Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Utilizing Consumer Health Posts For Pharmacovigilance: Identifying Underlying Factors Associated With Patients’ Attitudes Towards Antidepressants, Maryam Zolnoori

Theses and Dissertations

Non-adherence to antidepressants is a major obstacle to antidepressants therapeutic benefits, resulting in increased risk of relapse, emergency visits, and significant burden on individuals and the healthcare system. Several studies showed that non-adherence is weakly associated with personal and clinical variables, but strongly associated with patients’ beliefs and attitudes towards medications. The traditional methods for identifying the key dimensions of patients’ attitudes towards antidepressants are associated with some methodological limitations, such as concern about confidentiality of personal information. In this study, attempts have been made to address the limitations by utilizing patients’ self report experiences in online healthcare forums to …

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ …

Using Data Analytics For Discovering Library Resource Insights: Case From Singapore Management University, Ning Lu, Rui Song, Dina Li Gwek Heng, Swapna Gottipati, Aaron Tay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Library resources are critical in supporting teaching, research and learning processes. Several universities have employed online platforms and infrastructure for enabling the online services to students, faculty and staff. To provide efficient services by understanding and predicting user needs libraries are looking into the area of data analytics. Library analytics in Singapore Management University is the project committed to provide an interface for data-intensive project collaboration, while supporting one of the library’s key pillars on its commitment to collaborate on initiatives with SMU Communities and external groups. In this paper, we study the transaction logs for user behavior analysis that …

Policy Analytics For Environmental Sustainability: Household Hazardous Waste And Water Impacts Of Carbon Pollution Standards, Kustini

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Policy analytics are essential in supporting more informed policy-making in environmental management. This dissertation employs a fusion of machine methods and explanatory empiricism that involves data analytics, math programming, optimization, econometrics, geospatial and spatiotemporal analysis, and other approaches for assessing and evaluating current and future environmental policies.
Essay 1 discusses household informedness and its impact on the collection and recycling of household hazardous waste (HHW). Household informedness is the degree to which households have the necessary information to make utility-maximizing decisions about the handling of their waste. Such informedness seems to be influenced by HHW public education and environmental quality …

Controversy Analysis And Detection, Shiri Dori-Hacohen

Doctoral Dissertations

Seeking information on a controversial topic is often a complex task. Alerting users about controversial search results can encourage critical literacy, promote healthy civic discourse and counteract the "filter bubble" effect, and therefore would be a useful feature in a search engine or browser extension. Additionally, presenting information to the user about the different stances or sides of the debate can help her navigate the landscape of search results beyond a simple "list of 10 links". This thesis has made strides in the emerging niche of controversy detection and analysis. The body of work in this thesis revolves around two …

An Integrated Framework For Modeling And Predicting Spatiotemporal Phenomena In Urban Environments, Tuc Viet Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis proposes a general solution framework that integrates methods in machine learning in creative ways to solve a diverse set of problems arising in urban environments. It particularly focuses on modeling spatiotemporal data for the purpose of predicting urban phenomena. Concretely, the framework is applied to solve three specific real-world problems: human mobility prediction, trac speed prediction and incident prediction. For human mobility prediction, I use visitor trajectories collected a large theme park in Singapore as a simplified microcosm of an urban area. A trajectory is an ordered sequence of attraction visits and corresponding timestamps produced by a visitor. …

Tweet Geolocation: Leveraging Location, User And Peer Signals, Wen-Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We referred this as fine-grained geolocation. To solve this problem effectively, we develop novel techniques to exploit each posting user's content history. This is motivated by our finding that most users do not share their visitation history, but have ample content history from tweet posts. We formulate fine-grained geolocation as a ranking problem whereby given a test tweet, we rank candidate venues. We propose several models that leverage on three types of signals from locations, users and peers. Firstly, the location signals are words that are indicative of venues. We propose a location-indicative …

Modeling Check-In Behavior With Geographical Neighborhood Influence Of Venues, Thanh Nam Doan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With many users adopting location-based social networks (LBSNs) to share their daily activities, LBSNs become a gold mine for researchers to study human check-in behavior. Modeling such behavior can benefit many useful applications such as urban planning and location-aware recommender systems. Unlike previous studies [4,6,12,17] that focus on the effect of distance on users checking in venues, we consider two venue-specific effects of geographical neighborhood influence, namely, spatial homophily and neighborhood competition. The former refers to the fact that venues share more common features with their spatial neighbors, while the latter captures the rivalry of a venue and its nearby …

