Social Computing and Social Media. Participation, User Experience, Consumer Experience, and Applications of Social Computing

Online health communities (OHCs) have now become a valuable platform for people to seek health-related information. Knowledge sharing and community promotion in the OHCs are critical to sustain their continuous use and improve their engagement. This study aims to investigate factors influencing knowledge sharing and community promotion in the OHC in the perspectives of social support, commitment-trust, and trust transfer theory. A questionnaire survey is employed as a collection data technique. The study results reveal that informational support influences trust transfer, trust towards community and members of the community. In addition, emotional support has a positive impact on community commitment and trust in community members but not in the community itself. Further, community commitment is positively related to both knowledge sharing and community promotion. While trust towards the community is only positively related to community promotion, trust towards members of the community does not have a positive influence on both knowledge sharing and community promotion. This study contributes to the understanding of the relationships among social support, community commitment, and trust transfer towards knowledge sharing and community promotion in the OHC. The findings of the study provide a research model that could be implemented in other contexts that share similar technology landscape.

This study examines norms concerning appearance-related commenting on social media. More specifically, the focus of this study is on the approvability of positively commenting on other people’s physical appearance, commenting on other people’s dressing style and commenting on the appearance of public figures. We examined how these norms are predicted by gender and social media usage patterns, while considering also a set of control variables, including age. We approach these questions with unique data, which is nationally representative of the Finnish population aged 18–74 (N = 3,724). Our study offers insights into the discussion on the relationship between social media and appearance-related norms. Our findings suggest a generally positive attitude towards commenting on other people’s appearance if the comment is positive, with almost half of the respondents approving such commenting. By contrast, commenting on someone’s clothing or commenting on the appearance of public figures is considerably less acceptable, with only 20% approving. Our findings reveal that gender, preferred social networking site and age are associated with appearance commenting norms. Women are more likely to approve of positive appearance commentary on social media. However, the propensity to agree on the approvability of appearance commentary is higher for men when it comes to commenting on other people’s dressing or public figures’ appearances. Overall, the users of Instagram and Facebook seem more liberal towards appearance-related comments as compared to those who do not use social media or use other platforms. Additionally, young people were more positive about appearance commenting in all of these aspects.

Contents created by open collaboration online is an important knowledge source to the modern society nowadays. Wikipedia is a prime example which can match the quality of professional encyclopedias. Yet the percentage good quality articles are low. So how different sized teams yield similar quality work is unclear such as articles of the same Wikipedia category. By identifying different editors and studying the collaboration with the work process of Wikipedia Good Articles (GAs), one can understand how different teams create quality work in open collaboration online. To distinguish editors, this research denotes their editing activity categories and subject the editing activities to factor analysis to obtain editor characteristics in the form of quantitative scores. Then we study the collaboration by investigating editors’ engagement in the work creation process along with the article size changes. The result shows the GAs creation are largely done by editors of high scored in content-shaping characteristic. In a short period prior to GA nomination, these editors suddenly appear to work and increases the article’s size to the completed GA level. Editors without dominate editor characteristics are causing the differences in team size. This research contributes to propose a new method to understand how open collaboration creates quality work and the method can easily extend to study more Wikipedia article categories. Last, the research result implies quality work can be assured by expert to work at the end of the creation process in the open collaboration.

With the rapid adoption of Internet technologies, digital footprints have become ubiquitous and versatile to revolutionise the financial industry in digital transformation. This paper takes initiatives to investigate a new paradigm of the unified credit assessment with the use of federated artificial intelligence. We conceptualised digital human representation which consists of social, contextual, financial and technological dimensions to assess the commercial creditworthiness and social reputation of both banked and unbanked individuals. A federated artificial intelligence platform is proposed with a comprehensive set of system design for efficient and effective credit scoring. The study considerably contributes to the cumulative development of financial intelligence and social computing. It also provides a number of implications for academic bodies, practitioners, and developers of financial technologies.

Short-form video sharing mobile applications like TikTok (Douyin) have been gaining traction globally in recent years. These video sharing platforms have transformed how users consume online content in a drastic way. The recommendation algorithms of these applications form a “ludic loop” for users – the more users watch videos, the better the algorithms work, and the more users are exposed to content of their interest. Although prior research has explored how and why users watch short-form videos, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use Douyin. To address this, we conducted a survey study with Internet users in China (N = 192), focusing specifically on Douyin and those who have abandoned or never adopted Douyin. Our results show that various perceptions of these users shape diverse practices of engagement with and disengagement from Douyin. Those who choose not to use Douyin are mostly motivated by the fear of addiction, or the stigmatized perceptions of videos on Douyin that deemed low-quality. Those who are using Douyin and those who choose to quit Douyin have different perceptions of the efficacy of Douyin’s recommendation algorithms. We situate our findings with prior research on technology non-use, and provide design implications for future video-based social media.

