South Big Data Hub / Social Cybersecurity Working Group

Presenter: Kenny Joseph

Abstract/Description: Twitter users signal social identity in their profile descriptions, or bios, in a number of important but complex ways that are not well-captured by existing characterizations of how identity is expressed in language. Better ways of defining and measuring these expressions may therefore be useful both in understanding how social identity is expressed in text, and how the self is presented on Twitter. My presentation will discuss work that extends and makes three contributions in this stead. First, I will introduce the concept of a personal identifier, which is more representative of the ways in which identity is signaled in Twitter bios than the strict social psychological definition of identity. Second, I introduce a simple method to extract all personal identifiers expressed in a given bio. Finally, I will discuss a series of validation analyses that explore the strengths and limitations of our proposed method. This work is joint with former UB student Arjunil Pathak (now at Amazon), and current UB student Navid Madani.
Bio: Kenneth Joseph is an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Prior to joining the University at Buffalo, he was a postdoc at The Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, and graduated from the Societal Computing program at Carnegie Mellon University. He identifies as a computational social scientist, and is primarily interested in developing ways to measure and model how social inequality arises and is maintained, with a particular focus on the United States.

Presenter: Alice Marwick

Bio: Alice E. Marwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, which she co-founded, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies, and is currently investigating the relationship between disinformation and far-right online radicalization.

Presenter: Dr. Ugur Kursuncu

Bio: Ugur Kursuncu is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Georgia, and previously was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute, University of South Carolina His research is at the intersection of humans, society, and computers, designing socially responsible human-centered intelligent systems by integrating knowledge to enhance contemporary AI and data science methods.

Presenter: Dr. Manas Gaur
Institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Presenter: Dr. Gian Maria Campedelli
Institution: University of Trento, Italy

Presenter: Dr. Mia Bloom
Institution: Georgia State University

Sept. 2nd, 2021
Presenter: Megan Brown, James Bisbee,and Angela Lia

Bios:

Megan is a research engineer and research scientist at NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics. Megan researches disinformation, content moderation, and quantitative methods for measuring online behavior on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.

James is a postdoctoral fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. Previously, James was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. James received his PhD from NYU's Department of Politics in 2019. James now studies how economic dislocation influences politics using novel data -- ranging from Twitter and YouTube to the U.S. Census -- and quantitative methods.

Angelais a data science Ph.D. student at NYU working in the Center for Social Media and Politics. Her research interests include network analysis and natural language processing.

Date: 06/04/21
Moderator: Florence Hudson
Institution: NSF Big Data Hubs

Aug. 5th: Social Cybersecurity Working Group
Presenter: Vidhya Ramalingam
Title: Using technology to understand and counter violent extremism and hate online
Abstract/Description: NA


Bio: Vidhya Ramalingam is Founder of Moonshot CVE, an organization that uses technology to disrupt and counter violent extremism globally. She directs overall strategy and oversees campaigns, software development, and digital projects in over 25 countries. Under her leadership, Moonshot has pioneered new partnerships with tech companies to respond to violent extremism on their platforms, online intervention programs to pull individuals out of violent movements, and the use of automated messaging to disrupt hate groups online. Vidhya is recognized internationally for her role leading policy responses to white supremacist extremism and terrorism. Following the 2011 attacks in Norway, she led the European Union’s first inter-governmental initiative on white nationalist terrorism and extremism, initiated by the Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, and launched by the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs. She regularly advises Big Tech and Heads of State on tackling white supremacy online, including recently the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and Norway. She has testified before the U.S. Congress on the global threat posed by white nationalist terrorism. Vidhya also serves on the Board of Life After Hate, an organization set up by former white supremacists to help individuals leave hate groups. In 2020, she was named an Obama Leader by the Obama Foundation.

Date: 07/01/21
Presenter: Geoff Dobson
Institution: AIr Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, AFB


Bio: Geoffrey Dobson is a PhD candidate in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, focusing on agent-based modeling approaches to simulating cyber team performance. Geoff has been in the Air Force for 16 years, currently serving as a reservist assigned to the AIr Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, AFB in Dayton Ohio. In his full-time employment with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, Geoff works on cyber war exercises with various Department of Defense teams. In this role he's helped deliver over one hundred high fidelity, live-fire cyber war exercises, which has helped shape the ideas and concepts paramount to his research.

