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Explanations are essential in software engineering (SE) and requirements communication, helping stakeholders clarify ambiguities, justify design choices, and build shared understanding. Online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow provide…
Reputation systems concern soft security dynamics in diverse areas. Trust dynamics in a reputation system should be stable and adaptable at the same time to serve the purpose. Many reputation mechanisms have been proposed and tested over…
Generating models from large data sets -- and determining which subsets of data to mine -- is becoming increasingly automated. However choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied…
Environments for decentralized on-line collaboration are now widespread on the Web, underpinning open-source efforts, knowledge creation sites including Wikipedia, and other experiments in joint production. When a distributed group works…
Modern social platforms are characterized by the presence of rich user-behavior data associated with the publication, sharing and consumption of textual content. Users interact with content and with each other in a complex and dynamic…
Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, an attempt to show relevancy - why they are being shown. For example, Twitter search for a topical keyword shows expert twitterers…
The questions in a crowdsourcing task typically exhibit varying degrees of difficulty and subjectivity. Their joint effects give rise to the variation in responses to the same question by different crowd-workers. This variation is low when…
This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the interplay between decentralization -- a prevalent character of multi-agent systems -- and centralization, i.e., the task of imposing central control to meet system-level goals. In…
We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of…
As more individuals consider permanently working from home, the online labor market continues to grow as an alternative working environment. While the flexibility and autonomy of these online gigs attracts many workers, success depends…
Nowadays, most business and social interactions have moved to the internet, highlighting the relevance of creating online trust. One way to obtain a measure of trust is through reputation mechanisms, which record one's past performance and…
Product reviews significantly influence purchasing decisions on e-commerce platforms. However, the sheer volume of reviews can overwhelm users, obscuring the information most relevant to their specific needs. Current e-commerce…
Over the past decade, Internet centralization and its implications for both people and the resilience of the Internet has become a topic of active debate. While the networking community informally agrees on the definition of centralization,…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
Mining topical experts on social media is a problem that has gained significant attention due to its wide-ranging applications. Here we present the first study that combines data from four major social networks -- Twitter, Facebook, Google+…
Online communities are important organizational forms where members socialize and share information. Curiously, different online communities often overlap considerably in topic and membership. Recent research has investigated competition…
Ranking problem has attracted much attention in real systems. How to design a robust ranking method is especially significant for online rating systems under the threat of spamming attacks. By building reputation systems for users, many…
Personalization is pervasive in the online space as, when combined with learning, it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that such…
Stack Overflow is one of the most popular Programming Community-based Question Answering (PCQA) websites that has attracted more and more users in recent years. When users raise or inquire questions in Stack Overflow, providing related…
Badges are endemic to online interaction sites, from Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to ride sharing, as systems for rewarding participants for their contributions. This paper studies how badge design affects people's contributions and…