Ireland ranked #14 in the recent World Happiness Report 2023

In the recent World Happiness Report 2023, Ireland has been ranked 14th around the world. The top-3 happiest countries around the world are Finland, Denmark and Iceland, respectively.

The report is based on six variables below:

• GDP per capita, 
• social support, 
• healthy life expectancy, 
• freedom, 
• generosity, and 
• corruption

If we look into details about what kinds of variables contributed to what extent for the rank of Ireland, we can notice that GDP per capita plays a significant role. In contrast, the "dystopia+residual" part seems to have a lower score compared to other countries.
 

Hypertext2017 Travel Report

I participated the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT), which was located at Prague, Czech Republic from 4-7th, July. HT is a top-tier ACM conference in the areas of Hypertext and Social Media. This is the first time I'm attending HT, and interesting to know that TBL was demonstrated WWW in 1991 Hypertext conference https://home.cern/images/2014/01/tim-berners-lee-demonstrates-world-wide-web. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Sir-Tim-Berners-Lee-unnoticed-when-his-contribution-is-comparable-to-Jobs-and-Gates. This year, HT has 69 regular paper submissions with a 27% acceptance rate, and 12 short-presentations. As I was at UMAP conference twice before, and HT has been held in close proximity with UMAP with similar program committees, I was wondering what's the difference between the two conferences. After attending the conference, I guess the key difference is while UMAP is more focused on the context of e-learning, such as user modeling, RecSys in educational systems, HT is more focused on linking data & resources and Social Media. Although HT has wide range of acceptance rate, overall, it has good average citation according to ACM DL.

Day-1:

Keynote: Peter Mika SCHIBSTED (Yahoo before)

It is interesting to see the keynote on Semantic Web in HT. In this talk, we look back at the history of the Semantic Web. The speaker discussed what the original aspirations of its creators were, and what has been achieved in practice in these two decades including some achievements especially in terms of search engines. In addition, also some failures which have not been achieved based on original visions.

What happened to the Semantic Web? from Peter Mika

Most of the presentations today related to studying problems on Social Media, such as hate speech:

• Mainack Mondal, Leandro Augusto de Araújo Silva and Fabrício Benevenuto: A Measurement Study of Hate Speech in Social Media
• Stringhini and Athena Vakali: Hate is not binary: Studying abusive behavior of #GamerGate on Twitter

These talks were interesting as I was interested in computational social science when I first started my PhD. For example, the first one above discussed about "how to measure hate speech?", "does the anonymity plays a role in it?", and how these phenomena differ across countries. The results, based on Twitter dataset were interesting. The authors found that there are more anonymous account of hate speech compared to baseline (random), i.e, users post more hate speech.

Day-2:

Keynote: "A MEME IS NOT A VIRUS: THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE HEURISTICS IN INFORMATION DIFFUSION" by Kristina Lerman

Kristina Lerman is Research Team Lead at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and holds a joint appointment as a Research Associate Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. She talked about position bias in Social Mdedia, e.g., posts will be less likely to be seen with lower position, with more newer tweets coming, former tweets then become less likely to be seen with their positions moving down… and the phenomenon is more serious for well-connected users. Also, it is interesting that well-connected hubs are less likely to retweet older posts, retweet probability decreases with connectivity - highly connected people are less susceptible to infection, due to their increased cognitive load.

The presentations on day-2 were diverse, consists of linking content, crowd sourcing, story telling... And the following paper which tackles the problem of understanding task clarity in crowdsourcing platforms, especially CrowedFlow…, and how to measure it, won the best paper award in HT2017.

• Ujwal Gadiraju, Jie Yang and Alessandro Bozzon: Clarity is a Worthwhile Quality - On the Role of Task Clarity in Microtask Crowdsourcing

Day-3:

The presentations on day-3 were about location-based social networks, user modeling, ratings/reviews and visualizations. One of the interesting papers was the following one which I had read about the previous work about happy map done by Daniele QUercia (Bell Labs Cambridge). This paper talked about various elements which might affect perceptions (such as safety etc.) of people about places.

• David Candeia, Flávio Figueiredo, Nazareno Andrade and Daniele Quercia: Multiple Images of the City: Unveiling Group-Specific Urban Perceptions through a Crowdsourcing Game

My presentation was about "Leveraging Followee List Memberships for Inferring User Interests for Passive Users on Twitter", which is an extended work upon previous work in ECIR2017.

Leveraging Followee List Memberships for Inferring User Interests for Passive Users on Twitter from GUANGYUAN PIAO


Overall, the conference has around 70+ participants. However, what's impressive is the audiences were actively asking questions, and participated in discussions. In addition, the organizers made the proceedings available before the conference along with conference navigator developed by Uni. Pittsburgh: http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/portalindex.php

Proceedings: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3078714&picked=prox&cfid=782021270&cftoken=32813465

Next year, HT2018 will be in Baltimore, USA. It is a good conference and hope I will have chances to attend the conference in the future as well.

ACM SAC 2016 Travel Report

From the 4th to the 8th of April I had the pleasure to participate the 31st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC), which was held in beautiful city Pisa, Italy. I was there to present my full paper "Measuring Semantic Distance for Linked Open Data-enabled Recommender Systems" and to participate the Student Research Competition sponsored by Microsoft.

This year, there were over 500+ registrations from 59 countries at this conference. There were 37 tracks and the overall acceptance rate for this year is 24%.

Keynotes:

There were two keynotes given by John Mylopoulos and Marco Conti, respectively. The first keynote is about the requirements problem in Software Engineering and the second keynote is about "From MANET to people-centric computing and communications.

Semantic Web Track:

There were two sessions with eight papers for Semantic Web Track where three of the participants two of the participants from our institute. Pasquale Minervini presented "Leveraging the Schema in Latent Factor Models for Knowledge Graph Completion" and another college Feng Gao presented "QoS-Aware Adaptation for Complex Event Service" in another (SOA) track.

Measuring Semantic Distance for Linked Open Data-enabled Recommender Systems from GUANGYUAN PIAO

Social Network and Media Analysis Track (SONAMA):

One of the papers in this track I'm interested in was "Inferring Semantic Interest Profiles from Twitter Followees: Does Twitter Know Better than Your Friends?" from Christoph Besel, University of Passau, Germany, which is related to my work. Although many previous works focused on using tweets for inferring user interest profiles, they used the alternative source (followees) to retrieve user interest profiles, which are based on the tendency that more and more users are consuming feeds instead of producing content on the social networks.

Student Research Competition (SRC):

I also participated in SAC SRC and went through 2nd round (top-5 list) and it was a good opportunity to compete across different disciplines. Congrats to all top-3 winners! 

Lunch

Banquet

What would make the conference better?

It would be better to have a Twitter channel to communicate and disseminate activities during the conference. Next year, it will be in Morocco and hope I could attend again:).

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Update after the conference:

The proceedings are available from June, 2016

TOEFL paper report receive date

Due to the Visa application, I called the ETS office to inquiry about when I could get the TOEFL paper report for the test at 18th Jan.

As the administrator told to me, it will send from ETS three days later after the score is available online, and will take 4-6 weeks after that to be sent to the place you live.

In general, the date will be organized as below to receive the paper report.

• Test Date : 18th Jan.
• 
  
• Score available online : 29th Jan.
• 
  
• Sent from ETS : 1st Feb.
• 
  
• Receive 4-6 weeks later