arXiv subjects

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed

Publications and source records attributed to Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed.

59 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the `news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online everyday. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2019

Towards Automated Sexual Violence Report Tracking

Tracking sexual violence is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a supervised learning-based automated sexual violence report tracking model that is more scalable, and reliable than its crowdsource based counterparts. We define the sexual violence report tracking problem by considering victim, perpetrator contexts and the nature of the violence. We find that our model could identify sexual violence reports with a precision and recall of 80.4% and 83.4%, respectively. Moreover, we also applied the model during and after the \#MeToo movement. Several interesting findings are discovered which are not easily identifiable from a shallow analysis.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Critical Requirements Engineering in Practice

The design of software systems inevitably enacts normative boundaries around the site of intervention. These boundaries are, in part, a reflection of the values, ethics, power, and politics of the situation and the process of design itself. This paper argues that Requirements Engineering (RE) require more robust frameworks and techniques to navigate the values implicit in systems design work. To this end, we present the findings from a case of action research where we employed Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), a framework from Critical Systems Thinking (CST) during requirements gathering for Homesound, a system to safeguard elderly people living alone while protecting their autonomy. We use categories from CSH to inform expert interviews and reflection, showing how CSH can be simply combined with RE techniques (such as the Volere template) to explore and reveal the value-judgements underlying requirements.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

Can Women Break the Glass Ceiling?: An Analysis of #MeToo Hashtagged Posts on Twitter

In October 2017, there happened the uprising of an unprecedented online movement on social media by women across the world who started publicly sharing their untold stories of being sexually harassed along with the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). Those stories did not only strike the silence that had long hid the perpetrators, but also allowed women to discharge some of their bottled-up grievances, and revealed many important information surrounding sexual harassment. In this paper, we present our analysis of about one million such tweets collected between October 15 and October 31, 2017 that reveals some interesting patterns and attributes of the people, place, emotions, actions, and reactions related to the tweeted stories. Based on our analysis, we also advance the discussion on the potential role of online social media in breaking the silence of women by factoring in the strengths and limitations of these platforms.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2010

Cutting a Convex Polyhedron Out of a Sphere

Given a convex polyhedron $P$ of $n$ vertices inside a sphere $Q$, we give an $O(n^3)$-time algorithm that cuts $P$ out of $Q$ by using guillotine cuts and has cutting cost $O((\log n)^2)$ times the optimal.

cs.CG↗