Cities develop cycling plans as a tool to promote urban sustainable mobility. These plans are usually open to the participation of current cyclists. In some cases, an intense debate among them arises. Part of them defend the integration of cyclists in a calmer urban traffic, while others prefer dedicated cycling infrastructure separated from motor vehicles. This debate is often framed in terms of what would be more valuable for potential cyclists. Taking this blocking debate as motivation, this thesis explores the cycling planning network of stakeholders generated by participatory planning initiatives. Two study cases with different observed intensities of the described debate, Stockholm and Madrid, are analyzed. The project identifies the stakeholders engaged in cycling planning, both from institutions and civil society; makes a characterization of their relations; and studies the claims they make in relation to the interests of potential cyclists. The research is based in snowball sampling, interviews, questionnaires and social media data mining. The resultant networks combine a set of institutions embedded in a multilevel cycling governance landscape with a set of civil society entities, many characterized by organizational informality partly due to the emergence of virtual communities among them. Accordingly,informal channels of participation are very relevant. The analyzed debate produces tensions, but these are transient frictions grounded in two coexistent systems of meaning rather than permanent antagonism. This is consistent with agonist planning theories. In regard of these challenges, two strategic approaches to the design of participatory cycling planning are suggested: disaggregated stakeholder analysis, in order to reach all the diversity of stakeholders; and bigrelational data analysis, in order to have a first approximation to the particularities of any cycling planning network. / Städer utvecklas cykelplaner som ett verktyg för att uppmuntra hållbar stadsmobilitet. Cykelplaneringsprocesser är vanligtvis öppna för deltagande av nuvarande cyklister. I vissa fall uppstår en intensiv debatt bland de cyklister. Några av dem föredrar att cykla i blandtrafik medan andra förespråkar för dedikerad infrastruktur som separeras från motortrafik. Denna debatt uttrycks ofta i termer av vad som skulle vara mer värdefullt för potentiella cyklister. Uppsatsen tar detta komplexitet som utgångspunkt och utforskar cykelplaneringsnätet av intressenter som genereras av planeringsinitiativ. Två studiefall som presenterar olika intensiteter i debatten analyseras, Stockholm och Madrid. Forskningsprojektet identifierar intressenter engagerade i cykelplanering, både från institutioner och civilsamhället; karaktärisera deras relationer; och analyserar de påståenden som intressenterna gör i förhållande till potentiella cyklisters intressen. Forskningen är baserad på snöboll provtagningen, intervjuer, frågeformulär och datautvinning från sociala medier. De resulterande nätverken kombineras ett antal institutionella intresser som är inbäddade i en flernivå-system av cykelstyrning med några civilsamhällets enheterna, som många kännetecknas av organisatorisk informalitet delvis på grund av cykling virtuella gemenskaper relevans. Efter detta, informella kanaler för deltagande blir viktigare. Den analyserade debatten ger spänningar som är nära till övergående friktioner beroende på två samexisterande system av betydelser snarare än en ständig motsättning. Detta är förenligt med agonistiska planeringsteorier. Efter reflektioner kring dessa utmaningar, uppsatsen föreslår två strategiska tillvägagångssätt för utformningen av medborgardeltagande inom cykelplanering: disaggregerad intressentanalys för att fånga alla mångfalden av agenter; och användningen av bigdata källor för att analysera relationerna mellan intressenterna i syfte att få en första approximation till jämvikten och särdragen hos ett givet cykelplaneringsnät. / Muchas ciudades desarrollan planes ciclistas como herramienta para fomentar la movilidad sostenible. Dichos planes suelen ser abiertos a la participación de los ciclistas actuales, generando en ocasiones un debate intenso entre ellos: una parte defiende su integración en calzada junto a una pacificación del tráfico, mientras que otros prefieren dedicar infraestructura específica a la bicicleta separada del tráfico motorizado. Este debate se desarrolla habitualmente a través de referencias a la figura del ciclista potencial. Tomando esta cuestión como motivación, el proyecto explora las redes de agentes generadas por los procesos de planificación ciclista, analizando dos casos de estudio que muestran distintos impactos de dicho debate, las ciudades de Estocolmo y Madrid. El proyecto identifica los agentes involucrados en los planes ciclistas, tanto dentro como fuera de las instituciones; analiza sus relaciones; y estudia las referencias a los intereses del ciclista potencial. La metodología se basa en muestreo acumulativo tipo ‘bola de nieve’, entrevistas, un cuestionario y minería de datos de redes sociales. Las redes resultantes unen a una serie de agentes institucionales que operan en un marco de gobernanza multinivel con un gran número de agentes de la sociedad civil. Estos tienen una estructura cada vez menos rígida, en parte debido al impacto de las comunidades virtuales de activismo ciclista. En esta línea, se observa que las oportunidades informales de participación son muy relevantes. El debate sobre infraestructura ciclista produce tensiones, pero estas son fricciones transitorias causadas por la coexistencia de dos sistemas de pensamiento en torno a la bicicleta más que un antagonismo permanente, lo cual es consistente con el modelo de planeamiento agonista. Tras exponer estos retos, se sugieren dos estrategias que puede contribuir al diseño adecuado de procesos de participación ciclista: el análisis desagregado de agentes, para capturar la diversidad de entidades involucradas en planificación ciclista; y el uso de fuentes big data sobre relaciones entre agentes, para obtener una primera aproximación a los equilibrios existentes en las redes de planificación ciclista.

