This dissertation investigates ways of supporting parents in managing youth's social media use. I present empirical evidence of the challenges parents face in managing youth technology use. I then translate these results into the design and deployment of ParentNet, a community-based online social network for middle school parents to keep up with changes in technology. This dissertation provides new insights into the opportunities and challenges in conducting HCC research with a particular demographic, parents and youth. The contributions of this research are: (1) empirical studies of challenges parents face in managing youth technology use; (2) the design and deployment of a community-based online social network called ParentNet; (3) limitations and design considerations for deploying technological interventions for different social groups; and (4) reflection on emerging themes around overuse and disconnection in daily life.

How are technologies are designed and used tactically by activists? As the HCI community starts to contend with social inequalities, there has been debate about how HCI researchers should address approach this type of research. However, there is little research examining practitioners such as social justice activists who confront social problems, and are using technology, such as mobile phones, blogging, and social media to do so. In this dissertation, I build on this knowledge within the context of a social movement organization working to stop street harassment (harassment towards women and minorities in public) called Hollaback (ihollaback.org). I position myself as an action researcher doing research and building technologies such as mobile apps and a blogging platform to collect stories of harassment and to support activists. The organization has collected over 3000 stories and represents 50 different locales in 17 countries. Through a series of studies, I examined how technology impacts the organization, activists, and those who contribute stories of harassment. I found evidence that the storytelling platform helps participants fundamentally shift their cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience and informs what activists do on the ground. My results suggest that doing activism using technology can help remove some barriers to participation but can also lower expectations for the amount of work required. I also looked at how different social media tactics can increase the number of followers and how traditional media plays a role in these tactics. My work contributes theoretically to the HCI community by building on social movement theory, feminist HCI, and action research methodology. My investigation also sheds light empirically on how technology plays a role in a social movement organization, and how it impacts those who participate.

Access to computers, to mobile phones, and to data connectivity has opened new avenues of interaction and created expectations about the flattening of society brought about by these new modes of production. These technologies have enabled us to recognize many forms of community---from close knit social groups to individuals who merely co-habit public spaces---and to support interaction with each other in novel ways. The notion that modern digital technology holds promises of democratization by expanding access to information and broadening modes of knowledge production often fails to acknowledge that these benefits rely upon devices and infrastructure whose availability reflect socioeconomic contours; that the technologies that enable information access can also reinforce rather than obviate marginality due to barriers to access and suitability. This assessment points to opportunities for better understanding and better designing technologies for the marginalized or dispossessed. The research presented in this dissertation discusses the findings from empirical, theoretical, and design based investigations of technology use with the urban homeless. The empirical work provides a foundation for understanding current technology practices among the homeless and their care providers. The theoretical investigation develops Deweyan publics as a novel frame for participatory design. The design-based investigation presents findings from the design and deployment of the Community Resource Messenger at a shelter for homeless mothers. The results of this research shed light on impact of social computing platforms on social service provision and on the ways the staff and residents used the Community Resource Messenger as a resource for identifying common issues and taking action to contend with those issues.

Situation awareness and collective intelligence are two technologies used in smart systems. The former renders those systems able to reason upon their abstract knowledge of what is going on. The latter enables them learning and deriving new information from a composition of experiences of their users. In this dissertation we present a doctoral research on an attempt to combine the two in order to obtain, in a collaborative fashion, situation-based rules that the whole community of entities would benefit of sharing. We introduce the KRAMER recommendation system, which we designed and implemented as a solution to the problem of not having decision support tools both situation-aware and collaborative. The system is independent from any domain of application in particular, in other words generic, and we apply its prototype implementation to context-enriched social communication scenario.

