Publications by Robert West | EPFL Graph Search

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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Robert West

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

Human biases in body measurement estimation

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

Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube

GenIE: Generative Information Extraction

Food choice mimicry on a large university campus

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

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

Post Guidance for Online Communities

Low-Rank Subspaces for Unsupervised Entity Linking

On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web

Broccoli: Sprinkling Lightweight Vocabulary Learning into Everyday Information Diets

Message Distortion in Information Cascades

Distribution Inference Risks: Identifying and Mitigating Sources of Leakage

Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations

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

Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Strong Heuristics for Named Entity Linking

Crosslingual Document Embedding as Reduced-Rank Ridge Regression

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