Social Computing and Social Media. User Experience and Behavior

Creative idea generation is the core of the design process. Although existing literatures show that image stimulation plays a significant role in the innovation design process, it is generally unclear how to evaluate the effect of image stimuli in the design process and where the applicable point image stimulus should be set. This paper carries out a study to investigate the effect of image stimuli under different phase of product design with 28 industrial design students. We get three findings. Firstly, we find that sketching is a phase where a lot of ideas are generated by tracking designer’s total design flow. Secondly, by analyzing the sketching patterns of design students, we find that at the beginning of sketching their thinking model can be divided into two types, i.e., inspirational and rational. Under different thinking model, the participants, however, report positive benefits from the availability of image stimulus during creative idea generated in different levels, and express higher satisfaction to the image-stimulating work as well. The final finding is that applying the stimulus in the middle stage of the sketch design, which is the convergent stage of thinking, can stimulate creativity more effectively and avoid the limitations of thinking from insufficient stimulus to some extent. Based on the above findings, the research on creative stimulation theory and method driven by image materials can be established, which provides a reference for the development of intelligent design mechanism.

Currently, given the complexity of industrial problems, a powerful software is required to solve Constraint Satisfaction Problems. The constraint solvers are a kind of software that are based on a constraint approach. During the last years many constraint solvers have been created, some of them are intricate software and others are libraries to extend the features of a programming language. There are few efforts to have a framework that allows to compare a constraint system and less to allow the usability analysis of the solvers. In most cases, the users of these systems are more concerned about the number of enumeration and propagation strategies that can be used instead of the ease of use of constraint solvers. This paper presents a framework to compare and obtain a simple and objective analysis of the usability of these kind of systems. The paper shows that it is possible to establish comparison in terms of usability, allowing an analysis beyond the simple comparison of their internal strategies.

During the last two decades, online environments became rich grounds for ethnographic studies. In the same period, online communities have become a popular and broadly studied research topic. Along with online environments, the growth of online communities brought by the Computer-Mediated Communications created a solid research field for online ethnography studies. Online ethnography methods, such as virtual ethnography and netnography, are widely adopted for qualitative research. However, it is not clear how Computer Science field is using online ethnography for empirical studies. Thus, the main goal of this study is to present how online ethnographic studies have been performed in Computer Science. To accomplish this goal, we carried out a systematic mapping study regarding empirical studies on online environments. Through the analysis of 36 resulted papers, this systematic mapping provides a broad overview of existing online ethnography studies in Computer Science and by identifying how these studies have been performed considering adopted methods, collected and analyzed data, community characteristics, and researcher participation throughout these empirical studies.

This is a research proposal to demonstrate a suggested training design that can potentially be suitable to training mild cognitively-impaired elderly to successfully use social media mobile apps. To test its success, the researchers propose a 3 by 1 experimental design involving three training groups receiving similar training treatments. Training sessions will be followed by observation meetings in two weeks period to conduct three measures: whether participants were able to repeat and complete tasks successfully; whether they were able to retain the information using the mobile tutoring app after a certain period of time; and whether the child narrator embedded in the mobile app design affects the learning process. The experimental design will be explained in greater detail later in this research proposal.

Nowadays, web technology has changed drastically by positioning itself as an interactive, dynamic and very important in people’s life, which is why it has become a fundamental tool in social media and communication. As professors of Computer Science (CS) students, we have seen the need to encourage the development of “soft” skills in the learning process of future engineers, such as communication, which represents a major challenge in the field of engineering. The purpose of our study was to introduce to university students of CS, how to incorporate communication techniques when using social media networks as an effective communication tool. The study aims to show that it is not enough to know the current social media networks, but rather requires targeted communication strategies for this type of media. In this way, it involved CS undergraduate students who participate in an optional course called “Strategies of communication and diffusion in computer projects” and another group that have the same level of curriculum in the same career, but they have not internalized in the techniques of communication oriented to social media. As mentioned above, the opinion of both groups and the perception of how they can use properly communication skills for their future work are presented, and indicating the need to incorporate this ability as part of the learning process in CS students.

