DancingLines: An Analytical Scheme to Depict Cross-Platform Event Popularity

Nowadays, events usually burst and are propagated online through multiple modern media like social networks and search engines. There exists various research discussing the event dissemination trends on individual medium, while few studies focus on event popularity analysis from a cross-platform perspective. Challenges come from the vast diversity of events and media, limited access to aligned datasets across different media and a great deal of noise in the datasets. In this paper, we design DancingLines, an innovative scheme that captures and quantitatively analyzes event popularity between pairwise text media. It contains two models: TF-SW, a semantic-aware popularity quantification model, based on an integrated weight coefficient leveraging Word2Vec and TextRank; and wDTW-CD, a pairwise event popularity time series alignment model matching different event phases adapted from Dynamic Time Warping. We also propose three metrics to interpret event popularity trends between pairwise social platforms. Experimental results on eighteen real-world event datasets from an influential social network and a popular search engine validate the effectiveness and applicability of our scheme. DancingLines is demonstrated to possess broad application potentials for discovering the knowledge of various aspects related to events and different media

Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity: Cyber Attack Detection using Social Media

Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach detects a broad range of cyber-attacks (e.g., distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, data breaches, and account hijacking) in an unsupervised manner using just a limited fixed set of seed event triggers. A new query expansion strategy based on convolutional kernels and dependency parses helps model reporting structure and aids in identifying key event characteristics. Through a large-scale analysis over Twitter, we demonstrate that our approach consistently identifies and encodes events, outperforming existing methods.Comment: 13 single column pages, 5 figures, submitted to KDD 201