Developing Novel Auxiliary Technologies for Crisis Tracking

Description

Often, a well-organized, concerted response can greatly reduce the damage inflicted by large-scale disasters. An important factor affecting our ability to efficiently and promptly respond to crises is the availability of quality information to first-responders about the ground realities of the affected areas. During times of crises, conventional sources of communication are often disrupted and hence, the availability and reliability of information is called into question. However, we can leverage the vast amounts of data from social media sources such as Twitter to provide relevant information on resources and aid required in the affected areas. The current project is aimed at continuing improvement of the TweetTracker and CrisisTracker platforms with the primary purpose of providing timely, accurate, and unbiased information to dispatchers and first responders as well as researchers. The objective of this project is to empower first-responders with relevant, actionable local information gleaned from social media. Of course, the volume, variety and velocity of social media data imposes interesting challenges with regard to handling big data handling capabilities. Here, we draw from our expertise in successfully building and deploying systems such as ASU Coordination Tracker (ACT), BlogTrackers, CrisisTracker, and TweetTracker platforms to tackle these big data issues.

TweetTracker

Our latest system TweetTracker focuses on tweets collected from Twitter to support event monitoring and analysis. More information about this project can be found here.

News

• Scientists say fake news means real trouble

Invited Talks by the PI

• "Data Mining and Advanced Topics", CAS DragonStar Summer Lectures, Guilin, China. July 9-14, 2015
• "Advancing the Frontier of Social Media Mining”, Workshop on Social Multimedia Data Mining (ICDM), Shenzhen, China. December 12, 2014.
• "Social Media Mining: Looking Ahead”, Second HKUST-USC Big Data Applications Workshop, HKUST, China. December 12, 2014.
• "Social Media Mining: Looking Ahead”, Third China National Conference on Social Media Processing, Beijing, China. November 2, 2014.
• "Mining Social Media: Big Data, New Challenges”, Big Data Summit, Sydney, Australia. October 27-28, 2014.
• "Deepening Our Understanding of Social Media via Data Mining”, LinkedIn, California. October 6, 2014.
• "Keeping Pace with Big Data: A Data Mining Perspective”, NSF Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Infrastructure and Building Resilience and Sustainability, Beijing, China. September 19-20, 2014.
• "Advancing the Frontier of Social Media Mining”, CIDSE Faculty Talk Series, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. September, 2014.
• Summer School on Foundations and Applications of Social Network Analysis & Mining, Hellenic American College, Athens, Greece. June 2-6, 2014.

Publications

• Books and Book Chapters
• Huiji Gao and Huan Liu. "Mining Human Mobility in Location-Based Social Networks", Morgan & Claypool Publisher, April, 2015.
• Reza Zafarani, Mohammad Ali Abbasi, and Huan Liu. "Social Media Mining: An Introduction”, ISBN-13: 978-1107018853, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Shamanth Kumar, Fred Morstatter, and Huan Liu. "Twitter Data Analytics”, ISBN-13: 978-1461493716, Springer, 2014
• Shamanth Kumar, Fred Morstatter, and Huan Liu. "Analyzing Twitter Data,” in Twitter: A Digital Socioscope, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Huiji Gao and Huan Liu. "Time-Aware Personalized Location Recommendation”, Encyclopedia of GIS, 2nd Edition, Springer. Editors: Shashi Shekhar and Hui Xiong.


• Journal Articles
• Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu. "Evaluation without Ground Truth in Social Media Research”, Communications of the ACM, 2015.
• Jiliang Tang, Yi Chang and Huan Liu."Mining Social Media with Social Theories: A Survey," SIGKDD Explorations, 2014. A Preprint
• Jiliang Tang, Huiji Gao, Atish Das Sarma, Yingzhou Bi, and Huan Liu. "Trust Evolution: Modeling and Its Applications," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Forthcoming
• Zhi-Dan Zhao, Zi-Gang Huang, Liang Huang, Huan Liu, and Ying-Cheng Lai, "Scaling and correlation of human movements in cyberspace and physical space," Physical Review E, 2014
• Emily Schnebele, Guido Cervone, Shamanth Kumar, Nigel Waters "Flood Estimation and Analysis in a Variable and Changing Environment", Special Issue on Flood Estimation and Analysis in a Variable and Changing Environment in Water, 2014
• Huiji Gao, Jiliang Tang and Huan Liu.”Solving the Cold Start Problem in Location Recommendation with Geo-Social Correlations”, Data mining and Knowledge Discovery, Springer. 29(2): 299-323, 2015.
• Pritam Gundecha , Geoffrey Barbier, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "'User Vulnerability and its Reduction on a Social Networking Site'', ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. 9(2): Pages 12:1-12:25, 2014.
• Jiliang Tang and Huan Liu. "An Unsupervised Feature Selection Framework for Social Media Data'', IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 26(12): 2914-1927, 2014.