The past decade has been characterized by a strong increase in the use of social media and a continuous growth of public online discussion. With the failure of purely manual moderation, platform operators started searching for semi-automated solutions, where the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques is promising. However, this requires huge financial investments for algorithmic implementations, data collection, and model training, which only big players can afford. To support smaller or medium-sized media enterprises (SME), we developed an integrated comment moderation system as an IT platform. This platform acts as a service provider and offers Analytics as a Service (AaaS) to SMEs. Operating such a platform, however, requires a robust technology stack, integrated workflows and well-defined interfaces between all parties. In this paper, we develop and discuss a suitable IT architecture and present a prototypical implementation.

Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs) enable individuals to seek and provide support, and serve as a safe haven to disclose and share stigmatizing and sensitive experiences. Like other online communities, OMHCs are not immune to bad behavior and antisocial activities such as trolling, spamming, and harassment. Therefore, these communities are oftentimes guided by strict norms against such behavior, and moderated to ensure the quality and credibility of the content being shared. However, moderation within these communities is not only limited to ensuring content quality. It is far more complex—providing supportive spaces for disclosure, ensuring individuals’ privacy, etc.—because of the sensitive population that they cater to. By interviewing 19 moderators across 12 such OMHCs on Reddit, this paper studies the practices and structure of moderation in these communities to better understand their functioning and effectiveness. Our research questions primarily revolve around three major themes—moderation, support, and self-disclosure. We find practices of moderation hierarchy, and several distinctions in motivations and responsibilities of the moderators individually and as a group. We also notice that these communities predominantly encourage emotional support, and provide supportive spaces that encourage self-disclosure on stigmatized concerns. Our findings highlight the necessity of awareness corresponding to (currently lacking) privacy concerns, and raises the importance of the presence of mental health experts (counselors and psychiatrists) in these communities. On the basis of the insights drawn from this work, we discuss the implications and considerations for designing OMHCs.

According to Alexa’s ranking of the top 500 sites on the web, YouTube takes the second place, demonstrating the importance of online services focused on sharing of short self-shot videos. With growing popularity of mobile phones, mobile only short video sharing social media applications appeared on the market. One of such applications is TikTok, probably the most talked-of video sharing platform of 2019, similar to its twin service for the Chinese market, called Douyin. The content on YouTube varies greatly in topic: from music and toys to science and technologies, from computer games and cooking to education and politics. But does the content on mobile short video platforms differ that much too? The content of 1,000 videos on TikTok as a prominent representative of mobile short video sharing social media services was analyzed to find out which content is common and popular on TikTok. Content analysis was applied as the main research technique. Comedy videos and musical performances turned out to be the most popular and the most frequent categories among both male and female performers. Comedy videos are, however, especially frequent among male creators. At that, videos related to beauty and DIY are common for females, but not for males. Additional attention in this study was paid to the potential law infringements on the platform. The cases of potential violations of copyright and personal rights were observed. Videos containing inappropriate contents such as violence, sexual activity, or consumption of drugs and alcohol were, by contrast, not revealed.

The Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is recognized as one of the most influential resources of information transmission, especially in consumer purchase decisions. There exists an increasing trend in the number of publications related to the eWOM these years. In order to explore the specific developments in this field, a detailed overview of eWOM is presented. Different from other reviews focusing on qualitative analysis, we quantitatively analyze the relevant articles of eWOM with the bibliometric method, using 1000 eWOM-related publications retrieved from Web of Knowledge during 1998 and 2019, to ensure the objectivity and effectiveness of the results. To reveal the contributions of journals, authors, institutions and regions, leading individuals and collaboration patterns were identified. Furthermore, the topic-method mapping network (TMMN), a relationship network with two types of nodes for topic keywords and method keywords, was presented to demonstrate the hot research topics and corresponding methods as well as the relationships between them. Finally, some suggestions were provided for review websites. This study offers a valuable orientation for scholars focusing on eWOM processes.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method based on text mining techniques that employs user comments on the Web to clarify users’ experiences of a service. The method classifies user experiences into the categories of instrumental qualities, non-instrumental qualities, and emotional reactions. The Text-Miner Software Kit (TMSK) and Text Rule Induction Kit (RIKTEXT) were used to obtain the classification rule sets. A case study on the tourist domain was conducted to assess the rules’ precision in classifying sentences into the three user experience categories. One thousand hotel reviews from the website www.tripadvisor.com were used in the evaluation process. Two datasets were built: one for training and one for testing. For validation, 100 new opinions were used to assess the rules’ precision. The results are considered good because there was only a 10% error in automatic classification versus manual classification. Based on this result, we argue that the automatic identification of information about user experience of a service can be done accurately using text mining techniques, such as those presented in this work.

