Information Behaviour & Political Refugees
Title: Miss-information among refugees
Miss-information, half-truths and fake news have received considerable attention in the media in recent times. Most of the research attention in this space has focused on social-media and how rumours and untruths are spread. However, false information can be spread in many ways.
Taking the refugee population as a case study, the aim of this project is to determine whether there are commonly held beliefs that are formed within refugee communities in Germany that are not true and understand how these are formed.
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: Information sharing / withholding among refugees - a study in the mould of Elfrede Chatman
Elfrede Chatman can be considered as one of the most influential information scientists. Her work studied information poverty and in particular she used ethnographical methods to understand the information landscape and behaviour of particular social groups, including university janitors, elderly women in care homes and the homeless. This project would continue her work to understand another underprivileged demographic - political refugees in Germany.
Skills and interests: qualitative research
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: Information seeking strategies of refugees
The refugee crisis has brought increasing numbers of refugees to Germany. When they arrive here they are encountered with many hurdles. How do things work? Where can I stay? How long can I stay? Where can I get support? Cultural differences mean that the answers are often puzzling and all of this happens in a foreign language. This project will attempt to discover how refugees attempt to find answers to these kinds of questions. More specifically it will try to answer What kinds of information needs refugees have? What information resources do they have, which ones do they use hand how? What problems do they encounter?
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Information Behaviour & Healthy Lifestyles
Title: Analysing Trends in Online Supermarket Data
Government health initiatives often try to encourage home cooking as a means to promote healthier diets [1,3]. Nevertheless, past studies have shown that common sources of cooking inspiration, such as recipes published by celebrity chefs tend to be unhealthier in many ways [2]. These kinds of studies are typically based on very small hand picked samples. In Howard's work a sample of recipes from celebrity cookbooks with a small sample of ready meals from UK supermarkets. While such studies are insightful, they do not show the full picture.
This project would involve crawling data from the website http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/ (external link, opens in a new window) to determine a more accurate and complete dataset from which to investigate the healthiness of ready meals. When the dataset has been created data mining approaches can be employed to answer a number of questions, which previous studies have not yet been able to answer. These include:
- How healthy are ready meals?
- Does this vary across stores?
- Is there a relationship between price and healthiness?
- Is there a relationship between popularity and healthiness?
References
Department of health. change4life marketing strategy. 2009. available athttp://www.nhs.uk/Change4Life/supporter-resources/downloads/Change4Life_Marketing%20Strategy_April09.pdf. last accessed on20.6.2016.
Howard, Simon, Jean Adams, and Martin White. "Nutritional content of supermarket ready meals and recipes by television chefs in the United Kingdom: cross sectional study." BMJ 345 (2012).
Usda.cookmoreoftenathome.2011.availableathttp://www.choosemyplate.gov/weight-management-calories/weight-management/better-choices/cook-home.html last accessed on 20.6.2016
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: Studying how online recipes are used in practice
Our recent work has demonstrated that users of online food portals generally prefer less healthy meals and their choices can be influenced by several factors including presentation, algorithms and personal preferences. That being said, just because online recipes are interacted with online does not mean that they are actually prepared and consumed by users. This project will investigate how online recipes are actually used in practice and more specifically, attempt to answer the following research questions:
- When and why do people use online recipes? (for special occasions? to try something new? because they cannot cook without them?)
- How are they used? Do people tend to follow the ingredients and instructions exactly or are they just used as inspiration?
- When do users deviate and why?
- In which ways and to what extent does the finished product vary from what is described in the recipe?
The results are important not only because they help us understand people's behaviour, but also to help us estimate to what extent interactions with online recipes can be seen as a proxy for eating a meal with particular nutritional content.
Potential approaches: diary study, interview, observation.
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Food ordering system for a sports club
Although participating in sport is typically associated with a healthy lifestyle, many of the community sports clubs in Germany provide particularly unhealthy food to the members. This project would involve developing an online food ordering system allowing members to order their food in advance. Not only would this make life easier for both the members and the restaurant, it would also provide a platform to understand food recommendations and potential behavioural change.
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Website / Search engine to communicate and explore the geographical trends in health statistics and how this relates to the online food recipes with which people in those regions interact.
This project will involve indexing online recipes to make them searchable and at the same time visualising the trends found in recent publication. (external link, opens in a new window)
Here (external link, opens in a new window) is an example of such a site as means of inspiration.
