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- All Subjects: Machine Learning
- All Subjects: Cyberbullying
- All Subjects: Semantic computing
Description
Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications where their predictions are used to make critical decisions in a variety of domains. The proliferation of such models has led to a burgeoning need to ensure the reliability and safety of these models, given the potential negative consequences of model vulnerabilities. The complexity of machine learning models, along with the extensive data sets they analyze, can result in unpredictable and unintended outcomes. Model vulnerabilities may manifest due to errors in data input, algorithm design, or model deployment, which can have significant implications for both individuals and society. To prevent such negative outcomes, it is imperative to identify model vulnerabilities at an early stage in the development process. This will aid in guaranteeing the integrity, dependability, and safety of the models, thus mitigating potential risks and enabling the full potential of these technologies to be realized. However, enumerating vulnerabilities can be challenging due to the complexity of the real-world environment. Visual analytics, situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence, offers a promising approach for achieving high interpretability of complex black-box models, thus reducing the cost of obtaining insights into potential vulnerabilities of models. This research is devoted to designing novel visual analytics methods to support the identification and analysis of model vulnerabilities. Specifically, generalizable visual analytics frameworks are instantiated to explore vulnerabilities in machine learning models concerning security (adversarial attacks and data perturbation) and fairness (algorithmic bias). In the end, a visual analytics approach is proposed to enable domain experts to explain and diagnose the model improvement of addressing identified vulnerabilities of machine learning models in a human-in-the-loop fashion. The proposed methods hold the potential to enhance the security and fairness of machine learning models deployed in critical real-world applications.
ContributorsXie, Tiankai (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Bryan, Chris (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Data mining, also known as big data analysis, has been identified as a critical and challenging process for a variety of applications in real-world problems. Numerous datasets are collected and generated every day to store the information. The rise in the number of data volumes and data modality has resulted in the increased demand for data mining methods and strategies of finding anomalies, patterns, and correlations within large data sets to predict outcomes. Effective machine learning methods are widely adapted to build the data mining pipeline for various purposes like business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment. The major challenges for effectively and efficiently mining big data include (1) data heterogeneity and (2) missing data. Heterogeneity is the natural characteristic of big data, as the data is typically collected from different sources with diverse formats. The missing value is the most common issue faced by the heterogeneous data analysis, which resulted from variety of factors including the data collecting processing, user initiatives, erroneous data entries, and so on. In response to these challenges, in this thesis, three main research directions with application scenarios have been investigated: (1) Mining and Formulating Heterogeneous Data, (2) missing value imputation strategy in various application scenarios in both offline and online manner, and (3) missing value imputation for multi-modality data. Multiple strategies with theoretical analysis are presented, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms compared with state-of-the-art methods is discussed.
Contributorsliu, Xu (Author) / He, Jingrui (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Background: Cyberbullying and cyber-victimization are rising problems and are associated with increased risk for mental health problems in children. Methods for addressing cyberbullying are limited, however, interventions focused on promoting appropriate parental mediation strategies are a promising solution supported by evidence and by guided by the Theory of Parenting Styles.
Objective: To provide an educational session to parents of middle school students that promotes effective methods of preventing and addressing cyberbullying incidents. Design: The educational sessions were provided to eight parents middle school student. Surveys to assess parent perception of and planned response to cyberbullying incidents and Parent Adolescent Communication Scale (PACS) scores were collected pre-presentation, post-presentation, and at one-month follow up.
Results: Data analysis of pre- and post-presentation PACS using a Wilcoxon test found no significant difference (Z = -.405, p >.05). There was not enough response to the 1-month follow-up to perform a data analysis on follow-up data.
Conclusions: Due to low attendance and participation in the follow-up survey the results of this project are limited. However, parents did appear to benefit from communicating concerns about cyberbullying with school officials. Future studies should examine if a school-wide anti-cyberbullying program that actively involves parents effects parental response to cyberbullying.
