Nowadays social media are the main means for conducting discussions and sharing opinions. The huge amount of information generated by social media users is helpful for predicting outcomes of real-world events in different fields, including business, politics and the entertainment industry. In this paper, we studied the possibility of forecasting the success of music albums by analyzing heterogeneous data sources spanning from social media (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) to mainstream American newspapers (e.g., New York Times, Rolling Stones). The idea is to exploit music albums' pre-release hype and post-release approval to predict the album's rank with reference to the well-known Billboard 200 album chart, which tabulates the weekly popularity of music albums in the USA. To predict the success of a music album, that is its rank in the chart, we identified metrics based on the messages' posting trend, the variation of the sentiment associated to such messages, the number of followers of the album's author, and the importance of the people who talk about it. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics we have compared the prediction performances of several models based on supervised learning approaches among those most used in literature. As a result, we obtained that the Random Forest approach is able to predict the music album rank in the Billboard 200 Chart with an expected accuracy of 97%. As a further validation, using this specific model, we also conducted an additional real usage test obtaining an almost matching result (accuracy of 94%).INDEX TERMS Social media, machine learning, prediction, sentiment analysis, music industry.We design a machine learning-based prediction model that we call Billboard 200 Predictor, or BB200P.

Financial bubbles represent a severe problem for investors. In particular, the cryptocurrency market has witnessed the bursting of different bubbles in the last decade, which in turn have had spillovers on all the markets and real economies of countries. These kinds of markets and their unique characteristics are of great interest to researchers. Generally, investors and financial operators study market trends to understand when bubbles might occur using technical analysis tools. Such tools, which have been historically used, resulted in being precious allies at the basis of more advanced systems. In this regard, different autonomous, adaptive and automated trading agents have been introduced in the literature to study several kinds of markets. Among these, we can distinguish between agents with Zero/Minimal Intelligence (ZI/MI) and Computational Intelligence (CI)-based agents. The first ones typically trade on the market without resorting to complex learning strategies; the second ones usually use (deep) reinforcement learning mechanisms. However, these trading agents have never been tested on the cryptocurrencies market and related financial bubbles, which are still mostly overlooked in the literature. It is unclear how these agents can make profits/losses before, during, and after a bubble to adjust their strategy and avoid critical situations. This paper compares a broad set of trading agents (between ZI/MI and CI ones) and evaluates them with well-known financial indicators (e.g., volatility, returns Sharpe ratio, drawdown, Sortino and Omega ratio). Among the experiment’s outcomes, ZI/MI agents were more explainable than CI ones. Based on the results obtained above, we introduce GGSMZ, a trading agent relying on a neuro-fuzzy mechanism. The neuro-fuzzy system is able to learn from the trades performed by the agents adopted in the previous stage. GGSMZ’s performances overcome those of other tested agents. We argue that GGSMZ could be used by investors as a decision support tool.

Gender classification of mobile devices’ users has drawn a great deal of attention for its applications in healthcare, smart spaces, biometric-based access control systems and customization of user interface (UI). Previous works have shown that authentication systems can be more effective when considering soft biometric traits such as the gender, while others highlighted the significance of this trait for enhancing UIs. This paper presents a novel machine learning-based approach to gender classification leveraging the only touch gestures information derived from smartphones’ APIs. To identify the most useful gesture and combination thereof for gender classification, we have considered two strategies: single-view learning, analyzing, one at a time, datasets relating to a single type of gesture, and multi-view learning, analyzing together datasets describing different types of gestures. This is one of the first works to apply such a strategy for gender recognition via gestures analysis on mobile devices. The methods have been evaluated on a large dataset of gestures collected through a mobile application, which includes not only scrolls, swipes, and taps but also pinch-to-zooms and drag-and-drops which are mostly overlooked in the literature. Conversely to the previous literature, we have also provided experiments of the solution in different scenarios, thus proposing a more comprehensive evaluation. The experimental results show that scroll down is the most useful gesture and random forest is the most convenient classifier for gender classification. Based on the (combination of) gestures taken into account, we have obtained F1-score up to 0.89 in validation and 0.85 in testing phase. Furthermore, the multi-view approach is recommended when dealing with unknown devices and combinations of gestures can be effectively adopted, building on the requirements of the system our solution is built-into. Solutions proposed turn out to be both an opportunity for gender-aware technologies and a potential risk deriving from unwanted gender classification.

In the cloud-based society, where the vast majority of social, economic and personal interactions is mediated by information communication technology (ICT), technology is no longer simply a subject of regulation but is becoming an integral part of the regulatory process. Techno-regulation, the “intentional influencing of individuals’ behavior by building norms into technological devices,” is inspiring new ways to support legal safeguards through hardware and software tools, technical solutions allowing the creation of legal relations, hampering breaches of law and even promoting norm compliance. This paper touches on these issues by focusing on Digital Labor Platforms, one of the most relevant phenomena in the gig economy. We present a research project exploring innovative techno-regulatory solutions to protect gig economy workers. The idea is to integrate, in the same strategy, legal principles, regulatory objectives and software solutions. Our attention focuses on two results of our activity—a techno-regulatory model relying on reputational mechanisms to affect the behavior of digital labor market operators and GigAdvisor, a cross-platform experimental application implementing the model.

The growth of Internet and the pervasiveness of ICT have led to a radical change in social relationships. One of the drawbacks of this change is the exposure of individuals to threats during online activities. In this context, the techno-regulation paradigm is inspiring new ways to safeguard legally interests by means of tools allowing to hamper breaches of law. In this paper, we focus on the exposure of individuals to specific online threats when interacting with smartphones. We propose a novel techno-regulatory approach exploiting machine learning techniques to provide safeguards against threats online. Specifically, we study a set of touch-based gestures to distinguish between underages or adults who is accessing a smartphone, and so to guarantee protection. To evaluate the proposed approach’s effectiveness, we developed an Android app to build a dataset consisting of more than 9000 touch-gestures from 147 participants. We experimented both single-view and multi-view learning techniques to find the best combination of touch-gestures able of distinguishing between adults and underages. Results show that the multi-view learning combining scrolls, swipes, and pinch-to-zoom gestures, achieves the best ROC AUC (0.92) and accuracy (88%) scores.

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