The Debaqi project team, conducted at CICANT and funded by FCT (DSAIPA/DS/0102/2019), led by Manuel Pita and represented by PhD student Bruno Saraiva (COPELABS) at the Complex Networks and their Applications conference (Menton Riviera, France), won the best poster award. The work was selected from a group of over 100 other posters.
The team, which also includes Prof João Pedro Carvalho, presented preliminary results on creating a new computational method to understand how people use the option of explicit responses in online group interactions. The option to explicitly reply to a message exists on various social platforms such as Facebook, X, WhatsApp and Instagram and is very relevant in the collective coordination of group conversations. One of the questions the team is trying to answer, specifically in the educational context of the Debaqi project, concerns how young people use these coordination mechanisms to achieve various goals, such as deepening the topic of conversation or engaging in arguments.
Preliminary results from work conducted with Portuguese students suggest that the explicit response function is predominantly used to establish social alignment rather than for argumentation or deepening topics.
The team has been invited to publish a detailed, large-scale study on this topic during the first half of 2024.