Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons^™

Swimming In Uncertainty: Filling Data Gaps And Providing An Educational Platform For Beach Water Quality At Tybee Island, Georgia, Lukas Roberson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

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Swimming in beaches water contaminated with high levels of bacteria can make you sick. Current monitoring at the public beaches on Tybee Island consists of weekly monitoring and enumeration of fecal indicator bacteria that takes 24 hours for results. If the number of bacteria exceed regulatory limits, a public health advisory is issued, and affected waters are retested until …

Enhancing Multi-Step Stock Price Forecasting With Social Media Sentiment And Engagement Metrics, Damilare Olaniyan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates whether social media sentiment can improve the accuracy of stock price prediction beyond traditional historical data. While financial markets have long relied on structured numerical indicators, the growing influence of public discourse on platforms like Twitter has introduced new opportunities for extracting market-relevant signals from unstructured text. The study focuses on four major technology firms and combines sentiment features derived from Twitter with historical stock prices in a hybrid machine learning framework. Engagement-weighted sentiment, linguistic complexity, and polarity intensity were extracted using natural language processing techniques and incorporated into classification and regression models. Results show that including …

In-Season Nitrogen Mmanagement: Leveraging Data Visualization For Precision Agriculture, Chathurika Harshani Narayana

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Effective nitrogen management is vital for sustainable agriculture, impacting both crop yield and environmental health. Traditional methods often use fixed application rates set before planting, which do not adapt to changing crop needs during the season. This can lead to over- or under-application, reducing efficiency and sustainability. While modern tools like sensors, satellites, and UAVs provide valuable real-time data on crop and field conditions, integrating and using this data to guide timely nitrogen decisions remains a major challenge. In-season nitrogen management offers a solution by allowing for dynamic adjustments to nitrogen applications, addressing crop needs as they arise. This approach …

Empowering Crisis Information Extraction Through Actionability Event Schemata And Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the persistent challenges in crisis detection is inferring actionable information to support emergency response. Existing methods focus on situational awareness but often lack actionable insights. This study proposes a holistic approach to implementing an actionability extraction system on social media, including requirement gathering, selection of machine learning tasks, data preparation, and integration with existing resources, providing guidance for governments, civil services, emergency workers, and researchers on supplementing existing channels with actionable information from social media. Our solution leverages an actionability schema and domain-adaptive pre-training, improving upon the state-of-the-art model by 5.5% and 10.1% in micro and macro F1 …

Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection Through Multimodal Debate Between Large Language Models, Hongzhan Lin, Ziyang Luo, Wei Gao, Jing Ma, Bo Wang, Ruichao Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The age of social media is flooded with Internet memes, necessitating a clear grasp and effective identification of harmful ones. This task presents a significant challenge due to the implicit meaning embedded in memes, which is not explicitly conveyed through the surface text and image. However, existing harmful meme detection methods do not present readable explanations that unveil such implicit meaning to support their detection decisions. In this paper, we propose an explainable approach to detect harmful memes, achieved through reasoning over conflicting rationales from both harmless and harmful positions. Specifically, inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Language Models …

Matk: The Meme Analytical Tool Kit, Ming Shan Hee, Aditi Kumaresan, Nguyen Khoi Hoang, Nirmalendu Prakash, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rise of social media platforms has brought about a new digital culture called memes. Memes, which combine visuals and text, can strongly influence public opinions on social and cultural issues. As a result, people have become interested in categorizing memes, leading to the development of various datasets and multimodal models that show promising results in this field. However, there is currently a lack of a single library that allows for the reproduction, evaluation, and comparison of these models using fair benchmarks and settings. To fill this gap, we introduce the Meme Analytical Tool Kit (MATK), an open-source toolkit specifically …

Learning-Based Stock Trending Prediction By Incorporating Technical Indicators And Social Media Sentiment, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhenda Hu, Fang Li, Seng-Beng Ho, Erik Cambria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stock trending prediction is a challenging task due to its dynamic and nonlinear characteristics. With the development of social platform and artificial intelligence (AI), incorporating timely news and social media information into stock trending models becomes possible. However, most of the existing works focus on classification or regression problems when predicting stock market trending without fully considering the effects of different influence factors in different phases. To address this gap, this research solves stock trending prediction problem utilizing both technical indicators and sentiments of the social media text as influence factors in different situations. A 3-phase hybrid model is proposed …

