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Description
Social media has become a primary platform for real-time information sharing among users. News on social media spreads faster than traditional outlets and millions of users turn to this platform to receive the latest updates on major events especially disasters. Social media bridges the gap between the people who are affected by disasters, volunteers who offer contributions, and first responders. On the other hand, social media is a fertile ground for malicious users who purposefully disturb the relief processes facilitated on social media. These malicious users take advantage of social bots to overrun social media posts with fake images, rumors, and false information. This process causes distress and prevents actionable information from reaching the affected people. Social bots are automated accounts that are controlled by a malicious user and these bots have become prevalent on social media in recent years.
In spite of existing efforts towards understanding and removing bots on social media, there are at least two drawbacks associated with the current bot detection algorithms: general-purpose bot detection methods are designed to be conservative and not label a user as a bot unless the algorithm is highly confident and they overlook the effect of users who are manipulated by bots and (unintentionally) spread their content. This study is trifold. First, I design a Machine Learning model that uses content and context of social media posts to detect actionable ones among them; it specifically focuses on tweets in which people ask for help after major disasters. Second, I focus on bots who can be a facilitator of malicious content spreading during disasters. I propose two methods for detecting bots on social media with a focus on the recall of the detection. Third, I study the characteristics of users who spread the content of malicious actors. These features have the potential to improve methods that detect malicious content such as fake news.
In spite of existing efforts towards understanding and removing bots on social media, there are at least two drawbacks associated with the current bot detection algorithms: general-purpose bot detection methods are designed to be conservative and not label a user as a bot unless the algorithm is highly confident and they overlook the effect of users who are manipulated by bots and (unintentionally) spread their content. This study is trifold. First, I design a Machine Learning model that uses content and context of social media posts to detect actionable ones among them; it specifically focuses on tweets in which people ask for help after major disasters. Second, I focus on bots who can be a facilitator of malicious content spreading during disasters. I propose two methods for detecting bots on social media with a focus on the recall of the detection. Third, I study the characteristics of users who spread the content of malicious actors. These features have the potential to improve methods that detect malicious content such as fake news.
ContributorsHossein Nazer, Tahora (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Akoglu, Leman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Live streaming has risen to significant popularity in the recent past and largely this live streaming is a feature of existing social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. However, there does exist at least one social network entirely devoted to live streaming, and specifically the live streaming of video games, Twitch. This social network is unique for a number of reasons, not least because of its hyper-focus on live content and this uniqueness has challenges for social media researchers.
Despite this uniqueness, almost no scientific work has been performed on this public social network. Thus, it is unclear what user interaction features present on other social networks exist on Twitch. Investigating the interactions between users and identifying which, if any, of the common user behaviors on social network exist on Twitch is an important step in understanding how Twitch fits in to the social media ecosystem. For example, there are users that have large followings on Twitch and amass a large number of viewers, but do those users exert influence over the behavior of other user the way that popular users on Twitter do?
This task, however, will not be trivial. The same hyper-focus on live content that makes Twitch unique in the social network space invalidates many of the traditional approaches to social network analysis. Thus, new algorithms and techniques must be developed in order to tap this data source. In this thesis, a novel algorithm for finding games whose releases have made a significant impact on the network is described as well as a novel algorithm for detecting and identifying influential players of games. In addition, the Twitch network is described in detail along with the data that was collected in order to power the two previously described algorithms.
Despite this uniqueness, almost no scientific work has been performed on this public social network. Thus, it is unclear what user interaction features present on other social networks exist on Twitch. Investigating the interactions between users and identifying which, if any, of the common user behaviors on social network exist on Twitch is an important step in understanding how Twitch fits in to the social media ecosystem. For example, there are users that have large followings on Twitch and amass a large number of viewers, but do those users exert influence over the behavior of other user the way that popular users on Twitter do?
This task, however, will not be trivial. The same hyper-focus on live content that makes Twitch unique in the social network space invalidates many of the traditional approaches to social network analysis. Thus, new algorithms and techniques must be developed in order to tap this data source. In this thesis, a novel algorithm for finding games whose releases have made a significant impact on the network is described as well as a novel algorithm for detecting and identifying influential players of games. In addition, the Twitch network is described in detail along with the data that was collected in order to power the two previously described algorithms.
ContributorsJones, Isaac (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Shakarian, Paulo (Committee member) / Agarwal, Nitin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Over the last decade, deep neural networks also known as deep learning, combined with large databases and specialized hardware for computation, have made major strides in important areas such as computer vision, computational imaging and natural language processing. However, such frameworks currently suffer from some drawbacks. For example, it is generally not clear how the architectures are to be designed for different applications, or how the neural networks behave under different input perturbations and it is not easy to make the internal representations and parameters more interpretable. In this dissertation, I propose building constraints into feature maps, parameters and and design of algorithms involving neural networks for applications in low-level vision problems such as compressive imaging and multi-spectral image fusion, and high-level inference problems including activity and face recognition. Depending on the application, such constraints can be used to design architectures which are invariant/robust to certain nuisance factors, more efficient and, in some cases, more interpretable. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, I demonstrate these advantages of the proposed methods over conventional frameworks.
