Collaborative Research: SAI-R: Integrative Cyberinfrastructure for Enhancing and Accelerating Online Abuse Research

加强美国基础设施(SAI)是一项NSF计划，旨在刺激以人类为中心的基础性研究和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，增长经济，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供效率，加强社区力量，促进机会均等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，推动美国的领导地位。要实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI侧重于人类推理和决策、治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何能够建立和维护有效的基础设施，从而改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程进步的基础上。在线虐待是一个紧迫且日益增长的社会挑战。网络仇恨和骚扰、网络欺凌和极端主义威胁目标群体的安全和心理健康。了解这个问题并开发解决它的方法是社会和行为科学以及计算机科学中许多领域研究的活跃焦点。机器学习和人工智能(AI)的使用为支持这一领域的研究提供了巨大潜力。尽管如此，研究人员在利用新兴的机器学习技术进行创新研究和在线滥用的科学发现方面仍面临着根本性的挑战。这一SAI研究项目加强和改造了目前分散的机器学习软件基础设施。它为在线虐待研究(ICOAR)开发了一个可扩展、可定制、可扩展和用户友好的综合网络基础设施。新的基础设施提高了不同科学领域的学者利用先进的机器学习方法进行在线虐待研究的研究能力。ICOAR软件基础设施可以被大量且不断增加的在线滥用检测研究人员使用，并推动人工智能领域的研究和创新，以造福社会。该项目使人们能够轻松获得最先进的机器学习技术和数据集，以便快速在线滥用分析。它支持和推动未来对新概念和现象的调查、流行率评估、因果影响测量、预测和在线滥用检测算法的评估。ICOAR提供模块化和以用户为中心的方法，确保未来的增强和长期可持续性。开放软件基础设施由三个主要层组成：数据层、能力层和应用层。数据层包括自动数据收集和准备来自不同来源的在线社交媒体数据的工具，以及访问公共基准数据集的工具。能力层由模块化的基于机器学习的能力和用于研究在线滥用的算法组成。应用层允许研究人员根据他们的研究重点轻松开发不同的应用程序。ICOAR资源是开源的，为课程开发和劳动力培训提供了一个易于使用的学习平台。该奖项由社会、行为和经济(SBE)科学局支持。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.Online abuse is a pressing and growing societal challenge. Online hate and harassment, cyberbullying, and extremism threaten the safety and psychological well-being of targeted groups. Understanding the problem and developing ways to address it is the active focus of many fields of research in the social and behavioral sciences and in computer science. Machine learning and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) offers great potential to support research in this area. Still, researchers face fundamental challenges in leveraging emerging machine learning techniques for innovative studies and scientific discoveries in online abuse. This SAI research project strengthens and transforms the current disperse machine learning software infrastructure. It develops a scalable, customizable, extendable, and user-friendly Integrative Cyberinfrastructure for Online Abuse Research (ICOAR). The new infrastructure advances the research capability for scholars in different fields of science to leverage advanced machine learning methods for online abuse research. The ICOAR software infrastructure can be utilized by a large and growing number of researchers on online abuse detection and is a stimulus to research and innovation in AI for social good.This project enables easy access to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and datasets for rapid online abuse analysis. It supports and advances future investigations of new concepts and phenomena, assessments of prevalence, measures of causal effects, predictions, and evaluation of online abuse detection algorithms. ICOAR offers a modular and user-centered approach, ensuring future enhancements and long-term sustainability. The open software infrastructure consists of three major layers: a data layer, a capability layer, and an application layer. The data layer includes tools for automatic data collection and preparation of online social media data from different sources, and access to public benchmark datasets. The capability layer is composed of modularized machine learning-based capabilities and algorithms for the study of online abuse. The application layer allows researchers to easily develop different applications based on their research priorities. The ICOAR resources are open-source and provide an easy-to-use learning platform for curriculum development and workforce training.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.