Rafael E. Banchs

Urban cycles and mobility patterns: Exploring and predicting trends in a bicycle-based public transport system

This paper provides an analysis of human mobility data in an urban area using the amount of available bikes in the stations of the community bicycle program Bicing in Barcelona. Based on data sampled from the operators website, it is possible to detect temporal and geographic mobility patterns within the city. These patterns are applied to predict the number of available bikes for any station some minutes/hours ahead. The predictions could be used to improve the bicycle program and the information given to the users via the Bicing website.

The structure of political discussion networks: a model for the analysis of online deliberation

This paper shows that online political discussion networks are, on average, wider and deeper than the networks generated by other types of discussions: they engage a larger number of participants and cascade through more levels of nested comments. Using data collected from the Slashdot forum, this paper reconstructs the discussion threads as hierarchical networks and proposes a model for their comparison and classification. In addition to the substantive topic of discussion, which corresponds to the different sections of the forum (such as Developers, Games, or Politics), we classify the threads according to structural features like the maximum number of comments at any level of the network (i.e. the width) and the number of nested layers in the network (i.e. the depth). We find that political discussion networks display a tendency to cluster around the area that corresponds to wider and deeper structures, showing a significant departure from the structure exhibited by other types of discussions. We propose using this model to create a framework that allows the analysis and comparison of different internet technologies for the promotion of political deliberation.

Exploiting MDS Projections for Cross-language IR

In this paper, we describe some preliminary work on using monolingual projections of document collections for performing cross-language information retrieval tasks. The proposed methodology uses multidimensional scaling for projecting the vector-space representations of a given multilingual document collection into spaces of lower dimensionality. An independent projection is computed for each different language, and the structural similarities of the resulting projections are exploited for information retrieval tasks.

A Comparative Evaluation of 2D And 3D Visual Exploration of Document Search Results

This work presents and experimental comparison between 2D and 3D search and visualization platforms. The main objective of the study is two explore the following two research questions: what method is most robust in terms of the success rate? And, what method is faster in terms of average search time? The obtained results show that, although successful rates and subject preferences are higher for 3D search and visualization, search times are still lower for 2D search and visualization.

Emotional Links between Structure and Content in Online Communications

This papers aims at studying the existence of links between the structure of online communications and the contents they are composed of. The study is conducted over two datasets of similar online discussion platforms in different languages: English and Spanish. As a result of our analysis, it is concluded that there are significant trends in the variation patterns observed over the emotional load of user generated contents that are associated to the different types of communication structures existing in the datasets. Moreover, the observed trends are quite similar for both of the studied languages, suggesting that such kind of emotional links between structure and content in online communications are language independent in nature.