Related papers: Quantifying Spatial Under-reporting Disparities in…
This paper considers the problem of sequentially detecting a change in the joint distribution of multiple data sources under a sampling constraint. Specifically, the channels or sources generate observations that are independent over time,…
We consider estimation of worker skills from worker-task interaction data (with unknown labels) for the single-coin crowd-sourcing binary classification model in symmetric noise. We define the (worker) interaction graph whose nodes are…
We develop and analyze mathematical models for residential burglary that incorporates police deployment through a delayed feedback mechanism. Motivated by empirical observations from publicly available crime and policing data, we extend a…
Fact-checking is one of the effective solutions in fighting online misinformation. However, traditional fact-checking is a process requiring scarce expert human resources, and thus does not scale well on social media because of the…
Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among millions of posts being posted every day can be difficult, and developing a data…
Cities create potential for individuals from different backgrounds to interact with one another. It is often the case, however, that urban infrastructure obfuscates this potential, creating dense pockets of affluence and poverty throughout…
Official reports of hate crimes in the US are under-reported relative to the actual number of such incidents. Further, despite statistical approximations, there are no official reports from a large number of US cities regarding incidents of…
Typically crowdsourcing-based approaches to gather annotated data use inter-annotator agreement as a measure of quality. However, in many domains, there is ambiguity in the data, as well as a multitude of perspectives of the information…
Effective coordination of agents actions in partially-observable domains is a major challenge of multi-agent systems research. To address this, many researchers have developed techniques that allow the agents to make decisions based on…
Monitoring of streamed data to detect abnormal behaviour (variously known as event detection, anomaly detection, change detection, or outlier detection) underlies many applications of the Internet of Things. There, one often collects data…
Crowd scene analysis has received a lot of attention recently due to the wide variety of applications, for instance, forensic science, urban planning, surveillance and security. In this context, a challenging task is known as crowd…
Scaffolds, also called sidewalk sheds, are intended to be temporary structures to protect pedestrians from construction and repair hazards. However, some sidewalk sheds are left up for years. Long-term scaffolding becomes eyesores, creates…
Between January 2017 and January 2021, thousands of local news sources in the United States reported on over 42,000 protests about topics such as civil rights, immigration, guns, and the environment. Given the vast number of local…
Crowdsourcing refers to the arrangement in which contributions are solicited from a large group of unrelated people. Due to this nature, crowdsourcers (or task requesters) often face uncertainty about the workers' capabilities which, in…
Online communities provide a fertile ground for analyzing people's behavior and improving our understanding of social processes. Because both people and communities change over time, we argue that analyses of these communities that take…
We consider the problem of estimating the incidence of residential burglaries that occur over a well-defined period of time within the 10 most populous cities in North Carolina. Our analysis typifies some of the general issues that arise in…
In many information networks, data items -- such as updates in social networks, news flowing through interconnected RSS feeds and blogs, measurements in sensor networks, route updates in ad-hoc networks -- propagate in an uncoordinated…
Although much has been published regarding street protests on social media, few works have attempted to characterize social media users' spatial behavior in such events. The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to…
Breaking news leads to situations of fast-paced reporting in social media, producing all kinds of updates related to news stories, albeit with the caveat that some of those early updates tend to be rumours, i.e., information with an…
Thanks to the diffusion of the Internet of Things, nowadays it is possible to sense human mobility almost in real time using unconventional methods (e.g., number of bikes in a bike station). Due to the diffusion of such technologies, the…