Search

Emotion detection and Sentiment analysis techniques are used to understand polarity or emotions expressed by people in many cases, especially during interactive systems use. Recognizing users' emotions is an important topic for human–computer interaction. Computers that recognize emotions would provide more natural interactions. Also, emotion detection helps design human-centred systems that provide adaptable behaviour change interventions based on users' emotions. The growing capability of machine learning to analyze big data and extract emotions therein has led to a surge in research in this domain. With this increased attention, it becomes essential to investigate this research area and provide a comprehensive review of the current state. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of 123 papers on machine learning-based emotion detection to investigate research trends along many themes, including machine learning approaches, application domain, data, evaluation, and outcome. The results demonstrate: 1) increasing interest in this domain, 2) supervised machine learning (namely, SVM and Naïve Bayes) are the most popular algorithms, 3) Text datasets in the English language are the most common data source, and 4) most research use Accuracy to evaluate performance. Based on the findings, we suggest future directions and recommendations for developing human-centred systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) interruptions are a common feature of people's work activity. In studying interruptions, researchers can understand how people manage and co-ordinate their work when faced with multiple, often competing, demands. However, CMC interruptions are characteristically different from each other and impact people's work performance in different ways. In this theoretical paper, we define and differentiate between computer-mediated communication (CMC) interruptions, according to the level of control people are able to exert over an interruption at different points in the delivery timeline. Informed by the extant interruptions literature and Action Regulation Theory, a classification framework is provided, to help researchers and work designers distinguish which types of real-world CMC interruption are more or less disruptive, based on levels of control. Using the developed framework, two key research propositions are made, which we encourage future research to attend to. Unique contributions and implications of this paper are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines creators' contributions and the incentive effects of users' feedback, including upvoting, sharing, commenting, following, viewing comments, and clicking on the creators' homepage. We build a negative binomial and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model using data from a Chinese music streaming company NetEase Cloud Music. Results show that creators' number of content contributions is positively affected by the number of users' commenting, viewing comments, sharing, and clicking on homepage behaviors. On the other hand, users' upvotes and sharing behaviors can significantly influence the quality of content published by creators. Moreover, we find that the intensity level of creators has moderate effects on such influence. These findings help the researchers better understand creators' behaviors and community managers to build user-generated content (UGC) communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents key aspects that designers and Human–Computer Interaction practitioners might encounter when designing multimodal interaction for older adults, focusing on the trade-offs that might occur as part of the design process. The paper gathers literature on multimodal interaction and assistive technology, and describes a set of design challenges specific for older users. Building on these main design challenges, four trade-offs in the design of multimodal technology for this target group are presented and discussed. To highlight the relevance of the trade-offs in the design process of multimodal technology for older adults, two of the four reported trade-offs are illustrated with two user studies that investigate mid-air and speech-based interaction with a tablet device. The first study explores the design trade-offs related to redundant multimodal commands in older, middle-aged and younger adults, whereas the second one investigates the design choices related to the definition of a set of mid-air one-hand gestures and voice input commands for older adults. Further reflections highlight the design trade-offs that such considerations bring in the process, providing an overview of the design choices involved and of their potential consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing importance of social media in conflicts and crises is accompanied by an ever-increasing research interest in the crisis informatics field in order to identify potential benefits and develop measures against the technology's abuse. This special issue sets out to give an overview of current research on the use of social media in conflicts and crises. In doing so, it focuses on both good and malicious aspects of social media and includes a variety of papers of conceptual, theoretical and empirical nature. In six sections, the special issue presents an overview of the field, analytical methods, technical challenges, current advancements and the accepted papers before concluding. Specific topics range from cyber deception over information trustworthiness to mining and near-real-time processing of social media data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excessive use of personal social media has become prevalent in the work environment and has caused significant psychological and behavioural problems among employees. These problems call for in-depth study. In this paper, we develop a usage experience–stressor–strain model to examine the consequences of excessive social media usage behaviour of employees at work, revealing the effects of different excessive usage patterns (i.e. social, hedonic, and cognitive) on employees' psychological state (i.e. emotional exhaustion) and behavioural outcome (i.e. job performance) through dimensions of social media overload (i.e. information, communication, and social). We empirically test the research model with a survey of 422 employees who use social media at work. Our analysis presents that excessive social use at work is the major predictor of dimensions of overload. Furthermore, in contrast to the single effect of communication overload on emotional exhaustion and social overload on job performance, information overload has a significant impact on both emotional exhaustion and job performance of employees. This study advances our understanding of the complex relationships between excessive usage patterns, overload, emotional exhaustion, and job performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing tendency for users to expect conversational agents (CAs) to recognise social cues and follow interpersonal communication principles to enhance their subjective evaluation. Therefore, this paper studies how personal pronouns should be used by CAs in response to users. We conducted a 3 (CAs' personal pronoun) × 3 (users' personal pronoun) × 2 (participants'gender) mixed design. this study used mixed methods based on an experimental design, including ratings, forced choices and interviews, for mutual confirmation. The findings indicate that first, users prefer that CAs use second-person pronouns. Second, there is also turn-taking and convergence tendency between users and CAs in personal pronoun