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The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Amaç Herdagdelen, whose interest is in the experience of immigrants using social networks. On Facebook, for instance, information about one's migrant status can be included in one's profile information; by identifying users with a difference between their stated home country and country of residence, the present study identified some 93 home countries with more than 10,000 immigrants on Facebook, for migrants in the U.S.

Additionally, it computed the exposure of users to friends with a migrant background, and calculated the relative exposure to various countries of origin; the …

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Ilya Musabirov, whose focus is on place-based communities online. The focus here is especially on VKontakte, the most popular social media platform in Russia, and on how residents in apartment buildings in St. Petersburg are using this platform. The main tool here are restricted-access groups, which require formal vetting by the group owner before access is granted (and during that process aspects like the applicant's apartment number may be checked).

Such groups are much more active than open groups, in terms of the number of posts and active participants. Users are …

Next in this Web Science 2016 session is Yelena Mejova, whose work examines how privacy is being discussed on social media in Qatar. Privacy has a number of definitions: the right to be left alone, right to intimacy, etc. But privacy is also defined differently in different regions of the world; the dominant western definitions of privacy may not align with definitions that are prevalent elsewhere, such as for example in the Gulf region.

Culture in the Gulf region is relationship-based and collectivist, and loyalty and honour are exceptionally important values. This is also a rapidly developing region, with substantial …

Post-lunch, the final day of Web Science 2016 continues with a keynote by Andrew Tomkins, whose focus is on the dynamics of choice in online environments. He begins by highlighting R. Duncan Luce's work, including his Axiom of Choice, but also points out the subsequent work that has further extended the methods for analysing discrete choice. Today, the most powerful models are mathematically complex and computationally intractable, as well as requiring sophisticated external representations of dependence.

From this work it has become clear that the Axiom of Choice holds only under relatively select conditions. Contextual data is of great importance …

The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Clare Hooper, whose interest is in 'social machines' as defined by Tim Berners-Lee: systems were people do the creative work, and machines take care of the administration. Social machines will exist in the context of problems to be solved; they may be created by single stakeholders (as in the case of Galaxy Zoo), while others arise in a more emergent fashion (from online communities).

But any social machine has more than one stakeholder, and these often have more or less strongly conflicting needs. The job market site Skills Planner …

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Paul Seitlinger, whose interest is in social tagging practices. These provide a valuable insight into human cognition and offer an opportunity to validate lab-based models 'in the wild'. One key question in this is how semantic stabilisation, or consensual use of tags, comes into being. This is influenced by the interplay of both human and non-human actors.

As multiple users tag the same piece of content, unique new tags may be introduced – but over time, the likelihood of new tags being introduced declines, and there is a gradual settling on a shared …

The next Web Science 2016 presenter is Jack Webster, who focusses on music recommender systems. Such recommender systems could generate filter bubbles, but that threat is nothing new; the cultural intermediaries described by Pierre Bourdieu fulfilled very similar roles and could have engendered very similar patterns.

But music recommender systems do not draw on a lifetime of personal experience, but rather utilise large datasets on users' engagement with music streaming and download services, applying algorithms designed by human coders. How do these different human and technological actors come together in creating and operating recommender systems, then?

Cultural intermediaries are the …

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with Natalia Boldyrev, whose focus is on Web taxonomies. There are a number of different approaches to taxonomies, from traditional librarian approaches to user-generated taxonomies, and from hierarchical catalogues of terms to unordered tag clouds. Such taxonomies are also culturally predicated: the taxonomy for football-related books in the German Amazon is much more detailed than it is in Amazon US, for instance.

Matching such diverse taxonomies in order to connect the datasets they describe is difficult. This is, on the face of it, an ontology matching problem, and can also be understood …

The final day of Web Science 2016 starts with a keynote by Daniel Miller, who contributes an anthropologist's perspective to the conference. He notes that especially when it comes to the popular discussion of Web technologies such as social media, there are many spurious claims about how they change social interactions – and anthropologists are called upon to make sense of these claims. Anthropology, he notes, is in fact the study of people as social networks: we are all of us embedded in our social relations with others, and it is these relations that anthropology examines and analyses.

This enables …