While most social networking services require a registration and a user profile, the student app Jodel works in a different way, as it is completely anonymous, like its American former counterpart Yik Yak. This article comprises a comprehensive evaluation of the app, leading to a final assessment of its quality as an information service. To conduct this evaluation, the Information Service Evaluation (ISE) model from Schumann and Stock [1] is used. The users’ experiences were determined by an online survey with a total of 1,009 participants which therefore provided representative results. Furthermore, the expectations of the Jodel developers, regarding the user responses, were queried and the differences were determined according to Customers Value Research [2]. In addition, an expert interview with Jodel founder Alessio Avellan Borgmeyer was conducted. The survey showed that Jodel reached its target group, since 72% of the respondents are students. The users’ satisfaction with the app is extremely high. 92% of the respondents are satisfied with the app while 97% said that they would recommend Jodel. The network effect is therefore particularly pronounced. The used elements of gamification were discreetly but effectively implemented. The results of Customers Value Research showed, on the one hand, the accuracy of the developers assessing the participants’ responses and, on the other hand, that they are aware of possible vulnerabilities of the app. Overall, the evaluation showed that Jodel is a social information service of high quality.

This paper makes a proposal to reduce the abandonment of pets through a mobile application that makes the user aware before adopting a dog. This application is called MIGua! and the main function is to give some tasks to the user for some time so that he can feel the impact of having a pet before buying or adopting one. The developing process is based on the User-Centered Design methodology in order to include the user in all the stages and produce an app pertinent to the needs of our community. Paper and digital prototypes helped to evaluate the interface as the real impact on participants.

Usability is a basic attribute in software quality. Its complex and evolving nature is hard to describe in a unique definition. Usability refers to ease of use and the way users can perform their tasks. User eXperience (UX) goes beyond the three generally accepted usability’s dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. UX covers all aspects of someone’s interaction with a product, application, system and/or service including psychological ones. Psychometrics as a psychological assessment tool could be helpful in UX studies as a complement to usability evaluation methods. Communicability is a distinctive quality of interactive systems that effectively and efficiently communicate to the users the design intent and interactive principles. The paper explores how user testing (co-discovery), communicability evaluation, query techniques, and psychometrics (motivation scale) may complement each other when assessing UX. Empirical evidences are analyzed, using the World Digital Library (www.wdl.org) as a case study.

Forming usability professionals, particularly heuristic evaluators, is a challenging task. Heuristic evaluation is a well-known and widely employed usability evaluation method. A heuristic evaluation may be performed based on generic or specific heuristics. A key issue is how new heuristics are validated and/or evaluated; heuristic quality scales were proposed. The paper presents some recurrent problems when teaching the heuristic evaluation method. It also discusses novice evaluators’ perception over Nielsen’s usability heuristics, based on empirical data. The experiment that we made involved Computer Science graduate and undergraduate students, enrolled in a Human-Computer Interaction introductory course. 50 Chilean students and 18 Spanish students participated. The online travel agency Atrapalo.com was used as case study. We used a questionnaire that assesses evaluators’ perception over a set of usability heuristics. It rates each heuristic individually (Utility, Clarity, Ease of use, Necessity of additional checklist), but also the set of heuristics as a whole (Easiness, Intention, Completeness).

Online travel agencies’ customers have nowadays a wide range of alternatives and are more demanding. Usability is a basic attribute in software quality. Heuristic evaluation is arguably the most popular usability inspection method, well-known and widely used. A heuristic evaluation may be performed based on generic or specific heuristics. Many sets of specific (usually domain-related) usability heuristics were published. Heuristic quality scales to validate and/or evaluate new heuristics were proposed. The paper analyzes evaluators’ perception on three sets of usability heuristics, when evaluating the same product: Nielsen’s generic heuristics, a set of cultural-oriented heuristics for e-Commerce, and a set of heuristics for smartphones applications (SMASH). We made an experiment with 38 Computer Science students, enrolled in a Human-Computer Interaction introductory course, using the online travel agency Expedia.com as case study; the web and mobile versions were evaluated. We assessed students’ perception based on a questionnaire that rates each heuristic individually (Utility, Clarity, Ease of use, Necessity of additional checklist), but also the set of heuristics as a whole (Easiness, Intention of future use, Completeness).

In this study, we conducted purchasing simulation experiment using eye tracking device in fashion brand store. Using the gaze measurement data obtained through experiments, we conducted several analyses to evaluate the store layout. Firstly, we divided the inside of the store into several areas. We tried to identify the areas that can become areas that are easily visible (Golden Zone) by performing multiple comparison on visual time for each area. Through the result, we identify the area that could be Golden Zone. In addition, it became clarifying that the characteristics of the areas which can become Golden Zone. Secondly, we tried to clarify that relationship between good impression item and visual time. It is clarified that there had a positive correlation between “Purchasing time” and “The number of item held in hand.” Moreover, “Purchasing time” and “The number of good impression item” also had a positive correlation. From the results, we proposed improvement plans for better store layout.

