Publications related to Online advertising

Content Moderation in Online Platforms

A critical role of online platforms like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Doordash, and Tinder is to moderate content. Interventions like banning users or deleting comments are carried out thousands of times daily and can potentially improve our onlin ...

EPFL2024

Incentive Mechanism in the Sponsored Content Market With Network Effects

Olga Fink, Mina Montazeri

We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider (CP) market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph, and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function. The CP stipu ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Promoting synergies for sustainability through peer-to-peer sharing: an analysis of drivers and barriers

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Ralph Hansmann

Peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing may foster sustainability synergistically by saving resources, reducing costs and promoting satisfaction of consumer needs and social connectivity. A survey of Swiss and Swedish consumers (N = 1522) was conducted to analyze drive ...

TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC2023

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users' activity on fringe social media

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

Online platforms have banned ("deplatformed") influencers, communities, and even entire websites to reduce content deemed harmful. Deplatformed users often migrate to alternative platforms, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of deplatforming. He ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

Referencing in YouTube Knowledge Communication Videos

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Haeeun Kim

In recent years, there has been widespread concern about misinformation and hateful content on social media that are damaging societies. Being one of the most influential social media that practically serves as a newsearch engine, YouTube has accepted crit ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Protecting privacy through metadata analysis

Sandra Deepthy Siby

Although encryption hides the content of communications from third parties, metadata, i.e., the information attached to the content (such as the size or timing of communication) can be a rich source of details and context. In this dissertation, we demonstr ...

EPFL2022

Designing Gamified Activities with Haptic-Enabled Tangible Robots for Therapy and Assistance

Arzu Güneysu Özgür

In this thesis, we contribute to the field of rehabilitation robotics by designing haptic-enabled tangible robot-based activities and exploring their added value for therapy and assistance. The research specifically focuses on the design and development of ...

EPFL2021

Using “proof of personhood” to tackle social media risks

Bryan Alexander Ford

The ease of creating fake virtual identities plays an important role in shaping the way information — and misinformation — circulates online. Social media platforms are increasingly prominent in shaping public debates, and the tension between online anonym ...

International Risk Governance Center (IRGC)2021

Thread-Placement Learning

Rachid Guerraoui, Vasileios Trigonakis, Karolos Antoniadis

In a non-uniform memory access machine, the placement of software threads to hardware cores can have a significant effect on the performance of concurrent applications. Detecting the best possible placement for each application is a necessity for thread sc ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2020

Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends Using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing

Marcel Salathé, Martin Guillermo Mueller

In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these ...

2019

Message Distortion in Information Cascades

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Kristina Gligoric

Information diffusion is usually modeled as a process in which immutable pieces of information propagate over a network. In reality, however, messages are not immutable, but may be morphed with every step, potentially entailing large cumulative distortions ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

On the Impact of Choice Architectures on Inequality in Online Donation Platforms

Online donation platforms, such as DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving, or CrowdFunder, enable donors to financially support entities in need. In a typical scenario, after a fundraiser submits a request specifying her need, donors contribute financially to help rai ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Scrub: Online TroubleShooting for Large Mission-Critical Applications

Willy Zwaenepoel

Scrub is a troubleshooting tool for distributed applications that operate under strict SLOs common in production environments. It allows users to formulate queries on events occurring during execution in order to assess the correctness of the application’s ...

2018

Privacy in Recommender Systems

Mahsa Taziki

The upsurge in the number of web users over the last two decades has resulted in a significant growth of online information. Recommenders are machine learning approach and are becoming one of the main ways to navigate the Internet. They recommend appropria ...

EPFL2018

Robust Real-Time Control of Power Grids in the Presence of Communication Network Non-Idealities

Jean-Yves Le Boudec, Mario Paolone, Lorenzo Enrique Reyes Chamorro, Wajeb Saab, Roman Rudnik

Deploying a power grid controller in the field makes it susceptible to message losses caused by the inherent uncertainties and non-idealities of communication networks, especially when the control action is taken at a sub-second time-scale. We consider a c ...

2018

Predicting the Success of Online Petitions Leveraging Multidimensional Time-Series

Karl Aberer, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Julia Proskurnia, Carlos Castillo

Applying classical time-series analysis techniques to online content is challenging, as web data tends to have data quality issues and is often incomplete, noisy, or poorly aligned. In this paper, we tackle the problem of predicting the evolution of a time ...

Profiling, Modelling and Facilitating Online Activism

Julia Proskurnia

The extensive and successful use of social media has enhanced and empowered a variety of movements all over the world in a way that is hard to achieve through conventional means. This has led to numerous studies that leverage online social data to describe ...

EPFL2017

Hirability in the wild: Analysis of online conversational video resumes

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Laurent Son Nguyen

Online social media is changing the personnel recruitment process. Until now, resumes were among the most widely used tools for the screening of job applicants. The advent of inexpensive sensors combined with the success of online video platforms has enabl ...

2016

Squall: Scalable Real-time Analytics using Efficient, Skew-resilient Join Operators

Aleksandar Vitorovic

Squall is a scalable online query engine that runs complex analytics in a cluster using skew-resilient, adaptive operators. Online processing implies that results are incrementally built as the input arrives, and it is ubiquitous for many applications such ...

EPFL2023