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Description
In most social networking websites, users are allowed to perform interactive activities. One of the fundamental features that these sites provide is to connecting with users of their kind. On one hand, this activity makes online connections visible and tangible; on the other hand, it enables the exploration of our

In most social networking websites, users are allowed to perform interactive activities. One of the fundamental features that these sites provide is to connecting with users of their kind. On one hand, this activity makes online connections visible and tangible; on the other hand, it enables the exploration of our connections and the expansion of our social networks easier. The aggregation of people who share common interests forms social groups, which are fundamental parts of our social lives. Social behavioral analysis at a group level is an active research area and attracts many interests from the industry. Challenges of my work mainly arise from the scale and complexity of user generated behavioral data. The multiple types of interactions, highly dynamic nature of social networking and the volatile user behavior suggest that these data are complex and big in general. Effective and efficient approaches are required to analyze and interpret such data. My work provide effective channels to help connect the like-minded and, furthermore, understand user behavior at a group level. The contributions of this dissertation are in threefold: (1) proposing novel representation of collective tagging knowledge via tag networks; (2) proposing the new information spreader identification problem in egocentric soical networks; (3) defining group profiling as a systematic approach to understanding social groups. In sum, the research proposes novel concepts and approaches for connecting the like-minded, enables the understanding of user groups, and exposes interesting research opportunities.
ContributorsWang, Xufei (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
As the size and scope of valuable datasets has exploded across many industries and fields of research in recent years, an increasingly diverse audience has sought out effective tools for their large-scale data analytics needs. Over this period, machine learning researchers have also been very prolific in designing improved algorithms

As the size and scope of valuable datasets has exploded across many industries and fields of research in recent years, an increasingly diverse audience has sought out effective tools for their large-scale data analytics needs. Over this period, machine learning researchers have also been very prolific in designing improved algorithms which are capable of finding the hidden structure within these datasets. As consumers of popular Big Data frameworks have sought to apply and benefit from these improved learning algorithms, the problems encountered with the frameworks have motivated a new generation of Big Data tools to address the shortcomings of the previous generation. One important example of this is the improved performance in the newer tools with the large class of machine learning algorithms which are highly iterative in nature. In this thesis project, I set about to implement a low-rank matrix completion algorithm (as an example of a highly iterative algorithm) within a popular Big Data framework, and to evaluate its performance processing the Netflix Prize dataset. I begin by describing several approaches which I attempted, but which did not perform adequately. These include an implementation of the Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) algorithm within the Apache Mahout framework, which runs on top of the Apache Hadoop MapReduce engine. I then describe an approach which uses the Divide-Factor-Combine (DFC) algorithmic framework to parallelize the state-of-the-art low-rank completion algorithm Orthogoal Rank-One Matrix Pursuit (OR1MP) within the Apache Spark engine. I describe the results of a series of tests running this implementation with the Netflix dataset on clusters of various sizes, with various degrees of parallelism. For these experiments, I utilized the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service. In the final analysis, I conclude that the Spark DFC + OR1MP implementation does indeed produce competitive results, in both accuracy and performance. In particular, the Spark implementation performs nearly as well as the MATLAB implementation of OR1MP without any parallelism, and improves performance to a significant degree as the parallelism increases. In addition, the experience demonstrates how Spark's flexible programming model makes it straightforward to implement this parallel and iterative machine learning algorithm.
ContributorsKrouse, Brian (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
A myriad of social media services are emerging in recent years that allow people to communicate and express themselves conveniently and easily. The pervasive use of social media generates massive data at an unprecedented rate. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find relevant information or, in other words,

A myriad of social media services are emerging in recent years that allow people to communicate and express themselves conveniently and easily. The pervasive use of social media generates massive data at an unprecedented rate. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find relevant information or, in other words, exacerbates the information overload problem. Meanwhile, users in social media can be both passive content consumers and active content producers, causing the quality of user-generated content can vary dramatically from excellence to abuse or spam, which results in a problem of information credibility. Trust, providing evidence about with whom users can trust to share information and from whom users can accept information without additional verification, plays a crucial role in helping online users collect relevant and reliable information. It has been proven to be an effective way to mitigate information overload and credibility problems and has attracted increasing attention.