ContributorsKelsy, Streeter (Author) / Guthrey, Ann (Thesis advisor)
Created2017-04-30
Description
The pervasive use of social media gives it a crucial role in helping the public perceive reliable information. Meanwhile, the openness and timeliness of social networking sites also allow for the rapid creation and dissemination of misinformation. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find accurate and trustworthy information. As witnessed in recent incidents of misinformation, it escalates quickly and can impact social media users with undesirable consequences and wreak havoc instantaneously. Different from some existing research in psychology and social sciences about misinformation, social media platforms pose unprecedented challenges for misinformation detection. First, intentional spreaders of misinformation will actively disguise themselves. Second, content of misinformation may be manipulated to avoid being detected, while abundant contextual information may play a vital role in detecting it. Third, not only accuracy, earliness of a detection method is also important in containing misinformation from being viral. Fourth, social media platforms have been used as a fundamental data source for various disciplines, and these research may have been conducted in the presence of misinformation. To tackle the challenges, we focus on developing machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial manipulation and data scarcity.
The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic study of misinformation detection in social media. To tackle the challenges of adversarial attacks, I propose adaptive detection algorithms to deal with the active manipulations of misinformation spreaders via content and networks. To facilitate content-based approaches, I analyze the contextual data of misinformation and propose to incorporate the specific contextual patterns of misinformation into a principled detection framework. Considering its rapidly growing nature, I study how misinformation can be detected at an early stage. In particular, I focus on the challenge of data scarcity and propose a novel framework to enable historical data to be utilized for emerging incidents that are seemingly irrelevant. With misinformation being viral, applications that rely on social media data face the challenge of corrupted data. To this end, I present robust statistical relational learning and personalization algorithms to minimize the negative effect of misinformation.
The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic study of misinformation detection in social media. To tackle the challenges of adversarial attacks, I propose adaptive detection algorithms to deal with the active manipulations of misinformation spreaders via content and networks. To facilitate content-based approaches, I analyze the contextual data of misinformation and propose to incorporate the specific contextual patterns of misinformation into a principled detection framework. Considering its rapidly growing nature, I study how misinformation can be detected at an early stage. In particular, I focus on the challenge of data scarcity and propose a novel framework to enable historical data to be utilized for emerging incidents that are seemingly irrelevant. With misinformation being viral, applications that rely on social media data face the challenge of corrupted data. To this end, I present robust statistical relational learning and personalization algorithms to minimize the negative effect of misinformation.
ContributorsWu, Liang (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Davison, Brian D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Many neurological disorders, especially those that result in dementia, impact speech and language production. A number of studies have shown that there exist subtle changes in linguistic complexity in these individuals that precede disease onset. However, these studies are conducted on controlled speech samples from a specific task. This thesis explores the possibility of using natural language processing in order to detect declining linguistic complexity from more natural discourse. We use existing data from public figures suspected (or at risk) of suffering from cognitive-linguistic decline, downloaded from the Internet, to detect changes in linguistic complexity. In particular, we focus on two case studies. The first case study analyzes President Ronald Reagan’s transcribed spontaneous speech samples during his presidency. President Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, however my results showed declining linguistic complexity during the span of the 8 years he was in office. President George Herbert Walker Bush, who has no known diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, shows no decline in the same measures. In the second case study, we analyze transcribed spontaneous speech samples from the news conferences of 10 current NFL players and 18 non-player personnel since 2007. The non-player personnel have never played professional football. Longitudinal analysis of linguistic complexity showed contrasting patterns in the two groups. The majority (6 of 10) of current players showed decline in at least one measure of linguistic complexity over time. In contrast, the majority (11 out of 18) of non-player personnel showed an increase in at least one linguistic complexity measure.
ContributorsWang, Shuai (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / LaCross, Amy (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
High-level inference tasks in video applications such as recognition, video retrieval, and zero-shot classification have become an active research area in recent years. One fundamental requirement for such applications is to extract high-quality features that maintain high-level information in the videos.
