Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Visual Analytics Of Location-Based Social Networks For Decision Support, Junghoon Chae

Open Access Dissertations

Recent advances in technology have enabled people to add location information to social networks called Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) where people share their communication and whereabouts not only in their daily lives, but also during abnormal situations, such as crisis events. However, since the volume of the data exceeds the boundaries of human analytical capabilities, it is almost impossible to perform a straightforward qualitative analysis of the data. The emerging field of visual analytics has been introduced to tackle such challenges by integrating the approaches from statistical data analysis and human computer interaction into highly interactive visual environments. Based on …

Automatically Characterizing Product And Process Incentives In Collective Intelligence, Allen Brockhurst Lavoie

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Social media facilitate interaction and information dissemination among an unprecedented number of participants. Why do users contribute, and why do they contribute to a specific venue? Does the information they receive cover all relevant points of view, or is it biased? The substantial and increasing importance of online communication makes these questions more pressing, but also puts answers within reach of automated methods. I investigate scalable algorithms for understanding two classes of incentives which arise in collective intelligence processes. Product incentives exist when contributors have a stake in the information delivered to other users. I investigate product-relevant user behavior changes, …

Social Customer Relationship Management In Higher Education, Victorian A. Farnsworth

Open Access Theses

Customer Relationship Management is a concept that has become a requirement for any successful entity to attract and retain desired constituents. It is a set of processes and tools that help track, analyze, and act upon customer related data. Over the last decade, the toolsets have evolved to include social media as another source of information and connection. Nowhere is this information and connection more important than in higher education where globalization and tighter budgets have created a competitive market. This research evaluated the use of this most recent social toolset and its effectiveness in a higher education institution, all …

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium Of Rhetorical Application, Annalisa Perez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Technology, albeit exceedingly useful, has exponentially exacerbated the communications dilemma between the technical and the non-technical. Additionally, based on a current new understanding of the term environmental, it can no longer be fully defined by terms such as air, water, waste, or purification. Rather, the meaning of environmental has been globally transformed in several ways. The term environmental is encompassing an expansion of understanding and is further defined with words such as essence, perception, rapport and multi-dimensional spaces. This work, Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium of Rhetorical Application (EDC), provides a framework where communication can be enhanced in areas where communication …

Mathematical Modeling Of Public Opinion Using Traditional And Social Media, Emily Cody

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

With the growth of the internet, data from text sources has become increasingly available to researchers in the form of online newspapers, journals, and blogs. This data presents a unique opportunity to analyze human opinions and behaviors without soliciting the public explicitly. In this research, I utilize newspaper articles and the social media service Twitter to infer self-reported public opinions and awareness of climate change. Climate change is one of the most important and heavily debated issues of our time, and analyzing large-scale text surrounding this issue reveals insights surrounding self-reported public opinion. First, I inquire about public discourse on …

Mathematical Foundations Of Sentiment Classification : A Probabilistic Approach, Syed Shahzad Raza

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis is an introduction to the mathematical formalization of sentiment classification. It presents two popular probabilistic machine learning models to classify tweets downloaded from Twitter during the US Election Period, 2016. The thesis analyses accuracy of the two classification algorithms used. Namely, Multinomial Naïve Bayes and Bernoulli Naïve Bayes algorithms. Supervised learning approaches implemented in this thesis use approximately 600 manually labeled tweets containing information regarding the US presidential candidates. It is shown with 80% accuracy that majority of twitter users spoke in favor of Donald Trump before and after the presidential election through their tweets. We also discuss …

Exploiting Social Media Sources For Search, Fusion And Evaluation, Chia-Jung Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The web contains heterogeneous information that is generated with different characteristics and is presented via different media. Social media, as one of the largest content carriers, has generated information from millions of users worldwide, creating material rapidly in all types of forms such as comments, images, tags, videos and ratings, etc. In social applications, the formation of online communities contributes to conversations of substantially broader aspects, as well as unfiltered opinions about subjects that are rarely covered in public media. Information accrued on social platforms, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to augment web sources such as Wikipedia or news pages, …

Gsu Connects Us., Lokeshwar Reddy Nalavolu, Ravali Nirumalla, Priyanka Ranga, Sarmishta Ramamoorthy Venkatanarasimhan

All Capstone Projects

“GSU Connects US” is a posting based student communication website. Today on the internet there are lots of social sites available but most of them are for the technical purpose only. On the current market analysis the most popular site for posting is “Facebook” and the “Google+” but both contains mix categories of technical and non – technical, so a normal person surfing on the internet to find the event for his or her interested find it difficult to choose proper category for the event. It covers Events, Connect to the students, Q & A forum Resale of used books, …

