Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Air Force Institute of Technology

2022

Social network analysis

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Analysis Of Twitter Networks To Aid Open Source Intelligence Capabilities: A Multilayer Network Approach, Austin P. Logan Mar 2022

Analysis Of Twitter Networks To Aid Open Source Intelligence Capabilities: A Multilayer Network Approach, Austin P. Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Open Source Intelligence using social media is a practice which gives military intelligence analysts a window into the thoughts and minds of an online population. Using Social Network Analysis, user interactions on Twitter will be modeled as a weighted and directed network. Topic modeling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation uncovers the topics of discussion in Tweets and is then integrated into a multi-layer network which allows users to be connected to the conversations with which they have participated. Influential users in this network as well as highly connected groups of individuals are then discovered to paint a picture for intelligence analysts …


Screening Heuristics For The Evaluation Of Covert Network Node Insertion Scenarios, Andrew E. Pekarek Mar 2022

Screening Heuristics For The Evaluation Of Covert Network Node Insertion Scenarios, Andrew E. Pekarek

Theses and Dissertations

The majority of research on covert networks uses social network analysis (SNA) to determine critical members of the network to either kill or capture for the purpose of network destabilization. This thesis takes the opposite approach and evaluates potential scenarios for inserting an agent into a covert network for information gathering purposes or future disruption operations. Due to the substantial number of potential insertion scenarios in a large network, this research proposes three screening heuristics that leverage SNA measures to reduce the solution space before applying a simple search heuristic.