Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities

这项建议的目的是开发新技术的信息收集，分析和建模聊天室通信。 首先，研究人员和他的同事考虑无图模型来捕捉聊天室通信的结构。特别是，调查研究如何开发一个多维奇异值分解方法的聊天室通信数据的组件分析。 第二，研究人员开发新的可视化技术来显示在第一步中发现的结构信息。互联网聊天室为具有不同目标的参与者提供了一个互动和公开的交流论坛。聊天室的两个属性使它们特别容易被恶意方利用。 首先，参与者的真实的身份与他们的聊天室昵称分离。其次，多个通信线程可以并发共存。 虽然每个聊天室的人工监控以确定“谁在和谁聊天”是可能的，但这非常耗时，因此不可扩展。 因此，在互联网聊天室中隐藏恶意行为并将其用于隐蔽通信（例如，对手利用青少年聊天室策划恐怖行动）。 该项目旨在建立一个全自动监测系统，用于收集和分析互联网聊天室的数据，以发现隐藏的群体。监控是以统计分析的形式针对特定聊天者、一组聊天者或整个聊天室进行的。统计简档用于设计算法以确定聊天者和他们的伙伴，并回答包括（i）“在哪些聊天室讨论主题A”、（ii）“谁在聊天室X中谈论主题A”、（iii）“主题A是聊天室X中的热门话题吗”等的查询。拟议的系统可以帮助情报界在没有人为干预的情况下发现隐藏的社区和聊天室中的通信模式。国家科学基金会和情报机构 数学和物理科学局的恐怖主义方法方案支持基础研究和劳动力发展方面的新概念，有可能为国家安全做出贡献。

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.