Sofiane Abbar

You Tweet What You Eat: Studying Food Consumption Through Twitter

Food is an integral part of our lives, cultures, and well-being, and is of major interest to public health. The collection of daily nutritional data involves keeping detailed diaries or periodic surveys and is limited in scope and reach. Alternatively, social media is infamous for allowing its users to update the world on the minutiae of their daily lives, including their eating habits. In this work we examine the potential of Twitter to provide insight into US-wide dietary choices by linking the tweeted dining experiences of 210K users to their interests, demographics, and social networks. We validate our approach by relating the caloric values of the foods mentioned in the tweets to the state-wide obesity rates, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.77 across the 50 US states and the District of Columbia. We then build a model to predict county-wide obesity and diabetes statistics based on a combination of demographic variables and food names mentioned on Twitter. Our results show significant improvement over previous CHI research (Culotta 2014). We further link this data to societal and economic factors, such as education and income, illustrating that areas with higher education levels tweet about food that is significantly less caloric. Finally, we address the somewhat controversial issue of the social nature of obesity (Christakis & Fowler 2007) by inducing two social networks using mentions and reciprocal following relationships.

Diverse near neighbor problem

Motivated by the recent research on diversity-aware search, we investigate the k-diverse near neighbor reporting problem. The problem is defined as follows: given a query point q, report the maximum diversity set S of k points in the ball of radius r around q. The diversity of a set S is measured by the minimum distance between any pair of points in

Road Network Fusion for Incremental Map Updates

S

Ranking item features by mining online user-item interactions

(the higher, the better). We present two approximation algorithms for the case where the points live in a d-dimensional Hamming space. Our algorithms guarantee query times that are sub-linear in n and only polynomial in the diversity parameter k, as well as the dimension d. For low values of k, our algorithms achieve sub-linear query times even if the number of points within distance r from a query

To Post or Not to Post: Using Online Trends to Predict Popularity of Offline Content

q

Resilience analytics: coverage and robustness in multi-modal transportation networks

is linear in

Structural robustness and service reachability in urban settings

n

On the role of political affiliation in human perception the case of Delhi OddEven experiment

. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first known algorithms of this type that offer provable guarantees.

Dietary Habits of an Expat Nation: Case of Qatar

In the recent years a number of novel, automatic map-inference techniques have been proposed, which derive road-network from a cohort of GPS traces collected by a fleet of vehicles. In spite of considerable attention, these maps are imperfect in many ways: they create an abundance of spurious connections, have poor coverage, and are visually confusing. Hence, commercial and crowd-sourced mapping services heavily use human annotation to minimize the mapping errors. Consequently, their response to changes in the road network is inevitably slow. In this paper we describe \mapfuse, a system which fuses a human-annotated map (e.g., OpenStreetMap) with any automatically inferred map, thus effectively enabling quick map updates. In addition to new road creation, we study in depth road closure, which have not been examined in the past. By leveraging solid, human-annotated maps with minor corrections, we derive maps which minimize the trajectory matching errors due to both road network change and imperfect map inference of fully-automatic approaches.

Beyond itemsets: mining frequent featuresets over structured items

We assume a database of items in which each item is described by a set of attributes, some of which could be multi-valued. We refer to each of the distinct attribute values as a feature. We also assume that we have information about the interactions (such as visits or likes) between a set of users and those items. In our paper, we would like to rank the features of an item using user-item interactions. For instance, if the items are movies, features could be actors, directors or genres, and user-item interaction could be user liking the movie. These information could be used to identify the most important actors for each movie. While users are drawn to an item due to a subset of its features, a user-item interaction only provides an expression of user preference over the entire item, and not its component features. We design algorithms to rank the features of an item depending on whether interaction information is available at aggregated or individual level granularity and extend them to rank composite features (set of features). Our algorithms are based on constrained least squares, network flow and non-trivial adaptations to non-negative matrix factorization. We evaluate our algorithms using both real-world and synthetic datasets.