use. Third, there are gender differences in personal pronoun preferences and relationship positions toward CAs. These results can inform personalised voice interaction and humanlike design and help build closer relationships between users and CAs in future human–computer interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study about communicability of conversational interfaces (namely chatbots) under a semiotic perspective. A chatbot is a software system that allows you to simulate real conversations between devices and users by means of a conversational interface (CI). After introducing the chatbot concept, focusing on its advantages and issues, we will present two domains of use in which chatbot interfaces can be effective: healthcare and smart home. For carrying out simple tasks such as finding information or triggering operations, users need an easy-to-use and to an easy-to-learn system to communicate with. To face this, conversational interfaces represent the latest trend in the field of digital design. For studying the communicability aspects of a CI, we carried out a user test to compare traditional and chatbot interfaces. This paper aims at evaluating the benefits at the communicability level of a chatbot in comparison to traditional GUI for incrementing the effectiveness and efficacy of communication between users and the system specifically for users with poor attitude in using technologies. In details, we evaluated the communicability of two prototypes that can be used to solve simple tasks in order to favour user inclusion, including everyone with very little exposure to technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary school curricula teach children conversation norms for promoting positive social interactions, such as turn-taking and turn reserving, while curricula discourage other aspects of conversations, such as overlapping in turns. However such norms are abstract and difficult to master. Recently, interactive tangible solutions (briefly, tangibles) have been used to sustain the scaffolding of conversation norms. This paper continues this line of investigation. It discusses how meta-design and action research complement each other and tackle trade-offs in designing tangibles for conversations in primary schools. It reports on the emergence and genesis of tangibles for class conversation, named ClassTalk. Then it focusses on usages and actions with ClassTalk in 2018 in primary school classes, and it discusses them in relation to children's and teachers' engagement and usages of tangibles. It concludes by reflecting on the entire experience, and considers trade-offs and lessons learnt for meta-design and action research, as well as for the design of such tangibles per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant proportion of smartphone notifications are indicative of human behaviour (e.g. delivery updates for purchased items, physical activity summaries, and notification of updates to subscribed content). However, present attempts to understand human behaviour from smartphone traces typically focus on sensors such as location, accelerometer and proximity, overlooking the potential for notifications as a valuable data source. In this paper, we propose a general framework that provides end-to-end processing of notifications to understand behavioural aspects. We realise the framework with an implementation that tackles the specific use case of establishing prior buying behaviour from associated notifications. To evaluate the framework and implementation, we conduct a longitudinal user study in which we collect more than 250, 000 notifications, from twelve users, over an average of three months. We apply knowledge-based and machine learning techniques to those notifications to assess the tasks of the proposed framework. The results show a substantial difference in the performance between the methods used to extract behavioural features from the collected notifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of users' personality traits and emotions expressed through textual communications on YouTube to detect cyberbullying using a series of ensemble classifiers. Personality traits were determined using the Big Five model whereas emotions were based on Ekman's basic emotion theory. Annotated YouTube textual comments in English (N = 5152; i.e. 2576 number of bullying versus 2576 non-bullying instances) were used to detect cyberbullying incidents using several ensemble classifiers, including Random Forest and AdaBoost. Performance metrics revealed both personality traits and emotion to significantly improve the identification of cyberbullying presence, with accuracy and F-score values of more than 95%. Further fine-grained analysis revealed anger and openness to be more profound compared to other emotions and personalities. Further, neurotic individuals tend to be driven to cyberbullying by joy, disgust and fear. The findings show that personality and emotions play pertinent roles in cyberbullying, and the identification of specific traits and emotions can help in designing a more strategic intervention programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networking sites and apps (SNSAs) are being used more frequently across the world and yet the nature of this online environment and associated interactions are not fully understood. With no restrictions for SNSAs use related to specific geographical regions, language, age, gender, educational level, or any other factors, it is important to find a concept to describe and explain the components of this online environment and their relationships. This paper describes the environment of SNSAs use by Saudi postgraduate students from the perspective of second-generation activity theory (AT). The findings supported the theoretical framework of AT as a useful lens in understanding SNSAs use from the perspective of students, particularly in a cultural environment where physical communication has restrictions based on gender. A similar AT model can be drawn for the use of SNSAs, taking the perspective of different groups of academic users. The flexibility of the AT model appears at the level of SNSAs as technical and physical tools, and at the level of users' community, which was managed by the explicit and implicit rules relating to communication. This feature reveals the way in which this extended framework can be used to indicate pertinent features of SNSAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has established that leaders in information and communication technology (ICT) are crucial for establishing a user-centred systems design perspective in ICT for work-related tasks. This paper therefore describes the perspectives of 18 ICT leaders in three kinds of leadership roles (managers, project leaders and specialists) in order to understand their views of user-centred systems design concerning ICT. It uses the concept of technological frames of reference to analyse three domains: technology-in-use, technology strategy and nature of technology. The results show that many specialists see user involvement as a critical factor in successfully establishing new information and communication technologies, but that these systems are currently built around the needs of management rather than end users. Looking forward, all three relevant social groups are optimistic about how ICT will become more user-centred and more strategically aligned in the future. However, changes in ICT are described as extremely energy-consuming and difficult – akin to 'walking in the jungle with a machete'. Finally, we discuss the relevance of technological frames and present