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Topicsketch: Real-Time Bursty Topic Detection From Twitter, Wei Xie, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang Dec 2013

Topicsketch: Real-Time Bursty Topic Detection From Twitter, Wei Xie, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become one of the largest platforms for users around the world to share anything happening around them with friends and beyond. A bursty topic in Twitter is one that triggers a surge of relevant tweets within a short time, which often reflects important events of mass interest. How to leverage Twitter for early detection of bursty topics has therefore become an important research problem with immense practical value. Despite the wealth of research work on topic modeling and analysis in Twitter, it remains a huge challenge to detect bursty topics in real-time. As existing methods can hardly scale …


Predicting User's Political Party Using Ideological Stances, Swapna Gottopati, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang Nov 2013

Predicting User's Political Party Using Ideological Stances, Swapna Gottopati, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predicting users political party in social media has important impacts on many real world applications such as targeted advertising, recommendation and personalization. Several political research studies on it indicate that political parties’ ideological beliefs on sociopolitical issues may influence the users political leaning. In our work, we exploit users’ ideological stances on controversial issues to predict political party of online users. We propose a collaborative filtering approach to solve the data sparsity problem of users stances on ideological topics and apply clustering method to group the users with the same party. We evaluated several state-of-the-art methods for party prediction task …


Social Sensing For Urban Crisis Management: The Case Of Singapore Haze, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ming Gao, Ee Peng Lim, Christie N. Scollon Nov 2013

Social Sensing For Urban Crisis Management: The Case Of Singapore Haze, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ming Gao, Ee Peng Lim, Christie N. Scollon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensing social media for trends and events has become possible as increasing number of users rely on social media to share information. In the event of a major disaster or social event, one can therefore study the event quickly by gathering and analyzing social media data. One can also design appropriate responses such as allocating resources to the affected areas, sharing event related information, and managing public anxiety. Past research on social event studies using social media often focused on one type of data analysis (e.g., hashtag clusters, diffusion of events, influential users, etc.) on a single social media data …


Why Do I Retweet It? An Information Propagation Model For Microblogs, Fabio Pezzoni, Jisun An, Andrea Passarella, Jon Crowcroft, Marco Conti Nov 2013

Why Do I Retweet It? An Information Propagation Model For Microblogs, Fabio Pezzoni, Jisun An, Andrea Passarella, Jon Crowcroft, Marco Conti

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging platforms are Web 2.0 services that represent a suitable environment for studying how information is propagated in social networks and how users can become influential. In this work we analyse the impact of the network features and of the users' behaviour on the information diffusion. Our analysis highlights a strong relation between the level of visibility of a message in the flow of information seen by a user and the probability that the user further disseminates the message. In addition, we also highlight the existence of other latent factors that impact on the dissemination probability, correlated with the properties …


Information Vs Interaction: An Alternative User Ranking Model For Social Networks, Wei Xie, Ai Phuong Hoang, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim Nov 2013

Information Vs Interaction: An Alternative User Ranking Model For Social Networks, Wei Xie, Ai Phuong Hoang, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent years have seen an unprecedented boom of social network services, such as Twitter, which boasts over 200 million users. In such big social platforms, the influential users are ideal targets for viral marketing to potentially reach an audience of maximal size. Most proposed algorithms rely on the linkage structure of the respective underlying network to determine the information flow and hence indicate a users influence. From social interaction perspective, we built a model based on the dynamic user interactions constantly taking place on top of these linkage structures. In particular, in the Twitter setting we supposed a principle …


Social Listening For Customer Acquisition, Juan Du, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim Nov 2013

Social Listening For Customer Acquisition, Juan Du, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network analysis has received much attention from corporations recently. Corporations are trying to utilize social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo to expand their own markets. Our system is an online tool to assist these corporations to 1) find potential customers, and 2) track a list of users by specific events from social networks. We employ both textual and network information, and thus produce a keyword-based relevance score for each user in pre-defined dimensions, which indicates the probability of the adoption of a product. Based on the score and its trend, out tool is able to …


A Unified Model For Topics, Events And Users On Twitter, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang Oct 2013