Nowadays, autonomous driving systems are being developed and utilized. And high precision 3D map data is said to be necessary to realize autonomous driving. This data contains position data of features such as “road line”, “road edge” and “road sign”. This map data is created with point cloud data taken by Mobile Mapping System (MMS), and to reduce cost, it is desirable that the map creation work is automated, but in fact it is difficult to fully automate. So first, features detection process will be performed by an automatic process, and then a manual confirmation process will be performed. Therefore, in order to reduce cost, it is important to improve a manual confirmation process. In this paper, we propose a system that improves a manual confirmation process by displaying features in different color using evaluation items unique to each feature type.In experiment, we used actual MMS data on Tokyo Japan, performed auto features detection process and got features data with evaluation item values. We investigated whether an appropriate low evaluation item values is given for error detection. As a result, we confirmed the effectiveness of this system.

In a car navigation system, a voice guidance system is equipped to ensure the safety of driving. On the other hand, a driver requires a certain period of time to understanding instructions from the voice guidance and may misjudge them. To solve these problems, we propose a new expression (SVN) process of the voice guidance based on drivers’ soliloquy. When drivers confirm a point to turn or a distance to the point based on the voice guidance, they quite often make correspondence the expressions of the guidance to their own expressions. Such the expression in the brain of a driver is expected to be similar to the soliloquy type expression of the driver. We assume that the soliloquy expression of the guidance will be understandable easier than the conventional expression. We conducted the experiment on the driving simulator to verify our hypothesis. The results suggest that SVN decreases the time for understanding the instruction and the frequency of misjudgment.

Online shopping provides a convenient and diverse shopping experience. However, elderly customers are unable to leverage such benefits due to their age-related impairments or lack of computer knowledges. To solve this problem, we extend our previous e-commerce website design with novel assistance functions including multimodal search and personalized speech feedback. In this paper, we evaluated the usability of these functions through a phenomenography based qualitative study. From the results, we found out several biases which affect senior users’ interaction with the assistance functions. Firstly, there is a gap between the icon metaphor and the senior users’ real world experience. Secondly, consistency is more important than flexibility in e-commerce website design for the elderly. Thirdly, senior users tend to show less interest to explore the website than younger ones. These findings and considerations will guide us in the following rounds of age-friendly assistance function designs to improve the senior user’s online shopping experience.

Democracies in the late 2010s are threatened by political movements from the borders of the political spectrum. Right-wing populist parties increasingly find agreement in larger parts of the population. How are these people convinced to these political beliefs? One explanation can be seen in polarization and the phenomena that arise from it such as the spiral of silence. In this article we empirically investigate how digital media usage influences the perception of polarization in Germany using a survey with 179 respondents. We use polarized opinions and measure agreement from two perspectives with them. We find an influence of social media usage on the perception of polarization in our sample. Further, polarization seems to be perceived differently depending on the topic. The results contribute to an understanding of how to adequately design presentation of sensitive or controversial topics in digital social media and could be utilized in student eduction to sensitize social media users to the effect of polarization of opinions.

Social media and social network sites (SNSs) in particular are a response to the ever-changing, increasingly connected world – a world that needs more and more learning and collaboration to solve complex problems. In this context, the role played by leaders in organizations also changes. Despite the many studies published about leaderships, too little is known about the way we can use social networks in discovering/identifying potential leaders. So far we have been able to classify networks (Borgatti and Foster 2003; Plastrik and Taylor 2006), to define leadership networks and to see how they work (Hoppe and Reinelt 2010), to discuss about the social influence of leaders on followers, as well as the active way in which the followers, in their turn, influence leaders, particularly their behavior (Burak and Bashshur 2013). Much has been discussed about the skills leaders need to have (Mumford et al. 2007) on various hierarchical levels within the organization, but there is still no study on how we could identify these leadership skills by using social network sites (SNSs).Our research is qualitative. We aim to analyze the skills leaders need – cognitive, interpersonal, entrepreneurial and strategic skills – and the way these can be identified in social networking, mainly using observation and surveys as methods of research. The paper is organized as follows: in the first part we discuss the basic concepts of the network theory (Barabasi 2002), leadership (Maxwell 1991), skills (Mumford et al. 2007) and influence (Cocheci 2017). In the second part, we present four concrete cases of identifying leadership skills within and with the help of social network sites, namely of the information gathered and interpreted by us, according to the specialized literature. The subjects we chose are leaders of four large companies in Romania who allowed us to access their SNSs and answered our questions during interviews organized on this occasion. The purpose of these interviews was to outline some types of desirable/undesirable behaviors in specific situations (access to and distribution of information; direct or indirect interaction with third parties; attract material and/or financial resources; formulate a vision; identify problems and consequences, objective assessment of situations and people).The outcome of the whole work could be a model that can form the basis of a useful methodology for human resource departments, as well as for the head-hunting companies interested in finding people with leadership skills and potential.

