Workshop Program

09:00 AM – 09:15 AM

Welcome remarks

09:15 AM – 10:15 AM

Keynote address

"Bots, Socks, and Vandals: Advances in Identifying Malicious Actors in Social and Online Platforms"
V. S. Subrahmanian
, The Dartmouth College Distinguished Professor in Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society, Dartmouth College.

10:15 AM 10:30 AM

Break

10:30 AM – 11:50 AM

Paper Session*

A. Pal, P. Rangudu, S. S. Ravi, and A. K. Vullikanti, "Using Activity Patterns to Place Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Urban Regions" [Regular Paper]

E. E. Santos, J. Korah, and V. Murugappan, "Handling Vertex Deletions in Memory Scalable Anytime Anywhere Algorithms for Large and Dynamic Social Networks" [Regular Paper]

B. Thuraisingham, M. Kantarcioglu, and L. Khan,,  "Integrating Cyber Security and Data Science for Social Media: A Position Paper" [Short Paper]

11:50 AM - 12:00 Noon

Conclusion

*Duration of regular paper presentation: 25 minutes followed by Q/A
Duration of short paper presentation: 15 minutes followed by Q/A


Keynote Talk

Bots, Socks, and Vandals: Advances in Identifying Malicious Actors in Social and Online Platforms

V. S. Subrahmanian, The Dartmouth College Distinguished Professor in Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society, Dartmouth College.

Abstract:

Malicious actors are omnipresent in online social and crowdsourced platforms – vandals on Wikipedia, bots on Twitter, and trolls on various platforms all play a major role in degrading the quality of open information and free discussion on the web.This talk will focus on the role of semantics and its relationship with networks in order to classify users on Twitter as bots and users on Wikipedia as vandals. In the context of Twitter bots, this talk will discuss the DARPA Twitter Bot Challenge and subsequent research. In the context of Wikipedia, Professor will also discuss the vandal early warning system (VEWS) and its role in identifying vandals as early as possible. Time permitting, this talk will discuss malicious actors in other online networks such as Slashdot and/or on e-commerce sites such as Flipkart. The talk reflects joint work with many students and colleagues.

Speaker Bio:

V.S. Subrahmanian is The Dartmouth College Distinguished Professor in Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society. Prior to this, he was Professor of Computer Science, co-founder of the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics, and Director of the Center for Digital International Government at the University of Maryland. Over the years, he has developed data-driven algorithms and predictive analytics together for a variety of problems relating to counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and industry. He developed some of the first algorithms to capture the semantics of probabilistic logics and multivalued logics, and applied them to the study of the behavior of terrorist groups, yielding numerous forecasts of real world events. In the context of semantic computing, he developed some of the first disk-based query engines to query massive RDF triple stores, some of the first parallel algorithms to process subgraph matching queries, and some of the first probabilistic subgraph matching algorithms. More recently, he has developed algorithms and techniques to predict which actors are malicious and which ones are benign in a host of online platforms including Twitter, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and Flipkart. He led the team that won DARPA’s 2015 Twitter Bot Challenge in the SMISC program. He has written over 300 refereed papers and (co-) authored 6 books. Prof. Subrahmanian serves on the editorial boards of journals such as Science, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems & Technology. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and more. In addition, he is the editor in chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems. A fellow of both AAAI and AAAS, he has delivered numerous invited talks and keynote addresses.