This article investigates the application of the concept of Customer eXperience (CX) in the education and presents the results of Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) of the literature on CX specifically in e-Learning, also User Experience (UX) and Usability. Studies show that usability and UX in such platforms may influence in this process. The aim of this work aims to analyze scientific publications to characterize this context of CX. Existing studies on the subject were identified, specifying the type of research, its purpose, the use of techniques and method. The literature shows that the concept of CX has different definitions. The purpose of CX is identified as to deliver satisfaction throughout the customer experience that, in turn, leads to brand loyalty and advocacy, but results show there are few publications concerning the subject, especially in the domain of e-learning, and therefore is clear the need to encourage research and academic production.

Customer eXperience (CX) is a relatively new concept in the industry and generally related to marketing. It is focused examining the entire client’s journey and experiences with various systems, products or services offered by a company. Lately, there is a growing interest in CX by organizations, since it is one of the most important factors when it comes to maintaining a competitive advantage with their peers. Adding to this, that customers nowadays seek to create an experience beyond the acquisition of a product.The article examines a specific case study of a Chilean retail store through two Customer Journey Map (CJM) of the main sales channels (physical and virtual). In which the stages of the purchasing process are identified, considering the activities within these stages, the touchpoints and the elements present in the touchpoints, in order to make a comparison of the trips of the clients in their different channels of sale.

This article presents a review of the literature from the last 5 years in research related to methods they have used to evaluate the Customer eXperience. Following the area of computer science, we observe how different works have integrated artificial intelligence or physiological signals to evaluate the emotional state or perceptions of a customer. However, most of these works are very oriented towards a single channel of communication. Models and evaluation methods have also been implemented, where the interest of researchers in deepening the customer experience from different disciplines can be observed.

A national park website extends (in certain way) a physical national park. It does not have a physical location so its elements and information can be appreciated from anywhere in the world. Usability is a well-known concept, for decades. User eXperience (UX) is a broader concept that encompasses usability. The usability and UX evaluation are important tasks to perform when developing any kind of websites. In this regard it is important to evaluate whether a national park website is intuitive, easy to use, and allows users to complete their objectives. National park websites have their own features that differentiate them from other systems, so it is necessary to use a set of appropriate heuristics for these types of websites. The article presents a set of 14 heuristics to evaluate the UX of national park websites. The heuristics were developed using the methodology proposed by Quiñones et al. [2]. To validate and refine the UX heuristics for national park websites, we performed two iterations. In the first iteration the heuristics were validated through heuristic evaluation and expert judgment (survey), while in the second iteration the heuristics were validated through user tests (co-discovery and focus group). Based on validation results, we concluded that the proposed set of heuristics are effective.

The definition of user experience (UX) is broad and covers several aspects. The job of any programmer is very specific and demanding. He/she uses different systems or tools to carry out their programming tasks. We consider a programmer as a specific case of user, who employs programming environments and other software development artifacts. We therefore consider this particular kind of UX as Programmer eXperience (PX). Several authors have defined different aspects of PX, including, among others, language features, programming learning factors or programmer performance. Usability is a relevant aspect of UX, as well as an important aspect of programming environments. Heuristic evaluation is an inspection method that allows evaluating the usability of interactive software systems. We developed a set of heuristics following the methodology proposed by Quiñones et al. We defined a new set of 12 specific heuristics that incorporate concepts of UX and usability of programming environments. These heuristics have been validated following also that methodology. The results obtained in different effectiveness criteria were satisfactory. However, the set of heuristics could be further refined and validate in new scenarios or case studies.

Customer eXperience (CX) is one of the most important factors among companies and organizations to gain a competitive advantage in the area of tourism. To achieve this leadership in this area, it is important that industries focus on understanding the needs of their different customers, because the needs that a customer has and expects to satisfy when using products, systems or services, are not the same than those of another customer. This research presents a review and analysis of several articles related to the customer experience regarding hotels, restaurants and airlines in the tourism area. We classified the needs into these three industries or sectors and for each of them, we present the customer’s needs in a general way and then highlight some of these needs for the different classifications as purpose of travel (business or leisure), type of traveler (solo, couple, family, or friends) and cultural differences.

