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The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a

The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a reputation score for each tweet that is based not just on content, but also additional information from the Twitter ecosystem that consists of users, tweets, and the web pages that tweets link to. This information is obtained by modeling the Twitter ecosystem as a three-layer graph. The reputation score is used to power two novel methods of ranking tweets by propagating the reputation over an agreement graph based on tweets' content similarity. Additionally, I show how the agreement graph helps counter tweet spam. An evaluation of my method on 16~million tweets from the TREC 2011 Microblog Dataset shows that it doubles the precision over baseline Twitter Search and achieves higher precision than current state of the art method. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of RAProp in comparison to several alternative approaches proposed by me, as well as external evaluation in comparison to the current state of the art method.
ContributorsRavikumar, Srijith (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Multidimensional data have various representations. Thanks to their simplicity in modeling multidimensional data and the availability of various mathematical tools (such as tensor decompositions) that support multi-aspect analysis of such data, tensors are increasingly being used in many application domains including scientific data management, sensor data management, and social network

Multidimensional data have various representations. Thanks to their simplicity in modeling multidimensional data and the availability of various mathematical tools (such as tensor decompositions) that support multi-aspect analysis of such data, tensors are increasingly being used in many application domains including scientific data management, sensor data management, and social network data analysis. Relational model, on the other hand, enables semantic manipulation of data using relational operators, such as projection, selection, Cartesian-product, and set operators. For many multidimensional data applications, tensor operations as well as relational operations need to be supported throughout the data life cycle. In this thesis, we introduce a tensor-based relational data model (TRM), which enables both tensor- based data analysis and relational manipulations of multidimensional data, and define tensor-relational operations on this model. Then we introduce a tensor-relational data management system, so called, TensorDB. TensorDB is based on TRM, which brings together relational algebraic operations (for data manipulation and integration) and tensor algebraic operations (for data analysis). We develop optimization strategies for tensor-relational operations in both in-memory and in-database TensorDB. The goal of the TRM and TensorDB is to serve as a single environment that supports the entire life cycle of data; that is, data can be manipulated, integrated, processed, and analyzed.
ContributorsKim, Mijung (Author) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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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
In this dissertation, two interrelated problems of service-based systems (SBS) are addressed: protecting users' data confidentiality from service providers, and managing performance of multiple workflows in SBS. Current SBSs pose serious limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is sent in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned

In this dissertation, two interrelated problems of service-based systems (SBS) are addressed: protecting users' data confidentiality from service providers, and managing performance of multiple workflows in SBS. Current SBSs pose serious limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is sent in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned and operated by third-party service providers, there are risks of unauthorized use of the users' sensitive data by service providers. Although there are many techniques for protecting users' data from outside attackers, currently there is no effective way to protect users' sensitive data from service providers. In this dissertation, an approach is presented to protecting the confidentiality of users' data from service providers, and ensuring that service providers cannot collect users' confidential data while the data is processed or stored in cloud computing systems. The approach has four major features: (1) separation of software service providers and infrastructure service providers, (2) hiding the information of the owners of data, (3) data obfuscation, and (4) software module decomposition and distributed execution. Since the approach to protecting users' data confidentiality includes software module decomposition and distributed execution, it is very important to effectively allocate the resource of servers in SBS to each of the software module to manage the overall performance of workflows in SBS. An approach is presented to resource allocation for SBS to adaptively allocating the system resources of servers to their software modules in runtime in order to satisfy the performance requirements of multiple workflows in SBS. Experimental results show that the dynamic resource allocation approach can substantially increase the throughput of a SBS and the optimal resource allocation can be found in polynomial time
ContributorsAn, Ho Geun (Author) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
This research start utilizing an efficient sparse inverse covariance matrix (precision matrix) estimation technique to identify a set of highly correlated discriminative perspectives between radical and counter-radical groups. A ranking system has been developed that utilizes ranked perspectives to map Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral

This research start utilizing an efficient sparse inverse covariance matrix (precision matrix) estimation technique to identify a set of highly correlated discriminative perspectives between radical and counter-radical groups. A ranking system has been developed that utilizes ranked perspectives to map Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web site corpus. Simultaneously, a gold standard ranking of these organizations was created through domain experts and compute expert-to-expert agreements and present experimental results comparing the performance of the QUIC based scaling system to another baseline method for organizations. The QUIC based algorithm not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it is also the only system that consistently performs at area expert-level accuracies for all scales. Also, a multi-scale ideological model has been developed and it investigates the correlates of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Nigeria and UK. This analysis demonstrate that violence does not correlate strongly with broad Muslim theological or sectarian orientations; it shows that religious diversity intolerance is the only consistent and statistically significant ideological correlate of Islamic extremism in these countries, alongside desire for political change in UK and Indonesia, and social change in Nigeria. Next, dynamic issues and communities tracking system based on NMF(Non-negative Matrix Factorization) co-clustering algorithm has been built to better understand the dynamics of virtual communities. The system used between Iran and Saudi Arabia to build and apply a multi-party agent-based model that can demonstrate the role of wedges and spoilers in a complex environment where coalitions are dynamic. Lastly, a visual intelligence platform for tracking the diffusion of online social movements has been developed called LookingGlass to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups. The algorithm utilize large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales. Discriminating perspectives is utilized to classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their tweets.
ContributorsKim, Nyunsu (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Corman, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Traditionally, visualization is one of the most important and commonly used methods of generating insight into large scale data. Particularly for spatiotemporal data, the translation of such data into a visual form allows users to quickly see patterns, explore summaries and relate domain knowledge about underlying geographical phenomena that would

Traditionally, visualization is one of the most important and commonly used methods of generating insight into large scale data. Particularly for spatiotemporal data, the translation of such data into a visual form allows users to quickly see patterns, explore summaries and relate domain knowledge about underlying geographical phenomena that would not be apparent in tabular form. However, several critical challenges arise when visualizing and exploring these large spatiotemporal datasets. While, the underlying geographical component of the data lends itself well to univariate visualization in the form of traditional cartographic representations (e.g., choropleth, isopleth, dasymetric maps), as the data becomes multivariate, cartographic representations become more complex. To simplify the visual representations, analytical methods such as clustering and feature extraction are often applied as part of the classification phase. The automatic classification can then be rendered onto a map; however, one common issue in data classification is that items near a classification boundary are often mislabeled.

This thesis explores methods to augment the automated spatial classification by utilizing interactive machine learning as part of the cluster creation step. First, this thesis explores the design space for spatiotemporal analysis through the development of a comprehensive data wrangling and exploratory data analysis platform. Second, this system is augmented with a novel method for evaluating the visual impact of edge cases for multivariate geographic projections. Finally, system features and functionality are demonstrated through a series of case studies, with key features including similarity analysis, multivariate clustering, and novel visual support for cluster comparison.
ContributorsZhang, Yifan (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Mack, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Cyber systems, including IoT (Internet of Things), are increasingly being used ubiquitously to vastly improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of critical application areas, such as finance, transportation, defense, and healthcare. Over the past two decades, computing efficiency and hardware cost have dramatically been improved. These improvements have made

Cyber systems, including IoT (Internet of Things), are increasingly being used ubiquitously to vastly improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of critical application areas, such as finance, transportation, defense, and healthcare. Over the past two decades, computing efficiency and hardware cost have dramatically been improved. These improvements have made cyber systems omnipotent, and control many aspects of human lives. Emerging trends in successful cyber system breaches have shown increasing sophistication in attacks and that attackers are no longer limited by resources, including human and computing power. Most existing cyber defense systems for IoT systems have two major issues: (1) they do not incorporate human user behavior(s) and preferences in their approaches, and (2) they do not continuously learn from dynamic environment and effectively adapt to thwart sophisticated cyber-attacks. Consequently, the security solutions generated may not be usable or implementable by the user(s) thereby drastically reducing the effectiveness of these security solutions.

