Virtual communities (VCs) potentially increase community interaction, social support, civic engagement, and social capital. Concurrently, education research suggests that one important factor in improving student achievement is community and parent involvement. Would building a VC in a K-6 school to support information exchange facilitate parents’ involvement in school activities? How can a K-6...

Cellphones provide a unique opportunity to examine how new media both reflect and affect the social world. This study suggests that people map their understanding of common social rules and dilemmas onto new technologies. Over time, these interactions create and reflect a new social landscape. Based upon a year-long observational field study and in-depth interviews, this article examines cellph...

People’s social media text has been shown to have limited prediction power of their personality. In this work, we conducted a survey study and a field study to explore the feasibility of using predicted personality traits derived from social media text for the purpose of ad targeting. In the survey study, we measured people's personalities and their responses to an advertisement tweet. We found...

The popularity of social network services and their extension in mobile environments raises privacy and usability issues. Indeed, it is difficult to establish a link between real locations or situations and virtual information such as a user’s location or context. NFCSocial is a mobile application which tackles with this difficulty. By using proximity sensor technologies such as NFC to interact...

Positive health behaviour by eating nutritious foods and performing physical activity has been shown to have significant benefit. Furthermore, theoretical models show that social factors contribute to health behaviour. However, social technology for health behaviour has provided limited social interaction. This paper presents an online social network for health behaviour change called VivoSpace...

t is an exciting time to practice medicine during our digital " coming of age. " Social media, the freely available Web-based platforms that facilitate information sharing of user-generated content, such as social networking sites, media-sharing sites, blogs, microblogs, and wikis, have transformed the way we communicate as a society. Through community building, message amplification, rapid dis...

In a collaborative knowledge creation environment knowledge is socially constructed and the nature of knowledge being shared, integrated and converted is dominantly tacit. Achieving the required level of exchange, proliferation and extraction of tacit knowledge in a social network context is intimately tied to social capital and the socialization and externalization modes of knowledge conversio...

The aim of this work is to implement a statistical mechanics theory of social interaction, generalizing econometric discrete choice models. A class of simple mean field discrete models is introduced and discussed both from the theoretical and phenomenological point of view. We propose a parameter evaluation procedure and test it by fitting our model against three families of data coming from di...

Social media sites such as Twitter are attractive sources of information due to their combination of accessibility, timeliness and large data volumes. Identification of medical entities in Twitter can support tasks such public health surveillance. We propose an approach to perform annotation of medical entities using a sequence to sequence neural network. Results show that our approach improves...

The purpose of this study was to examine young children's tendencies to be task or socially oriented in an experimental situation. On the basis of past research, two independent variables were chosen: field dependence-independence and sex. It was expected that field-dependent subjects and girls would tend to be more socially oriented, while fieldindependent subjects and boys would tend to be mo...