Rahat Ibn Rafiq

Analyzing Labeled Cyberbullying Incidents on the Instagram Social Network

Cyberbullying is a growing problem affecting more than half of all American teens. The main goal of this paper is to study labeled cyberbullying incidents in the Instagram social network. In this work, we have collected a sample data set consisting of Instagram images and their associated comments. We then designed a labeling study and employed human contributors at the crowd-sourced CrowdFlower website to label these media sessions for cyberbullying. A detailed analysis of the labeled data is then presented, including a study of relationships between cyberbullying and a host of features such as cyberaggression, profanity, social graph features, temporal commenting behavior, linguistic content, and image content.

Careful what you share in six seconds: Detecting cyberbullying instances in Vine

As online social networks have grown in popularity, teenage users have become increasingly exposed to the threats of cyberbullying. The primary goal of this research paper is to investigate cyberbullying behaviors in Vine, a mobile based video-sharing online social network, and design novel approaches to automatically detect instances of cyberbullying over Vine media sessions. We first collect a set of Vine video sessions and use CrowdFlower, a crowd-sourced website, to label the media sessions for cyberbullying and cyberaggression. We then perform a detailed analysis of cyberbullying behavior in Vine. Based on the labeled data, we design a classifier to detect instances of cyberbullying and evaluate the performance of that classifier.

Prediction of cyberbullying incidents in a media-based social network

Cyberbullying is a major problem affecting more than half of all American teens. Prior work has largely focused on detecting cyberbullying after the fact. In this paper, we investigate the prediction of cyberbullying incidents in Instagram, a popular media-based social network. The novelty of this work is building a predictor that can anticipate the occurrence of cyberbullying incidents before they happen. The Instagram media-based social network is well-suited to such prediction since there is an initial posting of an image typically with an associated text caption, followed later by the text comments that form the basis of a specific cyberbullying incident. We extract several important features from the initial posting data for automated cyberbullying prediction, including profanity and linguistic content of the text caption, image content, as well as social graph parameters and temporal content behavior. Evaluations using a real-world Instagram dataset demonstrate that our method achieves high performance in predicting the occurrence of cyberbullying incidents.

Leveraging BLE and social trust to enable mobile in situ collaborations

Collaborative computing, where co-located mobile devices collaborate to perform a large computing task has emerged as an important computing paradigm. Two key challenges in this paradigm are discovering nearby mobile devices that are willing to participate and establishing trusted connections. This paper presents a middleware layer called CoTrust that addresses these two important issues. CoTrust is comprised of a collaboration protocol for negotiation between a small group of co-located mobile devices over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It incorporates a trust model to enable collaborators to assess the trust level of a collaboration based only on their observed interactions on the social network with their peers. A prototype implementation of CoTrust on Android smartphones demonstrates its feasibility, energy efficiency as well as good performance.

Analysis and detection of labeled cyberbullying instances in Vine, a video-based social network

The last decade has experienced an exponential growth of popularity in online social networks. This growth in popularity has also paved the way for the threat of cyberbullying to grow to an extent that was never seen before. Online social network users are now constantly under the threat of cyberbullying from predators and stalkers. In our research paper, we perform a thorough investigation of cyberbullying instances in Vine, a video-based online social network. We collect a set of media sessions (shared videos with their associated meta-data) and then label those using CrowdFlower, a crowd-sourced website for cyberaggression and cyberbullying. We also perform a second survey that labels the videos’ contents and emotions exhibited. After the labeling of the media sessions, we provide a detailed analysis of the media sessions to investigate the cyberbullying and cyberaggression behavior in Vine. After the analysis, we train different classifiers based upon the labeled media sessions. We then investigate, evaluate and compare the classifers’ performances to detect instances of cyberbullying.

Poster: Detection of Cyberbullying in a Mobile Social Network: Systems Issues

Cyberbullying is a major problem affecting more than half of all American teens, and has been attributed to suicidal behavior among teens. Instagram, a media-based mobile social network, is one of the most popular social networks used for cyberbullying. In this paper, we describe the development of classifiers to detect cyberbullying in Instagram. We identify systems issues that need to be considered in the design of a cyberbullying detection system.

Scalable and timely detection of cyberbullying in online social networks

Cyberbullying in Online Social Networks (OSNs) has grown to be a serious problem among teenagers. While a considerable amount of research has been conducted focusing on designing highly accurate classifiers to automatically detect cyberbullying instances in OSNs, two key practical issues remain to be worked upon, namely scalability of a cyberbullying detection system and timeliness of raising alerts whenever cyberbullying occurs. These two issues form the motivation of our work. We propose a multi-stage cyberbullying detection solution that drastically reduces the classification time and the time to raise alerts. The proposed system is highly scalable without sacrificing accuracy and highly responsive in raising alerts. The design is comprised of two novel components, a dynamic priority scheduler and an incremental classification mechanism. We have implemented this solution, and using data obtained from Vine, we conducted a thorough performance evaluation to demonstrate the utility and scalability of each of these components. We show that our complete solution is significantly more scalable and responsive than the current state of the art.

Analyzing Factors Impacting Revining on the Vine Social Network

Diffusion of information in the Vine video social network happens via a revining mechanism that enables accelerated propagation of news, rumors, and different types of videos. In this paper we aim to understand the revining behavior in Vine and how it may be impacted by different factors. We first look at general properties of information dissemination via the revining feature in Vine. Then, we examine the impact of video content on revining behavior. Finally, we examine how cyberbullying may impact the revining behavior. The insights from this analysis help motivate the design of more effective information dissemination and automatic classification of cyberbullying incidents in online social networks.