In this paper we present a study of political bots on Twitter and their influence on the Swedish general election in September 2018. We have not restricted our study to bots that are a software program, instead we are interested in any type of bot-like automated behaviour. This includes a human being manually copying or retweeting content repeatedly in a robot-like way with the aim of influencing the interaction between a user and content or with other users. We examined how bots influence discussions about the Swedish general election on Twitter during a three month period starting half a year before the election. For this purpose we trained a machine learning model to recognize automatic behaviour and studied accounts that tweet about the Swedish election. Our results show, among other things, that bot activity is at a similar level to that found in other studies, and that distinctive clusters, for example among right-wing Twitter accounts, can be identified.

This paper describes a conference which linked several remote sites via a virtual environment so that the virtual audience could follow the presentations and interact with real presenters. The aim was to assess the feasibility of linking distributed virtual audiences to an ongoing conference event. Various types of data about the conference were gathered, such as participant observations, interviews and a survey of the audience, and analyzed. The main finding is that a number of `low tech' improvements could be made that could greatly enhance this type of virtual conferencing. A related finding is that the visual fidelity of the environment and of the avatars plays a lesser role than other factors such as audio quality. Given the paucity of research on how virtual conferencing can substitute for travel, plus the urgency of this topic for environmental reasons, a number of suggestions are made for the implementation of remote virtual conference participation.

This paper examines various aspects of "openness" in research, and seeks to gauge the degree to which escience is congruent with "open science." Norms and practices of openness, arguably, have been vital for the work of modern scientific communities, but concerns about the growth of stronger technical and institutional restraints on access to research tools, data and information recently have attracted increased notice -- in part because of their implications for the effective utilization of advanced digital infrastructures and information technologies in research collaborations. Our discussion clarifies the conceptual distinctions between e-science and open science, and reports findings from a preliminary look at practices in U.K. e-science projects. Both parts serve to underscore the point that it is unwarranted to presume that the development of e-science necessarily promotes global open science collaboration. A programme of further empirical studies is outlined, aimed at establishing where, when, and to what extent "openness" and" eness" in scientific and engineering research may be expected to advance hand-in-hand.

Collaboration at a distance has long been a research goal of distributed virtual environments.A number of recent technologies, including immersive projection technology systems (IPTs) and head-mounted displays (HMDs), promise a new generation of technologies that are more intuitive to use than desktop-based systems.This paper presents an experiment that compares collaboration in five different settings.Pairs collaborated on the same puzzle-solving task using one of: an IPT connected to another IPT, an IPT connected to an HMD, an IPT connected to a desktop system, two connected desktop systems, or face-to-face collaboration with real objects.The findings demonstrate the benefits of using immersive technologies, and show the advantages of using symmetrical settings for better performance.Some usability problems of the different distributed settings are addressed, as well as factors such as "presence" and "copresence" and how these contribute to the participants' overall experiences.

This study examines pairs of subjects who used networked immersive projection technology systems to collaborate on five tasks over an extended period of time (210+ minutes). The aim was to compare zero history and mutual history partners, to examine how their experience changed over time, and compare their experience of different tasks. Analysis yields a number of interesting findings for these comparisons. Overall, the study shows that users could collaborate effectively over an extended period of time, but that understanding the intentions and activities of the other person remained a hindrance.