Shubham Mehta

Aniket Chandrakant Devle, Julia Ann Jose, Abhay Shrinivas Saraswathula et al.

As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts. Social bots not only learn human conversations, manners, and presence but also manipulate public opinion, act as scammers, manipulate stock markets, and so on. There has been evidence of bots manipulating people's opinions and thoughts which can be a great threat to democracy. Identification and prevention of such campaigns that release or create these bots have become critical. Our goal in this paper is to leverage web mining techniques to help detect fake bots on social media platforms such as Twitter, thereby mitigating the spread of disinformation.

Crescentia Jung, Shubham Mehta, Atharva Kulkarni et al.

Alternative text is critical in communicating graphics to people who are blind or have low vision. Especially for graphics that contain rich information, such as visualizations, poorly written or an absence of alternative texts can worsen the information access inequality for people with visual impairments. In this work, we consolidate existing guidelines and survey current practices to inspect to what extent current practices and recommendations are aligned. Then, to gain more insight into what people want in visualization alternative texts, we interviewed 22 people with visual impairments regarding their experience with visualizations and their information needs in alternative texts. The study findings suggest that participants actively try to construct an image of visualizations in their head while listening to alternative texts and wish to carry out visualization tasks (e.g., retrieve specific values) as sighted viewers would. The study also provides ample support for the need to reference the underlying data instead of visual elements to reduce users' cognitive burden. Informed by the study, we provide a set of recommendations to compose an informative alternative text.