BlogTrackers: Combining Domain Knowledge and Novel Search Capabilities

Description

This research project is a preliminary joint effort to integrate domain knowledge of a special cultural interest with novel search capabilities for assessing political risks. In particular, this project attempts to address three critical questions in order to stay in the frontier of stability operations in a global, forward-looking view: 1. the importance of the blogosphere to military or stability operations; 2. the significance of the blog research to these operations; and 3. the identification and development of tools of blog tracking and analysis to understand the communities of interest and help advance global security and prosperity. We first provide background information on blogs - Web-based media with increasing popularity among youths all over the world, and on Indonesia – a strategically significant country that serves as a case study for the proposal. Secondly, we illustrate the pressing need for studying the blogosphere as a new dimension for identifying pre-conflict indicators and potential threats. Thirdly, we articulate the demand for novel search capabilities that can integrate domain knowledge in search and scale up with the inordinate number of disconnected blogs of special interests in the digital jungle. Finally, we propose to design, develop, deploy, and evaluate BlogTrackers, a proof-of-concept system that distills and manifests the proposed research tasks and derived results.

News Articles

Publications

• Dissertations
• Sai Moturu. Ph.D. dissertation on "Quantifying the Trustworthiness of User-Generated Social Media Content". School of Computing and Informatics, Arizona State University, Summer 2009.
• Nitin Agarwal. Ph.D. dissertation on "Social Computing in Blogosphere". School of Computing and Informatics, Arizona State University, Summer 2009.
• Journal Articles
• Nitin Agarwal, Magdiel Galan, Huan Liu, and Shankar Subramanya. "WisColl: Collective Wisdom based Blog Clustering". Journal of Information Science (forthcoming).
• Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. "Blogosphere: Research Issues, Tools, and Applications". SIGKDD Explorations, 10(1): pp. 18-31, July 2008.
• Mark Woodward, "Burma’s Generals and Cyclone Nargis: Incompetence, Callous Indifference or Both?" COMPOS Journal: Analysis, Commentary and News from the World of Strategic Communications, pp. 1-18, May 2008
• Mark Woodward, "PKS Against the Rest. The Justice and Prosperity Party and the 2007 Jakarta Election", Nanayang Technological University, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Commentary no. 55, April 2008
• Mark Woodward, "Indonesia's Religious Political Parties: Democratic Consolidation and Security in Post-New Order Indonesia", Asian Security, 4:1 (2008). pp. 41-60
• Mark Woodward, "Time to Stop Fooling Ourselves about Salafis" COMPOS Journal: Analysis, Commentary and News from the World of Strategic Communications, 2008
• Conferences
• Sai Moturu, Jian Yang, Huan Liu. "Quantifying Utility and Trustworthiness for Advice Shared on Online Social Media", Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking, IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom'09),, Aug 29-31, 2009. Vancouver, Canada.
• Sai Moturu, Huan Liu. "Evaluating the Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Articles through Quality and Credibility" (Poster), 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2009),, Oct 25-27, 2009. Orlando, Florida.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Sudheendra Murthy, Arunabha Sen, Xufei Wang. "A Social Identity Approach to Identify Familiar Strangers in a Social Network", 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM09), May 17-20, 2009. San Jose, California.
• Nitin Agarwal, Shamanth Kumar, Huan Liu, Mark Woodward. "BlogTrackers: A Tool for Sociologists to Track and Analyze Blogosphere" (Demonstration Paper), 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM09), May 17-20, 2009. San Jose, California.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Sanjay Sundarajan. "Understanding Group Interaction in Blogosphere: A Case Study", 2nd International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD08), September 15-16, 2008. Washington D.C.
• S. T. Moturu, Huan Liu, and W. Johnson. "Trust Evaluation in Health Information on the World Wide Web", IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC '08), August 20 - 24, 2008. Vancouver, Canada.
• Nitin Agarwal, Magdiel Galan, Huan Liu, and Shankar Subramanya. "Clustering Blogs with Collective Wisdom", 8th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE08), July 14-18, 2008. Yorktown Heights, New York.