Customer eXperience is one of the key concepts in Service Science, an interdisciplinary research field oriented to the systematic innovation of services. The Tourist eXperience, as customer of specific services, is strongly related to the quality of the services that are offered. Online travel agencies generate online communities, where tourists can quantitatively (scores) and qualitatively (reviews) evaluate the services they received. Their opinions offer information for other fellow travelers when they are choosing tourism-related services. They also offer valuable information for decision makers in tourism entities. Tourist opinions express in fact their experiences as customers. Many researches focus on qualitative tourists’ comments, evaluating their reviews with big data and natural language processing techniques. However, we focused our work on quantitative data. The paper presents a quantitative study on the opinions of the tourists that used accommodation services offered through the online travel agency HostelWorld, in hostels from Valparaíso, Chile. We used descriptive statistics to analyze tourists’ profile, and inferential statistics to analyze tourists’ opinions.

Traditionally related to Service Science, Customer eXperience (CX) is also becoming a relevant Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) topic. The well-known concepts of usability and User eXperience refer to a single system, product or service. CX extends the UX concepts in a holistic approach, focusing on customer’s interactions (touchpoints) with all systems, products and services that a company offers. CX has a highly interdisciplinary nature; our approach on CX comes from HCI, as many of the customer – company interactions are based on interactives software systems and digital products. Forming CX professionals is challenging. We think that including CX as topic in HCI courses is becoming a necessity. The paper presents a 2019 comparative study on students’ perception on CX, which follows-up a similar study that we have done in 2018. The survey includes students from Chile, Spain, Romania, Colombia and Argentina, enrolled in CS and Law programs. The results help prioritizing the CX topics and designing a CX course.

Although one of the solutions for environmental issues is to promote our pro-environmental behaviors (PEB) which is one of prosocial behaviors, it has not been done enough. This study focuses on “Vanity” for interactive agents as motivation for PEB. The purpose of this study is to confirm three hypotheses as follows; (1) One have “Vanity” for an interactive agent who is an observer. (2) Pro-social behavior is promoted by “Vanity” for interactive agents. (3) (1) can be also realized even when the prosocial behavior is PEB that are not supposed to be shared as one of our norms. In order to confirm these hypotheses, a comparison experiment employing an interactive agent and non-interactive agent was conducted. In the experiment, participants were asked to communicate with one agent for five minutes. After the communication, they were asked to wash dishes and to donate some money by the agent. Then, they were also asked to communicate with another agent, and they were asked to wash dishes and to donate by the agent as well. The amount of water use and the amount of donation were evaluated as indicators of PEB and prosocial behavior, respectively. Furthermore, the “Vanity” for the agent was measured by a questionnaire. As the result, there was a significant difference in the degree of “Vanity” , however there was no significant difference in the amount of water use and donation amount. The interactivity of the agent affected participants’ subjective feelings.

The continuous increase of competition in international markets and the diversification of consumers’ interests and expectations of products and services expressed on the social media networks have led us to investigate how the opinions of consumers can significantly influence the changes in the strategy of the organizations. In order to find out the role of social media networks for developing a successful business based on consistent competitive advantages, we chose sentiment analysis and lexicon-based approach. In this paper we used a public dataset Women’s Clothing E-Commerce Review, consisting of real commercial data collected by Nick Brooks, but being anonymized, to analyze the customers’ reviews on fashion. The original dataset consists of 23486 customer reviews and 10 variables. The data are text and numerical types. First, we will analyze the numerical types to find out existing connections between data. We apply the supervised techniques, known as the corpus-based approach, such as neural networks and logistic regression by means of IBM SPSS Statistics v20 software. Thus, the manufacturing companies can discover in the opinions of the consumers the good parts of their products and services, which should be maintained and developed, but also not as good and totally inadequate characteristics of their products and services, which should be replaced. The results of our research help companies discover the key success factors for a business that can contribute significantly to their competitive advantages and also where they can intervene to change certain characteristics of the products and services offered on the market.

This paper questions the notion of digital advertising literacy. We first propose a theoretical positioning that tries to think of self-taught literacy, not necessarily linked to education and state intervention, by a daily company with advertising. We will explore the French case, since the nineteenth century, to understand how people developed advertising literacy through different means. In this respect, how can we think of an active receiver, controlling codes instead of manipulated crowds? We will then explore contemporary forms of advertising digital literacy such as online conversation on social networks, algorithmic advertising, and advertising culture

Vision, as the main channel for humans to obtain external information, has always been a hot area of research. Especially under the current heat of research on artificial intelligence, a large amount of research has been focused on intersecting research results in psychology and neuroscience with computer science to improve simulation capabilities of computers systems. This article briefly reviews the research progress in human visual cognition processes and their simulation methods in the fields of psychology, neuro-science, and computer science. In addition, eye movement experiments were carried out and models were built based on human cognitive processes to explore the influence of factors such as prior knowledge and emotional experience on model accuracy. Furthermore, the limitations and application prospects of the model were discussed.

