Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userUnderstanding and Monitoring Human Trafficking via Social Sensors: A Sociological Approach
63
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Yang Yang
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Human trafficking is a serious social problem, and it is challenging mainly because of its difficulty in collecting and organizing related information. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, it provides us a novel channel to tackle the problem of human trafficking through detecting and analyzing a large amount of human trafficking related information. Existing supervised learning methods cannot be directly applied to this problem due to the distinct characteristics of the social media data. First, the short, noisy, and unstructured textual information makes traditional learning algorithms less effective in detecting human trafficking related tweets. Second, complex social interactions lead to a high-dimensional feature space and thus present great computational challenges. In the meanwhile, social sciences theories such as homophily have been well established and achieved success in various social media mining applications. Motivated by the sociological findings, in this paper, we propose to investigate whether the Network Structure Information (NSI) could be potentially helpful for the human trafficking problem. In particular, a novel mathematical optimization framework is proposed to integrate the network structure into content modeling. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in detecting human trafficking related information.
rate research
Read More
The information collected by mobile phone operators can be considered as the most detailed information on human mobility across a large part of the population. The study of the dynamics of human mobility using the collected geolocations of users, and applying it to predict future users locations, has been an active field of research in recent years. In this work, we study the extent to which social phenomena are reflected in mobile phone data, focusing in particular in the cases of urban commute and major sports events. We illustrate how these events are reflected in the data, and show how information about the events can be used to improve predictability in a simple model for a mobile phone users location.
As the largest public blockchain-based platform supporting smart contracts, Ethereum has accumulated a large number of user transaction records since its debut in 2014. Analysis of Ethereum transaction records, however, is still relatively unexplored till now. Modeling the transaction records as a static simple graph, existing methods are unable to accurately characterize the temporal and multiplex features of the edges. In this brief, we first model the Ethereum transaction records as a complex network by incorporating time and amount features of the transactions, and then design several flexible temporal walk strategies for random-walk based graph representation of this large-scale network. Experiments of temporal link prediction on real Ethereum data demonstrate that temporal information and multiplicity characteristic of edges are indispensable for accurate modeling and understanding of Ethereum transaction networks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected peoples lives around the world on an unprecedented scale. We intend to investigate hoarding behaviors in response to the pandemic using large-scale social media data. First, we collect hoarding-related tweets shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus. Next, we analyze the hoarding and anti-hoarding patterns of over 42,000 unique Twitter users in the United States from March 1 to April 30, 2020, and dissect the hoarding-related tweets by age, gender, and geographic location. We find the percentage of females in both hoarding and anti-hoarding groups is higher than that of the general Twitter user population. Furthermore, using topic modeling, we investigate the opinions expressed towards the hoarding behavior by categorizing these topics according to demographic and geographic groups. We also calculate the anxiety scores for the hoarding and anti-hoarding related tweets using a lexical approach. By comparing their anxiety scores with the baseline Twitter anxiety score, we reveal further insights. The LIWC anxiety mean for the hoarding-related tweets is significantly higher than the baseline Twitter anxiety mean. Interestingly, beer has the highest calculated anxiety score compared to other hoarded items mentioned in the tweets.
The micromobility is shaping first- and last-mile travels in urban areas. Recently, shared dockless electric scooters (e-scooters) have emerged as a daily alternative to driving for short-distance commuters in large cities due to the affordability, easy accessibility via an app, and zero emissions. Meanwhile, e-scooters come with challenges in city management, such as traffic rules, public safety, parking regulations, and liability issues. In this paper, we collected and investigated 5.8 million scooter-tagged tweets and 144,197 images, generated by 2.7 million users from October 2018 to March 2020, to take a closer look at shared e-scooters via crowdsourcing data analytics. We profiled e-scooter usages from spatial-temporal perspectives, explored different business roles (i.e., riders, gig workers, and ridesharing companies), examined operation patterns (e.g., injury types, and parking behaviors), and conducted sentiment analysis. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first large-scale systematic study on shared e-scooters using big social data.
Does engagement with opposing views help break down ideological `echo chambers; or does it backfire and reinforce them? This question remains critical as academics, policymakers and activists grapple with the question of how to regulate political discussion on social media. In this study, we contribute to the debate by examining the impact of opposing views within a major climate change skeptic online community on Reddit. A large sample of posts (N = 3000) was manually coded as either dissonant or consonant which allowed the automated classification of the full dataset of more than 50,000 posts, with codes inferred from linked websites. We find that ideologically dissonant submissions act as a stimulant to activity in the community: they received more attention (comments) than consonant submissions, even though they received lower scores through up-voting and down-voting. Users who engaged with dissonant submissions were also more likely to return to the forum. Consistent with identity theory, confrontation with opposing views triggered activity in the forum, particularly among users that are highly engaged with the community. In light of the findings, theory of social identity and echo chambers is discussed and enhanced.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
