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Feb 28, 2017

Bringing more transparency to AI

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken giant steps during the last decade, to the point that for many experts, including the world-renowned astrophysics Stephen Hawking and hi-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, AI could even destroy our civilization by overtaking humans. However, on the other side, AI may bring about huge benefits for the humankind, some of which may be still beyond our imagination of today. Thus, the scientific community is faced with the challenge of how we can develop powerful AI systems that support our civilization, preventing, at the same time, the potential side effects of an uncontrolled AI evolution.

                                   

To address these challenges, in late September 2016, tech giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM launched a “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to benefit People and Society”. The new alliance has been established “to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.”

As claimed in the mission statement, a specific goal of the initiative is to help improving public awareness of what is happening in the AI field, where a number of players are shaping the future of intelligent services. Also, the Partnership aims at creating a more inclusive discussion, by extending the participation from AI specialists to activists and experts in other disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, economics, finance, sociology, public policy, and law, to discuss and provide guidance on emerging issues related to the impact of AI on society.

The Partnership on AI to benefit People and Society has the potential to create a greater multidisciplinary understanding of the opportunities and challenges associated with potential breakthroughs in this field; yet, some key players, such as Apple and Elon Musk's OpenAI, - a non-profit AI research project - have not yet joined the club.    

While the goals of the Partnership have been set, the strategy that the alliance intends to put in place to attain these objectives is still unclear. Thus, it is too early to understand how the association will concretely address the challenges that needs to be addressed with the public, i.e., how can AI be safely used to support military activities, or how to deal with the legal responsibilities for any damages caused by AI to humans.

Jan 19, 2017

Facebook Study Finds Introverts Feel More Comfortable with VR Social Interaction

Via RoadToVr

A recent study by Facebook IQ, in which people completed one-on-one conversations in VR, concluded that most people respond positively, and introverts in particular feel more comfortable. Facebook IQ is a team established to assist marketers in understanding the way people communicate online and offline.

Facebook has been exploring the potential of social VR since their famous acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014. More recently, they detailed the results of their social VR avatar experiments and are planning to launch a ‘social VR app’ very soon. A different social experiment was recently completed by Facebook IQ, an internal team who help businesses understand communication trends and advertising effectiveness – asking 60 people to have a one-on-one conversation, half of them being in person, and half being in a VR environment wearing the Oculus Rift.

Interestingly, they didn’t use the VR avatars seen in Facebook’s own demonstrations, nor did they use the Oculus avatars found in the Rift’s menus – instead they used vTime, a popular ‘sociable network’ app available for Rift, Gear VR, Cardboard and Daydream. vTime uses its own full-body avatar system, complete with automatically-animating hands – surprising that these would be used in such an experiment. However, it seems like the main reason for choosing the software was to use its comfortable ‘train cabin’ environment – a familiar and natural place to converse with a stranger – and the focus of the experiment was about vocal communication.

facebook-vr

Applied neuroscience company Neurons Inc was commissioned to assist with the study of cognitive and emotional responses; all participants wore high resolution electroencephalography (EEG) scanners, used to record electrical activity in the brain, and eye trackers. With half the group conducting a normal one-to-one conversation in person, and the other half engaged in vTime, Neurons Inc was able to compare the level of comfort and engagement of a VR conversation compared to a conventional one. The eye trackers helped to determine the user’s level of attention, and the EEG scanners were used to assess motivation and cognitive load, based on the level of brain activity. If the load is too low, it means the person is bored; too high and they’re stressed.

According to the report published on Facebook Insights, the participants, who had mostly never tried VR before, were within the ‘optimal range of cognitive effort’, being neither bored nor overstimulated. The cognitive load decreased over time, meaning that people naturally became more comfortable as the conversation progressed. In the interviews that followed, 93% said that they liked their virtual conversation partner, and those who were identified as more introverted responded ‘particularly positively’, being more engaged by meeting in VR than by meeting in person.

 
 

Oct 16, 2014

TIME: Fear, Misinformation, and Social Media Complicate Ebola Fight

From TIME

Based on Facebook and Twitter chatter, it can seem like Ebola is everywhere. Following the first diagnosis of an Ebola case in the United States on Sept. 30, mentions of the virus on Twitter leapt from about 100 per minute to more than 6,000. Cautious health officials have tested potential cases in Newark, Miami Beach and Washington D.C., sparking more worry. Though the patients all tested negative, some people are still tweeting as if the disease is running rampant in these cities. In Iowa the Department of Public Health was forced to issue a statement dispelling social media rumors that Ebola had arrived in the state. Meanwhile there have been a constant stream of posts saying that Ebola can be spread through the air, water, or food, which are all inaccurate claims.

