Regulatory limits on explicit targeting have not eliminated algorithmic profiling on the Web, as optimisation systems still adapt ad delivery to users' private attributes. The widespread availability of powerful zero-shot multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically lowered the barrier for exploiting these latent signals for adversarial inference. We investigate this emerging societal risk, specifically how adversaries can now exploit these signals to reverse-engineer private attributes from ad exposure alone. We introduce a novel pipeline that leverages LLMs as adversarial inference engines to perform natural language profiling. Applying this method to a longitudinal dataset comprising over 435,000 Facebook ad impressions collected from 891 users, we conducted a large-scale study to assess the feasibility and precision of inferring private attributes from passive online ad observations. Our results demonstrate that off-the-shelf LLMs can accurately reconstruct complex user private attributes, including party preference, employment status, and education level, consistently outperforming strong census-based priors and matching or exceeding human social perception at only a fraction of the cost (223× lower) and time (52× faster) required by humans. Critically, actionable profiling is feasible even within short observation windows, indicating that prolonged tracking is not a prerequisite for a successful attack. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that ad streams serve as a high-fidelity digital footprint, enabling off-platform profiling that inherently bypasses current platform safeguards, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in the ad ecosystem and the urgent need for responsible web AI governance in the generative AI era. The code is available at https://github.com/Breezelled/when-ads-become-profiles.

Calculating the Shannon entropy for symbolic sequences has been widely considered in many fields. For descriptive statistical problems such as estimating the N-gram entropy of English language text, a common approach is to use as much data as possible to obtain progressively more accurate estimates. However, in some instances, only short sequences may be available. This gives rise to the question of how many samples are needed to compute entropy. In this paper, we examine this problem and propose a method for estimating the number of samples required to compute Shannon entropy for a set of ranked symbolic “natural” events. The result is developed using a modified Zipf-Mandelbrot law and the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality, and we propose an approximation which yields an estimate for the minimum number of samples required to obtain an estimate of entropy with a given confidence level and degree of accuracy.

While information visualization frameworks and heuristics have traditionally been reluctant to include acquired codes of meaning, designers are making use of them in a wide variety of ways. Acquired codes leverage a user's experience to understand the meaning of a visualization. They range from figurative visualizations which rely on the reader's recognition of shapes, to conventional arrangements of graphic elements which represent particular subjects. In this study, we used content analysis to codify acquired meaning in visualization. We applied the content analysis to a set of infographics and data visualizations which are exemplars of innovative and effective design. 88% of the infographics and 71% of data visualizations in the sample contain at least one use of figurative visualization. Conventions on the arrangement of graphics are also widespread in the sample. In particular, a comparison of representations of time and other quantitative data showed that conventions can be specific to a subject. These results suggest that there is a need for information visualization research to expand its scope beyond perceptual channels, to include social and culturally constructed meaning. Our paper demonstrates a viable method for identifying figurative techniques and graphic conventions and integrating them into heuristics for visualization design.

Cloud computing is seen as an increasingly important enabler for improving productivity, efficiency and cost reduction. This research aims to identify factors that are perceived likely to influence the adoption of cloud computing for Australian municipal governments. The research model draws from the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and the diffusion of innovation (DOI) model. The research employed in-depth interviews of Australian councils' IT managers. The main factors that were identified as playing a significant role in Australian local council's adoption of cloud services were: relative advantage, compatibility, cost, technology readiness, competitive pressure.

Human communication is more than just the transmission of information. It also involves complex interaction dynamics that reflect the roles and communication styles of the participants. A novel approach to studying human communication is to view conversation as a coupled time series and apply analysis techniques from dynamical systems to the recurring topics or concepts. In this paper, we define a set of metrics that enable quantification of the complex interaction dynamics visible in conceptual recurrence. These multi-participant recurrence (MPR) metrics can be seen as an extension of recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) into the symbolic domain. This technique can be used to monitor the state of a communication system and inform about interaction dynamics, including the level of topic consistency between participants; the timing of state changes for the participants as a result of changes in topic focus; and, patterns of topic proposal, reflection, and repetition. We demonstrate three use studies applying the new metrics to conversation transcripts from different genres to demonstrate their ability to characterize individual communication participants and intergroup communication patterns.

Human discourse contains a rich mixture of conceptual information. Visualization of the global and local patterns within this data stream is a complex and challenging problem. Recurrence plots are an information visualization technique that can reveal trends and features in complex time series data. The recurrence plot technique works by measuring the similarity of points in a time series to all other points in the same time series and plotting the results in two dimensions. Previous studies have applied recurrence plotting techniques to textual data; however, these approaches plot recurrence using term-based similarity rather than conceptual similarity of the text. We introduce conceptual recurrence plots, which use a model of language to measure similarity between pairs of text utterances, and the similarity of all utterances is measured and displayed. In this paper, we explore how the descriptive power of the recurrence plotting technique can be used to discover patterns of interaction across a series of conversation transcripts. The results suggest that the conceptual recurrence plotting technique is a useful tool for exploring the structure of human discourse.

Most Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms are able to find a single (or few) optimal, or near-optimal, solutions to difficult (NP-hard) problems. An issue though is that a small change to the problem can have a large impact on a specific solution by decreasing its quality, or worse still, by rendering it infeasible. Niching methods, such as fitness sharing and crowding, have been implemented with success in the field of Evolutionary Computation (EC) and are aimed at simultaneously locating and maintaining multiple optima to increase search robustness - typically in multi-modal function optimization. In this paper it is shown that a niching technique applied to an ACO algorithm permits the simultaneous location and maintenance of multiple areas of interest in the search space.