• Conference Papers
• Reza Zafarani, and Huan Liu. "10 Bits of Surprise: Detecting Malicious Users with Minimum Information”. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2015.
• Jundong Li, Xia Hu, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "Unsupervised Streaming Feature Selection in Social Media”. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2015.
• Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "Toward Dual Roles of Users in Recommender Systems”. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2015.
• Fred Morstatter, Jürgen Pfeffer, Katja Mayer, and Huan Liu. "Text, Topics, and Turkers: Evaluation of Statistical Topics”. ACM Hypertext and Social Media, 2015.
• Justin Sampson, Fred Morstatter, Ross Maciejewski, and Huan Liu. "Surpassing the Limit: Keyword Clustering to Improve Twitter Sample Coverage”. ACM Hypertext and Social Media 2015.
• Jiliang Tang, Chikashi Nobata, Anlei Dong, Yi Chang and Huan Liu. "Propagation-based Sentiment Analysis for Microblogging Data". SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2015.
• Jiliang Tang, Shiyu Chang, Charu Aggarwal, and Huan Liu. "Negative Link Prediction in Social Media”. ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Shanghai, China. February 2-6, 2015.
• Ashwin Rajadesingan, Reza Zafarani, and Huan Liu. "Sarcasm Detection on Twitter: A Behavioral Modeling Approach”. ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Shanghai, China. February 2-6, 2015.
• Suhas Ranganath, Jiliang Tang, Xia Hu, Hari Sundaram, and Huan Liu. "Leveraging Social Foci for Information Seeking in Social Media”. The 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Austin, TX. January 25-30, 2015.
• Huiji Gao, Jiliang Tang, Xia Hu, and Huan Liu. "Content-Aware Point of Interest Recommendation on Location-Based Social Networks”. The 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Austin, TX. January 25-30, 2015.
• Xia Hu, Jiliang Tang, Huiji Gao, and Huan Liu. "Social Spammer Detection with Sentiment Information”. IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Shenzhen, China. December 14-17, 2014.
• Jiliang Tang, Xia Hu, Yi Chang, and Huan Liu. "Predictability of Distrust with Interaction Data", ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Shanghai, China. November 3-7, 2014.
• Shamanth Kumar, Huan Liu, and Fred Morstatter. "Social Computing and Information in the New Information Age, presentation", Intelligence in Science. Brussels, Belgium. October 8-9, 2013
• Jiliang Tang, Xia Hu, and Huan Liu. "Is Distrust the Negation of Trust? The Value of Distrust in Social Media", 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT2014), 1–4 Sep 2014, Santiago, Chile.
• Shamanth Kumar, Xia Hu, and Huan Liu. "A Behavior Analytics Approach to Identifying Tweets from Crisis Regions", short paper, 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT2014), 1–4 Sep 2014, Santiago, Chile.
• Mohammad Ali Abbasi, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "Scalable Learning of Users' Preferences Using Networked Data”, 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT2014), 1–4 Sep 2014, Santiago, Chile.
• Mohammad Ali Abbasi, Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu. " Am I More Similar to My Followers or Followees? Homophily Effect in Directed Online Social Networks", short paper, 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT2014), 1–4 Sep 2014, Santiago, Chile.
• Xia Hu, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "Online Social Spammer Detection". In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014). July 27-31, 2014. Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
• Xia Hu, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. "Leveraging Knowledge across Media for Spammer Detection in Microblogging". In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2014). July 6-11, 2014. Gold Coast, Australia.
• Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu."Users Joining Multiple Sites: Distributions and Patterns", International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, June 2014.
• Fred Morstatter, Nichola Lubold, Heather Pon-Barry, Jürgen Pfeffer, and Huan Liu. "Finding Eyewitness Tweets During Crises", ACL Workshop on Language Technology and Computational Social Science, Baltimore, Maryland. June 22-27, 2014.


• Awards
• Huan Liu received the "Best Researcher Award”, Senior Faculty, (CIDSE) 2015
• Jiliang Tang received the "ACM SIGKDD2015 Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner Up” , 2015
• Jiliang Tang received the "A Fulton Schools of Engineering Dean's Dissertation Award” , (CIDSE) 2015
• Jiliang Tang received the "Outstanding Computer Science PhD Student in CIDSE Award” , (CIDSE) 2015
• Xia Hu received the "Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Fulton Schools of Engineering”, (CIDSE) 2015
• ASU President’s Award for Innovation 2014

Project Members (current and former)

• Huan Liu
• Shamanth Kumar
• Fred Morstatter
• Justin Sampson
• Huiji Gao
• Xia Hu
• Ashwin Rajadesingan
• Jiliang Tang
• Reza Zafarani
• Mohammad Ali Abbasi
• Isaac Jones
• Suhas Ranganath
• Grant Marshall
• Daniel Howe
• Joshua Stiefer

Acknowledgments

Created on March 13,2017
Contact: Huan Liu.

Last Updated: March 13, 2017