Chatgpt As Metamorphosis Designer For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai): A Conceptual Investigation, Amarjit Kumar Singh (Library Assistant), Dr. Pankaj Mathur (Deputy Librarian)

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to explore ChatGPT’s potential as an innovative designer tool for the future development of artificial intelligence. Specifically, this conceptual investigation aims to analyze ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tool for designing and developing near about human intelligent systems for futuristic used and developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Also with the helps of this paper, researchers are analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT as a tool, and identify possible areas for improvement in its development and implementation. This investigation focused on the various features and functions of ChatGPT that …

Investment And Risk Management With Online News And Heterogeneous Networks, Meng Kiat Gary Ang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stock price movements in financial markets are influenced by large volumes of news from diverse sources on the web, e.g., online news outlets, blogs, social media. Extracting useful information from online news for financial tasks, e.g., forecasting stock returns or risks, is, however, challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratios of such online information. Assessing the relevance of each news article to the price movements of individual stocks is also difficult, even for human experts. In this article, we propose the Guided Global-Local Attention-based Multimodal Heterogeneous Network (GLAM) model, which comprises novel attention-based mechanisms for multimodal sequential and graph encoding, …

Anchorage: Visual Analysis Of Satisfaction In Customer Service Videos Via Anchor Events, Kam Kwai Wong, Xingbo Wang, Yong Wang, Jianben He, Rong Zhang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Delivering customer services through video communications has brought new opportunities to analyze customer satisfaction for quality management. However, due to the lack of reliable self-reported responses, service providers are troubled by the inadequate estimation of customer services and the tedious investigation into multimodal video recordings. We introduce , a visual analytics system to evaluate customer satisfaction by summarizing multimodal behavioral features in customer service videos and revealing abnormal operations in the service process. We leverage the semantically meaningful operations to introduce structured event understanding into videos which help service providers quickly navigate to events of their interest. supports a comprehensive …

What Really Matters?: Characterising And Predicting User Engagement Of News Postings Using Multiple Platforms, Sentiments And Topics, Kholoud K. Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research characterises user engagement of approximately 3,000,000 news postings of 53 news outlets and 50,000,000 associated user comments during 8 months on 5 social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit). We investigate the effect of sentiments and topics on user engagement across four levels of user engagement expressions (i.e. views, likes, comments, cross-platform posting). We find that sentiments and topics differ by both news outlets and social media platforms, and both sentiments and topics by the four levels of user engagement expression. Finally, we predict a volume of four user engagement levels for given news content, …

Action-Centric Relation Transformer Network For Video Question Answering, Jipeng Zhang, Jie Shao, Rui Cao, Lianli Gao, Xing Xu, Heng Tao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video question answering (VideoQA) has emerged as a popular research topic in recent years. Enormous efforts have been devoted to developing more effective fusion strategies and better intra-modal feature preparation. To explore these issues further, we identify two key problems. (1) Current works take almost no account of introducing action of interest in video representation. Additionally, there exists insufficient labeling data on where the action of interest is in many datasets. However, questions in VideoQA are usually action-centric. (2) Frame-to-frame relations, which can provide useful temporal attributes (e.g., state transition, action counting), lack relevant research. Based on these observations, we …

Themes, Communities And Influencers Of Online Probiotics Chatter: A Retrospective Analysis From 2009-2017, Santosh Vijaykumar, Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar, Kristofor Mccarty, Cuthbert Mutumbwa, Jawwad Mustafa, Cyndy Au

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We build on recent examinations questioning the quality of online information about probiotic products by studying the themes of content, detecting virtual communities and identifying key influencers in social media using data science techniques. We conducted topic modelling (n = 36,715 tweets) and longitudinal social network analysis (n = 17,834 tweets) of probiotic chatter on Twitter from 2009–17. We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to build the topic models and network analysis tool Gephi for building yearly graphs. We identified the top 10 topics of probiotics-related communication on Twitter and a constant rise in communication activity. However the number of …