ContributorsLohit, Suhas Anand (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
With the development of modern technological infrastructures, such as social networks or the Internet of Things (IoT), data is being generated at a speed that is never before seen. Analyzing the content of this data helps us further understand underlying patterns and discover relationships among different subsets of data, enabling intelligent decision making. In this thesis, I first introduce the Low-rank, Win-dowed, Incremental Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) framework to inclemently maintain SVD factors over streaming data. Then, I present the Group Incremental Non-Negative Matrix Factorization framework to leverage redundancies in the data to speed up incremental processing. They primarily tackle the challenges of using factorization models in the scenarios with streaming textual data. In order to tackle the challenges in improving the effectiveness and efficiency of generative models in this streaming environment, I introduce the Incremental Dynamic Multiscale Topic Model framework, which identifies multi-scale patterns and their evolutions within streaming datasets. While the latent factor models assume the linear independence in the latent factors, the generative models assume the observation is generated from a set of latent variables with various distributions. Furthermore, some models may not be accessible or their underlying structures are too complex to understand, such as simulation ensembles, where there may be thousands of parameters with a huge parameter space, the only way to learn information from it is to execute real simulations. When performing knowledge discovery and decision making through data- and model-driven simulation ensembles, it is expensive to operate these ensembles continuously at large scale, due to the high computational. Consequently, given a relatively small simulation budget, it is desirable to identify a sparse ensemble that includes the most informative simulations, while still permitting effective exploration of the input parameter space. Therefore, I present Complexity-Guided Parameter Space Sampling framework, which is an intelligent, top-down sampling scheme to select the most salient simulation parameters to execute, given a limited computational budget. Moreover, I also present a Pivot-Guided Parameter Space Sampling framework, which incrementally maintains a diverse ensemble of models of the simulation ensemble space and uses a pivot guided mechanism for future sample selection.
ContributorsChen, Xilun (Author) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Committee member) / Sapino, Maria Luisa (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Disentangling latent spaces is an important research direction in the interpretability of unsupervised machine learning. Several recent works using deep learning are very effective at producing disentangled representations. However, in the unsupervised setting, there is no way to pre-specify which part of the latent space captures specific factors of variations. While this is generally a hard problem because of the non-existence of analytical expressions to capture these variations, there are certain factors like geometric
transforms that can be expressed analytically. Furthermore, in existing frameworks, the disentangled values are also not interpretable. The focus of this work is to disentangle these geometric factors of variations (which turn out to be nuisance factors for many applications) from the semantic content of the signal in an interpretable manner which in turn makes the features more discriminative. Experiments are designed to show the modularity of the approach with other disentangling strategies as well as on multiple one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) datasets, clearly indicating the efficacy of the proposed approach.
transforms that can be expressed analytically. Furthermore, in existing frameworks, the disentangled values are also not interpretable. The focus of this work is to disentangle these geometric factors of variations (which turn out to be nuisance factors for many applications) from the semantic content of the signal in an interpretable manner which in turn makes the features more discriminative. Experiments are designed to show the modularity of the approach with other disentangling strategies as well as on multiple one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) datasets, clearly indicating the efficacy of the proposed approach.
ContributorsKoneripalli Seetharam, Kaushik (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
The advent of commercial inexpensive sensors and the advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have brought forth the era of pervasive Quantified-Self. Automatic diet monitoring is one of the most important aspects for Quantified-Self because it is vital for ensuring the well-being of patients suffering from chronic diseases as well as for providing a low cost means for maintaining the health for everyone else. Automatic dietary monitoring consists of: a) Determining the type and amount of food intake, and b) Monitoring eating behavior, i.e., time, frequency, and speed of eating. Although there are some existing techniques towards these ends, they suffer from issues of low accuracy and low adherence. To overcome these issues, multiple sensors were utilized because the availability of affordable sensors that can capture the different aspect information has the potential for increasing the available knowledge for Quantified-Self. For a), I envision an intelligent dietary monitoring system that automatically identifies food items by using the knowledge obtained from visible spectrum camera and infrared spectrum camera. This system is able to outperform the state-of-the-art systems for cooked food recognition by 25% while also minimizing user intervention. For b), I propose a novel methodology, IDEA that performs accurate eating action identification within eating episodes with an average F1-score of 0.92. This is an improvement of 0.11 for precision and 0.15 for recall for the worst-case users as compared to the state-of-the-art. IDEA uses only a single wrist-band which includes four sensors and provides feedback on eating speed every 2 minutes without obtaining any manual input from the user.
