NSF Award Abstract - #0442154
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 Directorate for Mathematical & Physical 
                             Sciences
               Start Date    January 1, 2005
                  Expires    December 31, 2005 (Estimated)
   Awarded Amount to Date    $157673
          Investigator(s)    Bulent Yener yener{at}cs.rpi.edu (Principal         
                             Investigator)
                             Mukkai Krishnamoorthy (Co-Principal Investigator)
                  Sponsor    Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
                             110 8th Street
                             Troy, NY 12180 518/276-6000
           NSF Program(s)    
     Field Application(s)    0000099 Other Applications NEC
Program Reference Code(s)    
  Program Element Code(s)    

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. 

                              -==-

Source: US National Science Foundation ...
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0442154


Cheers, Steve...

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