Ingmar Weber

Universität des Saarlandes | UKS · Department of Computer Science

Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how onli...

As online social activities have become increasingly important for people's lives, understanding how migrants integrate into online spaces is crucial for providing a more complete picture of integration processes. We curate a high-quality data set to quantify patterns of new online social connections among immigrants in the United States. Specifica...

We provide the first systematic, large-scale exploration of user counts by age, gender, and location on Weibo, the world’s largest microblogging platform, using data from its advertising platform. Digital platforms potentially give access to information, economic opportunities, and social participation to underserved groups, and can be used for inf...

We investigate how representations of Syrian refugees (2011-2021) differ across US partisan news outlets. We analyze 47,388 articles from the online US media about Syrian refugees to detail differences in reporting between left- and right-leaning media. We use various NLP techniques to understand these differences. Our polarization and question ans...

Extant literature has explored the social integration process of migrants settling in host communities. However, this literature typically takes a migrant-centric view, implicitly putting the burden of a successful integration on the migrant, and trying to identify the factors that lead to integration along various dimensions. In this paper, we fli...

Extant literature has explored the social integration process of migrants settling in host communities. However, this literature typically takes a migrant-centric view, implicitly putting the burden of a successful integration on the migrant, and trying to identify the factors that lead to integration along various dimensions. In this paper, we fli...

Migration and mobility present major societal challenges, while also representing key opportunities. New data sources from social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer valuable insights that can help us measure and understand patterns of long-term migration and short-term mobility, as well as migrant acculturation along various dimensions....

Social media serves as an important communication channel for people affected by crises, creating a data source for emergency responders wanting to improve situational awareness. In particular, social listening on Twitter has been widely used for real-time analysis of crisis-related messages. This approach, however, is often hindered by the small f...

The internet is often thought of as a democratizer, enabling equality in aspects such as pay, as well as a tool introducing novel communication and monetization opportunities. In this study we examine athletes on Cameo, a website that enables bi-directional fan-celebrity interactions, questioning whether the well-documented gender pay gaps in sport...

In times of crisis, real‐time data mapping population displacements are invaluable for targeted humanitarian response. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes including nearly 6 million refugees flowing across the border in just a few weeks, but information was scarce regarding di...

This chapter focuses on the potential value of data from two social media platforms: (a) geotagged tweets and (b) Facebook ads audience estimates – to demonstrate how these data can be used for migration statistics. The declared goal here is to enhance, not replace, traditional migration statistics. The chapter is divided into two main sections; th...

It is 10 years since neural networks made their spectacular comeback. Prompted by this anniversary, we take a holistic perspective on artificial intelligence (AI). Supervised learning for cognitive tasks is effectively solved—provided we have enough high-quality labelled data. However, deep neural network models are not easily interpretable, and th...

While the fighting in the Syrian civil war has mostly stopped, an estimated 5.6 million Syrians remain living in neighboring countries1. Of these, an estimated 1.5 million are sheltering in Lebanon. Ongoing efforts by organizations such as UNHCR to support the refugee population are often ineffective in reaching those most in need. According to UNH...

Social scientists increasingly use Facebook's advertising platform for research, either in the form of conducting digital censuses of the general population, or for recruiting participants for survey research. Both approaches depend on the accuracy of the data that Facebook provides about its users, but little is known about how accurate these data...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions implemented to prevent its spread, likethe suspension of international transit and closure of borders, first put into place in March 2020, oftensuddenly, have created complex, fast-evolving networks of restrictions between the countries of origin anddestination of migrants and would-be migra...

It is ten years since neural networks made their spectacular comeback. Prompted by this anniversary, we take a holistic perspective on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Supervised Learning for cognitive tasks is effectively solved - provided we have enough high-quality labeled data. However, deep neural network models are not easily interpretable, and...

Migration is hard to measure due to the complexity of the phenomenon and the limitations of traditional data sources. The Digital Revolution has brought opportunities in terms of new data and new methodologies for migration research. Social scientists have started to leverage data from multiple digital data sources, which have huge potential given...

The FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022 has been analyzed through the frameworks of nation branding and soft power. As the world’s most popular sport event, the World Cup has the possibility to enhance host nations’ images internationally, but we are not aware of empirical work attempting to assess public perceptions of Qatar, despite the considerable...

Migration and mobility present major societal challenges, while also representing key opportunities. New data sources from social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer valuable insights that can help us measure and understand patterns of long-term migration and short-term mobility, as well as immigrant integration along various dimensions. In...

Boosting the number of women and girls entering careers involving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) is crucial to achieving gender equality, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Girls and women tend to gravitate away from STEM fields at multiple stages from childhood through mid-career. The leaky pipeline is a metaphor often...

