Social media is continually emerging as a platform of information exchange around health challenges. We study mental health discourse on the popular social media:reddit. Building on findings about health information seeking and sharing practices in online forums, and social media like Twitter, we address three research challenges. First, we present a characterization of self-disclosure inmental illness communities on reddit. We observe individuals discussing a variety of concerns ranging from the daily grind to specific queries about diagnosis and treatment. Second, we build a statistical model to examine the factors that drive social support on mental health reddit communities. We also develop language models to characterize mental health social support, which are observed to bear emotional, informational, instrumental, and prescriptive information. Finally, we study disinhibition in the light of the dissociative anonymity that reddit’s throwaway accounts provide. Apart from promoting open conversations,such anonymity surprisingly is found to gather feedback that is more involving and emotionally engaging. Our findings reveal, for the first time, the kind of unique information needs that a social media like reddit might be fulfilling when it comes to a stigmatic illness. They also expand our understanding of the role of the social web in behavioral therapy.

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One subclass of human computation applications are those directed at tasks that involve planning (e.g. tour planning) and scheduling (e.g. conference scheduling). Interestingly, work on these systems shows that even primitive forms of automated oversight on the human contributors helps in significantly improving the effectiveness of the humans/crowd. In this paper, we argue that the automated oversight used in these systems can be viewed as a primitive automated planner, and that there are several opportunities for more sophisticated automated planning in effectively steering the crowd. Straightforward adaptation of current planning technology is however hampered by the mismatch between the capabilities of human workers and automated planners. We identify and partially address two important challenges that need to be overcome before such adaptation of planning technology can occur: (i) interpreting inputs of the human workers (and the requester) and (ii) steering or critiquing plans produced by the human workers, armed only with incomplete domain and preference models. To these ends, we describe the implementation of AI-MIX, a tour plan generation system that uses automated checks and alerts to improve the quality of plans created by human workers; and present a preliminary evaluation of the effectiveness of steering provided by automated planning.

Recent efforts in data cleaning of structured data have focused exclusively on problems like data deduplication, record matching, and data standardization; none of these focus on fixing incorrect attribute values in tuples. Correcting values in tuples is typically performed by a minimum cost repair of tuples that violate static constraints like CFDs (which have to be provided by domain experts, or learned from a clean sample of the database). In this paper, we provide a method for correcting individual attribute values in a structured database using a Bayesian generative model and a statistical error model learned from the noisy database directly. We thus avoid the necessity for a domain expert or clean master data. We also show how to efficiently perform consistent query answering using this model over a dirty database, in case write permissions to the database are unavailable. We evaluate our methods over both synthetic and real data.

As the information available to lay users through autonomous data sources continues to increase, mediators become important to ensure that the wealth of information available is tapped effectively. A key challenge that these information mediators need to handle is the varying levels of incompleteness in the underlying databases in terms of missing attribute values. Existing approaches such as QPIAD aim to mine and use Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs) to predict and retrieve relevant incomplete tuples. These approaches make independence assumptions about missing values-which critically hobbles their performance when there are tuples containing missing values for multiple correlated attributes. In this paper, we present a principled probabilistic alternative that views an incomplete tuple as defining a distribution over the complete tuples that it stands for. We learn this distribution in terms of Bayes networks. Our approach involves mining/"learning" Bayes networks from a sample of the database, and using it to do both imputation (predict a missing value) and query rewriting (retrieve relevant results with incompleteness on the query-constrained attributes, when the data sources are autonomous). We present empirical studies to demonstrate that (i) at higher levels of incompleteness, when multiple attribute values are missing, Bayes networks do provide a significantly higher classification accuracy and (ii) the relevant possible answers retrieved by the queries reformulated using Bayes networks provide higher precision and recall than AFDs while keeping query processing costs manageable.