Interactive Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chenghao Liu, Martin Ester

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation has been an active research topic over the last decade, based on the assumption that social information from friendship networks is beneficial for improving recommendation accuracy, especially when dealing with cold-start users who lack sufficient past behavior information for accurate recommendation. However, it is nontrivial to use such information, since some of a person's friends may share similar preferences in certain aspects, but others may be totally irrelevant for recommendations. Thus one challenge is to explore and exploit the extend to which a user trusts his/her friends when utilizing social information to improve recommendations. On the other hand, …

Spatiotemporal Identification Of Anomalies In A Wildlife Preserve, Bharadwaj Kishan, Jason Guan Jie Ong, Yanrong Zhang, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The datasets released for the VAST Challenge 2017 comprise vehicle movement data captured with RFID sensors, chemical emission data from factories captured by gas sensors, and image attributes of the wildlife plant health obtained from satellites, all pertaining to a fictional wildlife preserve. Using visual analytics, a compelling hypothesis is established to link the spatiotemporal datasets to the phenomenon, where the count of a bird specimen is found to decline over a given year. Anomalies in vehicle traffic patterns are linked to proximal factory emissions, and further associated with satellite imagery that show proof of degradation in plant quality in …

Systematic Analysis Of Enterprise Perception Towards Cloud Adoption In The African States: The Nigerian Perspective, George A. Oguntala, Prof. Raed A. Abd-Alhameed, Dr. Janet O. Odeyemi

The African Journal of Information Systems

The desirous benefits of cloud computing such as high return on investment through efficient resource management, high application throughput and on-demand capabilities have resulted in the unprecedented global acceptance of the computing paradigm. However, research on cloud adoption indicates that fewer organisations in the African states are adopting cloud services. Thus, the purview of the paper is to examine the factors responsible for the poor adoption of cloud computing in most African enterprises using Nigeria as a case study. The study focus on the perception of IT and non-IT employees towards cloud computing. Moreover, the paper reviews the literature on …

Using Osgeo Solutions For Local Development Systems Implementation. The Experience For The Northern Region Of Costa Rica, López-Villegas Oscar, Víquez-Acuña Oscar, Víquez-Acuña Leonardo

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

Although some general definitions classify Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) as technological standards, institutional and even political agreements, which allow the discovery and use of geospatial information by users for different purposes [Kuhn 2005], computationally this platforms are valuable data repositories that should reach people efficiently and effectively for analysis and decision making on issues of collective interest. Costa Rica has several SDIs experiences at national level (SNIT - http://www.snitcr.go.cr), regional level (IDEHN - http://www.idehn.tec.ac.cr) or local/cantonal level (IDESCA - http://idesca.cr). Those infrastructures can facilitate access between geospatial information managers and their consumers through the implementation of particular software applications. The …

Kadaster Data Platform - Overview Archicture, Erwin Folmer, Wouter Beek

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

The Dutch Cadastre is publishing its geospatial data assets as Linked Open Data through the Kadaster Data Platform (KDP). The KDP supports the following three Linked Data browsing paradigms: (1) graph navigation, (2) hierarchical browsing, and (3) faceted browsing. Graph navigation uses the graph-shape of the RDF datamodel, to display concepts and instances as nodes, and properties between them as edges between those nodes. Graph navigation works well for explorative browsing. For graph navigation the KDP uses LODView (http://lodview.it), an existing OSS. Hierarchical browsing uses the tree structure of the concept hierarchy in order to display the various classes and …

Towards A Web-Enabled Geo-Sample Web: An Open Source Resource Registration And Management System For Connecting Geo-Samples To The Web, Anusuriya Devaraju, Jens Klump, Victor Tey, Simon Cox, Ryan Fraser

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

Within the earth sciences the curation and sharing of geo-samples is crucial to supporting reproducible research, in addition to extending the use of the samples in new research, and saving costs by avoiding sample loss and duplicating sampling activities. In the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), researchers gather various geo-samples as part of their field studies and collaborative projects. The diversity of the samples and their unsystematic management led ambiguous sample numbers, incomplete sample descriptions, and difficulties in finding the samples and their related data. These problems are also found in universities, research institutes and government agencies, which …