Online social media plays an important role in the marketing communications mix of many companies. Thus, scholars have recently tried to uncover patterns that have a positive impact on the effectiveness of social media communication, predominantly focusing on message characteristics. Although a lot of valuable insights have been generated, it remains unclear what the drivers of ‘super successful posts’ (SSP) are. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal why a very small proportion of social media posts significantly outperform the majority of other posts. For this purpose, we employed case evidence from the automotive industry and collected 2,000 Facebook posts. In regard to the numbers of likes, comments, and shares, the 20 most successful posts each were selected. After removing the duplicates, a final sample of 42 SSP remained. With an explorative multi-level approach, including two focus group sessions, an in-depth analysis was conducted for every post. Aiming to capture a comprehensive picture, we also investigated the context of each post beyond the online environment. With our analysis, we reveal five typical patterns of social media excellence (co-branding, wow effect, cognitive task, timing, and campaign). In addition, we further elaborate on four selected SSP to enhance the understanding of underlying mechanisms. Among other things, our findings encourage practitioners to employ a broader view when planning social media posts. Thus, the understanding about the five patterns of SSP may support practitioners in enhancing the popularity of their future posts.

Social live streaming services (SLSSs) are social media, which combine Live-TV with elements of Social Networking Services (SNSs). In social media and thus also in SLSSs, the so-called influencer and micro-celebrities play an important role, but to what extend are SLSSs’ streamers motivated by fame or financial gain? We conducted a content analysis in order to investigate SLSSs’ streamers (n = 7,667) on Periscope, Ustream and YouNow in respect to their general characteristics and streaming motivation being fame and financial gain. We have developed a research model referring to the platform used by the streamers, their gender, origin, age and streamed content (general characteristics), as well as the motivational aspects. Streamers of Ustream are mostly motivated by financial gain, whereas YouNow broadcasters seek to be famous. Considering the streamers age, older generations (Gen X, Silver Surfers) aspire after financial gain. With progressing age the motivation to become a star decreases. Mostly streamed content by streamers motivated by money is entertainment media. For streamers wanting to become a star chatting and making music are the preferred content categories.

Viral messages reach a large number of people at almost no cost. However, the majority of viral messages are based on shocking or entertaining content. Is it possible to make other kinds of content go viral, such as science and technology news? I use conceptual blending analysis to analyze five representative, very small messages about solar technology that went viral (nanovirals). I identify four distinct viral strategies, that vary according to number of belief systems used, and whether the viral message confirmed or contradicted central beliefs. Finally, I use information systems modeling to depict a common viral mechanism underlying the strategies. I conclude with a practical heuristic to guide the design of nanoviral messages.

The prospects of spectrum sentiment analysis are great and is a field that has been given very little research focus. We develop a system that can recognize human recognizable emotions and quantify them, the system can then predict the trend in the spectrum sentiments provided a chronological data. This paper discusses a lexicon-based approach for spectrum sentiment analysis. It further describes a quantification method to factor in the effects of time in trend prediction and a novel idea of using consecutive calculated values for current trend value calculation. The system is designed for e-commerce data but has flexibility to be used for other fields too. The system uses a simple neural network with image and text features as input and the trend values as output. This system can then be used to predict sentiment trend for newer or existing products. The system shows great prospects for multi-modal sentiment analysis of sentiments on spectrum range and can be advanced by using more complex approach.

