Award#0442154 - Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Sep 15 02:41:57 PDT 2004


<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0442154>

  

NSF Award Abstract - #0442154
AWSFL008-DS3

Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities

NSF Org
 DMS

 Latest Amendment Date
 September 7, 2004

 Award Number
 0442154

 Award Instrument
 Standard Grant

 Program Manager
 Hans G. Kaper
DMS DIVISION OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
MPS DIRECT FOR MATHEMATICAL & PHYSICAL SCIEN

 Start Date
 January 1, 2005

 Expires
 December 31, 2005 (Estimated)

 Expected Total Amount
 $ (Estimated)

 Investigator
 Bulent Yener yener at cs.rpi.edu (Principal Investigator current)
Mukkai S. Krishnamoorthy (Co-Principal Investigator current)

 Sponsor
 Rensselaer Polytech Inst
110 8th Street
Troy, NY 121803522 518/276-6000

 NSF Program
 7276 APPROACHES TO COMBAT TERRORISM

 Field Application
 0000099 Other Applications NEC

 Program Reference Code
 0000,7276,9237,OTHR,

 Abstract
 The aim of this proposal is to develop new techniques for information
gathering, analysis and modeling of chatroom communications. First, the
investigator and his colleague consider graph-less models to capture the
structure of chatroom communications. In particular, the investigators
study how to develop a multidimensional singular value decomposition
approach for component analysis of chatroom communication data. Second, the
investigators develop new visualisation techniques to display the
structural information found in the first step.

 Internet chatrooms provide an interactive and public forum of
communication for participants with diverse objectives. Two properties of
chatrooms make them particularly vulnerable for exploitation by malicious
parties. First, the real identities of the participants are decoupled from
their chatroom nicknames. Second, multiple threads of communication can
co-exist concurrently. Although human-monitoring of each chatroom to
determine "who-is-chatting-with-whom" is possible, it is very time
consuming, hence not scalable. Thus, it is very easy to conceal malicious
behavior in Internet chatrooms and use them for covert communications
(e.g., adversary using a teenager chatroom to plan a terrorist act). This
project aims at a fully automated surveillance system for data collection
and analysis in Internet chatrooms to discover hidden groups. The
surveillance is done in the form of statistical profiling for a particular
chatter, a group of chatters, or for the entire chatroom. The statistical
profiles are used to devise algorithms to determine chatters and their
partners and answer to queries including (i) "in which chatrooms topic A is
discussed", (ii) "who is chatting about topic A in chatroom X", (iii) "is
topic A is a hot one in chatroom X" etc. Thus, the proposed system could
aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and
communication patterns in chatrooms without human intervention.

 This award is supported jointly by the NSF and the Intelligence Community.
The Approaches to Terrorism program in the Directorate for Mathematics and
Physical Sciences supports new concepts in basic research and workforce
development with the potential to contribute to national security.
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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