Within the commercial landscape of “social networking sites” turned into “social media platforms”, the aim of this paper is to gain insight on the ways in which ordinary users express criticisms towards digital advertising. In order to highlight the existence of a specific digital advertising literacy, we focus on the study of a new generation of vernacular expressions which seem to characterize a critical experience of ads and promotional contents on social media platforms: “fail”, “clickbait”, “cringe”, “cancel”, “woke”. A corpus of French-speaking Twitter contents documents the use of such terms as criticisms aimed at different digital promotional genres (ads, hashtags, sponsored posts, articles, banners, embedded videos). By conducting a micrological analysis of platformized user reactions, we show that an entire set of digital literacy skills can be conceptualized by observing the vernacular development of a vocabulary for the criticism of promotional contents and everyday ads.

In recent years, in the apparel industry, the EC market and SNSs have been expanding. Then it is needed a marketing strategy considering the needs of customers. In this study, we aim to identify fashion brands related to similar brands and customer growth (named “key brands”) which promote brand transition using a questionnaire data targeting about 30,000 monitors. Specifically, we used questions about consumption values and favorite fashion brands. We conducted the factor analysis using the question items to obtain potential factors of consumption values. Next, we classify monitors based on the result of factor analysis. Then, we aggregate question about favorite fashion brands and reveal key brands at each age and cluster. Finally, we compare to similar brands from questionnaire data with similar brands from tweet data from Twitter.

The spread of Social Networking Services (SNSs) changes personal communication around the world rapidly in recent years and the impact has affected the business field. Then many companies approach their consumers by using SNS, but those marketing effects are completely different depending on each community structure. Especially, there is a large difference in the cost that diffuses the information transmitted when the community is concentrated or scattered. It is important to perform a marketing approach that considers the community structure of each company. In this study, we use a brand in the fashion market to detect consumer community structure on SNSs. In addition, based on the formed community, we clarify the characteristic of each community by using posted contents posted by consumers and suggest the method of promotion to consumers via SNSs.

In a world full of signals and messages surrounded by mass medias as well as digital media, advertising literacy is considered a powerful tool for social communication. Based on today’s context, this exploratory research compared two advertising approaches: (a) the global phenomenon of femvertising, which empowers women in advertising, and (b) the emergence of the conception of a new man towards a more inclusive society. Drawing from Schema Congruence Theory, both paths were studied considering the importance of ads in the representation of gender roles and stereotypes, as value perceptions of justice, impartiality, traditional acceptance, cultural acceptance, family acceptance, and morality among young people in Chile. Participants were 110 students mainly from communication studies, who were exposed to six advertising messages shown on hybrid type of media, including social media. Quantitative statistical analysis was performed. Overall, findings revealed a favorable tendency of congruence between roles and stereotypes that students expected to be represented in both approaches, as well as with values that they associated with both types of perspectives. However, it is important to consider differences found among gender, student´s age and student´s school year variables for each approach. This study opens new paths to continue exploring further aspects of digital advertising literacy such as affective components, visual elements, among others.

In recent years, as the ratio of e-commerce is increasing, in the real store, it is necessary to use the strength of touching products. In order to be seen more products, we need to improve the layout at the real store. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the purchasing behavior of customers. Based on the idea that behavior changes depending on the purpose of purchase, we considered two types of purchasing behaviors: one for oneself and another for others. In this paper, we conducted the experiment of viewpoint observation about two kinds of the purchasing behaviors with the eye tracking device like glasses at an apparel store. In this study, we evaluate the difference of the purchasing behaviors by network analysis using gaze data obtained by experiments. Specifically, we clarify the relationships between showcases by network analysis. We analyzed the clusters between the showcases to use the average data of subjects for each scenario and we compared the two clusters. As a result, we found the differences and the features of two clusters.

In recent years, consumer needs for products have been diversified, and companies need proper site management considering trends. As the needs of consumers diversified, it became difficult to grasp the needs. In this study, we analyzed diversifying customer needs by focusing on internet advertising. We classify it into a company’s products by Doc2Vec using each shopping site documents to segment the market using word similarity in the fashion market and verify that a company can accurately identify the needs of consumers in fashion sites. Afterwards, we consider the impression tendency of sites with similar ones by using time-series clustering.