Frameaxis: Characterizing Microframe Bias And Intensity With Word Embedding, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Elise Jing Jing, Yong-Yeol Ahn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Framing is a process of emphasizing a certain aspect of an issue over the others, nudging readers or listeners towards different positions on the issue even without making a biased argument. Here, we propose FrameAxis, a method for characterizing documents by identifying the most relevant semantic axes (“microframes”) that are overrepresented in the text using word embedding. Our unsupervised approach can be readily applied to large datasets because it does not require manual annotations. It can also provide nuanced insights by considering a rich set of semantic axes. FrameAxis is designed to quantitatively tease out two important dimensions of how …

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 …

Escape From An Echo Chamber, Kuan-Chieh Lo, Shih-Chieh Dai, Aiping Xiong, Jing Jiang, Lun-Wei Ku

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An echo chamber effect refers to the phenomena that online users revealed selective exposure and ideological segregation on political issues. Prior studies indicate the connection between the spread of misinformation and online echo chambers. In this paper, to help users escape from an echo chamber, we propose a novel news-analysis platform that provides a panoramic view of stances towards a particular event from different news media sources. Moreover, to help users better recognize the stances of news sources which published these news articles, we adopt a news stance classification model to categorize their stances into “agree”, “disagree”, “discuss”, or “unrelated” …

Exploring Media Portrayals Of People With Mental Disorders Using Nlp, Swapna Gottipati, Mark Chong, Andrew Wei Kiat Lim, Benny Haryanto Kawidiredjo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Media plays an important role in creating an impact in society. Several studies show that news media and entertainment channels, at times may create overwhelming images of the mental illness that emphasize criminality and dangerousness. The consequences of such negative impact may impact the audience with stigma and on the other hand, they impair the self-esteem and help-seeking behavior of the people with mental disorders. This is the first study to examine the Singapore media’s portrayal of persons with mental disorders (MDs) using text analytics and natural language processing. To date, most studies on media portrayal of people with MDs …

Analyzing Tweets On New Norm: Work From Home During Covid-19 Outbreak, Swapna Gottipati, Kyong Jin Shim, Hui Hian Teo, Karthik Nityanand, Shreyansh Shivam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a large-scale work-from-home trend globally in recent months. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of “work-from-home” (WFH) by performing social listening. We propose an analytics pipeline designed to crawl social media data and perform text mining analyzes on textual data from tweets scrapped based on hashtags related to WFH in COVID-19 situation. We apply text mining and NLP techniques to analyze the tweets for extracting the WFH themes and sentiments (positive and negative). Our Twitter theme analysis adds further value by summarizing the common key topics, allowing employers to gain more insights on areas of …

Identifying And Characterizing Alternative News Media On Facebook, Samuel S. Guimaraes, Julia C. S. Reis, Lucas Lima, Filipe N. Ribeiro, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Fabricio Benevenuto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Internet users increasingly rely on social media sites to receive news, they are faced with a bewildering number of news media choices. For example, thousands of Facebook pages today are registered and categorized as some form of news media outlets. This situation boosted the so-called independent journalism, also known as alternative news media. Identifying and characterizing all the news pages that play an important role in news dissemination is key for understanding the news ecosystems of a country. In this work, we propose a graph-based semi-supervised method to measure the political bias of pages on most countries and show …

Social Media Analytics: A Case Study Of Singapore General Election 2020, Sebastian Zhi Tao Khoo, Leong Hock Ho, Ee Hong Lee, Danston Kheng Boon Goh, Zehao Zhang, Swee Hong Ng, Haodi Qi, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The 2020 Singaporean General Election (GE2020) was a general election held in Singapore on July 10, 2020. In this study, we present an analysis on social conversations about GE2020 during the election period. We analyzed social conversations from popular platforms such as Twitter, HardwareZone, and TR Emeritus.

