Online social media offers an unprecedented laboratory to explore social interactions at scale. Yet it's hard to anticipate all the effects of a system with so many actors, and the systems we build are often re-appropriated by end users. To better understand how these systems are used, we employ mixed methods research to combine small-scale observations with large-scale data analysis. I'll prov...

“Social TV” is a term that broadly describes the online social interactions occurring between viewers while watching television. In this paper, we show that TV networks can derive value from social media content placed in shows because it leads to increased word of mouth via online posts, and it highly correlates with TV show related sales. In short, we show that TV event triggers change the on...

There is a long-standing belief that in social networks with simultaneous friendly/hostile interactions (signed networks) there is a general tendency to a global balance. Balance represents a state of the network with lack of contentious situations. Here we introduce a method to quantify the degree of balance of any signed (social) network. It accounts for the contribution of all signed cycles ...

Why some dyadic interactions are more likely than others to trigger hinder the generation of novel and useful ideas? To investigate this question, we examine the attributes of dyadic ties that influence the generation of creative ideas, and how the strength of influence changes contingently on the mix use of communication media. Our study extends previous research by examining the impacts of Si...

Predicting the diffusion of information on social networks is a key problem for applications like Opinion Leader Detection, Buzz Detection or Viral Marketing. Many recent diffusion models are direct extensions of the Cascade and Threshold models, initially proposed for epidemiology and social studies. In such models, the diffusion process is based on the dynamics of interactions between neighbo...

The lack of precise models to support the design and analysis of social inclusion systems, and the growing informatization of the society which connects digital to social inclusion in multiple ways, lead to the need of exploring in full the potential of information technology to support social inclusion. However, this potential can only be achieved if we can rely on precise models that can be u...

We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes. W...

Empathy can be broadly defined as the ability to understand and respond appropriately to the affective states of others. In this paper, we present a scenario where a social robot acts as a chess companion for children, and describe our current efforts towards endowing such robot with empathic capabilities. A multimodal framework for modeling some of the user’s affective states that combines vis...

Background: Behavioral, social, psychological and biological factors influence health and disease; and, to achieve professional competency, physicians should be knowledgeable about their society and its inhabitants’ behavior. This knowledge will help physicians to become competent in communication, professional behavior, self-awareness, ethical reasoning, and understanding cultural and ...