The role of bot squads in the political propaganda on Twitter

Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on a specific topic, namely the migration flux from Northern Africa to Italy. We measure the significant traffic of tweets only, by implementing an entropy-based null model that discounts the activity of users and the virality of tweets. Results show that social bots play a central role in the exchange of significant content. Indeed, not only the strongest hubs have a number of bots among their followers higher than expected, but furthermore a group of them, that can be assigned to the same political tendency, share a common set of bots as followers. The retwitting activity of such automated accounts amplifies the presence on the platform of the hubs' messages.Comment: Under Submissio

Social Media for the Common Good: the case of EARS

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes and floods, are just some of the devastating events that may have catastrophic consequences on wide geographical areas. A quick and targeted response to emergencies greatly contributes in mitigating the losses. In recent years we have witnessed to many situations in which crowds of volunteer citizens have helped emergency responders via the use of widespread social media. Here we argue that technology can help in supporting the population, as well as the decision makers, by introducing tools that enhance the collective awareness level, providing quick yet accurate insights into the unfolding emergency. In this short paper we introduce the EARS system, a social media-based system that supports decision makers during earthquake emergencies in Italy. We discuss the implications and the responsibility related to the usage of such systems by the decision makers. Also, we discuss on how publicly opening systems like EARS to the population might change the problem approach and we introduce relevant opportunities and issues that this solution would imply.

Implementation of a suite of components for Software Defined Radio using an SCA-compliant framework

The aim of this work is to introduce Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology, present an open source SCA-compliant framework whose name is Redhawk, which derives from the OSSIE project and describes an implementation example of some processing instances. Since in SDR applications it is necessary to run the same software on different hardware, portability becomes the main important aspect in the development of software radio applica- tions. The use of a SCA-compliant framework solves this issue making hardware transparent to the programmer and reducing time and costs of code development. This aspect can be exploited for prototyping applications quickly without the need of a spe- cific hardware or testing new standards and protocols. We will introduce some basic concepts of SDR, of the SCA architecture, based on CORBA, and Redhawk. We will then talk about of the implementation of a suite of components, writ- ten by using Redhawk IDE and C++ programming language. These will be tied together to form an application called waveform. We will also present the results obtained by enforcing a certain level of parallelism in our algorithm to speed up computation in Redhawk components and boost performances against a more simpler non concurrent implementation of the same algorithms

Packet Fan-Out Extension for the pcap Library

The large availability of multi-gigabit network cards for commodity PCs requires network applications to potentially cope with high volumes of traffic. However, computation intensive operations may not catch up with high traffic rates and need to be run in parallel over multiple processing cores. As of today, the vast majority of network applications - e.g., monitoring and IDS systems - are still based on the pcap library interface which, unfortunately, does not provide the native multi-core support, even though the current underlying capture technologies do. This paper introduces a novel version of the pcap library for the Linux operating system that enables transparent application level parallelism. The new library supports fan-out operations for both multi-threaded and multi-process applications, by means of extended API as well as by a declarative grammar for configuration files, suitable for legacy applications. In addition, the library can transparently run on top of the standard Linux socket as well as on other accelerated active engines. Performance evaluation has been carried out on a multi-core architecture in pure capture tests and in more realistic use cases involving monitoring applications such as Tstat and Bro, with standard Linux socket as well as PFRING and PFQ accelerated engines

Impromptu crisis mapping to prioritize emergency response

To visualize post-emergency damage, a crisis-mapping system uses readily available semantic annotators, a machine-learning classifier to analyze relevant tweets, and interactive maps to rank extracted situational information. The system was validated against data from two recent disasters in Italy

Pulling Information from Social Media in the Aftermath of Unpredictable Disasters

