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A worldwide movement towards the publication of Open Government Data is taking place, and budget data is one of the key elements pushing this trend. Its importance is mostly related to transparency, but publishing budget data, combined with…
Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo…
Combining the results of different search engines in order to improve upon their performance has been the subject of many research papers. This has become known as the "Data Fusion" task, and has great promise in dealing with the vast…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
Considerable efforts are currently underway to mitigate the negative impacts of echo chambers, such as increased susceptibility to fake news and resistance towards accepting scientific evidence. Prior research has presented the development…
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public…
Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for…
The most important problem that has emerged after twenty years of popular internet usage is that of fact-checking at scale. This problem is experienced acutely in both of the major internet application platform types, web search and social…
Online social networks, such as Facebook and twitter, are a growing phenomenon in today's world, with various platforms providing capabilities for individuals to collaborate through messaging and chatting as well as sharing of content such…
In traditional usability studies, researchers talk to users of tools to understand their needs and challenges. Insights gained via such interviews offer context, detail, and background. Due to costs in time and money, we are beginning to…
The notion of grid computing has gained an increasing popularity recently as a realistic solution to many of our large-scale data storage and processing needs. It enables the sharing, selection and aggregation of resources geographically…
Public deliberation, as in open discussion of issues of public concern, often suffers from scattered and shallow discourse, poor sensemaking, and a disconnect from actionable policy outcomes. This paper introduces BCause, a discussion…
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
We develop a visual analytics system, NewsKaleidoscope, to investigate the how news reporting of events varies. NewsKaleidoscope combines several backend text language processing techniques with a coordinated visualization interface…
Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that…
Large text corpora, such as Reddit posts, have become an increasingly prevalent site of qualitative inquiry. However, most large text corpora are intractable for qualitative researchers. Instead, teams rely on statistical subsampling to…
Systems for large scale deliberation have resolved polarized issues and shifted agenda setting into the public's hands. These systems integrate bridging-based ranking algorithms - including group informed consensus implemented in Polis and…
Publicly available data from open sources (e.g., United States Census Bureau (Census), World Health Organization (WHO), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) are vital resources for policy makers, students and researchers across…