TY - CHAP T1 - Experimental Assessment of the Emergence of Awareness and Its Influence on Behavioral Changes: The Everyaware Lesson T2 - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness Y1 - 2017 A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Becker, Martin A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Vittorio Loreto AB - The emergence of awareness is deeply connected to the process of learning. In fact, by learning that high sound levels may harm one’s health, that noise levels that we estimate as innocuous may be dangerous, that there exist an alternative path we can walk to go to work and minimize our exposure to air pollution, etc., citizens will be able to understand the environment around them and act consequently to go toward a more sustainable world. JF - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness PB - Springer UR - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_16 ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Large Scale Engagement Through Web-Gaming and Social Computations T2 - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness Y1 - 2017 A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Saverio Caminiti A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Francesca Tria AB - In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents, so to steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as an alternative laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings can be effectively used for research purposes. Web-games introduce a playful aspect in scientific experiments with the result of increasing participation of people and of keeping their attention steady in time. The aim of this chapter is to suggest a general purpose web-based platform scheme for web-gaming and social computation. This platform will simplify the realization of web-games and will act as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users’ curiosity and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers. A platform built by following these criteria has been developed within the EveryAware project, the Experimental Tribe (XTribe) platform, which is operational and ready to be used. Finally, a sample web-game hosted by the XTribe platform will be presented with the aim of reporting the results, in terms of participation and motivation, of two different player recruiting strategies. JF - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness PB - Springer UR - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_12 ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Opinion dynamics: models, extensions and external effects T2 - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness Y1 - 2017 A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Francesca Tria AB - Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion dynamics is one of the processes studied, since opinions are the drivers of human behaviour, and play a crucial role in many global challenges that our complex world and societies are facing: global financial crises, global pandemics, growth of cities, urbanisation and migration patterns, and last but not least important, climate change and environmental sustainability and protection. Opinion formation is a complex process affected by the interplay of different elements, including the individual predisposition, the influence of positive and negative peer interaction (social networks playing a crucial role in this respect), the information each individual is exposed to, and many others. Several models inspired from those in use in physics have been developed to encompass many of these elements, and to allow for the identification of the mechanisms involved in the opinion formation process and the understanding of their role, with the practical aim of simulating opinion formation and spreading under various conditions. These modelling schemes range from binary simple models such as the voter model, to multi-dimensional continuous approaches. Here, we provide a review of recent methods, focusing on models employing both peer interaction and external information, and emphasising the role that less studied mechanisms, such as disagreement, has in driving the opinion dynamics. Due to the important role that external information (mainly in the form of mass media broadcast) can have in enhancing awareness of social issues, a special emphasis will be devoted to study different forms it can take, investigating their effectiveness in driving the opinion formation at the population level. The review shows that, although a large number of approaches exist, some mechanisms such as the effect of multiple external information sources could largely benefit from further studies. Additionally, model validation with real data, which are starting to become available, is still largely lacking and should in our opinion be the main ambition of future investigations. JF - Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness PB - Springer UR - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_17 ER - TY - CONF T1 - Unveiling Political Opinion Structures with a Web-experiment T2 - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems Y1 - 2016 A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Saverio Caminiti A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Francesca Tria A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Vittorio Loreto AB - The dynamics of political votes has been widely studied, both for its practical interest and as a paradigm of the dynamics of mass opinions and collective phenomena, where theoretical predictions can be easily tested. However, the vote outcome is often influenced by many factors beyond the bare opinion on the candidate, and in most cases it is bound to a single preference. The voter perception of the political space is still to be elucidated. We here propose a web experiment (laPENSOcos`ı) where we explicitly investigate participants’ opinions on political entities (parties, coalitions, individual candidates) of the Italian political scene. As a main result, we show that the political perception follows a Weber-Fechner-like law, i.e., when ranking political entities according to the user expressed preferences, the perceived distance of the user from a given entity scales as the logarithm of this rank. JF - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems SN - 978-989-758-181-6 UR - http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/Link.aspx?doi=10.5220/0005906300390047 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative. JF - PLoS One Y1 - 2015 A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Becker, Martin A1 - Saverio Caminiti A1 - De Baets, Bernard A1 - Elen, Bart A1 - Francis, Louise A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Hotho, Andreas A1 - Ingarra, Stefano A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Molino, Andrea A1 - Mueller, Juergen A1 - Peters, Jan A1 - Ricchiuti, Ferdinando A1 - Saracino, Fabio A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Stumme, Gerd A1 - Theunis, Jan A1 - Francesca Tria A1 - Van den Bossche, Joris AB -

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.

VL - 10 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Awareness and learning in participatory noise sensing. JF - PLoS One Y1 - 2013 A1 - Becker, Martin A1 - Saverio Caminiti A1 - Fiorella, Donato A1 - Francis, Louise A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Haklay, Mordechai Muki A1 - Hotho, Andreas A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Mueller, Juergen A1 - Ricchiuti, Ferdinando A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Francesca Tria AB -

The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.

VL - 8 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Cohesion, consensus and extreme information in opinion dynamics JF - Advances in Complex Systems Y1 - 2013 A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Francesca Tria VL - 16 UR - http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525913500355 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Opinion dynamics with disagreement and modulated information JF - Journal of Statistical Physics Y1 - 2013 A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Francesca Tria UR - http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10955-013-0724-x ER - TY - CONF T1 - XTribe: a web-based social computation platform T2 - Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), 2013 Third International Conference on Y1 - 2013 A1 - Saverio Caminiti A1 - Cicali, Claudio A1 - Pietro Gravino A1 - Vittorio Loreto A1 - Vito D P Servedio A1 - Alina Sirbu A1 - Francesca Tria JF - Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), 2013 Third International Conference on PB - IEEE UR - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6686061&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6686061 ER -