As the conceptual counterpart of trust, distrust could be as important as trust and its value has been widely recognized by social sciences in the physical world. However, little attention is paid on distrust in social media. Social media differs from the physical world - (1) its data is passively observed, large-scale, incomplete, noisy and embedded with rich heterogeneous sources; and (2) distrust is generally unavailable in social media. These unique properties of social media present novel challenges for computing distrust in social media: (1) passively observed social media data does not provide necessary information social scientists use to understand distrust, how can I understand distrust in social media? (2) distrust is usually invisible in social media, how can I make invisible distrust visible by leveraging unique properties of social media data? and (3) little is known about distrust and its role in social media applications, how can distrust help make difference in social media applications?

The chief objective of this dissertation is to figure out solutions to these challenges via innovative research and novel methods. In particular, computational tasks are designed to {\it understand distrust}, a innovative task, i.e., {\it predicting distrust} is proposed with novel frameworks to make invisible distrust visible, and principled approaches are develop to {\it apply distrust} in social media applications. Since distrust is a special type of negative links, I demonstrate the generalization of properties and algorithms of distrust to negative links, i.e., {\it generalizing findings of distrust}, which greatly expands the boundaries of research of distrust and largely broadens its applications in social media.
ContributorsTang, Jiliang (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Aggarwal, Charu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
US Senate is the venue of political debates where the federal bills are formed and voted. Senators show their support/opposition along the bills with their votes. This information makes it possible to extract the polarity of the senators. Similarly, blogosphere plays an increasingly important role as a forum for public

US Senate is the venue of political debates where the federal bills are formed and voted. Senators show their support/opposition along the bills with their votes. This information makes it possible to extract the polarity of the senators. Similarly, blogosphere plays an increasingly important role as a forum for public debate. Authors display sentiment toward issues, organizations or people using a natural language.

In this research, given a mixed set of senators/blogs debating on a set of political issues from opposing camps, I use signed bipartite graphs for modeling debates, and I propose an algorithm for partitioning both the opinion holders (senators or blogs) and the issues (bills or topics) comprising the debate into binary opposing camps. Simultaneously, my algorithm scales the entities on a univariate scale. Using this scale, a researcher can identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. Through performance evaluations I show that my proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to the problem, and performs much better than existing baseline algorithms adapted to solve this new problem. In my experiments, I used both real data from political blogosphere and US Congress records, as well as synthetic data which were obtained by varying polarization and degree distribution of the vertices of the graph to show the robustness of my algorithm.

I also applied my algorithm on all the terms of the US Senate to the date for longitudinal analysis and developed a web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com to visualize the analysis.

US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to the demographics of the senators, or simply receive consensus. I propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm that identifies groups of bills that share the same polarization characteristics. I developed a web based interactive user interface www.ControversyAnalysis.com to visualize the clusters while providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.
ContributorsGokalp, Sedat (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Woodward, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The rapid urban expansion has greatly extended the physical boundary of our living area, along with a large number of POIs (points of interest) being developed. A POI is a specific location (e.g., hotel, restaurant, theater, mall) that a user may find useful or interesting. When exploring the city and

The rapid urban expansion has greatly extended the physical boundary of our living area, along with a large number of POIs (points of interest) being developed. A POI is a specific location (e.g., hotel, restaurant, theater, mall) that a user may find useful or interesting. When exploring the city and neighborhood, the increasing number of POIs could enrich people's daily life, providing them with more choices of life experience than before, while at the same time also brings the problem of "curse of choices", resulting in the difficulty for a user to make a satisfied decision on "where to go" in an efficient way. Personalized POI recommendation is a task proposed on purpose of helping users filter out uninteresting POIs and reduce time in decision making, which could also benefit virtual marketing.

Developing POI recommender systems requires observation of human mobility w.r.t. real-world POIs, which is infeasible with traditional mobile data. However, the recent development of location-based social networks (LBSNs) provides such observation. Typical location-based social networking sites allow users to "check in" at POIs with smartphones, leave tips and share that experience with their online friends. The increasing number of LBSN users has generated large amounts of LBSN data, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study human mobility for personalized POI recommendation in spatial, temporal, social, and content aspects.

