This paper leverages open source “big data” intelligence to develop predictive models that can provide timely, relevant and accurate indications, warning, and tracking of migration flows / movements of large groups (> 100 persons) through South and Central America to the southwest border of the United States. We describe experiments with a live forecasting setup, development and refinement of predictive models, and how machine learning models can yield insight into the factors underlying mass migration.

Forecasting citations of scientific patents and publications is a crucial task for understanding the evolution and development of technological domains and for foresight into emerging technologies. By construing citations as a time series, the task can be cast into the domain of temporal point processes. Most existing work on forecasting with temporal point processes, both conventional and neural network-based, only performs single-step forecasting. In citation forecasting, however, the more salient goal is n -step forecasting: predicting the arrival of the next n citations. In this article, we propose Dynamic Multi-Context Attention Networks (DMA-Nets), a novel deep learning sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model with a novel hierarchical dynamic attention mechanism for long-term citation forecasting. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model learns better representations of conditional dependencies over historical sequences compared to state-of-the-art counterparts and thus achieves significant performance for citation predictions.

Predicting the impact of traffic i ncidents b ased on traffic s ensor d ata i s a n e ssential r esearch t opic i n t he fi eld of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Tackling the problem of estimating the durations of incidents from their early stages is a challenge due to the variable nature of such incidents and the complex structure of modern road networks. Existing studies on forecasting the incident duration from sensor data are mostly incapable of modeling 1) the spatiotemporal correlations of traffic s ensors a nd a rterial r oads a nd 2 ) t he hierarchical topology of the traffic sensor and road networks. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchical Attention-based Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network model (HastGCN) to solve the incident duration forecasting problem by formulating the spatiotemporal correlation and traffic p atterns o n b oth t he s ensor l evel and the road level in their natural hierarchical manner. At the sensor level, we propose a spatiotemporal attention mechanism followed by graph convolutions to model the local correlations and patterns between traffic s ensors o n t he s ame a rterial road. At the road level, a connectivity-aware attention mechanism is designed to learn the global spatial relatedness between each arterial road. Traffic-condition a ware g raph c onvolutions are then applied to understand the target incident representation for the incident duration forecasting.

In anagram games, players are provided with letters for forming as many words as possible over a specified time duration. Anagram games have been used in controlled experiments to study problems such as collective identity, effects of goal-setting, internal-external attributions, test anxiety, and others. The majority of work on anagram games involves individual players. Recently, work has expanded to group anagram games where players cooperate by sharing letters. In this work, we analyze experimental data from online social networked experiments of group anagram games. We develop mechanistic and data-driven models of human decision-making to predict detailed game player actions (e.g., what word to form next). With these results, we develop a composite agent-based modeling and simulation platform that incorporates the models from data analysis. We compare model predictions against experimental data, which enables us to provide explanations of human decision-making and behavior. Finally, we provide illustrative case studies using agent-based simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of models to provide insights that are beyond those from experiments alone.

Cybersecurity event detection is a crucial problem for mitigating effects on various aspects of society. Social media has become a notable source of indicators for detection of diverse events. Though previous social media based strategies for cyber-security event detection focus on mining certain event-related words, the dynamic and evolving nature of online discourse limits the performance of these approaches. Further, because these are typically unsupervised or weakly supervised learning strategies, they do not perform well in an environment of biased samples, noisy context, and informal language which is routine for online, user-generated content. This paper takes a supervised learning approach by proposing a novel multi-task learning based model. Our model can handle diverse structures in feature space by learning models for different types of potential high-profile targets simultaneously. For parameter optimization, we develop an efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Through extensive experiments on a real world Twitter dataset, we demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods at encoding and identifying cyber-security incidents.

Due to constant shifts in population and changing demographics, school boundary processes take place to make adjustments to school attendance zones. This spatial problem has multiple criteria like locations of schools, their capacity utilization, proximity, presence of geographical/ man-made barriers, etc. In this paper, we formulate the problem of designing school boundaries as a spatially-constrained clustering/ regionalization problem and propose an automated approach called REGAL for solving it. REGAL is two-stage framework that starts by creating a candidate solution with regard to domain constraints such as school locations and spatial contiguity. Then a local search method improves the quality of the candidate solution by optimizing population balance and compactness of school zones while satisfying problem constraints. Experimentally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the REGAL framework on actual datasets from two school districts in the US.

