Political Advocacy on the Web: Issue Networks in Online Debate Over the USA Patriot Act

This dissertation examines how people and organizations used the World Wide Web to discuss and debate a public policy in 2005, at a point of time when the Internet was viewed as a maturing medium for communication. Combining descriptive and quantitative frame analyses with an issue network analysis, the study evaluated the frames apparent in discourse concerning two key sections of the USA Patriot Act, while the issue network analysis probed hypertext linkages among Web pages where discussion was occurring. Sections 214 and 215 of the USA Patriot Act provided a contentious national issue with multiple stakeholders presumed to be attempting to frame issues connected to the two sections. The focus on two sections allowed frame and issue network contrasts to be made. The study sought evidence of an Internet effect to determine whether the Web, through the way people were using it, was having a polarizing, synthesizing, or fragmentizing effect on discussion and debate. Frame overlap and hypertext linkage patterns among actors in the issue networks indicated an overall tendency toward synthesis. The study also probed the degree to which there is a joining, or symbiosis, of Web content and structure, in part evidenced by whether patterns exist that like-minded groups are coming together to form online community through hypertext linkages. Evidence was found to support this conclusion among Web pages in several Internet domains, although questions remain about linking patterns among blogs due to limitations of the software used in the study. Organizational Web sites on average used a similar number of frames compared to other Web page types, including blogs. The organizational Web pages were found to be briefer in how they discussed issues, however. The study contributes to theory by offering the first known empirical study of online community formation and issue advocacy on a matter of public policy and through its finding of a linkage between Web content and Web structure. Methodologically, the study presents a flexible mixed-methods model of descriptive and quantitative approaches that appears excellently suited for Internet studies. The dissertation’s use of fuzzy clustering and discriminant analysis offer important improvements over existing approaches in factor-based frame analysis and frame mapping techniques

Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and qualitative methods

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer unprecedented opportunities to learn at scale. Within a few years, the phenomenon of crowd-based learning has gained enormous popularity with millions of learners across the globe participating in courses ranging from Popular Music to Astrophysics. They have captured the imaginations of many, attracting significant media attention - with The New York Times naming 2012 "The Year of the MOOC." For those engaged in learning analytics and educational data mining, MOOCs have provided an exciting opportunity to develop innovative methodologies that harness big data in education.Comment: Preprint of a chapter to appear in "Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research

Communication Theoretic Data Analytics

Widespread use of the Internet and social networks invokes the generation of big data, which is proving to be useful in a number of applications. To deal with explosively growing amounts of data, data analytics has emerged as a critical technology related to computing, signal processing, and information networking. In this paper, a formalism is considered in which data is modeled as a generalized social network and communication theory and information theory are thereby extended to data analytics. First, the creation of an equalizer to optimize information transfer between two data variables is considered, and financial data is used to demonstrate the advantages. Then, an information coupling approach based on information geometry is applied for dimensionality reduction, with a pattern recognition example to illustrate the effectiveness. These initial trials suggest the potential of communication theoretic data analytics for a wide range of applications.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Jan. 201

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

Simulating infrastructure networks in the Yangtze River Delta (China) using generative urban network models

This paper explores the urban-geographical potential of simulation approaches combining spatial and topological processes. Drawing on Vértes et al.'s (2012) economical clustering model, we propose a generative network model integrating factors captured in traditional spatial models (e.g., gravity models) and more recently developed topological models (e.g., actor-oriented stochastic models) into a single framework. In our urban network-implementation of the generative network model, it is assumed that the emergence of inter-city linkages can be approximated through probabilistic processes that speak to a series of contradictory forces. Our exploratory study focuses on the outline of the infrastructure networks connecting prefecture-level cities in the highly urbanized Yangtze River Delta (China). Possible hampering factors in the emergence of these networks include distance and administrative boundaries, while stimulating factors include a measure of city size (population, gross domestic product) and a topological rule stating that the formation of connections between cities sharing nearest neighbors is more likely (i.e., a transitive effect). Based on our results, two wider implications of our research are discussed: (1) it confirms the potential of the proposed method in urban network simulation in that the inclusion of a topological factor alongside geographical factors generates an urban network that better approximates the observed network; (2) it allows exploring the differential extent to which driving forces influence the structure of different urban networks. For instance, in the Yangtze River Delta, transitivity plays a less important role in the Internet-network formation; GDP and boundaries more strongly affect the rail network; and distance decay effects play a more prominent role in the road network

Social-aware Forwarding in Opportunistic Wireless Networks: Content Awareness or Obliviousness?

With the current host-based Internet architecture, networking faces limitations in dynamic scenarios, due mostly to host mobility. The ICN paradigm mitigates such problems by releasing the need to have an end-to-end transport session established during the life time of the data transfer. Moreover, the ICN concept solves the mismatch between the Internet architecture and the way users would like to use it: currently a user needs to know the topological location of the hosts involved in the communication when he/she just wants to get the data, independently of its location. Most of the research efforts aim to come up with a stable ICN architecture in fixed networks, with few examples in ad-hoc and vehicular networks. However, the Internet is becoming more pervasive with powerful personal mobile devices that allow users to form dynamic networks in which content may be exchanged at all times and with low cost. Such pervasive wireless networks suffer with different levels of disruption given user mobility, physical obstacles, lack of cooperation, intermittent connectivity, among others. This paper discusses the combination of content knowledge (e.g., type and interested parties) and social awareness within opportunistic networking as to drive the deployment of ICN solutions in disruptive networking scenarios. With this goal in mind, we go over few examples of social-aware content-based opportunistic networking proposals that consider social awareness to allow content dissemination independently of the level of network disruption. To show how much content knowledge can improve social-based solutions, we illustrate by means of simulation some content-oblivious/oriented proposals in scenarios based on synthetic mobility patterns and real human traces.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

The Abandoned Side of the Internet: Hijacking Internet Resources When Domain Names Expire

The vulnerability of the Internet has been demonstrated by prominent IP prefix hijacking events. Major outages such as the China Telecom incident in 2010 stimulate speculations about malicious intentions behind such anomalies. Surprisingly, almost all discussions in the current literature assume that hijacking incidents are enabled by the lack of security mechanisms in the inter-domain routing protocol BGP. In this paper, we discuss an attacker model that accounts for the hijacking of network ownership information stored in Regional Internet Registry (RIR) databases. We show that such threats emerge from abandoned Internet resources (e.g., IP address blocks, AS numbers). When DNS names expire, attackers gain the opportunity to take resource ownership by re-registering domain names that are referenced by corresponding RIR database objects. We argue that this kind of attack is more attractive than conventional hijacking, since the attacker can act in full anonymity on behalf of a victim. Despite corresponding incidents have been observed in the past, current detection techniques are not qualified to deal with these attacks. We show that they are feasible with very little effort, and analyze the risk potential of abandoned Internet resources for the European service region: our findings reveal that currently 73 /24 IP prefixes and 7 ASes are vulnerable to be stealthily abused. We discuss countermeasures and outline research directions towards preventive solutions.Comment: Final version for TMA 201