A fundamental virtue of social media is to build virtual communities between users. As such, it is no surprise that almost all social media sites provide web interfaces for the search and/or recommendation of other users who share similar attributes, interests, etc. with results being the top-k users selected according to a ranking function. Our studies of real-world websites unveil a novel yet...

In this paper, alternate schemes are examined and analysed aiming at the improvement of MSW management in small urban municipalities in Morocco. These schemes are estimated by developing and applying the PROMETHEE method consisting in a multi-criteria analysis of the parameters and the constraints bound to the financial, technical, environmental and social-institutional aspects. Thus, 10 altern...

The phenomenal growth of social media, both in scale and importance, has created a unique opportunity to track information diffusion and the spread of influence, but can also make efficient tracking difficult. Given data streams representing blog posts on multiple blog channels and a focal query post on some topic of interest, our objective is to predict which of those channels are most likely ...

The enormous growth of user-generated information of social networks has caused the need for new algorithms and methods for their classification. The Sentiment Analysis (SA) methods attempt to identify the polarity of a text, using among other resources, the ranking algorithms. One of the most popular ranking algorithms is the Okapi BM25 ranking, designed to rank documents according to their re...

Community question answering (cQA) websites are focused on users who query questions onto an online forum, expecting for other users to provide them answers or suggestions. Unlike other social media, the length of the posted queries has no limits and queries tend to be multi-sentence elaborations combining context, actual questions, and irrelevant information. We approach the problem of questio...

In the present paper, Characteristics of fuzzy project network using statistical data are discussed in detail in order to calculate the fuzzy critical path, fuzzy earliest times, fuzzy latest times and fuzzy total float. Fuzzy number as fuzzy activity time is constructed using interval estimate by calculating mean, variance and standard error. A new ranking function is used to discriminate the ...

Climate change puts pressure on existing health vulnerabilities through higher frequency of extreme weather events, changes in disease vector distribution or exacerbated air pollution. Climate change adaptation policies may hold potential to reduce societal inequities. We assessed the role of public health and social justice in European climate change adaptation using a three-fold approach: a d...

Given the deleterious consequences associated with chronic stress, individual differences in stress susceptibility can have important fitness implications. These differences may be explained in part by dominance status because high rank is typically associated with decreased aggression and improved nutrition. Here, we examined the relationship between dominance and social stress in lactating ch...