This mixed methods research project examined the relationship between social construction of knowledge and student centrality in three online discussion forums, which were part of a graduate online course on web conferencing in Spanish within the Mexican sociocultural context. The purpose of the study was to identify interaction patterns among twenty-one graduate students by analyzing discussion forum posts, measuring student centrality, and generating social network diagrams in order to explain the characteristics of posts and interaction dynamics that lead to social construction of knowledge. A sequential approach was used, starting with an interaction analysis model and social network analysis, followed by a combination of both analyses to shed light on interaction in online discussion forums carried out in Spanish.

In this research, we verify information of sightseeing spots as a weak trigger which gives strolling tourists a chance to change their behaviors but does not specify the spot in a recommendation system. In a general recommendation system, the system provides complete piece of information about recommended spots. However, the provided information may deprive users of opportunities to discover interesting something by themselves. On the other hand, if no information is recommended to tourists, they may stroll in a restricted area because they have no hints of unfamiliar area. To reveal an appropriate information solving the above problems, we focus on the amount of information provided to users. Information about sightseeing spots is classified into the position and the feature information of a spot. For each information, we define the four categories of information according to the amount of information. We conducted the experiment with some subjects, and analyzed the impact on the information of these categories.

This study is focused on questions regarding online identifications. We intend to examine the extent to which different demographic groups and generations in Finland identify with online communities in 2009 and 2017. Our empirical data are derived from nationally representative surveys collected in Finland in 2009 (n = 1,202) and 2017 (n = 1,648). The findings indicated that identification with online communities has increased in Finland between 2009 and 2017. Notably, demographic differences have diminished over time as the popularity of online groups has increased among middle-aged citizens especially. Analysis showed an interesting interaction between age cohort and observed year. It seems that younger generations have experienced a communal backlash, in which identification to online communities has decreased, while identification with traditional social groups has not changed.

Marketing planning is also undergoing rapid development as the way of marketing communicating has changed forever. The increasing popularity of blogging, podcasting, and social networks enable customers to broadcast their views about a product or service to a potential audience of millions, and the proliferation of Internet access gives everyone who wants to the tools to address issues with products and companies. The traditional communications paradigm, which relied on the classic promotional mix to craft Integrated marketing communications (IMC) strategies, must give way to an effective digital marketing planning framework which includes all forms of social media as potential tools in designing and implementing IMC strategies. Consequently, there needs to be a sophisticated process to develop and implement a digital marketing plan in the social media environment.

Items that provide a complex experience to the user can be difficult to review and compare. Deciding what food, movies, or clothes to purchase can prove to be difficult on star ratings alone. While most digital storefronts allow the user to rate an item based on a qualitative score, the experience is more nuanced than a simple rating. Beer is one such beverage that can be difficult to describe on star rating alone and provides an experience that can vary greatly from one person to another. Craft beer in the U.S. is a fast-growing market, with volume growth totaling 18% in 2014 [4]. As the craft beer market grows, so do the number of options available to a customer at the store. Currently there are three main ways to describe a beer: its style (lager, ale, lambic), its alcohol percentage, and its bitterness rating. This project aimed to quantify user’s beer experiences beyond these three characteristics, by performing a principal components analysis on user submitted reviews to RateBeer.com. Potential users were also involved in the development of an interactive information visualization, with the goal of allowing users to explore and navigate many beers at once by flavor. The research contained within this paper culminated in a live, fully functional informational visualization, which can be viewed online.

Social networking applications have come to dominate the attention of technology-users of all ages, and are seen as the quintessential application of social media. They promise to connect us to our friends and family, but there are growing concerns over their ability to achieve this. We are interested in the potential of technology to connect people, but we question the approach of social networking apps and sites. Perhaps the only activity that competes with social networks for occupying so much of people’s time is music-listening. Listening to music on personal devices is one of the most wide-spread forms of human-computer interaction. It also provides opportunities that could be characterized, positively, as privacy or, negatively, as isolation. To better understand the design space of people listening to music and their sociality, we examined the attitudes and practices of 26 semi-rural young people (9–15 years old) in the U.S. who are too young to drive and therefore cannot congregate at-will. Our study utilized semi-structured interviews, a design charrette, and user-testing of Colisten, our functional prototype. We found that the youth do not currently engage in widespread co-listening or even in the use of music recommendation systems. Indications are that the lack of co-listening is due to design gaps in sharing features rather than lack of interest. As one young person explained, co-listening would be “…more like a social thing, rather than ‘I want to listen to music’, more like, ‘I want to hang out with my friend and listen to music…’”. We present emergent design dimensions detailing how this population thinks about sociality and sharing media.