We Mind Your Well-Being: Preventing Depression In Uncertain Social Networks By Sequential Interventions, Aye Phye Phye Aung, Xinrun Wang, Bo An, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mental health has become a major concern according to WHO who estimates that more than 350 million people worldwide are affected by depression. Studies have shown that interventions and social support can reduce stress and depression. However, counselling centers do not have enough resources to provide counselling and social support to all the participants in their interest. This paper helps social support organizations (e.g., university counselling centers) sequentially select the participants for interventions. Unfortunately, previous works do not consider emotion propagation from other neighbours of the influencees and initial uncertainties of mental states and influence. Moreover, they fail to scale …

Are These Comments Triggering? Predicting Triggers Of Toxicity In Online Discussions, Hind Almerekhi, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the causes or triggers of toxicity adds a new dimension to the prevention of toxic behavior in online discussions. In this research, we define toxicity triggers in online discussions as a non-toxic comment that lead to toxic replies. Then, we build a neural network-based prediction model for toxicity trigger. The prediction model incorporates text-based features and derived features from previous studies that pertain to shifts in sentiment, topic flow, and discussion context. Our findings show that triggers of toxicity contain identifiable features and that incorporating shift features with the discussion context can be detected with a ROC-AUC score of …

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 …

Tracking Political Events In Social Media: A Case Study Of Hong Kong Protests, Haodi Qi, Hanyu Jiang, Wende Bu, Chengzi Zhang, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this study, we analyze social conversations about Hong Kong Protests, a series of events that were widely seen and debated in social media in 2019. Our system collects data from Twitter and Reddit using their APIs. It performs sentiment analysis, and the analysis results show changes in public sentiment around major events. Social network analysis reveals influencers - users that are in the center of social conversations. Our interactive Tableau dashboard allows the user to easily monitor live social conversations about Hong Kong protests.

Happy Toilet: A Social Analytics Approach To The Study Of Public Toilet Cleanliness, Eugene W. J. Choy, Winston M. K. Ho, Xiaohang Li, Ragini Verma, Li Jin Sim, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study presents a social analytics approach to the study of public toilet cleanliness in Singapore. From popular social media platforms, our system automatically gathers and analyzes relevant public posts that mention about toilet cleanliness in highly frequented locations across the Singapore island - from busy shopping malls to food 'hawker' centers.

Gender And Racial Diversity In Commercial Brands’ Advertising Images On Social Media, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gender and racial diversity in the mediated images from the media shape our perception of different demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender and racial diversity of 85,957 advertising images shared by the 73 top international brands on Instagram and Facebook. We hope that our analyses give guidelines on how to build a fully automated watchdog for gender and racial diversity in online advertisements.

Predicting Audience Engagement Across Social Media Platforms In The News Domain, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We analyze cross-platform factors for posts on both single and multiple social media platforms for numerous news outlets to better predict audience engagement, precisely the number of likes and comments. We collect 676,779 social media posts from 53 news outlets during eight months on four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube), along with the associated comments (more than 31 million) and the number of likes (more than 840 million). We develop a framework for predicting the audience engagement based on both linguistic features of the post and social media platform factors. Among other findings, results show that content …

Exploiting Mobility For Predictive Urban Analytics & Operations, Kasthuri Jayarajah

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As cities worldwide invest heavily in smart city infrastructure, it invites opportunities for a next wave of urban analytics. Unlike its predecessors, urban analytics applications and services can now be real-time and proactive -- they can (a) leverage situational data from large deployments of connected sensors, (b) capture attributes of a variety of entities that make up the urban fabric (e.g., people and their social relationships, transport nodes, utilities, etc.), and (c) use predictive insights to both proactively optimize urban operations (e.g., HVAC systems in smart buildings, buses in the transportation network, crowd-workers, etc.) and promote smarter policy decisions (e.g., …

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 …

Discrete Social Recommendation, Chenghao Liu, Xin Wang, Tao Lu, Wenwu Zhu, Jianling Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation, which aims at improving the performance of traditional recommender systems by considering social information, has attracted broad range of interests. As one of the most widely used methods, matrix factorization typically uses continuous vectors to represent user/item latent features. However, the large volume of user/item latent features results in expensive storage and computation cost, particularly on terminal user devices where the computation resource to operate model is very limited. Thus when taking extra social information into account, precisely extracting K most relevant items for a given user from massive candidates tends to consume even more time and memory, …