 

Research scientists who study how we communicate on social networks have a name for these people: the “infected.”

Read full story

Aug 28, 2013

Twitter reveals the happiest spots in New York

Sentiment in New York City: A High Resolution Spatial and Temporal View

Karla Z. Bertrand, Maya Bialik, Kawandeep Virdee, Andreas Gros, Yaneer Bar-Yam

http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5010v1 (link to PDF full text)

Measuring public sentiment is a key task for researchers and policymakers alike. The explosion of available social media data allows for a more time-sensitive and geographically specific analysis than ever before. In this paper we analyze data from the micro-blogging site Twitter and generate a sentiment map of New York City. We develop a classifier specifically tuned for 140-character Twitter messages, or tweets, using key words, phrases and emoticons to determine the mood of each tweet. This method, combined with geotagging provided by users, enables us to gauge public sentiment on extremely fine-grained spatial and temporal scales. We find that public mood is generally highest in public parks and lowest at transportation hubs, and locate other areas of strong sentiment such as cemeteries, medical centers, a jail, and a sewage facility. Sentiment progressively improves with proximity to Times Square. Periodic patterns of sentiment fluctuate on both a daily and a weekly scale: more positive tweets are posted on weekends than on weekdays, with a daily peak in sentiment around midnight and a nadir between 9:00 a.m. and noon.

Nov 02, 2012

Networked Flow: Towards an understanding of creative networks

Networked Flow

Gaggioli A., Riva G., Milani L., Mazzoni E.

Networked Flow: Towards an understanding of creative networks Springer, New York, 2013.
 
Identifying ‘networked flow’ as the key driver of networked creativity, this new volume in the Springer Briefs series deploys concepts from a range of sub-disciplines in psychology to suggest ways of optimizing the innovative potential of creative networks. In their analysis of how to support these networks, the contributing authors apply expertise in experimental, social, cultural and educational psychology. They show how developing a creative network requires the establishment of an optimal group experience in which individual intentions inform and guide collective goals. The volume represents a three-fold achievement. It develops a ground-breaking new perspective on group creativity: the notion of ‘networked flow’ as a bridging concept linking the neuropsychological, psychological and social levels of the creative process. In addition, the authors set out a six-stage model that provides researchers with a methodological framework (also by referring to the social network analysis) for studying the creativity traditionally associated with interpersonal contexts. Finally, the book includes perceptive analysis of the novel possibilities opened up by second-generation internet technologies, particularly in social networking, that seem destined to develop and sustain online creativity. As a wide-ranging exposition of a new direction in theoretical psychology that is laden with exciting possibilities, this volume will inform and inspire professionals, scholars and students alike.
 

Read an excerpt

Apr 04, 2012

Microsoft Academic Search: nice Science 2.0 service, wrong H-index calculation!

Yesterday I came across Microsoft Academic Search, supposingly the main contender of Google Scholar Citations.

Although the service provides a plenty of interesting and useful features (including customizable author profile pages, a visual explorer, open API and many others), I don't like AT ALL the fact that it publishes an author's profile, including publication's profile and list, without asking the permission to do that (as Google Scholar does).

But what is even worse, is that the data published are, in most cases, incomplete or incorrect (or at least, they seemed incorrect for most of the authors that I included in my search). And this is not limited to the list of the list of publications (which could be understandable) but it also affects the calculation of the H-index (which measures both the productivity and impact of a scholar, based on the set of the author's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications).

Since in the last few years the H-index has become critical to measure researcher's importance, displaying an inaccurate value of this index on a author's profile is NOT appropriate. While Microsoft may object that its service is open for users to edit the content (actually, the Help Center informs that "If you find any wrong or out-of-date information about author profile, publication profile or author publication list, you can make corrections or updates directly online") my point is that you CANNOT FORCE someone to correct otherwise potentially wrong data concerning scientific productivity.

One could even suspect that Microsoft purposefully underestimates the H-index to encourage users to join the service in order to edit their data. I do not think that this is the case, but at the same time, I cannot exclude this possibility.

Anyway, these are my two cents and I welcome your comments.

p.s. Interested in other Science 2.0 topics? Join us on Linkedin 

Mar 31, 2012

Blogging from my iPad

BlogSpirit has developed a nice app that allows posting from the iPad/iPhone.

I am just trying it out.