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This thesis investigates how everyday patterns of interactions among civil society organizations are transformed in a relatively short period of time when major changes in the broader political context occur. More precisely, it focuses on civic organizations engaged in environmental activism and advocacy in the Basque Country, examining whether ETA’s decision to abandon the armed struggle on October 20th, 2011 has affected their dynamics of collaboration. Combining diverse theoretical elements from the literature on social movements, together with insights from studies of civil society and peacebuilding, and relying upon the conceptual and methodological toolbox of social network analysis (SNA), I analyze the evolution of interorganizational networks of collective action before and after the end of violence, specifically, between the years 2007 and 2017. The empirical core of the dissertation is comprised by chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 5 examines the varying impact of two main external ideological cleavages (national identity and position towards ETA’s violence) on interorganizational collaboration. The findings confirm that allegiances and conflicts related to these two dimensions used to condition collaborative ties between organizations up to 2011, while during the more recent post-conflict period collaborative patterns seem to be less segmented along ideological lines. Chapter 6 complements the preceding one by adding into the analysis several other non-ideological predictors of interorganizational collaboration. Results show that, with the end of ETA’s armed struggle, pragmatic-instrumental factors and interpersonal bonds seem to play a larger role as drivers of public collaboration. Next, chapter 7 engages in a quite different and more exploratory kind of analysis. Applying Diani’s modes of coordination (MoC) analytical framework, I explore whether the underlying relational logics through which civic actors engage with one another have significantly changed before and after the end of violence. The structural network analyses conducted reveal that social movement patterns of relations have expanded after 2011, becoming dominant vis-à-vis other modes of coordination. At the same time, actors embedded in a social movement mode of coordination are slightly more heterogeneous after the definitive demise of the violent conflict in comparison with the previous phase. Taken as a whole, these findings can be interpreted as positive signs of post-conflict normalization of socio-political life in the Basque Country. The fact that environmental civic networks are now denser and more cross-cutting does not only mirror the lower saliency of the cleavages that used to severely condition Basque politics, but it can also serve as a powerful mechanism through which a more tolerant and vibrant democratic community can progressively be built. Overall, this dissertation provides a more nuanced and complex view of the role played by organized civil society and social movements in deeply divided communities, underlining the need to focus on their relational structure in order to correctly assess their potential impact on social integration and the functioning of democracy. Moreover, by analyzing networks among civic organizations in a longitudinal perspective, this dissertation makes several original contributions to social movement scholarship, especially to the stream of literature focusing on coalition making. Methodologically, the replication or adaptation of the empirical design employed in this research could be instrumental in fostering more longitudinal examinations of collective action fields, which until now remain scarce. From a theoretical standpoint, this investigation underlines the context-dependent nature of even well-established patterns of political interactions, underscoring the need to pay more attention to the complex interplay between historical conjunctures and underlying everyday patterns of sociopolitical behavior.

Из-за сформировавшихся внешне и внутренне политических условий, снижение зависимости экономики РФ от внешних факторов становится все более приоритетным направлением развития. Более того, имеется ряд проблем, связанных с недостаточно эффективным развитием нецентральных районов. В их числе проблемы миграции, низкого уровня рождаемости и другие. Более того, изменяется роль институтов государства и местного самоуправления по отношению к гражданскому обществу. Тем самым возникает потребность в разработке и внедрении современных механизмов функционирования местных сообществ для достижения долгосрочных целей социально-экономического развития муниципальных образований. Указанные обстоятельства актуализируют изучение цифровой финансовой экосистемы местных сообществ. Учитывая вышесказанное, целью работы является разработка методики идентификации отдельного экономического агента на предмет его потенциальной принадлежности к локальному экономическому сообществу. Для этого были проанализированы данные о банковских транзакциях. Замкнутые цепи обмена были найдены. Также были рассчитаны 4 типа коэффициентов для определения полезности потенциального включения в сеть экономического агента. И были рассмотрены 4 возможных стратегии развития местного сообщества. Рассчитан экономический эффект. / Due to the formed external and internal political conditions, reducing the dependence of the Russian economy on external factors is becoming an increasingly priority area of development. Moreover, there are a number of problems associated with the insufficiently effective development of non-central regions. Among them are the problems of migration, low birth rate and others. Moreover, the role of state and local government institutions in relation to civil society is changing. Thus, there is a need for the development and implementation of modern mechanisms for the functioning of local communities to achieve long-term goals of socio-economic development of municipalities. These circumstances actualize the study of the digital financial ecosystem of local communities. Considering the above, the aim of the work is to develop a methodology for identifying an individual economic agent for its potential belonging to the local economic community. For this, data on banking transactions were analyzed. Closed circuits of exchange have been found. Also, 4 types of coefficients were calculated to determine the usefulness of a potential inclusion in the network of an economic agent. And 4 possible strategies for the development of the local community were considered. The economic effect is calculated.