The extensive advancement of information technology, travel-related content creation is largely influenced by the use of social media. Travel-related social media (TSM) users do not only accept products and services but also participate in the operation process and play central roles in strengthening the creating value. Young consumers’ have a more dynamic relationship with social media technology, which is tapping into innovative creation behavior. While very few studies have focused on social media marketing activities in terms of co-creation value. With this realization, the aim of this study is to investigate the effects of social media marketing activities to examine the travel-related co-creation intention of young consumers. To empirically test the hypothetical model, this study conducted a paper-based survey on 365 young social media users from China for data analysis. The analytical results of structural equation modeling indicated that social media marketing activities have a positive significant effect on towards travel-related co-creation intention through the mediating effect of perceived satisfaction. Finally, the implications based on the empirical results of this study are provided as references for the improvement of social media marketing activities to promote the co-creation behavior.

Social media create enormous opportunity for entrepreneurship towards women in the developing country. Rural educated women are utilizing these opportunities for 24/7 business development through virtual platforms. In this context, this study aims to investigate the in-depth insights into women entrepreneurs’ behavioral intention to use Facebook live for entrepreneurship marketing. Extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this research examined the impact of compatibility, brand awareness, consumer relationship perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention in the context of women entrepreneurs. Data were collected using an online survey from 283 women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who have an online store on Facebook. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling employed to examine the hypothetical relationship the constructs. The results suggested that social media live marketing was influenced by women’s compatibility, ease of use and usefulness. Additionally, social media usage influence on brand awareness building, while ease of use had a strong direct influence on intention to use Facebook live marketing. The finding confirmed that social media compatibility, usefulness, brand awareness creation is the most significant factors toward women entrepreneurship success. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.

In order to solve problems of conventional multilingual display method represented by simultaneous multilingual display and language switching display, the authors have proposed a bilingual superimposed display. The purpose of this study is therefore to propose the method and to evaluate it with an experiment by searching optimal bilingual superimposed display and comparing its reading speed with that of language switching display method. In the experiment, two tasks were conducted as follows; (1) Optimal display search task was carried out to optimize reading speed of bilingual superimposed display based on participants’ subjective evaluations using interactive genetic algorithm. (2) Silent reading task was carried out to measure reading speed of sentences with monolingual display and optimized bilingual superimposed display. Then, the model of language switching display was created from the result of reading speed of monolingual display, and the expected reading time of the language switching display was compared with the reading time of bilingual superimposed display. As the comparison result, it was found that the reading speed of the bilingual superimposed display is significantly faster ($$p<0.01$$).

An outbreak of the Zika virus in 2016 caused great concern among the general public and generated a burst of tweets. The aim of this study was to develop a better understanding of the types of discussions taking place. Tweets were retrieved from the peak of the Zika outbreak (as identified by Google Trends). Tweets were then filtered and entered in NVivo to be analysed using thematic analysis. It was found that tweets on Zika revolved around seven key themes: pregnancy, travel and the Olympics, mosquitoes and conspiracy, health organisations, health information, travel and tracking, and general discussions around Zika. Our results are likely to be of interest to public health organisations disseminating information related to future outbreaks of Zika and we develop a set of preliminary recommendations for health authorities.

This paper presents a research study that investigated and analyzed the status of social media policies at Saudi Arabian higher education institutions (HEIs). This study is the first attempt to review social media policies in 68 Saudi universities and colleges. Social media policies published on the institutions websites were collected. This study focuses on the readability, accessibility, and content coverage of these policies. In addition, the study identified potential gaps concerning learning and teaching with social media policies, as well as how well these policies meet student and faculty needs. A summary of the current status of social media policies at Saudi HEIs and recommendations for improving the current status were presented as the result of this study.

Under the rigid regulation of Chinese 985-Project sponsored university entrance exam for 2.09% in 2018, the new generation of Chinese teenagers usually have to leave their province to another city which is thousand miles away from home. This means that these young adults have to leave familiar family support network and deal with homesickness earlier than other countries. Such lonely experience will affect these young adults who usually grew up as the middle class in the modern Chinese society. Friendship is the only support these young adults will get. And the hug from friends are their most missed interactions. Our research intends to develop an interactive device that can transfer their experience into a supporting comfort system that can provide warm awareness and inter-personal relationship. This paper reports our pilot study: an eMotional Supporting Awareness system (AMISA) as a haptic affect support system that supports affective communication with friends over long-distance. The approach of this study is user centered design, through user interviews and literature reviews, we defined the user requirements and found corresponding technology in HCI to prototype the conceptual design. We developed AMISA from three dimensions: (1) affective analysis; (2) mediated social touch; (3) user experience. Subsequently, we conducted a user evaluation of the prototype, AMISA is used as a data collector to observe user interactions for iterating subsequent design outcomes.

The rise of systems for smart cities has led to an increase in the incorporation of air quality monitoring and alert systems. However, evidence on the real impact of these initiatives on city-dwellers is still far from conclusive. Recent investigations stress the importance of early user involvement in the appropriation of proposed solutions; this article shows how an approach through product design can support the development and successful implementation of the mobile application AIRE implemented in the context of the SmartArucanía smart city project, from the perspective of iterative design and exploration focusing on citizen participation. The product design process involved three interventions: (i) a market benchmark – presenting the basic principles of functionality and aesthetics adopted by the market; (ii) a heuristic evaluation – evaluating the initial development proposal and identifying preliminary problems with the application; (iii) a user test with citizens – collecting information on the problems identified and general feelings about the use of the application. Through active participation of users in the early stages of product design, we ensured that the AIRE mobile application could inform citizens about complex concepts related with particulate matter which have a direct impact on their health and quality of life. This will improve decision-making in critical pollution episodes.

Instagram is one of the most influential social networks nowadays. This application experienced its largest growth after the implementation of the “Stories” tool, which consists of posts that vanish in 24 h. This study analyzes the factors that influence the intention to use this tool employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a basis and complementing it with the variables of perceived enjoyment, social presence, benign envy and malicious envy. A questionnaire was developed on SurveyMonkey, which was responded by 401 people sampled by convenience. The analysis of the results was conducted through a structural equation model (SEM) using SPSS AMOS. Ten hypotheses were proposed, and out of them, eight were accepted and two rejected. Finally, the attitude towards using is the most influential variable over the intention to use Instagram Stories, with a standardized coefficient of .539. This coefficient is mostly explained by perceived enjoyment (.849), which in turn, is explained by social presence (.743). Regarding the envy variables, only benign envy exhibits a relationship with perceived enjoyment, albeit a weak one.

Most of the university students in Japan think that a morning-oriented lifestyle will be better for their health and studies. However, some of them do not have the custom to wake up before 9 am and have breakfast. Especially skipping breakfast is considered to influence badly to their stats of absence and concentration to their classes before noon. Therefore, our study’s purpose is to develop the method to promote them to switch their lifestyle to a morning-oriented lifestyle. Our proposal method consists of following 2 activities; 1) logging time of their waking up and going bed and 2) engaging an online community activity including reporting having breakfast every morning and so on. In order to examine the effectiveness of our proposal, experiment was conducted with university students not having a morning-oriented lifestyle. As a result, our method appears to be effective to let participant have a morning-oriented lifestyle. Furthermore, it seems that the settings that a member who have had such a lifestyle already is in the community as a normal member who standing same place with other members, meaning not a leader, will be more effective.

Online professional communities on Twitter are increasingly gaining attention among users due to benefits such as knowledge sharing, professional development, and relationship building. Millions of hashtags are used every day in different disciplines (e.g., #educhat) or everyday situations (e.g. #MondayMotivation). Hashtags have led to the creation of conversations about topics (e.g., #highered), serving as a point of connection among different types of users. In the academic world, the hashtag #AcademicTwitter has evolved into an online community of educators, graduate students, organizations, and others engaged in the discussion of topics and issues related to academic life, funny moments, and survival stories. This paper examines participants and communication patterns in the #AcademicTwitter community. Using content analysis and social network analysis techniques, the researchers examined tweets including the #AcademicTwitter hashtag to discover the community’s network properties, roles of the participants, sentiment, and conversational themes. Findings indicated that the conversation was not centered on one topic, instead several micro-communities were found. Top participants in the #AcademicTwitter community were educators, media platforms, and other professionals which centered on conversations related to topics such as accessibility, academic life experiences, and teaching and research support. The study of social media in academic professional settings is still new. Our work contributes to the literature of social networks in academia, helping better understand how users connect and the network that supports the #AcademicTwitter community.

For over two decades, higher education has been facing the dilemma of what method of study is better for students. For example, is it face-to-face, online learning, or blended learning? The three mentioned methods are increasingly considered and reconsidered as to which one offers a better alternative to students. Over the last period of time, it has been acknowledged that students from different backgrounds have different learning styles and that alternating teaching methodologies and styles can aid the learning process. The fluid and diverse demographic population of the UAE requires careful consideration when considering the most adequate system/systems of higher education. The chosen method of instruction offered within educational institutions in the United Arab Emirates raises a challenge for educators as to provide active learning set up to maximise individual student satisfaction and performance while enabling students to recognise their own cognitive skillset. The objective of this study was to analyse the preference of undergraduate students’ delivery method of their courses. The study involved collection of relevant data through using a survey. A sample size of 37 undergraduate students was used to collect data. The data from the survey was analysed, and the results indicated students’ preference of the delivery method. Finally, recommendations for future research were presented.

Because of the ageing society, the number of elderly deaths in isolation is increasing and becoming a major problem in Japan. We conducted a quantitative survey in the neighborhood associations to see the likelihood of ICT service introduction in the context of neighborhood monitoring to support the elderly who is living alone. Two local communities in Kawasaki city were selected and the questionnaire was distributed in every household of the associations (250~400 households). The result illustrated that there is a great interest of neighborhood monitoring in urban area contrary to our expectations. Both associations showed that the communities are ageing, however certain amount of residents are using smartphones even if they are categorized as the elderly. Therefore, we concluded the introduction of ICT for neighborhood monitoring in the area is possible.

In this study, to encourage tourists to visit numerous sightseeing spots, we examine a method of presenting information for sightseeing spots without using a map display and propose the Onion Watch application. It runs on a smartwatch and shows only the distance and direction to registered sightseeing spots and their categories, such as temples, shrines, or monuments. We also test four different methods for presenting the estimated distance remaining to the tourist spot and carry out experiments to verify whether the user is able to predict the distance remaining. The results showed that the logarithmic distance presentation system achieved good results in relation to the user’s sense of approach and sense of distance. Therefore, we carried out a case study using this logarithmic distance presentation system in three sightseeing areas. The results showed that the participants enjoyed using the Onion Watch application. We also found that the characteristics of the sightseeing spots influenced their usability impressions of the Onion Watch application.

The article examines the recent trends in online gambling in Finland from 2006 to 2016. The data are derived from the “Use of Information and Communication Technology Statistics by Individuals and Household Survey” collected by Statistics Finland (N = 29,214). The analysis focuses on the frequencies of online gambling and the amounts of money spent on gambling applications in different population groups. The findings suggest that while online gambling has become more common in Finland, the amounts of money spent have decreased. Certain persisting differences by economic and socio-demographic characteristics are also detected. In particular, males, employed and under 40-year-old citizens are more likely than others to gamble. However, older people tend to spend higher amounts of money online. In addition, the probabilities of being a gambler are higher among less educated Finns. What is also noteworthy is that online gambling is clearly associated with the overall internet use frequencies and internet use purposes of the respondents. However, the internet use patterns do not associate as clearly with the amounts of money spent on the gaming applications.

Social media has become central to how people form and maintain friendships and romantic relationships, although its effects are not always positive. The current study investigates how social media use impacts satisfaction in three different types of romantic relationships: (i) long-distance relationships, (ii) geographically close relationships, and (ii) couples living together. How young adults communicate with their partner via social media, the shared behaviors they exhibit and their association with the support, conflict, and relationship depth they experience are explored. Responses from 236 participants aged between 18–25 years (M = 20.68, SD = 1.83) were obtained. Complex associations were found between perceived relationship quality and different indices of shared social media behaviors. Findings provide partial support for the idea that social media platforms may provide an effective mechanism to support and maintain long-distance romantic relationships. However, the overall frequency of social media use was not an important factor in maintaining a satisfying relationship, whether couples were long-distance, geographically close or living together. In addition, greater social media use was not predictive of reduced relationship conflict in any form of relationship. Paradoxically, engaging in social media based surveillance behaviors was related to a higher sense of relationship depth. Those in long distance relationships used social media more for direct communication with a partner, but this also correlated with greater levels of relationship conflict.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects a significant number of people who have difficulties with communication and socialization. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, defines ASD as a condition characterized by deficits in two core domains: (1) social communication and social interaction, and (2) restricted repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. Several authors examined the use of technology and computer-based interventions to teach people with ASD language and social skills. The use of technological advancements provides a comfortable, predictable, and structured environment that promotes constant learning for people with ASD, since they show affinity to technology. This paper explores: (1) how technology related papers to teach skills to people with ASD characterize the difficulties of these people, (2) how these characteristics have been considered to design their technological solutions and (3) which are the results obtained in these studies, in order to determine design guidelines and a structure and preliminary design for a future technological intervention that cover specific needs in people with ASD related to the area of ​​socialization.

People listen to music as it expresses and induce emotions. Considering millions of songs available in online streaming services, it is difficult to identify the most suitable song for an emotion of a user. Most of the music recommendation systems available today, are based on user ratings and acoustic features of the songs. Those systems are unable to address the cold start problem and rating diversity. Furthermore, song preferences will be altering based on the current mood of the users. If these problems were not addressed, then these online services will fail to achieve user satisfaction. To cope with those problems, this paper proposes a novel music recommendation approach that utilizes social media content such as posts, comments, interactions, etc. and recommend them with the most relevant songs to relax their mind considering the current mood (happy, sad, calm and angry). The current mood and the preferences are extracted from the social media profile of the users. Then the songs were classified to moods based on the lyrics and audio of the songs.