“Cloud Pet Keeping” is a phenomenon rising in Chinese UGC background that social media users keep eyes on certain pets’ growth by viewing the pictures and vocabularies released by pet bloggers. In the “cloud pet keeping” phenomenon, users can get emotional resonance through browsing the amusing pet photos shared by bloggers and are willing to contribute the consuming behavior. However, in the actual process of photos searching, users often fail to find the accurate content, as the users’ tags are different from the tags input by bloggers, leading to the bad user experience. It shows that the differences may exist in the expressions of emotional cognition between bloggers and the users. This paper focuses on whether there are differences or not, and the detailed information may exist. For the analysis methods, first stimulus was chosen and associated emotional expression vocabularies were found through brainstorming. Then final emotional expression vocabularies were organized and extracted by SPSS cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis. By calculating Euclidean distance with data from matching experiments of Emotional expression vocabularies and stimulus, the differences are obtained. The result indicated that there are differences existed between the bloggers and the users’ expressions and it is apparent. The reason may be that bloggers do not systematically study the information contained in the photo when uploading. Also, users’ individual differences and other factors impact the results of this study. Following research will focus on how to provide a tag selection mechanism on photo-sharing social media, to provide a better user experience.

Globalization refers not only economic globalization, which is the increasing economic interdependence of national economies across the world through a rapid increase in cross-border movement of goods, services, technology, and capital (Joshi (2014) International Business, Oxford University Press, New Delhi and New York.) but an essential aspect of globalization is also movement of people. International movement of labor is often seen as important to economic development (“Mainstreaming of Migration in Development Policy and Integrating Migration in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda”). Like the European Union, Japan has started to accept people from overseas, who are eligible to live, study and work in this country (Nikkei Newspaper (2017/1/28)). Since Japan has been a mono-ethnic nation because 99% are Japanese, every company in Japan needs to build its business model to meet immigrants’ expectation. This research paper examines what types of the segments of foreign residents exist and how effectively to respond to their needs, ending up increasing customer satisfaction. The focus is on the service industry whose share among the GDP of Japan exceeds 70%. The data, which collected from questionnaires regarding hair salon usage conducted towards foreign residents in Japan, are analyzed for the sake of clarifying distinctive consumer behavior.

Social Live Streaming Services (SLSSs) are a new and exciting area of Social Networking Services (SNSs), with Periscope, Ustream, and YouNow representing some of the most commonly used international services. SLSSs offer the opportunity to examine the human-computer interaction between the streamers and their medium, the live stream, as well as the streamers’ information behavior. To get a better understanding on the information behavior on SLSSs and who produces which kind of live streams we conducted a systematic observation of live streams (N = 7,667) in a time-span of four weeks. We implemented a content analysis and investigated if differences between gender and the produced content, as well as the motivation of a person can be observed. Furthermore, the content was analyzed by country (U.S., Germany, and Japan) as well as by the service (Periscope, Ustream, and YouNow) to gain insight into the question if the streamed content depends on the applied services or the cultural background.

Big data raises manifold ethical questions. While there is a certain consensus on general principles for addressing these issues, little is known about when and why decision-makers display such ethical conduct or opt for unethical behavior with regard to collecting, storing, analyzing, or using big data. To address this research gap, we draw on the concept of moral disengagement. Moral disengagement describes psychological mechanisms by which individuals rationalize and thus disengage themselves from unethical conduct. We develop a theoretical model in which the motivation for monetary benefits as well as the motivation for hedonic benefits is set into relation to moral disengagement and the tendency to make unethical decisions in the context of social media generated big data. Our model spells out four sets of testable propositions that invite further research.

The rapid technological advancements are supposed to simplify our everyday life. They are also increasingly utilized to support an active lifestyle with diverse tracking devices, like fitness trackers or smart watches. However, they do not seem to make the life of legislators and data privacy advocates easier. In contrary, with better and faster technology our (health-related) private data faces more and more threats. To better understand the current status of the intersecting domains of devices like fitness trackers and the data privacy, we have analyzed the development of general data privacy regulations in the EU as well as the data transfer modalities between EU and USA. Afterwards, we reviewed scientific publications on fitness trackers (or smart watches) and data privacy, in order to identify, whether there is interest in this topic among scholars and if so, which aspects do they investigate in particular.

