In the modern world, our cities and societies face several technological and societal challenges, such as rapid urbanization, global warming & climate change, the digital divide, and social inequalities, increasing the need for more sustainable cities and societies. Addressing these challenges requires a multifaceted approach involving all the stakeholders, sustainable planning, efficient resource management, innovative solutions, and modern technologies. Like other modern technologies, social media informatics also plays its part in developing more sustainable and resilient cities and societies. Despite its limitations, social media informatics has proven very effective in various sustainable cities and society applications. In this paper, we review and analyze the role of social media informatics in sustainable cities and society by providing a detailed overview of its applications, associated challenges, and potential solutions. This work is expected to provide a baseline for future research in the domain.

We present a novel end-to-end personality-based synthetic dialogue data generation pipeline, specifically designed to elicit responses from large language models via prompting. We design the prompts to generate more human-like dialogues considering real-world scenarios when users engage with chatbots. We introduce PSYDIAL, the first Korean dialogue dataset focused on personality-based dialogues, curated using our proposed pipeline. Notably, we focus on the Extraversion dimension of the Big Five personality model in our research. Experimental results indicate that while pre-trained models and those fine-tuned with a chit-chat dataset struggle to generate responses reflecting personality, models trained with PSYDIAL show significant improvements. The versatility of our pipeline extends beyond dialogue tasks, offering potential for other non-dialogue related applications. This research opens doors for more nuanced, personality-driven conversational AI in Korean and potentially other languages.

The perennial problem of "how many clusters?" remains an issue of substantial interest in data mining and machine learning communities, and becomes particularly salient in large data sets such as populational genomic data where the number of clusters needs to be relatively large and open-ended. This problem gets further complicated in a co-clustering scenario in which one needs to solve multiple clustering problems simultaneously because of the presence of common centroids (e.g., ancestors) shared by clusters (e.g., possible descents from a certain ancestor) from different multiple-cluster samples (e.g., different human subpopulations). In this paper we present a hierarchical nonparametric Bayesian model to address this problem in the context of multi-population haplotype inference. Uncovering the haplotypes of single nucleotide polymorphisms is essential for many biological and medical applications. While it is uncommon for the genotype data to be pooled from multiple ethnically distinct populations, few existing programs have explicitly leveraged the individual ethnic information for haplotype inference. In this paper we present a new haplotype inference program, Haploi, which makes use of such information and is readily applicable to genotype sequences with thousands of SNPs from heterogeneous populations, with competent and sometimes superior speed and accuracy comparing to the state-of-the-art programs. Underlying Haploi is a new haplotype distribution model based on a nonparametric Bayesian formalism known as the hierarchical Dirichlet process, which represents a tractable surrogate to the coalescent process. The proposed model is exchangeable, unbounded, and capable of coupling demographic information of different populations.

Many complex disease syndromes such as asthma consist of a large number of highly related, rather than independent, clinical phenotypes, raising a new technical challenge in identifying genetic variations associated simultaneously with correlated traits. In this study, we propose a new statistical framework called graph-guided fused lasso (GFlasso) to address this issue in a principled way. Our approach explicitly represents the dependency structure among the quantitative traits as a network, and leverages this trait network to encode structured regularizations in a multivariate regression model over the genotypes and traits, so that the genetic markers that jointly influence subgroups of highly correlated traits can be detected with high sensitivity and specificity. While most of the traditional methods examined each phenotype independently and combined the results afterwards, our approach analyzes all of the traits jointly in a single statistical method, and borrow information across correlated phenotypes to discover the genetic markers that perturbe a subset of correlated triats jointly rather than a single trait. Using simulated datasets based on the HapMap consortium data and an asthma dataset, we compare the performance of our method with the single-marker analysis, and other sparse regression methods such as the ridge regression and the lasso that do not use any structural information in the traits. Our results show that there is a significant advantage in detecting the true causal SNPs when we incorporate the correlation pattern in traits using our proposed methods.