Characterizing Pedophile Conversations on the Internet using Online Grooming

Cyber-crime targeting children such as online pedophile activity are a major and a growing concern to society. A deep understanding of predatory chat conversations on the Internet has implications in designing effective solutions to automatically identify malicious conversations from regular conversations. We believe that a deeper understanding of the pedophile conversation can result in more sophisticated and robust surveillance systems than majority of the current systems relying only on shallow processing such as simple word-counting or key-word spotting. In this paper, we study pedophile conversations from the perspective of online grooming theory and perform a series of linguistic-based empirical analysis on several pedophile chat conversations to gain useful insights and patterns. We manually annotated 75 pedophile chat conversations with six stages of online grooming and test several hypothesis on it. The results of our experiments reveal that relationship forming is the most dominant online grooming stage in contrast to the sexual stage. We use a widely used word-counting program (LIWC) to create psycho-linguistic profiles for each of the six online grooming stages to discover interesting textual patterns useful to improve our understanding of the online pedophile phenomenon. Furthermore, we present empirical results that throw light on various aspects of a pedophile conversation such as probability of state transitions from one stage to another, distribution of a pedophile chat conversation across various online grooming stages and correlations between pre-defined word categories and online grooming stages

IT for more effective team collaboration

ICT bring new possibilities in support of team cooperation, above all in creation and sharing of common content. On base of comparison of various systems for support of the cooperation it was found out that some systems purposefully solve a flow of time planning in a firm environment (e.g. Novell GroupWise), others supports in various way a cooperation in common contents space (discussion groups, Wiki, WCMS). Changes in approach to cooperation management appear in the social network. A substantial phenomenon of the present systems for cooperation support is their virtuality. The common space is „somewhere“ and a user can share (use) it from anywhere, if he/she is connected to the internet. An example still more often used is Google Apps.Collaborative software, groupware, GroupWise, Moodle Forums, Wiki, CMS, social networks, Google docs, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, GA, IN,

A user-oriented network forensic analyser: the design of a high-level protocol analyser

Network forensics is becoming an increasingly important tool in the investigation of cyber and computer-assisted crimes. Unfortunately, whilst much effort has been undertaken in developing computer forensic file system analysers (e.g. Encase and FTK), such focus has not been given to Network Forensic Analysis Tools (NFATs). The single biggest barrier to effective NFATs is the handling of large volumes of low-level traffic and being able to exact and interpret forensic artefacts and their context – for example, being able extract and render application-level objects (such as emails, web pages and documents) from the low-level TCP/IP traffic but also understand how these applications/artefacts are being used. Whilst some studies and tools are beginning to achieve object extraction, results to date are limited to basic objects. No research has focused upon analysing network traffic to understand the nature of its use – not simply looking at the fact a person requested a webpage, but how long they spend on the application and what interactions did they have with whilst using the service (e.g. posting an image, or engaging in an instant message chat). This additional layer of information can provide an investigator with a far more rich and complete understanding of a suspect’s activities. To this end, this paper presents an investigation into the ability to derive high-level application usage characteristics from low-level network traffic meta-data. The paper presents a three application scenarios – web surfing, communications and social networking and demonstrates it is possible to derive the user interactions (e.g. page loading, chatting and file sharing ) within these systems. The paper continues to present a framework that builds upon this capability to provide a robust, flexible and user-friendly NFAT that provides access to a greater range of forensic information in a far easier format

Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships

Comparison of Moodle and ATutor LMSs

E-learning is a technology that plays an important role in modern education and training. Its great importance lies in the fact that it makes learning content readily available at any place at any time. This paper examines and evaluates two of current systems Moodle and ATutor. The main aim of this paper is to identify the aspects of theese LMS systems, examine their functional features, modules, standards, hardware and software requirements, and compare them

Accessible Chats for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments in Mobile Devices (Doctoral Consortium),

Proceedings of: Seventh IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. Took place May 29-31, 2013 in Paris (France). The event Web site is http://www.rcis-conf.com/rcis2013/The use of chats in Mobile Devices (MD) for learning environments is being increased in the last decade. However, they present many accessibility barriers that prevent people from using them. As a result, some people do not have the same opportunities to learn. This research aims to solve the accessibility barriers of chats in learning environments for its use in MDs. Thus, this paper presents the proposal of an model-based design and the strategy development process to create an accessible chatThis research work has been partially supported by the Regional Government of Madrid under the Research Network MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy under the project MULTIMEDICA (TIN2010-20644-C03-01)Publicad

Methodological issues in developing a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small group chat communication

In CSCL research, collaboration through chat has primarily been studied in dyadic settings. This article discusses three issues that emerged during the development of a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small group chat communication: a) the unit of analysis and unit fragmentation, b) the reconstruction of the response structure and c) determining reliability without overestimation. Threading, i.e. connections between analysis units, proved essential to handle unit fragmentation, to reconstruct the response structure and for reliability of coding. In addition, a risk for reliability overestimation was illustrated. Implications for analysis methodology in CSCL are discussed

Conventions and mutual expectations — understanding sources for web genres

Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves

Social Bots: Human-Like by Means of Human Control?

Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their application is even suspected to be partly responsible for recent election results. Astonishingly, the term `Social Bot' is not well defined and different scientific disciplines use divergent definitions. This work starts with a balanced definition attempt, before providing an overview of how social bots actually work (taking the example of Twitter) and what their current technical limitations are. Despite recent research progress in Deep Learning and Big Data, there are many activities bots cannot handle well. We then discuss how bot capabilities can be extended and controlled by integrating humans into the process and reason that this is currently the most promising way to go in order to realize effective interactions with other humans.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure