EAGER

Adolescents have fully embraced social networks for socializing and communicating. However, cyberbullying has become widely recognized as a serious social problem, especially for adolescents using social networks. Also, cyberbullying techniques change rapidly. Perpetrators can use the camera-capacity of their mobile devices to bully others through making and distributing harmful pictures or videos of their victims via mobile social networks.

Recent improvements in computing capabilities, data collection, and data science have enabled tremendous advances in scientific data analysis. However, the relevant data are often highly sensitive (e.g., Census records, tax records, medical records). This project addresses an emerging and critical scientific problem: Privacy concerns limit access to raw data that might reveal information about individuals. Techniques to "sanitize" such data (e.g., anonymization) could have negative impact on the quality of the scientific results that use the data.

The explosion in data gathering has greatly exacerbated existing privacy issues in computing systems and created new ones due to the increase in the scale and the scope of available data as well as the advances in the capabilities of computational data analysis. Software professionals typically have no formal training or education on sociotechnical aspects of privacy. As a result, addressing privacy issues raised by a system is frequently an afterthought and/or a matter of compliance-check during the late phases of the system development lifecycle.

Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. The PIs will study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the way we catch and stop such bots. Experience suggests that political bots are most likely to appear during an international crisis, and are usually designed to promote the interests of a government in trouble.

This project aims to address privacy concerns of smartphone users. In particular, it investigates how the usages of the smartphone applications (apps) may reshape users' privacy perceptions and what is the implication of such reshaping. There has been recent work that investigates privacy leakage and potential defense mechanisms. However, so far there is only limited understanding on the consequences of such privacy losses, especially when large amount of privacy information leaked from smartphone users across many apps.