Publications by Robert West | EPFL Graph Search

Related publications (64)

Keeping Up with the Trends: Analyzing the Dynamics of Online Learning and Hiring Platforms in the Software Programming Domain

Pierre Dillenbourg, Robert West, Ramtin Yazdanian

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has considerably sped up the pace of skill changes in many professional domains, with scores of new skills emerging and many old skills moving towards obsolescence. For these domains, identifying the new necessary skills in ...

2021

Human biases in body measurement estimation

Robert West, Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella

Body measurements, including weight and height, are key indicators of health. Being able to visually assess body measurements reliably is a step towards increased awareness of overweight and obesity and is thus important for public health. Nevertheless it ...

2020

Recursive Input And State Estimation: A General Framework For Learning From Time Series With Missing Data

Robert West, Alberto Garcia Duran

Time series with missing data are signals encountered in important settings for machine learning. Some of the most successful prior approaches for modeling such time series are based on recurrent neural networks that transform the input and previous state ...

IEEE2021

Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

Non-profits, as well as the media, have hypothesized the existence of a radicalization pipeline on YouTube, claiming that users systematically progress towards more extreme content on the platform. Yet, there is to date no substantial quantitative evidence ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

GenIE: Generative Information Extraction

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Martin Josifoski

Structured and grounded representation of text is typically formalized by closed information extraction, the problem of extracting an exhaustive set of (subject, relation, object) triplets that are consistent with a predefined set of entities and relations ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2022

Food choice mimicry on a large university campus

Robert West

Social influence is a strong determinant of food consumption, which in turn influences the environment and health. Purchasing mimicry, a phenomenon where a person copies another person’s purchases, has been identified as the key governing mechanism. Althou ...

2024

Measuring and shaping the nutritional environment via food sales logs: case studies of campus-wide food choice and a call to action

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric, Robin Adrien Zbinden

Although diets influence health and the environment, measuring and changing nutrition is challenging. Traditional measurement methods face challenges, and designing and conducting behavior-changing interventions is conceptually and logistically complicated ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Differential Benefits of Explicit Failure-Driven and Success-Driven Scaffolding in Problem-Solving Prior to Instruction

Robert West

Unscaffolded problem-solving before receiving instruction can give students opportunities to entertain their exploratory hypotheses at the expense of experiencing initial failures. Prior literature has argued for the efficacy of such preparatory activities ...

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC2021

Post Guidance for Online Communities

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

Effective content moderation in online communities is often a delicate balance between maintaining content quality and fostering user participation. In this paper, we introduce post guidance, a novel approach to community moderation that proactively guides ...

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)2025

Low-Rank Subspaces for Unsupervised Entity Linking

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Alberto Garcia Duran

Entity linking is an important problem with many applications. Most previous solutions were designed for settings where annotated training data is available, which is, however, not the case in numerous domains. We propose a light-weight and scalable entity ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2021

On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi

By linking to external websites, Wikipedia can act as a gateway to the Web. To date, however, little is known about the amount of traffic generated by Wikipedia's external links. We fill this gap in a detailed analysis of usage logs gathered from Wikipedia ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Broccoli: Sprinkling Lightweight Vocabulary Learning into Everyday Information Diets

Arnaud Pierre Jean Miribel, Robert West, Lars Henning Klein

The learning of a new language remains to this date a cognitive task that requires considerable diligence and willpower, recent advances and tools notwithstanding. In this paper, we propose Broccoli, a new paradigm aimed at reducing the required effort by ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Message Distortion in Information Cascades

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Kristina Gligoric

Information diffusion is usually modeled as a process in which immutable pieces of information propagate over a network. In reality, however, messages are not immutable, but may be morphed with every step, potentially entailing large cumulative distortions ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Distribution Inference Risks: Identifying and Mitigating Sources of Leakage

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Valentin Hartmann

A large body of work shows that machine learning (ML) models can leak sensitive or confidential information about their training data. Recently, leakage due to distribution inference (or property inference) attacks is gaining attention. In this attack, the ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations

Robert West, Michele Catasta, Tiziano Piccardi

Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They enhance readability and can be used as a structured entry point for creating and expanding articles. Structuring a new or already existing Wikipedia article with sections is a hard task for human ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

Interventions for Softening Can Lead to Hardening of Opinions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

Motivated by the goal of designing interventions for softening polarized opinions on the Web, and building on results from psychology, we hypothesized that people would be moved more easily towards opposing opinions when the latter were voiced by a celebri ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Robert West

Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) 1 y before and after death. We measure the sharp spi ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

Strong Heuristics for Named Entity Linking

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Andreas Oliver Spitz

Named entity linking (NEL) in news is a challenging endeavour due to the frequency of unseen and emerging entities, which necessitates the use of unsupervised or zero-shot methods. However, such methods tend to come with caveats, such as no integration of ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2022

Crosslingual Document Embedding as Reduced-Rank Ridge Regression

Martin Jaggi, Robert West, Martin Josifoski

There has recently been much interest in extending vector-based word representations to multiple languages, such that words can be compared across languages. In this paper, we shift the focus from words to documents and introduce a method for embedding doc ...

2019

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023