The human gut microbiota has been the interest of extensive research in recent years and our knowledge on using the potential capacity of these microbes are growing rapidly. Microorganisms colonized throughout the gastrointestinal tract of human are coevolved through symbiotic relationship and can influence physiology, metabolism, nutrition and immune functions of an individual. The gut microbes are directly involved in conferring protection against pathogen colonization by inducing direct killing, competing with nutrients and enhancing the response of the gut-associated immune repertoire. Damage in the microbiome (dysbiosis) is linked with several life-threatening outcomes viz. inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, obesity, allergy, and auto-immune disorders. Therefore, the manipulation of human gut microbiota came out as a potential choice for therapeutic intervention of the several human diseases. Herein, we review significant studies emphasizing the influence of the gut microbiota on the regulation of host responses in combating infectious and inflammatory diseases alongside describing the promises of gut microbes as future therapeutics.
Geotagged tweets and other forms of social media volunteered geographic information (VGI) are becoming increasingly critical to many applications and scientific studies. An important assumption underlying much of this research is that social media VGI is "local", or that its geotags correspond closely with the general home locations of its contributors. We demonstrate through a study on three separate social media communities (Twitter, Flickr, Swarm) that this localness assumption holds in only about 75% of cases. In addition, we show that the geographic contours of localness follow important sociodemographic trends, with social media in, for instance, rural areas and older areas, being substantially less local in character (when controlling for other demographics). We demonstrate through a case study that failure to account for non-local social media VGI can lead to misrepresentative results in social media VGIbased studies. Finally, we compare the methods for determining localness, finding substantial disagreement in certain cases, and highlight new best practices for social media VGI-based studies and systems.
There is racial diversity as well as economic inequality in the United States (U.S.). To gain a nuanced understanding of how households from different socio economic and racial backgrounds integrate technology into their lives, we conducted a diary study with 22 parents who were Asian Indian (the fastest-growing immigrant population in U.S.) and 18 who were White American (the largest racial group in U.S.) parents from the working and middle classes. The participants logged in-situ instances of using smart phones and speaker use by, with, and around children for 8 weeks, and were interviewed once every four weeks (two times in total). Our findings reveal differences and similarities in parents' attitudes and practices of using or not using these devices around and with children, in parental restrictions of children's use of technology, and children's daily use patterns. The paper concludes with a discussions of the implications of our findings and suggestions for future design improvements in smart phones and speakers.
Over the past few years, the technological vision of the HCI and UbiComp communities regarding conversational devices has become manifest in the form of smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. Even though millions of households have adopted and integrated these devices into their daily lives, we lack a deep understanding of how different members of a household use such devices. To this end, we conducted interviews with 18 families and collected their Google Home Activity logs to understand the usage patterns of adults and children. Our findings reveal that there are substantial differences in the ways smart speakers are used by adults and children in families over an extended period of time. We report on how parents influence children's use and how different users perceive the devices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings and provide guidelines for improving the design of future smart speakers and conversational agents.
Stack Overflow (SO) has become a primary source for learning, how to code, with community features supporting asking and answering questions, upvoting to signify approval of content, and comments to extend questions and answers. While past research has considered the value of posts, often based on upvoting, little has examined the role of comments. Beyond value in explaining code, comments may offer new ways of looking at problems, clarifications of questions or answers, and socially supportive community interactions. To understand the role of comments, a content analysis was conducted to evaluate the key purposes of comments. A coding schema of nine comment categories was developed from open coding on a set of 40 posts and used to classify comments in a larger dataset of 2323 comments from 50 threads over a 6-month period. Results provide insight into the way the comments support learning, knowledge development, and the SO community, and the use and usefulness of the comment feature.
The establishment of one's professional identity can be essential to one's sense of worth. For women, such challenges can be further magnified owing to the need to perform traditional roles along with sustaining a professional career. Through an analysis of a random sample of 10 discussion threads (80 conversation traces) from a subreddit called r/careerwomen, we explore the needs that draw women to use such forums and the ways in which such forums help develop endurance. Our preliminary analysis provides 2 main themes towards understanding how multiple socio-cultural pressures create tensions in defining one's sense of worth. In contrast, 5 other themes provide insights into strategies to redefine norms of worth. Building on these themes, we propose the analytical frame of morale repair, which aims to discuss how such socio-technical interventions can be designed and structured to further address the struggles for women in establishing a sense of worth.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.
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