Detecting, Modeling, And Predicting User Temporal Intention, Hany M. Salaheldeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, …

Analysis Of Real-World Passwords For Social Media Sites, Mark J. Quinn

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Textual passwords have dominated all other entity authentication mechanisms since they were introduced in the early 1960’s. Despite an inherent weakness against social engineering, keylogging, shoulder surfing, dictionary, and brute-force attacks, password authentication continues to grow as the Internet expands. Existing research on password authentication proves that dictionary attacks are successful because users make poor choices when creating passwords. To make passwords easier to remember, users select character strings that are shorter in length and contain memorable content, like personal identity information, common words found in a dictionary, backward spellings of common words, recognizable sequences, and easily guessed mnemonic phrases. …

Fake And Spam Messages: Detecting Misinformation During Natural Disasters On Social Media, Meet Rajdev

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

During natural disasters or crises, users on social media tend to easily believe contents of postings related to the events, and retweet the postings, hoping that the postings will be reached by many other users. Unfortunately, there are malicious users who understand the tendency and post misinformation such as spam and fake messages with expecting wider propagation. To resolve the problem, in this paper we conduct a case study of the 2013 Moore Tornado and Hurricane Sandy. Concretely, we (i) understand behaviors of these malicious users; (ii) analyze properties of spam, fake and legitimate messages; (iii) propose flat and hierarchical …

Small Business Use Of Internet Marketing: Findings From Case Studies, Maya Demishkevich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Internet marketing is critical for meeting changing consumer needs and staying competitive in the business environment. Small business owners need strategies on how to use Internet marketing to promote their products or services. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore how 5 small business owners in Maryland developed and implemented an online marketing strategy. Participants were recruited for their roles as the chief decision maker of their business; additional prerequisites for their participation were that they used Internet marketing, represented different industries, and had fewer than 20 employees. Data came from semi-structured interviews with the small business …

Effects Of Investor Sentiment Using Social Media On Corporate Financial Distress, Tarek Hoteit

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The mainstream quantitative models in the finance literature have been ineffective in detecting possible bankruptcies during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Coinciding with the same period, various researchers suggested that sentiments in social media can predict future events. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between investor sentiment within the social media and the financial distress of firms Grounded on the social amplification of risk framework that shows the media as an amplified channel for risk events, the central hypothesis of the study was that investor sentiments in the social media could predict t he level …

Mining User Viewpoints In Online Discussions, Minghui Qiu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online discussion forums are a type of social media which contains rich usercontributed facts, opinions, and user interactions on diverse topics. The large volume of opinionated data generated in online discussions provides an ideal testbed for user opinion mining. In particular, mining user opinions on social and political issues from online discussions is useful not only to government organizations and companies but also to social and political scientists. In this dissertation, we propose to study the task of mining user viewpoints or stances from online discussions on social and political issues. Specifically, we will talk about our proposed approaches for …

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

Non-Learning Semantic Analysis For Context Discovery And Sentiment Estimation: Transportation Application, Himanshu Verma

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With enormous amount of linguistic data present on web, text analysis has become one of the major fields of interest today. This field includes sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text document classification, knowledge based modeling, content similarity measure, data clustering, words prediction/correction, decision making etc. Managing and processing such data has vital importance. The field being quite broad, our focus is mainly on transportation related social media(Twitter) data extraction, text categorization/classification which can be further sub-divided into concept discovery, word sense disambiguation and sentiment analysis to analyze performance of existing transportation system worldwide. Concept discovery is the method of extracting the …

The Lived Experience Of Young Adult Burn Survivors' Use Of Social Media, Marie S. Giordano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to illuminate the meaning of social media use by young adult burn survivors. Five females and four males, aged 20-25, who sustained burns > 25%, were interviewed. Van Manen's (1999) phenomenological methodology provided the framework for this study. The meaning of the context of the lived experience is described in the five essential themes of identity, connectivity, social support, making meaning, and privacy. These young adult burn survivors, having experienced the traumatic effects of a burn during adolescence, use social media as a way of expressing their identity, while being cautious about privacy. Part …