Many video feature extraction algorithms have been purposed, such as STIP, HOG3D, and Dense Trajectories. These algorithms are often referred to as “handcrafted” features as they were deliberately designed based on some reasonable considerations. However, these algorithms may fail when dealing with high-level tasks or complex scene videos. Due to the success of using deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) to extract global representations for static images, researchers have been using similar techniques to tackle video contents. Typical techniques first extract spatial features by processing raw images using deep convolution architectures designed for static image classifications. Then simple average, concatenation or classifier-based fusion/pooling methods are applied to the extracted features. I argue that features extracted in such ways do not acquire enough representative information since videos, unlike images, should be characterized as a temporal sequence of semantically coherent visual contents and thus need to be represented in a manner considering both semantic and spatio-temporal information.
In this thesis, I propose a novel architecture to learn semantic spatio-temporal embedding for videos to support high-level video analysis. The proposed method encodes video spatial and temporal information separately by employing a deep architecture consisting of two channels of convolutional neural networks (capturing appearance and local motion) followed by their corresponding Fully Connected Gated Recurrent Unit (FC-GRU) encoders for capturing longer-term temporal structure of the CNN features. The resultant spatio-temporal representation (a vector) is used to learn a mapping via a Fully Connected Multilayer Perceptron (FC-MLP) to the word2vec semantic embedding space, leading to a semantic interpretation of the video vector that supports high-level analysis. I evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new video representation by conducting experiments on action recognition, zero-shot video classification, and semantic video retrieval (word-to-video) retrieval, using the UCF101 action recognition dataset.
Many video feature extraction algorithms have been purposed, such as STIP, HOG3D, and Dense Trajectories. These algorithms are often referred to as “handcrafted” features as they were deliberately designed based on some reasonable considerations. However, these algorithms may fail when dealing with high-level tasks or complex scene videos. Due to the success of using deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) to extract global representations for static images, researchers have been using similar techniques to tackle video contents. Typical techniques first extract spatial features by processing raw images using deep convolution architectures designed for static image classifications. Then simple average, concatenation or classifier-based fusion/pooling methods are applied to the extracted features. I argue that features extracted in such ways do not acquire enough representative information since videos, unlike images, should be characterized as a temporal sequence of semantically coherent visual contents and thus need to be represented in a manner considering both semantic and spatio-temporal information.
In this thesis, I propose a novel architecture to learn semantic spatio-temporal embedding for videos to support high-level video analysis. The proposed method encodes video spatial and temporal information separately by employing a deep architecture consisting of two channels of convolutional neural networks (capturing appearance and local motion) followed by their corresponding Fully Connected Gated Recurrent Unit (FC-GRU) encoders for capturing longer-term temporal structure of the CNN features. The resultant spatio-temporal representation (a vector) is used to learn a mapping via a Fully Connected Multilayer Perceptron (FC-MLP) to the word2vec semantic embedding space, leading to a semantic interpretation of the video vector that supports high-level analysis. I evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new video representation by conducting experiments on action recognition, zero-shot video classification, and semantic video retrieval (word-to-video) retrieval, using the UCF101 action recognition dataset.
ContributorsHu, Sheng-Hung (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Cyberbullying is a phenomenon which negatively affects individuals. Victims of the cyberbullying suffer from a range of mental issues, ranging from depression to low self-esteem. Due to the advent of the social media platforms, cyberbullying is becoming more and more prevalent. Traditional mechanisms to fight against cyberbullying include use of standards and guidelines, human moderators, use of blacklists based on profane words, and regular expressions to manually detect cyberbullying. However, these mechanisms fall short in social media and do not scale well. Users in social media use intentional evasive expressions like, obfuscation of abusive words, which necessitates the development of a sophisticated learning framework to automatically detect new cyberbullying behaviors. Cyberbullying detection in social media is a challenging task due to short, noisy and unstructured content and intentional obfuscation of the abusive words or phrases by social media users. Motivated by sociological and psychological findings on bullying behavior and its correlation with emotions, we propose to leverage the sentiment information to accurately detect cyberbullying behavior in social media by proposing an effective optimization framework. Experimental results on two real-world social media datasets show the superiority of the proposed framework. Further studies validate the effectiveness of leveraging sentiment information for cyberbullying detection.