Different from recommender systems in other categories, e.g., movie recommendation in NetFlix, friend recommendation in dating websites, item recommendation in online shopping sites, personalized POI recommendation on LBSNs has its unique challenges due to the stochastic property of human mobility and the mobile behavior indications provided by LBSN information layout. The strong correlations between geographical POI information and other LBSN information result in three major human mobile properties, i.e., geo-social correlations, geo-temporal patterns, and geo-content indications, which are neither observed in other recommender systems, nor exploited in current POI recommendation. In this dissertation, we investigate these properties on LBSNs, and propose personalized POI recommendation models accordingly. The performance evaluated on real-world LBSN datasets validates the power of these properties in capturing user mobility, and demonstrates the ability of our models for personalized POI recommendation.
ContributorsGao, Huiji (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Caverlee, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
With the rise of social media, hundreds of millions of people spend countless hours all over the globe on social media to connect, interact, share, and create user-generated data. This rich environment provides tremendous opportunities for many different players to easily and effectively reach out to people, interact with them,

With the rise of social media, hundreds of millions of people spend countless hours all over the globe on social media to connect, interact, share, and create user-generated data. This rich environment provides tremendous opportunities for many different players to easily and effectively reach out to people, interact with them, influence them, or get their opinions. There are two pieces of information that attract most attention on social media sites, including user preferences and interactions. Businesses and organizations use this information to better understand and therefore provide customized services to social media users. This data can be used for different purposes such as, targeted advertisement, product recommendation, or even opinion mining. Social media sites use this information to better serve their users.

Despite the importance of personal information, in many cases people do not reveal this information to the public. Predicting the hidden or missing information is a common response to this challenge. In this thesis, we address the problem of predicting user attributes and future or missing links using an egocentric approach. The current research proposes novel concepts and approaches to better understand social media users in twofold including, a) their attributes, preferences, and interests, and b) their future or missing connections and interactions. More specifically, the contributions of this dissertation are (1) proposing a framework to study social media users through their attributes and link information, (2) proposing a scalable algorithm to predict user preferences; and (3) proposing a novel approach to predict attributes and links with limited information. The proposed algorithms use an egocentric approach to improve the state of the art algorithms in two directions. First by improving the prediction accuracy, and second, by increasing the scalability of the algorithms.
ContributorsAbbasi, Mohammad Ali, 1975- (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Agarwal, Nitin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have emerged as valuable

- in fact, the de facto - virtual town halls for people to discover, report, share and

communicate with others about various types of events. These events range from

widely-known events such as the U.S Presidential debate to smaller scale,

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have emerged as valuable

- in fact, the de facto - virtual town halls for people to discover, report, share and

communicate with others about various types of events. These events range from

widely-known events such as the U.S Presidential debate to smaller scale, local events

such as a local Halloween block party. During these events, we often witness a large

amount of commentary contributed by crowds on social media. This burst of social

media responses surges with the "second-screen" behavior and greatly enriches the

user experience when interacting with the event and people's awareness of an event.

Monitoring and analyzing this rich and continuous flow of user-generated content can

yield unprecedentedly valuable information about the event, since these responses

usually offer far more rich and powerful views about the event that mainstream news

simply could not achieve. Despite these benefits, social media also tends to be noisy,

chaotic, and overwhelming, posing challenges to users in seeking and distilling high

quality content from that noise.

In this dissertation, I explore ways to leverage social media as a source of information and analyze events based on their social media responses collectively. I develop, implement and evaluate EventRadar, an event analysis toolbox which is able to identify, enrich, and characterize events using the massive amounts of social media responses. EventRadar contains three automated, scalable tools to handle three core event analysis tasks: Event Characterization, Event Recognition, and Event Enrichment. More specifically, I develop ET-LDA, a Bayesian model and SocSent, a matrix factorization framework for handling the Event Characterization task, i.e., modeling characterizing an event in terms of its topics and its audience's response behavior (via ET-LDA), and the sentiments regarding its topics (via SocSent). I also develop DeMa, an unsupervised event detection algorithm for handling the Event Recognition task, i.e., detecting trending events from a stream of noisy social media posts. Last, I develop CrowdX, a spatial crowdsourcing system for handling the Event Enrichment task, i.e., gathering additional first hand information (e.g., photos) from the field to enrich the given event's context.

