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Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019

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A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903). This special issue belongs to the section "Techno-Social Smart Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 May 2020) | Viewed by 32940

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Franco Bagnoli

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Guest Editor

Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy
Interests: complex systems; network dynamics; social and cognitive models; Internet-mediated relationships
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Andrea Guazzini

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Guest Editor

Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy
Interests: His main research interests are cognitive and social psychology, social cognition, sociophysics, and virtual social dynamics. Moreover he adopts an approach based on complex systems science to model psychological and social systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This issue is dedicated to the contains extended versions of selected papers from the 6th International Conference “Internet Science”, INSCI 2019, Perpignan, France, December 2–5, 2019.

Internet Science constitutes a very broad concept that includes the technical parts concerning protocols and connections, but also the contents and applications, and, more importantly, the people. The Internet is changing our lives, and therefore many crucial questions have arisen: How do people behave on the Internet? Are they changing their lifestyle and how? Can the Internet promote sustainability, cooperation, and collective intelligence? Can it support open democracy and policy making? How can awareness of possibilities and dangers of the Internet be promoted? What about topics like intellectual properties, privacy, reputation, and participation? What are the juridical aspect of the Internet? What about arts and humanities in general?

INSCI 2019 aimed at providing a good opportunity to bridge the academic and industrial communities in northern and southern countries in order to converge to a noble idea of the role that the Internet should play. The theme, “The Internet and Geopolitical Crossroads,” dealt with the development of practices, platforms, and communication channels to promote the integration of southern European, Mediterranean, African, and Latin American countries in a peaceful world.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Sustainability
- Responsible Research and Innovation
- Transnational, and Inter-Cultural Projects
- Environment and Climate Change
- Smart Environments
Education
- Distance Education and Learning
- Platforms, Applications and Practices for Sustainability, Resilience, Pollution Control, Health and Life Quality, Integration,
- Infrastructures
Openness
- Open Science and access to Scientific Production
- Open Education
- Open Data: Issues, Services and Solutions
- Big Data and Privacy
E-Science
- E-Government
- E-Commerce
- E-Tourism
Engagement
- Citizen Participation,
- Citizen Science,
- Science Shops
Algorithms and computation
- Reinforcement Algorithms and Machine Learning
- Intelligent Systems
- Graph Based Algorithms
- Algorithms for mediation content
- Green Computing
- Cloud, Grid and Cluster Computing
Connection
- Network Design and Architecture
- Networking and Communication Protocols
- Wireless Systems and Applications
- Social Networks,
- Network Complexity
Information
- Dark Web
- Information Fusion
- Smart cities
Social analysis, modelling and media
- Online Human Behaviour
- Reputation and Trust Analysis in Social Media
- Efficient Algorithms for Social Computation
- Social Simulations
Economy
- Business, Finance and Management

Prof. Dr. Franco Bagnoli
Dr. Andrea Guazzini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Social Aspects of Internet
Cognitive dynamics
Internet-Mediated Communication
Information Diffusion and Processing
Data Gathering, Management and Protection
Health and Well-being

Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 558 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reviewing Stranger on the Internet: The Role of Identifiability through “Reputation” in Online Decision Making

by Mirko Duradoni, Stefania Collodi, Serena Coppolino Perfumi and Andrea Guazzini

Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050110 - 27 Apr 2021

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3110

Abstract

The stranger on the Internet effect has been studied in relation to self-disclosure. Nonetheless, quantitative evidence about how people mentally represent and perceive strangers online is still missing. Given the dynamic development of web technologies, quantifying how much strangers can be considered suitable for pro-social acts such as self-disclosure appears fundamental for a whole series of phenomena ranging from privacy protection to fake news spreading. Using a modified and online version of the Ultimatum Game (UG), we quantified the mental representation of the stranger on the Internet effect and tested if people modify their behaviors according to the interactors’ identifiability (i.e., reputation). A total of 444 adolescents took part in a 2 × 2 design experiment where reputation was set active or not for the two traditional UG tasks. We discovered that, when matched with strangers, people donate the same amount of money as if the other has a good reputation. Moreover, reputation significantly affected the donation size, the acceptance rate and the feedback decision making as well. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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10 pages, 584 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Intransitiveness: From Games to Random Walks

by Alberto Baldi and Franco Bagnoli

Future Internet 2020, 12(9), 151; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12090151 - 03 Sep 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2325

