Twitter user profiles contain rich information that allows researchers to infer particular attributes of users' identities. Knowing identity attributes such as gender, age, and/or nationality are a first step in many studies which seek to describe ...

In a multilingual society, language not only reflects culture and heritage, but also has implications for social status and the degree of integration in society. Different languages can be a barrier between monolingual communities, and the dynamics of ...

We present an in-depth study of co-following on Twitter based on the observation that two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are also similar, even though they might not share any direct links or a single mutual follower. We show how ...

This paper focuses on the prediction of real-world talk attendances at academic conferences with respect to different influence factors. We study and discuss the predictability of talk attendances using real-world face-to-face contact data and user ...

In this keynote we give an introduction to wisdom of crowds in the Web, the long tail of web content, and the bias involved in the generation of user generated content (UGC). This bias creates the wisdom of ad-hoc crowds or the wisdom of a few. Although ...

The fragility and interconnectivity of the planet argue compellingly for a greater understanding of how different communities make sense of their world. One of such critical demands relies on comparing the Chinese and the rest of the world (e.g., ...

User attribute extraction on social media has gain considerable attention, while existing methods are mostly supervised which suffer great difficulty in insufficient gold standard data. In this paper, we validate a strong hypothesis based on homophily ...

Social hierarchy plays an important role in shaping the way individuals interacting with each other. In this study, we propose three metrics: equality, diversity, and reciprocity to evaluate the social hierarchical differences in cross-ideological ...

Nowadays, smartphones and digital networks are being heavily used as data sources for research on social networks. Our daily experiences, interactions and transactions are recorded thanks to the digital traces that users leave behind their activities, ...