some implications for the successful establishment of user-centred system design as a perspective in organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For organisations utilising big data platforms, knowledge sharing helps spread contextualised information of data, increases efficiencies and reduces the cost of lost knowledge when employees leave. Query-Driven Knowledge Sharing Systems (QKSS) partially automate knowledge sharing in analytics teams by building context into data, enabling the reuse of complex queries. Although QKSS can improve knowledge sharing, encouraging reuse behaviour is a significant issue for adoption. This paper analyses the applicability of gamification for improving knowledge reuse in QKSS. In collaboration with a Sydney-based data analytics firm, we recruited professional data analysts to participate in an experiment. The recruited analysts were asked to complete Structured Query Language tasks using either the firm's QKSS platform or a gamified version which included a small number of gamified elements designed to increase the likelihood of query reuse. The results demonstrate the positive impact of gamification on query reuse and the efficiency of tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major issue in the digital age is how to safeguard the security of the massive amount of data being stored, processed and transferred through digital channels. Organisational communication research into data security shows that people are the weakest link. Non-compliant behaviour can lead to security breaches. Existing studies have focused above all on how employees can be motivated to comply with data security procedures. However, focusing on desirable behaviour does not explain why people often ignore security regulations. In addition, existing research tends to focus primarily on self-reported attitudes and perceptions, which can give a distorted impression of people's actual behaviour. In this paper, we address these issues by combining individual, habitual and situational factors to explain non-compliant behaviour in a vignette study, using SmartPLS to analyse survey data from 651 subjects in a large Dutch government organisation. The results indicate that bad habits play a significant role in non-compliant behaviour. This behaviour is fuelled by situational factors like time pressure, while a lack of self-efficacy also increases non-compliant behaviour. Based on these results, a communication strategy that addresses bad habits in a situational context may provide an alternative way to improve people's compliant behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underlying mechanism of the community climate on knowledge-sharing intention in virtual communities. Based on social cognitive theory, a theoretical model was developed and empirically tested using a web-based survey of 525 members from an online question and answer (Q&A) community in China. Results showed that knowledge-sharing self-efficacy and outcome expectation played a chain mediation role in the relationship between the community climate and knowledge-sharing intention. This study is among the first to examine whether and how community climate influences knowledge sharing. Our research findings unpack the mechanism of the community climate on knowledge-sharing intention, and provide practical insights on how to use community climate to facilitate users to share knowledge in online Q&A communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main features of the Scrum process are intense communication between different stakeholders, and rapid feedback based on regular delivery of working software. The integration of traditional user-centred evaluation activities in this context is challenging. Hence, this paper presents an interview study of 21 informants, categorised in four different professional roles. The main contribution of the paper is an overview of the types of user-centred evaluation conducted by information technology professionals in various Scrum projects. Results show that various forms of feedback are indeed gathered on the usability and user experience of the software, system or service being developed. However, the user-centred evaluations conducted typically are informal with few users, gathering empirical qualitative data and performed during short unplanned sessions. Performance measurements gathering quantitative data are seldom used. The informants in the business specialist role merely ask users about their opinion, whereas the other roles use several user-centred evaluation activities to gather feedback on their design. Generally, feedback is gathered throughout the whole project, but often evaluation is conducted early in the project or even before the actual development starts. Finally, these results are discussed in relation to previous studies in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Individuals share a diversity of content on social media for a variety of reasons. Research has often described and explained disclosure via the application of a subjective cost–benefit analysis framed around reciprocity, suggesting that people communicate selfishly motivated by the expectation of receiving something in return. This paper investigates the moderating effects of tie strength and interpersonal trust on the relationship between expected reciprocity and intensity of communication between two social media connections. A Facebook application presented participants with a random set of their friends and asked them to rate their friendships in terms of these values. Overall, 90 participants rated 1728 friendships, while the application collected 11 activity variables depicting the actual communication that has taken place in each pair of connections. A principal component analysis was used to distinguish between text- and photograph-related communication, and two moderated multiple regressions were conducted to establish the moderating effects. The results show significant moderating effects of tie strength and trust on the communication around photographs, but not around text. This study contributes to communication research by explicating the ways that tie strength and trust affect patterns of communication on social media. Implications for social media researchers and designers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The true self is one of the essential parts of people's self-concept and identity, but it is not easily expressed in face-to-face communications. On the Internet, people can express what they intrinsically think and believe with fewer concerns about others' disapproval and judgments. Increasingly more researchers have started to investigate people's expression of the true self in the online context. However, the existing research is quite diverse and fragmented. A rigorous and comprehensive review of the emerging literature is called for. The present study conducted a systematic literature review to examine what is already known about the expression of the true self online. This paper analysed the selected studies on the basis of research contexts, research methods, and research themes. Our review offers readers an easy access to the current status of research in this field; it also provides some insightful suggestions for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during conflicts and crises. Social media allow emergency services to reach the public easily in the context of crisis communication and receive valuable information (e.g. pictures) from social media data. However, the vast amount of data generated during large-scale incidents can lead to issues of information overload and quality. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes the semi-automatic creation of alerts including keyword, relevance and information quality filters based on cross-platform social media data. We conducted empirical studies and workshops with emergency services across Europe to raise requirements, then iteratively designed and implemented an approach to support emergency services, and performed multiple evaluations, including live demonstrations and field trials, to research the potentials of social media-based alerts. Finally, we present the findings and implications based on semi-structured interviews with emergency services, highlighting the need for usable configurability and white-box algorithm representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet technology has flourished in India keeping pace with other developing countries. In keeping pace with this advancement, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is also spreading in India. Government of India (GOI) has realised IoT's business prospect and published draft policy on IoT in 2015. To achieve a better result, the prospective users are required to be kept aware regarding the prospect of IoT and for this, social media is expected to play a pivotal role. Social media can highlight advantages of IoT and in turn, these advantages would be made known to other potential users through Word of Month (WOM). This would bring in projection of a new business paradigm as contemplated by GOI. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting actual use of IoT by the potential users of India and to develop a conceptual model. The model has been verified through survey with inputs from 208 participants identified from three metropolitan cities of India. The responses have been quantified through 5-Point Likert scale. The result shows the implication that social media and WOM almost equally influence Indians to use IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication in Online Distance Learning courses revolves around two distinct forms: synchronous and asynchronous. A lot of work has been already developed focused on better understanding the roles that each of these forms of communication plays in Distance Learning and to which extent they are sufficient to provide rich and in-depth interaction experience for students and professors. The present paper focuses on better understanding the perceptions of Online Distance Learning students and supervisors about communication tools available for them during the Final Year Project supervision (FYP). A total of 262 students and 62 professors were surveyed about their impressions related to three different aspects of communication during FYP distance supervision: preferences for one form of communication over the other (synchronous versus asynchronous), appropriateness of both forms of communication to different types of discussions, and the sufficiency of these forms of communication as the sole forms of communication in the FYP discipline. Among other things, results point out an explicit preference from students and supervisors for using the asynchronous form throughout the discipline (even though the synchronous form also received good ratings). Moreover, both forms of communication were more used by students and supervisors for the discussion of academic and important topics. At last, both students and supervisors consider distance supervision as efficient as face-to-face supervision, and less experienced students consider more important to have face-to-face meetings with their supervisors than more experienced students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) is challenging, especially for learners, as ICT control most of their work environment. These learners need to be supported with solutions that are up-to-date with the technological challenges, and can keep up with the fast-paced evolving ICT. Acquiring new knowledge is important for the progress of learners, but it is getting harder to obtain with the overwhelming amount of resources produced by many Information Systems (ISs) in the learning environment. In order to help learners manage resources, we are following the approach of System of Information Systems (SoIS) to support learners. The SoIS gives the opportunity to explore how individual and organisational learning can be enhanced through a combination of different ISs in the learning environment. In this context, we look into the orchestration of SoIS that can provide the ability to index, share, annotate, and recommend important resources in the learning environment. In that sense, this paper presents the approach of SoIS to support learners with a case study at the University of Technology of Compiègne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of immersive virtual reality (VR) can be considered as a communication process between human beings, mediated by computer systems, which uses visualisation and other sensory stimulation. In this paper, we analyse how VR characteristics can be explored using semiotic theory and, with methods of generative semiotics, we explore aspects of narrative and interaction in VR. We propose a semiotic analysis of VR communication focusing on syntax, semantics and pragmatics and considering also some principles of generative semiotics. The syntactic level is analysed as determined by the characteristics of the visual communication adopted. The semantic of VR is related to the functional model chosen to realise the virtual system. The pragmatic of VR is based on the human–computer interaction that changes the user's role. We explore how these aspects can be characterised in the context of VR communication design and what principles can be adopted for a VR application, and we present an analysis and a classification of the iconic signs that are being used in VR. Moreover, we present a framework that can be used to classify and describe different kinds of virtual reality systems and to better understand communication in VR, and we use it to classify eight popular systems for e-learning and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including ephemeral media platforms, visual discrimination of color intensity, and cognitive factors that must be considered when designing systems to improve decision-making based on large amounts of data.

The required skills for medical personnel in surgical operating rooms are not confined to medical and technical expertise. To understand how scrub nurses perform their critical role, cognitive, social, and collaborative skills are at the centre of interest. To navigate in a life-critical environment and react both appropriately and in a timely manner to the surgeon's actions, nurses need to have a fast and accurate understanding of the situation. We present how this reading of the situation is conducted during microsurgeries, where a surgical microscope takes a central role in the treatment. We employed contextual observation, gaze-tracking, video recordings, and interviews to describe the reliance of the surgeons' work on the microscope, as well as the situation-understanding strategies of the nurses in such a setting. Also, we present pieces of evidence of anticipation strategies that the nurses exploit in the face of challenges due to the main surgeon's lack of attention toward them because of the constant use of the microscope. To ameliorate these circumstances, the scrub nurse proactively employs a set of mechanisms to obtain and maintain situation awareness. Lastly, we present the implications of future technologies for operating rooms aiming to improve collaborative microsurgical work and