Abstract

Many games in which chance plays a role can be simulated as a random walk over a graph of possible configurations of board pieces, cards, dice or coins. The end of the game generally consists of the appearance of a predefined winning pattern; for random walks, this corresponds to an absorbing trap. The strategy of a player consist of betting on a given sequence, i.e., in placing a trap on the graph. In two-players games, the competition between strategies corresponds to the capabilities of the corresponding traps in capturing the random walks originated by the aleatory components of the game. The concept of dominance transitivity of strategies implies an advantage for the first player, who can choose the strategy that, at least statistically, wins. However, in some games, the second player is statistically advantaged, so these games are denoted “intransitive”. In an intransitive game, the second player can choose a location for his/her trap which captures more random walks than that of the first one. The transitivity concept can, therefore, be extended to generic random walks and in general to Markov chains. We analyze random walks on several kinds of networks (rings, scale-free, hierarchical and city-inspired) with many variations: traps can be partially absorbing, the walkers can be biased and the initial distribution can be arbitrary. We found that the transitivity concept can be quite useful for characterizing the combined properties of a graph and that of the walkers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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17 pages, 411 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Topic Detection Based on Sentence Embeddings and Agglomerative Clustering with Markov Moment

by Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Andrey V. Orekhov, Ivan S. Blekanov, Nikolay S. Lyudkevich and Nikita A. Tarasov

Future Internet 2020, 12(9), 144; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12090144 - 26 Aug 2020

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 3924

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to solving the problem of optimal text classification in the area of automated detection of typology of texts. In conventional approaches to topicality-based text classification (including topic modeling), the number of clusters is to be set up by the scholar, and the optimal number of clusters, as well as the quality of the model that designates proximity of texts to each other, remain unresolved questions. We propose a novel approach to the automated definition of the optimal number of clusters that also incorporates an assessment of word proximity of texts, combined with text encoding model that is based on the system of sentence embeddings. Our approach combines Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) data pre-processing, agglomerative hierarchical clustering by Ward’s method, and the Markov stopping moment for optimal clustering. The preferred number of clusters is determined based on the “e-2” hypothesis. We set up an experiment on two datasets of real-world labeled data: News20 and BBC. The proposed model is tested against more traditional text representation methods, like bag-of-words and word2vec, to show that it provides a much better-resulting quality than the baseline DBSCAN and OPTICS models with different encoding methods. We use three quality metrics to demonstrate that clustering quality does not drop when the number of clusters grows. Thus, we get close to the convergence of text clustering and text classification. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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12 pages, 758 KiB

Open AccessArticle

From Color-Avoiding to Color-Favored Percolation in Diluted Lattices

by Michele Giusfredi and Franco Bagnoli

Future Internet 2020, 12(8), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12080139 - 18 Aug 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2255

Abstract

We study the problem of color-avoiding and color-favored percolation in a network, i.e., the problem of finding a path that avoids a certain number of colors, associated with vulnerabilities of nodes or links, or is attracted by them. We investigate here regular (mainly directed) lattices with a fractions of links removed (hence the term “diluted”). We show that this problem can be formulated as a self-organized critical problem, in which the asymptotic phase space can be obtained in one simulation. The method is particularly effective for certain “convex” formulations, but can be extended to arbitrary problems using multi-bit coding. We obtain the phase diagram for some problem related to color-avoiding percolation on directed models. We also show that the interference among colors induces a paradoxical effect in which color-favored percolation is permitted where standard percolation for a single color is impossible. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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17 pages, 289 KiB