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Social Media Analysis
Title: Analysing Following and Unfollowing Dynamics in Social Media Click-Through Data
An essential feature of social media applications is the creation of a social network. In order to support the user in the search for potential accounts, several possibilities based on content- or network-based methods are discussed in the research. Motivation and triggers that explain how users approach the problem in everyday use and expand their social network or remove other users from their social network are little known.
Using a click-through dataset of 44 users collected over a period of 5 months, we will analyse how often new users are "followed" or "unfollowed", the reasons for this and how users go about it.
[1] Haewoon Kwak, Hyunwoo Chun, and Sue Moon. 2011. Fragile online relationship: a first look at unfollow dynamics in twitter. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1091-1100. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979104 (external link, opens in a new window)
[2] Seth A. Myers and Jure Leskovec. 2014. The bursty dynamics of the Twitter information network. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web (WWW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 913-924. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2566486.2568043 (external link, opens in a new window)
Contact persons: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: Detecting social media posts on controversial topics
The content posted on social-media is extremely diverse, ranging from posts documenting personal activities to opinions and statements of facts. Some of these facts are mundane and undisputed whereas others are extremely controversial. The aim of this project is to identify controversial tweets posted by German politicians. The student will develop and test automatic methods of detection using a large collection of tweets collected by elected politicians in Germany, which is being collected as part of an i:imsk collaboration.
This will involve some technical and programming skills as well as knowledge of statistics.
Contact persons: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: Studying images posted by politicians on Twitter
There are increasing numbers of studies investigating the social-media behaviour of politicians. These have applied both qualitative and quantitative approaches, demonstrating that politicians have diverse aims and behaviours, but in doing so exhibit many key cultural phenomena known from cultural studies. Many of the tweets politicians post contain images. The aim of this project is to understand what kinds of images are posted, in which situations and why they might want to do this. The student will be provided with access to a large collection of tweets collected by elected politicians in Germany, which is being collected as part of an i:imsk collaboration.
Contact persons: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Persuasive Computing
Title: Games with sensors to encourage children in their movement and increase coordination skills.
According to the WHO, 41 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2014 (WHO2014). However, obesity is preventable with a combination of healthy diet and adequate physical exercise. The aim of this project is to devise and develop interactive games for children to play, which will encourage them to be more active.
This project will require and interest in / and knowledge of programming and embedded systems (via raspberry pi).
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Recommender Systems
Title: Colour-based food recommender
The colourfulness of food plays a key role in food choice by influencing taste thresholds, sweetness perception, food preference, pleasantness, and acceptability [1]. A large body of research has shown that changing the hue or intensity of the colour of food items can exert a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations and subsequent experiences of consumers [2]. There is also evidence suggesting meals with broad range of colours tend to be more healthy.
While it makes sense that the image associated with a recipe will be important in determining how it is perceived and rated, in the recommender systems community no research to date has investigated this in detail. Using large datasets collected via popular Internet food portals (allrecipes.com and kochbar.de), this project will study the relationship between the colourfulness of food images and perception of the food and will investigate the feasibility of using colour information to provide recommendations. Potential research questions include:
Does the colour profile of a recipe correlate with the healthiness of the recipe? Does the colour profile of a recipe correlate with the popularity of the recipe? Is it possible to predict user recipe ratings based on the colour profiles of previously liked recipes?
[1] Clydesdale, Fergus M. "Colour as a factor in food choice." Critical Reviews in Food Science & Nutrition 33.1 (1993): 83-101. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8424857 (external link, opens in a new window)
[2] Spence, Charles. "On the psychological impact of food colour." Flavour 4.1 (2015): https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3 (external link, opens in a new window)
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Title: FoodChoice: an eye-tracking study
A lot of research has been performed in fields such as nutritional science and psychology to understand and model how people choose the food they eat. From this research we know choosing food is a complex, multi-faceted process, influenced by biological, personal and socio-economic factors [1]. Yet for the majority of people, aspects of taste and sensory appeal seem to be the drivers for decisions, followed by health concerns, nutritional value, and price [3], meaning that the decisions can be modelled using relatively simple heuristics [4].
In this project the aim is to use eye-tracking to confirm whether this holds in the context of choosing dishes on online food portals. We wish to understand which information people use to base their decision of which recipe to try and determine whether particular features (e.g. title, image, nutritional information boxes) influence the decision of which food is chosen. Such an understanding could lead to the possibility of changing the information shown in order to influence the recipe chosen to promote health.
Methodological inspiration for the study can be found in [2].
[1] Bellisle F. The determinants of food choice. EUFIC Review. 2005;17(April):1-8.
[2] Fernquist, Jennifer, and Ed H. Chi. "Perception and understanding of social annotations in web search." Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2013.