A Unified Model For Topics, Events And Users On Twitter, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant message. On the one hand, people tweets about their daily lives, and on the other hand, when major events happen, people also follow and tweet about them. Moreover, people’s posting behaviors on events are often closely tied to their personal interests. In this paper, we try to model topics, events and users on Twitter in a unified way. We propose a model which combines an LDA-like topic model and the Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process to capture …


Generative Models For Item Adoptions Using Social Correlation, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Ee Peng Lim Sep 2013

Generative Models For Item Adoptions Using Social Correlation, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users face many choices on the Web when it comes to choosing which product to buy, which video to watch, etc. In making adoption decisions, users rely not only on their own preferences, but also on friends. We call the latter social correlation which may be caused by the homophily and social influence effects. In this paper, we focus on modeling social correlation on users’ item adoptions. Given a user-user social graph and an item-user adoption graph, our research seeks to answer the following questions: whether the items adopted by a user correlate to items adopted by her friends, and …


Politics, Sharing And Emotion In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, William Cohen, Ee Peng Lim, Doug Pierce, David Redlawsk Aug 2013

Politics, Sharing And Emotion In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, William Cohen, Ee Peng Lim, Doug Pierce, David Redlawsk

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In political contexts, it is known that people act as "motivated reasoners", i.e., information is evaluated first for emotional affect, and this emotional reaction influences later deliberative reasoning steps. As social media becomes a more and more prevalent way of receiving political information, it becomes important to understand more completely the interaction between information, emotion, social community, and information-sharing behavior. In this paper, we describe a high-precision classifier for politically-oriented tweets, and an accurate classifier of a Twitter user's political affiliation. Coupled with existing sentiment-analysis tools for microblogs, these methods enable us to systematically study the interaction of emotion and …


Mining Direct Antagonistic Communities In Signed Social Networks, David Lo, Didi Surian, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Zhang Kuan, Ee Peng Lim Jul 2013

Mining Direct Antagonistic Communities In Signed Social Networks, David Lo, Didi Surian, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Zhang Kuan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social networks provide a wealth of data to study relationship dynamics among people. Most social networks such as Epinions and Facebook allow users to declare trusts or friendships with other users. Some of them also allow users to declare distrusts or negative relationships. When both positive and negative links co-exist in a network, some interesting community structures can be studied. In this work, we mine Direct Antagonistic Communities (DACs) within such signed networks. Each DAC consists of two sub-communities with positive relationships among members of each sub-community, and negative relationships among members of the other sub-community. Identifying direct antagonistic communities …


Reviving Dormant Ties In An Online Social Network Experiment, Ee Peng Lim, Denzil Correa, David Lo, Michael Finegold, Feida Zhu Jul 2013

Reviving Dormant Ties In An Online Social Network Experiment, Ee Peng Lim, Denzil Correa, David Lo, Michael Finegold, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network users connect and interact with one another to fulfil different kinds of social and information needs. When interaction ceases between two users, we say that their tie becomes dormant. While there are different underlying reasons of dormant ties, it is important to find means to revive such ties so as to maintain vibrancy in the relationships. In this work, we thus focus on designing an online experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of personalized social messages to revive dormant ties. The experiment carefully selects users with dormant ties so that no user gets mixed treatments and be affected by …


Anomaly Detection On Social Data, Hanbo Dai Jun 2013

Anomaly Detection On Social Data, Hanbo Dai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The advent of online social media including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube has drawn massive attention in recent years. These online platforms generate massive data capturing the behavior of multiple types of human actors as they interact with one another and with resources such as pictures, books and videos. Unfortunately, the openness of these platforms often leaves them highly susceptible to abuse by suspicious entities such as spammers. It therefore becomes increasingly important to automatically identify these suspicious entities and eliminate their threats. We call these suspicious entities anomalies in social data, as they often hold different agenda comparing to …


Real Time Event Detection In Twitter, Xun Wang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Sujian Li Jun 2013

Real Time Event Detection In Twitter, Xun Wang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Sujian Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection has been an important task for a long time. When it comes to Twitter, new problems are presented. Twitter data is a huge temporal data flow with much noise and various kinds of topics. Traditional sophisticated methods with a high computational complexity aren’t designed to handle such data flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a mixture Gaussian model for bursty word extraction in Twitter and then employ a novel time-dependent HDP model for new topic detection. Our model can grasp new events, the location and the time an event becomes bursty promptly and accurately. Experiments show the …


