Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

#Disruptjmm: Online Social Justice Advocacy And Community Building In Mathematics, Rachel Roca, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Drew Lewis, Joseph Hibdon, Stefanie Marshall

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In 2019, \#DisruptJMM, a Twitter hashtag, began circulating after an Inclusion/Exclusion blog by Dr. Piper H pointing to the need to make commonplace conversations about human suffering in the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). While the \#DisruptJMM hashtag has been used since 2019, the vast majority of use was in the JMM 2020 meetings. Twitter hashtags are used by activists to push forward conversations, join communities around a single idea, and create change. In this article, we draw on frameworks from community building seen in other equity and inclusion advocacy hashtags such as \#GirlsLikeUs [7] to qualitatively code and analyze tweets …

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …

Extracting Information From Twitter Screenshots, Tarannum Zaki, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

Screenshots are prevalent on social media as a common approach for information sharing. Users rarely verify before sharing screenshots whether they are fake or real. Information sharing through fake screenshots can be highly responsible for misinformation and disinformation spread on social media. There are services of the live web and web archives that could be used to validate the content of a screenshot. We are going to develop a tool that would automatically provide a probability whether a screenshot is fake by using the services of the live web and web archives.

Champions For Social Good: How Can We Discover Social Sentiment And Attitude-Driven Patterns In Prosocial Communication?, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Robert J. Kauffman, Helle Zinner Henriksen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is pursuing a social media strategy to inform people about displaced populations and refugee emergencies. It is actively engaging public figures to increase awareness through its prosocial communications and improve social informedness and support for policy changes in its services. We studied the Twitter communications of UNHCR social media champions and investigated their role as high-profile influencers. In this study, we offer a design science research and data analytics framework and propositions based on the social informedness theory we propose in this paper to assess communication about UNHCR’s mission. Two variables—refugee-emergency and champion …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Did They Really Tweet That?, Caleb Bradford, Michael L. Nelson (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Networks Of Disinformation: The Proliferation Of Hate Speech In Chile And Colombia During The Venezuelan Migration Crisis, Isabelle Valdes, Erika Frydenlund (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Religious Violence And Twitter: Networks Of Knowledge, Empathy And Fascination, Samah Senbel, Carly Seigel, Emily Bryan

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Twitter analysis through data mining, text analysis, and visualization, coupled with the application of actor-network-theory, reveals a coalition of heterogenous religious affiliations around grief and fascination. While religious violence has always existed, the prevalence of social media has led to an increase in the magnitude of discussions around the topic. This paper examines the different reactions on Twitter to violence targeting three religious communities: the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings. The attacks were all perpetrated by white nationalists with firearms. By analyzing large Twitter datasets in response to the attacks, …

Does Active Service Intervention Drive More Complaints On Social Media? The Roles Of Service Quality And Awareness, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not …

Using Large Pre-Trained Language Models To Track Emotions Of Cancer Patients On Twitter, Will Baker

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Twitter is a microblogging website where any user can publicly release a message, called a tweet, expressing their feelings about current events or their own lives. This candid, unfiltered feedback is valuable in the spaces of healthcare and public health communications, where it may be difficult for cancer patients to divulge personal information to healthcare teams, and randomly selected patients may decline participation in surveys about their experiences. In this thesis, BERTweet, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model, was used to predict sentiment and emotion labels for cancer-related tweets collected in 2019 and 2020. In longitudinal plots, trends in …

Sentiment Analysis, Quantification, And Shift Detection, Kevin Labille

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on event detection within streams of Tweets based on sentiment quantification. Sentiment quantification extends sentiment analysis, the analysis of the sentiment of individual documents, to analyze the sentiment of an aggregated collection of documents. Although the former has been widely researched, the latter has drawn less attention but offers greater potential to enhance current business intelligence systems. Indeed, knowing the proportion of positive and negative Tweets is much more valuable than knowing which individual Tweets are positive or negative. We also extend our sentiment quantification research to analyze the evolution of sentiment over time to automatically detect …

View, Like, Comment, Post: Analyzing User Engagement By Topic At 4 Levels Across 5 Social Media Platforms For 53 News Organizations, Kholoud K. Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We evaluate the effects of the topics of social media posts on audiences across five social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit) at four levels of user engagement. We collected 3,163,373 social posts from 53 news organizations across five platforms during an 8month period. We analyzed the differences in news organization platform strategies by focusing on topic variations by organization and the corresponding effect on user engagement at four levels. Findings show that topic distribution varies by platform, although there are some topics that are popular across most platforms. User engagement levels vary both by topics and …

Leveraging Natural Language Processing Applications And Microblogging Platform For Increased Transparency In Crisis Areas, Ernesto Carrera-Ruvalcaba, Johnson Ekedum, Austin Hancock, Ben Brock

SMU Data Science Review

Through microblogging applications, such as Twitter, people actively document their lives even in times of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. While first responders and crisis-teams are able to help people who call 911, or arrive at a designated shelter, there are vast amounts of information being exchanged online via Twitter that provide real-time, location-based alerts that are going unnoticed. To effectively use this information, the Tweets must be verified for authenticity and categorized to ensure that the proper authorities can be alerted. In this paper, we create a Crisis Message Corpus from geotagged Tweets occurring during 7 hurricanes …

The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory Of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Philip N. Howard

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

Over the past three years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. Our 2019 report analyses the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

1. Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.