Social media have become a primary communication channel among people and are continuously overwhelmed by huge volumes of User Generated Content. This is especially true in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters, when users report facts, descriptions and photos of the unfolding event. This material contains actionable information that can greatly help rescuers to achieve a better response to crises, but its volume and variety render manual processing unfeasible. This paper reports the experience we gained from developing and using a web-enabled system for the online detection and monitoring of unpredictable events such as earthquakes and floods. The system captures selected message streams from Twitter and offers decision support functionalities for acquiring situational awareness from textual content and for quantifying the impact of disasters. The software architecture of the system is described and the approaches adopted for messages filtering, emergency detection and emergency monitoring are discussed. For each module, the results of real-world experiments are reported. The modular design makes the system easy configurable and allowed us to conduct experiments on different crises, including Emilia earthquake in 2012 and Genoa flood in 2014. Finally, some possible functionalities relying on the analysis of multimedia information are introduced

Twelve Variants Polygenic Score for Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Distribution in a Large Cohort of Patients With Clinically Diagnosed Familial Hypercholesterolemia With or Without Causative Mutations

: Background A significant proportion of individuals clinically diagnosed with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), but without any disease-causing mutation, are likely to have polygenic hypercholesterolemia. We evaluated the distribution of a polygenic risk score, consisting of 12 low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C)-raising variants (polygenic LDL-C risk score), in subjects with a clinical diagnosis of FH. Methods and Results Within the Lipid Transport Disorders Italian Genetic Network (LIPIGEN) study, 875 patients who were FH-mutation positive (women, 54.75%; mean age, 42.47±15.00 years) and 644 patients who were FH-mutation negative (women, 54.21%; mean age, 49.73±13.54 years) were evaluated. Patients who were FH-mutation negative had lower mean levels of pretreatment LDL-C than patients who were FH-mutation positive (217.14±55.49 versus 270.52±68.59 mg/dL, P<0.0001). The mean value (±SD) of the polygenic LDL-C risk score was 1.00 (±0.18) in patients who were FH-mutation negative and 0.94 (±0.20) in patients who were FH-mutation positive (P<0.0001). In the receiver operating characteristic analysis, the area under the curve for recognizing subjects characterized by polygenic hypercholesterolemia was 0.59 (95% CI, 0.56-0.62), with sensitivity and specificity being 78% and 36%, respectively, at 0.905 as a cutoff value. Higher mean polygenic LDL-C risk score levels were observed among patients who were FH-mutation negative having pretreatment LDL-C levels in the range of 150 to 350 mg/dL (150-249 mg/dL: 1.01 versus 0.91, P<0.0001; 250-349 mg/dL: 1.02 versus 0.95, P=0.0001). A positive correlation between polygenic LDL-C risk score and pretreatment LDL-C levels was observed among patients with FH independently of the presence of causative mutations. Conclusions This analysis confirms the role of polymorphisms in modulating LDL-C levels, even in patients with genetically confirmed FH. More data are needed to support the use of the polygenic score in routine clinical practice

Spectrum of mutations in Italian patients with familial hypercholesterolemia: New results from the LIPIGEN study

Background Familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) is an autosomal dominant disease characterized by elevated plasma levels of LDL-cholesterol that confers an increased risk of premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Early identification and treatment of FH patients can improve prognosis and reduce the burden of cardiovascular mortality. Aim of this study was to perform the mutational analysis of FH patients identified through a collaboration of 20 Lipid Clinics in Italy (LIPIGEN Study). Methods We recruited 1592 individuals with a clinical diagnosis of definite or probable FH according to the Dutch Lipid Clinic Network criteria. We performed a parallel sequencing of the major candidate genes for monogenic hypercholesterolemia (LDLR, APOB, PCSK9, APOE, LDLRAP1, STAP1). Results A total of 213 variants were detected in 1076 subjects. About 90% of them had a pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants. More than 94% of patients carried pathogenic variants in LDLR gene, 27 of which were novel. Pathogenic variants in APOB and PCSK9 were exceedingly rare. We found 4 true homozygotes and 5 putative compound heterozygotes for pathogenic variants in LDLR gene, as well as 5 double heterozygotes for LDLR/APOB pathogenic variants. Two patients were homozygous for pathogenic variants in LDLRAP1 gene resulting in autosomal recessive hypercholesterolemia. One patient was found to be heterozygous for the ApoE variant p.(Leu167del), known to confer an FH phenotype. Conclusions This study shows the molecular characteristics of the FH patients identified in Italy over the last two years. Full phenotypic characterization of these patients and cascade screening of family members is now in progress