Exploratory: migration studies

Exploratory: Migration Studies

Online hate speech deserves special academic attention because of its social implications, as it can be an important predictor of hate crimes towards vulnerable individuals or groups. In Europe, it has not stopped rising in recent years, while these types of crimes are also increasing. Müller & Schwarz, (2018) explain that there is a correlation between hate speech online and hate crimes, so it is essential to study these types of messages that are transmitted on social networks in order to prevent and counteract their effects.

WP2: Responsible Data Science

Recently, there was a case that brought up - once again - the issue of bias in machine learning algorithms.

This is not a new issue per se, as in 2015 a black software developer tweeted about Google’s Photo service labelling him and a friend as “gorillas”. In 2018, a WIRED story highlighted that Google was still struggling to fix the issue with its software, and had resolved to removing the term “gorilla” and other primates from its image labelling lexicon.

Exploratory: Demography, Economy and Finance 2.0
 

Have you ever imagined a global database of society easily accessible and open for real time research? The Global Dataset of Events Location and Tone, or simply called GDELT (https://www.gdeltproject.org/) promises to be such a database, and it is supported by Google Jigsaw.

What is well-being, and how can we measure it? This complex question has fascinated philosophers and thinkers since ancient times. For example, Aristotle has expressed his interest on the topic claiming that human well-being, labeled as eudaimonia (greek: ευδαιμονία: Eu=Good, Daimon=spirit), is an activity of the soul expressing complete virtue [11].

A need for new technological tools has emerged during the current Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. In particular, several mobile applications based on digital tracking and contact tracing have been developed, with ethical implications that have been addressed differently by a number of countries.

The SoBigData community published a white paper, entitled “Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment” (https://bit.ly/whitepaper_covid_sobigdata). The white paper states:

Human migration is a constant phenomenon in human history, and its study involves numerous research fields. To date, data not typically used for studying migration are increasingly available. These include the so-called social Big Data: digital traces left by humans through cell phones, online social networks, and online services. More and more technologies can be employed to extract information from these large datasets. However, how can Big Data help to understand the migration phenomenon?

How did the COVID-19 epidemics change our mobility habits, and how did it impact on people’s well-being and on the virus transmissibility?

In the first webinar of the seminar series organized by SoBigData, we will address these questions, as well as many others, from the perspective of Data Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

Sentiment Analysis is a sub-field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that, combining tools and techniques from Linguistics and Computer Science, aims at systematically identifying, extracting, and studying emotional states and personal opinion in natural language.