ContributorsLee, Junghyo (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep K.S. (Thesis advisor) / Banerjee, Ayan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Chiou, Erin (Committee member) / Kudva, Yogish C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation focuses on creating a pluralistic approach to understanding and measuring interdisciplinarity at various scales to further the study of the evolution of knowledge and innovation. Interdisciplinarity is considered an important research component and is closely linked to higher rates of innovation. If the goal is to create more innovative research, we must understand how interdisciplinarity operates.
I begin by examining interdisciplinarity with a small scope, the research university. This study uses metadata to create co-authorship networks and examine how a change in university policies to increase interdisciplinarity can be successful. The New American University Initiative (NAUI) at Arizona State University (ASU) set forth the goal of making ASU a world hub for interdisciplinary research. This kind of interdisciplinarity is produced from a deliberate, engineered, reorganization of the individuals within the university and the knowledge they contain. By using a set of social network analysis measurements, I created an algorithm to measure the changes to the co-authorship networks that resulted from increased university support for interdisciplinary research.
The second case study increases the scope of interdisciplinarity from individual universities to a single scientific discourse, the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene began as an idea about the need for a new geological epoch and underwent unsupervised interdisciplinary expansion due to climate change integrating itself into the core of the discourse. In contrast to the NAUI which was specifically engineered to increase interdisciplinarity, the I use keyword co-occurrence networks to measure how the Anthropocene discourse increases its interdisciplinarity through unsupervised expansion after climate change becomes a core keyword within the network and behaves as an anchor point for new disciplines to connect and join the discourse.
The scope of interdisciplinarity increases again with the final case study about the field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a case of engineered interdisciplinary integration between evolutionary biology and medicine. The primary goal of evolutionary medicine is to better understand "why we get sick" through the lens of evolutionary biology. This makes it an excellent candidate to understand large-scale interdisciplinarity. I show through multiple type of networks and metadata analyses that evolutionary medicine successfully integrates the concepts of evolutionary biology into medicine.
By increasing our knowledge of interdisciplinarity at various scales and how it behaves in different initial conditions, we are better able to understand the elusive nature of innovation. Interdisciplinary can mean different things depending on how its defined. I show that a pluralistic approach to defining and measuring interdisciplinarity is not only appropriate but necessary if our goal is to increase interdisciplinarity, the frequency of innovations, and our understanding of the evolution of knowledge.
I begin by examining interdisciplinarity with a small scope, the research university. This study uses metadata to create co-authorship networks and examine how a change in university policies to increase interdisciplinarity can be successful. The New American University Initiative (NAUI) at Arizona State University (ASU) set forth the goal of making ASU a world hub for interdisciplinary research. This kind of interdisciplinarity is produced from a deliberate, engineered, reorganization of the individuals within the university and the knowledge they contain. By using a set of social network analysis measurements, I created an algorithm to measure the changes to the co-authorship networks that resulted from increased university support for interdisciplinary research.
The second case study increases the scope of interdisciplinarity from individual universities to a single scientific discourse, the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene began as an idea about the need for a new geological epoch and underwent unsupervised interdisciplinary expansion due to climate change integrating itself into the core of the discourse. In contrast to the NAUI which was specifically engineered to increase interdisciplinarity, the I use keyword co-occurrence networks to measure how the Anthropocene discourse increases its interdisciplinarity through unsupervised expansion after climate change becomes a core keyword within the network and behaves as an anchor point for new disciplines to connect and join the discourse.
The scope of interdisciplinarity increases again with the final case study about the field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a case of engineered interdisciplinary integration between evolutionary biology and medicine. The primary goal of evolutionary medicine is to better understand "why we get sick" through the lens of evolutionary biology. This makes it an excellent candidate to understand large-scale interdisciplinarity. I show through multiple type of networks and metadata analyses that evolutionary medicine successfully integrates the concepts of evolutionary biology into medicine.
By increasing our knowledge of interdisciplinarity at various scales and how it behaves in different initial conditions, we are better able to understand the elusive nature of innovation. Interdisciplinary can mean different things depending on how its defined. I show that a pluralistic approach to defining and measuring interdisciplinarity is not only appropriate but necessary if our goal is to increase interdisciplinarity, the frequency of innovations, and our understanding of the evolution of knowledge.