Date: 06/03/21
Presenter: Marshall Gunter
Institution: Nexalogy

Bio: Marshall is responsible for the engineering teams and architecture that power Nexalogy's advanced artificial intelligence tools. With over a decade of executive engineering leadership experience, Marshall has led engineering teams both large and small to drive and build great ideas into successful products. Marshall's engineering background is rooted in big data analysis. He has personally architected systems for both breadth and depth of data ingestion and throughput, processing billions of data points a day across hundreds of terabytes of footprint. Marshall will ensure the Nexalogy engineering department will continue to deliver the high-quality artificial intelligence products demanded by Nexalogy's clients.

January 7th: Social Cybersecurity Working Group
Presenter: Emma S. Spiro
Title: Election Disinformation: Real-time Analysis and Response
Abstract/Description: NA


Bio: Emma S. Spiro is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the UW Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. Dr. Spiro is a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute. Dr. Spiro is a PI and Co-Founder of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. Dr. Spiro’s research involves the collection and analysis of large-scale social and behavioral data to answer key questions within the areas of sociology, information science, and social computing. Since early 2012, her work has focused on understanding social and information-related behaviors in the context of crisis events, including rumors, misinformation and collective sensemaking in online environments. Her work also explores the structure and dynamics of interpersonal and organizational networks in both online and offline environments. Her research has been published in leading journals such as PNAS, Social Networks, Field Methods, Demography and Information, Communication & Society. She also participates in premier conferences such as ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, and AAAI ICWSM. Dr. Spiro earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. She also holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society from Pomona College, as well as an M.A. from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at University of California, Irvine.

Cori Faklaris is a 4th year Phd candidate in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Her thesis-directed research lies in the human factors of cybersecurity, in two parallel tracks: (1) understanding people’s security attitudes and behaviors (such as predicting whether they will update software or explaining ignorance of UX cues to “fake news”), and (2) empowering people to keep themselves and their networks secure in a social context (such as defining needs and creating tools to better enable account sharing by couples or workgroups). This work is informed by her years of experience as a journalist and IT analyst and in managing social media accounts. Her two feline pandemic co-workers like to unexpectedly show up and join in during her remote talks. She, and they, live in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Date: 11/05/20
Presenter: Cori Faklaris
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University

Captain Iain Cruickshank is a data scientist at the U.S. Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force and a non-resident, associate researcher with Carnegie Mellon's CASOS Institute. Iain holds a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy and a Master's of Science from the University of Edinburgh which was obtained as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. He is a recent graduate of the Doctor of Philosophy in Societal Computing program at Carnegie Mellon University where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Prior to starting his Ph.D. at CMU, Iain worked in various elements of the U.S. Army to include as an advisor to the Afghan National Army while with the 101st Airborne Division and as a company commander and signals intelligence officer with the 780th Military Intelligence Cyber Brigade. Iain's current research areas are computational techniques for clustering social-based multi-modal data, social-cyber security, and machine learning applications for military intelligence.

Date: 09/03/20
Presenter: Iain Cruickshank
Institution: U.S. Army Artificial Intelligence Task Force

Over the last twenty-five years Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. He is co-founder and CEO of a machine learning company called Tanjo Inc. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO.

Date: 08/06/20
Presenter: Richard Boyd
Institution: Tanjo Machine Learning Inc.

Ingrid is an educator and innovator with extensive experience as a content creator, editor and writer in print, broadcast and on the Internet. She has exceptional knowledge of Web technologies and social networking and has developed multimedia content and curriculum for world-class interactive experiences.

She is currently on faculty at Howard University as an assistant professor/new media in the Department of Journalism. She began working in interactive media in 1985 as a member of the New York Time’s videotext project. She has worked online since 2001, most recently as a Web strategist for heartandsoul.com. She also worked as a senior programming manager for AOL’s Black Voices and as editor in chief at Essence.com.