ContributorsDani, Harsh (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Due to vast resources brought by social media services, social data mining has
received increasing attention in recent years. The availability of sheer amounts of
user-generated data presents data scientists both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities are presented with additional data sources. The abundant link information
in social networks could provide another rich source in deriving implicit information
for social data mining. However, the vast majority of existing studies overwhelmingly
focus on positive links between users while negative links are also prevailing in real-
world social networks such as distrust relations in Epinions and foe links in Slashdot.
Though recent studies show that negative links have some added value over positive
links, it is dicult to directly employ them because of its distinct characteristics from
positive interactions. Another challenge is that label information is rather limited
in social media as the labeling process requires human attention and may be very
expensive. Hence, alternative criteria are needed to guide the learning process for
many tasks such as feature selection and sentiment analysis.
To address above-mentioned issues, I study two novel problems for signed social
networks mining, (1) unsupervised feature selection in signed social networks; and
(2) unsupervised sentiment analysis with signed social networks. To tackle the first problem, I propose a novel unsupervised feature selection framework SignedFS. In
particular, I model positive and negative links simultaneously for user preference
learning, and then embed the user preference learning into feature selection. To study the second problem, I incorporate explicit sentiment signals in textual terms and
implicit sentiment signals from signed social networks into a coherent model Signed-
Senti. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets corroborate the effectiveness of
these two frameworks on the tasks of feature selection and sentiment analysis.
received increasing attention in recent years. The availability of sheer amounts of
user-generated data presents data scientists both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities are presented with additional data sources. The abundant link information
in social networks could provide another rich source in deriving implicit information
for social data mining. However, the vast majority of existing studies overwhelmingly
focus on positive links between users while negative links are also prevailing in real-
world social networks such as distrust relations in Epinions and foe links in Slashdot.
Though recent studies show that negative links have some added value over positive
links, it is dicult to directly employ them because of its distinct characteristics from
positive interactions. Another challenge is that label information is rather limited
in social media as the labeling process requires human attention and may be very
expensive. Hence, alternative criteria are needed to guide the learning process for
many tasks such as feature selection and sentiment analysis.
To address above-mentioned issues, I study two novel problems for signed social
networks mining, (1) unsupervised feature selection in signed social networks; and
(2) unsupervised sentiment analysis with signed social networks. To tackle the first problem, I propose a novel unsupervised feature selection framework SignedFS. In
particular, I model positive and negative links simultaneously for user preference
learning, and then embed the user preference learning into feature selection. To study the second problem, I incorporate explicit sentiment signals in textual terms and
implicit sentiment signals from signed social networks into a coherent model Signed-
Senti. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets corroborate the effectiveness of
these two frameworks on the tasks of feature selection and sentiment analysis.
ContributorsCheng, Kewei (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The pervasive use of the Web has connected billions of people all around the globe and enabled them to obtain information at their fingertips. This results in tremendous amounts of user-generated data which makes users traceable and vulnerable to privacy leakage attacks. In general, there are two types of privacy leakage attacks for user-generated data, i.e., identity disclosure and private-attribute disclosure attacks. These attacks put users at potential risks ranging from persecution by governments to targeted frauds. Therefore, it is necessary for users to be able to safeguard their privacy without leaving their unnecessary traces of online activities. However, privacy protection comes at the cost of utility loss defined as the loss in quality of personalized services users receive. The reason is that this information of traces is crucial for online vendors to provide personalized services and a lack of it would result in deteriorating utility. This leads to a dilemma of privacy and utility.
Protecting users' privacy while preserving utility for user-generated data is a challenging task. The reason is that users generate different types of data such as Web browsing histories, user-item interactions, and textual information. This data is heterogeneous, unstructured, noisy, and inherently different from relational and tabular data and thus requires quantifying users' privacy and utility in each context separately. In this dissertation, I investigate four aspects of protecting user privacy for user-generated data. First, a novel adversarial technique is introduced to assay privacy risks in heterogeneous user-generated data. Second, a novel framework is proposed to boost users' privacy while retaining high utility for Web browsing histories. Third, a privacy-aware recommendation system is developed to protect privacy w.r.t. the rich user-item interaction data by recommending relevant and privacy-preserving items. Fourth, a privacy-preserving framework for text representation learning is presented to safeguard user-generated textual data as it can reveal private information.
