Social media has emerged as a primary source for accessing news due to its capacity to swiftly disseminate information from a myriad of sources, often without stringent filtration. This accessibility is particularly beneficial during exigent circumstances, affording individuals diverse perspectives on unfolding events. Consequently, a growing number of individuals rely on social media alongside traditional news outlets. However, the nature of information transmission within social media platforms fosters an echo chamber effect, wherein users are exposed predominantly to content aligned with their existing beliefs, leading to several deleterious consequences. Primarily, social media exacerbates societal divisions by amplifying pre-existing ideological segregation. Moreover, the susceptibility of social media content to manipulation renders it a potent tool for the dissemination of misinformation and propaganda, a concern underscored by numerous scholars. This dissertation delves into the phenomenon of social network polarization at a multi-level. The fist study examines social network polarization through the lens of activity generated by social bots. The second study investigates the relationship between social network polarization and external influences such as governmental announcements and vaccine availability in Kuwaiti twitter dataset. Building upon these macro-level analyses, the dissertation introduces methodologies for micro-level diagnosis of social network shifts, utilizing tweet-level textual analysis. Lastly, a masked aspect-based stance detection model is developed using weakly labeled datasets. This model facilitates the expedient prediction of individuals' stances on specific topics, offering a pragmatic alternative to labor-intensive human labeling systems. Through these multifaceted analyses and model developments, this research aims to provide insights into the detection of stances within real-world social network datasets, contributing to the understanding of and ability to navigate social media polarization.

Social networking platforms have redefined communication, serving as conduits forswift global information dissemination on contemporary topics and trends. This research probes information cascade (IC) dynamics, focusing on viral IC, where user-shared information gains rapid, widespread attention. Implications of IC span advertising, persuasion, opinion-shaping, and crisis response. First, this dissertation aims to unravel the context behind viral content, particularly in the realm of the digital world, introducing a semi-supervised taxonomy induction framework (STIF). STIF employs state-of-the-art term representation, topical phrase detection, and clustering to organize terms into a two-level topic taxonomy. Social scientists then assess the topic clusters for coherence and completeness. STIF proves effective, significantly reducing human coding efforts (up to 74%) while accurately inducing taxonomies and term-to-topic mappings due to the high purity of its topics. Second, to profile the drivers of virality, this study investigates messaging strategies influencing message virality. Three content-based hypotheses are formulated and tested, demonstrating that incorporation of “negativity bias,” “causal arguments,” and “threats to personal or societal core values” - singularly and jointly - significantly enhances message virality on social media, quantified by retweet counts. Furthermore, the study highlights framing narratives’ pivotal role in shaping discourse, particularly in adversarial campaigns. An innovative pipeline for automatic framing detection is introduced, and tested on a collection of texts on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Integrating representation learning, overlapping graph-clustering, and a unique Topic Actor Graph (TAG) synthesis method, the study achieves remarkable framing detection accuracy. The developed scoring mechanism maps sentences to automatically detect framing signatures. This pipeline attains an impressive F1 score of 92% and a 95% weighted accuracy for framing detection on a real-world dataset. In essence, this dissertation focuses on the multidimensional exploration of information cascade, uncovering the context and drivers of content virality, and automating framing detection. Through innovative methodologies like STIF, messaging strategy analysis, and TAG Frames, the research contributes valuable insights into the mechanics of viral content spread and framing nuances within the digital landscape, enriching fields such as advertisement, communication, public discourse, and crisis response strategies.

Social media has become a primary means of communication and a prominent source of information about day-to-day happenings in the contemporary world. The rise in the popularity of social media platforms in recent decades has empowered people with an unprecedented level of connectivity. Despite the benefits social media offers, it also comes with disadvantages. A significant downside to staying connected via social media is the susceptibility to falsified information or Fake News. Easy accessibility to social media and lack of truth verification tools favored the miscreants on online platforms to spread false propaganda at scale, ensuing chaos. The spread of misinformation on these platforms ultimately leads to mistrust and social unrest. Consequently, there is a need to counter the spread of misinformation which could otherwise have a detrimental impact on society. A notable example of such a case is the 2019 Covid pandemic misinformation spread, where coordinated misinformation campaigns misled the public on vaccination and health safety. The advancements in Natural Language Processing gave rise to sophisticated language generation models that can generate realistic-looking texts. Although the current Fake News generation process is manual, it is just a matter of time before this process gets automated at scale and generates Neural Fake News using language generation models like the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the third generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3). Moreover, given that the current state of fact verification is manual, it calls for an urgent need to develop reliable automated detection tools to counter Neural Fake News generated at scale. Existing tools demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in detecting Neural Fake News but exhibit a black box behavior. Incorporating explainability into the Neural Fake News classification task will build trust and acceptance amongst different communities and decision-makers. Therefore, the current study proposes a new set of interpretable discriminatory features. These features capture statistical and stylistic idiosyncrasies, achieving an accuracy of 82% on Neural Fake News classification. Furthermore, this research investigates essential dependency relations contributing to the classification process. Lastly, the study concludes by providing directions for future research in building explainable tools for Neural Fake News detection.