Previously, she worked as a managing editor for startup magazines BET Weekend and Savoy. In addition, she has worked for several newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Times-Herald Record and the Poughkeepsie Journal. She is the editor of “Are Traditional Media Dead: Can Journalism Survive in the Digital World,” author of the critically acclaimed “The Nubian Wedding Book: Words and Rituals to Celebrate and Plan an African-American Wedding,” and the anthology “Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother.”

Ingrid graduated from City College of New York with a B.A. in art and from New York University with a Master’s in journalism. Her academic research interests are social media, multimedia news entrepreneurship, the black press, the digital divide and online education.

Date: 07/02/20
Presenter: Ingrid Sturgis
Institution: Howard University

Date: 06/04/20

Presenter: Dr. Deen Freelon
Institution: UNC-Chapel Hill
Title: “Black Trolls Matter and Other Conclusions from Analyzing State-Sponsored Disinformation"

The increasing ease with which disinformation or "fake news" is produced has been recently touted as a threat to democracy. One proposed solution is to teach people how to be better able to recognize fake news, and Facebook recently announced plans to attempt to crowd source fact checking. With this in mind, we have undertaken a large-scale study where for almost three months we sent out 5 articles per day, 4 days per week, that had appeared in the past 24 hours to be fact checked by 150 people each as well as 6 professional fact checkers. We will assess both the ability of individuals and the crowd to identify the veracity of news. I will also present plans for extending the study to cover Covid-19-related news, as well as how the pandemic may have changed the ability of individuals and the crowd to identify the veracity of non-Covid-19-related news.

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory, and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. He serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and numerous academic journals, and was the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. His original research was on mass political behavior in post-communist countries, including voting and elections, partisanship, public opinion formation, and protest participation. More recently, he has been at the forefront of the newly emerging field of study of the relationship between social media and politics. His research in this area has included studies on the effects of network diversity on tolerance, partisan echo chambers, online hate speech, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, disinformation and fake news, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, and Russian bots and trolls. An internationally recognized scholar, he has served as a keynote speaker for conferences in Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States, and has given over 100 invited research presentations at top domestic and international universities and research centers over the past 10 years. His research has appeared in over two-dozen scholarly journals and has been supported by a wide range of philanthropic foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation. His most recent book is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017), and he is the co-editor of the forthcoming Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Date: 05/07/20
Presenter: Joshua Tucker
Institution: New York University

Understanding communications between source and target requires deciphering the unique language, semantic and contextual characteristics reflected through sentiment, emotion, intention and divergent thinking. A context-aware and knowledge-enhanced computational approach to the analysis of these narratives breaks down this long-running and complex process into contextual building blocks that acknowledge inherent ambiguity, sparsity, and creativity.

Date: 04/02/20
Presenter: Ugur Kursuncu & Amit Sheth
Institution: University of South Carolina

Could debates push forward collective understanding? If possible, how do we make it happen? The analysis of large datasets documenting a century of scientific debates through criticizing and endorsing citations between millions of scholars and two decades of edit battles between Wikipedia contributors provides insights into the social mechanisms of debates and informs institutional arrangements to facilitate knowledge creation from debates on social media.

Date: 3/5/20
Presenter: Lingfei Wu
Institution: University of Pittsburgh

This talk covers research efforts demonstrating the mechanics of disinformation campaigns, i.e., conducted primarily through blogs (and vlogs) but strategically linking to a variety of other social media platforms (viz., YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, WhatsApp, etc.). The critical link among social media platforms different media orchestration strategies are discussed. Using socio-computational models that leverage social network analysis and cyber forensic analysis, prominent information actors and leading coordinators of disinformation campaigns (akin to flash mobs) are identified. Of the several case studies the research methodology has been applied to, the talk illustrates disinformation campaigns pertaining to the Indo-Pacific region, Baltic region, and NATO’s military exercises in Europe. The research has been transitioned into publicly available software programs, viz., Blogtrackers and a YouTubeTracker that will be showcased during the talk.

Date: 2/6/20
Presenter: Nitin Agarwal
Institution: University of Arkansas Little Rock