Photographer Paths: Sequence Alignment of Geotagged Photos for Exploration-based Route Planning (pdf, blog, slides)
problem: how can we build city route planners that ‘automatically’ compute route plans based not on efficiency, but on people’s trailing city experiences?
proposal: use a sequence alignment technique from biology
evaluation: lab + web survey + interviews (well done)
Using Facebook after losing a job: Differential benefits of strong and weak ties (ACM pdf)
problem: @grammarnerd presents awesome work pairing surveys with Facebook log data to see what ties predict support & finding new job
results: social support and lowering of stress both increase with strong ties communication. Surprisingly, bridging social capital increases with not only weak-tie communication but also with strong-tie communication (which is not about reading but it’s about talking to them). talking with strong ties for people who are looking for jobs increases stress level, while talking with strong ties for people who have jobs decreases stress level BUT talking more to strong, not weak, ties was twice as likely to lead to a new job.
Trend Makers and Trend Spotters in a Mobile Application (pdf, slides)
questions: WHO creates trends in a mobile sharing app? accidentals or influentials?
answer: influentials DO exist, yet they are not few but many!
application: identify trends early on (recsys paper pdf)
Finger On The Pulse: Identifying Deprivation Using Transit Flow Analysis (pdf, blog, slides)
problem: can we assess a city’s health by monitoring the flow of people, just like a nurse takes your heart-rate and blood pressure during a health check?
answer: yes! using passenger flow, diversity of passenger geographic connections, and use of transport modality, one can effectively do so!
Ubiquitous Crowd-sourcing into Context (pdf)
problem: ”investigate what contextual factors correlate with coverage of OSM information in urban settings”
results: ” although there is a direct correlation between population density and information coverage, other socio-economic factors also play an important role. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to the design of urban crowd-sourcing applications.”
Major Life Changes and Behavioral Markers in Social Media: Case of Childbirth (pdf)
very interesting work by @munmun10, looking at linguistic markers pre and post childbirth. also, see great work to be published in chi 2013 on this.
User-Centric Evaluation of a K-Furthest Neighbor Collaborative Filtering Recommender Algorithm (pdf)
problem: instead of using KNN for recommending stuff, they came up with KFN!
KNN: recommend movies that are liked by people similar to you
KFN: recommend movies that are disliked by people dissimilar to you
results: KNN recommends movies that users have seen; KNN and KFN both recommend movies that user likes
Digital Neighborhood Watch: Investigating the Sharing of Camera Data Amongst Neighbors (pdf)
idea: neighborhood watch supported by webcams.
comment: the privacy angle is of great importance.
Representation and Communication: Challenges in Interpreting Large Social Media Datasets (pdf)
idea: study of “four features of Foursquare’s use: the relationship between attendance and check-ins, event check-ins, commercial incentives to check-in, and lastly humorous check-ins These points show how large data analysis is affected by the end user uses to which social networks are put.”
Hollaback!: The Role of Collective Storytelling Online in a Social Movement Organization (pdf)
idea: can sharing a story of experienced harassment really make a difference to an individual or a community?
Doodle Around the World: Online Scheduling Behavior Reflects Cultural Differences in Time Perception and Group Decision-Making (pdf, blog, data)
question: “Does (national) culture determine how we schedule events online?”
answer: yes, it does! big time 
individualists strategically respond late, but are less likely to find consensus, while collectivists seem to make a larger effort to reach mutual agreement
also, interesting the keynote talk by ron burt on the serial closure hypothesis (pdf) and the special session dedicated to the
conference’s most cited paper*, where: “The authors will re-present
the original papers using their original slides, and then discuss
developments in the field since then.” The paper is “Grouplens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of net news” (CSCW 1994)
