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Millions of users leave digital traces of their political engagements on social media platforms every day. Users form networks of interactions, produce textual content, like and share each others' content. This creates an invaluable opportunity to better understand the political engagements of internet users. In this proposal, I present three

Millions of users leave digital traces of their political engagements on social media platforms every day. Users form networks of interactions, produce textual content, like and share each others' content. This creates an invaluable opportunity to better understand the political engagements of internet users. In this proposal, I present three algorithmic solutions to three facets of online political networks; namely, detection of communities, antagonisms and the impact of certain types of accounts on political polarization. First, I develop a multi-view community detection algorithm to find politically pure communities. I find that word usage among other content types (i.e. hashtags, URLs) complement user interactions the best in accurately detecting communities.

Second, I focus on detecting negative linkages between politically motivated social media users. Major social media platforms do not facilitate their users with built-in negative interaction options. However, many political network analysis tasks rely on not only positive but also negative linkages. Here, I present the SocLSFact framework to detect negative linkages among social media users. It utilizes three pieces of information; sentiment cues of textual interactions, positive interactions, and socially balanced triads. I evaluate the contribution of each three aspects in negative link detection performance on multiple tasks.

Third, I propose an experimental setup that quantifies the polarization impact of automated accounts on Twitter retweet networks. I focus on a dataset of tragic Parkland shooting event and its aftermath. I show that when automated accounts are removed from the retweet network the network polarization decrease significantly, while a same number of accounts to the automated accounts are removed randomly the difference is not significant. I also find that prominent predictors of engagement of automatically generated content is not very different than what previous studies point out in general engaging content on social media. Last but not least, I identify accounts which self-disclose their automated nature in their profile by using expressions such as bot, chat-bot, or robot. I find that human engagement to self-disclosing accounts compared to non-disclosing automated accounts is much smaller. This observational finding can motivate further efforts into automated account detection research to prevent their unintended impact.
ContributorsOzer, Mert (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In a pursuit-evasion setup where one group of agents tracks down another adversarial group, vision-based algorithms have been known to make use of techniques such as Linear Dynamic Estimation to determine the probable future location of an evader in a given environment. This helps a pursuer attain an edge over

In a pursuit-evasion setup where one group of agents tracks down another adversarial group, vision-based algorithms have been known to make use of techniques such as Linear Dynamic Estimation to determine the probable future location of an evader in a given environment. This helps a pursuer attain an edge over the evader that has conventionally benefited from the uncertainty of the pursuit. The pursuer can utilize this knowledge to enable a faster capture of the evader, as opposed to a pursuer that only knows the evader's current location. Inspired by the function of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) neurons in natural predators, the use of a predictive model that is built using an encoder-decoder Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network and can produce a more accurate estimate of the evader's future location is proposed. This enables an even quicker capture of a target when compared to previously used filtering-based methods. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated by setting up these agents in an environment based in the Modular Open Robots Simulation Engine (MORSE). Cross-domain adaptability of the method, without the explicit need to retrain the prediction model is demonstrated by evaluating it in another domain.
ContributorsGodbole, Sumedh (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021