Submitted by Johnny Rodrigues (johnnyrodrigues@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-04-17T12:08:06Z No. of bitstreams: 1 JOSÉ ANTÔNIO LEAL DE FARIAS - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2014..pdf: 3257698 bytes, checksum: cea41aeb45f4b269f2356f8ecad15069 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-04-17T12:08:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JOSÉ ANTÔNIO LEAL DE FARIAS - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2014..pdf: 3257698 bytes, checksum: cea41aeb45f4b269f2356f8ecad15069 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-05 / Recompensas em Crowdsourcing Computação por Humanos é uma abordagem que utiliza seres humanos para obter resultados mais satisfatórios em áreas em que os atuais recursos computacionais não conseguem atender adequadamente. Diversas técnicas e aplicações foram desenvolvidas para suportar essa abordagem e algumas delas utilizam recompensas financeiras como forma de estímulo aos indivíduos, enquanto outras se utilizam de jogos criados especialmente para suportar uma determinada tarefa e ao mesmo tempo como meio para aumentar a participação e o engajamento dos participantes. Este estudo descreve os resultados de um experimento que utilizou jogos comuns, não associados a qualquer tarefa ou atividade específica, criados apenas para entretenimento, como forma de recompensa para esses indivíduos. Nossos resultados mostram que jogos são um meio eficiente de estímulo ao engajamento na execução de Computação por Humanos. / Human Computation is an approach that uses humans to get more satisfactory results in areas where current computational infrastructures cannot meet properly. Several techniques and applications have been developed to support this approach and some of them use financial rewards as a stimulus to individuals, while others make use of games specifically designed to support a particular task and, at the same time, as a means to increase the participation and engagement of his participants. This study describes the results of an experiment that used regular games, not associated with any specific task or activity, created just for entertainment, as a reward for these individuals. Our results show that games are an effective means of stimulating the involvement in the execution of Human Computations.

Orientador: Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-24T09:30:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Romani_Roberto_D.pdf: 5102420 bytes, checksum: 65d2d65457e2b1dc458f099a0a003c06 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Nos últimos anos, as novas tecnologias de informação e comunicação têm modificado a natureza da interação humano-computador, quebrando os limites do contexto de trabalho para fazer parte da vida cotidiana das pessoas em todos os lugares e em qualquer momento. Assim, novos sistemas disponíveis por meio da Web e de dispositivos móveis estão ao alcance de um número cada vez maior de pessoas, aumentando a importância de se projetar interfaces para todos. Ainda, o desafio número quatro proposto pela SBC se alinha a essa necessidade de viabilizar o acesso do cidadão comum ao conhecimento de forma participativa e universal. Embora várias normas, recomendações e diretrizes tenham sido utilizados para auxiliar designers na complexa tarefa de projetar interfaces para todos, grande parte das escolhas ainda dependem muito da experiência do designer que, nesse cenário, não tem mais um público-alvo bem definido. Ao mesmo tempo, uma cultura de participação, desencadeada por ideias de crowdsourcing, computação social e computação humana, vem permitindo novas formas de colaboração para resolver problemas diversos. Esta tese propõe mecanismos que a um só tempo envolvem o cidadão comum no processo de construção do conhecimento em design e oferecem recursos que podem ser apropriados pelos designers em seu processo criativo de projetar interfaces para todos. Dessa forma, esta tese propõe, desenvolve e experimenta a abordagem GWIDO (Games With Interaction Design Objective), beneficiando-se de recursos oferecidos pela Web contemporânea, bem como do interesse das pessoas por jogos na internet. A ideia central consiste no uso de GWAPS (Games With a Purpose) para apoiar o designer na escolha de elementos de design, envolvendo nesse processo um grande número de potenciais usuários. A tese traz contribuições na interseção das áreas de pesquisa da computação humana e da computação social, mostrando um levantamento preliminar dos trabalhos relacionados, ilustrando a ideia com uma instanciação de um ambiente para designers integrado a um jogo do tipo GWAP e demonstrando a utilização da metodologia proposta de maneira prática no redesign de um sistema real / Abstract: In recent years, new information and communication technologies have changed the nature of human-computer interaction, breaking the boundaries of the workplace to be part of the everyday people¿s lives in everywhere and at any time. Thus, new systems available through the Web and mobile devices can be used by a growing number of people, increasing the importance of designing interfaces for all. In addition, one of the challenges (number four) proposed by SBC is aligned to this need of improving the access of ordinary citizens to knowledge in a participatory and universal way. While several standards, recommendations and guidelines have been used to assist designers in the complex task of designing interfaces for all, most choices still rely strongly on the experience of the designer who, in this scenario, no longer has a well-defined target audience. At the same time, a culture of participation triggered by ideas of crowdsourcing, human computation and social computing has enabled new forms of collaboration to solve various problems. This thesis proposes mechanisms that involve ordinary citizens in the process of knowledge construction in design and in the same time offers resources that can be appropriated by designers in the creative process of designing interfaces for all. Thus, this thesis proposes, develops and experiences the GWIDO approach (Games With Interaction Design Objective), taking advantage of features offered by contemporary Web as well as the interest of people for games in the internet. The main idea is to use GWAPs (Games with a Purpose) to assist the designer in the choice about design elements, involving a large number of potential users. The thesis provides contributions at the intersection of research fields (human computation and social computing), showing a preliminary survey of the related work, illustrating the idea with an instantiation of an environment for designers integrated with a GWAP game and demonstrating the use of the proposed methodology in a practical way during a redesign of a real system / Doutorado / Ciência da Computação / Doutor em Ciência da Computação