With the rapid growth in urban transit networks in recent years, detecting service disruptions in a timely manner is a problem of increased interest to service providers. Transit agencies are seeking to move beyond traditional customer questionnaires and manual service inspections to leveraging open source indicators like social media for deteting emerging transit events. In this paper, we leverage Twitter data for early detection of metro service disruptions. Inspired by the multi-task learning framework, we propose the Metro Disruption Detection Model, which captures the semantic similarity between transit lines in Twitter space. We propose novel constraints on feature semantic similarity exploiting prior knowledge about the spatial connectivity and shared tracks of the metro network. An algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework is developed to solve the proposed model. We run extensive experiments and comparisons to other models with real world Twitter data and transit disruption records from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to justify the efficacy of our model.

Abduction is an inference approach that uses data and observations to identify plausible (and preferably, best) explanations for phenomena. Applications of abduction (e.g., robotics, genetics, image understanding) have largely been devoid of human behavior. Here, we devise and execute an iterative abductive analysis process that is driven by the social sciences: behaviors and interactions among groups of human subjects. One goal is to understand intra-group cooperation and its effect on fostering collective identity. We build an online game platform; perform and analyze controlled laboratory experiments; form hypotheses; build, exercise, and evaluate network-based agent-based models; and evaluate the hypotheses in multiple abductive iterations, improving our understanding as the process unfolds. While the experimental results are of interest, the paper's thrust is methodological, and indeed establishes the potential of iterative abductive looping for the (computational) social sciences.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are today ubiquitous in urban environments. Such systems now serve as the backbone to numerous critical infrastructure applications, from smart grids to IoT installations. Scalable and seamless operation of such CPSs requires sophisticated tools for monitoring the time series progression of the system, dynamically tracking relationships, and issuing alerts about anomalies to operators. We present an online monitoring system ( illiad ) that models the state of the CPS as a function of its relationships between constituent components, using a combination of model-based and data-driven strategies. In addition to accurate inference for state estimation and anomaly tracking, illiad also exploits the underlying network structure of the CPS (wired or wireless) for state estimation purposes. We demonstrate the application of illiad to two diverse settings: a wireless sensor motes application and an IEEE 33-bus microgrid.

EMBERS is an anticipatory intelligence system forecasting population-level events in multiple countries of Latin America. A deployed system from 2012, EMBERS has been generating alerts 24x7 by ingesting a broad range of data sources including news, blogs, tweets, machine coded events,currency rates, and food prices. In this paper, we describe our experiences operating EMBERS continuously for nearly 4 years, with specific attention to the discoveries it has enabled, correct as well as missed forecasts, lessons learnt from participating in a forecasting tournament, and our perspectives on the limits of forecasting including ethical considerations.

Modeling the movement of information within social media outlets, like Twitter, is key to understanding to how ideas spread but quantifying such movement runs into several difficulties. Two specific areas that elude a clear characterization are (i) the intrinsic random nature of individuals to potentially adopt and subsequently broadcast a Twitter topic, and (ii) the dissemination of information via non-Twitter sources, such as news outlets and word of mouth, and its impact on Twitter propagation. These distinct yet inter-connected areas must be incorporated to generate a comprehensive model of information diffusion. We propose a bispace model to capture propagation in the union of (exclusively) Twitter and non-Twitter environments. To quantify the stochastic nature of Twitter topic propagation, we combine principles of geometric Brownian motion and traditional network graph theory. We apply Poisson process functions to model information diffusion outside of the Twitter mentions network. We discuss techniques to unify the two sub-models to accurately model information dissemination. We demonstrate the novel application of these techniques on real Twitter datasets related to mass protest adoption in social communities.

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Feb 2014 violent protests in Venezuela. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

Financial markets are quite sensitive to unanticipated news and events. Identifying the effect of news on the market is a challenging task. In this demo, we present Forex-foreteller (FF) which mines news articles and makes forecasts about the movement of foreign currency markets. The system uses a combination of language models, topic clustering, and sentiment analysis to identify relevant news articles. These articles along with the historical stock index and currency exchange values are used in a linear regression model to make forecasts. The system has an interactive visualizer designed specifically for touch-sensitive devices which depicts forecasts along with the chronological news events and financial data used for making the forecasts.