In order to address these major issues, a comprehensive approach to securing ubiquitous smart devices in IoT environment by incorporating probabilistic human user behavioral inputs is presented. The approach will include techniques to (1) protect the controller device(s) [smart phone or tablet] by continuously learning and authenticating the legitimate user based on the touch screen finger gestures in the background, without requiring users’ to provide their finger gesture inputs intentionally for training purposes, and (2) efficiently configure IoT devices through controller device(s), in conformance with the probabilistic human user behavior(s) and preferences, to effectively adapt IoT devices to the changing environment. The effectiveness of the approach will be demonstrated with experiments that are based on collected user behavioral data and simulations.
ContributorsBuduru, Arun Balaji (Author) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Continuous advancements in biomedical research have resulted in the production of vast amounts of scientific data and literature discussing them. The ultimate goal of computational biology is to translate these large amounts of data into actual knowledge of the complex biological processes and accurate life science models. The ability to

Continuous advancements in biomedical research have resulted in the production of vast amounts of scientific data and literature discussing them. The ultimate goal of computational biology is to translate these large amounts of data into actual knowledge of the complex biological processes and accurate life science models. The ability to rapidly and effectively survey the literature is necessary for the creation of large scale models of the relationships among biomedical entities as well as hypothesis generation to guide biomedical research. To reduce the effort and time spent in performing these activities, an intelligent search system is required. Even though many systems aid in navigating through this wide collection of documents, the vastness and depth of this information overload can be overwhelming. An automated extraction system coupled with a cognitive search and navigation service over these document collections would not only save time and effort, but also facilitate discovery of the unknown information implicitly conveyed in the texts. This thesis presents the different approaches used for large scale biomedical named entity recognition, and the challenges faced in each. It also proposes BioEve: an integrative framework to fuse a faceted search with information extraction to provide a search service that addresses the user's desire for "completeness" of the query results, not just the top-ranked ones. This information extraction system enables discovery of important semantic relationships between entities such as genes, diseases, drugs, and cell lines and events from biomedical text on MEDLINE, which is the largest publicly available database of the world's biomedical journal literature. It is an innovative search and discovery service that makes it easier to search
avigate and discover knowledge hidden in life sciences literature. To demonstrate the utility of this system, this thesis also details a prototype enterprise quality search and discovery service that helps researchers with a guided step-by-step query refinement, by suggesting concepts enriched in intermediate results, and thereby facilitating the "discover more as you search" paradigm.
ContributorsKanwar, Pradeep (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Dinu, Valentin (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
One of the most remarkable outcomes resulting from the evolution of the web into Web 2.0, has been the propelling of blogging into a widely adopted and globally accepted phenomenon. While the unprecedented growth of the Blogosphere has added diversity and enriched the media, it has also added complexity. To

One of the most remarkable outcomes resulting from the evolution of the web into Web 2.0, has been the propelling of blogging into a widely adopted and globally accepted phenomenon. While the unprecedented growth of the Blogosphere has added diversity and enriched the media, it has also added complexity. To cope with the relentless expansion, many enthusiastic bloggers have embarked on voluntarily writing, tagging, labeling, and cataloguing their posts in hopes of reaching the widest possible audience. Unbeknown to them, this reaching-for-others process triggers the generation of a new kind of collective wisdom, a result of shared collaboration, and the exchange of ideas, purpose, and objectives, through the formation of associations, links, and relations. Mastering an understanding of the Blogosphere can greatly help facilitate the needs of the ever growing number of these users, as well as producers, service providers, and advertisers into facilitation of the categorization and navigation of this vast environment. This work explores a novel method to leverage the collective wisdom from the infused label space for blog search and discovery. The work demonstrates that the wisdom space can provide a most unique and desirable framework to which to discover the highly sought after background information that could aid in the building of classifiers. This work incorporates this insight into the construction of a better clustering of blogs which boosts the performance of classifiers for identifying more relevant labels for blogs, and offers a mechanism that can be incorporated into replacing spurious labels and mislabels in a multi-labeled space.
ContributorsGalan, Magdiel F (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015