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We present a case study of a local community debate about a land development proposal. The debate was not amicably resolved. It entrained an encampment, a lawsuit, a local electoral upheaval, and sustained outrage. It was a serious community conflict. Through a set of converging interviews and field visits with key actors from throughout the community, researchers reconstructed what happened, gathered diverse views about how and why it happened, and reviewed the shorter- and longer-term outcomes of the conflict. As can be true in significant conflicts, all participants can be seen as rational and well-intentioned, and some of the outcomes are clearly positive for the community. But the cost was high in terms of civility, trust, and community coherence. Implications include both insights into, and opportunities to re-conceive and redesign, local governance and planning policies, practices, and information support.

Data, big data, and data analytics are contemporary touchstones for rational and technocratic thinking about human activity. Data also provide a new foundation and focus for community innovation, and new concrete possibilities for enhancing community activities, experiences, and civic participation. We present and discuss a series of community design scenarios envisioning how community data can be produced, gathered, analyzed, interpreted and used by community members to enhance community awareness and engagement, to provide new opportunities for learning and development among community members, and to increase the transparency, effectiveness and fairness of local government. Our argument is that community data can be seen as a vehicle not only for more pervasive participation in local communities but also for richer, better-grounded, and more effective participation.

Active engagement in social activities is important to maintain and promote healthy aging. In this study, we further investigate how older adults take the initiative role to support their health and well-being. To understand their active participation towards aging, we conducted an interview study with ten retirees who are "aging in place" (adults 65 and older who live independently). Our findings suggest that older adults are naturally developing a network of connections, which we refer to as their safety net. We have identified five social circles inside this safety net: predetermined, chosen, interest-based, location-based, and shared-identity circles. Each circle has a different impact on the support of older adults' health and well-being. Based on these findings, we suggest taking the safety net into consideration when designing technologies to promote and maintain healthy aging.

Engaging in an active life is important for older adults to maintain and promote well-being. In this study, we discuss how older adults who are aging in place actively promote their well-being through the lens of interacting and socializing with others. We conducted an interview study with 10 participants to understand how they develop and maintain interpersonal relationships with others. We found that older adults took charge in creating, building, developing, and maintaining a safety net, which is reflected in the following four representations: pre-determined network, chosen network, interest-based network, and shared-identity network. We also identified three important characteristics of the safety net: co-producing, reciprocating, and strengthening identity, which influence older adults' personal and social experiences.

Smartphones have fueled a shift in the way we communicate with each other via Instant Messaging. With the convergence of Internet and telephony, new Over-The-Top (OTT) messaging applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat etc.) have emerged as an important means of communication for millions of users. These applications use phone numbers as the only means of authentication and are becoming an attractive medium for attackers to deliver spam and carry out more targeted attacks. The universal reach of telephony along with its past trusted nature makes phone numbers attractive identifiers for reaching potential attack targets. In this paper, we explore the feasibility, automation, and scalability of a variety of targeted attacks that can be carried out by abusing phone numbers. These attacks can be carried out on different channels viz. OTT messaging applications, voice, e-mail, or SMS. We demonstrate a novel system that takes a phone number as an input, leverages information from applications like Truecaller and Facebook about the victim and his / her social network, checks the presence of phone number's owner (victim) on the attack channel (OTT messaging applications, voice, e-mail, or SMS), and finally targets the victim on the chosen attack channel. As a proof of concept, we enumerated through a random pool of 1.16 million phone numbers and demonstrated that targeted attacks could be crafted against the owners of 255,873 phone numbers by exploiting cross-application features. Due to the significantly increased user engagement via new mediums of communication like OTT messaging applications and ease with which phone numbers allow collection of pertinent information, there is a clear need for better protection of applications that rely on phone numbers.

Who can spot the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Who can discover the next billion-dollar startups? Measuring investor success is a challenging task, as investment strategies can vary widely. We propose InvestorRank, a novel method for identifying successful investors by analyzing how an investor's collaboration network change over time. InvestorRank captures the intuition that a successful investor achieves increasingly success in spotting great startups, or is able to keep doing so persistently. Our results show potential in discovering relatively unknown investors that may be the success stories of tomorrow.