• Nitin Agarwal "A Study of Communities and Influence in Blogosphere", 2nd SIGMOD PhD Innovative Database and Research Doctorate Consortium (IDAR08), June 13 2008. Vancouver, Canada.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Lei Tang, and Philip S. Yu. "Identifying Influential Bloggers in a Community", 1st International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM08), pp 207-218, February 11-12, 2008. Stanford, California.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Philip S. Yu. "Searching for `Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere: Problems and Challenges", NSF Symposium on Next-Generation Data Mining and Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation(NGDM07). October 10-12, Baltimore, MD.
• Books or Chapters
• Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu."Modeling and Data Mining in Blogosphere". Synthesis Lectures on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery No. 1, Morgan and Claypool Publishers, Robert Grossman (Editor), August 2009. Morgan and Claypool webiste; Amazon website.
• Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. "Trust in Blogosphere", in Encyclopedia of Database Systems, forthcoming.
• Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Michael J. Young, editors, "Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction", 2008, Springer.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, and Jianping Zhang. "A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere", Handbook of Research on Text and Web Mining, Technologies. Editors: Min Song and Yi-fang Brook Wu. Idea Group Inc.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Philip S. Yu. "Searching for 'Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere", Next Generation of Data Mining, Editors: Hillol Kargupta, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu, Rajeev Motwani, and Vipin Kumar. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.
• M. Woodward, H. Goodal, L.Cady, S. Corman, K. McDonald and C. Forbes, "The Iranian Letter to President Bush: Analysis and Recommendations". Weapons of Mass Persuasion. Strategic Communication to Combat Violent Extremism. Editors: S. Corman, A. Trethewey and H.Goodal. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
• Technical Reports
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, Shankara Subramanya, and Philip S. Yu. "Familiar Strangers: Connecting Dots on Blogosphere", Technical Report, TR-08-005, School of Computing Informatics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, 2008.
• Nitin Agarwal, Magdiel Galan, Huan Liu, Shankara Subramanya. "Clustering with Collective Wisdom - A Comparative Study", Technical Report, TR-08-004, School of Computing Informatics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, 2008.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, Philip S. Yu. "Searching for `Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere: Problems and Challenges", Technical Report, TR-07-008, CSE, School of Computing Informatics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, 2007.
• Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Lei. Tang. "Identifying the Influentials in Blogosphere", Technical Report, TR-07-004, CSE, School of Computing Informatics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, 2007.
• Tutorials
• Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. A Tutorial on "Blogosphere: Research Issues, Applications, and Tools", 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD08), August 24-27, 2008. Las Vegas, NV.
• Others
• A Special Issue of IEEE Internet Computing on "Social Computing in Blogosphere" scheduled to appear in 2010.
• M. Woodward, "On Heresy and Religious Freedom: The Ahmadiyah Movement in Islam and the Front for Defense of Islam in Indonesia", to be appeared.

Demonstration

• BlogTracker demonstration video can be downloaded by clicking here.
or get the flash video here.
Cannot play the video? Download VLC player here

PDFTracker

PDFTracker helps a user to parse, store, and analyze PDF (Portable Document Format) documents. PDF is a very flexible and convenient format that is widely used for storing documents. PDF Tracker makes searching and analyzing PDF documents easier.

Download the Demo version of PDFTracker here
User manual for the tool is available here
PDF document corpus used in the demo version of the tool can be downloaded here

Project Members (current and former)

• Huan Liu
• Mark Woodward
• Nitin Agarwal(Graduated)
• Alan Zheng Zhao
• Shamanth Kumar
• Shankara Subramanya (Graduated)
• Sai Moturu
• Xufei Wang
• David Webb

Acknowledgments

Created on August 1, 2008.
Contact: Huan Liu.

Last Updated: July 24, 2009