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We introduce VDCook: a self-evolving video data operating system, a configurable video data construction platform for researchers and vertical domain teams. Users initiate data requests via natural language queries and adjustable parameters…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, health-related misinformation and harmful content shared online had a significant adverse effect on society. To mitigate this adverse effect, mainstream social media platforms employed soft moderation…
Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic…
Content monetization on social media fuels a growing influencer economy. Influencer marketing remains largely undisclosed or inappropriately disclosed on social media. Non-disclosure issues have become a priority for national and…
The World Wide Web is a complex interconnected digital ecosystem, where information and attention flow between platforms and communities throughout the globe. These interactions co-construct how we understand the world, reflecting and…
The opaqueness of modern digital advertising, exemplified by platforms such as Meta Ads, raises concerns regarding their autonomous control over audience targeting, pricing structures, and ad relevancy assessments. Locked in their leading…
Privacy-preserving medical decision support for kidney disease requires localized deployment of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining clinical reasoning capabilities. Current solutions face three challenges: 1) Cloud-based LLMs…
TikTok, the social media platform that is popular among children and adolescents, offers a more restrictive "Under 13 Experience" exclusively for young users in the US, also known as TikTok's "Kids Mode". While prior research has studied…
The Topics API for the web is Google's privacy-enhancing alternative to replace third-party cookies. Results of prior work have led to an ongoing discussion between Google and research communities about the capability of Topics to trade off…
Recent decisions to discontinue access to social media APIs are having detrimental effects on Internet research and the field of computational social science as a whole. This lack of access to data has been dubbed the Post-API era of…
Short-video platforms show an increasing impact on people's daily lives nowadays, with billions of active users spending plenty of time each day. The interactions between users and online platforms give rise to many scientific problems…
Regulatory bodies worldwide are intensifying their efforts to ensure transparency in influencer marketing on social media through instruments like the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) in the European Union, or Section 5 of the…
With nearly 2.5m users, onion services have become the prominent part of the darkweb. Over the last five years alone, the number of onion domains has increased 20x, reaching more than 700k unique domains in January 2022. As onion services…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
Wikipedia is a rich and invaluable source of information. Its central place on the Web makes it a particularly interesting object of study for scientists. Researchers from different domains used various complex datasets related to Wikipedia…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Video-sharing social media platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, implement content moderation policies aimed at reducing exposure to harmful videos among minor users. As video has become the dominant and most immersive form of…
This paper discusses the problem of lack of clear licensing and transparency of usage terms and conditions for research metadata. Making research data connected, discoverable and reusable are the key enablers of the new data revolution in…
The European Union introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA) to address the risks associated with digital platforms and promote a safer online environment. However, despite the potential of components such as the Transparency Database,…
Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with browsing tools substantially improves their potential as deep search agents to solve complex, real-world tasks. Yet, open LLMs still perform poorly in such settings due to limited long-horizon…