Discovering user demographic attributes from social media is a problem of considerable interest. The problem setting can be generalized to include three components — users, topics and behaviors. In recent studies on this problem, however, the behavior between users and topics are not effectively incorporated. In our work, we proposed an integrated unsupervised model which takes into considerati...

Racial and ethnic division is a mainstay of the American social structure, today these strains are exacerbated by political binaries. Moreover, media has become increasingly polarized whereby certain outlets intensify perceived differences between racial groups, alignments, religious affiliations. Using data from recent psychological study Alt-Right, we assess associations perceptions issues, f...

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

BACKGROUND During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the global health community sought to make vaccine available "in developing nations in the same timeframe as developed nations." However, richer nations placed advance orders with manufacturers, leaving poorer nations dependent on the quantity and timing of vaccine donations by manufacturers and rich nations. Knowledge of public support for timely donat...

Climate engineering has begun to enter the scientific mainstream as a potential agent of relief in the event that climate change threatens our food or water security. There has been little research conducted on the potential hazards of climate engineering, yet already has sparked controversy amongst the scientific community, as well as some of the public. The purpose of this research was to gau...

BACKGROUND As public opinion is an important part of the health equity policy agenda, it is important to assess public opinion around potential policy interventions to address health inequities. We report on public opinion in Ontario about health equity interventions that address the social determinants of health. We also examine Ontarians' support and predictors for targeted health equity inte...

We present two demos that give personalized “out-of-context” recommendations of Twitter users to follow. By out-of-context we mean that a user wants to receive recommendation on, say, musicians to follow even though the user’s tweets’ contents and social links have no connection to the “context” of music. In this setting, where a user has never expressed interest in the context of music, many e...