The Billion Object Platform (Bop): A System To Lower Barriers To Support Big, Streaming, Spatio-Temporal Data Sources, Devika Kakkar, Ben Lewis, David Smiley, Ariel Nunez

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

With funding from the Sloan Foundation and Harvard Dataverse, the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) has developed a big spatio-temporal data visualization platform called the Billion Object Platform or "BOP". The goal of the project is to lower barriers for scholars who wish to access large, streaming, spatio-temporal datasets. Since once archived, streaming data gets big fast, and since most GIS systems don't support interactive visualization of millions of objects, a new platform was needed. The BOP is loaded with the latest billion geo-tweets and is fed a real-time stream of about 1 million tweets per day. The CGA …

Optimizing Spatiotemporal Analysis Using Multidimensional Indexing With Geowave, Richard Fecher, Michael A. Whitby

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

The open source software GeoWave bridges the gap between geographic information systems and distributed computing. This is done by preserving locality of multidimensional data when indexing it into a single-dimensional key-value store, using space filling curves. This means that like values in each dimension are stored physically close together in the datastore. We demonstrate the efficiencies and benefits of the GeoWave indexing algorithm to store and query billions of spatiotemporal data points. We show how this indexing strategy can be used to reduce query and processing times by multiple orders of magnitude using publicly available taxi trip data published by …

Smartphone Sensing Meets Transport Data: A Collaborative Framework For Transportation Service Analytics, Yu Lu, Archan Misra, Wen Sun, Huayu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for and introduce TRANSense, a framework for urban transportation service analytics that combines participatory smartphone sensing data with city-scale transportation-related transactional data (taxis, trains etc.). Our work is driven by the observed limitations of using each data type in isolation: (a) commonly-used anonymous city-scale datasets (such as taxi bookings and GPS trajectories) provide insights into the aggregate behavior of transport infrastructure, but fail to reveal individual-specific transport experiences (e.g., wait times in taxi queues); while (b) mobile sensing data can capture individual-specific commuting-related activities, but suffers from accuracy and energy overhead challenges due to usage artefacts and lack …

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative …

Real-Time Influence Maximization On Dynamic Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence maximization (IM), which selects a set of k users(called seeds) to maximize the influence spread over a social network, is a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications such as viral marketing and network monitoring.Existing IM solutions fail to consider the highly dynamic nature of social influence, which results in either poor seed qualities or long processing time when the network evolves.To address this problem, we define a novel IM query named Stream Influence Maximization (SIM) on social streams.Technically, SIM adopts the sliding window model and maintains a set of k seeds with the largest influence value over …

Introduction To Gis Using Open Source Software, 8th Ed, Frank Donnelly

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.18 "Las Palmas", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.

Discovering Explanatory Models To Identify Relevant Tweets On Zika, Roopteja Muppalla, Michele Miller, Tanvi Banerjee, William L. Romine

Kno.e.sis Publications

Zika virus has caught the worlds attention, and has led people to share their opinions and concerns on social media like Twitter. Using text-based features, extracted with the help of Parts of Speech (POS) taggers and N-gram, a classifier was built to detect Zika related tweets from Twitter. With a simple logistic classifier, the system was successful in detecting Zika related tweets from Twitter with a 92% accuracy. Moreover, key features were identified that provide deeper insights on the content of tweets relevant to Zika. This system can be leveraged by domain experts to perform sentiment analysis, and understand the …

Data Insertion In Bitcoin's Blockchain, Andrew Sward, Vecna Op_0, Forrest Stonedahl

Computer Science: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of methods for inserting arbitrary data into Bitcoin's blockchain. Historical methods of data insertion are described, along with lesser-known techniques that are optimized for efficiency. Insertion methods are compared on the basis of efficiency, cost, convenience of data reconstruction, permanence, and potentially negative impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The Role Of Different Tie Strength In Disseminating Different Topics On A Microblog, Felicia Natali, Kathleen M. Carley, Feida Zhu, Binxuan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The study of information flow typically does not distinguish the choices of tie strength on which the information flows. All receivers of the information are assumed to have the same potential to pass on the information. Modifying the SEIZ (susceptible, exposed, infected, skeptic) model, we discover that people choose to retweet strong or weak ties based on the topic. We made two modifications in the model. In the first modification (Model I), we assume that the contact rates of agents in different compartment and the probability of an agent transitioning from one compartment to another are different for strong ties …

