No abstract

The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The resulting bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as Iraq war. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. This paper presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. As such, it effectively helps readers understand a fact from a plural of viewpoints and formulate their own, more balanced viewpoints. While media bias problem has been studied extensively in communications and social sciences, our work is the first to develop a news service as a solution and study its effect. We discuss the effect of the service through various user studies.

The key feature of many emerging pervasive computing applications is to proactively provide services to mobile individuals. One major challenge in providing users with proactive services lies in continuously monitoring users' context based on numerous sensors in their PAN/BAN environments. The context monitoring in such environments imposes heavy workloads on mobile devices and sensor nodes with limited computing and battery power. We present SeeMon, a scalable and energy-efficient context monitoring framework for sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments. Running on a personal mobile device, SeeMon effectively performs context monitoring involving numerous sensors and applications. On top of SeeMon, multiple applications on the mobile device can proactively understand users' contexts and react appropriately. This paper proposes a novel context monitoring approach that provides efficient processing and sensor control mechanisms. We implement and test a prototype system on two mobile devices: a UMPC and a wearable device with a diverse set of sensors. Example applications are also developed based on the implemented system. Experimental results show that SeeMon achieves a high level of scalability and energy efficiency.

Bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as the Iraq war. This article presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service which aims to mitigate the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified views on a news event. As such, it helps readers understand the event from a plurality of views and to formulate their own, more balanced, viewpoints. The media bias problem has been studied extensively in mass communications and social science. This article reviews related mass communication and journalism studies and provides a structured view of the media bias problem and its solution. We propose media bias mitigation as a practical solution and demonstrate it through NewsCube. We evaluate and discuss the effectiveness of NewsCube through various performance studies.