Protecting users' privacy while preserving utility for user-generated data is a challenging task. The reason is that users generate different types of data such as Web browsing histories, user-item interactions, and textual information. This data is heterogeneous, unstructured, noisy, and inherently different from relational and tabular data and thus requires quantifying users' privacy and utility in each context separately. In this dissertation, I investigate four aspects of protecting user privacy for user-generated data. First, a novel adversarial technique is introduced to assay privacy risks in heterogeneous user-generated data. Second, a novel framework is proposed to boost users' privacy while retaining high utility for Web browsing histories. Third, a privacy-aware recommendation system is developed to protect privacy w.r.t. the rich user-item interaction data by recommending relevant and privacy-preserving items. Fourth, a privacy-preserving framework for text representation learning is presented to safeguard user-generated textual data as it can reveal private information.
ContributorsBeigi, Ghazaleh (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Eliassi-Rad, Tina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The recent proliferation of online platforms has not only revolutionized the way people communicate and acquire information but has also led to propagation of malicious information (e.g., online human trafficking, spread of misinformation, etc.). Propagation of such information occurs at unprecedented scale that could ultimately pose imminent societal-significant threats to the public. To better understand the behavior and impact of the malicious actors and counter their activity, social media authorities need to deploy certain capabilities to reduce their threats. Due to the large volume of this data and limited manpower, the burden usually falls to automatic approaches to identify these malicious activities. However, this is a subtle task facing online platforms due to several challenges: (1) malicious users have strong incentives to disguise themselves as normal users (e.g., intentional misspellings, camouflaging, etc.), (2) malicious users are high likely to be key users in making harmful messages go viral and thus need to be detected at their early life span to stop their threats from reaching a vast audience, and (3) available data for training automatic approaches for detecting malicious users, are usually either highly imbalanced (i.e., higher number of normal users than malicious users) or comprise insufficient labeled data.
To address the above mentioned challenges, in this dissertation I investigate the propagation of online malicious information from two broad perspectives: (1) content posted by users and (2) information cascades formed by resharing mechanisms in social media. More specifically, first, non-parametric and semi-supervised learning algorithms are introduced to discern potential patterns of human trafficking activities that are of high interest to law enforcement. Second, a time-decay causality-based framework is introduced for early detection of “Pathogenic Social Media (PSM)” accounts (e.g., terrorist supporters). Third, due to the lack of sufficient annotated data for training PSM detection approaches, a semi-supervised causal framework is proposed that utilizes causal-related attributes from unlabeled instances to compensate for the lack of enough labeled data. Fourth, a feature-driven approach for PSM detection is introduced that leverages different sets of attributes from users’ causal activities, account-level and content-related information as well as those from URLs shared by users.
To address the above mentioned challenges, in this dissertation I investigate the propagation of online malicious information from two broad perspectives: (1) content posted by users and (2) information cascades formed by resharing mechanisms in social media. More specifically, first, non-parametric and semi-supervised learning algorithms are introduced to discern potential patterns of human trafficking activities that are of high interest to law enforcement. Second, a time-decay causality-based framework is introduced for early detection of “Pathogenic Social Media (PSM)” accounts (e.g., terrorist supporters). Third, due to the lack of sufficient annotated data for training PSM detection approaches, a semi-supervised causal framework is proposed that utilizes causal-related attributes from unlabeled instances to compensate for the lack of enough labeled data. Fourth, a feature-driven approach for PSM detection is introduced that leverages different sets of attributes from users’ causal activities, account-level and content-related information as well as those from URLs shared by users.
ContributorsAlvari, Hamidreza (Author) / Shakarian, Paulo (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Ruston, Scott (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020