Public Social Network Sites And Social Recruiting, Abby Peters

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Social network sites (SNSs) are an increasingly popular form of social media used by individuals and organizations. As these platforms continue to transform the way people communicate with one another, they are simultaneously revolutionizing the way individuals interact with organizations. Part of this dramatic change is apparent in the processes by which organizations are recruiting employees and job seekers are pursuing employment. To investigate these phenomena, I employed the diffusion of innovations theory in a SNS context to examine the relationship between organizations' use of their corporate career website and their use of SNSs as recruiting sources. Subsequently, I used …

Attitudes And Behaviors In Online Communities: Empirical Studies Of The Effects Of Social, Community, And Individual Characteristics, Richard Kumi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online communities and communities of practice bring people together to promote and support shared goals and exchange information. Personal interactions are important to many of these communities and one of the important outcomes of personal interactions in online communities and communities of practice is user-generated content. The three essays in the current study examines behavior motivation in online communities and communities of practice to understand how Social and personal psychological factors, and user-generated influence attitudes, intentions and behaviors in online communities.

The first essay addresses two research questions. First, how does Social capital influence exchange and combination behaviors in online …

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 …

Virtual Interactions With Real-Agents For Sustainable Natural Resource Management, Tyler Pierce

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Common pool resource management systems are complex to manage due to the absence of a clear understanding of the effects of users’ behavioral characteristics. Non-cooperative decision making based on individual rationality (as opposed to group rationality) and a tendency to free ride due to lack of trust and information about other users’ behavior creates externalities and can lead to tragedy of the commons without intervention by a regulator. Nevertheless, even regulatory institutions often fail to sustain natural common pool resources in the absence of clear understanding of the responses of multiple heterogeneous decision makers to different regulation schemes. While modeling …

Constructing A Community Response Grid (Crg): The Dublin, Ohio Case Study, John Freund

CCE Theses and Dissertations

During an emergency, information availability is critical to preserving life and minimizing damages. During the emergency response, however, information may not be available to those who need it. A community response grid (CRG) can help ameliorate this lack of availability by allowing people to document and distribute emergency information to professional emergency responders (PERs). A CRG combines mobile communications services, Internet technologies, e-government applications, and social network concepts with traditional emergency response systems.

The problem that this case study investigated was how to construct a CRG for the City of Dublin, Ohio, Division of Police that works in conjunction with …

Predictive Modeling For Navigating Social Media, Meiqun Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social media changes the way people use the Web. It has transformed ordinary Web users from information consumers to content contributors. One popular form of content contribution is social tagging, in which users assign tags to Web resources. By the collective efforts of the social tagging community, a new information space has been created for information navigation. Navigation allows serendipitous discovery of information by examining the information objects linked to one another in the social tagging space. In this dissertation, we study prediction tasks that facilitate navigation in social tagging systems. For social tagging systems to meet complex navigation needs …

The Valuation Of User-Generated Content: A Structural, Stylistic And Semantic Analysis Of Online Reviews, Noi Sian Koh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The ability and ease for users to create and publish content has provided vast amount of online product reviews. However, the amount of data is overwhelmingly large and unstructured, making information difficult to quantify. This creates challenge in understanding how online reviews affect consumers’ purchase decisions. In my dissertation, I explore the structural, stylistic and semantic content of online reviews. Firstly, I present a measurement that quantifies sentiments with respect to a multi-point scale and conduct a systematic study on the impact of online reviews on product sales. Using the sentiment metrics generated, I estimate the weight that customers place …

Social Media In Higher Education: Building Mutually Beneficial Student And Institutional Relationships Through Social Media., Megan L. Fuller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social applications such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have driven the public growth of Web 2.0. Universities and colleges are using social media to reach student prospects, keep contact with current students and alumni, and provide a mechanism for group collaboration and interaction in the classroom. Higher education institutions are influenced by current social media trends, and figuring out how to effectively interact with various constituencies within the social media environment can be challenging.

In this study, a group of higher education students were surveyed about their social media practices and preferences with a focus on education-related activities. The goal …

The Dynamics Of Cyberspace: Examining And Modelling Online Social Structure, Brian S. Butler '89

Doctoral Dissertations

It has been proposed that online social structures represent new forms of organizing which are fundamentally different from traditional social structures. However, while there is a growing body of empirical research that considers behavioral aspects of online activity, research on online social structure structural remains largely anecdotal. This work consists of three papers that combine previous studies of traditional social structures, empirical analysis of longitudinal data from a sample of Internet listservs, and computational modeling to examine the dynamics of social structure development in networked environments.

The first paper (Title: When is a Group not a Group: An Empirical Examination …