Abstract
The automatic content analysis of mass media in the social sciences has become necessary and possible with the raise of social media and computational power. One particularly promising avenue of research concerns the use of opinion mining. We design and implement the POPmine system which is able to collect texts from web-based conventional media (news items in mainstream media sites) and social media (blogs and Twitter) and to process those texts, recognizing topics and political actors, analyzing relevant linguistic units, and generating indicators of both frequency of mention and polarity (positivity/negativity) of mentions to political actors across sources, types of sources, and across time.

Abstract

Abstract
The road transportation sector is responsible for 87% of the human CO2 emissions. The estimation and prediction of fuel consumption plays a key role in the development of systems that foster the reduction of those emissions through trip planing. In this paper, we present a predictive regression model of instantaneous fuel consumption for diesel and gasoline light-duty vehicles, based on their instantaneous speed and acceleration and on road inclination. The parameters are extracted from GPS data, thus the models do not require data from dedicated vehicle sensors. We use data collected by 17 drivers during their daily commutes using the SenseMyCity crowdsensor. We perform an empyrical comparison of several regression algorithms for prediction across trips of the same vehicle and for prediction across vehicles. The results show that models trained for a vehicle show similar RMSE when are applied to other vehicles with similar characteristics. Relying on these results, we propose fuel type specific models that provide an accurate prediction for vehicles with similar characteristics to those on which the models were trained.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Open set recognition is, more than an interesting research subject, a component of various machine learning applications which is sometimes neglected: it is not unusual the existence of learning systems developed on the top of closed-set assumptions, ignoring the error risk involved in a prediction. This risk is strictly related to the location in feature space where the prediction has to be made, compared to the location of the training data: the more distant the training observations are, less is known, higher is the risk. Proper handling of this risk can be necessary in various situation where classification and its variants are employed. This paper presents an approach to open set recognition based on an elaborate distance-like computation provided by a weightless neural network model. The results obtained in the proposed test scenarios are quite interesting, placing the proposed method among the current best ones.