ContributorsPainter, Deryc T (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred D (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Bliss, Nadya T (Committee member) / Simeone, Michael P (Committee member) / Nesse, Randolph M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Reverse engineering is critical to reasoning about how a system behaves. While complete access to a system inherently allows for perfect analysis, partial access is inherently uncertain. This is the case foran individual agent in a distributed system. Inductive Reverse Engineering (IRE) enables analysis under
such circumstances. IRE does this by producing program spaces consistent with individual input-output examples for a given domain-specific language. Then, IRE intersects those program spaces to produce a generalized program consistent with all examples. IRE, an easy to use framework, allows this domain-specific language to be specified in the form of Theorist s, which produce Theory s, a succinct way of representing the program space.
Programs are often much more complex than simple string transformations. One of the ways in which they are more complex is in the way that they follow a conversation-like behavior, potentially following some underlying protocol. As a result, IRE represents program interactions as Conversations in order to
more correctly model a distributed system. This, for instance, enables IRE to model dynamically captured inputs received from other agents in the distributed system.
While domain-specific knowledge provided by a user is extremely valuable, such information is not always possible. IRE mitigates this by automatically inferring program grammars, allowing it to still perform efficient searches of the program space. It does this by intersecting conversations prior to synthesis in order to understand what portions of conversations are constant.
IRE exists to be a tool that can aid in automatic reverse engineering across numerous domains. Further, IRE aspires to be a centralized location and interface for implementing program synthesis and automatic black box analysis techniques.
such circumstances. IRE does this by producing program spaces consistent with individual input-output examples for a given domain-specific language. Then, IRE intersects those program spaces to produce a generalized program consistent with all examples. IRE, an easy to use framework, allows this domain-specific language to be specified in the form of Theorist s, which produce Theory s, a succinct way of representing the program space.
Programs are often much more complex than simple string transformations. One of the ways in which they are more complex is in the way that they follow a conversation-like behavior, potentially following some underlying protocol. As a result, IRE represents program interactions as Conversations in order to
more correctly model a distributed system. This, for instance, enables IRE to model dynamically captured inputs received from other agents in the distributed system.
While domain-specific knowledge provided by a user is extremely valuable, such information is not always possible. IRE mitigates this by automatically inferring program grammars, allowing it to still perform efficient searches of the program space. It does this by intersecting conversations prior to synthesis in order to understand what portions of conversations are constant.
IRE exists to be a tool that can aid in automatic reverse engineering across numerous domains. Further, IRE aspires to be a centralized location and interface for implementing program synthesis and automatic black box analysis techniques.
ContributorsNelson, Connor David (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Shoshitaishvili, Yan (Committee member) / Wang, Ruoyu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had tremendous success in a variety of
statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most
applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need
for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog
accelerators. To make trained models more robust for this setting, quantization and
analog compute noise are modeled as weight space perturbations to DNNs and an
information theoretic regularization scheme is used to penalize the KL-divergence
between perturbed and unperturbed models. This regularizer has similarities to
both natural gradient descent and knowledge distillation, but has the advantage of
explicitly promoting the network to and a broader minimum that is robust to
weight space perturbations. In addition to the proposed regularization,
KL-divergence is directly minimized using knowledge distillation. Initial validation
on FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 shows that the information theoretic regularizer
and knowledge distillation outperform existing quantization schemes based on the
straight through estimator or L2 constrained quantization.
statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most
applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need
for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog
accelerators. To make trained models more robust for this setting, quantization and
analog compute noise are modeled as weight space perturbations to DNNs and an
information theoretic regularization scheme is used to penalize the KL-divergence
between perturbed and unperturbed models. This regularizer has similarities to
both natural gradient descent and knowledge distillation, but has the advantage of
explicitly promoting the network to and a broader minimum that is robust to
weight space perturbations. In addition to the proposed regularization,
KL-divergence is directly minimized using knowledge distillation. Initial validation
on FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 shows that the information theoretic regularizer
and knowledge distillation outperform existing quantization schemes based on the
straight through estimator or L2 constrained quantization.
ContributorsKadambi, Pradyumna (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Humans perceive the environment using multiple modalities like vision, speech (language), touch, taste, and smell. The knowledge obtained from one modality usually complements the other. Learning through several modalities helps in constructing an accurate model of the environment. Most of the current vision and language models are modality-specific and, in many cases, extensively use deep-learning based attention mechanisms for learning powerful representations. This work discusses the role of attention in associating vision and language for generating shared representation. Language Image Transformer (LIT) is proposed for learning multi-modal representations of the environment. It uses a training objective based on Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) to maximize the Mutual Information (MI) between the visual and linguistic representations. It learns the relationship between the modalities using the proposed cross-modal attention layers. It is trained and evaluated using captioning datasets, MS COCO, and Conceptual Captions. The results and the analysis offers a perspective on the use of Mutual Information Maximisation (MIM) for generating generalizable representations across multiple modalities.
ContributorsRamakrishnan, Raghavendran (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth Kumar (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020