[3] Rozin P, Zellner D. The role of pavlovian conditioning in the acquisition of foodlikes and dislikesa. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.1985;443(1):189-202
[4] Scheibehenne B, Miesler L, Todd PM. Fast and frugal food choices: Uncoveringindividual decision heuristics. Appetite. 2007;49(3):578-589
Contact person: PD Dr David Elsweiler
Pedestrian navigation & landmark research
Analysing the URWalking log data
Our URWalking web app has been storing all requests including geocoordinates etc. in a database table for several months. The table has grown quite a bit and is therefore confusing.
In order to better adapt our navigation to the needs of the users, it would be interesting to know, for example
- Which users request routes (are they only members of the department or also students or other employees)?
- Which destinations are queried and how can we use this data to expand our system in a meaningful way?
- What problems occur when entering the start/destination?
- How do users interact with the system?
Basic knowledge of databases (PostgreSQL) and experience with any programming language would be required.
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig
WiFi Heatmaps (in cooperation with the Computer Center)
A function is to be developed for the URWalking Android app (external link, opens in a new window) that shows users where they have the best WiFi quality.
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig
Motion logging via WiFi
A function is to be developed for the URWalking Android app (external link, opens in a new window) that records which hotspots users pass by saving received WiFi signals. Preferred routes are to be derived from this.
Contact person: Prof Dr Bernd Ludwig
Title: Your opinion is important to us! Evaluation of route segments in outdoor areas
Context
The concrete experiences of a person during navigation are formative for future navigation experiences. It therefore makes sense to collect these experiences systematically and comprehensively. In doing so, the small-scale nature of these experiences must be taken into account. Bad experiences on route sections may influence the perception of the entire route.
Aim of the work
A web-based UI is to be developed on the basis of the data model provided by the Geoinformatics Group at the University of Augsburg.
The application should map the following aspects:
1) Selecting/marking route sections in outdoor environments
2) Questionnaire-based survey of people from within the application
3) Transfer of the data in the specified data model to a web server
This application will then be used to collect and analyse data.
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig
Can low-level image features predict indoor salience?
As part of a seminar, a data set with a total of approx. 7000 ratings of indoor objects was collected. Each rating includes three questions to measure the overall salience, which were taken from Kattenbeck (2016).
The master's thesis will investigate the question of whether the questionnaire-based saliency values can be predicted sufficiently well with low-level image features (e.g. local colour changes etc.).
Various state-of-the-art machine learning methods will be used to answer this question.
Literature:
- Kattenbeck, Markus (2016): Empirically Measuring Salience of Objects for Use in Pedestrian Navigation.
- Dominguez et al. (2017): Comparing Neural and Attractiveness-based Visual Features for Artwork Recommendation, available at: arXiv.org/pdf/1706.07515.pdf
- Itt & Koch (2001): Computational modelling of visual attention, available at www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v2/n3/full/nrn0301_194a.html
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig
Identification of global landmarks on the university campus
Global landmarks, i.e. those that lie off the route, support orientation during navigation and promote the development of a cognitive map. For example, the "university globe" can be easily referenced in many situations as it is a familiar meeting point. The integration of global landmarks into route instructions, especially for indoor areas, is the overarching goal of the work.
As part of the URWalking seminar, several landmarks have already been surveyed on campus. The thesis will analyse these objects with regard to
- Type (areal, local, etc.)
- Visibility from the point of view of the instruction
- Position inside/outside a building
- Distance of the object from the viewpoint.
To do this, this data must first be annotated. Then different properties of global landmarks are to be identified that go beyond the position relative to the route.
Literature:
Anacta, V. J. A., Wang, J., & Schwering, A. (2014). Routes to Remember: Comparing Verbal Instructions and Sketch Maps. In Connecting a Digital Europe Through Location and Place (pp. 311-322). Springer International Publishing.
Lovelace, K. L., Hegarty, M., & Montello, D. R. (1999, August). Elements of good route directions in familiar and unfamiliar environments. In International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (pp. 65-82). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Schwering, A., Li, R., & Anacta, V. J. A. (2013). Orientation information in different forms of route instructions. In Short Paper Proceedings of the 16th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Leuven, Belgium.
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig
Further topics:
- Prediction of landmarks
- Generation of context-dependent navigation instructions
- Voice interface for the URWalking Android app with chat function
- Crowdsourcing of landmarks
- Evaluation of landmarks as games with a purpose
Contact person: Prof. Dr Bernd Ludwig