This chapter presented RATC, an approach able to cluster tags in a tagging system, which can be used to produce tag recommendations that facilitate the exploration of a tagging system. Furthermore, RATC has the capability to dynamically improve its performances by monitoring users behavior and exploiting implicit feedbacks left by users during their search activity. RATC brings several contributions both to the tag clustering research area and to the social recommender systems that recommend tags. In fact, the proposed approach is able to dynamically update tag-resource associations and tag-tag-associations in order to limit misleading semantic relations. None of the existing works in tag clustering is able to dynam- ically update associations between tags during the system activity and none of the existing social recommender systems that operate with tags uses clustering to produce the recommendations.
Moreover, thanks to the lack of super visioning during the classification step, this approach lends itself very well to operate in a real web scenario where everything evolves very quickly.
Chapter 5
Social Media Motivation
5.1 Overview
One of the several aspects that lead to a rapid growth of social media sys-
tems is that they are among the most persuasive technologies [Fogg and Iizawa, 2008, Weiksner et al., 2008]. In fact usually the behavior of a user in a social net-
work can motivate other users to adopt the same or similar behavior. This phenomenon, known as “Social Influence”, occurs when the opinions and behavior of a person influences those of the other ones.
So, starting from the main topic of this thesis, i.e. the social web, some interest was also put in the motivational domain, performing some studies, in order to infer how to motivate people to do something by using social media tools. In fact, motivating one person to do something can be seen
as a form of suggestion. Therefore the motivation domain intersects with the recommendation domain presented in previous chapters.
In order to study the motivational aspect in the social environment, some Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications to support and motivate users to do more physical activity were developed. This work was followed by the design and implementation of a web application which allows users to interact with Facebook, in order to study how the social aspect can influence the motivational one. To be more precise, two Android applications, based on a persuasive technology, that aims at mo- tivate people to practice running activity have been developed: Every- whereRun [Mulas et al., 2011, Mulas et al., 2013a], that allows users to get a workout plan from a personal trainer and EverywhereRace that allows users to create virtual competitions (races) with people anywhere in the world. These two application will be soon merged in a unique application.
The reason why this type of applications are gaining always more im- portance is that many people are facing health’s problem due to a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, it is known that a sedentary lifestyle is the cause of several serious illnesses like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so on. The main reason for which people do not practice any physical activity are moti- vational lack, time constrains, difficulties to start, gym membership fees, equipment costs and so on.
The idea behind this study is that HCI and Social web can benefit each other; for example, a Human-Computer Interaction application could be
5.1. Overview 109
developed in the Social Web scenario, in order to study and improve re- lationships among people. Furthermore, many researches demonstrate that the inclusion of social interactions in HCI applications motivate peo- ple to practice more physical activity [Consolvo et al., 2006, Virzi, 1992, Buttussi et al., 2006, de Oliveira and Oliver, 2008].
Like other computer science domains, recently, Human-Computer In- teraction (HCI) has had an exponential and rapid growth. In [ACM SIGCHI, 1992], authors define Human-Computer Interaction as “a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surround- ing them”.
In this chapter a web application, that implements some race manage- ment features (e.g., the creation, the subscription or the participation to a race), previously available only in the Android mobile application is pre- sented. Particularly, in the web application some new innovative social features by means of the Facebook social network are implemented, in order to allow users to share their workout experience with their friends.
The social aspect, through the interaction with Facebook, allows to en- hance the social engagement that, as previously mentioned, is a key aspect in a motivation scenario. In fact, the interaction with a social network leads to the phenomenon of the “social influence” (a widely known concept in sociology and viral marketing) [Cha et al., 2010], for which the enhance- ments of a user in her/his exercising activity can inspire and motivate other
users to improve their performances. So, the availability of the features to manage the races on more devices and the capability to interact with a social network, should improve the motivation to exercise regularly. The choice to develop a web application that focuses on the organization of races, was made because a race involves more than a user, so this scenario lends itself well to link Human-Computer Interaction with the Social Web. The contribution brought by the study presented in this chapter concern both to the Human-Computer Interaction and the Social Web research areas, precisely:
• exploit virtual races to motivate people;
• the use of a web application, which introduces some functionalities of the already existing Android application, allows to manage the races not only from small devices, like mobile phones and tablets. This simplifies the access to the functionalities and improves the user experience, in order to motivate people to organize more races and to exercise more;
• using the web application, users can create new races and challenge their friends in real time;
• by mining the behavior of the users with respect to the Facebook social network, it is possible to study how social media can act on the motivational aspect of the users.