Alzheimer's disease is the 6th leading cause of death in the United States and vastly affects millions across the world each year. Currently, there are no medications or treatments available to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. The GENUS therapy out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presently shows positive results in slowing the progression of the disease among animal trials. This thesis is a continuation of that study, to develop and build a testing apparatus for human clinical trials. Included is a complete outline into the design, development, testing measures, and instructional aid for the final apparatus.

A human communications research project at Arizona State University aurally

recorded the daily interactions of aware and consenting employees and their visiting

clients at the Software Factory, a software engineering consulting team, over a three

year period. The resulting dataset contains valuable insights on the communication

networks that the participants formed however it is far too vast to be processed manually

by researchers. In this work, digital signal processing techniques are employed

to develop a software toolkit that can aid in estimating the observable networks contained

in the Software Factory recordings. A four-step process is employed that starts

with parsing available metadata to initially align the recordings followed by alignment

estimation and correction. Once aligned, the recordings are processed for common

signals that are detected across multiple participants’ recordings which serve as a

proxy for conversations. Lastly, visualization tools are developed to graphically encode

the estimated similarity measures to efficiently convey the observable network

relationships to assist in future human communications research.

Machine learning (ML) has played an important role in several modern technological innovations and has become an important tool for researchers in various fields of interest. Besides engineering, ML techniques have started to spread across various departments of study, like health-care, medicine, diagnostics, social science, finance, economics etc. These techniques require data to train the algorithms and model a complex system and make predictions based on that model. Due to development of sophisticated sensors it has become easier to collect large volumes of data which is used to make necessary hypotheses using ML. The promising results obtained using ML have opened up new opportunities of research across various departments and this dissertation is a manifestation of it. Here, some unique studies have been presented, from which valuable inference have been drawn for a real-world complex system. Each study has its own unique sets of motivation and relevance to the real world. An ensemble of signal processing (SP) and ML techniques have been explored in each study. This dissertation provides the detailed systematic approach and discusses the results achieved in each study. Valuable inferences drawn from each study play a vital role in areas of science and technology, and it is worth further investigation. This dissertation also provides a set of useful SP and ML tools for researchers in various fields of interest.

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.

The media disperses a large amount of information daily pertaining to political events social movements, and societal conflicts. Media pertaining to these topics, no matter the format of publication used, are framed a particular way. Framing is used not for just guiding audiences to desired beliefs, but also to fuel societal change or legitimize/delegitimize social movements. For this reason, tools that can help to clarify when changes in social discourse occur and identify their causes are of great use. This thesis presents a visual analytics framework that allows for the exploration and visualization of changes that occur in social climate with respect to space and time. Focusing on the links between data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and a streaming RSS news data set, users can be cued into interesting events enabling them to form and explore hypothesis. This visual analytics framework also focuses on improving intervention detection, allowing users to hypothesize about correlations between events and happiness levels, and supports collaborative analysis.

Stock market news and investing tips are popular topics in Twitter. In this dissertation, first I utilize a 5-year financial news corpus comprising over 50,000 articles collected from the NASDAQ website matching the 30 stock symbols in Dow Jones Index (DJI) to train a directional stock price prediction system based on news content. Next, I proceed to show that information in articles indicated by breaking Tweet volumes leads to a statistically significant boost in the hourly directional prediction accuracies for the DJI stock prices mentioned in these articles. Secondly, I show that using document-level sentiment extraction does not yield a statistically significant boost in the directional predictive accuracies in the presence of other 1-gram keyword features. Thirdly I test the performance of the system on several time-frames and identify the 4 hour time-frame for both the price charts and for Tweet breakout detection as the best time-frame combination. Finally, I develop a set of price momentum based trade exit rules to cut losing trades early and to allow the winning trades run longer. I show that the Tweet volume breakout based trading system with the price momentum based exit rules not only improves the winning accuracy and the return on investment, but it also lowers the maximum drawdown and achieves the highest overall return over maximum drawdown.

This dissertation explores the various online radicalization and recruitment practices of groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, as well as Salafi Jihadists in general. I will also outline the inadequacies of the federal government's engagement with terrorist / Islamist ideologies and explore the ways in which early 20th century foundational Islamist theorists like Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Abul ala Mawdudi have affected contemporary extremist Islamist groups, while exploring this myth of the ideal caliphate which persists in the ideology of contemporary extremist Islamist groups. In a larger sense, I am arguing that exploitation of the internet (particularly social networking platforms) in the radicalization of new communities of followers is much more dangerous than cyberterrorism (as in attacks on cyber networks within the government and the private sector), which is what is most often considered to be the primary threat that terrorists pose with their presence on the internet. Online radicalization should, I argue, be given more consideration when forming public policy because of the immediate danger that it poses, especially given the rise of microterrorism. Similarly, through the case studies that I am examining, I am bringing the humanities into the discussion of extremist (religious) rhetorics, an area of discourse that those scholars have largely ignored.