Comment peut-on devenir plus conscients des sources de connaissance au sein des organisations des humains? Les changements économiques et technologiques rapides forcent les organisations à devenir plus souples, agiles et interdisciplinaires. Pour cela, les organisations cherchent des alternatives pour les structures de communication hiérarchiques traditionnelles qui entravent les pratiques de collaboration ascendantes. Pour que les méthodes ascendantes soient efficaces, il est nécessaire d'offrir aux membres l'accès à l'information et à l'expertise dont ils ont besoin pour prendre des décisions qualifiées. Ceci est un défi complexe qui implique la culture organisationnelle, l'informatique et les pratiques de travail. Un défaut au niveau de l'application de ce système peut aborder des points critiques qui peuvent ralentir les processus de travail, d'entraver l'innovation et qui conduisent souvent au travail suboptimal et redondant. Par exemple, une enquête 2014 de 152 dirigeants de Campus IT aux Etats-Unis, estime que 19% des systèmes informatiques du campus sont redondants, ce qui coûte les universités des Etats-Unis 3.8B$ par an. Dans l'ensemble, les travailleurs intellectuels trouvent l'information dont ils ont besoin seulement 56% du temps. Avec un quart du temps total des travailleurs intellectuels consacré à la recherche et l'analyse des informations. Ce gaspillage de temps coûte 7K$ pour chaque employé par an. Un autre exemple du gaspillage est celui des nouveaux arrivants et des employés promus qui peuvent prendre jusqu'à 2 ans pour s'intégrer pleinement au sein de leur département. En outre et selon des enquêtes étendues, seulement 28% des apprenants estiment que leurs organisations actuelles «utilisent pleinement» les compétences qu'ils ont actuellement capable d'offrir et 66% prévoient quitter leur organisation en 2020. Réussir la résolution de ce défi est capable de motiver les membres de l'organisation, ainsi que d'y améliorer l'innovation et l'apprentissage. L'objectif de cette thèse est de mieux comprendre ce problème en explorant les défis rencontrés par le service d'informatique dans une université et un centre de recherche interdisciplinaire. Deuxièmement, co-développer et mettre en œuvre une solution avec ces institutions, je décris leur utilisation des logiciels que nous avons développés, les résultats et la valeur obtenus avec ces pilotes. Troisièmement, tester l'efficacité de la solution, et explorer de nouvelles applications et le potentiel d'un tel système similaire pour être utilisé dans une plus grande échelle. Pour mieux comprendre le problème je me suis engagé dans une discussion avec les membres et les dirigeants des deux organisations. Une conclusion importante des discussions est que les membres de ces organisations souffrent souvent d'un manque de sensibilisation à propos de leurs connaissances-compétences au niveau d'organisation du capital, et la connaissance des processus et des relations sociales avec leurs collègues dans l'organisation. Grâce à cette exposition, les idées novatrices, les opportunités et les intérêts communs des pairs sont sévèrement limités. Cela provoque des retards inutiles dans les projets inter-équipes, des goulots d'étranglement, et un manque de sensibilisation sur les possibilités de stages. Aussi, j'ai craqué le problème et je l’avais défini comme l'une des informations de fragmentation: Différentes informations sont stockées dans des bases de données disparates ou dans la tête des gens, exigeant un effort et de savoir-faire pour l'obtenir. (...) / How can we become more aware of the sources of insight within human organisations? Rapid economical and technological changes force organisations to become more adaptive, agile and interdisciplinary. In light of this, organisations are seeking alternatives for traditional hierarchical communication structures that hinder bottom-up collaboration practices. Effective bottom-up methods require empowering members with access to the information and expertise they need to take qualified decisions. This is a complex challenge that involves organisational culture, IT and work practices. Failing to address it creates bottlenecks that can slow down business processes, hinder innovation and often lead to suboptimal and redundant work. For example, a 2014 survey of 152 Campus IT leaders in the US, estimated that 19% of the campus IT systems are redundant, costing US universities 3.8B$ per year. In aggregate, knowledge workers find the information they need only 56% of the time. With a quarter of knowledge workers total work time spent in finding and analyzing information. This time waste alone costs 7K$ per employee annually. Another example of the waste created is that newcomers and remote employees may take up to 2 years to fully integrate within their department. Furthermore according to extended surveys, only 28% of millennials feel that their current organizations are making ‘full use’ of the skills they currently have to offer and 66% expect to leave their organisation by 2020. Successfully resolving this challenge holds the potential to motivate organisation members, as well as enhance innovation and learning within it. The focus of this thesis is to better understand this problem by exploring the challenges faced by a university IT department and an interdisciplinary research center. Second, co-develop and implement a solution with these institutions, I describe their usage of the software tool we developed, outcomes and value obtained in these pilots. Third, test the effectiveness of the solution, and explore further applications and potential for a similar system to be used in a wider scale. To better understand the problem I engaged in discussion with members and leaders of both organisations. An important conclusion from the discussions is that members of these organizations often suffer from lack of awareness about their organisation’s knowledge capital—the competencies, knowledge of processes and social connections of their colleagues. Due to this exposure to innovative ideas, opportunities and common interests of peers is severely limited. This causes unnecessary delays in inter-team projects, bottlenecks, and lack of awareness about internship opportunities. I further broke down the problem, and defined it as one of information fragmentation: Different information is stored in disparate databases or inside people’s heads, requiring effort and know-how in order to obtain it. Following the conclusions of this analysis and state-of-the-art review, we have set together the goal to create a collaborative visual database to map the people, projects, skills and institutions for the IT department of Descartes University, and in addition, people, interests and internship opportunities within the CRI, an interdisciplinary research and education center. We have also conducted interviews, surveys and quizzes that ascertain that people had difficulties identifying experts outside their core teams. During the course of this thesis, I progressively addressed this challenge by developing two collaborative web applications called Rhizi and Knownodes. Knownodes is a collaborative knowledge graph which utilized information-rich edges to describe relationships between resources. Rhizi is a real-time and collaborative knowledge capital mapping interface. A prominent unique feature of Rhizi is that it provides a UI that turns text-based assertions made by users into a visual knowledge graph. (...)

