One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing theoretical and empirical literature on optimal aggregation. This literature suggests that sequential voting will promote herding---the tendency for individuals to copy the decisions of others around them---and hence lead to suboptimal content recommendation. Is there a problem with our practice, or a problem with our theory? Previous attempts at answering this question have been limited by a lack of objective measurements of content quality. Quality is typically defined endogenously as the popularity of content in absence of social influence. The flaw of this metric is its presupposition that the preferences of the crowd are aligned with underlying quality. Domains in which content quality can be defined exogenously and measured objectively are thus needed in order to better assess the design choices of social recommendation systems. In this work, we look to the domain of education, where content quality can be measured via how well students are able to learn from the material presented to them. Through a behavioral experiment involving a simulated massive open online course (MOOC) run on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we show that sequential voting systems can surface better content than systems that elicit independent votes.
There are a number of avenues of research in computational social science related to our study. Our work is related to the large literature on identifying content quality, which primarily strives to develop automated techniques for quality prediction in online settings. One way to identify the quality of content is based on the contributor's reputation and past work @cite_20 @cite_12 . Specific content features can also be used, such as the inclusion of references to external resources, the length, the utility or the verifiability @cite_9 @cite_13 @cite_5 . Another growing related area involves popularity prediction @cite_2 @cite_28 @cite_14 , which also strives to quantify the effect of social influence on popularity @cite_7 @cite_15 @cite_26 . Other work has examined the impact of social influence on various online user behaviors more generally @cite_0 @cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_24 @cite_3 . Our work contributes to these areas by identifying the effect that social influence has on the discovery of high quality content in a domain where quality can be objectively defined.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_24 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_20 @cite_13 @cite_12
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In this paper, we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background—16 postdoctoral researchers and 16 students—who were asked to solve a task on searching related work to a given topic. The exploratory search task was performed in a 10-min time slot. The use of certain search activities is measured and compared to gaze data recorded with an eye tracking device. We use a novel tree graph representation to visualise the users’ search patterns and introduce a way to combine multiple search session trees. The tree graph representation is capable of creating one single tree for multiple users and identifying common search patterns. In addition, the information behaviour of students and postdoctoral researchers is being compared. The results show that search activities on the stratagem level are frequently utilised by both user groups. The most heavily used search activities were keyword search, followed by browsing through references and citations, and author searching. The eye tracking results showed an intense examination of documents metadata, especially on the level of citations and references. When comparing the group of students and postdoctoral researchers, we found significant differences regarding gaze data on the area of the journal name of the seed document. In general, we found a tendency of the postdoctoral researchers to examine the metadata records more intensively with regard to dwell time and the number of fixations. By creating combined session trees and deriving subtrees from those, we were able to identify common patterns like economic (explorative) and exhaustive (navigational) behaviour. Our results show that participants utilised multiple search strategies starting from the seed document, which means that they examined different paths to find related publications. We live in a computerized and networked society where many of our actions leave a digital trace and affect other people’s actions. This has lead to the emergence of a new data-driven research field: mathematical methods of computer science, statistical physics and sociometry provide insights on a wide range of disciplines ranging from social science to human mobility. A recent important discovery is that search engine traffic (i.e., the number of requests submitted by users to search engines on the www) can be used to track and, in some cases, to anticipate the dynamics of social phenomena. Successful examples include unemployment levels, car and home sales, and epidemics spreading. Few recent works applied this approach to stock prices and market sentiment. However, it remains unclear if trends in financial markets can be anticipated by the collective wisdom of on-line users on the web. Here we show that daily trading volumes of stocks traded in NASDAQ-100 are correlated with daily volumes of queries related to the same stocks. In particular, query volumes anticipate in many cases peaks of trading by one day or more. Our analysis is carried out on a unique dataset of queries, submitted to an important web search engine, which enable us to investigate also the user behavior. We show that the query volume dynamics emerges from the collective but seemingly uncoordinated activity of many users. These findings contribute to the debate on the identification of early warnings of financial systemic risk, based on the activity of users of the www. This paper intends to provide some insights of a scientific problem: how likely one's interests can be inferred from his her social connections -- friends, friends' friends, 3-degree friends, etc? Is "Birds of a Feather Flocks Together" a norm? We do not consider the friending activity on online social networking sites. Instead, we conduct this study by implementing a privacy-preserving large distribute social sensor system in a large global IT company to capture the multifaceted activities of 30,000+ people, including communications (e.g., emails, instant messaging, etc) and Web 2.0 activities (e.g., social bookmarking, file sharing, blogging, etc). These activities occupy the majority of employees' time in work, and thus, provide a high quality approximation to the real social connections of employees in the workplace context. In addition to such "informal networks", we investigated the "formal networks", such as their hierarchical structure, as well as the demographic profile data such as geography, job role, self-specified interests, etc. Because user ID matching across multiple sources on the Internet is very difficult, and most user activity logs have to be anonymized before they are processed, no prior studies could collect comparable multifaceted activity data of individuals. That makes this study unique. In this paper, we present a technique to predict the inference quality by utilizing (1) network analysis and network autocorrelation modeling of informal and formal networks, and (2) regression models to predict user interest inference quality from network characteristics. We verify our findings with experiments on both implicit user interests indicated by the content of communications or Web 2.0 activities, and explicit user interests specified in user profiles. We demonstrate that the inference quality prediction increases the inference quality of implicit interests by 42.8 , and inference quality of explicit interests by up to 101 . The emergence of social media has created new ways to publish scientific work, foster collaboration, and build professional connections in the research community. The rich data collected in social media platforms has provided new opportunities for assessing scholars' impact other than the traditional citation-based approach. In this paper, we investigate the measures of scholars' influence in academic social media platforms, taking both academic and social impact into account. A real-life dataset collected from Mendeley is used to apply different influence metrics. We first assess the academic influence of scholars based on the scientific impact of their publications using three different measures. Then we investigate their social influence using network centrality metrics. The experiments show that top influencers with high academic impact tend to be senior scholars with many coauthors. Furthermore, academic influence and social influence measures do not strongly correlate with each other, and thus scholars with high academic impact are not necessarily influential from a social point of view. Adding the social dimension could enhance the traditional impact metrics that only take academic influence into account.