Category: english

Tips for Using AI in Academic Writing

Published by Joni on September 29, 2023

This post contains an example of how to declare the use of AI in academic work (see the ‘Methodology’ section below) as well as explaining triangulation as a way of verifying AI-generated information. (Read also my previous post about how to handle AI in education.) Methodology OpenAI’s ChatGPT (September 25 Version) was used to define triangulation and present examples of…

How to Handle AI in Education?

Published by Joni on May 18, 2023

In this post, I’m discussing the use of AI — specifically LLMs or large language models, also known as generative AI, of which Open AI’s GPT models (including ChatGPT) are prominent examples. I will first present a case for why detection and prevention of such models in education is not feasible or even possible. Then, I’ll propose ways of instructing…

Problem of averages applies to social media community guidelines

Published by Joni on November 8, 2022

(This post is based on a discussion with a couple of other online hate researchers.) given a general policy (community guidelines), it is possible to create specific explanations that cover most cases of violating the policy (example of explanation: “your message was flagged as containing islamophobic content”). This is based on the idea that ultimately the policy itself is finite,…

Sales attribution in cross-channel retargeting

Published by Joni on October 21, 2022

Digital marketing thought of the day (with Tommi Salenius): There are two channel types for online ads: “first-channel”, meaning the channel that gets a customer’s attention first. And “second-channel”, where we run retargeting ads to activate the non-converted audience from the first-channel. There are also two types of consumers: “buy now”, meaning those that buy immediately without the need for…

“It eliminates all the fun.” Automation taking over marketing?

Published by Joni on September 16, 2022

Jon Loomer, a well-respected digital marketer, was interviewed by Andy Gray in Andy’s podcast. They discussed automation and the impacts it has on the future of digital marketing. Andy asked what happens when everything becomes standardized by the platform? That is, when the platform sets the click price, chooses the targeting, and even writes the ads. The logic of the…

Non-linear growth of value in platform business

Published by Joni on July 28, 2022

The value of aggregation in ad business (and probably in most other verticals, too) is that 1 impression would have zero value, i.e., no advertiser wants to pay. 10 impressions also have zero value, so do 100 impressions. But when we get to hundreds of thousands to millions, all of a sudden the value spikes from zero to a non-trivial…

About academic competition and network effects

Published by Joni on November 16, 2021

It’s extremely hard for a small research team to compete against huge labs. It’s a question of network effects; the huge labs have the critical mass of funding, collaborators, momentum, and publication pull to attract the best talent, whether the brightest PhD students or the best post-docs. The rest are left with the “scraps”. Seems cold to say so, but…

A New Blog on Customer Segmentation

Published by Joni on November 1, 2021

Hi! Our team has started a new blog about customer segmentation. The blog reports our research progress on new customer segmentation algorithms and summarizes a lot of the previous work on customer segmentation. You can access the blog at: https://quecst.qcri.org/blog/

Fake reviews dataset and generation

Published by Joni on September 21, 2021

We published a paper and resources, including a dataset, related to generation of fake online product reviews. Link to the fake reviews paper. Link to the fake reviews dataset. Link to the fake reviews code.

Research on Persona Analytics

Published by Joni on May 29, 2021

This year (2021), we have managed to publish two research papers that I consider important milestones in persona analytics research. They are listed below. Jung, S., Salminen, J., & Jansen, B. J. (2021). Persona Analytics: Implementing Mouse-tracking for an Interactive Persona System. Extended Abstracts of ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI EA ’21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451773 Jung, S.-G., Salminen, J.,…