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Ben Daniel, Social Capital Modeling in Virtual Communities:
Bayesian Belief Network Approaches

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Description
Throughout history, the permeation of new technologies have assisted communities in their aim to collectively work together in addressing shared
problems for the attainment of specific goals and outcomes.
Social Capital Modeling in Virtual Communities: Bayesian Belief Network Approaches broadly examines what constitutes social capital in geographical communities and offers an in-depth description of its potential in virtual communities. Providing the latest findings for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and academicians involved with virtual communities and social capital, this book draws upon insights from interdisciplinary fields such as artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, educational technology, and economics and sociology.

The authors

Ben K. Daniel is a researcher and an interim manager for Research and Innovation with the Office of the Associate Vice President Research-Health (University of Saskatchewan) and Vice President of Research and Innovation at Saskatoon Health Region (Saskatoon, Canada). He also lectures on statistics, research methods and communication technologies at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada). He is an eclectic scholar with a vast array of training and experiences drawn from many disciplines, some of which include graduate training in computer science, educational and training systems design, philosophy, statistics, and communications technologies. Dr. Daniel has extensively published over fifty peer-reviewed conference papers, six international and national journal articles and 10 book chapters on variety of topics in advanced learning technologies. He reviews for half a dozen international conferences and journals on advanced learning technologies and knowledge management. His research has won two major national and international awards and was nominated for a couple of international awards. In the past, he held numerous undergraduate and graduate fellowships, awards, and was a Dutch NUFFIC University Fellow at the University of Twente (Enshede, the Netherlands). Dr. Daniel has recently developed curiosity in e-health systems. He is interested in exploring new techniques and opportunities for extending virtual communities and social networking systems to the
domain of e-health.

Piet Kommers is an associate professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, as well as an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Joensuu University (Finland). Professor Kommers served as advisor to the Ministry of Education in Singapore and several UNESCO international projects on educational technology. Currently, he lectures in the fields of media, technology, communication and education. Dr. Kommers’ early research focused on conceptual representations for learning and exploration of virtual reality environments to support learning. He developed several techniques including cognitive style effects that could be derived back to differences in students’ short term memory capacity. For more than twenty years, Professor Kommers has worked on various large-scale European
research projects. He has organized numerous conferences, initiated new scientific journals covering a variety of areas on virtual presence,
explorative learning environments and web-based communities. His work appears in many European and international scientific conferences, book chapters, and journal articles. In addition, he has published six books and was awarded as Honorary Doctorate by Capital Normal University in Beijing in 2000.

Purchase the book

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Contents

Foreword by Piet Kommers, University of Twente, the Netherlands
Preface: Book Motivation
Section I: Theory and Application of Social Capital
Chapter I: The Roots of Communities and Social Capital
Chapter II: Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations of Social Capital
Chapter III: Social Capital Use-Case Application Areas
Chapter IV: Approaches for Measuring Social Capital
Chapter V: Trust and Social Capital
Section II: Social Computing and Virtual Communities
Chapter VI: Social Computing and Social Software
Chapter VII: Virtual Communities
Chapter VIII: Knowledge and Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Communities
Section III: Computational Modeling
Chapter IX: Foundations of Social Modeling
Chapter X: Overview of Bayesian Belief Network
Chapter XI: Construction of Bayesian Models
Section IV: Computational Model of Social Capital
Chapter XII: A Computational Model of Social Capital
Chapter XIV: Model Validation
Chapter XV: Conclusions, Book Limitations and Future Directions
Topics Covered
• Approaches for measuring social capital
• Bayesian belief network
• Computational model of social capital
• Construction of Bayesian models
• Model validation
• Sensitivity analysis

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