If you are able to read this post, well, it does work (btw, this is Matilde)

mobile_picture

17:03 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dec 19, 2011

MIT to launch free online interactive learning labs in 2012

MIT announced today online learning initiative called MITx that will offer a portfolio of free selected MIT courses starting in Spring 2012 through an online interactive learning platform, with  online laboratories.

MIT expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

May 21, 2011

You are not a gadget

Recently, I came across an intriguing book that brings a new, thought-provoking perspective on how the Internet is shaping our lives and culture. The title of the book is You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto and the author is Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and musician who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality.

The leitmotiv of the book can be summarized in a single question: are new technologies really playing an empowering role, by increasing people’s creativity, control, and freedom? As can be expected from the title, the author’s answer is more negative than positive. To construct his argument, Lanier starts from the observation that the evolution of computing is not as free of constraints as one might assume.

As a key example, the author describes the evolution of MIDI, a protocol for composing and playing music on computers. This format emerged in the early 1980s and was immediately recognized as an empowering tool for musicians. However, as more and more people adopted it, it became a rigid standard that limited the expressive potential of artists because, as Lanier points out, it ‘‘could only describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin.’’ For the author, this lock-in effect can be seen in other fields of information technology. For example, certain features that were included in the early versions of the UNIX operating system are now deeply embedded in the software and cannot be modified, even if they are considered obsolete or inappropriate. Once an approach becomes standard, it tends to inhibit other solutions, thereby limiting the potential for creativity.

Lanier goes on to demystify some of today’s most popular Internet buzzwords, such as ‘‘Web 2.0,’’ ‘‘Open Culture,’’ ‘‘Mash-Ups,’’ and ‘‘Wisdom of Crowds.’’ He maintains that these trendy notions are ultimately pointing to a new form of ‘‘digital collectivism,’’ which rather than encouraging individual inventiveness, promotes mediocrity and homologation. By allowing everyone to offer up their opinion and ideas, the social web is melting into an indistinct pool of information, a vast gray zone where it is increasingly difficult to find quality or meaningful content. This observation leads the author to the counterintuitive conclusion that the introduction of boundaries is sometimes useful (if not even necessary) to achieve originality and excellence.

Another issue raised by Lanier concerns the risk of de-humanization and de-individualization associated with online social networks. He describes the early Web as a space full of ‘‘flavours and colours’’ where each Web site was different from the others and contributed to the diversity of the Internet landscape. But with the advent of Facebook and other similar sites, this richness was lost because people started creating their personal web pages using predefined templates. On the one hand, this formalism has allowed anyone to create, publish, and share content online easily (blog, video, music, etc.). On the other hand, it has reduced the potential for individuals to express their uniqueness.

Lanier reminds us of the importance of putting the human being, and not the machine, at the center of concerns for technology and innovation. For this goal to be achieved, it is not enough to develop usable and accessible tools; it is also necessary to emphasize the uniqueness of experience. This humanist faith leads the author to criticize the idea of technological Singularity, popularized by recognized experts such as Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and Kevin Kelly. This concept holds that exponential increase in computing power and communication networks, combined with the rapid advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, may lead to the emergence of a super-intelligent organism (the ‘‘Singularity’’), which could eventually develop intentional agency and subordinate the human race. Lanier’s opposition to this idea is based on the conviction that the ‘‘human factor’’ will continue to play an essential role in the evolution of technology. The author believes that computers will never be able to replace the uniqueness of humans nor replicate the complexity of their experience. Further, he considers the concept of technological Singularity culturally dangerous because it enforces the idea of an inevitable superiority of machines over humans: ‘‘People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time,’’ writes Lanier.

However, Lanier is genuinely admired by the potential of the Internet and new technologies. This iswhy he calls for a new ‘‘technological humanism’’ able to contrast the overarching vision of digital collectivism and empower creative selfexpression. As a key illustration, the author describes the unique combination of idealism, technical skills, and imaginative talent that, in the 1980s, lead a small group of programmers to conceive the vision of virtual reality. This powerful new paradigm in human–computer interaction inspired in the following decades a number of innovative applications in industry, education, and medicine.

Beside the nostalgic remembrances of the heroic times of Silicon Valley and the sophisticated overtone of some terms (e.g., ‘‘numinous neoteny’’), the book written by Lanier conveys a clear message and deserves the attention of all who are interested in the relationship between humans and technology. The idea that technological innovation should be informed by human values and experience is not new, but Lanier brings it out vividly in detail and with a number of persuasive examples.

