University of Tasmania, Australia

A social issue is what arises when the public discuss a specific event. This influences individuals or organisations and in turn they react to the social issue. The Internet and communication technology including social network services has changed the way social issues are formed such as their lifecycle patterns. Many large Internet based service companies have developed services to provide trend services with an example being “top 10 most searched terms” by ‘Google’. This service is designed to entice and intrigue users so that it enables them further to discuss the topics. This service enables the user to notice the popular topics, such as trending social issues. This empowerment poses the question as to whether this information can be utilised beyond just “interests” and “fun”.

We propose two different studies through this project. The first study is to develop the forecasting model for social issues. This study focuses on the formation and fading of social issues and the trend during this lifecycle. Throughout this study, we develop the model to forecast a trend’s, “up”, “down” and estimated lifetime of the issues. The other study is about the automated personalised relevance identification system that discovers how a social issue affects a target group or individual. The impact strength of a social issue is closely related to the strength of the relationship between the user and the issue. Therefore, this study will propose a method to identify the relevance between users and social issues.

Members (External)

• Soyeon Han
• Assoc. Prof. Byeong Kang
• Assoc. Prof. Paul Turner