patient safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated vehicles (AVs) enable driver-passengers to perform non-driving related tasks (NDRTs). However, it remains unclear if and how they would engage with NDRTs. Therefore, we developed a questionnaire on NDRTs, the QNDRT, for SAE Level 3 (L3) and 5 (L5) driving automation. It comprises 24 items with a general NDRT Work subscale querying general aspects of working while driving in an AV (8 items; L3: 4 items, L5: 4) and a specific NDRT Communication subscale assessing different communication modalities (16 items; L3: 8, L5: 8). Hence, we carried out a cross-sectional questionnaire study and queried 725 participants (351 female, 374 male) from 18 to 96 years. We applied factor analyses and extracted a stable unidimensional factor structure for both NDRT subscales with good psychometric properties (e.g. high and clear factor loadings; satisfactory communalities, item discrimination, and internal consistency). The initial findings revealed that significantly smaller values were assigned to both subscale factors by participants older than 55 years in contrast to younger ones and by women when compared to men. The QNDRT can be used in future (quasi-)experimental L3 and L5 studies and in population surveys to obtain more insight into working and communicating while driving in an AV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising prominence of social media coupled with a myriad of recent developments in the built-in features has allowed users to instantly share news both within and across their social networks, making news-sharing a savvy trend. Additionally, these platforms have enabled users to share news critical to social and civic responsibilities, as well as political news critical to healthy socio-political function. Given the prominence of citizen-driven digital journalism, even ordinary users and passive receivers of information have a powerful voice in modern society, making news-sharing on social media a significant phenomenon spanning across social, economic, and political boundaries. News-sharing behaviour on social media demands further empirical investigation, especially with respect to the roles of online civic engagement and social influences. Drawing upon Elaboration Likelihood Model and Social Influence Theory, this study proposes a research model to explore individuals' news-sharing behaviour and validates the proposed research model using empirical data collected by a survey of 513 active social media users. Findings confirm that online news quality, news source credibility, perception of online civic engagement, perceived influence on others, and social influence play a crucial role in users' news-sharing behaviours. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily stand-up meetings (DSMs) are the most popular technique in agile methodologies and are deemed crucial for communication among the individual agile software developers to perform. Only a handful of studies in the past have shown the effect of the characteristics of DSMs on the attitude of agile developers. Little is known about how agile developers experience DSMs in their roles as junior/senior developers, and what feelings evoke these experiences. The purpose of this study was to describe and interpret agile developers' lived experiences with DSMs in their diverse roles. We conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study with 19 professional agile developers. The lived experiences across the interviews revealed as an interaction between four categories: rationalising irrelevancy of DSMs, experiencing challenges with DSMs, conflicted opinion on the advantages of DSMs, and finding solutions. Developers experienced DSMs were too short to facilitate clear problem identification, or solve problems, or have a meaningful outcome. Senior developers experienced DSMs differently than junior developers in terms of sharing information, interest in other's work, monitoring progress, and facilitating decision making. Based on these findings, we discuss the theoretical contributions of our study, and offer recommendations for practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question: Is social media activity related to layers of intimacy in social relationships? Study design: Mixed methods, survey on social relationships with 30 participants who identified up to 20 best/close friends and their use of social media. The same 30 participants were interviewed to gather details of how they communicated with close and best friends, and how they used social media/CMC to maintain their social relationships. Analysis: communication frequency, content and rationale were classified according to the intimacy of relationships between the ego and recipients as best or close friends. Results: Communication with best friends was either face to face or by conversational media (phone, text) in both normal use and emergencies. Emotional support and intimate topics dominated these exchanges. Communication with close friends used broadcast social media (Facebook), text and phone. Face to Face (FtF), phone and text were preferred by the majority of participants for social relationship maintenance. Implications: Dyadic (person to person) communication face to face and via social media, phone and text are vital to provide social and emotional support in intimate social relationships. Social media in particular Facebook broadcast functions play a role in supporting awareness of both intimate and less intimate social relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, work, pleasure, entertainment, social interactions, and meetings have shifted online. The conversations on social media have spiked, and given the uncertainties and new policies, COVID-19 remains the trending topic on all such platforms, including Twitter. This research explores the factors that affect COVID-19 content-sharing by Twitter users. The analysis was conducted using 57,000 plus tweets that mentioned COVID-19 and related keywords. The tweets were subjected to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques like Topic modelling, Named Entity-Relationship, Emotion & Sentiment analysis, and Linguistic feature extraction. These methods generated features that could help explain the retweet count of the tweets. The results indicate that tweets with named entities (person, organisation, and location), expression of negative emotions (anger, disgust, fear, and sadness), reference to mental health, optimistic content, and greater length have higher chances of being shared (retweeted). On the other hand, tweets with more hashtags and user mentions are less likely to be shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With technology being ubiquitous in our daily lives, it is crucial to understand the factors that influence their perceived credibility. In the current research, we focus on the design of Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNSs). In order to facilitate continuous adoption and use of ASNSs, it is important to understand the factors that determine their Perceived Credibility. Using the Persuasive System Design (PSD) framework as a foundation, the study investigated which of these four key constructs (i.e. Perceived Aesthetics, Perceived Usability, Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Primary Task Support) are the most relevant determinants of the Perceived Credibility of ASNSs. In an online survey, the current research assessed this research model. The results of Partial Least Square analyses confirmed that Perceived Aesthetics, Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Primary