Companies that design, develop, and deploy software products at scale face a learning gap. To be effective, software developers need to continuously conceptualize, collaborate, and communicate - to share and learn from each other. To sustain a ...

In the last decade, cybercrime has risen considerably. One key factor is the proliferation of online cybercrime communities, where actors trade products and services, and also learn from each other. Accordingly, understanding the operation and behavior of ...

Through a mixed-method analysis of data from Scratch, we examine how novices learn to program with simple data structures by using community-produced learning resources. First, we present a qualitative study that describes how community-produced learning ...

Practice and Policy Oriented Abstract

Forums such as Quora, Stack Exchange, Yahoo!Answers, Office Forum, and Photoshop Guru provide a free alternative to the paid support services offered by various software vendors; it is not obvious how a vendor should react to this competition. ...

This research develops a microeconomic model to study the impact of support forums on the software industry. Motivated by the rapid growth of forums such as Stack Exchange, Quora, and Yahoo! Answers, we examine what impact they could have on a software ...

UX practitioners increasingly rely on online communities to collaborate on and discuss complex design problems. Understanding how these platforms flourish is thus of interest to both HCI academia and the broader UX discipline. In this study, we ...

Little has changed in the design of online discussion systems in the decades they have been available, even as problems involving scale, loss of context, and bad actors mount with broader use. To solve these problems, my research is on building novel ...

Determining affective states such as confusion from students' participation in online discussion forums can be useful for instructors of a large classroom. However, manual annotation of forum posts by instructors or paid crowd workers is both time-...

A large body of research uses data from social media websites to predict offline economic outcomes such as sales. However, recent research also points out that such data may be subject to various limitations and biases that may hurt predictive accuracy. ...

Technical Support (TS) users are moving from company based TS offerings to TS forums. Overall, my research takes a critical look at what the forums are offering in terms of perceived improvement in quality of service. The focus is to identify how ...

Research in formal education has repeatedly offered evidence of the importance of social interactions for student learning. However, it remains unclear whether the development of such interpersonal relationships has the same influence on learning in the ...

This position paper provides an overview of the OCKTOPUS project whose goal is to increase the social and economic benefit of user-generated content, by transforming it into knowledge which can be shared and reused broadly.

Institutional data collection practices inevitably evolve over time, especially in a distributed clinical setting. Clinical and administrative data can improve health and healthcare, but only if researchers ensure that the data is well-aligned to their ...

In this paper, we investigate insider threat cases in which the insider had relationships with the Internet under-ground community. To this end, we begin by explaining our insider threat corpus and the current state of Internet underground forums. Next, ...

Global software development is becoming increasingly popular. Working in geographically distributed teams affords advantages to both employer and employee alike. Despite this, distributed working remains a point of contention for many organisations, ...

Stack Overflow is an enormously popular question-and-answer web site intended for software developers to help each other with programming issues. Some software projects aimed at developers (for example, application programming interfaces, application ...

Automated clustering of threads within and across web forums will greatly benefit both users and forum administrators in efficiently seeking, managing, and integrating the huge volume of content being generated. While clustering has been studied for ...

In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) ...

By augmenting conventional techniques of topic modeling with unigram analysis and community detection, we establish an automated method that generates a comprehensive and meaningful summary of forum conversations over time that also sheds light on ...

Online forums are becoming a popular way of finding useful information on the web. Search over forums for existing discussion threads so far is limited to keyword-based search due to the minimal effort required on part of the users. However, it is often ...

Online forums have long since been the most popular platform for people to communicate and share ideas. Nowadays, with the boom of multimedia sharing, users tend to share more and more with their online peers within online communities such as forums. ...