A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang Jun 2013

A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threaded discussion forums provide an important social media platform. Its rich user generated content has served as an important source of public feedback. To automatically discover the viewpoints or stances on hot issues from forum threads is an important and useful task. In this paper, we propose a novel latent variable model for viewpoint discovery from threaded forum posts. Our model is a principled generative latent variable model which captures three important factors: viewpoint specific topic preference, user identity and user interactions. Evaluation results show that our model clearly outperforms a number of baseline models in terms of both clustering …


Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao May 2013

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …


Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim May 2013

Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a …


Unified Entity Search In Social Media Community, Ting Yao, Yuan Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei May 2013

Unified Entity Search In Social Media Community, Ting Yao, Yuan Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as “entities” and all of these applications …


Fragmented Social Media: A Look Into Selective Exposure To Political News, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft May 2013

Fragmented Social Media: A Look Into Selective Exposure To Political News, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people crave like-minded information and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on political life. Yet, despite decades of research, this hypothesis remains theoretically promising but empirically difficult to test. We look into news articles shared on Facebook and examine whether selective exposure exists or not in social media. We find a concrete evidence for a tendency that users predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones, and partisans are more likely to do that. Building tools to counter partisanship on social media would require the ability …


Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou May 2013

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in Sina Weibo. Multimedia …


Finding The Optimal Social Trust Path For The Selection Of Trustworthy Service Providers In Complex Social Networks, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Mehmet A. Orgun, Ee Peng Lim Apr 2013

Finding The Optimal Social Trust Path For The Selection Of Trustworthy Service Providers In Complex Social Networks, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Mehmet A. Orgun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social networks have provided the infrastructure for a number of emerging applications in recent years, e.g., for the recommendation of service providers or the recommendation of files as services. In these applications, trust is one of the most important factors in decision making by a service consumer, requiring the evaluation of the trustworthiness of a service provider along the social trust paths from a service consumer to the service provider. However, there are usually many social trust paths between two participants who are unknown to one another. In addition, some social information, such as social relationships between participants and …


Dynamic Label Propagation In Social Networks, Juan Du, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim Apr 2013

Dynamic Label Propagation In Social Networks, Juan Du, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Label propagation has been studied for many years, starting from a set of nodes with labels and then propagating to those without labels. In social networks, building complete user profiles like interests and affiliations contributes to the systems like link prediction, personalized feeding, etc. Since the labels for each user are mostly not filled, we often employ some people to label these users. And therefore, the cost of human labeling is high if the data set is large. To reduce the expense, we need to select the optimal data set for labeling, which produces the best propagation result. In this …


K-Pop Live: Social Networking & Language Learning Platform, Thomas Chua, Chin Leng Ong, Kian Ming Png, Aloysius Lau, Houston Toh, Feida Zhu, Kyong Jin Shim, Ee-Peng Lim Feb 2013

K-Pop Live: Social Networking & Language Learning Platform, Thomas Chua, Chin Leng Ong, Kian Ming Png, Aloysius Lau, Houston Toh, Feida Zhu, Kyong Jin Shim, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

K-Pop live is a social networking and language learning platform developed by an undergraduate student team from Singapore Management University. K-Pop live aims to combine social media together with gamification to promote Korean culture. It consolidates all relevant Tweets from Twitter as well as videos from YouTube. The platform allows the user to connect with his friends who share similar interests in terms of K-pop artists and music.


Fair Cost Sharing Auction Mechanisms In Last Mile Ridesharing, Duc Thien Nguyen Jan 2013

Fair Cost Sharing Auction Mechanisms In Last Mile Ridesharing, Duc Thien Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With rapid growth of transportation demands in urban cities, one major challenge is to provide efficient and effective door-to-door service to passengers using the public transportation system. This is commonly known as the Last Mile problem. In this thesis, we consider a dynamic and demand responsive mechanism for Ridesharing on a non-dedicated commercial fleet (such as taxis). This problem is addressed as two sub-problems, the first of which is a special type of vehicle routing problems (VRP). The second sub-problem, which is more challenging, is to allocate the cost (i.e. total fare) fairly among passengers. We propose auction mechanisms where …


Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo, Xun Zhao Jan 2013

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo, Xun Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This thesis provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. In addition to consider the multimedia impact on popularity, we also compare the user influence …