Task Support are determinants of Perceived Credibility but provided no evidence for Perceived Usability as a determinant. Moreover, the results showed that Perceived Primary Task Support was the most relevant determinant of Perceived Credibility. Implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pervasive social networking sites (SNSs) access has forced people to pay continuous attention to the overwhelming volume of information which ultimately increases their usage. The extensive use of SNSs has contributed to the overuse of technology and that can lead to overload which may produce negative behavioural consequences. This study used cognitive load theory as foundation of the model to examine the effect of overloads and discontinuous intentions incorporating SNS addiction, social media self-efficacy and SNS fatigue. To test the proposed model and hypothesis, a total of 371 Chinese university students participated in the study. Findings reveal that information and communication overload exert a direct impact on SNS addiction, and the relationship between SNS addiction and discontinuous intentions amongst users is negatively significant. The moderated mediation analysis result indicates that social media self-efficacy moderates the mediating effect of SNS addiction between overloads (information and communication) and discontinuous intentions. Moreover, the relationship between SNS addiction and discontinuous intentions is partially mediated by SNS fatigue. Implications emphasise that SNS providers should effectively prevent the negative behavioural response of SNS users by providing training on the effective use of SNSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working remotely from home within lockdown conditions can have implications on wellbeing and how people perceive and interact with technology to coordinate, communicate and collaborate with others. Previous research has shown relationships amongst life satisfaction, loneliness and problematic internet use and, also, between the latter and cyber security behaviours. We re-examine these relationships during the UK COVID-19 lockdown through an online survey completed by 299 participants working from home. The survey included demographics and work conditions questions and also the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), UCLA-3 Loneliness Scale, Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire-Short Form-6 (PIUQ-SF-6), and Security Behavior Intentions Scale (SeBIS). Structural equation modelling revealed that most notably, loneliness positively predicted problematic internet use, life satisfaction negatively predicted problematic internet use and that problematic internet use negatively predicted cyber security behaviours Implications includes educational and therapeutic interventions which could be applied by employers/governing bodies to target those at risk of loneliness and problematic internet use with the hope of mitigating these experiences and improving cyber security behaviours. The current findings may be especially relevant should waves of COVID-19 or similar crisis are experienced, and when working from home becomes a norm for some organisations and jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of crowdsourcing contest through which seekers attempt to obtain creative solutions by tapping into the wisdom of crowds with a competition-based reward system, this study investigates the submission behaviour of solvers by exploring the role of contest reward and two kinds of seeker feedback. Due to the associated competition uncertainties, this study supposes that contest reward encourages submission behaviour only to a certain degree, and seeker feedback – a communication channel – is positively associated with solvers' submission behaviour. Drawing on the uncertainty reduction theory, the core contribution of this study points to a complementary relationship, in that rating feedback can mitigate the uncertainties that prevent solvers from actively submitting solutions encouraged by a high level of contest reward. An analysis of 1064 crowdsourcing contests supports the theoretical model and hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With ubiquitous, mobile computing, health care systems, and smart factories, socio-technical phenomena continue to emerge that challenge traditional design and evaluation methods. We perceive such phenomena as the intertwinement of technical artifacts and social practices. Previous work shows that there is no sufficient method to evaluate the quality of this socio-technical intertwinement. Hence, our goal was to develop socio-technical heuristics, in short ST-heuristics, that can be applied by individuals to detect issues. Drawing inspiration from the success of usability heuristics in the field of human–computer interaction, we first applied a literature review to develop an initial set of ST-heuristics derived from six domains comprising groupware/computer-support cooperative work, job design, usability, socio-technical design principles, privacy, and process design. We then conducted two studies to evaluate and improve this set using empirical data from 13 cases from health care, industry, and engineering education fields. In total, we analysed 306 problems. The results substantiate a final set of eight ST-heuristics which allow for evaluating the socio-technical intertwinement in situ. We perceive the contribution of this work as a starting point for evaluators to uncover crucial issues and to improve current practice. We discuss the developed set of ST-heuristics within existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older adults were at particular risk for loneliness during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this instance, the use of computers for communication (i.e. computer-mediated communication, CMC) may help to enhance older people's social interactions and relationships. In the present study, 113 community-dwelling users of CMC, aged 65 years and over, were surveyed in order to better understand the effects of CMC in addition to the individual characteristics contributing to patterns of online communication. An opportunity to examine the impact of the pandemic on CMC behaviours presented approximately 12 months after the initial study with 70 participants resurveyed. High levels of social functioning, in addition to good physical and psychological health, were reported by this group of digitally active users. A positive association between high CMC use and social functioning was noted, even after controlling for differences in personality, frequency of face-to-face communication, health, gender, and relationship status. Interestingly, the pandemic saw a reduction in weekly CMC use, although CMC-based behaviours remained unchanged. The present findings highlight the important role that technology has in facilitating and maintaining supports and, potentially, reducing social isolation by helping older adults stay in touch with family and friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disclosing information in help-seeking settings is important, but often, disclosure in these contexts is low due to embarrassment. Here, we examined adults' views about disclosing embarrassing information to an avatar interviewer. In Study 1, 296 adults were asked to indicate their preference to speak to an avatar or to a human about each of the 41 topics varying in degrees of embarrassment. Regardless of topic, participants indicated a higher preference for talking to a human over an avatar. In Study 2, 50 adults indicated their preference to speak to an avatar or to a human about