The identification of automated activitiy in social media, specifically the detection of social bots, has become one of the major tasks within the field of social media computation. Recently published classification algorithms and frameworks focus on the identification of single bot accounts. Within different Twitter experiments, we show that these classifiers can be bypassed by hybrid approaches, which on a first glance may motivate further research for more sophisticated techniques. However, we pose the question, whether the detection of single bot accounts is a necessary condition for identifying malicious, strategic attacks on public opinion. Or is it more productive to concentrate on detecting strategies?

The growing popularity and use of mobile devices over the past decade has provided law enforcement agencies with new types of evidence to aid them in solving crimes. These devices can store a great deal of data that can be instrumental in digital investigations. Equally important is the acquisition and analysis of this data, which can be used to connect individuals or organizations to an incident or crime involving cell phone communication.Data obtain from cell phones and SIM cards are useful and meaningful because it can help investigators connect individuals who may have been collaborating or cooperating about a criminal activity; for instance, in the scenario of drug trafficking and/or terrorism events. In situations such as these where the data is not standalone, the visualization of this information is of high importance. Law enforcement officials must be able to not only collect data from cell phones but also understand the big picture; in other words, to determine how the data is connected and correlated to better draw conclusions about crimes and other topics of forensic interest. A good data visualization tool would allow them to make connections they otherwise might not have seen. While there exist many forensic tools for mobile phone data collection, the current software available to transform this information into a meaningful presentation is limited. To this effect, this research aims at addressing the need to create a mobile forensic tool that involves semantic data analysis to provide real-time data visualization information.

Social media has brought about a new communication landscape and this has far reaching implications for higher education and academic practice. With this comes a need for a sound governance structure, and this paper aims to investigate the prevalence and content of social media policies within the UK higher education environment. Governance documents from all publicly funded universities were gathered and analyzed for accessibility through readability statistics, and a thematic analysis of the content compared to the main themes from the current body of literature pertaining to social media policies. The results suggest that a large proportion of UK institutions lack an explicit social media governance document and those that do exist score reasonably high on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and SMOG readability measures. The content suggests that whilst higher education institutions are providing guidance for use of social media at work, little direction is provided for the use of social media for work. The paper then concludes by considering issues for policy implementation within the UK higher education environment.

This paper outlines the development of Fake News and seeks to clarify different perspectives regarding the term within Social Media communication. Current information systems, such as Social Media platforms, allow real-time communication, enabling people to produce and spread false information and rumors within a few seconds, potentially reaching a wide audience. This, in turn, could have negative impacts on politics, society, and business. To demystify Fake News and create a common understanding, we analyzed the literature on Fake News and summarized existing articles as well as strategies tested to detect Fake News. We conclude that detection methods mostly perform binary classifications based on linguistic features without providing explanations or further information to the user.

Bosnia-Herzegovina (BH) and its entity Republika Srpska (RS) are among the most fragile democratic environments in Europe. In the first phase of our long-term participatory design case study, we engaged the some of the main activists in BH/RS, providing a structured picture of their practices in recent years, concrete needs and the various constraints under which they act. Our research highlighted importance and utilization of the social media for the activism in the region, but also problems such as limited budgets and know-how of the activists, intensive outsourcing practices, and a lack of awareness regarding data privacy and cyber security. Due to the perspective of BH/RS, the rising number of threats and impact incidents, and activist experiences from other unstable regions, we propose a more structured approach to privacy and security within activist circles and non-profit organizations. As the initial step in the second phase of our study, we offered a prototype of the free web application “CyberActivist” to BH/RS activists for user tests. Based on their qualitative feedback we defined the functional and non-functional requirements on further improvement of this privacy and security awareness tool. In the next phase, we will technically address their direct feedback, as well as design recommendations from relevant research and user experience literature. We also plan to propose design method improvements, design corresponding privacy and security trainings and to further internationalize the tool.

Social media offers both very small companies and the Fortune 500 a variety of benefits in communication within the company as well as in dealing with customers, suppliers and business partners. At the same time, the integration of social media into everyday business life presents new challenges for companies. From an interdisciplinary point of view, this article is intended to give an overview of some negative factors that can arise through the use of social media in companies. In this context, the focus is on the negative effects on sexual harassment at work and the prevention of unethical behavior in companies.