Incentivizing The Use Of Bike Trailers For Dynamic Repositioning In Bike Sharing Systems, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bike Sharing System (BSS) is a green mode of transportation that is employed extensively for short distance travels in major cities of the world. Unfortunately, the users behaviour driven by their personal needs can often result in empty or full base stations, thereby resulting in loss of customer demand. To counter this loss in customer demand, BSS operators typically utilize a fleet of carrier vehicles for repositioning the bikes between stations. However, this fuel burning mode of repositioning incurs a significant amount of routing, labor cost and further increases carbon emissions. Therefore, we propose a potentially self-sustaining and environment friendly …

Marketing The Mountain State: A Large N Study Of User Engagement On Twitter, Kirk Richardson

Capstone Projects – Politics and Government

Much of the evolving research on the use of social media in destination marketing emphasizes how information diffusion influences the reputational image of place. The present study uses Twitter data to focus on the relative differences in user engagement across discrete account types. Specifically, this is done to examine how the official destination marketing organization of Montana—the Montana Office of Tourism (MTOT)—performs relative to other account types. Several regression analyses conducted on Twitter data associated with an ongoing MTOT place branding campaign reveal that tweets sent from ‘official’ accounts are more likely to be retweeted, and are estimated to receive …

A Knowledge Graph Framework For Detecting Traffic Events Using Stationary Cameras, Roopteja Muppalla, Sarasi Lalithsena, Tanvi Banerjee, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid increase in urban development, it is critical to utilize dynamic sensor streams for traffic understanding, especially in larger cities where route planning or infrastructure planning is more critical. This creates a strong need to understand traffic patterns using ubiquitous sensors to allow city officials to be better informed when planning urban construction and to provide an understanding of the traffic dynamics in the city. In this study, we propose our framework ITSKG (Imagery-based Traffic Sensing Knowledge Graph) which utilizes the stationary traffic camera information as sensors to understand the traffic patterns. The proposed system extracts image-based features …

Selecting Link Resolver And Knowledge Base Software: Implications Of Interoperability, Cyndy Chisare, Jody C. Fagan, David J. Gaines, Michael Trocchia

Libraries

Link resolver software and their associated knowledge bases are essential technologies for modern academic libraries. However, because of the increasing number of possible integrations involving link resolver software and knowledge bases, a library’s vendor relationships, product choices, and consortial arrangements may have the most dramatic effects on the user experience and back-end maintenance workloads. A project team at a large comprehensive university recently investigated link resolver products in an attempt to increase efficiency of back-end workflows while maintaining or improving the patron experience. The methodology used for product comparison may be useful for other libraries.

The Retransmission Of Rumor And Rumor Correction Messages On Twitter, Alton Y. K. Chua, Cheng-Ying Tee, Augustine Pang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article seeks to examine the relationships among source credibility, message plausibility, message type (rumor or rumor correction) and retransmission of tweets in a rumoring situation. From a total of 5,885 tweets related to the rumored death of the founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, 357 original tweets without an “RT” prefix were selected and analyzed using negative binomial regression analysis. The results show that source credibility and message plausibility are correlated with retransmission. Also, rumor correction tweets are retweeted more than rumor tweets. Moreover, message type moderates the relationship between source credibility and retransmission as well as that …

Towards Unobtrusive Mental Well-Being Monitoring For Independent-Living Elderly, Sinh Huynh, Hwee-Pink Tan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is essential to proactively detect mental health problems such as loneliness and depression in the independently-living elderly for timely intervention by caregivers. In this paper, we introduce an unobtrusive sensor-enabled monitoring system that has been deployed to 50 government housing ats with the independent-living elderly for two years. Then, we also present our initial findings from the 6-month sensor data between August 2015 and April 2016 as well as the survey data to measure the subjective well-being indicator. Our study showed the promising results that "room-level movements within a house" and "going out" behavior captured by our simple sensor …