Open AccessArticle

How Reputation Systems Change the Psychological Antecedents of Fairness in Virtual Environments

by Stefania Collodi, Maria Fiorenza, Andrea Guazzini and Mirko Duradoni

Future Internet 2020, 12(8), 132; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12080132 - 09 Aug 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2749

Abstract

Reputational systems promote pro-social behaviors, also in virtual environments, therefore their study contributes to the knowledge of social interactions. Literature findings emphasize the power of reputation in fostering fairness in many circumstances, even when its influence is not directly oriented towards specific individuals. The present study contributes to the investigation of the psychological antecedents of fairness, introducing (or not) reputation in the social dilemma framework. Although reputational systems usually influence fairness dynamics, there are also socio-psychological characteristics that can play a role, affecting the adhesion to the norm online. To investigate their effects, we employed a virtual bargaining game that could include a reputational system depending on the experimental condition. Results show that the participant’s fairness could be significantly influenced by socio-psychological and demographic characteristics, as well as personality traits. Reputation seems to decrease fairness in those individuals who report high levels of Neuroticism and Openness. At the same time, high values of Self-Efficacy appear to be more likely associated with unfair behaviors when reputation is off the bargaining. Finally, Age and Sense of Community emerge as fairness promoters regardless of the experimental condition. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

16 pages, 270 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Data Lake Governance: Towards a Systemic and Natural Ecosystem Analogy

by Marzieh Derakhshannia, Carmen Gervet, Hicham Hajj-Hassan, Anne Laurent and Arnaud Martin

Future Internet 2020, 12(8), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12080126 - 27 Jul 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4110

Abstract

The realm of big data has brought new venues for knowledge acquisition, but also major challenges including data interoperability and effective management. The great volume of miscellaneous data renders the generation of new knowledge a complex data analysis process. Presently, big data technologies provide multiple solutions and tools towards the semantic analysis of heterogeneous data, including their accessibility and reusability. However, in addition to learning from data, we are faced with the issue of data storage and management in a cost-effective and reliable manner. This is the core topic of this paper. A data lake, inspired by the natural lake, is a centralized data repository that stores all kinds of data in any format and structure. This allows any type of data to be ingested into the data lake without any restriction or normalization. This could lead to a critical problem known as data swamp, which can contain invalid or incoherent data that adds no values for further knowledge acquisition. To deal with the potential avalanche of data, some legislation is required to turn such heterogeneous datasets into manageable data. In this article, we address this problem and propose some solutions concerning innovative methods, derived from a multidisciplinary science perspective to manage data lake. The proposed methods imitate the supply chain management and natural lake principles with an emphasis on the importance of the data life cycle, to implement responsible data governance for the data lake. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

20 pages, 412 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Collaborative Facilitation and Collaborative Inhibition in Virtual Environments

by Andrea Guazzini, Elisa Guidi, Cristina Cecchini and Eiko Yoneki

Future Internet 2020, 12(7), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12070118 - 13 Jul 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3670

Abstract

Worldwide, organizations and small and medium-sized enterprises have already disruptively changed in many ways their physiological inner mechanisms, because of information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution. Nevertheless, the still ongoing COVID-19 worldwide emergency definitely promoted a wide adoption of teleworking modalities for many people around the world, making it more relevant than before to understand the real impact of virtual environments (VEs) on teamwork dynamics. From a psychological point of view, a critical question about teleworking modalities is how the social and cognitive dynamics of collaborative facilitation and collaborative inhibition would affect teamwork within VEs. This study analyzed the impact of a virtual environment (VE) on the recall of individuals and members of nominal and collaborative groups. The research assessed costs and benefits for collaborative retrieval by testing the effect of experimental conditions, stimulus materials, group size, experimental conditions order, anxiety state, personality traits, gender group composition and social interactions. A total of 144 participants were engaged in a virtual Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) classical paradigm, which involved remembering word lists across two successive sessions, in one of four protocols: I-individual/nominal,

