Changing Post-Adoptive Personal Healthcare IT Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic

We examine post-adoptive IT use of fitness tracking technologies longitudinally using three data sets gathered before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States. Using adaptive structuration theory (AST) as a meta-theory, we model post-adoptive IT use as having two fundamental types (continued and novel), each having distinct psychological and sociological antecedents. Sociological antecedents are further broken down into those coming from society and those coming from the technology. Findings indicate there are strong correlations between antecedents and the two types of use in all three data sets. Post-hoc analysis indicates continued and novel use vary across time. These variations are not static and appear to be non-linear. Implications and future research directions are also discussed. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Analysis of Semantic Shift before and after COVID-19 in Spanish Diachronic Word Embeddings

Words can shift their meaning across time. This case study shows the results obtained by the exploratory analysis of the semantic shifting on Spanish vocabulary using Diachronic Words Embeddings. Diachronic data consists of a 2018 Spanish corpus, before the COVID-19 outbreak, and a second corpus with documents from 2021. We focused on the semantic shift of three of the topics: COVID-19, masks and vaccines. This paper addresses the construction of the diachronic Spanish word embeddings model, as well as the results obtained by the analysis using a non-supervised distance vector technique. The results allowed to identify shifts related to increase in COVID-19 content. © 2022 IEEE.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influences Human Mobility? Similarity Analysis Leveraging Social Media Data

This paper aims to understand the impact of the COVID-19 on human mobility. We explore individual traces through spatial-temporal check-ins on social media. In particular, we leverage geo-tagged tweets, to extrapolate people's geo-locations in New York City (NYC) when they check in Twitter. Building on these data, we perform gyration and travel similarity analysis to study the change of travel pattern during the pandemic. We make a comparison of users' gyration and the number of COVID-19 deaths across time. We find that (1) Users' gyration decreased by 35% after the stay-at-home order. (2) Check-in activities on social media is related to the fear of coronavirus: User's gyration has a negative correlation (-0.7) with the number of deaths across time. (3) Travel similarity decreased by 15% from March 2020 to June 2020 because many people did not travel outside after the stay-at-home order. (4) Inter-personal travel similarity among users was lower than 0.2 and individual traces of a majority of people had no overlap during the pandemic. © 2022 IEEE.

KidConnect VR: Technology to Stay Connected

Having a healthy social life is an important part of our mental health, especially when it comes to children. Kids need to feel a connection between the environments in which they both live and play. In the last two years, COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our lives both personally and professionally. Because of the pandemic, meeting people in physical locations has been problematic. This situation has only amplified the need to foster connections. Technology plays a crucial role in helping children stay connected, however, we have found that children are more accepting of this when they are allowed to be able to take more active role in developing these platforms. Creating virtual environments, for example, has been shown to increase the interest of children in reaching out to their friends and family, and connecting with others across time zones, languages, and cultures. The children's Idea Booklet, from the 2022 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Research & Design Challenge identified significant interest in children using VR headset technology to connect with friends and family. Our research team, KidsTeam, built on these ideas to design KidConnect VR. KidConnect VR allows kids to connect with others via a virtual environment. This environment can be built to look like their surrounding area. In the virtual world, children can play, chat, and even study with friends. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Student Motivation and Engagement across Time and Context through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Motivation is a multi-faceted construct encompassing orientation towards certain types of goals, the value and expectation of achieving those goals, and attributional beliefs. Our unique dataset tracks cohorts of mechanical engineering students through time and across multiple courses, allowing us to study context-dependent variables across time. We measured intrinsic goal orientation and extrinsic goal orientation in two cohorts of mechanical engineering students at the beginning and end of the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 terms. Though our original study was designed to evaluate instructional interventions in a “difference-of-differences” design, our cohorts were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the ongoing stress of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as widespread dissatisfaction with remote learning, we expected students to be less motivated overall in Fall 2020 compared to Fall 2019, and for motivation to erode more rapidly over the semester. Although intrinsic motivation was indeed lower in Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019, the decrease in motivation over the course of the semester was the same. Furthermore, the availability of recorded lecture videos and class content may have mitigated against an expected drop in level of engagement for some students. Average student engagement, as measured by responses to in-class polling exercises remained constant between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, and it appears that more students were able to maintain a 100% participation rate in the remote context, though there is significant variation in engagement within the class. We seek input from the engineering education research community on this work-in-progress study. We especially invite a discussion about how to make sense of survey results in dramatically different teaching contexts. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Hate speech and topic shift in the covid-19 public discourse on social media in Italy

The availability of large annotated corpora from social media and the development of powerful classification approaches have contributed in an unprecedented way to tackle the challenge of monitoring users' opinions and sentiments in online social platforms across time but also arose the challenge of temporal robustness of such detection and monitoring systems. We used as case study a dataset of tweets in Italian related to the COVID-19 induced lockdown in Italy to measure how quickly the most debated topic online shifted in time. We concluded that it is a promising approach but dedicated corpora and fine tuning of algorithms are crucial for more insightful results. © 2021 for this paper by its author. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).