I’m nearing the end of the third year of my PhD and, for the third consecutive time, I have attended the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). In ICWSM-16 I presented my (2nd) master thesis, and the demo paper which inaugurated the list of publications of my PhD research. One year later, the first full paper of that list was presented in ICWSM-17. For the 2018 edition, held at the Stanford University, I selected a different format: a dataset paper.
Dataset papers are a particular track of ICWSM which encourages researchers to present a valuable dataset and to share it with the community. This was an ideal scenario for the dataset of online petitions from Avaaz.org that I was exploring with my colleagues Diego Saéz-Trumper and Miriam Redi. In addition, taking advantage of my visit to the Oxford Internet Institute, this project became the first collaboration with Scott A. Hale, my host supervisor during this visit. The resulting paper, which also benefited from the expertise of my PhD supervisors Vicenç Gómez and Andreas Kaltenbrunner, covers the relevance of releasing this open resource, the creation process and final structure of the dataset, and some findings when exploring the data. It is worth mentioning that our results have allowed to debug the platform (see the additional appendix) and, furthermore, they are the starting point of an extended version, which we are currently working on. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502)
Pablo Aragón 