We investigate how representations of Syrian refugees (2011-2021) differ across US partisan news outlets. We analyze 47,388 articles from the online US media about Syrian refugees to detail differences in reporting between left- and right-leaning media. We use various NLP techniques to understand these differences. Our polarization and question ans...

In times of volatility and crisis, it is essential to have real-time data mapping population movements to facilitate a rapid and effective humanitarian response. Considerable attention has been placed on the 5.8 million Ukrainian refugees crossing the border as of early May 2022, but information is scarce to quantify and locate over 38 million peop...

In 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the heart of this are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which call for action by all countries through a global partnership. The need to better monitor progress towards the realization of the SDGs has led to a concurrent call for a data revo...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/22313.].

Although established marketing techniques have been applied to design more effective health campaigns, more often than not, the same message is broadcasted to large populations, irrespective of unique characteristics. As individual digital device use has increased, so have individual digital footprints, creating potential opportunities for targeted...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on economies, governments, businesses, and most importantly, people’s health. To bring the spread of COVID-19 under control, strict lockdown measures have been implemented across the globe. These lockdown measures resulted in a spate of panic buying and increase in demand for hygiene pr...

The choice of what to read is both influenced by and indicative of such factors as a person's beliefs, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status. However, obtaining data including such personal attributes, as well as detailed reading habits and activities of individuals is difficult and would usually require either (i) data from e-readers, such as...

Predictions of node categories are commonly used to estimate homophily and other relational properties in networks. However, little is known about the validity of using predictions for this task. We show that estimating homophily in a network is a problem of predicting categories of dyads (edges) in the graph. Homophily estimates are unbiased when...

Social media advertising data, particularly data from Facebook’s advertising platform, have been successfully used for monitoring population and development indicators, with an emphasis on monitoring digital gender inequality. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the feasibility of the attribute of user behavior of “using a mobile...

While the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, we have witnessed substantial mis- and disinformation regarding various aspects of the disease. We conducted a cross-sectional study using a self-administered questionnaire for the general public (recruited via social media) and healthcare workers (recruited via...

Digital technology is rapidly evolving and increasingly indispensable in our lives. This is true not only for adults, but also for children and adolescents. For young people, digital technology provides tools to engage in entrepreneurship, network with peers, and access critical health, career and financial information. For women and girls, digital...

An accurate estimation of international migration is hampered by a lack of timely and comprehensive data, and by the use of different definitions and measures of migration in different countries. In an effort to address this situation, we complement traditional data sources for the United Kingdom with social media data: our aim is to understand whe...

Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize that the amount of received feedback influences the choice of topics on which a social media user posts. Howeve...

The world is facing enormous challenges, ranging from climate change to extreme poverty. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by United Nations Member States in 2015 as an operational framework to address these challenges. The SDGs include No Poverty, Quality Education, Gender Equa...

Timely evidence for policymaking has been a consistent objective for UN organizations and member states. The classical data sources needed for official statistics have been expensive, time consuming, leading to delayed outcomes, and in certain cases impossible to access (e.g. images, videos). Today’s connected world offers alternatives and suppleme...

In this paper, we introduce Recipe1M+, a new large-scale, structured corpus of over one million cooking recipes and 13 million food images. As the largest publicly available collection of recipe data, Recipe1M+ affords the ability to train high-capacity models on aligned, multimodal data. Using these data, we train a neural network to learn a joint...

Abstract The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a global consensus on the world’s most pressing challenges. They come with a set of 232 indicators against which countries should regularly monitor their progress, ensuring that everyone is represented in up-to-date data that can be used to make decisions to improve people’s lives...

Abstract Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback—called community feedback—to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize that the amount of received feedback influences the choice of topics on which a social media user posts. How...

The article by Florianne C.J. Verkroost, Ridhi Kashyap, Kiran Garimella, Ingmar Weber and Emilio Zagheni analyses gender gaps in the IT industry based on data from the advertising platform of LinkedIn, which the authors use to estimate the supply side of these industries and identify gender gaps across countries. They disaggregate the IT industry i...

Background: In recognition of the empowering potential of digital technologies, gender equality in internet access and digital skills is an important target in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Gender-disaggregated data on internet use are limited, particularly in less developed countries. Objective: We leverage anonymo...

This chapter presents a descriptive analysis of migration-related data from Facebook's Advertising Platform for the African continent. It provides an estimate of the raw number of migrants in Africa, and a disaggregation by country of origin and by sex. According to the data, the total number of "migrants"-Facebook users who "live abroad" in Africa...