<p>Nowadays an increasing number of people consume, share, and interact with information online. This results in posting and counter-posting on online media by different ideological groups on various polarized topics. Consequently, online media has become the primary platform for political and social influencers to directly interact with the citizens and share their perspectives, views, and stances with the goal of gaining support for their actions, bills, and legislation. Hence, understanding the perspectives and the influencing strategies in online media texts is important for an individual to avoid misinformation and improve trust between the general people and the influencers and the authoritative figures such as the government.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Automatically understanding the perspectives in online media is difficult because of two major challenges. Firstly, the proper grammar or mechanism to characterize the perspectives is not available. Recent studies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have leveraged resources from social science to explain perspectives. For example, Policy Framing and Moral Foundation Theory are used for understanding how issues are framed and the moral appeal expressed in texts to gain support. However, these theories often fail to capture the nuances in perspectives and cannot generalize over all topics and events. Our research in this dissertation is one of the first studies that adapt social science theories in Natural Language Processing for understanding perspectives to the extent that they can capture differences in ideologies or stances. The second key challenge in understanding perspectives in online media texts is that annotated data is difficult to obtain to build automatic methods to detect the perspectives, that can generalize over the large corpus of online media text on different topics. To tackle this problem, in this dissertation, we used weak sources of supervision such as social network interaction of users who produce and interact with the messages, weak human interaction, or artificial few-shot data using Large Language Models. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Our insight is that various tasks such as perspectives, stances, sentiments toward entities, etc. are interdependent when characterizing online media messages. As a result, we proposed approaches that jointly model various interdependent problems such as perspectives, stances, sentiments toward entities, etc., and perform structured prediction to solve them jointly. Our research findings showed that the messaging choices and perspectives on online media in response to various real-life events and their prominence and contrast in different ideological camps can be efficiently captured using our developed methods.</p>

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[pt] Esta dissertação discute técnicas para automaticamente analisar, comparar e recomendar conferências, usando dados bibliográficos. Apresenta uma implementação das técnicas propostas e descreve experimentos com os dados extraídos de uma versão triplificada do repositório DBLP. A análise de conferências baseia-se em medidas estatísticas e medidas para a análises de redes sociais aplicadas à rede de coautoria das conferências. As técnicas para comparar conferências exploram um conjunto de medidas de similaridades como, por exemplo, o coeficiente de similaridade de Jaccard, a similaridade por correlação de Pearson e o Cosseno, além de uma nova medida de similaridade baseada em comunidades de coautores. As medidas para calcular similaridade entre conferências são usadas em um sistema de recomendação baseado na estratégia de filtragem colaborativa. Finalmente, a dissertação introduz duas técnicas para recomendar conferências a um determinado autor, usando uma medida de relação entre autores. A primeira alternativa usa o índice de Katz, que pode ser computacionalmente lento para grandes grafos, enquanto a segunda adota uma aproximação do índice de Katz, que mostrou ser computacionalmente mais eficiente. Os experimentos sugerem que as melhores técnicas são: a técnica de comparação de conferências que utiliza a nova medida de similaridade baseada em comunidades de coautores; e a técnica para recomendação de conferências que explora os autores mais relacionados na rede de coautores. / [en] This dissertation discusses techniques to automatically analyze, compare and recommend conferences, using bibliographic data, outlines an implementation of the proposed techniques and describes experiments with data extracted from a triplified version of the DBLP repository. Conference analysis applies statistical and social network analysis measures to the co-authorship network. The techniques for comparing conferences explore familiar similarity measures, such as the Jaccard similarity coefficient, the Pearson correlation similarity and the cosine similarity, and a new measure, the co-authorship network communities similarity index. These similarity measures are used to create a conference recommendation system based on the Collaborative Filtering strategy. Finally, the work introduces two techniques for recommending conferences to a given prospective author based on the strategy of finding the most related authors in the co-authorship network. The first alternative uses the Katz index, which can be quite costly for large graphs, while the second one adopts an approximation of the Katz index, which proved to be much faster to compute. The experiments suggest that the best performing techniques are: the technique for comparing conferences that uses the new similarity measure based on co-authorship communities; and the conference recommendation technique that explores the most related authors in the co-authorship network.

