Related papers: Understanding Factors that Influence Upskilling
The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs…
The lack of an engaging pedagogy and the highly competitive atmosphere in introductory science courses tend to discourage students from pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Once in a STEM field, academic…
There has been a long standing interest in understanding `Social Influence' both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily…
Higher education students are increasingly using generative AI in their academic work. However, existing institutional practices have not yet adapted to this shift. Through semi-structured interviews with 23 college students, our study…
Discovering the antecedents of individuals' influence in collaborative environments is an important, practical, and challenging problem. In this paper, we study interpersonal influence in small groups of individuals who collectively execute…
Instructors of statistics who teach non-statistics majors possess varied academic backgrounds, and hence it is reasonable to expect variability in their content knowledge, and pedagogical approach. The aim of this study was to determine the…
Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons:…
Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users…
Public opinion is subject to peer interaction via social networks and external pressure from the media, advertising, and other actors. In this paper, we study the interaction between external and peer influence on the stochastic opinion…
We present an investigation in the connection between computing students' civic knowledge, attitude, or self-efficacy and their willingness to work on civic technologies. Early results indicate that these factors are related to a…
The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…
We study a two-stage model, in which students are 1) admitted to college on the basis of an entrance exam which is a noisy signal about their qualifications (type), and then 2) those students who were admitted to college can be hired by an…
The growing reliance on online services underscores the crucial role of recommendation systems, especially on social media platforms seeking increased user engagement. This study investigates how recommendation systems influence the impact…
Decision to participate in education depends on the circumstances individual inherits and on the returns to education she expects as well. If one person from any socio-economically disadvantaged social group inherits poor circumstances…
Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the…
In-person instruction for professional development or other types of workplace training provides a social environment and immediate feedback mechanisms that typically ensure all participants are successful. Online, self-paced instruction…
Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning is an increasingly popular technique that involves training an agent on a sequence of intermediate tasks, called a Curriculum, to increase the agent's performance and learning speed. This paper…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
This article investigates mechanism-based explanations for a well-known empirical pattern in sociology of education, namely, that Black-White unequal access to school resources -- defined as advanced coursework -- is the highest in racially…