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Real-time social systems are the fastest growing phenomena on the web, enabling millions of users to generate, share, and consume content on a massive scale. These systems are manifestations of a larger trend toward the global sharing of the real-time interests, affiliations, and activities of everyday users and demand new computational approaches for monitoring, analyzing, and distilling information from the prospective web of real-time content. In this dissertation research, we focus on the real-time social trails that reflect the digital footprints of crowds of real-time web users in response to real-world events or online phenomena. These digital footprints correspond to the artifacts strewn across the real-time web like posting of messages to Twitter or Facebook; the creation, sharing, and viewing of videos on websites like YouTube; and so on. While access to social trails could benefit many domains there is a significant research gap toward discovering, modeling, and leveraging these social trails. Hence, this dissertation research makes three contributions: • The first contribution of this dissertation research is a suite of efficient techniques for discovering non-trivial social trails from large-scale real-time social systems. We first develop a communication-based method using temporal graphs for discovering social trails on a stream of conversations from social messaging systems like instant messages, emails, Twitter directed or @ messages, SMS, etc. and then develop a content-based method using locality sensitive hashing for discovering content based social trails on a stream of text messages like Tweet stream, stream of Facebook messages, YouTube comments, etc. • The second contribution of this dissertation research is a framework for modeling and predicting the spatio-temporal dynamics of social trails. In particular, we develop a probabilistic model that synthesizes two conflicting hypotheses about the nature of online information spread: (i) the spatial influence model, which asserts that social trails propagates to locations that are close by; and (ii) the community affinity influence model, which asserts that social trail prop- agates between locations that are culturally connected, even if they are distant. • The third contribution of this dissertation research is a set of methods for social trail analytics and leveraging social trails for prognostic applications like real-time content recommendation, personalized advertising, and so on. We first analyze geo-spatial social trails of hashtags from Twitter, investigate their spatio-temporal dynamics and then use this analysis to develop a framework for recommending hashtags. Finally, we address the challenge of classifying social trails efficiently on real-time social systems.

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The impetus for the research reported in this thesis came after reflection on my career in engineering which led to the observation that descriptions of what engineers do, or should do, when they work on projects, do not address the social aspects of their interactions with other people, both engineers and non-engineers, who are involved with the project. Teams of engineers can be viewed as social systems and I believed that it should be possible to describe their activities using social theories, as distinct from descriptions which focus on the application of technology and the management of resources to meet clients' requirements. The research followed a heuristic methodology. There was no initial theory. Theory emerged from the data. As a preliminary step, I examined documents prescribing the way engineering work is done and compared them with accounts of successful projects. The comparison shows that the prescriptive documentation overlooks the interaction between people, which however features prominently in the accounts of successful projects. As well, examination of the systems representation widely employed throughout projects shows that it can lead to oversimplification, when it is used to model socio-technical and social systems. / In the first iteration of this research, social theories relating to individual and collaborative learning, and the life-cycle of teams were examined. From the very large field of sociology, I used my own experience to select those theories that explained the interactions between people engaged in engineering projects. As a reality check on the applicability of the selected theories, I interviewed four successful engineer/managers, now retired. The first three confirmed the relevance of those theories. In addition, their interviews pointed to other factors requiring a second iteration of researching social theories that centred on forms of capital, leadership styles, and the interdependence of formal and informal organizational structures to management and problem-solving practices. The suite of social theories from the first and second iterations of research is integrated into a Social Systems Evaluation Framework (SSEF) that encompasses the four forms of capital, Embodied, Social, Institutionalised and Economic, and facilitates an evaluation of the social systems associated with a project. The use of the SSEF at any stage of a project life cycle is explained. Finally, it was applied successfully to the fourth interview as a “trial fit”. The thesis concludes with suggestions for further work in validating the SSEF and extending its application to other domains and cultures. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Diss. - Munich. / Bibliography: p. 145-154.

Diss. - Munich. / Bibliography: p. 145-154.

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This thesis contributes to a better understanding of social media designs for more civil conversations online. I first demonstrated that people disengage from social media interactions when they encounter uncivil behavior from friends. To find alternative designs for social media that are more civil, I evaluated novel social interaction techniques. To do this, I designed a six-phase framework for prototyping social interactions called piggyback prototyping; and an algorithmic probe study methodology to include participants in the development of social curation algorithms. I built a piggyback prototype that modifies the civility on Facebook by highlighting positive posts in green and hiding impolite posts, and I deployed it as an algorithmic probe with 20 participants. I uncovered ways to improve the algorithm, and I found that participants responded most favorably to having civil posts highlighted. These findings open avenues for future research in designing pro-social platforms.

55 pp. / Training resources for volunteer facilitators of grandparent discussion groups; Grandparents Raising Grandchildren / Grandparents-raising-grandchildren discussion groups may conduct their meetings by a) focusing on issues that members suggest and/or b) choosing from among a list of critical topics that are common issues to most grandparents. Sometimes, discussion group facilitators want help identifying topics that are both reliable and educational. To fill the need for conversation-starting topics, we have provided a series of discussion topics for a facilitator's reference. These discussion topics have been gathered from KKONA's experience listening to the issues grandparents bring up about raising grandchildren. Some of the best group discussions introduce a topic after grandparents have attended a related workshop or training that allows grandparents to process information that they have heard or read. Following through with a discussion topic will help the group more deeply explore the issue and gather grandparents' ideas. The themes of the discussion topics include legal issues, relationship issues, discipline, schools, accessing social services and recordkeeping. There are eighteen topics. The sources for these materials include research and parenting materials as well as practical recommendations gathered from discussion groups. As you use these sheets, remember that they are intended to spark discussion and give you some reliable references. The sheets are not meant to be a step-by-step method for conducting your discussion groups nor do they provide in-depth information.

This paper puts forth a radical behaviorist approach to legal theory according to which law is a set of behavioral contingencies which control the behavior of individuals according to politically defined goals. Based on the proposition that modern legal systems, because of their inherent contingency and chronic mutability, are irremediably instrumental to politically defined social goals, and on the radical behaviorist fundamental assumption that a science of human behavior is possible, the paper develops what can be called a radical behaviorist perspective on social systems theory. According to this perspective, a social system is neither a collection of individuals nor of individual acts, but a class of interconnected behavioral patterns or cultural practices conditioned and maintained through the same generalized reinforcer, which, in the case of law, is the dichotomy between legal versus illegal. To construct this radical behaviorist perspective on social systems theory, the paper relies on three major theoretical foundations. The first one is a criticism of Skinner’s concept of verbal behavior according to which instead of a special kind of behavior, it is defined as nothing but the human species-specific operant control of the vocal musculature by social reinforcement contingencies. The second one is to propose a more functional alternative to Skinner’s concept of human social behavior as that kind of operant behavior which is conditioned and maintained by other people’s behavior. The third one is a dialogue between radical behaviorism and Luhmann’s social systems theory, whose main purpose is to provide radical behaviorism with a more sophisticated description of modern society which, despite several differences, is also radically anti-individualistic and evolutionary. The final part of the paper is a detailed discussion of how law controls human behavior.