Related papers: Science Bots: a Model for the Future of Scientific…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
The reproduction and replication of reported scientific results is a hot topic within the academic community. The retraction of numerous studies from a wide range of disciplines, from climate science to bioscience, has drawn the focus of…
Software bots have attracted increasing interest and popularity in both research and society. Their contributions span automation, digital twins, game characters with conscious-like behavior, and social media. However, there is still a lack…
The process of developing theories and models and testing them with experiments is fundamental to the scientific method. Automating the entire scientific method then requires not only automation of the induction of theories from data, but…
With the increasing use of social media data for health-related research, the credibility of the information from this source has been questioned as the posts may originate from automated accounts or "bots". While automatic bot detection…
We are witnessing a massive adoption of software engineering bots, applications that react to events triggered by tools and messages posted by users and run automated tasks in response, in a variety of domains. This thematic issues…
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…
Bots are software systems designed to support users by automating a specific process, task, or activity. When such systems implement a conversational component to interact with the users, they are also known as conversational agents. Bots,…
With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false…
Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…
Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the…
Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have…
Automated software agents --- or bots --- have long been an important part of how Wikipedia's volunteer community of editors write, edit, update, monitor, and moderate content. In this paper, I discuss the complex social and technical…
The reproduction and replication of research results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the challenges closely revolve around…
The reproduction and replication of novel results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the issues closely revolve around the…
The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human counterparts. We…
Since its beginnings in the 1940s, automated reasoning by computers has become a tool of ever growing importance in scientific research. So far, the rules underlying automated reasoning have mainly been formulated by humans, in the form of…
Suppose we need a deep collective analysis of an open scientific problem: there is a complex scientific hypothesis and a large online group of mutually unrelated experts with relevant private information of a diverse and unpredictable…
In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration…
Over 15 years of teaching, advising students and coordinating scientific research activities and projects in computer science, we have observed the difficulties of students to write scientific papers to present the results of their research…