There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems~Users and interactive retrieval • Humancentered computing~Empirical studies in HCI • Information systems~Retrieval tasks and goals
In the current climate of shrinking newsrooms and revenues, journalists face increasing pressures exerted by the industry's for-profit focus and the expectation of intensified output. While AI-enabled journalism has great potential to help alleviate journalists' pressures, it might also disrupt journalistic norms and, at worst, interfere with their duty to inform the public. For AI systems to be as useful as possible, designers should understand journalists' professional values and incorporate them into their designs. We report findings from interviews with journalists to understand their perceptions of how professional values that are important to them (such as truth, impartiality and originality) might be supported and/or undermined by AI technologies. Based on these findings, we provide design insight and guidelines for incorporating values into the design of AI systems. We argue HCI design can achieve the strongest possible value alignment by moving beyond merely supporting important values, to truly embodying them. CCS Human-centered computing Empirical studies in HCI.
Creativity and verification are intrinsic to high‐quality journalism, but their role is often poorly visible in news story creation. Journalists face relentless commercial pressures that threaten to compromise story quality, in a digital era where their ethical obligation not to mislead the public has never been more important. It is therefore crucial to investigate how journalists can be supported to produce stories that are original, impactful, and factually accurate, under tight deadlines. We present findings from 14 semistructured interviews, where we asked journalists to discuss the creation of a recent news story to understand the process and associated human information behavior (HIB). Six overarching behaviors were identified: discovering, collecting, organizing, interrogating, contextualizing, and publishing. Creativity and verification were embedded throughout news story creation and integral to journalists' HIB, highlighting their ubiquity. They often manifested at a micro level; in small‐scale but vital activities that drove and facilitated story creation. Their ubiquitous role highlights the importance of creativity and verification support being woven into functionality that facilitates information acquisition and use in digital information tools for journalists.
It is my pleasure to present the XVIII volume of LNCS Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence. This volume includes nine interesting and original papers that have been selected via the peer-review process. The first paper, "Using Semantic Web for Generating Questions: Do Different Populations Perceive Questions Differently?" by Thinh Le Nguyen, is devoted to the problem of organizing effective learning processes in intelligent e-learning systems. The author proposes an approach to using Semantic Web data for generating questions that are intended to help people develop arguments in a discussion session. The second paper entitled "Reflection of Intelligent e-Learning/Tutoring-The Flexible Learning Model in LMS Blackboard" by Ivana Simonova, Petra Poulova, and Pavel Kriz describes the theoretical background and practical concept of teaching/ learning through online courses as an example of a smart solution of e-learning system. The authors consider personalization based on individual learning preferences, including students' reflection on the individualized online instruction. In the third paper, "GLIO: A New Method for Grouping Like-Minded Users," Soufiene Jaffali et al. present a novel unsupervised method for grouping like-minded users within social networks. The idea of their method is based on detecting groups of users sharing the same interest centers and having similar opinions. Owing to this it can extract the interest centers and retrieve the polarities from the user's textual posts. The fourth paper, "A Preferences-Based Approach for Better Comprehension of User Information Needs," by Sondess Missaoui and Rim Faiz desribes a model that can identify which contextual dimensions have a strong influence on the outcome of the retrieval process and should therefore be in the user's focus. In order to achieve these objectives, the authors create a new query language model based on the user's preferences. Next they extend this model in order to define a relevance measure for each contextual dimension for automatically classifying each dimension. The fifth paper entitled "Performance Evaluation of the Customer Relationship Management Agent's in a Cognitive Integrated Management Support System" by Marcin Hernes concerns essential issues related to the sentiment analysis of customers' opinions performed by customer relationship management agents running in a multiagent cognitive integrated management information system. This system uses computational collective intelligence methods and allows for supporting the management processes related with all the domains of the enterprise's functioning. In the sixth paper, "Agreements Technologies-Towards Sophisticated Software Agents in Multi-Agent Environments," Mirjana Ivanović and Zoran Budimac present an approach for using agreement technologies in implementation of sophisticated autonomous software agents that mutually negotiate in order to achieve win-win situations. The authors describe the key concepts in this area and highlight the influence of agreement...
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