on the Web. We systematically asse…
