Inference of the Russian drug community from one of the largest social networks in the Russian Federation

The criminal nature of narcotics complicates the direct assessment of a drug community, while having a good understanding of the type of people drawn or currently using drugs is vital for finding effective intervening strategies. Especially for the Russian Federation this is of immediate concern given the dramatic increase it has seen in drug abuse since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Using unique data from the Russian social network 'LiveJournal' with over 39 million registered users worldwide, we were able for the first time to identify the on-line drug community by context sensitive text mining of the users' blogs using a dictionary of known drug-related official and 'slang' terminology. By comparing the interests of the users that most actively spread information on narcotics over the network with the interests of the individuals outside the on-line drug community, we found that the 'average' drug user in the Russian Federation is generally mostly interested in topics such as Russian rock, non-traditional medicine, UFOs, Buddhism, yoga and the occult. We identify three distinct scale-free sub-networks of users which can be uniquely classified as being either 'infectious', 'susceptible' or 'immune'.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Social Networks Mining for Analysis and Modeling Drugs Usage

AbstractThis paper presents approach for mining and analysis of data from social media which is based on using Map Reduce model for processing big amounts of data and on using composite applications for performing more sophisticated analysis which are executed on environment for distributed computing- based cloud platform. We applied this system for creation characteristics of users who write about drugs and to estimate factors that can be used as part of model for prediction drug usage level in real world. We propose to use social media as an additional data source which complement official data sources for analysis and modeling illegal activities in society

Seeing the Unseen Network: Inferring Hidden Social Ties from Respondent-Driven Sampling

Learning about the social structure of hidden and hard-to-reach populations --- such as drug users and sex workers --- is a major goal of epidemiological and public health research on risk behaviors and disease prevention. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a peer-referral process widely used by many health organizations, where research subjects recruit other subjects from their social network. In such surveys, researchers observe who recruited whom, along with the time of recruitment and the total number of acquaintances (network degree) of respondents. However, due to privacy concerns, the identities of acquaintances are not disclosed. In this work, we show how to reconstruct the underlying network structure through which the subjects are recruited. We formulate the dynamics of RDS as a continuous-time diffusion process over the underlying graph and derive the likelihood for the recruitment time series under an arbitrary recruitment time distribution. We develop an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm called RENDER (REspoNdent-Driven nEtwork Reconstruction) that finds the network that best explains the collected data. We support our analytical results through an exhaustive set of experiments on both synthetic and real data.Comment: A full version with technical proofs. Accepted by AAAI-1

NGOs and illicit drug policy change in the Russian Federation

In the decade to 2010, international initiatives directed at changing Russian illicit drug policy gained considerable momentum. However from 2010 official Russian government ambivalence evolved into open hostility directed against foreign ideas and against donor funded NGOs. By 2013, large scale donor-funded programs directed at reducing the social and individual harms associated with illicit drug use became effectively unimplementable in Russia. The main objective of this thesis is to establish if any non-government initiatives directed at illicit drug policy change were politically feasible in Russia between 2010 and 2013. In order to address this overarching objective, I sought to answer the following research questions: 1. What framed the possibilities and limits of political feasibility of drug policy initiatives that relied on international funding sources? 2. What political and other structures framed the feasibility of domestically funded non-government drug policy initiatives? 3. Contemporary Russia has presented unique barriers to the application of conventional methods of researching illicit drug policy. What novel data sources and methods might frame these limits? This thesis examines Russian drug policy from a pragmatic perspective. It examines both internationally and domestically funded civil society actors to identify what worked to influence Russian drug policy in the recent past. This thesis consists of a series of mixed methods exploratory case studies that offer a rich "bottom up" description of the contemporary Russian context. It also describes novel "big data" quantitative Internet search methods as a valid research method to study of complex environments. Against the backdrop of increasing security tensions between Russia and NATO, it proposes mechanisms that may allow future collaboration between donors, researchers, and Russian civil society organisations in a new, largely unknown policy space

Ethnic and religious identities in Russian penal institutions: A case study of Uzbek Transnational Muslim prisoners

Russia has become one of the main migration hubs worldwide following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of migrant workers travel to Russia from three Central Asian countries. However, Russian immigration laws and policies are ambiguous and highly punitive. The result is that many migrants resort to undocumented status working in the shadow economy, which places them in a disadvantaged and precarious position. In this position they are vulnerable to becoming targets of the Russian criminal justice system as they take to crime to overcome economic uncertainty, become embroiled in interpersonal conflicts ending in violence, or fall victim to fabricated criminal charges initiated by Russian police officers under pressure to produce their monthly quota of arrests. The impact on Russian penal institutions is that they have become ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse sites as a consequence of the incarceration of growing numbers of transnational prisoners. Using person-to-person interviews conducted in Uzbekistan with men and women who served sentences in Russian penal institutions during the past two decades, we show in this article how the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian prisons into sites of ethnic and religious plurality, in which formal rules and informal sub-cultures - the colony regime, so-called thieves' law (vorovskoy zakon), ethnic solidarity norms, and Sharia law - coexist and clash in new ways compared with the status quo ante. Thus, we argue there is a need to revise the prevailing understanding about the power dynamics in Russian penal institutions. Our findings undermine the prison service's insistence of the ethnic and ethno-religious neutrality and cosmopolitanism of Russian penal space, which is presented as a latter-day manifestation of the Soviet-era 'friendship of nations' policy. Russian prisons today must be understood as sites of ethnic and religious pluralism

Policy Pathways to Health in the Russian Federation

"Policy Pathways to Health in the Russian Federation" was the name given to a project implemented in 2002-04 by IIASA in collaboration with the institute for Socio-economic Studies of Population of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The core activity of the project was organizing a workshop, held at IIASA in September 2003, at which national and international researchers and policy makers shared information and insights. Through workshop papers and discussions, sources of the poor health situation in Russia ranging from bad health behaviors to inadequate health care financing were discussed and analyzed. The focus throughout was on possible policy responses. This IIASA Interim REport presents the Proceedings of the Workshop, followed by the workshop program and list of participants given as Annexes 1 and 2. The presentations published are condensed versions of project papers available at the workshop web site www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/RMS/TACIS03/?sb=19

HIV/AIDS, Security and Conflict: New Realities, New Responses

Ten years after the HIV/AIDS epidemic itself was identified as a threat to international peace and security, findings from the three-year AIDS, Security and Conflict Initiative (ASCI)(1) present evidence of the mutually reinforcing dynamics linking HIV/AIDS, conflict and security