Studien syftade till att undersöka förekomsten samt utformningen av samarbeten mellan kriminella nätverk, samt vad dessa aspekter har för betydelse för brottsligheten. Vidare ämnade studien att kvalitativt undersöka de kriminella nätverkens penningtransaktioner till utlandet, samt hur dessa kunde kopplas till tidigare forskning, med avsikt att få en djupare förståelse kring internationell ekonomisk brottslighet. Centralt för detta arbete var det material som undersöktes i form av domslut, med tillhörande förundersökningsprotokoll, gällande valutaväxlingskontoret World Exchange. Den valda metoden social nätverksanalys (SNA) användes för att kartlägga nätverkspositioner och deras relationer. En kvalitativ analys applicerades beträffande de internationella transaktionerna som fördjupades med hjälp av den tillgängliga Encrochatbevisningen. Resultaten visade på att det förekommer en viss grad av gruppöverskridande brottsliga samarbeten - nexus - mellan de studerade nätverken. De mer tongivande nätverken, inom kontexten för transaktionerna inom World Exchange, påvisades även inneha en central position gällande de ekonomiska transaktioner som överfördes till utlandet. / The study aimed to investigate the existence and design of nexus between criminal networks and what significance these aspects have for criminality. Furthermore, the study aimed to qualitatively examine the criminal networks money transactions abroad, and how these could be linked to previous research, with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of international economic crime. Central to this work was the material examined in the form of verdicts, with accompanying preliminary investigation protocols, concerning the currency exchange office World Exchange. The chosen method Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used to map network positions and their relationships. A qualitative analysis was applied to the international transactions that were deepened using the available Encrochats. The results showed that there is a certain degree of cross-group criminal cooperation - nexus - between the studied networks. Additionally, the results exhibited that the more dominant networks, within the context of the transactions within World Exchange, also held a central position regarding the financial transactions transferred abroad.

本研究旨在探討國小班級關係氛圍的類型以及班級人際網絡結構的現況。 研究中抽樣調查了全國54個四到六年級的班級，依據問卷所得資料進行集群分析法(clustering method)，依同儕關係、師生關係兩向度將班級自然分類成三個集群。 研究進行了不同關係氛圍班級之差異分析，研究二檢驗不同類型班級在師生關係變項上的差別；研究三採用社會網絡分析法(social network analysis)描繪班級人際網絡結構的差別。研究四班級內部的結構，進行核心邊陲分析與班級塊模型分析，研究五進行人際互動課程的實驗研究。研究後建構出診斷班級小社會的訊息，未來可提供給實務現場教師採用。 本研究所得之研究結論如下： 一、國小班級內部關係品質，包含了學生之間的同儕關係、學生與教師的師生關係兩向度，共同建構班級關係氛圍，各班級區分類為低、中、高三種關係品質的班級。。 二、相較於低關係班級，高關係氛圍班級在班內師生關係的標準差較小、班級內師生關係的性別差異亦小。此外，高關係班級的學童的社交計量數與自身師生關係呈現顯著相關。 三、高關係與低關係班級，在人際網絡結構上並沒有顯著的差別，包含了網絡密度、EI指數、二方關係、派系數、成分數、孤離者數和比率。顯示無論班級關係品質為何，都會自然形塑而成班級小社會。 四、低關係班級有幾個值得關係的議題，包含核心學生之間的互惠關係、高密度的子群之間的關係，以及核心學生與高密度學生們對於自身班級的同儕關係與師生關係，都是教師在班級經營中須特別關注的。 五、進行班級氛圍的改變效果，短期課程對氛圍與人際網絡結構的改變效果並不明顯，推論需仰賴教師平時之互動與班務上的經營。 / The study was to investigated the primary school’s classes. The purpose is to understand the class climate and social network of the class. The forty-four classes were in the study by random sampling from Taiwan area.Teacher-student relationship and peer relationship are treated the classification variables. The classes were divided into three categories by clustering method. 18 classes were High-quality relationship; 11 calasses were Low-quality relationship. The results are the comparison of two types of class. High-quality relationship classes have some features: Standard deviation is smaller in teacher-student relationship, the same result of differences between boys and girls. The better the relationship between popular students and teacher. Second, the two-type classes were no differences in social network model. High-quality and Low-quality classes both forming a small community in nature. From the analysis of the class entrials, Mutually beneficial relationship and the relationship between small groups were the important issues. A six-week course experimented in a class. Only small impacts on the class climate and social network.