Artificial intelligence (AI) applications can profoundly affect society. Recently, there has been extensive interest in studying how scientists design AI systems for general tasks. However, it remains an open question asto whether the AI systems developed in this way can work as expected in different regional contexts while
simultaneously empowering local people. How can scientists co-create AI systems with local communitiesto address regional concerns? This article contributes new perspectives in this underexplored direction atthe intersection of data science, AI, citizen science, and human-computer interaction. Through case studies,
we discuss challenges in co-designing AI systems with local people, collecting and explaining communitydata using AI, and adapting AI systems to long-term social change. We also consolidate insights into bridgingAI research and citizen needs, including evaluating the social impact of AI, curating community datasets for
AI development, and building AI pipelines to explain data patterns to laypeople.@en

Traditional approaches to data-informed policymaking are often tailored to specific contexts and lack strong citizen involvement and collaboration, which are required to design sustainable policies. We argue the importance of empathy-based methods in the policymaking domain given the successes in diverse settings, such as healthcare and education. In this paper, we introduce COCTEAU (Co-Creating The European Union), a novel framework built on the combination of empathy and gamification to create a tool aimed at strengthening interactions between citizens and policy-makers. We describe our design process and our concrete implementation, which has already undergone preliminary assessments with different stakeholders. Moreover, we briefly report pilot results from the assessment. Finally, we describe the structure and goals of our demonstration regarding the newfound formats and organizational aspects of academic conferences.

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EmpathiCH aims at bringing together and blend different expertise to develop new research agenda in the context of “Empathy-Centric Design at Scale”. The main research question is to investigate how new technologies can contribute to the elicitation of empathy across and within multiple stakeholders at scale; and how empathy can be used to design solutions to societal problems that are not only effective but also balanced, inclusive, and aware of their effect on society. Through presentations, participatory sessions, and a living experiment—where data about the peoples’ interactions is collected throughout the event—we aim to make this workshop the ideal venue to foster collaboration, build networks, and shape the future direction of “Empathy-Centric Design at Scale”.@en

Current artificial intelligence and information retrieval systems need to be trained with a large amount of data to achieve satisfying performance. A popular solution to create such datasets is to employ crowdsourcing; however, the content to be annotated may contain private or sensitive information that can be extracted by workers, limiting the applicability of crowdsourcing data annotation techniques in privacy-sensitive contexts. In this paper, we survey the literature finding that current solutions in crowdsourcing and machine learning do not provide satisfactory solutions as they either hinder the capabilities of workers to annotate the data, increase the overall cost, or lack generalizability. We identify current challenges, propose and elaborate a hybrid human-machine approach to detect private information in images, discuss its features and propose future directions.

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Social web data increasingly complement studies of various social phenomena, especially when the availability of traditional data is limited. One such case is that of vulnerable young populations that are disengaged from employment, education, or training; usually referred to as NEETs. This paper explores the extent to which social media data and discussion websites could complement conventional sources in the study of NEETs. We focus on user-generated content posted to the dedicated r/NEET subreddit, which gathers subscribers who self-identify as NEETs. We develop and implement a data processing pipeline for the analysis of the behavioral patterns and main concerns of this social group. Our analysis of Reddit data reaches similar conclusions to official reports from governmental institutions in Europe. The paper also provides insights into health-related issues and latent interests of NEETs, not recorded in official reports and related literature.

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Human annotation is still an essential part of modern transcription workflows for digitizing music scores, either as a standalone approach where a single expert annotator transcribes a complete score, or for supporting an automated Optical Music Recognition (OMR) system. Research on human computation has shown the effectiveness of crowdsourcing for scaling out human work by defining a large number of microtasks which can easily be distributed and executed. However, microtask design for music transcription is a research area that remains unaddressed. This paper focuses on the design of a crowdsourcing task to detect errors in a score transcription which can be deployed in either automated or human-driven transcription workflows. We conduct an experiment where we study two design parameters: 1) the size of the score to be annotated and 2) the modality in which it is presented in the user interface. We analyze the performance and reliability of non-specialised crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk with respect to these design parameters, differentiated by worker experience and types of transcription errors. Results are encouraging, and pave the way for scalable and efficient crowdassisted music transcription systems. @en

Understanding and improving the energy consumption behavior of individuals is considered a powerful approach to improve energy conservation and stimulate energy efficiency. To motivate people to change their energy consumption behavior, we need to have a thorough understanding of which energy-consuming activities they perform and how these are performed. Traditional sources of information about energy consumption, such as smart sensor devices and surveys, can be costly to set up, may lack contextual information, have infrequent updates, or are not publicly accessible. In this paper, we propose to use social media as a complementary source of information for understanding energy-consuming activities. A huge amount of social media posts are generated by hundreds of millions of people every day, they are publicly available, and provide real-time data often tagged to space and time. We design an ontology to get a better understanding of the energy-consuming activities domain and develop a text and image processing pipeline to extract from social media the description of energy-consuming activities. We run a case study on Istanbul and Amsterdam. We highlight the strength and weakness of our approach, showing that social media data has the potential to be a complementary source of information for describing energy-consuming activities. C 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Understanding how individuals consume energy is considered to be a fundamental step in improving energy conservation and stimulating energy efficiency. Multiple studies have shown how feedback loops encourage en- ergy conservation and efficiency among policy makers and citizens. Fischer (2008), for instance, explores the ways in which a sense of competition, social comparison, and peer pressure impels people to adopt better energy consuming behavior. The online platform ‘Social Electricity’ allows citizens to compare energy footprints with friends, neighbors, or other users. This process, Kamilaris, Pitsillides, and Fidas (2016) argue, affects people’s energy awareness, making them more sensitive to the environment and motivating them to behave more sustainably. Many other energy-saving applications have been developed (Albertarelli et al., 2018), which exploit gamification and social interaction to promote energy-efficient lifestyles.@en

Having a thorough understanding of energy consumption behavior is an important element of sustainability studies. Traditional sources of information about energy consumption, such as smart meter devices and surveys, can be costly to deploy, may lack contextual information or have infrequent updates. In this paper, we examine the possibility of extracting energy consumption-related information from user-generated content. More specifically, we develop a pipeline that helps identify energy-related content in Twitter posts and classify it into four categories (dwelling, food, leisure, and mobility), according to the type of activity performed. We further demonstrate a web-based application--called Social Smart Meter--that implements the proposed pipeline and enables different stakeholders to gain an insight into daily energy consumption behavior, as well as showcase it in case studies involving several world cities.@en

In many settings, the human opinion provided by an expert or knowledgeable user can be more useful than factual information retrieved by a search engine. Search systems do not capture the subjective opinions and recommendations of friends, or fresh, online-provided information that require contextual or domain-specific expertise. Search results obtained from conventional search engines can be complemented by crowdsearch, an online interaction with crowds, selected among friends, experts, or people who are presently at a given location; an interplay between conventional and search-based queries can occur, so that the two search methods can support each other. In this paper, we use a model-driven approach for specifying and implementing a crowdsearch application; in particular we define two models: the "Query Task Model", representing the meta-model of the query that is submitted to the crowd and the associated answers; and the "User Interaction Model", showing how the user can interact with the query model to fulfil her needs. Our solution allows for a top-down design approach, from the crowd-search task design, down to the crowd answering system design. Our approach also grants automatic code generation, thus leading to quick prototyping of crowd-search applications.@en