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Two papers got accepted for ACM WebSci’23

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Two of our latest works got accepted for the 15th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci’23)!

Web Science is an interdisciplinary field to study socio-technical systems, particularly on the web, and ACM WebSci is the premier conference for Web Science research.

“Political Honeymoon Effect on Social Media: Characterizing Social Media Reaction to the Changes of Prime Minister in Japan” by Kunihiro Miyazaki (The University of Tokyo, postdoctoral researcher at CNetS from March 1), Taichi Murayama (Osaka University), Akira Matsui (Yokohama National University), Masaru Nishikawa (Tsuda University), Takayuki Uchiba (Sugakubunka), Haewoon Kwak (Associate Professor of Informatics at IU Luddy), and Jisun An (Assistant Professor of Informatics at IU Luddy)

In this study, we examine how social media users respond to changes in political leadership to understand the honeymoon effect in politics better. In particular, we constructed a 15-year Twitter dataset on eight change timings of Japanese prime ministers consisting of 6.6M tweets and analyzed them in terms of sentiments, topics, and users.

“Wearing Masks Implies Refuting Trump?: Towards Target-specific User Stance Prediction across Events in COVID-19 and US Election 2020” by Hong Zhang (Singapore Management University), Haewoon Kwak (Associate Professor of Informatics at IU Luddy), Wei Gao (Singapore Management University), and Jisun An (Assistant Professor of Informatics at IU Luddy).

In this work, we look into an individual’s stance on three seemingly independent but related controversial topics: wearing masks, racial equality, and Donald Trump. These topics correspond to one’s behavior in three events that happened in 2020: mask adoption, racial unrest, and US Election. Our goal is to investigate how one’s behavior in a target event is associated with their behaviors in other related events, which we call connected behavior, beyond the context of COVID-19, and ultimately, predict one’s future behavior given their previous behaviors.

The conference will be Co-located with The Web Conference, Austin, Texas, USA, from April 30th to May 1st.

AI, Society and Organizations

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On the 7th of March 2019, CNETS Professor Luis Rocha will participate in a panel organized by Nova SBE’s Executive Education, Instituto Gulbenkian da Ciência and ISI Foundation with the theme of AI, society and organisations: experiences from applied projects in governments, companies and NGO’s, where the role of data science in today’s world will be discussed.

Other guest speakers, include Rayid Ghani, director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy in the University of Chicago, founder of the Data Science for Social Good fellowship and Chief Scientist at the Obama for America 2012, Daniela Paolotti, Ciro Cattuto, Joana Gonçalves-Sá and Leid Zejnilovic.

Art-Science Installation Musical Morphogenesis

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‘Musical Morphogenesis’ is an interactive installation that translates to sound, movement and lights the dynamics behind the development of petals in a flower. It is a collaborative piece developed by designers, architects, musicians and scientists in Luis Rocha‘s CASCI group. The control of this robotic “macroscope” is an implementation of the gene regulatory network of the Thaliana Arabidopsis flower. The installation provides a sensorial exploration of the dynamics between genes and proteins that leads to organ formation in plants, namely sepals, stamen, and petals. The genetic network provides an interactive “genetic soundtrack” that allows visitors to control the development of the plant towards its wild-type or mutant states. The installation has been on display at various museums such as the Science Museum in Lisbon, Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Belém ArtFest. This week it will be displayed at Dia D Ligações – Gulbenkian Foundation.