Det demokratiska projektet har pågått i tusentals år. En av dess uttolkare och teoretiker är Jürgen Habermas som med sina teorier om deliberativ demokrati och Public Sphere formulerat teorier om mer jämlikhet och rättvisa grundat i den mänskliga kommunikationen. I detta arbete prövar vi Habermas teorier i modern kontext och utreder om informationsteknologin besitter kvaliteter för att möjliggöra denna kommunikation. Utifrån kritisk teori, datavetenskap och en demokratisk modell utreder vi även hur tanken om det gemensamma förhåller sig till en digital kontext och analyserar hur privat eller statlig äganderätt begränsar information som skulle kunnat komma alla tillgodo. Arbetet visar att informationsteknologierna blockchain och sociala medier besitter några av de demokratiska kvaliteter Habermas formulerat, men också att informationsteknologin brister på vissa andra bärande punkter. / The development of democracy is an old ongoing project. One of its main interpreters and theorists is Jürgen Habermas, who with his theories about deliberative democracy and Public Sphere formulated theories of more equality and justice based on human communication. In this work, we test Habermas' theories in a modern context and investigate whether information technology has qualities to enable this communication. Based on critical theory, computer science and a deliberative democratic model, we also investigate how the idea of the common works in a digital context. We also reflect and analyse how private or state ownership restricts information that could benefit everyone. The work shows that information technologies like blockchain and social media possess some of the democratic qualities Habermas formulated, but also that information technology lacks some other key points.