Enabled by EventRadar, it is more feasible to uncover patterns that have not been

explored previously and re-validating existing social theories with new evidence. As a

result, I am able to gain deep insights into how people respond to the event that they

are engaged in. The results reveal several key insights into people's various responding

behavior over the event's timeline such the topical context of people's tweets does not

always correlate with the timeline of the event. In addition, I also explore the factors

that affect a person's engagement with real-world events on Twitter and find that

people engage in an event because they are interested in the topics pertaining to

that event; and while engaging, their engagement is largely affected by their friends'

behavior.
ContributorsHu, Yuheng (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Horvitz, Eric (Committee member) / Krumm, John (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Users often join an online social networking (OSN) site, like Facebook, to remain social, by either staying connected with friends or expanding social networks. On an OSN site, users generally share variety of personal information which is often expected to be visible to their friends, but sometimes vulnerable to

Users often join an online social networking (OSN) site, like Facebook, to remain social, by either staying connected with friends or expanding social networks. On an OSN site, users generally share variety of personal information which is often expected to be visible to their friends, but sometimes vulnerable to unwarranted access from others. The recent study suggests that many personal attributes, including religious and political affiliations, sexual orientation, relationship status, age, and gender, are predictable using users' personal data from an OSN site. The majority of users want to remain socially active, and protect their personal data at the same time. This tension leads to a user's vulnerability, allowing privacy attacks which can cause physical and emotional distress to a user, sometimes with dire consequences. For example, stalkers can make use of personal information available on an OSN site to their personal gain. This dissertation aims to systematically study a user vulnerability against such privacy attacks.

A user vulnerability can be managed in three steps: (1) identifying, (2) measuring and (3) reducing a user vulnerability. Researchers have long been identifying vulnerabilities arising from user's personal data, including user names, demographic attributes, lists of friends, wall posts and associated interactions, multimedia data such as photos, audios and videos, and tagging of friends. Hence, this research first proposes a way to measure and reduce a user vulnerability to protect such personal data. This dissertation also proposes an algorithm to minimize a user's vulnerability while maximizing their social utility values.

To address these vulnerability concerns, social networking sites like Facebook usually let their users to adjust their profile settings so as to make some of their data invisible. However, users sometimes interact with others using unprotected posts (e.g., posts from a ``Facebook page\footnote{The term ''Facebook page`` refers to the page which are commonly dedicated for businesses, brands and organizations to share their stories and connect with people.}''). Such interactions help users to become more social and are publicly accessible to everyone. Thus, visibilities of these interactions are beyond the control of their profile settings. I explore such unprotected interactions so that users' are well aware of these new vulnerabilities and adopt measures to mitigate them further. In particular, {\em are users' personal attributes predictable using only the unprotected interactions}? To answer this question, I address a novel problem of predictability of users' personal attributes with unprotected interactions. The extreme sparsity patterns in users' unprotected interactions pose a serious challenge. Therefore, I approach to mitigating the data sparsity challenge by designing a novel attribute prediction framework using only the unprotected interactions. Experimental results on Facebook dataset demonstrates that the proposed framework can predict users' personal attributes.
ContributorsGundecha, Pritam S (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Barbier, Geoffrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Multi-label learning, which deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously, is ubiquitous in real-world applications. To overcome the curse of dimensionality in multi-label learning, in this thesis I study multi-label dimensionality reduction, which extracts a small number of features by removing the irrelevant, redundant, and noisy information while considering

Multi-label learning, which deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously, is ubiquitous in real-world applications. To overcome the curse of dimensionality in multi-label learning, in this thesis I study multi-label dimensionality reduction, which extracts a small number of features by removing the irrelevant, redundant, and noisy information while considering the correlation among different labels in multi-label learning. Specifically, I propose Hypergraph Spectral Learning (HSL) to perform dimensionality reduction for multi-label data by exploiting correlations among different labels using a hypergraph. The regularization effect on the classical dimensionality reduction algorithm known as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is elucidated in this thesis. The relationship between CCA and Orthonormalized Partial Least Squares (OPLS) is also investigated. To perform dimensionality reduction efficiently for large-scale problems, two efficient implementations are proposed for a class of dimensionality reduction algorithms, including canonical correlation analysis, orthonormalized partial least squares, linear discriminant analysis, and hypergraph spectral learning. The first approach is a direct least squares approach which allows the use of different regularization penalties, but is applicable under a certain assumption; the second one is a two-stage approach which can be applied in the regularization setting without any assumption. Furthermore, an online implementation for the same class of dimensionality reduction algorithms is proposed when the data comes sequentially. A Matlab toolbox for multi-label dimensionality reduction has been developed and released. The proposed algorithms have been applied successfully in the Drosophila gene expression pattern image annotation. The experimental results on some benchmark data sets in multi-label learning also demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
ContributorsSun, Liang (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate

This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved.
ContributorsZhong, Yunji (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011