I I

-nominal/individual,

I I I

-nominal/collaborative,

I V

-collaborative/nominal. Results suggested, in general, a reduced collaborative inhibition effect in the collaborative condition than the nominal and individual condition. A combined effect between experimental condition and difficulty of the task appears to explain the presence of collaborative inhibition or facilitation. Nominal groups appeared to enhance the collaborative groups’ performance when virtual nominal groups come before collaborative groups. Variables such as personality traits, gender and social interactions may have a contribution to collaborative retrieval. In conclusion, this study indicated how VEs could maintain those peculiar social dynamics characterizing the participants’ engagement in a task, both working together and individually, and could affect their intrinsic motivation as well as performances. These results could be exploited in order to design brand new and evidenced-based practices, to improve teleworking procedures and workers well-being, as well as teleworking teamwork effectiveness. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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11 pages, 1890 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Science Cafés, Science Shops and the Lockdown Experience in Florence and Rome

by Giovanna Pacini, Cinzia Belmonte and Franco Bagnoli

Future Internet 2020, 12(7), 115; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12070115 - 08 Jul 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2821

Abstract

The lockdown was crucial to stop the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, but it affected many aspects of social life, among which traditional live science cafés. Moreover, citizens and experts asked for a direct contact, not relying on mass-media communication. In this paper, we describe how the Florence and Rome science cafés, contacted by citizens and experts, either directly or through the Florence science shop, responded to these needs by organizing online versions of traditional face-to-face events, experiencing high levels of participation. The science café methodology was also requested by a high school that needed to conclude an engagement experience with students and their families. We also report the results of a survey about the satisfaction of this new methodology with respect to the old one. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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17 pages, 540 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Investigating the Relationship between Personality and Technology Acceptance with a Focus on the Smartphone from a Gender Perspective: Results of an Exploratory Survey Study

by Cornelia Sindermann, René Riedl and Christian Montag

Future Internet 2020, 12(7), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12070110 - 30 Jun 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4244

Abstract

Prior research found that user personality significantly affects technology acceptance perceptions and decisions. Yet, evidence on the moderating influence of user gender on the relationship between personality and technology acceptance is barely existent despite theoretical consideration. Considering this research gap, the present study reports the results of a survey in which we examined the relationships between personality and technology acceptance from a gender perspective. This study draws upon a sample of N = 686 participants (n = 209 men, n = 477 women) and applied the HEXACO Personality Inventory—Revised along with established technology acceptance measures. The major result of this study is that we do not find significant influence of user gender on the relationship between personality and technology acceptance, except for one aspect of personality, namely altruism. We found a negative association between altruism and intention to use the smartphone in men, but a positive association in women. Consistent with this finding, we also found the same association pattern for altruism and predicted usage: a negative one in men and a positive one in women. Implications for research and practice are discussed, along with limitations of the present study and possible avenues for future research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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20 pages, 292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Collective Intelligence in Polish-Ukrainian Internet Projects. Debate Models and Research Methods

by Rafał Olszowski and Marcin Chmielowski

Future Internet 2020, 12(6), 106; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12060106 - 20 Jun 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2933

Abstract

In this study, we focus on models of civic debate suitable for use in Polish-Ukrainian internet projects, as well as methods of researching collective intelligence that can help to monitor particular aspects of such debates and consequently create social bridging capital between these groups. The dynamic socio-political situation of recent years, both in Ukraine and in Poland, has created new conditions. Anti-government protests and social turmoil related to the war in Crimea and Donbas, as well as a high level of migration in the region in a short period led to the creation of a multi-ethnic society. This brings opportunities for the development of a new type of social capital: A new participative model of social life based on internet projects, with a relatively low entry barrier, space for creativity, and the widespread use of ICT technologies, can provide the new ways of debating, civic engagement, and collective action. Our research, based on a multidisciplinary literature review, as well as a series of qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs), proved that the selected collective intelligence (CI) research methods and debate models can help to develop internet communities that will contribute to building bridging capital between Poles and Ukrainians. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the INSCI2019: Internet Science 2019)

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