each topic after they had experience with each kind of interviewer. Again, regardless of topic, participants indicated a higher preference for talking to a human over an avatar. In sum, the present study highlights that for communicating embarrassing topics in help-seeking settings, some people may prefer their own kind over an avatar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social commerce is an emergent business model where user-generated content is a valuable source of information that minimises the risk and ambiguity surrounding online purchase decisions. This study examines the user-generated content represented by reviews and recommendations (electronic word of mouth or eWOM) by contrasting customer (peer) vs. authority (expert) generated eWOM, from a product buying criteria perspective. Using five consumer healthcare wearable products as a benchmark, customer reviews from Amazon.com were analysed and compared with expert reviews and recommendations from Consumer Reports using machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, logistic regression, multinomial naïve Bayes, random forest and support vector machines. The findings suggest that expert reviews and recommendations remain product-centric and are not attuned to shifts in customer buying patterns, thus missing out on important product context-based usage and evaluation criteria such as operational, personal, and environmental. Considering these results, the authors discuss implications for managers and researchers, and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to provide insights concerning the effects of the ubiquitous digital environment on the way people think and the subsequent need to equip young individuals with the necessary skills. Several studies focus on defining the so-called digital skills, also providing indications that higher cognitive skills are required. However, they do not examine how young individuals could perform better to adapt to the continuously evolving digital environment. To address this gap, the study introduces and analyses the construct of digital intelligence, representing the new way of thinking and behaviour in the digital environment. For the purposes of the study, a set of tests was given to students at Greek high schools, targeting 15–16 years old students and employing original tests to assess digital intelligence. According to the findings, digital intelligence is composed of: (1) logical reasoning, algorithms, and evaluation, (2) abstraction, decomposition, and patterns and generalisation, (3) digital emotional intelligence and communication, (4) digital safety and security, and (5) digital identity, use, literacy, and rights. Assessing digital intelligence, as proposed in this study, could be used to assist vocational guidance, employee selection and evaluation, and development of revised school curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data protection regulations require that website visitors provide their informed consent before their personal data are collected. However, privacy notices are often misunderstood. We claim that the context of the notice, i.e. the visitor's action preceding their appearance, can affect its comprehension. In two studies with an ad hoc website (N = 132, 128), we either preserved the sequential connection between the notice and the action triggering it or broke it with a delay. We also manipulated the reference to the triggering action in the notice's title. The participants' comprehension, perceived comprehension, and response were measured. In a third study (N = 91), we investigated how different contexts (i.e. generic vs. specific) affect the participants' interpretation of the notice. Overall, the results suggest that the action preceding the notice affects the identification of its cause (studies 1, 2, and 3) and the interpretation of its content (study 3), whereas the explicit content of the notice does not. The acceptance of the notice does not seem to directly follow an improvement in comprehension, as would be foreseen by the transparency paradox. Considering the sequential context in which the notice appears seems then a good design practice to achieve genuine comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business collaboration in the era of digital transformation requires the exchange of operational data. Since data are hardly controllable once they have been published or shared with others, it is highly important that users are clearly informed about who has access to which data and how certain settings can prevent the disclosure of sensitive data. However, giving end users more control over their data through increased transparency could also lead to information overload. This is particularly true in the field of agriculture, where tight schedules put pressure on employees of small enterprises. We conduct an empirical prestudy with 52 German farmers to investigate current data sharing scenarios. From these insights, we derive requirements and a concept for data sharing solutions providing data flow transparency for users. To investigate the behavior of users and the effects of transparent UI controls, we evaluate a prototype with 18 persons. Our evaluation shows that farmers demand flexible and secure tools that adjust to their workflows. Also, data should be stored and processed locally, granting farmers data sovereignty. Although the controls require additional effort, the evaluated transparent controls for data disclosure are easy to use and raise user awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks are online platforms that people use for interaction, information sharing and propagation of new ideas. Finding influential users in online social networks is a significant research problem due to its vast research applications in information diffusion, marketing and advertising. The relevant literature presents several models proposed for identifying influential users in social networks. In this survey, we present a review of the most relevant studies on influential users mining in microblog networks. First, we propose a new taxonomy by classifying the influence finding algorithms into five main categories based on their underlying framework and baseline methods. Second, each study is analysed according to the proposed framework, experimental datasets, validation approaches and evaluation results. Finally, the survey concludes with discussion on applications from the relevant literature, exploring open research challenges and presenting possible future research directions. The findings of this survey indicate that influential users mining in microblogs has many applications in marketing, advertising and information diffusion. In addition, this survey can be used as a guideline, particularly by young researchers, for establishing a baseline before initiating a research or identifying attractive as well as relevant research insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the role of communication from users on dropout from digital learning systems to answer the following questions: (1) how does the sentiment within qualitative signals (user comments) affect dropout rates? (2) does the variance in the proportion of positive and negative sentiments affect dropout rates? (3) how do quantitative signals (e.g. likes) moderate the effect of the qualitative signals? and (4) how does the effect of qualitative signals on dropout rates change across early and late stages of learning? Our hypotheses draws from learning theory and self-regulation theory, and were tested using data of 447 learning videos across 32 series of online tutorials, spanning 