Public opinion

Public opinion, or popular opinion, is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. The term originates from France, and first appeared in the 17th century, though writers had identified the importance of the opinion of the people long before this. Prior to the advent of mass media, public fora such as coffee houses and gentlemen's clubs were used as exchanges of opinion and some reputable locations had great influence. In the 21st century, public opinion is widely thought to be heavily influenced by the media; many studies have been undertaken which look at the different factors which influence public opinion. Politicians and other people concerned with public opinion often attempt to influence it using advertising or rhetoric. One of the struggles of public opinion is how it can be influenced by misinformation. Etymology The term "public opinion" was derived from the French opinion

"La cathédrale": un monument ferroviaire au coeur du développement urbain de Bellizona

Enrico Margaroli

Situé au cœur de la ville de Bellinzona, le site ferroviaire des ateliers CFF constitue une étape importante dans le développement urbain futur de la ville. Le site imposant, intimement lié au développement de la ligne du Saint-Gothard depuis plus d’un siècle, n’as jamais cessé d’évoluer. Après la fin de son activité, prévue pour l’an 2026, cette aire accueillera un projet d’urbanisation. «La cathédrale» se distingue dans l’ensemble ferroviaire par son caractère et son importance architecturale. L’œuvre, protégée par les autorités et sur laquelle a travaillé le jeune Mario Chiattone, se prête comme carte de visite de ce nouveau quartier du chef-lieu tessinois. Le projet se compose d’une part d’une reconversion des espaces existants avec des programmes publics et d’autre part, d’un nouveau volume qui prends place au cœur de l’ensemble, grâce à la démolition d’une toiture récente. L’objectif du projet est d’accompagner la transition du monument vers un profil public, à travers la création d’un nouvel espace servant (distribution et services) ainsi que d’un espace de restauration et de détente. L’intervention met en avant la valorisation du patrimoine grâce à une attitude contemporaine en dialogue avec l’existant. De cette manière, cette nouvelle et dernière étape architecturale donne une nouvelle perspective à cet ensemble historique, qui s’élève ainsi à un point déclencheur pour le développement de l’ensemble du nouveau quartier.

2021

On the use of applied machine learning and digital infrastructure to leverage social media data in health and epidemiology

Martin Mathias Müller

The quantification of population-level health behaviors is crucial for guiding public health policy. However, traditional methods for measuring such health behaviors have several short- comings. In recent years social media data has been successfully used to measure health behaviors and may be used as a low-cost and real-time addition to traditional data sources. Methods from the field of natural language processing are increasingly used to automatically process, filter and categorize the rapidly growing amount of publicly available social media data. However, a number of methodological challenges limit the rate at which we can generate insight from such data. In this work I will argue that long-term investment into digital infrastructure and open source tooling is required in order to overcome these challenges. In chapter 2 we introduce the Crowd- breaks platform which is the basis of this thesis. Crowdbreaks is an open source framework for real-time data collection, continuous crowdsourced annotation, and continuous re-training of machine learning classifiers. In contrast to traditional research workflows, projects on Crowdbreaks run over an extended period of time, allowing for the observation of health trends over multiple years while keeping algorithms up-to-date. In chapter 3 we quantify the occurrence of concept drift in vaccine-related Twitter data, which further validates the need for the Crowdbreaks platform. In chapter 4 we use the Crowdbreaks platform to trace sentiment towards the novel gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 back to its first application in 2013 and investigate how public opinion may have been affected in context of recent scandals sur- rounding the technology. In chapter 5 we turn our attention to the COVID-19 pandemic and analyze who was speaking and who was heard in the early months of the pandemic. Chapter 6 builds on this work and explores the dynamics of Twitter communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, in chapter 7 we introduce COVID-Twitter-BERT, a domain-specific language model which has been used in various downstream natural language processing applications on COVID-19-related Twitter data.

EPFL2021

On the use of applied machine learning and digital infrastructure to leverage social media data in health and epidemiology

Martin Mathias Müller

EPFL2021

Les médias nous manipulent-ils ? L'opinion publique et les médias

"La cathédrale": un monument ferroviaire au coeur du développement urbain de Bellizona

On the use of applied machine learning and digital infrastructure to leverage social media data in health and epidemiology

"La cathédrale": un monument ferroviaire au coeur du développement urbain de Bellizona

Les médias nous manipulent-ils ? L'opinion publique et les médias

On the use of applied machine learning and digital infrastructure to leverage social media data in health and epidemiology