2.Social media has become co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda …

Recommending Who To Follow In The Software Engineering Twitter Space, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, Dinusha Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape.” Unfortunately, due to the general-purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets.To help developers perform this task, in …

Offline Versus Online: A Meaningful Categorization Of Ties For Retweets, Felicia Natali, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the recent proliferation of news being shared through online social networks, it is crucial to determine how news is spread and what drives people to share certain stories. In this paper, we focus on the social networking site Twitter and analyse user’s retweets. We study retweeting patterns between offline and online friends, particularly, how tweet novelty and tweet topic differ between tweets retweeted by offline friends and those retweeted by online friends.

Temporal And Spatiotemporal Investigation Of Tourist Attraction Visit Sentiment On Twitter, Jose J. Padilla, Hamdi Kavak, Christopher J. Lynch, Ross J. Gore, Saikou Y. Diallo

VMASC Publications

In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists' emotions when visiting a city's tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and …

How College Campuses Are Using Social Media During Severe Weather Events, Emmale Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how college campuses are using social media during severe weather events. This topic surfaced after a tornado devastated Moore, Oklahoma in May 2013 and those displaced flocked to the University of Oklahoma campus after a post made on Twitter went viral prior to an official message being sent out by the university. In order to further explore this topic, a qualitative phenomenological case study was conducted at the following sites: University of Alabama, Missouri Southern State University, University of Oklahoma, and Florida State University. This study included observations of social media posts on Facebook and Twitter on …

Social Media: On Tech-Caves, Virtual Panopticism, And The Science Fiction-Like State In Which We Unwittingly Find Ourselves, Michael Major

Theses

Making use of three historic philosophical thought experiments, this paper blends psychological perspectives with philosophical reasoning to show how social media is corrupting our perception of reality, the result of which is ultimately detrimental to society as a whole. This is accomplished by first using Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to analyze and discuss the ways in which social media is limiting humanity’s access to real knowledge. Next, Michel Foucault’s analysis of punishment in its social context, Discipline and Punish, is used to discuss the ways in which social media is adversely affecting our behavior. Finally, Robert Nozick’s “Experience …

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 …

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 …

Demographics Of News Sharing In The U.S. Twittersphere, Julio C.S. Reis, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Benevenuto Fabrıcio.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to …

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 …

Infodemiology For Syndromic Surveillance Of Dengue And Typhoid Fever In The Philippines, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, Kennedy E. Espina

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Finding determinants of disease outbreaks before its occurrence is necessary in reducing its impact in populations. The supposed advantage of obtaining information brought by automated systems fall short because of the inability to access real-time data as well as interoperate fragmented systems, leading to longer transfer and processing of data. As such, this study presents the use of realtime latent data from social media, particularly from Twitter, to complement existing disease surveillance efforts. By being able to classify infodemiological (health-related) tweets, this study is able to produce a range of possible disease incidences of Dengue and Typhoid Fever within the …

Efficient Online Summarization Of Large-Scale Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Feida Zhu, Christian S. Jensen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information diffusion in social networks is often characterized by huge participating communities and viral cascades of high dynamicity. To observe, summarize, and understand the evolution of dynamic diffusion processes in an informative and insightful way is a challenge of high practical value. However, few existing studies aim to summarize networks for interesting dynamic patterns. Dynamic networks raise new challenges not found in static settings, including time sensitivity, online interestingness evaluation, and summary traceability, which render existing techniques inadequate. We propose dynamic network summarization to summarize dynamic networks with millions of nodes by only capturing the few most interesting nodes or …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

Detecting Community Pacemakers Of Burst Topic In Twitter, Guozhong Dong, Wu Yang, Feida Zhu, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become one of largest social networks for users to broad-cast burst topics. Influential users usually have a large number of followers and play an important role in the diffusion of burst topic. There have been many studies on how to detect influential users. However, traditional influential users detection approaches have largely ignored influential users in user community. In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting community pacemakers. Community pacemakers are defined as the influential users that promote early diffusion in the user community of burst topic. To solve this problem, we present DCPBT, a framework that can …

Extending The Network: The Influence Of Offline Friendship On Twitter Network, Young Soo Kim, Kyungsub Stephen Choi, Felicia Natali

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter effectively provides a communication platform that allows users to strengthen or augment relationships with their close ones. It is a common scene to see groups of people in continuing group communication from offline to online using tools such as Twitter. Furthermore, it is also possible to meet new friends via online encounter. Under these circumstances, there would be friends who are both offline and online, or only in online. Many of earlier Twitter network studies focused on the network effects’ direction going from online to offline network. This paper explores the opposite direction, going from offline to online network. …

Can Instagram Posts Help Characterize Urban Micro-Events?, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media content, from platforms such as Twitter and Foursquare, has enabled an exciting new field of social sensing, where participatory content generated by users has been used to identify unexpected emerging or trending events. In contrast to such text-based channels, we focus on image-sharing social applications (specifically Instagram), and investigate how such urban social sensing can leverage upon the additional multi-modal, multimedia content. Given the significantly higher fraction of geotagged content on Instagram, we aim to use such channels to go beyond identification of long-lived events (e.g., a marathon) to achieve finer-grained characterization of multiple micro-events (e.g., a person …