UNSTRUCTURED While established marketing techniques have been applied to design more effective health campaigns, more often than not, the same message is broadcasted to large populations, irrespective of unique characteristics. As individual digital device usage has increased, so has individual digital footprints, creating potential opportunities f...

Having reliable and up-to-date poverty data is a prerequisite for monitoring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for planning effective poverty reduction interventions. Unfortunately, traditional data sources are often outdated or lacking appropriate disaggregation. As a remedy, satellite imagery has recently become prominen...

Having reliable and up-to-date poverty data is a prerequisite for monitoring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for planning effective poverty reduction interventions. Unfortunately, traditional data sources are often outdated or lacking appropriate disaggregation. As a remedy, satellite imagery has recently become prominen...

This report uses strategic foresight to study applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve water-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report discusses motivations, applications, and opportunities related to the adoption of AI for sustainable development. AI is a thriving field, that aims to build systems that function intell...

In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack...

Venezuela is going through the worst economical, political and social crisis in its modern history. Basic products like food or medicine are scarce and hyperinflation is combined with economic depression. This situation is creating an unprecedented refugee and migrant crisis in the region. Governments and international agencies have not been able t...

In online social networks, it is common to use predictions of node categories to estimate measures of homophily and other relational properties. However, online social network data often lacks basic demographic information about the nodes. Researchers must rely on predicted node attributes to estimate measures of homophily, but little is known abou...

Mapping the distribution of poverty in developing countries is essential for humanitarian organizations and policymakers to formulate targeted programs and aid. However, traditional methods for obtaining socioeconomic data can be time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of combining machine...

Abstract The recent rise of the political extremism in Western countries has spurred renewed interest in the psychological and moral appeal of political extremism. Empirical support for the psychological explanation using surveys has been limited by lack of access to extremist groups, while field studies have missed psychological measures and faile...

Some 17.6 million EU citizens are currently living and working abroad, and 4% of the EU population of working age lives in another EU country. Having up-to-date information about the nature and extent of such mobility is important for policy making. However, timely and reliable statistics on the number of EU citizens residing in or moving across ot...

Quantifying global international mobility patterns can improve migration governance. Despite decades of calls by the international community to improve international migration statistics, the availability of timely and disaggregated data about long-term and short-term migration at the global level is still very limited. In this study, we investigat...

In light of the ongoing events of the Syrian Civil War, many governments have shifted the focus of their hospitality efforts from providing temporary shelter to sustaining this new long-term population. In Turkey, a heightened focus has been placed on the encouragement of integration of Syrian refugees into Turkish culture, through the dismantling...

In this paper, we introduce Recipe1M+, a new large-scale, structured corpus of over one million cooking recipes and 13 million food images. As the largest publicly available collection of recipe data, Recipe1M+ affords the ability to train high-capacity models on aligned, multimodal data. Using these data, we train a neural network to learn a joint...

A food recipe is an ordered set of instructions for preparing a particular dish. From a visual perspective, every instruction step can be seen as a way to change the visual appearance of the dish by adding extra objects (e.g., adding an ingredient) or changing the appearance of the existing ones (e.g., cooking the dish). In this paper, we aim to te...

A food recipe is an ordered set of instructions for preparing a particular dish. From a visual perspective, every instruction step can be seen as a way to change the visual appearance of the dish by adding extra objects (e.g., adding an ingredient) or changing the appearance of the existing ones (e.g., cooking the dish). In this paper, we aim to te...

Technologies for abusive language detection are being developed and applied with little consideration of their potential biases. We examine racial bias in five different sets of Twitter data annotated for hate speech and abusive language. We train classifiers on these datasets and compare the predictions of these classifiers on tweets written in Af...

The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebo...

Background: Brief intervention is a critical method for identifying patients with problematic substance use in primary care settings and for motivating them to consider treatment options. However, despite considerable evidence of delay discounting in patients with substance use disorders, most brief advice by physicians focuses on the long-term ne...

The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebo...

Much research has examined how crime rates vary across urban neighborhoods, focusing particularly on community-level demographic and social characteristics. A parallel line of work has treated crime at the individual level as an expression of certain behavioral patterns (e.g., impulsivity). Little work has considered, however, whether the prevalenc...

Factor loadings for the demographic variables. (PDF)

Details on the factor analysis. (PDF)

Preliminary analysis across various demographic groups on Facebook. (PDF)

BACKGROUND As the process of producing official health statistics for lifestyle diseases is slow, researchers have explored using Web search data as a proxy for lifestyle disease surveillance. Existing studies, however, are prone to at least one of the following issues: ad-hoc keyword selection, overfitting, insufficient predictive evaluation, lack...