TY - GEN
T1 - On urban event tracking from online media
T2 - 1st IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence, CogMI 2019
AU - Abdelzaher, Tarek
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/12
Y1 - 2019/12
N2 - Modern online media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, democratized information broadcast, allowing anyone to offer content for large-scale dissemination. The resulting global accessibility of real-time information marked an unprecedented change in human history. It ushered-in an age of information overload and introduced fundamentally new content dissemination dynamics within a very short period of time compared to that necessary for our cognitive faculties to co-evolve. In the meantime, the public nature of offered information allows automated tools to observe not only what is being transmitted but also how it propagates. Actual diffusion of information is driven by recepients, who must individually prioritize what to consume and propagate in the face of mounting overload. The resulting propagation patterns offer insights into the collective cognitive choices made by the underlying population. Automated algorithms can harvest these insights to offer added value to the population at hand. One example is content curation (or recommendation) services that help users sift through increasingly larger amounts of information clutter to find the most relevant and interesting items. We argue that contemporary information distillation services that manage overload can lead to significant negative side-effects that may range from unintentional suppression of pertinent information to the undermining of the very foundations of modern democracy. This paper explains the mechanism by which these side effects occur and explores possible research directions surrounding the mitigation of such side effects, set in the context of urban event tracking applications.
AB - Modern online media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, democratized information broadcast, allowing anyone to offer content for large-scale dissemination. The resulting global accessibility of real-time information marked an unprecedented change in human history. It ushered-in an age of information overload and introduced fundamentally new content dissemination dynamics within a very short period of time compared to that necessary for our cognitive faculties to co-evolve. In the meantime, the public nature of offered information allows automated tools to observe not only what is being transmitted but also how it propagates. Actual diffusion of information is driven by recepients, who must individually prioritize what to consume and propagate in the face of mounting overload. The resulting propagation patterns offer insights into the collective cognitive choices made by the underlying population. Automated algorithms can harvest these insights to offer added value to the population at hand. One example is content curation (or recommendation) services that help users sift through increasingly larger amounts of information clutter to find the most relevant and interesting items. We argue that contemporary information distillation services that manage overload can lead to significant negative side-effects that may range from unintentional suppression of pertinent information to the undermining of the very foundations of modern democracy. This paper explains the mechanism by which these side effects occur and explores possible research directions surrounding the mitigation of such side effects, set in the context of urban event tracking applications.
KW - Information dissemination
KW - Online media
KW - Social sensing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081232815&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85081232815&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CogMI48466.2019.00031
DO - 10.1109/CogMI48466.2019.00031
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85081232815
T3 - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE 1st International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence, CogMI 2019
SP - 160
EP - 167
BT - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE 1st International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence, CogMI 2019
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 12 December 2019 through 14 December 2019
ER -