Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Evolution Of Computational Propaganda: Trends, Threats, And Implications Now And In The Future, Holly Schnader

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Computational propaganda involves the use of selected narratives, social networks, and complex algorithms in order to develop and conduct influence operations (Woolley and Howard, 2017). In recent years the use of computational propaganda as an arm of cyberwarfare has increased in frequency. I aim to explore this topic to further understand the underlying forces behind the implementation of this tactic and then conduct a futures analysis to best determine how this topic will change over time. Additionally, I hope to gain insights on the implications of the current and potential future trends that computational propaganda has.

My preliminary assessment shows …

Use Of Verified Twitter Accounts During Crisis Events, Kai Anderson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis reports on the use of verified Twitter accounts during crisis events. Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to broadcast and exchange public text messages and it can be used as a communication tool during crisis events. Verified Twitter accounts are those accounts that Twitter has investigated and found to be genuinely maintained by the claimed owner. Celebrities, public officials, and other well-known persons or companies often seek this account status. The owners of these accounts are likely to provide more accurate or relevant information during a crisis event because they represent a brand, whether themselves …

My Choice Greens, Alina Zulfikarova, Amelia Mohr, Hesi Zhang, Ruiqi Huang, Sean Tatar, Yuhao Zhou, Zijun Zhou

School of Professional Studies

My Choice Programs for Independent Living is a nonprofit in Worcester, Massachusetts that helps individuals with special needs. In 2016, My Choice Programs added a branch to their organization called My Choice Greens. My Choice Greens is committed to growing fresh produce in their hydroponic farm. The profit generated from selling their vegetables is put back into direct programming for My Choice Programs. My Choice Greens is the first hydroponic farm in Worcester, but unfortunately not many people are aware of their program. Also, since they are a small nonprofit, they do not have sufficient funding or resources to market …

A Social Media Plan For The Changemakers’ Playground, Meng Cong, Ciara Kilian, Xinling Wang, Sumanth Wilson, Chenyu Yan

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project was to create a social media plan for the Changemakers’ Playground campaign. The Changemakers’ Playground is a website thought up by our client, Sarah Lange, whereby ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things in their community can be celebrated for the work they are doing. Each person featured on the website, also known as a Changemaker, was interviewed by Sarah and that interview was split into three videos to be posted on the Changemakers’ Playground website throughout the week they are being featured. In short, our task was to create the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content to …

Effectiveness Of Social Media Analytics On Detecting Service Quality Metrics In The U.S. Airline Industry, Xin Tian

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Theses & Dissertations

During the past few decades, social media has provided a number of online tools that allow people to discuss anything freely, with an increase in mobile connectivity. More and more consumers are sharing their opinions online with others. Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) is the virtual communication in use; it plays an important role in customers’ buying decisions. Customers can choose to complain or to compliment services or products on their social media platforms, rather than to complete the survey offered by the providers of those services. Compared with the traditional survey, or with the air travel customer report published …

Online Social Capital: Social Networking Sites' Influence On Civic And Political Engagement, Charles L. Bush

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines how using social networking sites (SNS) is correlated with levels of civic and political engagement of college students at Old Dominion University. Past research has yielded mixed results on the link between online social capital and civic and political engagement. Major limitations of past research include grouping together social networking sites that are substantially different and not considering these sites’ impact on the different forms of social capital. This thesis first examines how social networking site preference, intensity of use, and motives for use factor into an individual’s online social capital. Secondly, this thesis looks at how …

Measuring Decentralization Of Chinese Censorship In Three Industry Segments, Jeffrey Knockel

Computer Science ETDs

What is forbidden to talk about using Chinese apps? Companies operating in China face a complex array of regulations and are liable for content voiced using their platforms. Previous work studying Chinese censorship uses (1) sample testing or (2) measures content deletion; however, these techniques produce an incomplete picture biased toward (1) the tested samples or (2) whichever topics were trending.

In this dissertation, I use reverse engineering to study the code that applications use to determine whether to censor content. In doing so, I can provide a more complete and unbiased view of Chinese Internet censorship. I reverse engineer …

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …

Graduate Admissions Recruitment Project, Kevin Anderson, Chiemela Dike, Yixin Du, Arvinder Kaur, Amanda Popp, Huizhong Yang

School of Professional Studies

In this project, several comparison schools were interviewed and disclosed to have used search lists to find candidates. The organizations that have valuable search lists which may be of good use for the School of Professional Studies include Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). By choosing criteria such as demographics, location, academic performance, educational history provided by search lists, we believe there are many quality candidates for SPS programs. However, as we further investigated the functionality and cost-efficiency or return of investment of GRE search list, we spotted many uncertainties and few solid and successful …

Estimating The Optimal Cutoff Point For Logistic Regression, Zheng Zhang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Binary classification is one of the main themes of supervised learning. This research is concerned about determining the optimal cutoff point for the continuous-scaled outcomes (e.g., predicted probabilities) resulting from a classifier such as logistic regression. We make note of the fact that the cutoff point obtained from various methods is a statistic, which can be unstable with substantial variation. Nevertheless, due partly to complexity involved in estimating the cutpoint, there has been no formal study on the variance or standard error of the estimated cutoff point.

In this Thesis, a bootstrap aggregation method is put forward to estimate the …

Content-Based Clustering And Visualization Of Social Media Text Messages, Sydney A. Barnard

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Although Twitter has been around for more than ten years, crisis management agencies and first response personnel are not able to fully use the information this type of data provides during a crisis or natural disaster. This thesis addresses clustering and visualizing social media data by textual similarity, rather than by only time and location, as a tool for first responders. This thesis presents a tool that automatically clusters geotagged text data based on their content and displays the clusters and their locations on the map. It allows at-a-glance information to be displayed throughout the evolution of a crisis. For …

A Semantically Enhanced Approach To Identify Depression-Indicative Symptoms Using Twitter Data, Ankita Saxena

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

According to the World Health Organization, more than 300 million people suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) worldwide. PHQ-9 is used to screen and diagnose MDD clinically and identify its severity. With the unprecedented growth and enthusiastic acceptance of social media such as Twitter, a large number of people have come to share their feelings and emotions on it openly. Each tweet can indicate a user's opinion, thought or feeling. A tweet can also indicate multiple symptoms related to PHQ-9. Identifying PHQ-9 symptoms indicated by a tweet can provide crucial information about a user regarding his/her depression diagnosis. The current …