Developing a framework for investigating citizen science through a combination of web analytics and social science methods-The CS Track perspective.

Over the past decade, Citizen Science (CS) has shown great potential to transform the power of the crowd into knowledge of societal value. Many projects and initiatives have produced high quality scientific results by mobilizing peoples' interest in science to volunteer for the public good. Few studies have attempted to map citizen science as a field, and assess its impact on science, society and ways to sustain its future practice. To better understand CS activities and characteristics, CS Track employs an analytics and analysis framework for monitoring the citizen science landscape. Within this framework, CS Track collates and processes information from project websites, platforms and social media and generates insights on key issues of concern to the CS community, such as participation patterns or impact on science learning. In this paper, we present the operationalization of the CS Track framework and its three-level analysis approach (micro-meso-macro) for applying analytics techniques to external data sources. We present three case studies investigating the CS landscape using these analytical levels and discuss the strengths and limitations of combining web-analytics with quantitative and qualitative research methods. This framework aims to complement existing methods for evaluating CS, address gaps in current observations of the citizen science landscape and integrate findings from multiple studies and methodologies. Through this work, CS Track intends to contribute to the creation of a measurement and evaluation scheme for CS and improve our understanding about the potential of analytics for the evaluation of CS.

A Virtual Sandbox Approach to Studying the Effect of Augmented Communication on Human-Robot Collaboration.

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has the potential for a paradigm shift in industrial production by complementing the strengths of industrial robots with human staff. However, exploring these scenarios in physical experimental settings is costly and difficult, e.g., due to safety considerations. We present a virtual reality application that allows the exploration of HRC work arrangements with autonomous robots and their effect on human behavior. Prior experimental studies conducted using this application demonstrated the benefits of augmenting an autonomous robot arm with communication channels on subjective aspects such as perceived stress. Motivated by current safety regulations that hinder HRC to expand its full potential, we explored the effects of the augmented communication on objective measures (collision rate and produced goods) within a virtual sandbox application. Explored through a safe and replicable setup, the goal was to determine whether communication channels that provide guidance and explanation on the robot can help mitigate safety hazards without interfering with the production effectiveness of both parties. This is based on the theoretical foundation that communication channels enable the robot to explain its action, helps the human collaboration partner to comprehend the current state of the shared task better, and react accordingly. Focused on the optimization of production output, reduced collision rate, and increased perception of safety, a between-subjects experimental study with two conditions (augmented communication vs non-augmented) was conducted. The results revealed a statistically significant difference in terms of production quantity output and collisions with the robot, favoring the augmented conditions. Additional statistically significant differences regarding self-reported perceived safety were found. The results of this study provide an entry point for future research regarding the augmentation of industrial robots with communication channels for safety purposes.

Using attractiveness model for actors ranking in social media networks.

BACKGROUND: Influential actors detection in social media such as Twitter or Facebook can play a major role in gathering opinions on particular topics, improving the marketing efficiency, predicting the trends, etc. PROPOSED METHODS: This work aims to extend our formally defined T measure to present a new measure aiming to recognize the actor's influence by the strength of attracting new important actors into a networked community. Therefore, we propose a model of the actor's influence based on the attractiveness of the actor in relation to the number of other attractors with whom he/she has established connections over time. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Using an empirically collected social network for the underlying graph, we have applied the above-mentioned measure of influence in order to determine optimal seeds in a simulation of influence maximization. We study our extended measure in the context of information diffusion because this measure is based on a model of actors who attract others to be active members in a community. This corresponds to the idea of the IC simulation model which is used to identify the most important spreaders in a set of actors.

A model-driven PBL application to support the authoring, delivery, and execution of PBL processes.

As problem-based learning (PBL) is becoming more and more popular, there is also a growing interest in developing and using technologies in the implementation of PBL. However, teachers may have difficulties to design and deliver a pedagogically well-designed and technically smoothly executable online or blended PBL process on their own because they lack appropriate expertise in learning theories and design methods as well as a deeper understanding of the potential affordances of the available technologies. From this premise, we are committed to developing and testing methods and tools to support the design and delivery of online or hybrid PBL processes with high flexibility and a low threshold of usage requirements. This paper presents a technical approach to develop a web-based PBL application that supports both authoring and run-time usage. In comparison with other tools and technical approaches, it is concluded that a combined use of a model-driven approach and semi-structured data management appears to be a promising approach to effectively and efficiently support the authoring, delivering, and execution of design-time and run-time PBL processes.

Detection of strong attractors in social media networks.

BACKGROUND: Detection of influential actors in social media such as Twitter or Facebook plays an important role for improving the quality and efficiency of work and services in many fields such as education and marketing. METHODS: The work described here aims to introduce a new approach that characterizes the influence of actors by the strength of attracting new active members into a networked community. We present a model of influence of an actor that is based on the attractiveness of the actor in terms of the number of other new actors with which he or she has established relations over time. RESULTS: We have used this concept and measure of influence to determine optimal seeds in a simulation of influence maximization using two empirically collected social networks for the underlying graphs. CONCLUSIONS: Our empirical results on the datasets demonstrate that our measure stands out as a useful measure to define the attractors comparing to the other influence measures.