Several calamities occur throughout the world each year, resulting in varying losses. Disasters wreak havoc on infrastructures and impair operation. They result in human deaths and injuries and stress people's mental and emotional states. These negative impacts of natural disasters induce significant economic losses, as demonstrated by the $ 423 billion loss in 2011 in Tohoku, Japan, and the $ 133 billion loss in hurricane Harvey, U.S.A. Every year, hurricanes and tropical storms result in 10,000 human deaths worldwide. To mitigate losses, communities' readiness, flexibility, and resilience must be strengthened. To this end, appropriate techniques for forecasting a community's capacity and functionality in the face of impending crises must be developed and suitable community resilience metrics and their quantification must be established. Collaboration between critical infrastructures such as power systems and emergency services and social networks is critical for building a resilient community. As a result, we require metrics that account for both the social and infrastructure aspects of the community. While the literature on critical infrastructures such as power systems discusses the effect of social factors on resilience, they do not model these social factors and metrics due to their complexity. On the other hand, it turns out that the role of critical infrastructures and some critical social characteristics is overlooked in the computational social science literature on community resilience. Thus, this dissertation presents a multi-agent socio-technical model of community resilience, taking into account the interconnection of power systems, emergency services, and social communities. We offer relevant measures for each section and describe dynamic change and its dependence on other metrics using a variety of theories and expertise from social science, psychology, electrical engineering, and emergency services. To validate the model, we used data on two hurricanes (Irma and Harvey) collected from Twitter, GoogleTrends, FEMA, power utilities, CNN, and Snopes (a fact-checking organization). We also describe methods for quantifying social metrics such as anxiety, risk perception, cooperation using social sensing, natural language processing, and text mining tools. / Doctor of Philosophy / Power systems serve social communities that consist of residential, commercial, and industrial customers. The social behavior and degree of collaboration of all stakeholders, such as consumers, prosumers, and utilities, affect the level of preparedness, mitigation, recovery, adaptability, and, thus, power system resilience. Nonetheless, the literature pays scant attention to stakeholders' social characteristics and collaborative efforts when confronted with a disaster and views the problem solely as a cyber-physical system. However, power system resilience, which is not a standalone discipline, is inherently a cyber-physical-social problem, making it complex to address. To this end, in this dissertation, we develop a socio-technical power system resilience model based on neuroscience, social science, and psychological theories and use the threshold model to simulate the behavior of power system stakeholders during a disaster. We validate our model using datasets of hurricane Harvey of Category 4 that hit Texas in August 2017 and hurricane Irma of Category 5 that made landfall in Florida in September 2017. We retrieve these datasets from Twitter and GoogleTrend and then apply natural language processing and language psychology analysis tools to deduce the social behavior of the end-users.

The widely used mobile phone, as well as its related technologies had opened opportunities for a complete change on how people interact and build relationship across geographic and time considerations. The convenience of instant communication by mobile phones that broke the barrier of space and time is evidently the key motivational point on why such technologies so important in people's life and daily activities. Mobile phones have become the most popular communication tools. Mobile phone technology is apparently changing our relationship to each other in our work and lives. The impact of new technologies on people's lives in social spaces gives us the chance to rethink the possibilities of technologies in social interaction. Accordingly, mobile phones are basically changing social relations in ways that are intricate to measure with any precision. In this dissertation I propose a socioscope model for social network, relationship and human behavior analysis based on mobile phone call detail records. Because of the diversities and complexities of human social behavior, one technique cannot detect different features of human social behaviors. Therefore I use multiple probability and statistical methods for quantifying social groups, relationships and communication patterns, for predicting social tie strengths and for detecting human behavior changes and unusual consumption events. I propose a new reciprocity index to measure the level of reciprocity between users and their communication partners. The experimental results show that this approach is effective. Among other applications, this work is useful for homeland security, detection of unwanted calls (e.g., spam), telecommunication presence, and marketing. In my future work I plan to analyze and study the social network dynamics and evolution.