Abstract:
As part of the NSF-funded Dark Web research project, this paper presents an exploratory study of cyber extremism on the Web 2.0 media: blogs, YouTube, and Second Life. We examine international Jihadist extremist groups that use each of these media. We observe that these new, interactive, multimedia-rich forms of communication provide effective means for extremists to promote their ideas, share resources, and communicate among each other. The development of automated collection and analysis tools for Web 2.0 can help policy makers, intelligence analysts, and researchers to better understand extremists' ideas and communication patterns, which may lead to strategies that can counter the threats posed by extremists in the second-generation Web. ©2008 IEEE.
Abstract:
As an important type of social media, the political Web forum has become a major communication channel for people to discuss and debate political, cultural and social issues. Although the Internet has a male-dominated history, more and more women have started to share their concerns and express opinions through online discussion boards and Web forums. This paper presents an automated approach to gender difference analysis of political Web forums. The approach uses rich textual feature representation and machine learning techniques to examine the online gender differences between female and male participants on political Web forums by analyzing writing styles and topics of interest. The results of gender difference analysis performed on a large and long-standing international Islamic women's political forum are presented, showing that female and male participants have significantly different topics of interest. ©2009 IEEE.
Abstract:
As Internet services based on the World-Wide Web become more popular, information overload has become a pressing research problem. Difficulties with search on Internet will worsen as the amount of on-line information increases. A scalable approach to Internet search is critical to the success of Internet services and other current and future National Information Infrastructure (Nil) applications. As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent personal spider (agent) approach to Internet searching. The approach, which is grounded on automatic textual analysis and general-purpose search algorithms, is expected to be an improvement over the current static and inefficient Internet searches. In this experiment, we implemented Internet personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A plain, static CGI/HTML-based interface was developed earlier, followed by a recent enhancement of a graphical, dynamic Java-based interface. Preliminary evaluation results and two working prototypes (available for Web access) are presented. Although the examples and evaluations presented are mainly based on Internet applications, the applicability of the proposed techniques to the potentially more rewarding Intranet applications should be obvious. In particular, we believe the proposed agent design can be used to locate organization-wide information, to gather new, time-critical organizational information, and to support team-building and communication in Intranets. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Abstract:
The importance of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) has significantly increased with the rapid and large-scale migration of local/national security information from physical media to electronic platforms, including the Internet and information systems. Motivated by the significance of ISI in law enforcement (particularly in the digital government context) and the limited investigations of officers' technology-acceptance decision-making, we developed and empirically tested a factor model for explaining law-enforcement officers' technology acceptance. Specifically, our empirical examination targeted the COPLINK technology and involved more than 280 police officers. Overall, our model shows a good fit to the data collected and exhibits satisfactory power for explaining law-enforcement officers' technology acceptance decisions. Our findings have several implications for research and technology management practices in law enforcement, which are also discussed.
Abstract:
Event visualization holds the promise of alleviating information overload in human analysis and numerous tools and techniques have been developed and evaluated. However, previous work does not specifically address either the coordination of event dimensions with the types of tasks involved or the way that visualizing different event dimensions can benefit human analysis. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of event visualization and present a methodology for evaluating a coordinated event visualization tool called COPLINK Spatio-Temporal Visualizer (STV). The taxonomy encompasses various event dimensions, application domains, visualization metaphors, evaluation methods and performance measures. The evaluation methodology examines different event dimensions and different task types, thus juxtaposing two important elements of evaluating a tool. To achieve both internal and external validity, a laboratory experiment with students and a field study with crime analysis experts were conducted. Findings of our usability study show that STV could support crime analysis involving multiple, coordinated event dimensions as effectively as it could analyze individual, uncoordinated event dimensions. STV was significantly more effective and efficient than Microsoft Excel in performing coordinated tasks and was significantly more efficient in doing uncoordinated tasks related to temporal, spatial and aggregated information. Also, STV had compared favorably with Excel in completing uncoordinated tasks related to temporal and spatial information, respectively. Subjects' comments showed STV to be intuitive, useful and preferable to existing crime analysis methods. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
