Well-being is an important value for people’s lives, and it could be considered as an index of societal progress. Researchers have suggested two main approaches for the overall measurement of well-being, the objective and the subjective well-being. Both approaches, as well as their relevant dimensions, have been traditionally captured with surveys. During the last decades, new data sources have been suggested as an alternative or complement to traditional data. This paper aims to present the theoretical background of well-being, by distinguishing between objective and subjective approaches, their relevant dimensions, the new data sources used for their measurement and relevant studies. We also intend to shed light on still barely unexplored dimensions and data sources that could potentially contribute as a key for public policing and social development.

A novel, simple, and effective approach to modeling online user behavior extracts and analyzes digital DNA sequences from user online actions and uses Twitter as a benchmark to test the proposal. Specifically, the model obtains an incisive and compact DNA-inspired characterization of user actions. Then, standard DNA analysis techniques discriminate between genuine and spambot accounts on Twitter. An experimental campaign supports the proposal, showing its effectiveness and viability. Although Twitter spambot detection is a specific use case on a specific social media platform, the proposed methodology is platform and technology agnostic, paving the way for diverse behavioral characterization tasks.

Social sensing is based on the idea that communities or groups of people can provide a set of information similar to those obtainable from a sensor network. Emergency management is a candidate field of application for social sensing. In this work we describe the design, implementation and deployment of a decision support system for the detection and the damage assessment of earthquakes in Italy. Our system exploits the messages shared in real-time on Twitter, one of the most popular social networks in the world. Data mining and natural language processing techniques are employed to select meaningful and comprehensive sets of tweets. We then apply a burst detection algorithm in order to promptly identify outbreaking seismic events. Detected events are automatically broadcasted by our system via a dedicated Twitter account and by email notifications. In addition, we mine the content of the messages associated to an event to discover knowledge on its consequences. Finally we compare our results with official data provided by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), the authority responsible for monitoring seismic events in Italy. The INGV network detects shaking levels produced by the earthquake, but can only model the damage scenario by using empirical relationships. This scenario can be greatly improved with direct information site by site. Results show that the system has a great ability to detect events of a magnitude in the region of 3.5, with relatively low occurrences of false positives. Earthquake detection mostly occurs within seconds of the event and far earlier than the notifications shared by INGV or by other official channels. Thus, we are able to alert interested parties promptly. Information discovered by our system can be extremely useful to all the government agencies interested in mitigating the impact of earthquakes, as well as the news agencies looking for fresh information to publish

The advent of online social networks (OSNs) paired with the ubiquitous proliferation of smartphones have enabled social sensing systems. In the last few years, the aptitude of humans to spontaneously collect and timely share context information has been exploited for emergency detection and crisis management. Apart from event-specific features, these systems share technical approaches and architectural solutions to address the issues with capturing, filtering and extracting meaningful information from data posted to OSNs by networks of human sensors. This paper proposes a conceptual and architectural framework for the design of emergency detection systems based on the “human as a sensor” (HaaS) paradigm. An ontology for the HaaS paradigm in the context of emergency detection is defined. Then, a modular architecture, independent of a specific emergency type, is designed. The proposed architecture is demonstrated by an implemented application for detecting earthquakes via Twitter. Validation and experimental results based on messages posted during earthquakes occurred in Italy are reported.