12 different fields of learning. The findings indicate a main effect of negative sentiment on dropout rates but no effect of positive sentiment on preventing dropout behaviour. This main effect is stronger in the early stages of learning and weakens at later stages. We also observe an effect of the extent of variance of positive and negative sentiments on dropout behaviour. The effects are negatively moderated by quantitative signals. Overall, making commenting more broad-based rather than polarised can be a useful strategy in managing learning, transferring knowledge, and building consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WeChat Official Account (WCOA) is the most influential self-media platform in China, and the follower economy brought by the extension of self-media has profoundly affected its survival and development. Therefore, it is of vital importance to understand the followers' behavioural patterns and the law of quantity change of followers. To study this problem, we collected the operation data of two WCOAs. First, an evolutionary Followers-Susceptible-View-Forward-Removed (F-SVFR) model is proposed to describe the trends in the behavioural state of the followers of WCOA after accepting the pushed message. Second, we proposed an equation to simulate the number of newly increased followers and find that the number of newly increased followers of WCOA followed a similar pattern that grew rapidly in the early stages and kept a relatively low and steady rate of increase rate later on. Finally, the popularity formula is defined for the WCOA to serve as a predictor of online popularity, which demonstrated that popularity is positively correlated with the number of followers. Our study provides account operators with practical guidance, which has significance for understanding the popularity of increased official accounts and the law of quantity growth of followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have increasingly emphasised the importance of using social media for knowledge sharing in healthcare. However, few studies have explored physicians' perspectives. The present study aimed to explore the potential roles of social media for facilitating knowledge sharing from Iranian physicians' perspectives. In the present qualitative study, semi-structure interview was administered to 21 physicians by adopting a purposive snowball sampling method. The data analysis was done using the thematic analysis method by MAXQDA 10. The analysis of interviews resulted in the extraction of 164 codes into three themes and eight sub-themes. Accordingly, the main benefits of social media for sharing health knowledge were as follows: supporting information encountering, stimulate knowledge sharing and facilitating tacit knowledge sharing. Although physicians have different attitudes toward using social media, similar to other health professionals, facilitating the role of social media to facilitate knowledge sharing can be beneficial to physicians The study aims to provide an opportunity for physicians and healthcare management to better understand the impact of social media in health knowledge sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rising popularity of SNS games, virtual goods are expected to generate revenue for game providers. However, previous findings may be at odds with changes in this new virtual environment, while some social platforms lack understanding of what motivates users to purchase virtual goods in SNS games either. Considering the social nature of SNS games, this study adopted the self-presentation theory to explore these factors. A conceptual model was proposed and subsequently empirically tested with 302 samples collected from the questionnaire survey. The results show that the desire for online self-presentation is significantly influenced by SNS games involvement, online self-presentation norms, interactivity, and perceived usability. The results also indicate that the effect of the desire for online self-presentation on intention to purchase virtual goods is significant. In addition, the moderated role of perceived usability on the relationship between interactivity and the desire for online self-presentation is established as well. Our findings contribute to the literature on SNS games as well as self-presentation. It also lends insights into how SNS providers can tap this source of revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct two studies to evaluate the suitability of artificially generated facial pictures for use in a customer-facing system using data-driven personas. STUDY 1 investigates the quality of a sample of 1,000 artificially generated facial pictures. Obtaining 6,812 crowd judgments, we find that 90% of the images are rated medium quality or better. STUDY 2 examines the application of artificially generated facial pictures in data-driven personas using an experimental setting where the high-quality pictures are implemented in persona profiles. Based on 496 participants using 4 persona treatments (2 × 2 research design), findings of Bayesian analysis show that using the artificial pictures in persona profiles did not decrease the scores for Authenticity, Clarity, Empathy, and Willingness to Use of the data-driven personas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey study employed a framework of self-presentation motives in physical exercise to advance the understanding of exercise monitoring apps users' sharing behaviours on social networking sites (SNS). 551 participants were recruited using Qualtrics national research panel. A model of moderated mediation was proposed and analysed. The results suggested that both agentic and communal self-presentation motives significantly predicted fitness sharing on SNS and fitness app use. Perceived self-presentation outcome value for agentic purposes significantly enhances the agentic motive in predicting sharing on SNS. Fitness sharing on SNS mediated the significant effect of both agentic and communal presentational motives on fitness app use. A number of theoretical and design implications to extend the understanding of fitness social sharing to health technology applications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities of practice (COPs) have become increasingly important across a wide range of casual and business contexts, including innovative technical product development, refining skill sets for competitions, or establishing corporate strategies. Members of such communities forge interpersonal relationships and develop sophisticated practices around a shared domain, either interdependently contributing to a joint product or advancing as individuals. However, prior research has not examined attempts to sustain a COP whose domain has been terminated. Such cases have become increasingly common, especially as COPs emerge around ephemeral media products such as mobile games. A recent example, Tales of Link, based on the popular 'Tales of' Japanese role-playing game series, shut down on March 2018, but members of the subreddit devoted to it have attempted to keep the community active. As such, a computational text analysis of 33,476 comments and 1,000 posts on the r/talesoflink subreddit was conducted to assess how community members attempt to sustain COPs beyond the lifespan of their original domains. The findings offer insight into the discourse within COPs, the strategies and success rates of survival that may vary by such organisations, conversations surrounding the ever-changing gacha game model, and the potential changes in members' messages and behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]