More to explore

  • Jaron Lanier’s homepage: The official website of Jaron Lanier, which with its old-fashion style recaptures the freshness and simplicity of the early Internet. The website features biographical information about the author and includes links to a number of Lanier’s articles and commentaries on a number of different technology-related topics. 
  • Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence: Launched in 2001, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence explores the forecasts and insights on accelerating change described in Ray Kurzweil’s books, with updates about breakthroughs in science and technology.
  • Singularity University: Singularity University is an interdisciplinary university founded by Ray Kurzweil and other renowned experts in technology with the support of a number of sponsors (including Google), whose mission is “to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges”. Singularity University is based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.
  • Humanity+: Humanity+ is a non-profit organization dedicated to “the ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities and transcend the legacy of the human condition”. The mission of the organization is to support discussion and public awareness about emerging technologies, as well as to propose solutions for potential problems related to these technologies. The website includes plenty of resources about transhumanism topics and news about upcoming seminars and conferences.

 

Dec 27, 2010

Zilok: peer to peer renting

From Mauro Cherubini's Moleskine

Zilok is a startup that offers an interesting service: peer to peer renting.

How it works? Users post possessions they are willing to rent out, along with a price. The web site processes the fee, track the reputation of your renting partner and issues insurance for the item.

zilok_rent-anything.png

Dec 08, 2009

FaceBots

The world's first robot with its own Facebook page (and that can use its information in conversations with "friends") has been developed by Nikolaos Mavridis and collaborators from the Interactive Robots and Media Lab at the United Arab Emirates University.

The main hypothesis of the FaceBots project is that long-term human robot interaction will benefit by reference to "shared memories" and "events relevant to shared friends" in human-robot dialogues.

More to explore:

  • N. Mavridis, W. Kazmi and P. Toulis, "Friends with Faces: How Social Networks Can Enhance Face Recognition and Vice Versa", contributed book chapter to Computational Social Networks Analysis: Trends, Tools and Research Advances, Springer Verlag, 2009. pdf

    N. Mavridis, W. Kazmi, P. Toulis, C. Ben-AbdelKader, "On the synergies between online social networking, Face Recognition, and Interactive Robotics", CaSoN 2009. pdf

    N. Mavridis, C. Datta et al,  "Facebots: Social robots utilizing and publishing social information in Facebook", IEEE HRI 2009. pdf

 

Apr 16, 2009

The future news ecosystem

According to Steven Johnson, this is what the future news ecosystem will look like.

Well, it makes sense, right?

Newsecosystem

Jul 23, 2008

Web GIS in practice VI: a demo "playlist" of geo-mashups for public health neogeographers

Web GIS in practice VI: a demo "playlist" of geo-mashups for public health neogeographers.

Int J Health Geogr. 2008 Jul 18;7(1):38

Authors: Kamel Boulos MN, Scotch M, Cheung KH, Burden D

ABSTRACT: 'Mashup' was originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks to create a new piece of music. The term now refers to Web sites or services that weave data from different sources into a new data source or service. Using a musical metaphor that builds on the origin of the word 'mashup', this paper presents a demonstration "playlist" of four geo-mashup vignettes that make use of a range of Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and 3-D Internet methods, with outputs/end-user interfaces spanning the flat Web (two-dimensional -- 2-D maps), a three-dimensional -- 3-D mirror world (Google Earth) and a 3-D virtual world (Second Life (R)). The four geo-mashup "songs" in this "playlist" are: 'Web 2.0 and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for infectious disease surveillance', 'Web 2.0 and GIS for molecular epidemiology', 'Semantic Web for GIS mashup', and 'From Yahoo! Pipes to 3-D, avatar-inhabited geo-mashups'. It is hoped that this showcase of examples and ideas, and the pointers we are providing to the many online tools that are freely available today for creating, sharing and reusing geo-mashups with minimal or no coding, will ultimately spark the imagination of many public health practitioners and stimulate them to start exploring the use of these methods and tools in their day-to-day practice. The paper also discusses how today's Web is rapidly evolving into a much more intensely immersive, mixed-reality and ubiquitous socio-experiential Metaverse that is heavily interconnected through various kinds of user-created mashups.

