We as a society have accepted the internet as an extension of the self. The online disinhibition effect sometimes allows us to open up to strangers in order to seek support, or disclose proxies for medical conditions while being social on the networking platforms. These signals – albeit subtle – could be used to develop tools to understand population health, and in some cases, develop interventions. In these works, I explored different data source, methods, and models to capture these signals using methods from complex networks and NLP.
The strength of social relations has been shown to affect an individual’s access to opportunities. To date, however, the correspondence between tie strength and population’s economic prospects has not been quantified, largely because of the inability …
Online forums that allow participatory engagement between users have been transformative for public discussion of important issues. However, debates on such forums can sometimes escalate into full blown exchanges of hate or misinformation. An …
Online debates typically possess a large number of argumentative comments. Most readers who would like to see which comments are winning arguments often only read a part of the debate. Many platforms that host such debates allow for the comments to …
A biological understanding is key for managing medical conditions, yet psychological and social aspects matter too. The main problem is that these two aspects are hard to quantify and inherently difficult to communicate. To quantify psychological …
Platforms like Reddit and Twitter offer internet users an opportunity to talk about diverse issues, including those pertaining to physical and mental health. Some of these forums also function as a safe space for severely distressed mental health …
In online debates, as in offline ones, individual utterances or arguments support or attack each other, leading to some subset of arguments (potentially from different sides of the debate) being considered more relevant than others. However, online …
Social media has been on the vanguard of political information diffusion in the 21st century. Most studies that look into disinformation, political influence and fake-news focus on mainstream social media platforms. This has inevitably made English …
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content, usually …