Apr 10, 2008

Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement

a worth-reading article by Rheingold about the role of social media in supporting civic engagement

Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement

Abstract. Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs (“web logs,” web pages that are regularly updated with links and opinion), wikis (web pages that non-programmers can edit easily), podcasts (digital radio productions distributed through the Internet), and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on “public voice,” should be considered a pillar—not just a component—of twenty-first-century civic curriculum. Participatory media that enable young people to create as well as consume media are popular among high school and college students. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation. The participatory characteristics of online digital media are described, examples briefly cited, the connection between individual expression and public opinion discussed, and specific exercises for developing a public voice through blogs, wikis, and podcasts are suggested. A companion wiki provides an open-ended collection of resources for educators: https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy.

 
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PDF (145 KB) PDF Plus (145 KB)

 

 

 

 

15:37 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mar 10, 2008

New platform for crowdsourcing

Via TheAppGap 

Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives.  From the ReadWriteWeb review:

Kluster Launches at TED: A New Product in 72 Hours

Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.

The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can.

[ Snip … ]


The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or "phase"), people submit what are called "sparks." Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit "amps" — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign "watts" to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.

Then an algorithm that takes into account "each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history" goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).

Dec 22, 2007

Neulio: Free Video Site for Educational Clips

Via Mashable

 

neulio-logo.png

 

Neulio is a video education site where anyone can create lessons for free. Lessons created can be in video or quiz format. Create a profile, and you’ll be able to access, share, and create lessons, though lessons are also available for non-members as well. Neulio will keep track of the recent lessons you’ve viewed, but there doesn’t appear to be an option for saving lessons in any way associated to your account (i.e. favorites folder, etc.). You can send lessons to friends, social bookmarking sites, rate them and leave comments.

 

neulio-s.png

18:50 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: social media

Dec 16, 2007

Google launches Knowledge Project "Knol"

The BBC reports that Google has launched "knol", a project to create an authoritative store of information about any and every topic.  The search giant has already started inviting people to write about the subject on which they are known to be an expert.
 
According to analysts, the knol system is an attack on Wikipedia
 
Screengrab of Wikipedia homepage, Wiki Media Foundation

 

16:55 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: wikipedia

Aug 07, 2007

MATES

mates

mates is a location-based social networking system in the form of a robust web service, or Relationship Engine, and an optional rich media client application, or Relationship Space Navigator.




from the project's website

Our objective in creating mates has been to build an open infrastructure to introduce and connect individuals based on the intersection of physical location and other properties they might have in common.

mates is different than the wide range of existing social networking and instant messaging applications. We strive to create an open infrastructure that will allow existing software to harness the power of location based social networking

The current version of mates is geared towards the academic community, focusing on course registration and academic interests. This set of properties could easily be extended to encompass professional or social environments with hooks into LDAP directories or existing social networking applications. and a platform on top of which other new, powerful applications can be developed.

20:05 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: social computing

Apr 01, 2007

Democratic polling interface

 

Re-blogged from InfoAesthetics


undiscovered_country.jpg

a web-based application prototype that allows participants to provide direct responses to current issues facing their governments on a selection of social scales (e.g. housing, health, immigration, social rights). the "Waterfall" interfaces visualizes the issues, votes & opinions of participants, with size depending on importance. "Where in the World" aligns contributing authors with their geographical location. "In Context" displays issues in a quantative by a matrix of horizontal stacked bar graphs.

 

links:

undiscovered-country.net 

restlesseye.com

Feb 17, 2007

Social Networks for Disaster Relief


i still prefer google maps

 

From MIT's Technology Review:

 

The emergence of the Internet as a social environment led us to come up with a service where people could first report the scope of a tsunami or a wildfire or even an E. coli attack," says Ben Schneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland and a coauthor of the report. Schneiderman got the idea when he typed 911 into Google and was unable to find any useful information. "There was no service that would provide information or assistance during Katrina-like events." The system is not strictly an online analog of 911 or other emergency-reporting services, says Schneiderman. "We think it may be helpful in advance of emergencies, during emergencies, and during rebuilding and restoration afterwards."

Murray Turoff, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says that "what most people don't seem to understand is that the real first responders in disasters are the people in the community." Turoff, who developed the first emergency computer network for the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness in 1971, says that the government still has not taken steps to ensure that relief efforts are properly coordinated. "All these organizations need to be able to talk laterally," he says.

Jennifer Preece, an expert in human-computer interactions at the University of Maryland and a coauthor of the study, says that for 911.gov to be successful, it will have to draw in volunteers from other communities and be integrated with existing social-networking sites. If the government backs the site, she says, it, too, could have the clout to draw in users. She points out that during Katrina, many people found their information by heading to local libraries. "Why did they go there? These are established and trusted communities that they know about.

20:39 Posted in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: social computing

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